Le Pays Va Mal
By: Kayla Nova
Freshman year of high school, french class, sixth period. I walked in to what sounded a lot like reggae. As a Caribbean, this was exciting usually in school, I wouldn’t be hearing reggae, and if i were it would be some popular Bob Marley song, and not in my French class. As I said bye to my friends, I started to listen in for the lyrics, much to my surprise they were in french. Now I was really curious. This type of music seemed straight up my street, reggae with some African spice in french! In class, we spoke about the importance of the song. The song’s title actually means “The country isn’t doing well”. The lyrics explain why, there is no unity, everyone is against each other, no one has respect for one another, the entire society is a mess. Because I’ve lived in the States my entire life, I felt oddly curious about the accuracy of his statements. I’m rather sensitive to the interesting things people say about Africa (as a whole) and Africans, typically because comments aren’t positive, and people are uneducated about the subject. I thought about my classes reaction to the song, comments flying like, “ Imagine living in such a toxic environment”, “They all hate each other !”, “They’re fighting for resources that they don’t have” (that comment meaning that they for example want internet but such things don’t even exist). I listened to the song on repeat for the rest of the day, listening to the same complaints, the same worries. Although my dad is Togolese he went to school in Ivory Coast for eleven years, Tiken Jah Foloky the author of the song, grew up and still lives in Ivory Coast. Knowing my dad knows the current affairs for practically all of West Africa, especially Ivory Coast, Togo and Benin, I decided to send the song to him and ask him if the song was really still accurate after all these years, at that point the song had been out for 17 years. He agreed, things were bad then and things were still bad, but it’s a different type of bad. I then knew there had to be some way to encourage change even from New York. I remembered my aunt had opened an orphanage in Lomé (Togo), I also remembered that today’s children are tomorrow’s game changers. Days later, I asked her to play the song every day, during quiet time for everyone there. Kids often feel like they’re watching adults but have no say in what happens or that by the time the problems adults face will be historic, but what they don’t think is how the problem will become historic, what happens, where the change will occur. So I figured, if these kids heard a song often about how badly things were in their nations and the ones nearby, that they would be motivated to want to be apart of the change. Months later, my aunt called me, super excited that an education inspector came by and heard the song being played during quiet time in all the classrooms and break rooms, commons areas, and wondered why. The inspector liked the idea and brought it to the public school inspectors hoping that they too would want to be a part of the change that’s much needed. The following school year, my aunt called me back to let me know that now in neighboring counties, schools have adopted the same practice and with other songs as well, to motivate kids to be the change they want to see. This was exciting news to hear !! I didn’t think that I would have had anything to do with the social change that occurs in West Africa- and I still wouldn’t say I’m actively involved but I’m glad that children will now grow up thinking about how they can be the change they want to see.
