“The first thing an African loses when he arrives in Europe is his culture,” he tells us. Baba Sya Senegalese DJ, music producer and activist living in Barcelona. In exchange, he adds, “he receives a shopping cart to collect scrap metal. And that is all people see. The cart and the black-skinned man pushing it. The scrap dealer who comes from far away, the hustler, the stranger, the threat.” Sy insists that those who cross the Strait or the arm of the sea that separates Senegal, the Sahara and Mauritania from the Canary Islands are dignified individuals, “with their identity, their values, their intelligence, their qualities and their principles.” People, very often, well-educated, with concerns and, in addition, “authentic warriors, because the jump to Europe is a terrible test, both physical and psychological, which forces you to face not only the sea, but also multiple dangers and your fears.”
He is a product of that diaspora, but also, as he naturally admits, “a privileged one.” After all, he did not have to face the atrocious initiation journey through clandestine migration networks, which costs the lives of around 1,300 Africans every year. Sy, of Fulani ethnicity, born in the industrial city of Thiès in 1986 and raised in Dakar, arrived in the Canary Islands on a plane at the turn of the century, shortly after turning 14. In the archipelago he was reunited with his mother, was able to complete his studies, played football with some success in several local clubs, worked in car companies, cafes and shops, and began to try his luck in the world of music.
In 2005, after a short period with his brothers in Mallorca, he ended up in Barcelona. In his new adopted city he would soon make his way as a DJ, with restless and unprejudiced sessions at the Razzmatazz club (often in the company of selector Miquel Pàmies, cousin of one of the stars of the local scene, DJ Buenri) which he now remembers as his true baptism of fire in the booths. At that time, the electronic scene in the Catalan capital was a monoculture of icy German-inspired electronica. He brought with him in his bag an interest in Senegalese and international hip hop, junglehe drum and bassUK garage, Afro-Latin electronics and, in general, almost any sound that incorporated a certain dose of African polyrhythm. Rather than perforating eardrums and dislocating hips, he set out from the beginning to spread the sounds of urban, mixed and contemporary Africa, a cultural and human ecosystem “that has little to do with that exotic postcard Africa that many Europeans imagine.”
Sy welcomes us in the industrial warehouse of FOC, the self-managed cultural centre in the Barcelona neighbourhood of Marina del Prat Vermell, between the sea, the Montjuïc mountain and the industrial and logistics area of Zona Franca. This space, shared with the experimental art school Choro and the independent gallery Cordova, is home to Jokkoo, the anti-racist activism and promotion project that Sy and the Catalan DJ of Senegalese origin Maguette Dieng founded in 2017. Today, the collective has six members with complementary profiles, all children of the exodus. Here they organise, according to Baba, “workshops on music production and events, concerts and sessions of experimental and minority DJs (marginal art, as we like to call it), talks, performances… Everything.” They have also participated in neighbourhood festivals, in participatory activities aimed at teenagers, the elderly and newcomers, as well as in the independent art days that Choro organises at the nearby La Bàscula youth centre. Sy shows the large, open-plan central space, known as “the Beach” and resembling an aircraft hangar, where their most daring initiatives take shape: “Any idea that doesn’t fit in a conventional club, but perhaps does in alternative galleries and spaces like the Macba or La Casa Encendida (in Madrid), with which we regularly collaborate, first passes through this place, which is our laboratory and our project incubator. We like it to be in a peripheral, working-class neighbourhood with a rather limited cultural offering. It’s better to try to create a community in such an environment than in a place where they already have everything.”
Sy invites us to share a ginger water in the loft where he has set up his office, a room where the squawking of the seagulls mixes with the songs of the parallel musical project he wants to tell us about, his new alter ego, Passportman. It is, according to him, “a concept and a character” conceived as “the Superman of the African diaspora”. A redeemer, a vigilante determined to preserve the memory “of those who die almost daily in the difficult transit to Europe”, and who end up in that pair of gigantic mass graves that the Atlantic Ocean and the Mauritanian and Saharan desert are becoming. Sy, a cordial and empathetic man, who expresses himself in a more than correct Spanish with a soft Canarian accent sprinkled with words in French, English and Wolof, chokes up when he refers to this daily catastrophe: “If the corpses of our predecessors, brought by force in the centuries of the slave trade or forced to emigrate in recent years by the need and plunder that Africa continues to suffer, were to float in that stretch of the Atlantic that separates Senegal from the Canary Islands, they would form a bridge that would allow Africans to enter the European Union on foot”.
Under the umbrella of Passportmanthe most committed of his alternative artistic identities (he has some others, such as DEER, more focused on broad-spectrum experimental electronics), has dedicated two tracks to the “cemeteries of the sea” and the “cemeteries of sand” and a third to the “cemetery of culture”, which condemns those who survive the crossing to lose their identity and their roots. Part of the music that we hear while its author explains the concept belongs to this last session, a powerful avant-garde litany that links, on a tenuous rhythmic and melodic base, the sounds captured by Sy during his last vacation in Dakar, starting with the call to prayer of the muezzins. It is a funeral oration dedicated both to those who die and to those who see their illusions buried.
Europe, Baba concludes, is an island of material prosperity in a dying world. And it has chosen to shield itself from sharing its opulence and privileges: “The problem of mass immigration is a complex one, I accept that. I don’t know how it could be resolved. Perhaps a serious policy of hiring immigrants from their country of origin would help alleviate it, because Europe needs and will continue to need immigrants. And it is very selfish and very mean to expect them to come here risking their lives to then be treated as second-class citizens, with hardly any rights, suffering labour exploitation and at risk of continuous expulsion. They should be brought here with a reasonable salary, good working conditions and a six-month visa that can be extended if everything goes well and they want to stay. I also consider effective development aid necessary, not a simple pact of interests that further enriches corrupt African elites and harms citizens, as happens, for example, with the fishing agreements between my country and the European Union.”
Once again, he admits that he was lucky, as he was able to regularise his situation in Spain without any more tolls than a bureaucratic ordeal lasting several months. But he also had to endure the dark side of African immigration in the first world: “More than a violent racist rejection, I have suffered the double standard of a society that practices systematic exclusion. Earning a miserable salary of 30,000 pesetas a month when your white colleagues earn 75,000 for doing the same job, having to stay to finish the job when everyone else had left because my situation was more precarious than theirs and I was required to make twice as much effort if I wanted to keep my job. I am not complaining, it is what I had to live through and I have also found honest people who have given me opportunities and treated me with dignity without caring about the colour of my skin. Others have had it much worse than me. But what I find unacceptable is that people say that those of us who come from outside have it easier than the native population or that we are blamed for almost everything that goes wrong in Spain.”
Pasaporteman is a project that Sy defines as “radical and very political”, because it is impossible, in his opinion, to take refuge in moderation and ideological asepsis when the raw material that feeds you is an urgent and burning problem. In the song dedicated to the cemeteries of the sea, Sy collects testimonies from “mothers, sisters and wives” of those who gave their lives in the Atlantic crossing and today “feed the fish”. Even more crude is his vision of the sand cemeteries. Of that desert where some of the migrants in transit detained by the Moroccan police or the rest of the paid guards who are in charge of protecting the accesses to the fortress of the European community end up: “They don’t even return them to their countries of origin anymore. They abandon them in the desert without food or resources of any kind. Many of them die. In that song he explains how the victims of this terrible injustice end up wrapped in shrouds of grains of sand. And how some of their flesh and rotting bones end up reaching Europe when the wind blows from the Sahara, so that they end up entering the mouths of Europeans. No European is vegan. All of them have at some time eaten the flesh of African migrants abandoned in the desert.”
The track that contains the prayers of those who are about to lose their culture gave rise to a performance carried out in collaboration with Cordova and presented for the first time at Sâlmon, the Festival de Artes Vivas in Barcelona. For the occasion, Sy invited “two professionals of Senegalese wrestling, a very popular traditional sport in the country and quite similar to Canarian wrestling.” Illuminated by a single spotlight, coming from a supermarket trolley suspended in the air, the wrestlers engaged in a ritual combat consisting of dance steps, a testing phase and, finally, that duel that Sy conceived as a visual metaphor of the confrontation with nature and chance of those who decide to undertake the great journey: “I started from that image, two bodies intertwined, two men making a very intense physical effort, in close connection with their bodies, their minds and their culture, and I turned it into a visual concept that I believe illustrates this idea of transition from one world to another, with its hope and its risks.”
A Herculean effort that could lead to a better life, but also to a certain melancholy: “I feel that we Africans who have settled in Europe have the responsibility of weaving networks of exchange. To keep in touch with our roots, to make them known, to contribute to improving the image of the continent. And also to share with our communities of origin the experience of having lived here and learned to do things differently. That is the essence of Jokkoo, of Pasaporteman and of almost everything I do.”
