© 2024 Milwaukee Public Media is a service of UW-Milwaukee's College of Letters & Science
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

Blick Bassy: Keeping Cameroon Tradition Alive

In a tiny village in central Cameroon, musician Blick Bassy discovered his sound. Bassy now lives in Paris, but he continues to sing in his native language, Bassa. Bassa is one of the 250 or so languages spoken in Cameroon, and Bassy fears it is dying out.

In an interview with Guy Raz, Bassy worries that Africa is losing not only its own languages and traditions but also its own history. He lays it all out on the first track of his debut album, Leman, called "Africa."

"I am calling [the young people] to go back to the land of history and to learn oral traditions we have there," Bassy says. "We write our history by ourself."

Click on the audio link above to hear the full interview with Blick Bassy.

Copyright 2022 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.