Chicago Studies in Ethnomusicology

Music, Politics, and Pleasure in Guinea

Nomi Dave

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780226654775
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Music has long been an avenue for protest, seen as a way to promote freedom and equality, instill hope, and fight for change. Popular music, in particular, is considered to be an effective form of subversion and resistance under oppressive circumstances. But, as Nomi Dave shows us in The Revolution's Echoes, the opposite is also true: music can often support, rather than challenge, the powers that be.Dave introduces readers to the music supporting the authoritarian regime of former Guinean president Sékou Touré, and the musicians who, even long after his death, have continued to praise dictators and avoid dissent. Dave shows that this isn't just the result of state manipulation; even in the absence of coercion, musicians and their audiences take real pleasure in musical praise of leaders. Time and again, whether in traditional music or in newer genres such as rap, Guinean musicians have celebrated state power and authority. With The Revolution's Echoes, Dave insists that we must grapple with the uncomfortable truth that some forms of music choose to support authoritarianism, generating new pleasures and new politics in the process.

1

Agents of the Revolution

Touré was a passionate lover of his people’s culture, but could also be a paranoid tyrant. Guinea was a beautiful and terrifying place.

HUGH MASEKELA AND D. MICHAEL CHEERS, Still Grazing (2004)

In January 1959 the Republic of Guinea appointed a national dance band. The country had declared its independence from France just four months earlier, becoming the first sovereign state in francophone Africa. While other colonies weighed the benefits of continued ties through membership in a Franco-African Community, Guinea opted for a swift break from French rule. This decisive move made waves through West Africa and far beyond, as Guinea plunged forward into a revolutionary future. Its leader, Sékou Touré, emerged as a fiery nationalist and anti-imperialist, determined to create a new African model for the postcolonial era. And by naming the Syli National Orchestra, Touré announced that music would play a role in the struggle ahead.

What did it mean to be “revolutionary” in Sékou Touré’s Guinea? What constituted revolutionary practice, and revolutionary music? In the twenty-six years of his rule, from 1958 till his death in 1984, Touré sought to instill new sensibilities and practices in Guinea to engineer a break from past values and older structures of authority. He continually emphasized the narrative of Guinea’s radical decolonization in order to underline the revolutionary nature of his regime—and his key role in it. This process nominally saw its peak in 1968 with the launch of the Socialist Cultural Revolution. Yet Touré saw his revolution as a permanent one, predating independence and leading onward into an African nationalist future.

The example of Touré’s Guinea shows us that, despite their doctrines and dogma, revolutions are replete with contradictions, as are the lived experiences of citizens living within them. Ideology seeks to present a unified vision of a utopian future, yet it is always contradictory and cosmopolitan. In the case of Guinea, Sékou Touré wished to unify Guineans, and to alienate them from each other; to make Guinea global, and to isolate it from an ever-growing list of countries; to march resolutely into the future, and look continually back to the past; to uplift his subjects with hope, and to instill in them constant fear. The revolution was never a coherent or consistent project, but rather an ever-shifting set of strategies, whims, practices, and meanings that Touré pursued in his quest for influence and domination. Like all ideologues, Touré espoused a worldview that evolved historically in response to its own circumstances, and tried continually to bridge its internal contradictions. In this context, revolutionary music and performance registered and negotiated these inconsistencies and unintended effects, sometimes pushing past the regime and at other times falling closely in step. Popular musicians, both those sponsored by the state and those aspiring to be, actively supported rather than resisted Touré’s rule. But their practices also exceeded official directives and ideology, shaping and channeling forms of public pleasure that, as later chapters show, continue to reverberate in Guinea today.

New Sounds for a New Nation

There was a time, as older inhabitants of the city remember, that Conakry hosted a great festival. “La Quinzaine!” recalls Linké Condé, a guitarist active on the scene since the 1950s. “Everyone was together and there weren’t any thugs or crooks then. The city was alive! There was ambiance!”1

Condé and many others from his generation fondly recollect the Quinzaine Artistique (Artistic Fortnight), an annual festival of music, dance, theater, poetry, and speeches that enthralled the capital through the 1960s. Reconfigured in 1970 as a biennial National Cultural Festival, the Quinzaine and its successor festivals were the summit of an elaborate national arts competition in Sékou Touré’s Guinea. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s this competition amalgamated and appropriated practices from across a vast topography of two dozen ethnic groups. Teams of bureaucrats from Touré’s Parti Démocratique de Guinée (PDG) were sent to recruit the most promising artists. Local and regional competitions culminated in the national festival in Conakry, where artists would compete for recognition as the nation’s representatives and stars.

Each night of the festival, performances would be held in Guinea’s most prestigious cultural and political venue, the Palais du Peuple. The audience would be composed of visiting dignitaries, local VIPs, and members of the public. No concert at the Palais could begin, however, before Sékou Touré had arrived. Seated in the front row, Touré would take notes during each performance and mark each group, distilling his critiques and indicating which groups deserved to advance.2 Touré aimed to position himself as the ultimate arbiter in the construction of national culture.

Performance in the Touré era was divided into various categories: ensembles (traditional choral and instrumental groups), ballets (dance and percussion groups), théâtre militant (nationalist theater groups), and orchestres (modern electric dance bands). All of these groups were tasked with compiling and re-presenting local melodies, rhythms, dances, stories, ritual objects, and poetic texts for the national and international stage. At the top of the system were national groups. In addition to the Syli National Orchestra and a National Theatre Troupe, the National Instrumental Ensemble was created in November 1960, incorporating traditional instruments from throughout the country.3 The state also appointed two national ballets that still exist to this day, the Ballets Africains and the Ballet Djoliba.

The Ballets Africains originated as the Théâtre Africain, a performance group founded in Paris in the 1940s by two Guinean students, Fodéba Keita and Facélli Kanté. The group later switched from theater to dance and percussion and was renamed the Ballets Africains de Fodéba Keita. Keita, a poet, writer, and choreographer, adapted dances and rhythms from West African ritual performance to stage-friendly- and shortened formats for European audiences. One of his central aims was to promote African culture as sophisticated and modern, embracing the idea of both African tradition and an African modernity “marked by Western civilization” (1957: 206). Upon independence, Fodéba Keita returned to Guinea and was named Minister of the Interior and of Information, a position from which he oversaw cultural production in the new nation.4 In 1960 his troupe was renamed the Ballets Africains de Guinée.5 In contrast, the Ballet Djoliba was created in 1964 as a state-controlled national troupe. The group is named after the Niger River, whose source is in Guinea. Djoliba was founded with some initial support from Harry Belafonte, who was Touré’s guest in the early 1960s.6 The new ballet recruited performers from across the country, including the percussionist Mamady Keita, who debuted for Djoliba as a teenager.7

Popular music in Touré’s Guinea was similarly patterned on earlier, existing models. Electric dance bands such as La Joviale Symphonie, La Douce Parisette, and Le Tropical Jazz had proliferated in Conakry since the late colonial era, playing tangos, foxtrots, and waltzes for European and Guinean audiences. Upon independence, one of the regime’s first acts was to ban European music from the radio and live performance, insisting that the country relieve itself of its imperial burden.8 “Each People has its own Culture,” Touré would often declare over his rule. He called for the existing dance bands to cease playing and in their place appointed the Syli National Orchestra. Syli, the Soso word for elephant, became a common prefix for cultural nationalist projects in Guinea, including the subsequently formed Syli-Cinéma, the Syli-Photo bureau, the Syliphone record label, and the now-defunct Syli national currency. The term was also linked to Touré himself, with the elephant standing as a metaphor for Touré’s strength.

Despite the regime’s moves against colonial-era bands, it retained much of their basic style and format. Many of their musicians were recruited into the Syli Orchestra, including Linké Condé and the saxophonists Momo “Wandel” Soumah and Kélétigui Traoré. Moreover, the Syli Orchestra’s instrumentation borrowed directly from its predecessors, centering on electric guitar, bass, trumpet, saxophone, drum kit, claves, and conga drums. Percussion instruments were largely borrowed from Cuban rhythms, which had been introduced through imported rumba recordings since the 1930s and were hugely popular throughout West and Central Africa. As Condé describes, the Syli Orchestra was “a school of music” for these musicians, who had to relearn local melodies after years of playing European dance tunes.9 The Orchestra’s mission was to rework the dance-band formula to incorporate and foreground elements of Guinean folk traditions. Other musicians were also recruited, included pioneering guitarists from hereditary musician families, such as Sékou “Le docteur” and Kerfala “Papa” Diabaté, as well as musicians from non-hereditary backgrounds, such as the trumpeter Balla Onivogui and the Martiniquean clarinetist Honoré Coppet.

As more musicians began performing local songs on imported instruments, the Syli Orchestra strained to incorporate the talent swelling its ranks. In response, the government decided in 1963 to divide it into two national dance bands: the Orchestre de la Paillote and Orchestre du Jardin de Guinée (later renamed, respectively, Kélétigui et ses Tambourinis and Balla et ses Balladins). Three years later a regional band from the town of Beyla in southeastern Guinea was accorded the same status after amassing victories at successive Quinzaines and thus became Bembeya Jazz National. Although at one time there were at least seven official national dance bands, these three groups in particular—Kélétigui, Balla, and Bembeya—defined the sound of Guinean pop music through the 1960s and 1970s.

In addition to influences from Cuban son and jazz big bands, the dance-band sound borrowed from West and Central African styles: the finger-picking guitar of palm-wine, the trumpet and saxophone of high-life, the Latin rhythms of Congolese rumba. But the songs themselves were distinctly Guinean, often derived from the repertoire of Mande jeliya, the art of hereditary musicians known as jelilu (Mn. jeli, sing.). Touré self-identified as Maninka and foregrounded Mande music in his construction of Guinean national music.10 Dance-band songs often adapted melodies from jeli pieces, substituting electric instruments such as the guitar for local ones.11

Dance-band songs also borrowed from poetic texts and stories from jeliya, often recounting the heroism of legendary figures from the Mande empire and its descendants. The traditional jeli piece “Kèmè Bourema,” for example, narrates a story about Kèmè Bourema Touré, a nineteenth-century warrior who miraculously escaped death. Under Touré, pieces such as these were reworked to render homage to the president and his rule. The band Kebendo Jazz was one of many who adapted “Kèmè Bourema” into a dance song, transposing the bala (xylophone) melody to guitar but also repurposing the lyrics in praise of and thanks to Sékou Touré, who claimed Kèmè Bouréma Touré as an ancestor. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, dance bands from across the country similarly released hundreds of songs praising the president and his various instruments of power, including his party, his revolution, his army, his slogans, and even his wife.12 In some cases these songs were newly composed or used non-jeli melodies; in others they borrowed directly from earlier melodic and poetic references. Either way, by rendering homage to Touré they built on jeli traditions of singing in praise of the king and nobility. Here, of course, the king was Sékou Touré.

Jeli songs provided a prestigious and culturally familiar template for praise that could now be redirected to the Guinean state and its leader. By foregrounding jeliya, the dance bands not only centered their practice on Mande music, but also sought to evoke affective ties among Mande peoples. For the descendants of the Mande empire, these songs create a powerful sense of pride, evoking shared epic histories and memories. Central to the aesthetics of jeliya is naming—declaiming the names of living people and long-deceased ancestors. By calling on all within earshot to hear and recognize an individual’s name, the singer affirms the place of that person in history and the present. Naming generates great social value. The practice also extends beyond the individual to recognize the larger collectivity of which he or she is a part. Songs to ancestors and legendary historical figures evoke the kingdoms and empire of the past, while songs to the living evoke their membership in a glorious community of memory and endurance. Under Touré, these pleasures of self-recognition were rendered double by repurposing these songs as revolutionary national culture. Not only was Guinea claiming a glorious legendary history, but it was using popular music to claim recognition in the modern world. The Bembeya Jazz song “La Guinée” illustrates the work done in this regard:

La Guinée diyara mɔɔ ye	If a person loves Guinea
La Guinée diyananko tɛ sa	What pleases Guinea will be
La Guinée gboyara mɔɔ ye	If a person disagrees with Guinea
La Guinée diyananko tɛ sa	What pleases Guinea will be
Ala nɔ le, mɔɔ nɔ tɛ	God has the authority, not people

As shown here, the song uses repeated phrases to create rhythmic structures in the text, as well as sacred phrases and formal evocations of God to call to a higher authority. Such forms are key features commonly used in jeliya to move listeners (Hoffman 2000: 64). Here the musicians deploy these powerful tropes within a pop idiom to sing of patriotism to the new nation. Beyond facile propaganda, post-independence pop songs singing of the country, of the “PDG,” “President Sékou Touré,” or his “Révolution Culturelle” served as deeply rooted, culturally resonant vehicles to proclaim the existence and honor of these institutions.

These songs thus made heroes of all who descended from the Mande empire (Diawara 1998: 98). Such knowing emphasis on Mande was key. Touré’s regime greatly privileged Mande culture in its construction of Guinean national culture. As the musicologist Graeme Counsel (2015) notes, music from this period is dominated by songs and groups from Touré’s Maninka ethnicity. Praise singing to a president created excesses of pleasure and pride that could be shared by all who felt recognized by the song’s references—but this recognition was particularly strong for Mande people.

From this model the 1960s and 1970s saw an explosion of creative musical output in Guinea as bands proliferated throughout the country and competed to release new songs. The best of their songs were recorded and broadcast on La Voix de la Révolution radio, and later on the national broadcasting company Radio Télévision Guinée (RTG), as well as on the state-run Syliphone record label.13 As a series of recordings from the early 1960s announced, these were Sons nouveaux d’une nation nouvelle (New Sounds for a New Nation).14 The optimism of this title is reflected in the sound of revolutionary pop music. Through much of the 1960s, dance-band songs were characterized by punchy brass-instrument arrang...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1   Agents of the Revolution
• 2   City of Musicians
• 3   Sweetness and Truth
• 4   Warriors for Peace
• 5   The Risks of Displeasure
• 6   Blue Zones
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index