From the world’s biggest music stages, which she toured for over two decades, to the severity of the Italian and Belgian prisons, Malian singer Rokia Traoré has seen her world collapse. After spending over six months in detention between Rome and Brussels, she was finally released on January 22. For five years now, a legal dispute over the custody of her daughter has opposed her to ex-spouse Jan Goossens, Belgian stage director and former director of the Royal Flemish Theatre in Brussels, with whom she was in a relationship from 2013 to 2018. He accuses her of preventing him from seeing his daughter since their separation; she argues to have brought her up alone in Bamako, despite inviting the father to Mali.

New African artists have recently joined the singer’s long-standing supporters, giving more media attention to a case that could have remained private. At the beginning of January, thirteen musicians produced an album titled Support Rokia Traoré. From Malian instrumentalists Bassekou Kouyaté and Mamadou Diabaté to Senegalese stars Youssou Ndour and Daara J Family, as well as Nigerian singers Nneka and Keziah Jones, each track is an ode to struggle and freedom. The chorus of Senegalese folk musician Dady Thioune’s ‘Fi la bok’ intones: “I’m from here, and here is where I belong. And you, where are you from? We all belong to this Earth we share” (“Fii laa bokk, fee laa book. Fan nga bokk? Ñun ñépp fu ñu bokk,” in Wolof).

As is often the case, each protagonist is supported by their country’s justice system. While the Malian courts issued an interlocutory judgment awarding sole custody of the child to the mother in 2019, the Belgian courts took the opposite decision that same year. In October 2019, the latter issued a European arrest warrant for the Bamako-based artist for “kidnapping, illegal restraint and hostage-taking.” For the father’s lawyer, the Malian decision was nothing more than “a temporary order” issued without respect for the rights of the defense.

In March 2020, Rokia Traoré was arrested at Roissy airport in France, while on her way to appeal against the Belgian judgment. While in police custody, she went on a hunger strike, denouncing what she described as the “hostage-taking” of her international career. Her arrest sparked a wave of support: several prominent figures, from film director Mati Diop and actor Omar Sy to scholars Judith Butler and Achille Mbembe,  called for her immediate release, stating that “it is unacceptable that a five-year-old child should be deprived of her mother because she complied with a court summons. It is unacceptable that France, which prides itself on being a country of human rights, should disregard women’s rights to such an extent.”

Two weeks after her arrest, the French courts released Rokia Traoré but banned her from leaving the country. She circumvented this restriction by taking a flight to Bamako. “I am shocked that the European arrest warrant could be used against me in this way as a method of blackmail,” the musician reacted immediately. Jan Goossens’ lawyer believes that his client “wants to see his child during the school holidays: to say that he wanted to take her and separate her from her mother is, once again, a lie.” 

Back in Bamako, the Belgian courts’ restrictions on the artist’s movements put her career on hold. In October 2023, a new verdict was handed down: the Brussels Criminal Court sentenced the musician to two years in prison for “kidnapping” and “failing to represent a child.” She was tried in absentia, claiming the court had not informed her of the trial.

When she resumed her concerts outside Mali in the spring of 2024, the musician was due to perform in Italy. However, upon arrival in Rome, when she presented her French passport to customs (she has dual Malian-French nationality), the European arrest warrant resurfaced, and she was arrested again. Traoré was detained in the Italian capital for over five months until her extradition to Belgium in late November 2024. Until January 22, she was held in the Haren prison in Brussels.

Shortly before her extradition from her Italian cell, Rokia Traoré shared her dismay in a letter in which she denounced “a limitless, omnipotent judicial machine:”

During these five years, the father, a Belgian citizen, never came to see his child in Mali. He never contributed to his child’s school fees. He never had any idea of the budget for her food or clothing. But from one European arrest warrant to another, from one prison to another, I’ve been terrorized for the past five years. […] What is this rule that says that a child born to an African and a European must live in Europe, or at least with the European parent? Why does this rule apply first, and then why does it seek and find justification in the rules of law, disregarding the rights of the African parent and the child?

In Bamako, where Rokia Traoré’s ten-year-old daughter still lives, her family has been raising the alarm with the Malian authorities since 2020. The youngest daughter, Naba Aminata Traoré, continued to plead for her sister’s release. The Haren prison imposes a strict visiting regime, and the thousands of kilometers between Bamako and Brussels made the trip expensive—over 800 dollars for a round-trip flight. News was scarce, as the prison administration did not provide an internet connection or telephone flat rates for Mali. Isolated from her family, to whom she sent letters through relatives in Europe, the musician spent her days reading, mainly law, and writing the manuscript of a forthcoming book.

One of Rokia Traoré’s rare visitors was Fatma Karali, who had launched an online petition calling for her release from custody in March 2020 that then gathered over 30,000 signatures. Co-founder of the Mères Veilleuses collective, an association dedicated to defending the rights of single mothers and their children, she campaigned tirelessly in Europe to release the musician; attending all the public hearings following Rokia Traoré’s extradition to Belgium.

In 2021, the Malian singer agreed to become the patron of Mères Veilleuses to support the women in need whom the collective accompanies. “In reality, Rokia’s story is ordinary,” Fatma Karali explains. “Other mothers are in situations stricken by economic, psychological or institutional violence. Often from Sub-Saharan Africa, they are forced to stay in Belgium to be with their children as if the child were the property of the state.”

The opposite scenario – that of a Belgian father being held for months in a Malian prison despite a favorable ruling by his country’s courts – would seem unlikely, at least before the coups in Mali. “His embassy would have mobilized, defended him, and got him off the hook, regardless of Malian law,” said Senegalese intellectual Felwine Sarr the day after Rokia Traoré’s first arrest in Paris. He went on: “This case, although private and intended to remain so, has become political: it reflects the state of political, legal, and symbolic relations between Africa and the rest of the world. […] If words still have meaning, the little girl in question was never kidnapped and taken from her mother, who looked after her in Mali when everything was going well.”

While some have gone so far as to denounce the racist treatment of Rokia Traoré, the courts only rule based on positive law, as Abdoul Aziz Diouf, professor of private law at the Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar, points out: “Court rulings are sometimes superficial: women who cannot prove their accusations are powerless before the law because of patriarchy, and many suffer as a result.”

While an “amicable” agreement was finally the favored option, the decision on custody arrangements remains in the hands of the Belgian courts. A new closed-door hearing at the Brussels Criminal Court is scheduled for June to examine the terms of this agreement before pleadings allow a final decision by the end of the year. As for the singer’s appeal against her two-year sentence in absentia in 2023, her lawyer believes it should be a “formality,” provided both parties respect the agreement. 

In the meantime, Rokia Traoré will not be able to leave European territory, at least until her next hearing in June. “Strong personality or not,” says Fatma Karali, “by choosing to stay in Mali for five years, she has paid a high price for her career.”