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African artists face a global scourge: piracy

On the crowded streets of Paris' multi-ethnic 18th district, the sale of pirated tapes and cassettes going for peanuts has long been a booming trade. Not so common is the recent buzz for good quality, legally-made recordings.

At Africa Productions, the outlet for officially-made tapes and videos, 25-year-old Bathily was thrilled to have found cassettes direct from Senegal television, featuring Domou Baay, and the current hit music compilation, Takkussanu N'Dakaru.

"I live in Paris, but with the films and music directly from Dakar, I have my head and my heart back there at home."

The store in a down-at-heels section of the northern 18th arrondissement, or district, has a catalogue of television films and music cassettes from the continent, which are all legal quality recordings, originating from Senegal, Gambia, Mali and Cote d'Ivoire.

In 1997, the company signed contracts with state television in Senegal, the west African country with the greatest number of audiovisual productions, and the following year with Gambia.

"Our most intimate get-togethers to watch the films and music tapes are always within the community," said Babacar Sall, 41, from Dakar.

Sall says the audiovisual attraction is much stronger than novels or poetry, because the Wolof language is based on an oral tradition.

"For me, it's the music I like the most, but my wife and her friends love the films, because they can check out the latest fashions and how actresses are wearing their hair," Sall said.

Sall is the director of Banlieues du Monde (Suburbs of the World), an association that takes groups of French secondary school students to train on construction sites in Africa.

The battle for the hearts and minds of African expatriates has long been open to anyone who could mass-produce pirated cassettes, but with no guarantee of quality and no royalty payments to the theatre troupes who produce the films.

"Our greatest battle has always been with pirated cassettes in film and music," says Frenchwoman Nadine Besnard, who runs Africa Productions with her husband Mohamed Diakite, from Mali.

"In France, we have succeeded in eliminating almost all the bootlegs from the market, but in Italy we sell only 25 percent of what we should be selling. Our cassettes are pirated there and sold more cheaply."

Mohamed Soumare, a 29-year-old from Dakar, until last year worked in an Africa Productions store in Harlem.

"Our cassettes sold very well there to Africans and New Yorkers both white and black, who really like African music," he says, "but there were so many bootleg tapes being sold that eventually we had to close the store."

At most times of day the Paris store is busy.

Africa Productions usually has three or four new releases every month direct from the continent, with the cassettes professionally copied in a factory in Belgium.
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