Malian singer-songwriter Salif Keita has always played by his own rules. As a teenager, he broke ranks with his royal lineage by becoming a singer; he was so good that he overcame social prejudices against albinos like himself and was embraced as a national superstar. Leaving behind both the Rail Band of Bamako, where he got his start, and his own more experimental group, Les Ambassadeurs, Keita moved to Paris in the 1980s and recorded one of the defining albums of the emerging electric Afropop movement, Soro (Mango, 1987). He has labored over every album since, sometimes for as long as three years, and no two have sounded the same. He got jazzy with Joe Zawinul on Amen (Mango, 1991) and rocked out with Vernon Reid on Papa (Metro Blue, 1999). He made a moody film soundtrack for L’Enfant Lion (Mango, 1993) and recorded a dubious set of French pop songs called Sosie (BIEM, 1996). On his elegant new Moffou (Universal), he works with a new band in a mostly acoustic setting and a subtle, reflective mood. He brings that band to Sanders Theatre this Saturday for an acoustic performance that’s he’s not likely to repeat in his peripatetic career.

Keita’s concert is the centerpiece of "Rhythm & Ritual: Ancestors and Memory," a weekend of films, lectures, exhibits, workshops, and performances that focus on present-day realities in Africa and the diaspora; it’s all presented by World Music and the Cambridge Center for Adult Education. Attendees can learn about the musical and cultural legacy of the Manding Empire, which was established by Keita’s ancestor Sunjata Keita in 1235. They can chant to the ancestor spirits under the direction of a Yoruba priest. And they can contemplate the way today’s African artists are challenging the continent’s darker traditions, such as genocide and clitorectomy. Keita should fit right in to this complex swirl of ancient and modern ideas. He’ll be joined on stage by mostly Malian musicians playing traditional instruments. The songs, however, will not be traditional — they’ll be the idiosyncratic creations of a restless individualist.

"I looked for my own formula for this project," he explains when we meet in New York. "I sought out young Malian musicians. I played with them and rehearsed with them for a month. Then I called Kante Manfila [his guitarist back in the days of Les Ambassadeurs] to put his grand touch on it. And voilà!"

Keita says he wanted to find qualities in his voice that he had never used before, and he actually does. He’s known as a belter and a howler, splitting the difference between high-flown griot praise songs and rock-and-rollish gut cries. But on three solo-guitar-and-vocal performances on Moffou, he pares his voice down to a rough whisper that’s haunted and vulnerable. He sings so gently and smoothly on the opening "Yamore" that when the voice of Cape Verde diva Cesaria Évora comes in on the second verse, you might for a moment think it’s still Keita. The two voices caress each other sweetly on a bed of acoustic guitar, ngoni (a Malian lute), and accordion. The song has a clever vocal hook that catches the ear and doesn’t let go. "I am a searcher," Keita says. " ‘Yamore’ came to me in a magical way. I looked for that melody for three days."

Keita does open his pipes full bore on the driving "Madan," which is based on a rhythm from a Malian harvest party. At the center of this spiraling groove is Harouna Samaké, a young master of the six-string harp called kemelengoni. "He’s a monster, this guy," Keita says. "I know a lot of kamelengoni and doso ngoni players, but he plays in a way I’ve never seen before. He plays everything."

"Baba" likewise has a stunning groove — it’s sensuously ambiguous with a hint of bossa nova and a feel that shifts between a steadfast six-beat count and swaggering, triplet-twisted 4/4 time. Keita also plays the edge with his voice, settling on its natural, clear center and then fraying off into its ragged outer reaches. The song talks about a Malian millionaire who’s famed for his gifts to musicians. "They say he is a swindler, but I like the way he swindles. Even God likes his way of swindling people, because he makes the poor rich. He has given houses to people who never even had a room to sleep in."

Keita has a love/hate relationship with tradition. He looks back to the kingdom that his ancestor Sunjata built in the 12th century and sees the first African democracy, a pluralistic society in which each ethnic group got respect. Then he looks at the literal democracy his country has enjoyed since 1991, and he sees it as threatened by encroaching Islamic fundamentalism. "Mali is run from the mosques. That’s dangerous. We had a chance. We became a democratic country. But what is a country? A country is a way of thinking, and there is a risk that that will escape us now." He has always been among Africa’s most provocative and driven musicians, and now he’s in a mood to open up his music and his politics like never before

IN THE YEARS since Bob Marley first put reggae on the international map, it’s gotten harder and harder to create original music within the prescribed conventions of the genre. Stray from the righteous messages and slow, heavy beats and you lose the loyal audience fast; stay true to them and you’re reworking well-tilled ground. But two veteran African singers — Alpha Blondy of the Ivory Coast and Lucky Dube of South Africa — are creating new music that sells well and, at its best, reinvigorates the genre. Their new albums — Merci and Soul Taker (both on Shanachie) — make the argument that the best reggae around these days comes from Africa.

Alpha Blondy is an unlikely star who rose in the wake of Bob Marley’s death, singing in English, French, Dioula, and other African languages. He studied English at Hunter College in New York (his family wanted him to be an English teacher); when he returned home, he was, after a scuffle with police, briefly confined to a mental hospital in Abidjan, as much as anything because he was too radical for the authorities at the time. Blondy knew about struggle first hand. He also wrote songs with the kind of directness and clarity that Marley’s audience craved, and he sang them in his unmistakable thin, scrappy voice. By 1984, when he recorded his landmark hit, "Cocody Rock," he was in demand all around the world.

Merci is his first album in four years, and it’s a gem, loaded with catchy vocal hooks, nifty arranging by West African genius Boncana Maiga, rich brass-section work, and the same brisk simplicity that to many has marked him as Marley’s heir. "Wari," a song about money, kicks things off with irresistible, sing-along exuberance. Its artful inclusion of kora (West African harp) enriches the skanking groove without denaturing it. Pan pipes do the same on the slow, soulful "Souroukou Logo." Blondy gets away with a few Abidjan tricks, like cross-pollinating one song with the more party-hardy Antillean zouk sound, and of course singing in French and Dioula. He also sings convincingly in English, as on "Who Are You?", a song about the children of West Africa’s civil wars.

Some of the later songs are too clever for their own good, like "Hey Jack," an adaptation of Free’s "All Right Now," with lines like "All right now, Rastafari. All right now." But it’s easy to forgive a little silliness when the music has such energy and Blondy’s voice conveys such a charismatic personality.

The press for Lucky Dube’s 10th international release, Soul Taker, claims that he’s the top-selling reggae artist alive today. Dube’s music is far more encumbered in convention than Blondy’s — he favors certain melodic constructs so heavily that you’re apt to feel you’ve already heard the song on some earlier album. His band is powerful, if a little predictable and lugubrious. But there is that fabulous voice, capable of Smokey Robinson wails, Peter Tosh growls, and everything in between. Dube is a reggae soul man given not to heady philosophy but to worldly angst, notably on the title track and the somewhat gushy "Romeo."

His saving grace may be his subject matter. He built his career on lightly veiled criticisms of apartheid, like his 1985 hit "Slave"; it purported to be a song about alcoholism, but everyone saw past that. Dube didn’t miss a beat when South African politics turned upside down: he set straight to chanting down corruption and cronyism in the new regime. "Sleeping Dogs" and "Is This Freedom?" carry on that tradition here. Some of these songs are about or from the perspective of women. Mostly, he’s sensitive and sympathetic, though "Good Girl" includes the line "I would hate to see my good girl go bad." He also has a feel for the way AIDS has ravaged family life in his country, and he speaks every South African adult’s fears on the album closer, "Sins of the Flesh," with its doo-wop-meets-Zulu-choral-music vocal backing and the question "Where have I been, and who have I been with?"

Dube’s engagement with compelling social issues helps him transcend his musical ideas, which often sound as tired as a lot of other reggae these days. Blondy’s willingness to toy with the music makes his sound fresher, but it’s his proximity to real suffering, real villains, and real injustice that gives his work its immediacy and bite. Without genuine subject matter, reggae’s stern self-importance can quickly turn sour or, worse, ridiculous. This may be the secret to the success of African reggae: a preponderance of villains, hypocrisy, and innocent victims of human folly.

The "Rhythm and Ritual: Ancestors & Memory" takes place this weekend, October 18 through 20, at various venues in Harvard Square. Salif Keita performs this Saturday, October 19, at Sanders Theatre. For conference information and concert tickets, call (617) 876-4275.