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Introduction

STAN RIJVEN

Most people with a Western way of thinking want to preserve Africa as a museum. I mean, they want to allow Africa just to play tam-tam because for them Africa is tam-tam and snakes and monkeys. But they don't realise we know how to play electric. I think it is extremely important that people understand that there is an electric Africa. (Dibango 1984, p. 34) In 1961 the American vocal group The Tokens topped the charts with a song called 'The Lion Sleeps Tonight'. Seven years later the British teenybopper band the Tremeloes had a hit with 'Helule Helule'. And in 1981 German disco disaster Boney M added to his successfully slick repertoire another million seller with 'Malaika'. Few people probably realised that The Tokens had woken up an old South African song from 1939 called 'Mbube' written and performed originally by Soloman Linda's Original Evening Birds. There were no acknowledgements made: The Tremeloes said to Hell(ule) with copyright for the Kenyan composer Daudi Kabaka and Boney M took Kenyan composer Fadhili William's money too (Walk's & Malm 1984, p. 186). These examples do not of course develop a new theory of post-colonial influence from Africa on Western pop music. They are not meant to. Nor are they here to prove that colonial practices still exist. The fact is that this information is of both general interest and part of the research picture of recent years and tells its own story. It coincides with the slow but steady acceptance of the idea that there is electric popular music in the world outside the Anglo-American sphere and that it developed in its own right. At the same time as Elvis Presley was making his first recording at the Sun Studios in Memphis, Franco was making his (be it enlightened by another sun) in Kinshasa: the cycle of ragtime to blues to rock'n'roll and all its substyles finds its equivalent in the development of highlife, juju and many other genres. Today this fits in with the 'discovery' of the existence of a whole continent full of popular music. This shift marks a certain change in attitude towards African popular music. As John Collins and Paul Richards (1981, p. Ill) have written: An earlier generation of European Ethnomusicologists interested in African music tended to dismiss popular musics in West Africa as commercial phenomena of little substance or to deprecate them as by products of 'culture contact'. African researchers have been preoccupied with more urgent projects in connection with major cultural traditions threatened by colonialism. 'Counter-colonial' scholarship has had little time to spare for music which emerged under colonialism. Not only that, in recent years the holy trinity of pop, rock and disco has been faced with increasing competition from both 'roots' and 'world' music. Paul Simon's record Graceland became a huge international success introducing South African mbaqanga music and Ladysmith Black Mambazo to a much larger audience. Los Lobos reached a high chart position with 'La Bamba', Robert Cray's blues have been a hot seller, Dwight Yoakam and Steve Earle have led a country revival. Les Voix

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.35.76, on 25 Sep 2021 at 10:39:28, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0261143000003500 Introduction 217 and in live performance. In addition the sampling experiments of hip-hop and house producers have contributed to the process, an example being 'Paid in Full' by Eric B and Rakim, which features the high almost falsetto sounding voice of the Yemenite singer Ofra Haza. Another reason for the growing interest in non-western pop music is connec- ted with the emergence of a new kind of perception of the 'third world'. The West has long been burdened with a colonial inheritance to which the mentality of 'developed' versus 'primitive' and later 'underdeveloped' has been central. Band Aid songs like 'Do They Know It's Christmas' and 'We Are The World' are still contaminated with this attitude, this bad breath. But it is only a matter of time until we will have a parabolic antenna on our roof and a world receiver in our living room to pick out not only the European pop stations but the Indian Top of The Pops and the Nigerian counterpart of the British cult DJ John Peel out of the air waves for us. In the 1960s India was the main point of reference for many pop artists, in the 1970s it was Jamaica, but nowadays the whole world seems to be a source of inspiration. Brian Eno and David Byrne were forerunners in 1981 with their album My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts. Peter Gabriel contributed with his inspiration of the first World of Music, Arts and Dance (WOMAD) Festival organised with Thomas Brooman and others of the Bristol Recorder in Shepton Mallet in 1982. As the catalyst of this innovative event Gabriel was one of the first advocates of global music integration. In the eight years it has existed WOMAD has programmed the ideal global foxtrot: XTC alongside The Mighty Sparrow, New Order with Tabu Ley, and Elvis Costello next to Remmy Ongala. An issue of Popular Music focusing on African pop therefore is part of this process. And it includes the 'mistake' of choosing a theme that implies broader boundaries than one might think. African popular music does not exist: African popular musics do. Not only does the adjective 'popular' court difficulties, but also the word 'African' is too easily used as a passepartout without content. The content is a continent in which both Europe and the United States could easily drown without anybody noticing: a small part of the desert of the Maghreb countries would be enough to cover the whole 'old' world with Sahara sand. Only recently have world maps been drawn to realistic proportions. Geographically speaking Africa is not a peninsula of Europe but the reverse: this shows how mental attitudes can be projected into other activities like map drawing. Another point should be made. When the term African popular music is used, it is the sub-Sahara which is implicitly meant. And yet we are dealing with a vast and diverse area which consists of thousands of different peoples, languages and musics. It is both too limited and beyond reality to take the borders for granted that were drawn at the 'cut-the-cake' meeting of the Conference and Treaty of Berlin (1884-5). Although this conference had its effect on the propagation of two lingua francos, English and French, the variety of indigenous languages persisted and gave birth to a wide range of different popular music styles. To give a rough indication: Arabic and Indian music influenced taraab music in East African countries like Somalia, Kenya, Zanzibar and Burundi; shonabeat in Zimbabwe; mbaqanga and mbube in South Africa; rumba-based soukous in Zaire and the Congo; makossa in Cameroon; juju, 'Afro-beat' and fuji in Nigeria; 'highlife' in Ghana; mbalax in Senegal* a mixture of Islamic-Latin-local influenced genres that have emerged on the homemarket and in Western Europe. However, it is possible to find some common influences on this multitude of

genre and styles. Starting with the idea that 'all culture is adultery and music joins everybody' (de Swann 1985) over time there has been a constant process of feedback and crossover, especially in the coastal areas where trade \vith European merchants led to the beginning of urbanisation. This process was propelled by the liberation of the slaves (late eighteenth century), the arrival after 1884 of missionaries (church hymns), the Army (brassbands, military music and marches) and the colonial elite (sophisticated dance music like foxtrot and swing). In this issue of Popular Music both Afolabi Alaja-Browne and John Collins show in their respective contributions how juju and highlife music were moulded by this process. Besides urbanisation of rural music, feedback and crossover, the smooth adaptation of Anglo-American styles into existing local music practice and the frequent involvement of electric guitars in the overall interaction between rhythm, melody and harmony are other important features. Taking all these arguments into consideration this issue of Popular Music cannot and does not pretend to be able to give a representative, comprehensive overview of African popular musics. Unfortunately not enough work has been done yet: we still seem to be at the stage of impact, discovery and pleasure. Much of that which has been done seems to be more in the enthusiastic, impressionistic journalistic sphere than the purely academic. And much of the purely academic has focused inwardly, looking into and defining musical details while failing to place such knowledge in any broader perspective. But the issue does address aspects which are related to the rising interest outside Africa for its music. While Lucy Duran offers us the definitive article to date on Senegalese star Youssou N'Dour; Werner Graebner's essay focuses on aspects of the career and song texts of Remmy Ongala from Tanzania; in 'Horses in the race course' Veit Erlmann charts the domestification of Zulu ingoma dancing, its transformation from a militant, oppositional and suppressed form of popular culture to a tourist attraction; and Christopher Ballantine offers a brief, succinct and seductive general introduction to the music of South Africa which includes an examination of the relationship between music and politics. Taking up this theme in the 'Middle Eight' Charles Hamm focuses on the still hot issue of the implications of Graceland and last but not least Philip Tagg cracks hard, intense notes and contro- versy in his open letter about those much used, much abused concepts 'Black music', 'Afro-American music' and 'European music'. We also include a brief bibliography and discography to orientate readers and listeners. Such material would have helped the pop critic who fifteen years ago indulged in the following unenlightened stereotyped writing:

moves back to his straw hut. With some trouble he turns on his old gramophone. And before he invites his fourth wife to come into the hut, he quickly puts Osibisa's record on the turntable . . . (Schmitt 1987).

References Collins, J. and Richards, P. 1981. 'Popular Music from West Africa - suggestions for an interpretative framework' in Popular Music Perspectives: Papers from the First International Conference on Popular Music Research, Amsterdam, ed. David Horn and Philip Tagg (Goteborg and Exeter: IASPM) Dibango, Manu. 1984. Melody Maker (8 September), p. 34. Quoted in Bender, Wolfgang, 1986. Sweet Mother (Munich: Trickster), p. 85 Schmitt, R. 1987. 'Hot, hotter, African stereotypes in the (re-) presentation of African music in German and European media'. Unpublished paper given at the International Conference of the International

Association for the Study of Popular Music, the IASPM, Ghana, August 1987. Original source Sounds 11 (1974), p. 31 deSwaai\,BtaTt\. \9%5. 'He\.\ied van deV.osmopo\\et, NRC (October^) Wallis, R. and Malm, K. 1984. Big Sounds from Small Peoples (London: Constable)