There was a time, not that long ago, when Kimi Djabaté was afraid. He was afraid of, among other things, being successful. His own mother, recalls Kimi, who was a child prodigy playing the balafon back home in Guinea-Bissau, would advise him against it. “Be careful,” she would say, “you’re playing and singing too well, people may want to harm you.” This virtually paralysing menace, Kimi tells me, meant that even after relocating to Portugal 26 years ago and putting a 2,000-mile distance between him and his home country, he still censored his own music, tried not to deviate from tradition and stopped himself from letting his recordings “shine.” He even asked his producers not to work too much on the albums, preferring to release them as if they were…
