Popular Musical Cultures of the Diaspora, Youth Culture and Identity in Francophone West Africa

Back From Babylon: Popular Musical Cultures of the Diaspora, Youth Culture and Identity in Francophone West Africa

LISA MCNEE

West African youth culture entered the era ofgloba lization long ago, as youth reappropriated and recontextualized arts and musics imported from the African Diaspora as well as from other parts ofthe world. Reggae offers the most obvious example ofsuc h reappropriations and allows African youth to simultaneously rebel against oppressive systems and identify with the oppressed youth ofthe Diaspora. This essay focuses on the career ofAlpha Blondy, one ofC ôte d’Ivoire’ s most famous stars. Blondy synthesizes tradition and modernity by using western instruments and Jula words; his foulosophie allows him to be the court jester who speaks the truth about life in Côte d’Ivoire while retaining the support of regimes such as that ofHophouët-Boigny .

Arrêtez les combats Ceux de Babylone arrivent Peuples noirs, arrêtez de vous combattre … Les marchands d’armes arrivent Ils vont nous abuser, nous abuser Pour nous opposer les uns aux autres (Alpha Blondy, “Babylone Kele”) 1

The image of the enslaved peoples of Israel, weeping on the banks of the river in Babylon, still captures the imagination today. Although the images are local, xed in a speci c time and place, youth around the world attempt

1“Stop the conflicts / People ofBabylon are coming / Black peoples, stop ghting each other / The arms merchants are coming / They will take advantage ofus, deceive us / To make us oppose each other.” First released on S.O.S. Guerre Tribale (EMI, 1990). Lyrics in Jula translated into French by Yacouba Konaté ( 214). All translations from French are mine. 214 Lisa McNee to “chant down Babylon” – white-controlled, western capitalism – by cre- atively re-imagining the confrontation between oppressor and victim in song and art. Rastafarianism is the obvious referent, while reggae music is the signier of this double-voiced sign. Although reggae music has become an international form of protest and confrontation, the reformulation of Diaspora signifying systems such as reggae is perhaps most dynamic in Africa. I ndeed, “ Africans have welcomed reggae and wedded it to their own national concerns. Of all continents, Africa has explored reggae the most as a means to chant down colonial oppression” (Spencer, 273). As the youth of the continent know, Babylon continues to pillage black peoples the world over. This is why Alpha Blondy appeals so urgently to African listeners in “ Babylone Kele” (B abylon’s War), calling f or an end to the many armed con icts in Africa that pro t western arms merchants. To some, any celebration of reggae’s redemptive power may seem pre- mature, given that the current generation “has no memory of coloniza- tion” and “does not recognize itself, either in the ideologies of a Négritude that it denounces, nor in those of an authenticity which it parodies in laughter and disdain” (Mbembe, 7). However, youth in francophone West Africa clearly do see themselves re ected in certain post-colonial evoca- tions of Pan-Africanism, particularly those of reggae artists who present embattled postcolonial situations in music that does not simply present the idea of resistance, but is a form ofresistance in itself– that is, ifwe accept, along with Simon Frith, that “making music isn’t a way of expressing ideas; it is a way of living them” ( 111). The identication of West African youth with reggae and Rastafarian ideals thus takes place through a double movement, one that is marked both by local concerns and by a speci cally inected cosmopolitanism. This double movement is discernable in almost all aspects of reggae in West Africa, for it is the “point of suture,” as Stuart Hall would have put it in his Introduction to Questions ofIdentity (1–17), of several discursive practices that mark the performance of youth identity in francophone Africa. Hall writes that the politics of exclusion (equally relevant to the lives of alienated urban youth in West Af rica and to minority youth in B rixton) makes identication, rather than identity, the salient place for a rearticulation of “the relationship between subjects and discursive practices.” I denti cation, always“ lodged in contingency ,” “never a proper t, a totality,” is “ con- structed on the back of a recognition of some common origin or shared characteristics with another person or group, or with an ideal” ( 2–3). Thus identication with reggae and/or Rastafarianism is predicated on an uncer- tain sense of racial identity that is always already an identi cation of common exclusion from dominant cultural discourses in Babylon. In exploring