Maloya / Reunion Island / Sin Dni

Maloya is a fire. Charged with energy songs form hours long sets open to anyone who can sing or play. Songs belong to creole culture and most of them are well known to all participants. You do not come here to give concert but to be part of it. You would sing, keep a rhythm for few minutes on the rouler, than bash the drumsticks on the sati or piquer to end up dancing with kayamb in your hands. Musicians share and swap instruments all the time and although skills are carefully watched and appreciated no one is shy to get on it. Maloya thrives from the beautiful and lively culture of Reunion Island.

Maloya on Réunion, Sega Tipik and Sega Ravanne in Mauritius, Sega on Chagos and Agaléga, Sega Tambour on Rodrigues, and Moutya in the Seychelles… this are all forms of music developed by creole culture in the Indian Ocean region. For the African diaspora, these music - deeply related with the experience of colonialism and slavery - was not so much form of entertainment as a way to survive.

It is not fully understood in popular discourse in "the West" that the driving force behind the industrial revolution, and the foundation of the empires, was the slave labour of hundreds of thousands of people. Overseas colonies were huge factories where cost optimisation knew no bounds. Sugar, alcohol, tobacco, coffee, tea, cotton, indigo and tropical timber helped to build fortunes and fill the state treasuries of the global powers. The same model of colonisation was used in the southwestern part of the Indian Ocean as in the Atlantic Ocean: islands completely transformed into plantations, thousands upon thousands of people brought over by ship; an unprecedented demographic experiment. Historically and culturally, the Mascarene archipelago is a mirror image of the Caribbean....

There is much more to maloya. Full story will be published soon on jujusounds.com

This video was shot with smartphone only in August 2020.