Representing African Music

Postcolonial Notes, Queries, Positions

Kofi Agawu

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317794059
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

The aim of this book is to stimulate debate by offering a critique of discourse about African music. Who writes about African music, how, and why? What assumptions and prejudices influence the presentation of ethnographic data? Even the term "African music" suggests there is an agreed-upon meaning, but African music signifies differently to different people. This book also poses the question then, "What is African music?" Agawu offers a new and provocative look at the history of African music scholarship that will resonate with students of ethnomusicology and post-colonial studies. He offers an alternative "Afro-centric" means of understanding African music, and in doing so, illuminates a different mode of creativity beyond the usual provenance of Western criticism. This book will undoubtedly inspire heated debate--and new thinking--among musicologists, cultural theorists, and post-colonial thinkers. Also includes 15 musical examples.

1
Colonialism's Impact

Conquest

In the early 1400s, Portugal, a relatively small and not particularly wellendowed European nation, sent groups of explorers along the West African coast in search of opportunities to trade and to spread the Christian religion. Reaching Cape Bianco in 1441, the Portuguese proceeded to the Senegal River in 1444, Sierra Leone in 1460, Elmina in the Gold Coast in 1471, and finally farther south to the Cape of Good Hope in 1487. Within a hundred years, Portugal had consolidated its position as a significant imperial force in Africa, later counting among its possessions the coastal areas of Angola and Mozambique. It would not be long before other Europeans, notably the Dutch, British, Belgians, Germans, and French, motivated by similar imperial ambitions, joined the assault. Beginning in 1532 and extending into the second half of the nineteenth century, a massive trans Atlantic slave trade, involving perhaps as many as 20 million Africans, provided a forum for the enactment of various forms of European ambitions for power and control. By the late nineteenth century, and as a result of agitation and conflicts between and among Africans and Europeans, the occupation of Africa could no longer be sustained as an unformalized arrangement. Hence, individual European powers met at the Berlin conference of 1884-1885 to partition the continent and to establish regulations that would protect their economic and political interests.¹

The Berlin conference prepared the period of official colonial rule. Colonialism meant the usurpation of Africa's political sovereignty and independence. By 1914 all of Black Africa, with the exception of Liberia and Ethiopia, was under the rule of one or another European power. In time, however, the colonial presence began to be challenged by a not unexpected internal agitation for self-rule and by an increasing realization that maintaining an empire was a costly business. The tables turned in 1957 when the Gold Coast became the first Black African country to attain independence. Following in rapid succession were various colonies including Nigeria, Kenya, Uganda, Ivory Coast, Guinea, Senegal, Zäire, and a host of others. Today, all of Africa is officially under indigenous rule, including the Republic of South Africa, where a long-standing institutional and systematic racism delayed the emergence of majority rule until 1994.

The five hundred or so years in which these events unfolded may not seem like a long time in the history of a continent many millions of years old, a continent credited with the origins of human life. But history is made not by time but by events, and it is in this sense that the European intrusion in Africa is properly understood. Colonialism had a profound effect on practically every aspect of African life: economic, political, social, and religious. Many historians regard this as a decisive phase in Africa's history. Basil Davidson describes "the arrival of Europeans [since the early 16th century]" as "the greatest calamity in [Africa's] history," while A. Adu Boahen calls colonialism an "extremely important" episode, one that "marks a clear watershed in the history of the continent."²

Our subject is music, but I have begun with a conventional outline of Africa's recent history in order to provide a context for understanding the specifically musical developments of the last one hundred years. For unlike political history, with its kingdoms and wars, migrations and inventions, music—an art of sound and a performing art in an oral culture—leaves different, more complex and elusive traces on the historical record, which may explain why historians of Africa have ignored its music. Kevin Shillington's widely used textbook History of Africa (1989) has nothing to say about African music; nor does John Reader's recent Africa: A Biography of the Continent (1998). The problem is even more acute in histories of precolonial Africa. While it is true that such histories have only recently begun to be authoritative on account of archaeological findings, themselves enabled by advances in technology, it is nevertheless striking that a volume like the Encyclopedia of Pre-Colonial Africa (1997), subtitled "Archaeology, History, Languages, Cultures, and Environments," has nothing to say about music. This systematic absence may well come as a surprise to those who regard music's role in Africa as basic and indispensable, and who therefore expect to find discussion of it in descriptions of African society. Such absence suggests that writing the history of a performing art poses unique challenges.³

The purpose of this chapter is to highlight salient aspects of the impact of colonialism on African music in order to prepare the postcolonial critique of subsequent chapters. What was the musical society like before the arrival of Europeans? How did contact with Europe affect musical practice? What sort of legacy is evident in the musical forms that circulate in postcolonial Africa? These are, of course, huge questions that require treatment in several monographs. Nevertheless, we can make a start by taking note of the most visible colonial traces.

Two qualifications need to be established from the outset. First, by "colonialism," I mean the broad range of European influences in Africa from the fifteenth century onward, rather than the narrower range of influences initiated during the 1880s. Strictly speaking, the colonial period began with the partitioning of Africa and ended at independence, roughly 1884 to 1957. To speak of colonialism is therefore to speak of events influenced by institutional practices and discourses put in place during this seventy-three-year period. But the formal partitioning was preceded by several centuries of European contact with initially coastal then later inland Africans, resulting in influences on religion, culture, and education. Speaking of colonialism in this expanded sense means overlooking differences in character between occupation after formal annexation and informal but power-based prior contact. While these differences are most pronounced in respect of sociopolitical life, they are less so in the area of musical practice, and so can be safely ignored. Second, this chapter cannot hope to provide a comprehensive account of its subject, detailing every trace of European colonial influence. Because my own experience is most complete with respect to Ghana, I will draw my main examples from there, incorporate others from the research of Gerhard Kubik and Michael Echeruo, and leave readers to supply analogous ones from other parts of Africa.

Precolonial Africa

Information about music in precolonial Africa is scanty. The earliest records stem from archaeological findings in which dance movements and musical instruments are featured. For example, in a 1956 expedition to the Sahara, Henri Llhote and a team of explorers discovered in the Tassili n'Ajjer at Sefar a rock painting featuring eight dancers (five women and three men). Experts think that the painting comes from the period 6,000-4,000 B.C. Gerhard Kubik, who cites this and other evidence in a discussion of "African music in history," draws on a theory of Helmut Günther's to suggest an affinity between the dance depicted in the rock painting and a contemporary Zulu stamping dance known as indlamu.⁴ Whether or not the specific connection is valid is less important than that the bold dance gestures featuring the upper torso and the enhanced legs of the male dancers provide some indication of the antiquity of certain contemporary dance movements. Another musical finding, also a rock painting, depicts a solo musician playing a six-string harp. He is flanked by an auditor, a person of ostensibly high rank; both are seated on stools. This painting has been dated to the period ca. 800-700 B.C.⁵ Its somewhat intimate setting suggests that contemplative music, that is, music composed to be listened to rather than danced to, is, contrary to popular opinion, not exactly unheard of in Africa's history.

With the Arab exploration of North Africa and the Sahara during the seventh through the twelfth centuries and the arrival of Europeans in the fifteenth, the written historical record becomes a bit more precise. Paintings and illustrations in books feature musical instruments and movement stances. For example, the second volume of Michael Praetorius's Syntagma Musicum (1620)—another piece of evidence cited by Kubik—is a work of organology in which is found an illustration of a seven-string harp of African origins. Kubik conjectures that this harp originated from Gabon, collected perhaps by a German consul.

By far the clearest imaginings of precolonial musical society come from the written accounts of various travelers, explorers, and missionaries. A number of writers have made intelligent use of these sources. Percival Kirby, for example, writing about the music of Africans in South Africa, includes a large number of prior references to musical instruments found in scholarly as well as nonscholarly sources.⁶ Gerhard Kubik, likewise, seeking to untangle the knotted history of multipart singing in Africa, goes to some trouble to acknowledge what others have written on the subject, before adding his own discoveries and conjectures.⁷ And, in a comprehensive portrait of Mande music, Eric Charry includes an appendix of "References Related to Mande Music in Historical Sources from the Eleventh to the Mid-Nineteenth Century."⁸ In reading these reports, one must not underestimate the extent to which they are constructed, that is, woven together on the basis of observation, imagination, and prejudice.⁹

What, then, are some of the themes expressed in earlier writings? In a fascinating lecture describing the making of images of West Africans by medieval Arabs, John Owen Hunwick assembles a series of quotations from Arabic sources to illustrate the kinds of stereotypes that emerged during the ascendancy of Islam in North Africa and further south across the Sahara.¹⁰ These include the African's gifts for music and poetry, his love of dancing and sensuousness, his laziness, and the modesty of his intellectual gifts. Africans were thought to be a cheerful people: "Cheerfulness was divided into ten parts; the blacks got nine parts, the rest of humanity one." From here it is but a short step to the association of cheerfulness with merrymaking, itself inevitably accompanied by music and dancing. Hunwick notes: "the stereotype of the African as the incorrigible dancer and instinctive rhythmist, [is] summed up in an epigrammatic Arabic saying: "If a black were to fall down from heaven he would surely fall down to a beat." The tenacity of these images in subsequent representations of Africa is striking. (We shall return to them in chapter 3.)

A more recent compilation by John McCall of references to African music in "early documents" reinforces contemporary views of the place of music in African society.¹¹ Starting with Hanno's Periplus, a Greek source dating from about 500 B.C., McCall combs works by well-known figures such as Mohammed ibn Abdullah ibn Battuta, William Bosman, and Sir Richard Burton, as well as those of lesser-known figures such as Al Bekri, the Abbé Proyart, and Archibald Schweinfurth, for musical references. There is information about instruments (their nature, construction, and the kind of music they make, whether pleasing or not) and about the contexts of music-making, including the ceremonies of royal persons, healing rituals, and recreation. One also finds references to drums and—more unusually—flutes as speech surrogates. Musical features mentioned include the relative brevity of musical phrases, the extensive use of repetition as an organizing principle, and various forms of vocal and instrumental polyphony. Ranging from the scientific to the condescending and racialist, McCall's references are remarkably consistent in highlighting the same basic aspects of African musical practice that feature in today's ethnographies. From this, one may be tempted to conclude that African musical practice has long remained static. Stable, perhaps, rather than static. The colonial moment introduced rapid, far-reaching change, however, change that has led to a dramatic reconfiguring of the earlier stability. In the last one hundred years, some aspects of tradition have remained intact, some have even intensified their authenticity, while others have metamorphosed into new traditions.

Transforming the Musical Language

The most obvious sign of colonial influence is the material presence of foreign musical instruments in Africa. It is true that Africa has long been the site of various forms of culture contact, contact that is not restricted to Europe. For example, the one-string fiddle or goje (it comes under a variety of regional names), prominent in the Sudan and in portions of the Islamic belt of West Africa, may well have come from the Middle East via North Africa. Similarly, the xylophone, which is widely distributed in East, Central, and Southern Africa, may, according to A. M. Jones, have come originally from Indonesia.¹² The goje and xylophone are today regarded as African, evidence that the assimilation and adaptation of "foreign" musical instruments have long been a facet of African culture. European instruments, however, not only outnumber other "foreign" instruments but also are symbolically more prominent in modern life. A partial inventory would include violins, violas, cellos, double basses (including the one-stringed bass), and harps. There are clarinets, oboes, flutes, saxophones, fifes, and piccolos. One also finds a whole slew of brass instruments including trumpets, horns, tubas, trombones, bugles, and euphoniums. Percussion instruments include the side and snare drums. Of special significance are keyboard instruments such as pipe organs, pianos, and harmoniums. And there is the ever-prominent guitar.¹³

The emergence of new institutions as a result of the encounter with Europe is responsible for the cultivation of certain types of music and musical instruments. Churches, the police, the army, and the entertainment industry provided opportunities for music-making. Bremen and Basel missionaries in the mid-1800s, for example, introduced the singing of hymns and anthems as well as the use of harmoniums and brass choirs to accompany congregational singing. In the Evangelical Presbyterian Church prominent in the Volta Region of Ghana, for example, a number of congregations (notably those at Amedzofe, Ho, Alavanyo, and Akpafu-Todzi) acquired brass instruments to enhance music-making during worship.¹⁴ Although their repertoires were initially European, brass bands began to incorporate simple arrangements of African music. Elsewhere in Ghana, bands not affiliated with churches were formed in Agona-Swedru in 1905, in Kwanyaku in 1927, and in Yamoah's Trading House in Winneba in 1925. As the brass-band culture spread to other parts of the country, drawing in audiences as well as amateur performers, the repertoire expanded to include various forms of popular music, most prominent among which was highlife.¹⁵

The material presence of European musical instruments is ultimately of limited significance. More important and yet more elusive is the transformation of the musical language itself. Although the era of recorded sound does not allow us to begin our inquiry before the 1900s, it is nevertheless possible to extrapolate from present-day practices some sense of that transformation. To put the matter perhaps too directly: European music, in its most influential manifestations, colonized significant portions of the African musical landscape, taking over its body and leaving an African dress, transforming the musical background while allowing a few salient foreground features to indicate an African presence. In less-influential manifestations, the body remained African while sporting a European dress.

Let me illustrate one aspect of colonial influence by constructing a fictional narrative of the make-up of an individual African's musical imagination. The year is 1920, the place Cape Coast on the Gold Coast, one of the sites of earliest European contact with and subsequent presence in West Africa, an important center for both human and material trade, and home to some of the first churches and schools built in the country. Our protagonist is a young musician by the name Kwame. From hearing and overhearing the music played by Castle bands and various town bands, Kwame has internalized some of the idiomatic expressions of military band music. He knows a great many hymns from the Methodist Hymnal, being a regular churchgoer. He has been exposed to the music of asafo and adowa "traditional" ensembles, and he frequently listens to the songs sung by migrant Ga and Ewe fishermen. Occasionally he encounters a guitarplaying seaman from Liberia. As technical residue, Kwame's knowledge registers diatonic as opposed to chromatic melody, extensive repetition, frequent use of melodic ornamentation, modal scales, and, perhaps most important, certain closing formulas. He is also familiar with a number of rhythmic topoi, a set of distinctive and memorable rhythmic patterns associated with specific dances. These topoi are familiar to the man in the street as free-floating, interesting rhythms, not necessarily as the identifying rhythms of specific dances. Finally, Kwame's idea of harmony is guided by a preference for consonance at phrase ends (unison, octaves, or thirds, usually, but also fourths and fifths) and a polyphonic feeling based on streams of parallel thirds (or maybe fourths, based on what the Anlo-Ewe fishermen sing) and voice-crossing at cadences.

On the other hand, Kwame's store of knowledge of European music is marked by the diatonic melodies of his favorite hymns and of arrangements of sea-shanties that he hears the bands play. He tends to prefer major to minor mode; indeed, he has great difficulty singing melodic- and harmonic-minor scale segments in a few of the hymns that he encounters on Sundays. Kwame has developed a particular fondness for tonal harmony, in particular its reassuring points of punctuation, including ii6-V7 I and IV-V-I cadences articulated with great satisfaction by brass bands. Many times he hears the church organist play a 4-3 suspension over the final tonic in a perfect cadence, and he is struck by how long the organist withholds the note of resolution. He is aware that secondary dominants are very colorful, and that they make certain moments in his favorite hymns sweeter. He is also aware that too many secondary dominants spoil the hymns; he thinks that this is akin to putting too much meat in soup. Although Kwame has so internalized the expectations of diatonic harmony that he can improvise a bass line to a new hymn or anthem, he does not yet possess a long-term contrapuntal sense. He will often start a phrase with the correct harmony, sleepwalk his way through the intermediate harmonies, and then hit the final cadence with unerring accur...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Colonialism's Impact
• 2 The Archive
• 3 The Invention of "African Rhythm"
• 4 Polymeter, Additive Rhythm, and Other Enduring Myths
• 5 African Music as Text
• 6 Popular Music Defended against Its Devotees
• 7 Contesting Difference
• 8 How Not to Analyze African Music
• 9 The Ethics of Representation
• Epilogue
• Notes
• References
• Index