Kidjo is a firm believer in the need to make major change in the way we treat the planet and protect future generations. “When you’re pregnant and you eat bad food, it affects your child. The same goes for Mother Earth: when we pollute the planet, we are polluting our children’s future too,” she says. “When I was six months pregnant, I realised the amount of garbage I put out there. I thought to myself, do I need all of this? How can I consume in a way that I don’t add pain to Earth?”

The singer is also a human rights activist: she has long travelled through different regions of Africa to collect folk music, but she was exposed to far more than melodies and lyrics, observing situations that have driven her activism. A trip to the Samburu district in northern Kenya ten years ago was particularly motivating, as she witnessed cases of acute malnutrition in newborn babies. “As a mother, it’s always difficult for me to see children suffering. I have no filters for this,” she says. “But in those moments, I meet resilience and beauty at their core. The women in Kenya probably saw me getting emotionally so [distraught] that they started singing. I felt like being wrapped in a comforting blanket, and I walked right into the song.” Kidjo recovered from her tears and started singing with the women.

This experience would later on be encapsulated in the 2014 album Eve, named after her own mother and the mythical mother of all living things. The record features songs that incorporate samples recorded in this and other villages in Kenya and Benin to celebrate the women of Africa, their resilience and beauty. And she wants to do more for mothers everywhere. “We want our children to have a decent life, three meals a day, great education and a bright future,” she says. “Everywhere I’ve been, [this] has been a constant. This is what gives me the strength to do what I do for my music and work with [organisations like] Unicef.”

As well as being a Goodwill Ambassador for Unicef since 2002 and receiving Amnesty’s Ambassador of Conscience Award in 2016, Kidjo also has her own charity, the Batonga Foundation, which she set up in 2006. It works across Benin, Mali, Cameroon, Ethiopia and Sierra Leone, where dropout rates are high among schoolgirls, to provide disadvantaged adolescent girls and young women with safe spaces to learn, mentoring programmes, financial literacy education and seed funding for their own businesses. “We design the [learning centres’] curriculum based on their needs and whatever they want to do,” she explains.

Like her own parents before her, Kidjo is a firm believer that “education is the only way for any human being to face the challenges of the ever changing world. Because how do you live as a citizen of this world if you cannot absorb the changes that come your way and see them as opportunities instead of threats?

“My father used to say that the world is big, and that I had to envision the world through its [diverse] cultures,” she says. Kidjo was born to a musical family in 1960 in a village in Benin, West Africa. “We weren’t rich: my father was the only one with a pay cheque. But he sent ten children to school and made sure we had everything—books, uniform, tutoring and mentoring.” While folk music was very much a part of her hometown’s way of life—“when people are happy, sad, die or have a newborn, or people would just come around when you have the drums out”—Kidjo’s father would bring home music from the rest of the world, so that his daughter could be exposed to international cultures and languages. “It was amazing for me to discover the languages, the music and where these people were from. That wasn’t normal for my people back then. The way my parents raised me was very liberal,” she recalls.

As a child, Kidjo learnt singing from her mother and, in her teens, performed with her brothers’ band in the nightclub run by her father’s friend. Later, she played in her high school band The Sphinx, which won numerous competitions. When she was 20, she released her first album with her student loan, launching her musical career.

It wasn’t until 1983, when her family relocated to Paris to evade a political coup, that Kidjo received institutional music education at CIM, one of Europe’s most renowned jazz schools. She rose gradually to fame in the 1990s with albums such as Logozo (1992), Ayé (1994) and Fifa (1996), which blended African languages and musical traditions with western soul and pop, and brought a refreshing sound to the music scene both in the west and Africa.

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“Music is a powerful way of speaking and connecting human beings; it isn’t about the language,” says Kidjo, who speaks four African languages, English and French, and has invented a language of her own which she sometimes includes in her songs. “Batonga”, for instance, is an invented word which, as a schoolgirl, she used to yell at the boys who bullied her and discouraged her from going to school. “A lot of people don’t understand [some of the lyrics], but I sometimes see people crying in my concerts. Music is the only way that allows me to speak about the pain, injustice and resilience that I have seen. By getting the [negative emotions] out of my system, I make something positive out of them by sharing my knowledge and empathy with the public. That’s where my songs come from.”

After her December concert with Ma, the singer headed to Geneva to speak and perform at the celebration of the 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. “Where are we, 75 years into the Human Rights Declaration? That’s what we have to figure out here: how do we boost what we have built? How do we move to the next step? How do we make this a reality for everybody?” she says.

The diva certainly has a lot going on and more coming down the pipeline—but there’s one simple calling that keeps her motivated. “I’ve been told by the traditional musicians in my country that my gift is special, that it’s my obligation is not to keep it to myself but to share it with the world. That’s what I’ve been trying to do: build bridges between cultures.”

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