The Guardian : Shakira Mebarak is ‘Madonna Gone Right’
In an interview with The Guardian, Shakira Mebarak talks about economic development, poverty, sociology, and global history while promoting her new album She Wolf.
During the course of the interview, Shakira manages to go from hip-shaking International pop star to an intelligent, intellectually provocative, well-intentioned woman who manages to change Euan Ferguson’s perception of the cliche do-gooder pop star:
It suddenly strikes me that she‘s Madonna gone right. She’s not arrogant or demanding, she can sing, can actually dance, writes her own music, does good things for children without always having to pick them up and “take them home with her“. Shakira doesn’t just talk about it: she gets things done. In the past few years she has built five children’s schools in her native Colombia. She sits through interminable meetings with squabbling Latin American politicians, trying to charm and nuance her way into firm commitments to education for 0 to 6-year-olds. Both Barack Obama and Gordon Brown have called her for advice, and they weren’t cosmetic calls, and she’s now busy talking to Warren Buffet’s son, Howard, about future programmes. For perhaps the first time ever, I find myself becoming interested in pop stars who do – well, this is honestly not “charidee”, it’s the real thing.
On human nature and lack of Development in Latin America:
we’re animals as well, and we’re territorial, and we are more often than not put in survival mode, and it becomes the law of the jungle. We follow it when we see our own kind endangered; it’s part of natural selection.” Why in particular, I wondered, did Latin America seem to find it so hard to haul more of itself out of the Third World, out of its drugs and corruption and cyclical poverty? “Well, there are pretty fundamental sociological reasons, historically. Part of it is to do with the fact that when the English came, they travelled with their families, and they settled along with their families. Worked the land, to get their own goods. And, yes, granted, they pretty much exterminated most of the Indian population, but they didn‘t subjugate them, make them submit. But when the Spanish came, many of them were on the run, they were criminals, put on this very risky voyage. Without their families. And so they raped and slaved and subjugated, and then tried to convert them. And that has certainly left a trauma mindset on the whole of the continent. The leftovers of colonialism… we‘re still eating them.”
On the children of Latin America:
Thirty-five million children in Latin America receive no access to education of any kind. “A lot of families earn less than $2 a day,” Shakira says, “and they think that‘s normal. Poverty traps them, and they can see no way to break the cycle. Education is the only way forward in Latin America and developing countries in general.”
“In Colombia, in Latin America, the kids are still very smiley, enjoy music, have very high spirits. And yet you know that society is one day soon going to crush them and any dreams like… cockroaches.”
The making of Saint Shakira [Guardian]
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