Zifa - Interview

I never got 'started' in music, I just grew up with it," yells Zifa, 28, while frenetically drumming away on a pair of congas, sitting in his two-room apartment in downtown Stockholm. We're listening to his debut album, The Last Dog, a suggestive and rhythmical collection of songs, "dance-oriented and modern, but still authentic Africa". I count six African hand drums of various sizes, one large enough to sit on. A beautiful striped and spotted pelt of civet cat is draped over one and, knowing that Zifa hunted with his missionary father in Zaire as a child, I ask if he trapped the animal himsele "No," he says, putting the congas aside, "I think my father accidentally ran over it with his car."

"Africans drum all the time," he tells me and serves me pepparkakor (Swedish gingerbread biscuits) and herbal tea. "Rhythms are like a pulse, a heartbeat, and if you don't have that heartbeat, Africans don't believe you can do anything in life. Not work, not play, not travel - nothing. I grew up with this belief."

Considering his Scandinavian looks - tall with long blond hair - he speaks in a surprisingly high-pitched voice. He moves with gentle dignity around the cramped but cosy flat. On the walls hang symbolic icons from different cultures: a black European crucifix made of large nails, an Arabic Fatima hand in brass supposed to ward off evil, and an arrangement in wood and leather resembling a spider's web, made by Navaho Indians. "It's a 'dream catcher'," Zifa says. "It catches and entangles bad dreams, letting only the good ones through. You've got to believe in things to make them come true."

He's always believed that he would be able to make a living out of his music. However, for the past two years he's supported himself by working in a daycare centre for young refugee children. "It's easy for me to understand their difficulties in adapting, knowing the circumstances they're coming from."

Zifa was born Mikael Eriksson in Gothenburg on Sweden's west coast in 1968. When he was two, his family moved to Semendua, a village of 3,000 inhabitants in central Zaire, where his parents worked as missionaries for the Swedish Baptist Union. He quickly became a natural part of the local Baskata tribe and was given the African name of Zifa.

Zifa describes his music as
"Dance-oriented and modern,
but still authentic Africa."

My fellow tribe members sing all the time. In Afirica, music is never a performance, it's a form of expression.

Apart from singing in the local church choir, Zifa learnt to play.bambunda, the village drum, and sing traditional African folk music. "My family and fellow tribe members sang all the time. But we never gathered for the purpose of singing; we would just sing spontaneously. That's how things are done in Africa. Music's never a performance or an accomplishment, it's a form of expression, showing joy or pain, or whatever."

At seven, he started at Semendua's Swedish missionary school where he studied not only his mother tongue but also Kisakata, the local tribal language, and Lingala, the most common trading language used by the tribes in the region. He still speaks Lingala fluently, along with French and English, complete with an American accent.

"When I was a kid we used to make our toys out of bamboo," he says. "We'd go swimming and fishing and we hunted with bows and arrows and slingshots. We'd go after wild boar, antelopes and monkeys."

In 198 1, Zifa and his twin brother were sent 800 kilometres north to attend Zaïre's Ubangi Academy - an American high school for missionary children. They lived in a dormitory together with 45 other children and followed the normal school curriculum of reading, writing and 'rithmetic, as well as engaging in nightly prayer devotions. Here, Zifa came across western music for just about the first time. "Apart from knowing all the ABBA lyrics backwards and forwards, I had only listened to my parents' collection of choral music before," he says. He recalls his initial reaction to rock 'n' roll. The group? Van Halen. "It sounded like someone had gone into a kitchen, taken all the pots and pans out and was clanking them together. It sounded like total chaos and almost scared me. But then I learned to harness that distortion in my head and, now, when I listen to that album, Women and Children First, I hardly think it's heavy at all." He also remembers the first time he heard Michael Jackson's Thriller. One of his classmates had gone to America and brought the album back to school. "I listened to 'You Wanna Be Starting Something' and I swear I smiled for days. I couldn't believe it! It was like somebody had written words and music to express some personal longing of mine. The music reflected a part of me. We all listened to that album until there was nothing left of it."

Music has inspired me to use and appreciate the talent I have," he says. "Usually, we go through life thinking that we're not good enough. Musicians like Youssou N'Dour have helped me to bring out what is ‘me'."

N'Dour, who was born in Senegal, is Zifa's musical hero. "It was amazing. I'd been in Africa for 14 years, but I hadn't experienced West African music until I came back to Sweden when I was 16. 1 think the African rhythms and Arabic melodies are the ultimate combination. Like putting music to the Koran."

Moving on to his own music, I ask him about The Last Dog, a title taken from a 1996 Bill Clinton campaign speech - "I'll be around until the last dog dies." "I have no doubts or regrets about my album," he says. "I feel it's the best work I've ever done." He lists a track called "Yerusalema" (Lingala for Jerusalem) as his favourite song. Another is the first single, released last November, called "African Prayer". Complex background vocals power the strongly religious lyrics - the spiritual terminology reflecting Zifa's past rather than his personal beliefs.