Tshegue, the Afropunk duo melding Paris, Lingala and Latin America

When it’s time for my interview with Faty Sy Savanet, lead singer of the duo Tshegue, I catch her mid-power-hosing. She’s wearing knee-length wellies, and is battling the debris that’s built up on the paving stones of her garden in the Parisian suburbs of Ivry-sur-Seine. Remarkably, she doesn’t seem to have chipped her nail extensions. She hasn’t taken off a single ring, either. It’s all a far cry from what Savanet’s music exudes: I would have thought she’d be a ‘gardening-is-waiting-for-death’ kind of girl. The sound she’s created with co-founder Nicolas Dacunha is confident, flamboyant and endlessly fun: it would be at home on a playlist with Nihiloxica, Sault and even Major Lazer. But, as we settle into our interview, together with Dacunha, it seems very natural for her to take a break from gardening by sitting on the stoop of her front door to catch the last of the Sunday afternoon sun, smoking a cigarette and reapplying her lipstick.

It’s impressive that both Savanet and Dacunha, who goes by the nickname Dakou, have remained so down-to-earth. Just months after Tshegue released their first EP, Vice magazine came out with the headline “This Afropunk Singer Should Be Very, Very Famous”. Critics applauded their idiosyncrasy, born from a cocktail of Dacunha’s Latin American and Spanish roots, the punk that inspired Savanet in her teens, and her childhood in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Through their eight-year career, they’ve covered a lot of ground. Some of their songs, such as “Mais”, deal with questions such as child malnutrition and corruption. Others, such as “Plus de Place Nulle Part”, are tongue-in-cheek. (Savanet sings: “money isn’t enough, what I want is a planet.”) Half the songs on Tshegue’s eponymous debut EP are in Lingala, Savanet’s native tongue, while the other half are in English. But even though Tshegue’s most recent EP, ARGENT, is the duo’s first to use French, their music has a distinctly Parisian sound – it’s the kind of music that can only be made in an urban sprawl where cultures intermingle. 

How did you settle on the name Tshegue?
Faty Sy Savanet: People have called me ‘tshegue’ since I was small and living in Congo. A tshegue is a street child, someone who has difficult experiences, family issues and a tragic story, who lives in turbulence. And I had this story too, you see. A tshegue creates that link between being uprooted and being around music. They have this power that they’ve gotten from living on the street, which can be very violent, which they channel into music.

Do you still feel like you make music as a tshegue today?
Nicolas Dacunha: The way people make music has changed a lot in the last few years, what with social media. But we make music for music. We start with something really live. Either on the stage or in the studio, we’re thinking more about the music than we are about TikTok. Of course, you have to present your work on social media, but the point of departure for our music is the music itself. Faty has a good artistic eye, so she can make good artistic videos – the operative word being art – but the starting point is getting together around music.

Faty, do you still feel like a tshegue, even living in France and having become so successful?
FSS: I’m interpreting being a tshegue in a very western sense. You know, when you’re not living in the same environment as you were in Africa, you can’t appropriate that story for yourself too much: it stops being a story you live and becomes a story you know. [But] being a tshegue did allow me to fight and to express myself in music, to express my political intentions and my aspirations. I’m a grown-up tshegue.

What are your political objectives?
FSS: That we can all be free, and stop all discrimination based on religion, sex or identity. It’s about not being below someone. Honestly, if I could put it in one phrase, it’s that we should treasure human life. That we should stop killing, that we should stop children dying of hunger. It’s an old-school discourse. But I think we should get back to simple values.

Is this what you were getting at on your track from last year, “Sing My Song”?
FSS: I wrote that song when I was in Kinshasa, because we have an artist there called Papy Mbavu, who wrote a song called “Kotazo” and other really punk, electric street music in the 90s. I was trying to pay homage to him and his music, which is a kind of cry from the street. I don’t really know what kotazo means, but the way I tried to interpret it in the song is by saying kota – which means ‘come’ in Lingala – with zo to stand for ‘zoo’: together I was saying “come to my zoo”. Because in France we still have this problem, and in some other countries it’s even worse, that people judge people who don’t look like them. So, for me, the purpose of this music is to break down barriers. If people look at you like an animal, they should come to your zoo. It’s about connecting people with all the people they don’t like, which we tshegues know well.

When did you leave Kinshasa?
FSS: When I was 10. And it wasn’t easy. I didn’t arrive in France looking like this, looking like a flower! I had experienced war in Congo. I’d been out of school for a while and I had no idea I was in France. I had never experienced cold in my life. For three years I was allergic to winter.

So how did the two of you meet?
ND: We got to know each other in this club, L’Embuscade, where Faty was musical director and where I used to go with friends. We talked a lot about music, and we found that we had the same approach: one that centres around emotions and dance. When I produce and she sings, we have to be thinking of dance, trance and emotion.

Your sound has changed since you released your first EP in 2017. At first, Tshegue seemed more rooted in Congolese music; now the sound is more heterodox. Was that a conscious change?

FSS: I will always, always feel Congolese. That’s really important for me. Because I left Congo in a very brutal way, I wanted to keep the language. I wanted to continue singing in Lingala to feel connected to my country. Lingala helps me not to forget where I’m from. It took me a while to sing in French because I didn’t feel it was legitimate for me to do so. I feel more at ease in Lingala and actually in English too. French is a language that has to grow inside of you and wrap itself around you. But I didn’t know where I should position myself. I felt like I was between Africa and the west. Now I feel more like I’m on a universal plane. I’ve lived in so many places, with so many different cultures, and I’ve travelled so much, that I tell you I could belong on some new planet, where all the cultures are respected. My father is Guinean-Malian, my mother is Senegalese-Congolese. So four African countries are already inside me. But they don’t fight: they’re in communion. I know that we can evolve, we can marry others, we can intermix. I feel more at ease today than I used to. Now people are less embarrassed of where they come from, they’re no longer ashamed. I’m happy to come from a world which is happy with this diversity. 

Can you still distinguish your own musical influences in the music you make together?
ND: Latin American music is very close to African music. Those kinds of rhythms were taken to South America by enslaved people. The percussion, the constant link between music and dance, and the energy, I believe they’re all shared by the two musical traditions.

Is it because you feel more at ease with your identity that your new songs are in French?
FSS: I don’t write my songs thinking, “OK, now I want to write in French.” I was inspired by the big movements in France, like the anti-racist punk movements in the 1980s. When I was listening to them, it’s like my French-language songs came out by themselves. It’s like it was linked to the issues we have today in France: Islamophobia, racism, transphobia. We did it without reflecting, but it worked well for the times we’re living in. 

But some of your songs are quite light-hearted?

FSS: They’re funny but they’re also serious at the same time. When I sing in Lingala, people don’t really understand. There are punchlines that Congolese people would understand among themselves. But my serious songs all have a punchline. When I sing in Lingala, people may be dancing, but I’m saying something really dramatic. That’s part of the joke. I’d rather see people dance. It’s part of being a tshegue. There’s a sassy side. And I’m a little bit sassy, that’s for sure. We’re not politicians, we’re [not] doing politics, but the goal is to make music. To change the day-to-day. I think we’re too serious as a culture. 

So, Nicolas, how do you understand these punchlines when you’re writing music together?

ND: It’s Faty who writes the text, and I do the music. When we’re in the studio, we start with a basic idea – like some words, a piece of music, a drawing – and then it’s instinctual. There’s a connection between us both. If the idea works for us, we follow it to the end. There are pieces that took us one day, and some that took us six months, because the words weren’t right, the music wasn’t right.

FSS: Our music is really instinctive. When I sing in Lingala, without explaining, he’ll understand. I will be singing about my personal life, about what I experienced in Congo, but he’ll understand. Lingala is a very percussive and emotional language, and so it’s always clear when I’m doing well and when I’m doing badly. I think, Nicolas, because you’re a drummer, you understand percussion, sonority, better than others.

ND: I generally can tell pretty quickly what emotion Faty is trying to convey in Lingala.

FSS: As a feminist, it’s really important for me that he understands. Making music with a man, if he didn’t understand, it would be really difficult. So we’re always in conversation about humanity, seeing the world as a woman, as a man, as a Black woman. If he can’t understand, you can’t expect anyone else to understand. But Dakou, he can understand me very well, and that also helps our music.

ND: We’re really different on paper. But I couldn’t create this music without understanding it. Faty’s words are important. It’s not just the music. There’s a real message. It’s important for me to have a vision, to take a stance. It’s never just ‘political’.

FSS: I think it’s also important to keep the primitive side of music. That’s why I drew the cover of the last EP, ARGENT, so that people could take what they wanted from it. It was a kind of translation. But that’s just my opinion. Dakou?

ND: Yeah. Music is about understanding emotions, even if you don’t understand the text, because there’s an emotion that passes through the music. Of course, there are lots of things to say about the world. But if the only thing you understand is the music, that’s good in and of itself.

Hair NICOLAS PHILIPPON at ARTLIST, make-up LISA MICHALIK at ARTLIST, set design FÉLIX GESNOUIN at TOTAL MANAGEMENT, lighting NIKLAS BERGSTRAND at STRAND DIGITAL, lighting assistant MARCOS MARCHETTI, styling assistants MONICA JIANG, CARI LIMA, JOANA MAHAFALY, ZOÉ MINARD-LIÉVAIN, MACY RICHARDS, JUDE WAITE, tailoring GUILLEM RODRIGUEZ BERNAT, hair assistant HAWA DRAME, make-up assistants SIGRID LARSSON, MARIE GOUGEON, set design assistants ELIJAH DEROCHE, FAUSTINE MORISSET, production EVELYNE BONNEAU at FOUDRE PARIS, production assistants MAËLLE GHESQUIÈRE, EMMA QUEILLE, post-production HAND OF GOD