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PERFORMING AFRICA This page intentionally left blank PAULLA A. EBRON Performing Africa PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS PRINCETON AND OXFORD Copyright © 2002 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 WIlliam Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 3 Market Place, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1SY All Rights Reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ebron, Paulla A., 1953– Performing Africa / Paulla A. Ebron. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-691-07488-7 (alk. paper)—ISBN 0-691-07489-5 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Griots—Gambia—Music—History and criticism. 2. Mandingo (African people)— Gambia—Music—History and criticism. 3. Music—Gambia—History and criticism. 4. Gambia—Social life and customs. 5. Folklore—Gambia—Performance. I. Title. ML3760 .E27 2002 781.62'96345—dc21 2001055408 British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available This book has been composed in Sabon Printed on acid-free paper ∞ www.pup.princeton.edu Printed in the United States of America 10987654321 CONTENTS OVERTURE Where and When I Enter vii INTRODUCTION Performing Africa 1 PART ONE Representations/Performances 29 CHAPTER ONE Music: Europe and Africa 33 CHAPTER TWO Performances 53 PART TWO Professional Dreams 73 CHAPTER THREE Curators of Tradition 81 CHAPTER FOUR Personalistic Economy 114 CHAPTER FIVE Interview Encounters: The Performance of Profession 134 PART THREE Culture as Commodity 163 CHAPTER SIX Travel Stories 167 CHAPTER SEVEN Tourists as Pilgrims 189 CODA 213 NOTES 217 BIBLIOGRAPHY 225 INDEX 237 v This page intentionally left blank OVERTURE Where and When I Enter A convention has marked the opening of ethnographic accounts of the field: the arrival story. More often than not, these stories have posited stable identities for both a Western ethnographer and the “natives” he finds; this difference between the West and its Other provides the window of insight for arrival. Yet my arrival story focuses on a mutual figuring of the field and the identities of those who make the moments of encounter.1 Here a degree of negotiation over culture and difference takes place. Moreover, this was not my arrival. In the summer of 1989 I had been in The Gambia for several months, absorbed in the everyday lives of the people in the compound where I lived. I had gone there to learn more about a hereditary group of artisans known in a local language, Mandinka, as jali. Jali fill a number of profes- sional roles, including orator, praisesinger, arbiter, political negotiator, matchmaker, genealogist, historian, ceremonial officiator, and entrepre- neur. Jali performances of music, however, often assume primacy in cur- rent transnational encounters. I had come to The Gambia to study the training jali were expected to undergo to practice their profession, jaliya. (Griot is a French term for praiseingers, including jali.) A short visit in 1984 helped me establish the connections that would set the context of the collaborative aspects of my work. Now, five years hence, I had embarked upon a much lengthier stay. Already in the first few months of my research, I had begun to understand social interactions in a society complicated by age, gender, class, ethnicity, and caste differ- ences. These crosscutting, complex social locations were well documented in the literature on the Senegambian region. Yet living there changed my appreciation of the significance of the ways these social categories in- formed everyday interactions; these categories were no longer mere ab- stractions that I had encountered in social science accounts, but experi- ences informing the lives of the people I knew. A few months into my fieldwork I was acutely aware of the difference between the social com- plexity there and what I was familiar with in the United States. In the United States, race more often than not takes precedence over other categories in social interactions. Age, gender, class, and national background follow in the wake of the major divide between black and white.2 This everyday prominence of racial status in the United States vii viii Overture contrasted sharply with the multiplicity of social statuses, identities, and languages I found in The Gambia. Furthermore, in the United States I had become used to being perceived as a racial embodiment of subaltern sta- tus; strikingly, in Africa, I carried the privilege of status and mobility of my U.S. nationality. To many Gambians, I was an American; to others, my otherness appeared as a complicated mystery. Some people assumed I was from southern Africa. This association was commonly made be- cause of the presence of refugees from Namibia, other Others with whom I could easily be categorized. Strikingly, at this time, African Americans were not as familiar to many of the people I met as would later become the case.3 Among the many things that fieldwork accomplishes is its providing an occasion to readjust our sense of who we are as we learn to understand different contexts and other ways of constructing personhood. Yet I only appreciated how much my perspective had begun to change when I came face-to-face with African American visitors who reminded me of the ideas and assumptions held by many African Americans about Africa and our relationship to it. Their arrival story provided my moment of insight. I had gone along with a friend to the airport in Dakar to meet a visitor. The wait took several hours. We sat in the arrival area where, even in the earliest hours of the morning, people milled about. The sun cast rays of dusty light through the windows high above floor level. This gave the waiting area the appearance of an airport hangar: an expansive cave of dim lights and smoky shadows. During this extended period of waiting my mind wandered as I stared out at the passersby; among the things that moved through my consciousness was the question of home and cultural differences. Sitting down at an airport cafe´, I soon found myself in conversation with three African American men who had come to Senegal as tourists a few weeks earlier, but Africa was not simply a vacation destination for them. The men introduced themselves as “businessmen,” not affiliated with a particular company but independent scouts hoping to develop an as-yet-undetermined financial venture with Senegalese entrepreneurs. Ini- tially, I was thrilled to see people from “home.” Our conversation was warm and engaging. Slowly, however, I became acutely aware that we were talking past each other, sharing familiar feelings about “home,” but not common assumptions about Africa. I realized that my thoughts and their thoughts about Africa differed enormously. They spoke of Africa and the people they had met with a distant awe, a reverence. Africa was the land of the noblest people. The Senega- lese they had only recently met were just amazing, above mortal status. The teachings of U.S. Afrocentric philosophers provided a refrain in my mind that echoed the chorus of praises set off against an Other: “Afri- Where and When I Enter ix cans are a spiritual people; Europeans are a materialistic people.” In- deed, the travelers expressed their worry that Africa unfortunately lagged behind in material ways. Luckily, they had a solution to the conti- nent’s “problems.” As businessmen, with a consciousness of course, they would develop Africa. I listened halfheartedly, frankly dubious of their claims. In the previ- ous few months I had somehow muted my awareness of what coming to Africa meant for many African Americans: that juxtaposition between the humble need to learn and connect, a personal quest, and the self- assured desire to be of some assistance, however vague, though seemingly altruistic, that purposefulness might be. On the one hand, African Ameri- cans know Africa through the imagery of underdevelopment. Like other Americans, we grew up with various aid campaigns directed toward Af- rica. The advertisements of international donor agencies such as CARE and Save the Children framed our sense of Africa. On the other hand, the continent represented more for Africans in diaspora. This “homeland,” largely an imagined Africa, created a seem- ingly timeless sense of connection for many of its long displaced kin. When confronted with contemporary Africa, a compression of time and space occurs where the lives of present-day Africans are blocked out by the overwhelming desire to search for lost kinship ties and belonging. Connection with Africa, it is hoped, will heal the physical and psychologi- cal rift created by our departure centuries ago.4 For many African Ameri- cans, Africa was imagined as a potently mythic space of meaning that could embody a fullness absent in the present. But this longing often had little space in which to take in the expanse of present day Africa in all its complexities. My sense of this “Africa” had been reworked by my interactions with Gambian interlocutors. Some of the Gambians I met were sympathetic to diasporic yearnings, while others, as I suggested earlier, had no notion of the transatlantic slave trade or even of the existence of “African Ameri- cans.”5 Still others expressed hostile sentiments: “African Americans were nothing but the slaves of Africans,” quipped one Gambian. In this setting, I could not naturalize African American dreams; they suddenly seemed quite exotic. In our brief conversation, the tourists/entrepreneurs were impressed by my relatively long stay in The Gambia, which seemed to them to indi- cate deep commitment on my part, particularly when compared to their visit of a few weeks. Yet when they asked me about my work, I sat ner- vously preparing my defenses. Given my own immersion in the debates about anthropology’s history, I thought they would be horrified to hear that I was an anthropologist.