In 2019, 23-year-old Nadia Mohamed made history when she became the youngest person elected to the city council in the city of St. Louis Park. On Tuesday, Mohamed made history again, this time as the first Somali immigrant elected as mayor of a U.S. city, and the first Black mayor of the suburban city in the Minneapolis metro area. In her victory speech, Mohamed credited her mother for her win.

“She gets to go and watch her daughter legislate in the same building where she used to go to pay her public housing rent.,” said Mohamed.

Mohamed won 58.45% of all cast ballots by registered voters, defeating her opponent Dale A. Anderson.

Mohamed first ran for elected office in 2019 and won a position as an at-large councilmember. She was 22 years old and a fresh college graduate. She attributed her political success to the St. Louis Park Human Rights Award, which she won in March 2019. She said she entered politics because she saw the need for voices like hers—a person of color, an immigrant, a renter, and a woman.

Four years on the St. Louis Park Multicultural Advisory Committee prior to elected office also provided her with the experience needed to lead with competency. The Multicultural Advisory Committee plans and implements efforts to connect various communities within the city.

Mohamed kicked off her campaign for mayor in May at the Westwood Hills Nature Center on May 31, the same place where she held her elections night watch party.

Incorporated as a village in November 1886, St. Louis Park grew from 31 people to a first-ring western suburb of Minneapolis with more than 50,000 people, 77% whom identify as white, 8% as Black, 5% as Latino, and 4% as Asian, according to 2020 U.S. Census Bureau data.

Mohamed attended Aquila Primary as a 4^th grader, when she (at the age of 10) along with her mother and siblings joined her father in Minnesota. Mohamed continued in the St. Louis Park school system, graduating from the public high school in 2015.

She earned a bachelor’s degree in human resources management from Metropolitan State University and is presently pursuing her master’s in educational leadership at St. Thomas University. She works as a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion specialist at a primary school in St. Louis Park.

While Deqa Dhalac, the mayor of South Portland, Maine, is the first Somali American to serve as mayor, she was first elected to the city council in 2018 before a seven-member board chose her to serve as the city’s mayor in 2021.

Lynette Dumalag, who represents Ward 2 in St. Louis Park city council said she looked forward to seeing Mohamed bring her lived experience to her job as a first-generation, younger person who’s a renter, “we don’t hear very often in council chambers.”

“I’m excited to see all the things we’ll get to do as council with Nadia running the meeting advancing some of the values that we have as a city,” Dumalag said.

Fantastic Negrito shocked us at Mshale with the revelation that he was not the son of a Somali immigrant. He shocked himself when, during the pandemic with live performance off the table, he dug into his past and discovered that he was a child of distant immigrants and one of them was white.

Seven generations back, his grandfather was an enslaved African man and his grandmother an indentured Scottish servant.

These discoveries informed his entire show at the Dakota on October 25th where he debuted his film, “White Jesus Black Problems,” and followed the viewing with a Q&A and a full acoustic set of his own songs.

When Fantastic Negrito changed his moniker from Xavier Dphrepaulezz, he couldn’t have chosen a more apt name. His music truly was fantastic. His demeanor that Wednesday was raw, unfiltered, and honest, delivered with a bluntness that might be heard at a BLM protest but without the protesting tone.

Quite possibly the Dakota had never had more F-bombs dropped on stage since it opened in 1980. Yet Fantastic Negrito’s contemporary language didn’t detract from his performance. It gave him a credibility that he was coming from a place of authenticity and showed that he trusted his audience to get him with being offended.

His show that evening carried two messages: First, Get it Done. Despite any obstacle or legality, just get it done. And Freedom for all is still an unachieved aspiration toward which we must strive.

He marveled at and admired his ancestors, an African man and a white woman, who defied all convention and built a life together that included children. Since his 7th generation grandmother was not enslaved, the children she gave birth to were also not enslaved although their father was. He discovered these distant cousins via Ancestry.com when he came across Registered Free Negroes.

He said from the stage, “It all goes back to one word, which is gratitude. I get scared, too, but I just keep on going. Freedom is terrifying.”

“White Jesus Black Problems” is like a mash-up of home-movies, Tom Petty music videos, and the MLK documentary “Montgomery to Memphis.” The story, the music, and the images are compelling, worth a second or third viewing.

Considering the circumstances—a global pandemic and tremendous loss of income due to a national shut-down of people congregating, thus no live performances—the film succeeds in its mission, to tell the story of Fantastic Negrito’s ancestry. He said, “If I happened to meet you walking on the street, I’d ask you to be in my movie.”

The set-list from the Dakota stage:

• Lost in a Crowd
• Grandfather Courage
• Highest Bidder
• Black Girl—a song for his mother. “She was strong; she was wrong. But she was strong.”
• Honest Man— when he explained, “If you wanna know how your songs connect with people, you’ve gotta play where people don’t want to hear them.”
• She Gets What She Wants
• Bullshit Anthem/Night has Turned to Day
• Son of a Broken Man—that he wrote on an airplane. He said, “Only the dreamers survive, but I picked up the pieces of my life and I survived.”
• Sex with a Robot in Tokyo

He ended with Virginia Soil—a song telling the story of his grandparents. “Freedom will come. I know that one day freedom will come.”

The 7 pm show didn’t end until 9:40. The audience didn’t demand an encore because we knew he and his keyboardist, Bryan Simmons, had given us everything they had to give.

“To respect music, you respect your life,” said Joseph Shabalala, founder and leader of South Africa’s acclaimed band, Ladysmith Black Mambazo. His message is repeated in a biopic, Music is My Life, a film that has been submitted for consideration to compete in the International Feature Film category for the 96th annual Academy Awards.

In the 34 years since South Africa has been submitting films for this category, formerly known as Best Foreign Language Film, only twice has a film been nominated and once has the nomination taken the Oscar.

Seventeen years after that one-time win, Tsotsi directed by Gavin Hood, the National Film and Video Foundation (NFVF) hopes this year’s submission will be as successful.

Music is My Life follows the senior Shabalala from his early years in rural South Africa to the apex of Shabalala’s international success to his passing in 2020, at the age of 79.

Through clips, guest cameos of colleagues and celebrities, Shabalala’s story is told. Especially notable is the focus on Isicathamiya music, which defines Ladysmith Black Mambazo as well as South Africa.

The film was produced by veteran film producer, Carolyn Carew and directed by Mpumi “Supa” Mbele.  The documentary was shot over a period of five years.

The official nominations for the 96th Annual Academy Awards will be announced on 23 January 2024.

If you were at The Cedar for the music, on October 5th, you were happy. If you came to see dancing, again, you were happy. If you wanted your fix of gorgeous Malian dress, yes, you were happy.

Fatoumata Diawara had it all and more at her show on the evening of October 5. Over a dozen songs filled nearly two full hours of space along with a mini-preaching-to-the-choir chat about honoring our children and the value of education and empowering all people to achieve their potential.

Diawara delivered her message through powerful song, humor, intimate conversation—as intimate as she could muster on stage with hundreds of people in the audience, and dramatic, evocative dancing. The songs themselves are sung mostly in Bambara that few in the audience understood, but summarized in English so that we could grasp the intent during the songs themselves.

Diawara’s outfit dazzled us as did her headwear. The patterns, colors, and material all worked in combination with her make-up and ornate jewelry to transport us out of Minnesota and into Mali.

By the fourth song, which she dedicated to “all the women in this crazy world” she fully turned on her own power and grooved on stage, embracing the audience with her performance. She sang about strength and emancipation, about “our truth” and the preciousness of children. When she pumped her arms upward, the lights responded with likewise flashing, modulating according to her signals.

She took a quick five-minute break as we listened to an instrumental piece from her band of Juan Finger: bass, Arecio Smith: keys, and Yves William Ombe Monkama: drums, percussion.

When Fatoumata returned to the stage, she’d shed her elaborate headgear and now wore a yellow-blond thick braid atop her head. She also held a small baton with a long dark shock of hair attached. As she danced, she’d loop the baton around her head and body often twirling around like an ice skater.

Half-way through her set list, Fatoumata gave a shout-out to Fela Kuti. She prefaced this talking about the rhythms of Senegal and the Gambia and Guinea. She especially mentioned Nigeria. “I just want to thank Fela Kuti for introducing AfroBeat to the rest of the world!”

The last part of her show relied on call-and-response from the audience as she urged us to “wake up” and be a change agent in the world.

She lamented Africa losing its soul, its distinctiveness, and culture. Then she put on a mask and a white flowing scarf and danced across the stage to a very appreciative audience.

The encore gave her a chance to call up friends and family, including her own mother, to dance along with her on stage as she sang and the band played. The energy rather than waning at the end of the show only ramped up. When the house lights came on two hours after the show began, few made a move toward the exit. Pictures, selfies, and excited chatter engulfed the room. We were all galvanized by the show.

His name used to be Xavier Amin Dphrepaulezz, but Fantastic Negrito didn’t mention that. He also didn’t mention the accident that left him in a coma for three weeks and robbed him full mobility of his hand. He didn’t mention winning three Grammys in as many years for Best Contemporary Blues Album. He didn’t even mention couch-surfing in Los Angeles as he worked to build his name in music.

Even so, Fantastic Negrito was able to drop a bombshell that contradicts what’s reported on dozens of websites including NPR and Wired and CBS News.

This first-generation Somali-American isn’t.

Mshale’s attention was grabbed when Fantastic Negrito was booked to perform at The Dakota Oct. 25. Fantastic Negrito, raised in a strict Muslim household by a Somali-immigrant father, seemed an ideal story of a first-generation Somali-American.

That was before he left us speechless with this news about his father’s immigration status, a story that’s been passed along for dozens and dozens of years.

“That’s one of the things that I discovered was a complete lie,” Fantastic Negrito said during a Zoom interview with Mshale.

“I [also] discovered that my dad created this name [Dphrepaulezz], which is unpronounceable to most people in order to give himself an upper hand during the 1920s and 30s,” Fantastic Negrito said.

In other words, Dphrepaulezz, Sr. was more than a self-made man. He was also self-invented.

“My dad was born in 1905. He was a pretty fascinating person. He faked an identity in the early 1900s in order to basically trick white people into thinking he was someone else. He had a name that was extremely different. He had a previous life and previous marriage and children of whom he’d never spoke.…[but] I think he was just able to get a lot of things done [through his deception].”

Why would he do this?

Fantastic Negrito postulated on his now deceased father’s reasons for his deception. “He tried to give us some identity that wasn’t just based on slave-trade,” he said.

While Dphrepaulezz, Sr.’s immigrant status was fabricated, his connections and investment in the Somali diaspora were genuine and deep. In the 1920s, Somali immigrants first arrived in the United States as sailors from British Somaliland.

“My dad,” said Fantastic Negrito, “had very strong ties with that community, with Abdullahi Issa, [Prime Minister of Italian Somalia] and Ibrahim Guled. It’s very heavily documented that he…that my father did assist that group of Somali people that were seeking independence.”

“You gotta remember, my dad was born in 1905 [during] that Pan-African movement,” Fantastic Negrito said. “I think he got the Somali thing…that very intense close ties and helping the Somalis achieve their goal of independence from their colonial masters was important to him.”

“He played this whole act at being [of] Somali heritage until he died,” Fantastic Negrito said.

Discovering the cock and bull story didn’t stop Fantastic Negrito from reaching deeper into his ancestry and finding an authentic immigrant story to inform his most recent film and album, White Jesus, Black Problems.

“I discovered during the pandemic as I told you about the story with my dad, on my [maternal] side, there was a union between an enslaved African and a white Scottish indentured servant so I made a film about that,” Fantastic Negrito said.

A union, by the way that was illegal as well as socially verboten in 1750s America.

His show at The Dakota will be about White Jesus Black Problems. “I’m premiering that film in the Minneapolis market and then afterward we just talk and play acoustic. That’s really what’s gonna happen, which is incredible to tell the story of my seventh-generation grandparents who really got some s-t done,” he said.

“We live in an era now where people can’t get anything done. And it’s totally polarized. Either you’re all the way to the left or you’re all the way to the right and we seem paralyzed and we can’t agree on anything but what I found fascinating and inspiring about my seventh generation grandparents is they got something done in an impossible time and in an impossible place. So so much love and respect for them and they inspired my 40-minute film.”

Tickets for the Oct. 25th 7 pm show available here.

As Minnesota has shifted its immigrant population from Scandinavian-European to a broader, more colorful global immigrant citizenry, so too has the Cedar Cultural Center transitioned from its Nordic Roots Festival to Global Roots Festival.

This year, the three-day event, September 25 – 27, included acts from many countries and five of the seven continents. Hundreds of people attended, some returned every evening, others joined the audience for one specific show.

Program manager, Robert Lehmann, said the entire festival’s open to the community free of charge, funded by various sponsors and grants including the Minnesota Legacy Amendment.

It’s not a case of you get what you pay for…though the festival’s free, the music is priceless.

Ana Everling and Robert Palos were up first on Monday evening with ethereal sound that won the audience over immediately. Everling’s voice was a full range of dulcet notes and rich memories including one about her grandmother’s lullabies.

Following the Eastern European/Balkan act was House of Waters, comprised of six-stringed bassist Moto Fukushima  from Japan and hammered dulcimer player Max ZT. They were joined by guest drummer Juan Chiavassa  originally from Argentina, but as are the other band members, now residing in the US.

The Cedar’s mission to promote intercultural appreciation and understanding through the presentation of global music and dance was fully realized even in this first night of the festival.

As House of Waters band member Max ZT said, “There’s a lot of education to be gained in non-institutional arenas. Thank the Cedar for providing that platform via Global Roots.”

Monday night’s crowd was modest, but appreciative. The fully-seated audience filled over 120 seats. It was the calm before the storm.

The second evening of Global Roots Festival saw the largest turn-out in attendees as well as the loudest and largest bands of the festival.

Madalitso, a Malawian band of two, avoided their visa problems from a previous engagement at the Cedar and opened the evening. The Cedar’s floor was filled with would-be dancers, eager for the show. Madalitso offered an appetizer, a segue from last night’s moody, soulful sound.

Madalitso, hailing from Lilongwe, Malawi, relies on a four-string guitar and a babatone, a one-string washtub-type bass that’s neck is so long, a narwhale in the ocean comes to mind. The pair sit to play their music, which is interspersed with whistles and yodels that the crowd, in their excitement, quickly parrot back.

With the audience’s palate prepped, Ethiocolor walked on stage enabling the Cedar to fully realize its mission: promoting intercultural appreciation through global music.

This band from Ethiopia plays instruments most of the audience has never seen before: a masengo, which is a single-stringed bowed lyre, a kebero, which is a double-headed drum, and two krar, which is a bowl-shaped lyre that’s plucked.

Ethiocolor’s contribution to the festival looked and sounded like an amalgamation of rock opera, ballet, and tent-revival meeting complete with the shimmy of shoulders, eskista dancing, mimicking the tremors experienced in some religious gatherings.

The founder of Ethiocolor, Melaku Belay, called out to the 400 people in the crowd, “Music is not only for dancing, music is healing ourselves!”

The festival’s third night began with a trio of Colombian female musicians who strictly beat out their music on drums and other percussive instruments. Many in attendance had been there the previous two nights, but many audience members were new and there to primarily hear this South American band.

The many languages that have been heard on stage over the festival—Romanian, Spanish, French, Ethiopian, English, and more—are eclipsed by the language of music. La Perla made their message known through rhythm, facial expression, and body language. The energy of Diana Sanmiguel, Karen Forero, and Giovanna Mogollón who form La Perla was high and infectious.

Robert Lehmann had been looking forward to ending the festival with Waahli, a hip hop band out of Montreal. The founder, Waahli, shared his enthusiasm, “I’m really happy that the arts and culture is coming back live and we can create together,” he said.

Every night of the Cedar’s festival held appeal to people of many ethnicities. Also gratifying to the Cedar was the influx of both youth and elders. Waahli’s show proved true in this respect as well. Both young and old gyrated and grooved to the tunes, hanging in until their late finish after 11 pm.

Waahli alluded to the multigenerational connection to music when he said, “When you leave your home and relocate in another country, it’s hard. It takes many generations to establish yourself.”  Music offers a cohesive element to link generations and diverse people to one another.

The countdown begins as October 5th nears and The Cedar presents Fatoumata Diawara, musician, actor, and advocate for human rights of immigrants and especially those of young girls in Mali, her ancestral home.

Born in 1982 in Côte d’Ivoire to Malian parents, Diawara spent her childhood in Mali. She launched her career as an actor while still a teen, appearing in 1999 in the film, Genesis, and several subsequent films. Even with the strong success of 2014’s Timbuktu, a film which garnered an Academy Awards nomination, Diawara pursued a parallel career in music.

Perhaps her mad skills on guitar, of which she proclaims herself, “the first female solo electric guitar player in Mali,” are also her strongest suit. Diawara has performed around the globe with international stars in a career that’s spanned nearly two dozen years.

In a 2018 interview with Amy Goodman (Democracy Now!), Diawara confesses that she is self-taught on the guitar. She also composes her own music drawing on the popular genre in West Africa, Wassoulou, and adding her own style that includes blues.

Many of Diawara’s songs encourage all people to embrace immigrants and welcome them into their communities and lives. Diawara herself, living now in France, has intimate knowledge of living as an immigrant.

“I want my song to give back the value, the dignity of Africa.” Diawara said, talking about her 2018 album, Fenco, (Something to Say) with Giovanca on VPRO Vrije Geluiden.

Her show at The Cedar, followed by a gig in Chicago, rounds out her US tour until she returns Stateside again in spring. Tickets for October 5th, 7:30 show are available here.

What defines Baba Commandant and the Mandingo band might be described as guttural singing or throat singing or Tina Turner-like screaming, maybe most closely as growling, but none are a perfect account of what we heard on September 20th on stage at The Cedar Cultural Center.

This band from Burkina Faso populate the stage a half-hour later than scheduled starting with the bass player, Jessie “JC” Josias Ouedraogo who quietly walks up the stairs and begins strumming his guitar. A minute or two later, Issouf Diabate climbs the steps to take his lead guitar and Doudou Kabore seats himself behind the drum kit.

At last Baba Commandant slips into the mix, but when he opens his mouth, we hear his distinctive and unique vocalizations as they perform Natembolo with Baba wielding a shekere, a dried gourd covered in a web woven with cowries.

The ten minute song drives through the audience with an electric charge urging us to dance, but many are not quite sure how to interpret Baba’s riveting sound and instead only sway and bounce a bit as we watch in fascination.

The band continues with a slightly slower tune, Afromandingo, and Baba picks up his donso ngoni, the hunter’s harp.  This ngoni resembles a kora, but with fewer strings. Baba wears a cap on his head that resembles a square of fabric shaped and knotted for his head alone. His shirt appears to be a white tunic with an ornate vest, but looking more closely, it’s clear the vest and tunic are one draping blouse.

Baba concludes the song sung in Mandinka and then speaks to the audience in French with the candor as if we can all understand him. JC provides a presumed translation in English.

By the fourth song, Semayala, we are invited to mimic Baba’s growl and we all discover how challenging it is. It’s not like reading to a young child and asking, “What does the lion say?” Baba’s guttural vocalization is loud and long with full support of his diaphragm and vocal cords as strong as a bungee cord. I can’t even approach making that sound without injuring myself.

The band plays together without a hitch, they are a well-oiled machine in function, but not to the point of humdrum, playing by rote. Throughout their setlist, they take turns solo-ing and featuring their instruments. Baba’s clearly the leader, yet he concedes to his bandmates and relishes their musicianship.

They play for nearly two hours covering at least 14 different songs. By the end, most people were dancing and a couple of tired children were flat on the floor while dancers stepped around them.

Bombino and band left Niger to climb the steps of the Cedar Cultural Center’s stage on September 13th, kicking off their current US tour 2023. Their first three songs featured founder, Omara “Bombino” Moctar, on acoustic guitar and later lead guitar, fellow Nigerien Kawissan Mohamed on rhythm guitar, Youba Dia, from Mauritania, but now lives in Belgium on djembe and later bass, and on the drum set, USian Corey Wilhelm.

Hundreds of people fill the floor, Kendal, house manager, said they’d sold 309 tickets in presale and another 50 at the door. The venue holds 400 for a seated performance and 645 for a standing show.

Wednesday evening, there is no banter from the band, they move from one song to another, all simple, yet evocative numbers. I’m reminded of my childhood when I’d swing on the playground swings, pumping my legs over and over in an effort to flip around the top bar of the swing set, believing it was possible. It wasn’t, I never went over the top, but the pure pleasure of swinging, the rhythmic trance I entered into felt the same as the sensation delivered by Bombino’s music Wednesday evening.

Then as if to shake up the audience, Bombino switches to electric guitar and Dia picks up a third guitar. Now the energy ramps up, the crowd shows its appreciation with applause and hollers. At least two-thirds of the audience are standing and swaying or bouncing to the music.

If you could plop the country of Niger on top of the United States, its capital, Niamey, would be near Albuquerque, New Mexico, and its northern tip close to Minneapolis, even reaching over near Milwaukee, Wisconsin. However, 80% of the country is a part of the arid Sahara Desert.

The music that comes out of Niger aligns with the music of the nomadic peoples of West Africa. Bombino and band draw on the rhythms and sounds of the Tuareg people.

Bombino attempts to say a few words, but they come out a mixture of French and English. He apologizes, blaming their traveling schedule and jet lag, “Hier (yesterday) we were in Paris.”

He is fluent in Tamasheq, the language of Touaregs, as well as the local Hausa language and French, the language of Niger’s colonizers, plus Arabic. That his fifth language is still rudimentary warrants no defense.

His bandmate, Youba Dia, wearing a turban, steps up to provide some commentary in English, but mostly, this show is all about the music, the rhythms, and the guitar licks, which have earned them multiple Grammys.

As if the audience is their baby and they are rocking us in a cradle, song after song is played. Every time the band segues to a new song, the crowd roars. On either side of the audience, someone calls out repeatedly, “Bombino!! Bombino!”

We are treated to two hours of the main act on stage. Even the gray-haired fans stay for the last song. The band troupes down to the merch table to converse and take selfies with concert-goers, reluctant to leave the venue. A rewarding evening and auspicious start to their US tour.

Although the full moon was making its second appearance of the month on August 30th, Nduduzo Makhathini was making his first appearance at The Dakota, Lowell Pickett, owner of the venue assured me.

Jazz pianist, maestro of both his genre and instrument, sat down at the Steinway piano Wednesday evening and began murmuring what sounded like a prayer. Neither of the other two musicians made a noise, only Makhathini reciting in a low voice, Zulu words that few in the audience could understand.

Then the string bass was stroked and the drum set pattered until a song burst forth, dissonant, disjointed, and very jazzy.

Makhathini’s voice wove in and out with the piano keys neither producing a melodic tune, yet urging the piece forward.

Makhathini said to me earlier that “if you have the most beautiful room, you tend to sound good because it becomes a beautiful dialogue between the place and the musicians and the songs.” Such was the case that evening, a dialogue based on the songbook and album, Spirit of Ntu at the Dakota under a blue moon.

It also becomes a beautiful dialogue between the audience and the band, a band comprised of Nduduzo Makhathini and two other consummate musicians, drummer Francisco Mela of Cuban origin now living in Boston and fellow South African bassist Zwelakhe-Duma Bell le Pere.

Makhathini held our attention not only for his skill on the keyboard, but also in his attire. He wore a bright red tarboosh or fez, but without any tassel. His tunic vest was navy and red vertical stripes over a blue shirt and pants. His Nikes were a fresh white as was his beard in contrast to his dark black coif.

The second number, Izinkonjana, featured each musician and included Zulu lyrics and dancing even by Makhathini. This music from South Africa was such a contrast to the opening band, Suitor.

The warm-up band lead by trumpeter Decarlo Jackson was a mirror image of Makhathini. Where Jackson was relaxed and played in a colloquial undemanding style, Makhathini was intense and complex and challenging. Suitor’s music was easy to love because it was easy on the ears. Makhathini’s offerings confronted the listener and the hard-won gift of following along created immense satisfaction as if one solved the Grandfather Burr puzzle resolving its interlocking blocks.

Makhathini turned to the audience after the fourth number and launched into a mini-lecture providing context for his music. He referenced the displacement of people in Africa and lost culture, lost customs, and lost lands, leaving people adrift.

The fifth song reflected his spoken word perfectly with each musician playing their instrument often in conflict with one another, jumbled and seemingly disorganized, but then coming together in synchronistic harmony until they move apart only to dovetail again and again. As if they are working together in an auditory roulette creating aural hypo- and epi-trochoids.

The evening ended with Makhathini giving us an extra gift. He sang about rain, which our drought-battered state needs right now. The drums mimicked raindrops and rumbling thunder. Makhathini coaxed the audience to sing along in Zulu.