Angélique Kidjo
July 14, 1960 — Ouidah, Benin
Angélique Kidjo is a Beninese singer, songwriter, and activist who has won five Grammy Awards and the Polar Music Prize, is a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador, and has spent four decades creating music that draws on West African traditional music, jazz, gospel, funk, and Latin rhythms to produce a sound that is entirely her own and entirely singular.
Growing Up in Benin
Born on July 14, 1960 in Ouidah, a port city on the coast of what was then Dahomey (now Benin), Kidjo came from a large, musical family. Her mother directed a theatrical troupe; her siblings played instruments; music was treated as a communal, serious pursuit rather than entertainment. She performed publicly from the age of six and was already a recording artist in Benin by her early twenties. In 1983, recognising that the political climate under the Marxist government of Mathieu Kérékou was becoming hostile to artistic expression, she left Benin for Paris, where she enrolled at the CIM Jazz School. In Paris she worked as a backing vocalist, formed her own band, and developed the synthesized, boundary-crossing sound — Afropop, jazz, funk, gospel — that she would bring to the world.
International Recognition
Kidjo signed with Island Records in the late 1980s and released Parakou (1989) and Logozo (1991), which established her internationally. Her 1994 album Aye included her signature song "Agolo," a plea for environmental protection set to a hypnotic, layered groove, which became her first major Western hit. Over the following decades she recorded prolifically — releasing more than 15 studio albums — working with artists including Bono, Carlos Santana, Peter Gabriel, Alicia Keys, and Branford Marsalis. She won Grammy Awards for Best World Music Album in 2008 (Djin Djin), 2016 (Sings), 2020 (Celia, a tribute to Celia Cruz), 2022 (Mother Nature), and 2023. Her Grammy for Celia — on which she performed Celia Cruz's classic songs through a West African lens — was acclaimed as one of her finest artistic achievements.
Did You Know?
Kidjo founded the Batonga Foundation in 2006, dedicated to providing secondary education to girls in sub-Saharan Africa. The organisation takes its name from a Beninese expression meaning "let her be" — an injunction to allow girls to grow and become what they are capable of becoming. The Foundation has helped thousands of girls access secondary school in countries including Ghana, Cameroon, Ethiopia, Uganda, and Burkina Faso.
Activist, Ambassador, Artist
Kidjo has served as a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador since 2002, using her platform to advocate for children's rights, girls' education, and HIV prevention across Africa. She has spoken before the United Nations, the African Union, and numerous national governments. In 2023 she received the Polar Music Prize, one of the most prestigious awards in music, from the Royal Swedish Academy of Music — described by the Academy as one of the world's most versatile and influential musicians. She has also performed her stage presentation of Talking Heads' album Fear of Music to wide acclaim, a choice that exemplifies her lifelong insistence on treating genre boundaries as suggestions rather than rules. She lives between New York and Paris, and continues to record and perform actively.