The Anthropology of Anger: Civil Society and Democracy in Africa, by Célestin Monga, translated by Linda L. Fleck and Célestin Monga

 

3. Changing Identities: Memory, Culture, and Revolt

 

Je suis fier d’être un bâtard culturel. Si chacun reconnaissait sa bâtardise, il y aurait moins d’intolérance dans le monde.

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I’m proud of being a cultural bastard. If each of us claimed our own bastardy, there would be less intolerance in the world.

—Rachid Bahri, Algeria

 

Many of the social scientific works on Africa surveyed in Chapter 2 used culturalistic paradigms to explain the slow rate at which political reforms have been enacted on the continent. I highlighted the contradictions in these works and observed that they rely heavily on the rhetorical figures of a mysterious black Africa, as well as on the stereotypes about Africa’s so-called specific historicity, to explain today’s political ineptitude. To paraphrase Said (1993), what is most striking in these writings is the implied notion of bringing morals and civilization to reluctant barbarian peoples and the disturbing, selective attitude of not using the same rigid ethical standards to explore the determinants of political failures elsewhere on the planet. The key assumption in this “rationale,” which seems compelling even to some African intellectuals (M’nteba 1992, Owusu 1992), is that African peoples are not “serious” in their quest for freedom, because they are not used to self-government and because they understand only brutality and violence. Moreover, that is why they are so quick to engage in civil wars or ethnic tensions. Such contempt toward the process of social change in Africa can only lead to an intellectual vacuum in many important areas of public policy and to some mistakes in the design and implementation of the nation-building project.

In this chapter, through an analysis of cultural politics, I will examine, on the one hand, how African governments exploit this dearth of knowledge and, on the other, how artists react to and attempt to counteract this effort. On the basis of cultural relativism, governments have tried to impose an official historiography of national culture as a means of political legitimization. Artists and intellectuals have resisted the official discourse in various ways, attempting in their work to circumvent the mainstream historiography of culture. This chapter is about the silent conflict between these two forms of logic. It is about the clash between a single official narrative built around the idea of culture and an infinite number of informal counternarratives.

In the first section, I argue that the conceptual frameworks used by African governments to back up their relativistic views of national culture are inconsistent, to say the least. Adapting West’s method of periodization of the history of cultural politics in the world (1990), I challenge the validity of the concepts and notions behind hegemonic public discourse on national identities in sub-Saharan Africa. In the second section I discuss the authenticity of collective memory and traditions that are supposed to sustain and justify public policies in the domain of culture; I show that the celebration of the past is mainly designed to articulate the hegemonic discourse of domination and sometimes leads government propagandists to fall into the fundamentalist trap. However, there is always a strong response from below: Even in the face of violence, African societies resist anything perceived as a symbol of a dominating state and see through even the most subtle techniques for the appropriation and rearticulation of official discourse on culture.

 

Ethical Stakes Poorly Evaluated

As I argued in Chapter 2, democracy is often perceived as having a cultural foundation that enables its social structures to deal successfully and quickly with the challenges of pluralism, which is why the paradigm of culture is invariably present in public discourse in Africa. However, the emphasis placed on the importance of cultural factors in political and social development has increasingly been reduced to the level of empty, demagogic promises made by African politicians for the sole purpose of spicing up their speeches and appearing up to date. When officials speak in public, they feel obligated to brag about the philosophical richness of tradition and to underscore the critical necessity of “valorizing African culture.” The spell cast by their words is so strong that one catches oneself taking them seriously, even though one knows that nothing will remain of them tomorrow.

This chapter was inspired by what strikes me as the ineffectiveness of cultural politics as it has been practiced in African nations over the past thirty or so years of independence. Indeed, it is questionable whether one can speak of a true politics here, for the inconsistencies of officials in both discourse and action are so numerous that the very existence of their strategy may be mere hypothesis.

A crossroads of peoples and civilizations, Africa is first of all a profusion of different types of social structures, and as a result, it abounds in cultural potential. Unfortunately, only its superficial aspects tend to be retained—those that the tourism industry celebrates by way of slogans on promotional brochures. Behind all the pretty words, there is nevertheless the force of the myths, beliefs, customs, and visions that form mankind’s collective memory and determine its future. Thus understood, culture does not correspond to the exotic superficialities exalted from time to time on state-run television (potbellied “traditional” dancers, charlatans dressed up as sorcerers, etc.). Traumatized by distressing problems, African peoples have tended to repress the remaining vestiges of an authentic culture. Of course, far from the indiscreet cameras of tourists, far from the voyeuristic gaze of short-term visitors, people continue to invent in their daily lives an approach to the world (and thus to other cultures) that helps them give meaning to the era in which they live.

Thrown off balance by a political, economic, and social crisis without clear beginning or end, African peoples have witnessed, and have been powerless to stop, the collapse of the value systems that long governed their social organizations. There has been a demise of so-called traditional cultures, many of which now appear obsolete. Insofar as they do not allow peoples to conceptualize and give meaning to modernity, they do not stand up well to today’s problems and seem even less well adapted to future challenges.

Oswald Spengler once wrote:

[A culture] dies when [its] soul has actualized the full sum of its possibilities.... Every Culture stands in a deeply symbolical, almost in a mystical, relation to the Extended, the space, in which and through which it strives to actualize itself. The aim once attained—the idea, the entire content of inner possibilities, fulfilled and made externally actual—the Culture suddenly hardens, it mortifies, its blood congeals, its force breaks down, and it becomes Civilization (1926:106).

This sympathetic but somewhat naive reading of the “normal” course of a culture obviously cannot be applied to Africa, whose inhabitants have been forced to suffer other forms of violence. The German philosopher did not conceive of the possibility of a cultural confrontation that would upset the evolutionary cycle he described. African cultures were not given the time to go through all the phases of prosperity; rather, they collided with the harshness of history, resulting in problems of identity for many of their peoples. Caught within the upheavals of politics and history, Africans have been obliged to fit themselves into social molds that were conceived by others and to improvise the development of new codes and cultural markers.

Though one need not link the consequences of this confrontation to the notion of decline, one must nevertheless recognize that the primary difficulty in speaking of African culture today consists in clearly establishing what is authentic in this expression. How can one evaluate a culture in which the principal actor does everything possible, for whimsical or serious reasons, to muddy the waters and dissolve himself in his various representations? How can one define what remains of the indigenous in their way of being? These are questions that have yet to be answered by those who have undertaken to define Africa’s identity. In what follows, I shall first consider the hypothesis as to the existence of political cultures in Africa, examining the conceptual components of this notion. I shall then analyze the authenticity of various schools of thought, whose theorists consider themselves as representatives of today’s culture.

The first issue to be addressed is straightforward: does African culture exist? This question, which sounds like a joke, haunts the mind of anyone who examines cultural politics in Africa. In order to answer it, one must first define the notion of culture—already a challenge, since Kroeber and Kluckhohn (1952) identified 160 definitions in the literature—and then determine what is truly indigenous in the current worldview of the peoples on this continent. The impossibility of such an endeavor goes without saying. The question must nevertheless be raised and debated. A discussion of underlying principles allows one to evaluate the redundancies within official discourse on culture and to measure the gap that exists between the real urgency of preserving, valorizing, and reinvigorating collective spiritual heritage and the politics of folklorizing all sorts of practices incorrectly considered as representative of African civilizations.

Semantic Doubts

The idea that there is a culture identical for all human beings has preoccupied philosophers since Socrates. Based on the notion that people possess a set of fixed characteristics stemming from reason, this theory led to a rethinking of everything that appeared to be specifically tied to biology or geography. For several centuries, philosophers defined culture as all that in human society that is socially transmitted. The spirituality of the individual, for example, was part of the common foundation of universal culture even if the manner in which it manifested itself varied in different places and eras. The antithesis of this point of view was developed notably by nineteenth-century anthropologists, such as Edward Tylor and Lewis Henry Morgan, who defined culture as a conscious creation of human rationality.

Later, Sartre also rejected the overly broad generalization, arguing that the nonexistence of God, creator of all human beings, implied de facto the nonexistence of an indivisible human nature and culture:

Not only is man what he conceives himself to be, but he is also only what he wills himself to be after this thrust toward existence. Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself.... Man is at the start a plan which is aware of itself, rather than a patch of moss, a piece of garbage, or a cauliflower; nothing exists prior to this plan; there is nothing in heaven; man will be what he will have planned to be (1947:18–19).

Social anthropological conceptions of culture are based to a great extent on Tylor’s assumption that culture and civilization are synonymous. However, archaeological approaches tend to distinguish material culture, or artifacts, and practices and beliefs, the nonmaterial or adaptive culture. Indeed, as Marshall pointed out,

Modern ideas of culture arose through the work of field anthropologists such as Franz Boas, around the turn of the century, and tend towards relativism. The intention is to describe, compare, and contrast cultures, rather than ranking them, although Boas and some later North American anthropologists have also been interested in the processes by which cultural traits may be borrowed or otherwise transmitted between societies (1994:105).

The debate surrounding the question is considerably more advanced today, as both sides appear to accept the idea that everything that constitutes the biological essence of human beings is mediated through several cultural strata. Thus, human nature is always actualized in the culture to which one chooses to belong. One’s vision of the world, one’s approach to all types of problems, one’s actions and reactions concerning the difficulties of daily life, one’s feelings about things, all stem primarily from various cultural phenomena. While it is certainly a legitimate concern for African intellectuals to object to Eurocentric hegemony posing as universalism, as Chinweizu and Madubuike (1980) eloquently did, it is also illusory to claim to evaluate the culture of human beings exclusively in terms of skin color, as certain theorists of negritude or even Pan-Africanism have attempted to do. Appiah (1992) made this point brilliantly.

The Imprints of History

It is necessary to specify the field of inquiry: what is the meaning of culture for Africans who are said to be acculturated? It is difficult for Africans to avoid this problematic issue. On the one hand, the elements of their culture have not been defined systematically; on the other, the forces and violence of history have created blurred and debatable boundaries. And even if one accepts Tylor’s classical definition of culture as “a learned complex of knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom and any other capabilities and habits acquired by a man as a member of society” (1871:2), there are ambiguities that Etounga-Manguelle, among others, has addressed:

African society today has piled very different strata of time on top of one another. Onto a very old layer concerned with the relationship between the sexes, kinship, and religion has been superimposed an intermediate layer concerned with the teachings of the law, with Islam, writing, and the domination of men. To this layer a third, modern one is joined that concerns French, English, Portuguese, or Spanish colonization and raises the question of money, urban life, and education (1990:31).

This complication of the essential problem—that of definition itself—leads one to express a semantic doubt about everything that has been officially presented as constituting African culture. For no sooner has the factor of time been added to the equation than one is forced to admit that its mental makeup, its political and social structures, its legal system, its cultural practices, and even its language have been affected by historical processes that resulted in a power structure in its disfavor (slavery, wars, conquests, colonization). Everything that is customarily brought under the heading of “national cultural heritage” has by and large been borrowed from those who falsified the history of the continent through the brutality of their methods. Everything, even what is known as the cultural universe of Africans’ ancestors, was profoundly shaken by the double tragedy of slavery and colonization.

Without lapsing into what Bayart (1989) calls “the paradigm of the yoke,” a sort of persecution complex to which a large fraction of the African intelligentsia has fallen victim, one cannot fail to agree with the Zairean Ngandu Nkashama when he laments that

by treacherously inserting us into an historical process begun in a different political and economic context, by stealing from us other myths (social, cosmic) and other poetic metaphors, by surreptitiously spiriting away a different knowledge—and not only simple “technology,” which does not come to us (in terms, at any rate, of a capital asset) as a legacy from our ancestral group (what is it henceforth?)—we can only be received by our partners in the human race as pilgrims, if not as usurpers (1985:33).

In sum, there is little among those “cultural riches” that Africans currently tend to (over)value that actually belongs to them. And the emblem of their authenticity is too often altered by the violence of the mark of others. Bamileke or Yoruba art objects are assessed on the scale of values established by Africa’s (former) masters—what Ngandu Nkashama calls “the standard of canonical measurements and transistorized metrics.” Ancient Zulu dances are evaluated by specialists of Maurice Béjart or Merce Cunningham. The polyphonic songs of the Pygmies from the forests in eastern Cameroon and southern Congo are analyzed by musicologists trained in the school of Mozart and Stravinsky. New national literatures tend to imitate the French “new novel” because the imagination of writers is held prisoner to techniques in vogue in the West and because the critics whose role it is to appreciate and make known this literature do not have any other intellectual reference points.

The Ambiguity of Being African

The object of the gaze of others rather than the subject of its own future, African culture is subjected to new forms of subjectification. A grammar of human history, this culture has been strongly conditioned by the fact that it has borrowed methodological processes from others in order to validate its own knowledge and update the rites of initiation. As a result of very strong historical ties, Africans are enmeshed in what Foucault (1969, 1976) has termed episteme, and their roots will continue to draw sustenance from it. Is it possible to sever this technological and psychological legacy from their “biological” heritage? Is it reasonable and desirable to envision this intellectual disconnection at a time when the imperative of economic development (and hence of integration in a world more than ever dominated by the influence and power of the West) requires that they fit their minds into conceptual molds invented by others?

The essential question is how to come to terms with the ambiguous adventure that Africans’ existence in the contemporary world represents. They are trained and educated in an environment to whose construction, development, and renewal they have contributed very little. How are they to believe in the utopia of an “authentic” African culture, that is, one from which the influence of history has been purged? Is not the real challenge to manage the ambiguity of being African today in such a way as to leave their mark and their creativity on everything that comes to them from outside and that global political and economic realities require they assimilate—if they do not wish to be pushed to the margin of history? If Lévi-Strauss (1958) is correct in asserting that language is the very foundation of culture, is not the first step toward liberation the invention of new languages? Would it alone help Africans subvert from within the invasion of “universal” culture in which they have so little say?

Redundancies in the Discourse and Management of Virtualities

Let us get back to politics. Without clearing the semantic doubts raised earlier, official ideologues have undertaken, with an almost admirable obstinacy, to exalt within each African country a virtually mythic “national culture.” Orphans of the mystique of lost traditions, they have turned conceit and symbolism into instruments of political propaganda. When they pronounce the words “African culture,” the expression takes on a sort of syntactic incompatibility. But no matter: All they care about is the celebration of a ceremonial folklorism capable of satisfying the desires of tourists.

Slings and Arrows of Utopia and the Exhaustion of Myths

Nostalgic for a “traditional culture” complete with every virtue, officials dream of the dawn of an era soon to come in which Africans would turn to their ancestors in order to explore other avenues of access to modernity. It would not take much for them to imagine the young replacing their jeans with bila (the traditional loin cloth) or chucking their electric toothbrushes, so little in keeping with our customs and environment, in favor of a good old bamboo shoot. It is a handful of fundamentalists who suffer daily from the slings and arrows of their utopia. As Appiah reminds us, a process of cultural aggiornamento has been going on for a very long time:

We must not fall for the sentimental notion that the “people” have held onto an indigenous national tradition, that only the educated bourgeoisie are “children of two worlds.” At the level of popular culture, too, the currency is not a holdover from an unbroken stream of tradition; indeed, it is, like most popular culture in the age of mass production, hardly national at all. Popular culture in Africa encompasses the (Americans) Michael Jackson and Jim Reeves; when it picks up cultural production whose sources are geographically African, what it picks up is not usually in any plausible sense traditional. Highlife music is both recognizably West African and distinctly not precolonial; and the sounds of Fela Kuti would have astonished the musicians of the last generation of court musicians in Yorubaland. As they have developed new forms of music, drawing on instrumental repertoires and musical ideas with a dazzling eclecticism, Africa’s musicians have also done astonishing things with a language that used to be English. But it is as English that that language is accessible to millions around the continent (and around the world) (1992: 58–59).

In fact, the dreams of the fundamentalists have been kept alive by the inflamed rhetoric of politicians and the attendant establishment of gimmick institutions. Designed to organize and disseminate “national cultures,” these institutions have actually done nothing more than manage virtualities insofar as the men in charge of running them have had neither the material and conceptual means nor the actual will to exploit existing possibilities.

Cameroon provides a good example of this ambition and its limitations. As early as 1962, President Ahmadou Ahidjo signed a decree creating the Federal Linguistic and Cultural Center. Based in Yaoundé, the capital city, this research center’s mission was “the compilation, preservation, and diffusion of Cameroon’s national cultures.” ₁ Well before the establishment of the Office of Cultural Affairs within the Ministry of Education, Youth and Leisure, it was the state’s primary cultural institution. Researchers conducted a few studies throughout the country and the center prepared Cameroon’s contribution to the much vaunted Festival of Negro Art held in Dakar in 1966. But its activities were soon hampered by the inefficiency of its bureaucracy and the inadequacy of its means, notably with regard to the valorization of Cameroon’s linguistic heritage.

Rather than calmly examining the reasons for its failure, the authorities opted to rush ahead, instituting the Service for Cultural Development within the Ministry of Education in 1965. This new entity was subsequently transformed into the Office of Cultural Affairs, described as “the governmental arm of cultural action” (Bahoken and Atangana 1975). Under its aegis, various events were organized that were cultural in name but largely political in aim. Cameroonian productions and artists (theater companies, village dance groups, rural musicians) were exported north. The basic marketing strategy was as follows: The artists were to preserve the image of their country—that is, of their government—while abroad and “sell” to the rest of the world the image of a mythical Africa, with its exotic, lost civilizations, the evocation of which was intended to arouse feelings of guilt among European audiences. Sponsored by such organizations as UNESCO, these tours were favorably received and allowed those in power to maintain relatively high ratings in international opinion, which was, of course, the goal. Small matter that Cameroonians were little involved in what they saw as political posturing.

In 1967, influenced by the “revolutionary” dogma of the time, Cameroon’s head of state signed another decree whose terms appeared to have been taken directly from the Marxist vulgate, calling for, among other things, the “national consolidation of activities for the young and for the education of the people.” ₂ Its terminology was forceful, the content of the new agencies it created less substantial. A number of youth centers were indeed established throughout the country, most notably the Federation of the Arts and Humanities, managed by both the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Youth, whose mission was to coordinate the activities of theater companies and dance groups. But in reality, these were yet again gimmick agencies lacking clearly established goals and run according to the whims and personalities of the government officials appointed to head them.

During the first convention of the Cameroonian National Union (single party), held in Garoua in 1969, the Cameroonian president gave a speech in which he “acknowledged the importance of emotions” and “the affective and spiritual reality of tribal collectivities” and praised “the cultural content and richness of the Cameroonian people’s traditional values.” These slogans, designed to reflect the mood of the day, were embraced and applauded by the official media. They were accompanied by the creation of regional entities (cultural and youth centers) intended to rally the young around the idea of culture. As before, there was no follow-through, not only because the government had a poorly defined national strategy but also because it had finally unveiled its true conception of the role of cultural leaders and the debate of ideas.

The exhaustion of the myth of prosperity fostered after independence contributed to the government’s increasing rigidity and further strengthened its reflex to shut down thought. The attainment of political sovereignty (the replacement of European government officials with nationals) had not improved the living conditions of Cameroonians, and the population exhibited a clear loss of confidence in the idea of the state and hence a lack of interest in the official cultural discourse. Through the use of slogans and the creation of so-called national institutions designed to celebrate the past, the government was trying to reshape people’s understanding of politics. Thus, cultural politics was conducted as a set of narratives purveyed by authorities, civil servants, intellectuals, and various groups of civil society. Yet it turned out that people at the grassroots level were at the same time developing some counternarratives; that is, a broad range of means (and a fretwork of assumptions supporting those means) by which they would contest the dominant reality of cultural politics.

At the beginning of the 1970s, the young began to show signs of protest, such as the memorable student strikes at the University of Yaoundé. Suspecting that several intellectuals had encouraged if not fomented the movement, the Cameroonian president decided that the best way to block the road to “subversion” was to enlist in the single party all those capable of stirring up ideas. This was not done to stimulate action in the party (which, though not a state party under the constitution, was assigned the task of setting public policy), but rather to compromise as many intellectuals as possible and to keep a watchful eye on heretical thinkers.

Thus, while his Senegalese counterpart, Léopold Sédar Senghor, tolerated within his country the presence of intellectuals and cultural leaders (Cheikh Anta Diop, Pathé Diagne, Jean-Pierre Ndiaye, etc.) whose activities might provoke criticism among the young, President Ahidjo outlined his ideas to his country’s cultural leaders, clearly articulating the role he assigned to culture: “Every effective cultural action is at root an enterprise, if not a political one, then at least a civic one” (1973). Given that the government was growing more and more repressive, few men dared to distance themselves from the party line. Two important meetings of the Higher Education Council and the National Council on Cultural Affairs confirmed the adherence of scholars to the party line. The two events brought together scholars from around the country who were presented as leaders in their fields. Bahoken and Atangana have captured the essence of the texts adopted after days of debate:

The Commission [the first, devoted to policy development] settled upon the basic idea that the university, which was called upon to involve itself in the realities facing the nation through the medium of politics (whose principles were defined by the party), should be integrated into the party structure. The university would no longer constitute, as it had in the past, a separate world or, to borrow the President’s phrase, a place for “thinking heads totally removed from the realities facing the nation.” ... The duty of researchers, professors and students alike was to become activists in the Cameroonian National Union and to contribute in a concrete way to the formation of the national consciousness (1975: 37–38).

Acknowledging that it ultimately fell to the experts to devise the ways and means of transforming the university into a veritable political instrument, the commission advised that “the engagement of the university take place at the level of structure, course content, and people, so that it might in the end produce citizens who speak the language of their country and reason as Cameroonians concerned with the stature of their nation” (1975: 37–38). The resolutions adopted ran along the same lines: “Whereas cultural renewal, if it is truly to become a political instrument in the service of the nation, must be placed within the sphere of the Cameroonian National Union Party ... [we] recommend that the Cameroonian cultural and artistic movement engage itself politically in accordance with the ideals defined by the party” (MINFOC 1974).

It is easy to understand the ineffectiveness and pointlessness of subsequently established institutions: from that date forward, the political slant imposed upon the results of studies conducted in various “laboratories” at the University of Yaoundé ensured that little was accomplished, except, perhaps, some sort of naive management of party slogans. The conference on Cameroonian cultural identity held in 1985—at which there were a few excellent participants—and the States General on culture (1991) were both organized by the government for the sole purpose of creating a political diversion. Neither was able to generate enough enthusiasm to instill a new sense of confidence in cultural leaders or to trigger a real debate on the question of national identity.

 

The Time for Counternarratives and Refutations

Ensconced in their certainties, preoccupied exclusively with the political aspects of their actions, forgetful of passing time, those in charge of what passed for cultural politics in Africa missed the arrival of modernity and all that it called into question. As a result, they failed to notice the irruption of new ways of seeing and thinking in the daily lives of those peoples they thought would forever remain in the dark. ₃

Of course, on the pretext of celebrating the authenticity and the splendor of collective memory, a number of prominent figures have continued to promote archaic mentalities and anachronistic social conventions. Responsible for a palpable obscurantism, these antiquated souls have been challenged and defeated by the advocates of a new order who do not feel any allegiance to the habits and customs of their ancestors. Below the surface have developed new ways of being that have bold visions of the future and a thoroughly “subversive” conception of art. They have helped us forget the shame of things past.

Beyond Remembrance of Things Past

For many years, it was extremely difficult, if not impossible, to dispute the effectiveness of what Africans presented to the world as the essence of their cultures. Western intellectuals and Africans invariably felt the need to respect certain customs and traditions, occasionally criticizing their origin but never daring to pass judgment on them. It was only in 1990 that a Cameroonian writer, Etounga-Manguelle, had the courage to start a ripple in the pond of certainties. Offering a brutal analysis of the (non)functioning of Africa’s systems and a no-excuses approach to hard truths, his book endeavored to decolonialize African citizens from their feelings so that they might question their value system.

Seeking out those conditions in which a type of hope differing from the current definition—a string of self-congratulatory slogans—might be born, Etounga-Manguelle reformulated some of the questions surrounding the difficulty of being African today: What African has not privately deplored the cultural and psychological stumbling blocks that have made their peoples “social misfits,” marginalized players in the construction of history? Who is unaware of the burdensome aspects of the African family? Who does not recognize the futility of certain “folkloric” rites and ceremonies? What African has not suffered or seen someone suffer as a result of witchcraft, that plague Amnesty International has forgotten in its inventory of attacks on human rights?

Etounga-Manguelle belongs to the same school of thought as Yambo Ouologuem, who in Le Devoir de violence (The Duty of Violence, translated into English as Bound to Violence) examined the receptiveness of precolonial African societies to slavery and colonization. Emphasizing their propensity for disorder, inversely proportionate to their ability to take on the responsibilities involved in shaping their destiny, he rooted out the seeds of failure. These seeds are not found in Africans’ chromosomes or in their political and economic structures, but rather in the outdated precepts that govern their behavior. The unresolved question at the end of this century is whether the intellectual and psychological approach these peoples have to problems is compatible with the demands and realities of our time.

An example of the necessity of this type of questioning is African peoples’ collective approach to the future. They have little inclination to plan for the future and thus have insufficient control over the notion of uncertainty. This attitude is found in their intensely spiritual relationship with the divinity, in their desire to cohabit with nature (seen as a divine space) rather than dominate it as do other peoples, and in their concept of time management. In the eighteenth century, Scottish explorer Mungo Park lamented the fact that “the African shows little interest in the future. If there is something important that he has to do, it does not matter to him whether he does it today, tomorrow, or two months from now” (quoted by Comte 1988). Though this observation may strike us today as something of an ethnological cliché, we would be wrong to dismiss it altogether. Servan-Schreiber has returned to it and critiqued it:

Time in Africa has both a cultural and symbolic value that plays an important role in the manner in which time is experienced. As such, it is both a source of richness and a handicap. It is a source of richness insofar as it is satisfying for individuals to live in time at their own pace, something they do not wish to give up. But it is also a handicap insofar as we are in competition with other countries that do not employ the same work methods and in which competition at the level of productivity, for example, is tied to a more rational use of time (1985).

Etounga-Manguelle corroborates Servan-Schreiber’s assessment when he relates the indignant response that the man on the street in Lagos gives in order to justify his free conception of time: “The watch did not invent man!” Likewise, Djiboutians describe “hurried time as an ‘outside’ joke” (Monga 1990c). Despite insinuations by some of Gobineau’s followers (Lugan 1989), this fatalism obviously is not biological. For if Mali, which opened the world’s first university during the Middle Ages (in Tombouctou), no longer has a single institution of higher learning, it is the result of a political failure itself caused by a naive and whimsical conception of culture.

Indicted, therefore, is so-called traditional culture, which is at once archaic and pretentious, and which “defies time because it considers itself to be at the beginning of time.” Of arguable authenticity (compare Mudimbe 1988), it produces conceptual handicaps that make it difficult to decipher the future. It authorizes not only authoritarian practices to prevail in everyday life but also the dictatorship of the community over the individual, the excessive cult of conviviality (which is evidenced by a taste for celebrations), the conflicted relationship with wealth in general and money in particular, and the bloated role of the irrational (witchcraft, religious fundamentalism, and paganism) in peoples’ daily lives. It transforms Africa’s countries into totalitarian, cannibalistic societies. Its incapacity to meet the challenges of our time—which has made most Africans “stowaways” in this century—speaks to the urgency of a veritable aggiornamento. Africa must bring itself up to date if it wants to embrace this century, something that can be accomplished without losing the humanism associated with its ancestral traditions. The challenge, therefore, is to reconcile the sociability that is the essence of Africanness with the autonomy of the people, necessary if Africans are to affirm themselves as autonomous political, economic, and social agents. In other words, the real challenge for the advocates of democracy and self-empowerment is to transform the current celebration of cultural immobilism (which is done by African governments mainly for political purposes) into a dynamic discussion over the function of culture and the need for alternative visions. Indeed, in all African countries, the struggle has already begun between, on the one hand, governments and their fundamentalist flatterers and, on the other, prodemocracy apostles, who are trying to develop counternarratives through arts.

Memory Forgotten

There appears to be a multidirectional evolution taking place. Among those to whom I refer as “fundamentalists” of a mythic culture, there is a tendency toward radicalization. On the part of the young, especially those who live in urban areas, there is a strong desire to free themselves of the postulates established by their ancestors, to adapt the cultural environment of the family to their own temperament, and to leave behind the imprint of their ideals. Battle lines have been drawn between those who want to restore a waning traditional “moral order” and those who view themselves as the apostles of a postmodern, fragmented cultural identity in tune with the turbulent state of the world.

The Fundamentalist Temptation

The official ideologues of African culture, whose utopian conception of social relations and brutal theory on Africa’s integration in the world have been critiqued earlier, still seek to “reconstruct” in each citizen a mental landscape that belongs to an irretrievable past. On the pretext of celebrating what they see as the “eternal values of our cultures” (compare MINFOC 1985), they have developed a discourse aimed at an excessive socialization of individuals and at an absolute respect for the established order. Committed to the idea of a single truth, they advocate a form of positivism claiming to encompass the entire complex of reality. Philosophers dedicated to totalizing systems and a return to myth, they measure the truth of an idea in terms of what they deem to be constants of history. I call this perversion of memory the fundamentalist temptation.

At the present time, this temptation is expressed in all parts of the country through the medium of so-called cultural associations and socioethnic organizations. The extent of their activities cannot be precisely determined. Defining themselves as mere extensions of earlier movements active during the colonial period (the Ngondo, the traditional Duala Assembly in Cameroon, or the Bwiti in Gabon are good illustrations of the resurgence of such movements), they have a simple goal: to provide the existing precepts of each community with a moral content and to protect community interests.

The ambiguity of their agenda lies in their second objective. How can one establish a moral boundary between the celebration of the tribe and the incitement toward tribalism? How can one differentiate the instance in which people from the same ethnoregional group come together to shore up their common spiritual foundation so as to integrate themselves within the national community from the one in which they calmly devise strategies to increase their own power and material wealth to the obvious detriment of other groups in the country? How can one accept the idea that every African state should be conceived as nothing more than a conglomeration of different “ethnic” groups?

Of course, the pretext here is to reconstruct frayed identities, to realize possibilities, and to organize collective resistance against the transformation of unified subjects into multiple ones; in short, to take old philosophical values (fraternity, solidarity, mutual assistance), battered, in their view, by modernity, and turn them into reality. The actual goal of the members of these associations—political domination—is never stated. But an examination of the facts and an analysis of the action taken by (or in the name of) these cultural associations clearly prove their interest in increasing the political power of the “ethnic” or social groups that they are supposed to represent.

Some countries have witnessed recently an attempt to polarize national politics through a war of political tracts designed to create ethnic tension. In Cameroon, the Essingan ethnopolitical group has been pitted most notably against the Laakam. The former is supported by the political barons from the central and southern regions of the country and has the backing of the official press—the government daily, the Cameroon Tribune, publishes its communiqués. The latter comprises officials from the western part of the country and has taken positions that clearly indicate its willingness to defend only “the interests of the Bamileke community.”

In addition to rebutting these pressure groups’ claims concerning their affiliation with earlier movements, it is necessary to put into perspective the confrontation between these two lobbies. The tabloids make much ado about mere epiphenomena, and the strategy of those in power is to do their best to exploit them. By showcasing the opposition between the Essingan and the Laakam, the government creates a diversion, succeeds in changing the terms of the current political debate, lends credence to the idea of an upcoming civil war, and arouses the fears of Cameroonians—even as it allays those of the international community by affirming that the nation’s recent troubles concern only a few extremists in the rival Beti and Bamileke communities. The strategy is subtle but hardly original: the French and English colonists employed the very same tactics in the 1950s during decolonialization. They too claimed that the fight being led by the Union des Populations du Cameroun (the nationalist party) was not aimed at achieving independence but rather at establishing a hierarchy among tribes.

Culture and Violence

In the face of these associations, with their dubious definitions of micro-citizenry and their vitriolic theories of inequality, in the face of these illusory attempts to sunder the cultural arena through its division into monolithic ethnic blocs, the young have endeavored to develop different points of view and different behaviors. If one concurs with Foucault (1966) that an underlying structural configuration shapes the culture of a given era, and that a specific mode of knowledge undergirds a civilization (Sheridan 1985), molds the collective unconscious, and renders possible the formation of new discourses and behaviors, then it might be said that in our case this social base has been increasingly marked by violence. Given that each culture develops within the framework of an “historical a priori” (episteme), urban civilization in sub-Saharan Africa today bears the stigmata of the political and social upheavals that have occurred time and again since independence. The necessities of daily life have caused a large number of people, notably the young, to devise various methods of revolt against the current social system. Having understood that it is futile to follow precepts that are continually violated by those who endorse them, young people from Dakar to Djibouti have rejected Descartes’s first moral maxim: “to obey the laws and customs of my country” (1962:24). The lifestyles they have invented in order to survive involve different factors. Theirs is a true urban culture that rests upon the truth of violence. Its effectiveness, in their eyes, is beyond the shadow of a doubt. Violence has tended to reduce the part episteme plays in their approach to life’s problems and difficulties. Respect for political, parental, or traditional power—discredited by its tendency to exacerbate injustices and its inability to bring about public prosperity—has increasingly declined and young people have manifested their disgust through a greater need for violence.

To the aggressive instinct that Freud described as a fundamental characteristic of the human species, one must add the revolt against social norms, which everyone knows were established for the purpose of being, well, ridiculed. The perversion of collective memory has given rise to the violation of laws and to the creation of a different form of popular culture, less passive, more arrogant. Thus, in the slums of Cameroon’s large urban centers, and in depressed areas generally, young people have developed a Rambo culture, because a certain type of film is their only escape from local bars. In their eyes, Sylvester Stallone, Chuck Norris, and Arnold Schwarzenegger are visionaries of freedom and have displaced Césaire, Anta Diop, or Mongo Beti.

Whether uneducated or educated but unemployed these young people have nothing around them except the abdication of intellectuals and the rhetoric of politicians. There are no role models to emulate, no emblematic figures to stimulate their minds. And as the government appears unwilling to accord any significance to college degrees; as the myth of education crumbles in the face of a system that produces more and more unemployed, disenfranchised, and marginalized people; as the number of unemployed continues to rise, but no public policy is developed to address the problem of inclusion and to prevent delinquency, Rambo becomes an escape valve. The young form gangs and organize their survival around terror. Of course their actions demonstrate a perverted vision of excellence, but the formation of gangs along other than tribal lines announces the emergence of a form of popular culture that disrupts current models.

A Subversive Conception of Art

Within this tumultuous conceptual framework, one in which a chaotic political culture has given rise to all sorts of perversions, African art has painfully attempted to find its way. Insofar as the ethical substratum of a work of art promotes the possibility of a different way of life, artists have become increasingly bold. Without engaging in Manichaeanism, artists from all fields may be said to fall into two basic groups: those who have the support of the government and those who do not. On the one side are those intellectuals and artists who subscribe to the official view of art as first and foremost a reproduction of tradition and hence a means of defending the established order, even if—indeed, especially if—the established order involves political power. The goal of their work is to imitate what came before or to celebrate things as they are. For in their eyes, everything is always for the best in the best of all possible worlds. One might counter their arguments with the criticisms Hegel leveled at the advocates of a Platonist theory of art: “This superfluous labour [of imitation] may even be regarded as a presumptuous game which falls far short of nature. For art is restricted in its means of portrayal, and can only produce one-sided deceptions, for example a pure appearance of reality for one sense only, and, in fact, if it abides by the formal aim of mere imitation, it provides not the reality of life but only a pretence of life” (1975, 1:42).

In reality, only a few African artists and intellectuals content themselves with this mimetic theory of art (compare Kom 1991b). Most fall into the second category and do not consider the goal of art to be the celebration of long lost myths, a perspective that empties art of any content or meaning of its own insofar as its object is imposed from without. Championing a popular culture attuned to the times, to the imperatives and concerns of modern life, they conceive of art as the expression of an idea, as the spiritual transfiguration of new truths. This is how one must understand the words of the musician Toto Guillaume:

Getting an album out every six months is like punching in at the factory. Before I can present something to the public, I have to feel something go off inside me, some inner development.... When you’re just starting out, you have a tendency to do what other people are doing. But over time you start feeling the need to make your own statement.... I like tradition, I just have very modern ideas. I think we need to get our music out of the ghetto and start putting it on the market. The artistic war today is fought with missiles. We’re not fighting with bows and arrows or spears anymore” (Monga 1988:236).

Refusing to fit themselves into preestablished molds, African artists eagerly embrace their role and seek to convey the specificity of their doubts and emotions. Whether writers, philosophers, musicians, singers, comedians, actors, or painters, they draw inspiration from the need to change the order (or, more precisely, the disorder) of things. Strengthened by the force of their convictions, they endeavor to leave the imprint of their values and beliefs on society. They believe that art should be a reflection of both social realities and human dreams. That is why the main themes that drive their work are the striving for a better world, criticism of the prevailing sociopolitical order, and resistance to any kind of totalitarianism. In other words, they tend to attribute a utopian function to art—in the sense suggested by Bloch (1988). This explains why, for example, the singers Lapiro de Mbanga and Ben Decca felt they should lead the public demonstrations in support of protecting human rights that took place in Douala in January 1991.

On January 1 of that year, a Cameroonian army patrol broke into my house at six o’clock in the morning and dragged me to a filthy cell in a police station in Douala. I had been arrested like this before, so I did not even bother to ask the police for an explanation. As always in this part of the world, the police had no other warrant than their revolvers and machine guns. Several days later, I learned from an article in the official press that I had been arrested for “contempt of the President of the Republic and official bodies” as a result of a piece I had written in a local newspaper criticizing democratization, “Cameroonian style.” According to the official press, I deserved a five-year prison sentence without possibility of parole and a fine of FCFA 5 million ($20,000).

On January 18, after a bizarre three-day trial, the Cameroonian judicial system gave me a six-month suspended sentence and fined me FCFA 300,000. Given the seriousness of the charges against me, the relative clemency of the court can be attributed to the massive show of popular support for my cause. In Douala and other cities throughout the country, tens of thousands of people had decided to confront the forces of order so as to express their solidarity with my cause—something never before seen in Cameroon. My work as an economist and my “status” as a writer might account for the support of intellectuals, but I remain convinced that above all it was the work of a group of well-known artists in the streets and working-class neighborhoods that raised the consciousness of the masses.

My trial would no doubt have been just another political trial had Lapiro de Mbanga, André-Marie Tala, and Ben Decca not decided to dedicate themselves so completely to my cause. Among other things, they created an advocacy group, made daily trips to working-class neighborhoods wearing T-shirts printed with slogans demanding freedom of expression, and distributed pamphlets asking people to show their support for me. All of this was unheard of in a regime where the word democracy was a rhetorical artifice and where people never dared express their true thoughts in public.

Stunned by the sudden awakening of a civil society everyone thought had been immobilized by thirty years of political monolithism, unpunished police brutality, and repression raised to an art of government, the power base around Paul Biya was thoroughly humiliated and lost its assurance. The official political ideologues had to come up with an explanation for the slap in the face to the president of the republic and also had to find a way to restore the authority of the state and its institutions. Held accountable for the disorder and anarchy, Lapiro de Mbanga and the other artists involved in the affair were subjected to slanderous accusations in the official press and had their songs banned on national radio and television. As if that were not enough, the National Center of Studies and Research (CENER, the political police) asked John Salle, another popular singer, to compose, posthaste, a song along the lines of the official slogans. Financing came from the military budget, and in late January the song was hastily recorded. It was later turned into a video shown daily on state-run television. This surprising reaction by Cameroonian authorities was proof of a new phenomenon: the consciousness that both politicians and civil society had of the power of music. This was further evidenced by the fact that several months after the trial the government engaged in a strong seduction-intimidation campaign aimed at the artists who had come to my defense. Considered by the authorities as the leader of the popular uprising, Lapiro de Mbanga was severely pressured by police officials, who eventually succeeded in getting him to “reverse” his position: The singer publicly denounced the goals of the Cameroonian opposition, though he had been its most prominent member. His statement, of course, did not fail to raise all sorts of questions as to the reasons for his sudden change of heart.

The Lapiro de Mbanga case reveals a great deal about the changes now occurring in black Africa. Throughout the continent, music is now considered a legitimate and effective way to get one’s message across, that is, a counternarrative to the official cultural politics. An important threshold has been crossed with respect to the perception politicians, intellectuals, and businessmen have of African music. An increasing number of artists have begun to engage themselves publicly—in order to defend their rights, but also to address concerns of a political nature.

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In truth, what strikes us today as the “discovery” of the power of music was more the doing of the politicians than of the artists themselves. Artists have always thought of their art as a medium of expression for the ethical goal toward which we all strive. This conviction—timid, of course, and virtually clandestine—was hidden from view by the paternalism and superficiality of the musicologists who evaluated African music. Indeed, sociologists and musicologists have long analyzed African lyrics through the prism of the methodologies in vogue in their fields.

Based on traditional methods of observation, this musical historiography has allowed for the detection of forms of language that are understandable only within Western analytical paradigms. Hence, the recognized importance of the griots, keepers of the ancestral moral order and heralds of collective memory, has unfortunately lent credence to the false idea that musical satire can occur only in linear form. The conclusion that has thus been drawn is that contemporary African music is incapable of transmitting a message of protest, but that is not the case. The disappearance of the griots has been counterbalanced by the emergence of singers who wish to exploit fully their freedom of expression and explore taboo themes. The language and the register in which they work differs from those of their ancestors, and new tools of measurement are required if one is to detect and appreciate what they are saying.

If one agrees with Attali (1977) that a society ought to be judged more on the basis of its sounds, its music, and its taste in entertainment than on its statistics, then it is necessary to alter one’s approach to African social realities: Africa must not only be “seen” but “heard.” Its countries cannot be understood by simply analyzing their sociopolitical and economic structures. By deciphering the lyrics and the sounds of different types of music in Senegal or Djibouti, one is better able to perceive the concerns and hopes of these peoples.

To understand properly the production of music in black Africa, two levels of reading must be distinguished. On the one hand, the use and the extent of freedom of expression need to be evaluated through both the lyrics and what lies beyond them, for language is multidimensional and can sometimes be accessed only with the aid of a few well-defined keys. On the other hand, what appears as an expansion and appropriation of freedom needs to be explored on a strictly musical level (instrumentation), for freedom of expression is not confined to lyrics. It likewise involves the choice of instruments and the philosophy behind the way they are played, the combination of sounds, the construction of harmonies, and the development of arrangements that give a musical work its stamp of originality.

Let us begin, then, with the lyrics. Roughly speaking, the evolution of African song may be divided into three periods. Originally, it served chiefly as a means of keeping popular memory alive and celebrating societal values. During the colonial era, it functioned as a rite of exorcism—exorcism of the concerns and difficulties of daily life and of the violence of a colonial government seen as illegitimate and treacherous.

Love songs, songs of war or protest, odes to the dead, prayers, incantations, and lullabies first and foremost celebrated the possibility of happiness and the necessity of hope. This dimension has been missed by a number of commentators because the first artists to record albums sang the ideology of love. Because these artists had to seek financial backing from French and Belgian producers, who were few in number and little inclined to invest in material with a message, the first songs to be recorded were bland and vapid. This, of course, gave credence to the idea that African songs were just another form of entertainment.

The context in which contemporary African music was born did not lend itself to great ethical declarations, at least not in a form easily deciphered by using ordinary criteria of analysis. Thus, when Congolese Joseph Kabassele, alias Grand Kalle, formed the African Jazz Band in Léopoldville (now Kinshasa) in 1955, he had no idea that the ensemble would become the first important band in black Africa. Bringing together his fellow Congolese Tabu Ley Rochereau and Luambo Makiadi (Franco), as well as Jean Serge Essous and Cameroonian Manu Dibango, Kabassele, now considered a pioneer, no doubt invented modern African music. From the beginning, his idea was to offer the African public songs celebrating the sensual delights of existence. According to Manu Dibango, “You had to be nuts to go into the music business in those days. Not only was the road a precarious one, but you ran the risk of being called a deserter in the fight for national independence” (Monga 1983:67).

It was only in 1960, after the great debates on colonialism, that Grand Kalle recorded his hit song, “Indépendance tchatcha,” which for years would serve as the banner of African music. Following on his heels, the Congolese Franklin Boukaka attempted to start a “revolutionary” trend and stir up social and political protest. In his most famous song in Lingala, “Le bûcheron,” he said:

Ba voti tango ekomaka

Nakombi moto ya bango

Nakomituna mondele akende

Dipanda to dzua ya nini (Bemba 1984)

Which can roughly be translated as follows:

Only when the time comes for electoral campaigns

I become their body.

I am starting to wonder whether the colonial masters actually left this country.

To whom is devoted the so-called independence we fought for?

In spite of Boukaka’s enormous popularity throughout central Africa, he did not meet with much success. The reasons for his failure are threefold: First, artists were less sensitive to this type of combat, preferring to express their subversive vision of the world through instrumentation. Second, the 1960s saw the rise of authoritarian regimes, which plunged African countries into a long period of darkness. Third, the production, distribution, and promotional arms of the music industry long closed their doors to artists considered dangerous because of the nature of their work and the possible impact of their discourse of protest on a population prepared to receive it, given the tragic conditions of daily life.

A confused and tumultuous second phase of music expressed the disenchantment that followed, in the wake of independence. Lyricists ceased to be prophetic and became preoccupied with everyday problems. Reality was echoed in these songs rather than challenged, and no effort was made to change society. The great ethical goals of the colonial period were progressively abandoned and the entire complex of traditional values began to unravel.

There were, however, two notable exceptions: Francis Bebey, from Cameroon, and Pierre Akendengue, from Gabon. Ceaselessly referring to what they considered Africa’s cultural heritage, they succeeded in establishing a small but significant trend. They channeled their freedom of expression through African parables and allegories, which they used to transmit their critical vision of the world. In “King of Pygmies,” one of his best-known songs, Bebey employed humor and feigned ingenuousness to ridicule the pretentiousness of certain African heads of state:

In our camp

there’s a little man

who claims to be the king.

Everyone laughs when he says

that his father was a king.

Because everyone knows that in our tribe

there has never been a king.

We don’t think that a crown

serves much purpose on hunting trips. (1983)

Which can roughly be translated as follows:

I never get any rest

I never get any sleep

My nights are filled with nightmares—the tears of children

Who are hungry and who want every day

A little more ...

The sun bites into my body

I sing

The tse-tse flies suck on my blood

I sing. (1973)

If one excludes the work of such “oddballs” as Bebey and Akendengue (who, not surprisingly, had to live in France for a number of years), there was no song on the market that could be termed subversive before Nigerian Fela Ransome Kuti burst upon the scene. His arrival in the early 1970s inaugurated the third phase of contemporary African music. There was a large public response to his message and a trend began to take shape.

Some of the movement’s artists—Ivoirians Alpha Bondy and Serge Kasy among the most prominent—have since turned to reggae, in their view a better vehicle of expression for oppressed peoples’ yearnings for freedom. Returning to highly complex forms, other artists have introduced a discourse of revolt into the most sophisticated musical structures (Euba 1989; Kwabena Nketia 1990). Still others, such as Zaireans Ray Lema and Lokua Kanza, Senegalese Baaba Maal, Malian Salif Keita, and Cameroonians Koko Ateba and Nkembe Pesauk, have taken inspiration from the textual framework and techniques of popular singers in the West. The electrifying force of their songs remains a source of concern for political authorities.

The unfolding of freedom of expression in black Africa is best observed on the level of the music per se. If one takes seriously both the axiom that all music speaks—even in the absence of lyrics—and the need to decipher the unspoken dimension of this art form, one can attribute some of the social upheavals of our time to the impact of different types of African music.

This postulate is not fortuitous. The new generation of African artists has clearly chosen to favor the music itself over the lyrics. The Senegalese sabar of Youssou Ndour and Ismael Lo, the Cameroonian makossa of Toto Guillaume, and the Zairean rumba of Koffi Olomidé illustrate this phenomenon. Nzete has shown how the stars of Zairean music define their priorities, always to the detriment of the lyrics: “When there are more syllables than will fit in a given rhythmic sequence, the author-composer always cuts one out. When the length of a word doesn’t disrupt the rhythm, we leave all the syllables in” (1991:99). This technique allows the artists to accommodate the lyrics to the pulse of the music and to preserve the melody by modifying the pitch curve of words—no easy task given that in most African languages pitch is all that distinguishes certain words from others. The preference given to the rhythm has also led to the suppression of elements of syntax. Thus, when the tempo is fast, most subordinate clauses and almost all adverbial complements are dropped.

Taking tremendous liberties with the techniques governing lyrical composition, African artists underscore their desire to free themselves of the criteria established by musicologists. Artists give importance to musical composition, often to the detriment of the lyrics. Consequently, if one wishes to get at the essence of these works, one must study the various sound configurations, examine the instrumental discourse as a whole, and unearth the ethos buried within the harmonies and arrangements.

Such an endeavor requires the adoption of a multifaceted, expansive approach that integrates both what is termed traditional African music and what is referred to as modern or popular African music. The debate between the “old” and the “new” is far from over, but because producers, distributors, and promoters are interested in only what they think (rightly or wrongly) is in demand, only “modern” African music has gained the attention of the music industry’s principal players. This has caused Angolan guitarist Mario Rui Silva to remark: “We must not allow the success of this music to eclipse Africa’s other music. We have a tendency to forget it, but another one exists. From the Pygmies through the Bochimans to the Bamilekes, the Fulani, the Hausas, and the Zulus, all the populations of Africa have their own ancestral music. In purely structural terms, this music has no reason to be jealous of any other” (Monga 1983:68).

Francis Bebey has said much the same thing:

We only call it “traditional” music because we don’t recognize it for what it is. It continues to advance towards the future whose course it is destined to upset through the renewal of sincerity. It speaks of man, eternal and diverse, steadily moving through the maze of poverty and misery; it speaks of injustice, racism and segregation; it proclaims to the world of the disenchanted the joy of living as long as there is dance, the joy of hearty laughter. It reinvents life around legends as old as our first ancestor. It plays its flutes, koras, mvets, and sanzas with the delicacy of harmony; it beats its tom-toms with the brutality of passion; it calls to the gods and opens men’s eyes to the invisible. It wishes to be known, studied and respected for what it is, and not admired for what we wish it were (1981:38).

However, the idea of an either-or opposition between these two forms of music—if it is indeed possible to reduce all the different types of music that are found in Africa to these two broad categories—is not justified. Each has its own function and role. Rarely recorded, listened to less and less, traditional music has certainly suffered from its association with the past and the fundamentalist discourse of some of its practitioners. It is rare and elicits twinges of nostalgia reflective of contradictory, anguished feelings toward modernity, dizzying and difficult to control. But the place of traditional music remains an important one inasmuch as tomorrow’s popular music will draw inspiration from it.

Popular music is indeed very popular and has taken over the airwaves. In touch with the problems of daily life, in tune with today’s atmosphere of disorder, it is often syncretic but nevertheless contributes to the development of a new social order. Though it is fumbling and repetitive, though it sometimes appears neurotic or lost in the fun house of such fleeting trends as disco, reggae, funk, rap or zouk, popular music has never stopped playing an essential role—that of recording the frenzied chronicle of our collective meanderings, ambitions, and dreams.

It is therefore illusory to perform a Manichaean reading of the different types of African music and to establish a moral hierarchy among them. Through their work, individual creators express their desire to explore the unknown order of things, to elaborate new and exciting sound combinations, and to contribute to what will later be the memory of their people. This is how one must understand Manu Dibango’s words when he declares:

When you’re a musician, you don’t get up one morning and say to yourself, “I’m making African music”; you say, “I’m making music.” Period.... All along people have accused me of “stealing.” But how can you create anything if you don’t use what’s out there? All creators are a little like vampires. Painting, literature, the information industry, they all function like the music industry. Some musicians are afraid of tapping into this universal dimension. But without this perspective, what’s the point of being born? What good is curiosity, energy and movement if you live behind bars, feet and hands tied, in a little corner of the world for seventy years? (1991:4)

The lucidity and realism of this approach have allowed Dibango to reach a worldwide audience and to position himself as a singer who remains in touch with the times but also with his African identity. This positive approach to art is deeply significant. Rejecting the nondestiny that conservatives offer us, it expresses the will to extract a little emotion from the universe that constantly beats us down and underscores the ability of humans to contribute to the construction of a different world.

In all fields, these types of artists have always been the most numerous. Although the work of the first African writers was somewhat conformist, the generation that gave African literature its letters of nobility was also the one that introduced dynamism into the subject matter along with social and political protest. Moreover, from Mongo Beti to Simon Njami or Ben Okri, writing has often been a space of revolt against the established social or aesthetic norms, despite the inevitable constraints imposed upon the imagination by the use of foreign languages (Muhando Mlama 1990; Midohouan 1991).

I must also mention the remarkable deconstructive/reconstructive efforts of several African thinkers. Through the power and originality of their work, they have opened up new perspectives on African culture and have contributed to the development of a new set of working principles for its study. They have triggered that indispensable cultural update, alone able to inject a sufficient dose of authenticity into culture so that it might invest without fear in the future (compare Ndiaye 1976; Fonkoué 1985; Mudimbe 1988).

Per Capita Anxiety Rate and Gross Domestic Happiness

Musicians, singers, and dancers are at the forefront of the effort to transform reality. The sounds, noises, and forms of African music increasingly set the tempo of social change. Africans have always known that most musicians were sorcerers, entrancing the populations of whole cities and altering the beliefs of entire peoples through the magic of their instruments, bodies, and voices (Bender 1991). They have also become preachers and futurologists. Their art is not merely an avenue that focuses the world’s attention on Africa’s plight; it is also a way of telling what the future holds in store. In the words of Francis Bebey:

On a purely political and economic level, our countries appear to be going nowhere. But if you listen to the music of the young, it becomes clear that sweeping changes lie just around the bend. The new sounds I am hearing in African music announce social upheavals. Let me give you an example. The voice of Bailly Spinto, from the Ivory Coast: it predicts cataclysmic events, announces a great rebellion still in the process of formation—it doesn’t matter what words he happens to be singing. ₄

In other words, if political scientists and sociologists wish to understand the way African societies function, they need to go beyond statistics and macroeconomics in order to decipher the sounds and the music of Africa. The rates of inflation and unemployment may allow for the calculation of a fictive gross domestic product, but only music can help us measure the per capita anxiety rate and gross domestic happiness—fundamental underpinnings of culture.

Miséréor’s Fast and Guernica

Although the plastic arts in Africa are not among the techniques of cultural expression that one associates with a long and rich tradition, they must be considered, for a number of exciting and influential developments have occurred in painting and sculpture during the three decades of independence. If such artists as Zairian Liyolo or Cameroonian Gédéon Mpando, sculptors of the principal monuments that “adorn” our capitals (they uglify them in fact), have made a travesty of the plastic arts, it is because the authorities have chosen to make them important figures despite their lack of talent, creativity, and charisma. Fortunately, sculptors such as Damian Manuhwa (Zimbabwe) and painters such as Iba Ndiaye (Senegal), Zogo, Manuela Dikoume, Othéo, Pascal Kenfack, and especially René Tchébétchou (Cameroon) are now demonstrating that one can successfully promote a different conception of art.

The refusal to conform and the desire to rebel is prevalent in the works of all these artists, particularly in Tchébétchou’s. When the eye rests upon one of his paintings, it ceases to operate as an optical instrument in search of pleasurable emotion. Rather, it is assaulted and transformed by the diversity of styles, by the willed shift in pictorial techniques—in short, by the multiple dimensions it perceives in the work of an artist who appears to have freed himself of the psychological constraints imposed by tradition.

It is true that some of his paintings seem to have been inspired by the impressionism of a Monet, a Pissarro, or a Degas. There are the gradation and the nuances of color, the fragmented brush strokes used to render the brilliance of a sky or the shadows of a face. There is also the light, predominant and exultant. Precise contours and details are abandoned. Other paintings pose the essential question of cubism: how to represent a three-dimensional object on a two-dimensional surface. Different facets of the same object are assembled in a single painting; the naked object is exposed, opened from within, presented not as it is seen but as it is thought by the artist. And though Tchébétchou has incorporated the influence of Miró and Picasso into his work, he has not lost sight of his African identity. Bearing witness to this are his great kaleidoscopic frescoes, among which is one of his finest paintings, Miséréor’s Fast, a panorama of daily African life. The manner in which it is conceived, the order in which the scenes are presented, and the attitudes of the characters bring to mind Miró’s Soirée snob chez la Princesse (Snobbish Evening with the Princess), or Picasso’s phenomenal Guernica: The characters, limp and spiritless, mirror their destiny; the situations are tragic, heart wrenching. The Western references suggested by this painting do not take away from the authenticity of a culture deliberately oriented toward the universal. Black African culture, let us not forget, has likewise made a large contribution to humanity’s common heritage. Neither should we forget that African society as depicted in Tchébétchou’s paintings today is in the same sorry shape that European society in Spain was at the time Picasso painted Guernica. Finally, neither the turmoil of an artist nor the personal anguish that stimulates creativity is the exclusive province of a single race. In a word, suffering is color-blind.

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In view of all that has been said, a few remarks are in order concerning the future of cultural politics in Africa. Both technological evolution and social revolutions will no doubt make it necessary for Africa’s peoples to adapt themselves continually to new dynamics. Countries that are little prepared for the so-called global battle of culture (encompassing, of course, geopolitical and economic struggles) run the risk of being swallowed up in a standardized culture: if music from elsewhere is all that is heard, and the most readily available literature—that is, from Europe and the United States—is all that is read, then Africa’s young people, like the rest of the world’s youth, will be “Americanized.” In many African countries, those in power oppose the very idea of democracy on the grounds that it is a threat to “authentic” African culture and a challenge to secular values of respect to the chief (the authoritarian head of state).

Obviously, one should be wary of overestimating the effects of the so-called Western influence on Africans’ values, for artists and some intellectuals will always develop counternarratives to any form of universal narrative—as they did with official cultural politics and its hegemonic narrative. For centuries now, experts have described Africa as totally “deculturized.” Of course, they are the same experts who lament that the continent has yet to “free itself” of the cultural habits that impede its development.

Juxtapositions of different cultures are part of the normal course of history, and encounters with other civilizations help peoples make adjustments necessary for the survival and renewal of future generations. Moreover, it would be ill advised to judge the substance of a culture based on a given era lifted from the continuum of history. Culture, by its very essence, is dynamic, constantly in flux. And like all other peoples, Africans must contend with an ever changing identity. In the current quest for democracy, it is not a liability.

 

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Endnotes

Note 1: See the Presidential Decree No. 62/DF/108, March 31, 1962. Back.

Note 2: Decree No. 67/DF/503, November 21, 1967. Back.

Note 3: Balandier (1985) and Vattimo (1987), among others, have suggested interesting frameworks to analyze the effects of new ways of seeing and thinking in people’s daily lives. Back.

Note 4: Bebey, interview. Back.

 

The Anthropology of Anger: Civil Society and Democracy in Africa