This article isn’t an attempt to tell the whole story of African music; it’s an account of the time I’ve spent exploring the popular sounds of 1960s and 70s Africa. It’s not the easiest music to fall deeply in love with, in part because it comes from a place most Westerners aren’t close to understanding, a continent obscured by our misconceptions, prejudices, and expectations of “world music.” The other difficulties are more practical: The most fertile period for African funk, soul, rock, and jazz lasted from 1965 to 1982, a time of great upheaval in Africa, and much of this music wasn’t recorded. Of that which was put to tape, if the masters still exist, they’re likely significantly degraded by decades of neglect.
This list definitely defies the expectations of Kenny Loggins infused World Music. The 12 most essential discs include classics such as Fela’s “Expensive Shit“, the Ethipiques complication “Swinging Addis” and the T.P Orchestre Poly-Rythmo de Contonou anthology. The article covers a range of boutique record labels and provides a top 100 tracks of African music that is a great Saturday morning listen.
Noticeably absent from the top 100 tracks, however, is music from African countries starting with the letter M. There is nothing from Mozambique or Malawi, the former who continues to produce amazing urban folk music, Marrabenta, and the latter who has recently put out superstar rap-pop fusion bands like the Very Best. Music capital Mali only gets one song. Also surprising is the lack of Kenyan music. Any list without Benga or classics like Sina Makosa or Tabu Hey is just not that bangin’. It would also have been nice to see a bit more Congolese music, given the reach and influence of rumba.
Even with its Nigerian-Ghanaian emphasis, Tangari’s review is an excellent introduction to post-colonial African music, its presence on the web, and ways to use ’state of mind’ to describe Afropop and most things African.
He has single-handedly rescued 5 000 people from the clutches of militiamen as they deliberated whether to keep the group as a human shield or massacre them in a show of strength. He has freed scores of kidnapped child soldiers by persuading Mai Mai rebels to exchange them for goats.
It is an approach that has produced results. One of the other rebel colonels at the table, Joel Vahinghene, worked with Henri months ago to secure the release of 100 child soldiers, some as young as six, by trading their freedom for goats.
This unusual ransom idea originated with the rebel chiefs. They were acutely aware that the ranks of child soldiers, who once afforded a battlefield advantage, had become a burden, extra mouths to feed. So they contacted Henri. There was just one snag. Some parents had an animal they could sacrifice,but others couldn’t afford one. Undeterred, Henri went to negotiate, settling on the rate of 10 goats for 40 children. And so 100 children won their freedom between February and April, helped by funds supplied by Peace Direct.
It’s unclear why child soldiers have become a burden, but at a goat-to-child exchange rate of 1:4, who cares!
Because contemporary Beninois jazz artist Lionel Loueke went to the Ivory Coast to study how music and somewhere along the way learned how to scat really, really well:
1. Burundi peacekeepers serving in Somalia tried for mutiny; local judge upset that he was not included in the escape plan.
2. Rwandan opposition candidate Victoire Ingabire demands government protection from government threat prior to election.
3. DRC donates 2.5 million USD to Haiti; Congolese protest in the streets, government reassures them it was a counterfeit check.
4. Crazy old white guy searches for legendary killer crocodile Gustav in Burundi; makes entertaining crazy old white guy video about the pursuit.
5. Nicholas Kirstof writes about American Lisa and Congolese Lisa; doesn’t realize that Congolese Lisa made up her name once she met his traveling partner American Lisa.
Great Lakes scholar Betsy Levy Paluck and academic superstar Donal Green teamed up to study a radio program intervention in Rwanda. Apparently, Rwandan soap operas can have a huge impact:
Our evidence suggests that certain behavioral aspects of political culture are malleable in the short run. A mass media program was sufficient to shift perceived norms of open expression and local responsibility for community problems, as well as actual expression and dissent about sensitive community issues such as trust and resource distribution. Listeners did not become contrarians or antiauthoritatrians – for example, when reconciliation listeners decided to take collective responsibility for [a] hypothetical refugee problem, they created roles for local authorities in their decision-making process.
I thought people were over all that fluffy media sensitization stuff. It’s all about institutions and governance now, right?
Political science is concerned with the ways institutions are internalized – it is one thing to write legislation and enact policies, and it is another for citizens to recognize opportunities and constraints set by these institutions. Clearly, mass communication is an important way in which institutions are translated for public understanding. This leads to the question: is institutional change a necessary condition for changing public understanding of institutions and constraints? The provocative suggestion of our current finds is that perhaps it is sufficient to encourage a new understanding of social norms of dissent, deference, or dispute resolution using the media, rather than to launch far-reaching changes in law or policy.
This excellent paper is well worth a read, as is the rest of Paluck’s research on prejudice, conflict resolution and behavioral change in the Great Lakes.
At last week’s fifth inter-parliamentary relations seminar for the East African Legislative Assembly in Arusha, President Pierre Nkurunziza of Burundi promised that upcoming national elections will be free and fair. He then went home and arrested a lot of people who were purportedly plotting a coup. According to the AFP:
Thirteen soldiers, including a captain and a lieutenant, were arrested on Friday on a popular beach on the shores of Lake Tanganyika in a highly-publicised swoop by dozens of troops filmed by state television.
The senior officer said the plan was to launch a mutiny in army bases across the country, take commanders hostage and demand direct negotiations with President Pierre Nkurunziza.
While there is unquestionable dissatisfaction among soldiers in the Burundias army, this event seems more like a staged performance of voter intimidation than a threat to national security.
Most coup plotting does not happen on ‘popular beaches’ where most diplomats and politicians spend their days holding meetings and eating fish. Rather, shows of government power occur on these beaches. Moreover, if coup planning was serious enough to require foiling, it would have been done secretly rather than Fox Station COPS style.
With a shaky hold on power, Nkurunziza is flexing his muscle and setting the tone for this summer’s national elections. Even if these plotters were a critical threat to political stability, the public dimension of this foiled coup narrative makes it all seem a bit more performative than serious.
That said, I am looking forward to the new to the new government sponsored TV show, Coup Plotters.
1. Tennis player Justine Henin goes to DRC and finds tennis inspiration; rubbing the bellies of Congolese children proved to increase the probability of winning Aussie Open.
2. Rwanda fails to sweep warlords with pet goats into past memories; surge in goat-as-pet purchase in Great Lakes.
3. Head of UN Mission to Burundi kicked out of country; ex ante headless bureaucracy is now actually headless.
In last weekends Kigali City Council meeting, hundreds of attendants came down with food poisoning. Which really means witchcraft. According to the New Times:
The meeting had been called to present KCC’s achievements in 2009, also attracted several senior government officials.
Bruno Rangira, the Director of Communication at KCC, confirmed that out of the 3000 people who attended, 350 later had food poisoning problems while 6 others were admitted in hospital.
Nothing like the systematic poisoning of political meeting goers to suggest dubious macrobiotic processes. While the director of the venue where the meeting took place blamed the incident on an incompetent cook, the police are investigating:
In her statement to the police, Sumwiza [the cook] said that there was no intention of serving contaminated food to the masses.
“This problem was caused by the fact that the food served to the people that day had been prepared a day before the function and unfortunately, it later went bad.”
Rangira asserts that police is apparently handling the matter.
And, the negative correlation between civic participation and cooking time is established.
Congolese super-musician Franco has just been re-mastered. Word on the street about Francophonic Volume 2 is its good, really good:
But this 2xCD sequel to the first Sterns anthology of Franco’s recordings (which covered 1953-1980) is thunderbolts and fireworks, start to finish. Maybe it’s just canny song selection by compiler/annotator Ken Braun, who boiled down the dozens of albums Franco released in the 1980s to these 13 songs, but it sure sounds like the final quarter of TPOK’s career was its best, which would make them close to unique in pop history.
The compilation is thoughtful and well-laid out with a perfect mix of mainstream pop songs and garage serenades. Check it out.
