She is a shining example of a mixed-race individual who has fully accepted her combined black and white parentage.

Although the line-up of the group has changed considerably over the years, Marie Daulne’s mixed-race background has remained at the root of both the music and the mission of Zap Mama.

She is certainly proud of being mixed-race and very positive about her role as a mixed-race individual. In her own words, she identifies with the 'European desire to analyse and intellectualise, but also the African vibe is there. It is my gift to be able to take the essential parts of different cultures and put them together'.

Like her parents, who dared to cross racial boundaries and paid the cost for doing so, she confronts the concept of race and she does this by affirming her mixed-race identity. In many ways it has been easier for her to do this having been brought up in Belgium. It would certainly have been much harder for her to express herself in the manner that she does had she been living in the United Kingdom, where local and national politics have been dogged by a polarised concept of race. In this matter she has been lucky.

Nonetheless, her story deserves to be told if only because she is a shining example of a mixed-race individual who has fully accepted her combined black and white parentage. Marie’s parents chose to blur the boundaries of race through their relationship with each other. Marie is the offspring of that relationship and she is now using the gifts that she has inherited
as a mixed-race person to actively tear down established racial and cultural barriers. No doubt she will continue to do this, as she expands her horizons and pursues her mission into the twenty first century. (c)Martin Relph