Meet the pioneering ‘ first lady lady’ of graffiti

When Dieynaba Sidibé discovered graffiti, it was love at first sight. She was 17 and had already begun experimenting with painting and drawing.

“It was on TV. I was sitting in my living room and I saw people doing big walls and I thought: ‘This is what I need,’” the Senegalese artist laughs. “I don’t like small things. I was doing big canvases, and I said to myself: ‘A wall is a bigger surface for expression.’”

Her parents wanted her to focus on her studies, but Sidibé, who adopted the name Zeinixx, sought out Senegal’s budding graffiti community, finding her way to the Africulturban cultural association – a nonprofit in Dakar’s Pikine suburb that promotes urban culture through festivals and skills training.

There, she persuaded one of the country’s pioneering artists, Oumar Diop, AKA Afia Grafixx, to mentor her.

“I already had my basic drawing skills because I used to draw Mickey Mouse, McDonald’s logos, and things like that, and I drew on the walls of my room,” Zeinixx, 31, says. “Grafixx showed me what graffiti was – how to write, how to do lettering – and I started to get interested in hip-hop culture. Now, here I am, 14 years later.”

Zeinixx is Senegal’s first female professional graffiti artist and a core member of its male-dominated hiphop scene. She is also a slam poet, singer and entrepreneur. In August, she launched Zeinixx Entertainment, organising visual arts workshops.

“My refrain is to tell young people: ‘Don’t let others choose for you what you would like to do tomorrow,’” she says from the Africulturban centre, where she runs communications and is preparing for her next project at a girls’ high school in Dakar.

Senegal is in many ways a conservative country, but also has a long history of art, music and poetry. Traditionally in this part of west Africa, the artistic caste of griots were responsible for storytelling through music, spoken word and dance. Senegal’s first president, Léopold Sédar Senghor, was a poet. And last year, a Senegalese writer, Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, won the prestigious Goncourt literary prize. “All this is the common point that unites us, that brings us all together,” says Zeinixx, whom colleagues refer to as the “first lady”

‘Her project must continue because girls need these spaces to express themselves’

of graffiti. “It’s this need to express ourselves, this need to share things and to do beautiful things, whether it’s audiovisual or something physical like dance, or something else.”

Hip-hop took root in Senegal in the 1980s with influences from America, but with its own distinctive flavour.

Senegalese graffiti is typically socially conscious. “You speak directly to the people with messages like, ‘Stop throwing rubbish in the streets,’ or something like ‘ thiono dou reer’ (hard work always pays off),” she says. “They’re actually messages of hope.”

Zeinixx’s messages are often for and about women. She participated in a campaign as part of the annual UN initiative 16 Days of Activism against Gender-Based Violence. At her first workshop, Graff ’All, in October and November, six of the 14 participants were women. “We are still in a very masculine environment … and the rare women we find in this environment, most of the time, they don’t really assert themselves,” she says.

What she is doing is huge, says Fatou Warkha Sambe, a prominent Senegalese feminist and journalist. “We need women everywhere, in every domain. And she’s a pioneer, so I admire her.”

Another recent workshop, Taaru Mbedd (beauty in the street), paired 15 young artists with mentors for four days of discussions before they painted the walls of the French cultural organisation the Institut Français du Sénégal à Dakar. Inspired by the theme djoko , which means connection or communication in Wolof, a traditional oral poetry genre, their work will be exhibited there until April.

Zeinixx asked the trainee artists to bring their families to the exhibition’s opening. In her speech, she pointed to her mother in the audience and said: “If what we are doing is a bad thing, my mother would not be here.” Afterwards, she says, several parents called to thank her for reassuring them.

“It’s great, because it’s not a man’s domain,” says Babacar Niang, AKA Matador, a graffiti artist, dancer, rapper and early member of Senegal’s hip-hop community, who founded Africulturban. “If you have it in you, you should be able to do it. Her project must continue because the girls need these spaces to express themselves, to blossom.”