Last Night: Baaba Maal, Womad Festival, Charlton Park, Wiltshire

Baaba Maal closed the Womad Festival last night with a 70-minute celebration of Senegalese song and dance, which made the fireworks that followed superfluous.

Maal both epitomises and pre-dates Womad's ideals. Growing up in Senegal's cultural crossroads, Podor, where Saharan and southern Africa mingle, his musical curiosity saw him scour his country's backroads for styles, before studying at a Paris conservatory, as he constructed a culturally open yet proudly Senegalese sound. Western fans range from Damon Albarn to the UN, for whom he has been a Goodwill Ambassador. But Maal is not grateful for such attention. He publicly attacked Live8's presumption it could speak for Africa, minus African musicians, refusing to see Europe and the US as the world's centre, and his continent as a charity case.

Instead, he has scoured the globe, Europe included, for roots music to enrich his next album, and, with the recent Blues du Fleuve Festival in Senegal, began a Womad of his own in Africa. A constitutional anti-colonialist seeking to preserve and renew Senegalese traditions, he is the perfect choice to close Britain's most radical, prejudice-shattering music festival.

Multiple talking drums are whipped as Daande Lenol, Maal's orchestra, slowly fill the stage, before Maal himself, in white robes which make him exactly resemble a dreadlocked Anglican vicar, arrives. Impassive as a statue at first, as the drums and limber funk guitar back a wildly shaking female dancer, he moves to the front to ask us for, essentially for, justice: "love'', and "respect'', to make Africa, "one of the best places in the world'', instead of the place of blameless, destitute children it can be.

Typically, the song that follows is no sorrowful dirge, but pure celebrations. Four drummers construct accelerating polyrhythms to befuddle even master hip-hop producers such as the Neptunes. Meanwhile, female dancers casually contort in mid-air, and Maal, strips to more African robes, does his own supple, slippery moves.

Soon, high-life guitars are rolling out a sunny rhythm and, for Maal the playful taskmaster, female dancers contorting limbs are matched by a male drummer shaking down to his boxers. Despite Maal's speeches, he knows earnestness won't affect the changes he wants. Creative joy gets under more skins.

Maal's voice is its simplest expression. When accompanied only by an acoustic guitar, he first sits singing quietly, aristocratically enthroned. Then he hurls out piercing, shockingly full notes into the West Country night. Next, he brings on his old griot mentor, Mansour Seck, to do almost the same: acknowledging his roots, and staying proud, not vain. Oars and pestles are brought on, turning this Wiltshire country stage into a Senegalese village scene.

Musicians somersault, swirl and dance on their backs, as a piano hits an incongruous samba groove. The night finishes with Maal as the Whirling Dervish centre of an all-singing, all-dancing response to a rippling, mutating African rhythm.

Live8 organisers, you would hope, are hanging their heads.