While Afro-Cuban music has been a source of enjoyment for many Senegalese, it also has been a tool for moral instruction and a means for thinking about alternative varieties of citizenship from French colonial models. Since the 1930s the Senegalese have equated Afro-Cuban music with “modern” forms of sociality and leisure. Integrating women into previously all-male social domains was intrinsic to these new practices, as was patronizing cabarets and music clubs. Dancing to Cuban music with a partner of the opposite sex became for men and women a symbol of sophistication. Innovative patterns of consumption were even more important as Senegalese acquired the latest European male fashion and, by the 1950s, LPS of Cuban music. The new forms of sociality emphasized that being correcte was a path to modernity. Self-discipline, affability, tolerance, erudition, an elegant appearance, and a general air of savoir faire became characteristics of the well-ordered, morally grounded life. Changes in consumption relating to Afro-Cuban music enabled young Senegalese to claim “rights of difference” within the context of the Franco-Senegalese state.4 They appropriated power consumer goods from abroad, like shoes, shirts, jackets, sunglasses, pens, and Cuban records, to assert and create cultural spaces beyond French domination. Though grounded in cultural practices, these patterns of consumption had significant political ramifications. They solidified new ways of defining and actualizing themselves and helped lay the foundations for a Senegalese national culture in tune with but subtlety different from the official negritude version propagated by President Léopold Senghor.
THE ORAL AND THE AURAL: RESEARCHING THE HISTORY OF SENEGALESE POPULAR MUSIC
The Senegalese have valued Afro-Cuban music both for its artistic worth and for the sensibility and conduct linked with it. Because the music and its cultural complex have been intertwined with so many major social and cultural issues in the Senegalese past and present, any research methodology for studying its changing roles and meanings must be multidisciplinary and attuned to the multivocality of the nation’s Afro-Cuban music scene. Monographs on African popular music tend to either focus exclusively on recordings and musicians in a “maps and chaps” narrative or reduce music to its sociological and historical dimensions where context overrides content. Neither one of these approaches can account for Afro-Cuban music in Senegal. The story of this music has involved intellectuals, musicians, members of record collecting clubs, amateur dancers, music club habitués, broadcasters, club owners, impresarios, and world music executives. Its geographical expanse is equally vast, taking in Cuba, Puerto Rico, Colombia, Peru, New York, Miami, Paris, Abidjan, Dakar, and a number of smaller Senegalese cities. Only a multifaceted research methodology can capture this complexity.
I began my fieldwork by immersing myself in the recorded music of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Senegalese Afro-Cuban ensembles. The advent of CDs in the 1980s led to the reemergence of large amounts of previously unavailable music. Small record labels in Europe, especially in the Netherlands, Germany, and Greece, pioneered the re-release of Senegalese music. The owners of these labels traveled to Senegal, bought old discs or tapes, remastered them, and then repackaged them as CDs, often with excellent liner notes. Sometimes these re-releases were “pirated,” but in most cases the original musicians were compensated for their work.5 Without this newly available invaluable archive, it would have been almost impossible to conduct my research. The records in and of themselves constitute a treasure of oral histories. with proverbs, historical references, and interpretive “takes” on cultural change. Moreover, by the time I interacted with the musicians who made these recordings, I already had a rough understanding of their artistic development. I also had an extensive familiarity with recorded Latin music from the Caribbean and the United States. If I had been without this expertise, the Afro-Senegalese music community in Dakar would have dismissed me as an amateur who was not worth their time. With that knowledge came not only mutual esteem but also camaraderie. We all were initiated members of an exclusive club of enthusiasts and experts.
Attending concerts and recording sessions in New York was another valuable research activity. Before I began my research in Dakar, I was able to attend a performance by the Senegalese Afro-Cuban group Africando at Lincoln Center in New York in 1997. I also had the privilege of being present at some of their recording sessions for two of their albums and engaging in extensive conversations with one of the album’s arrangers, the Malian/Nigerian arranger and flutist Boncana Maïga, and with the late Senegalese producer Ibrahima Sylla. These experiences gave me a solid grounding for my work in Senegal years before I arrived in Dakar in the fall of 2002 to spend a year as a Fulbright professor at Cheikh Anta Diop University.
I originally conceived of my project as being based on a series of interviews I planned to do with Afro-Cuban musicians in Senegal. I thought these oral histories would supply me with everything I needed. I soon discovered I was wrong in two respects. I started off well enough in January 2003. Two of the most prominent salsa musicians in Dakar, Pape Fall and Mar Seck, readily agreed to be interviewed. They couldn’t have been more accommodating and were articulate and well informed. However, after this promising start my work ground to a halt. I made appointments with musicians, but they didn’t show up. I realized I had proceeded too rapidly. I needed to work at establishing a relationship of trust and respect with the musical community. Regularly attending their performances at clubs around Dakar, like Chez Iba, and visiting them during the day facilitated this. Over a period of four years and a number of research trips, I attended hundreds of these performances in a variety of venues, ranging from elegant private parties to working-class neighborhood bars. Participant observation became part of my research tool kit. The musicians turned out to be welcoming, frank, open, and eager to talk about their work and lives with insight and eloquence. They appreciated that I had become a semipermanent fixture in their world, as I was able to make annual research trips to Senegal for a number of years.
Once I had established myself in the Afro-Cuban musical community, I resumed my formal interviews. These interviews gave the musicians an opportunity to be taken seriously as artists, something they clearly relished (and merited). If an interview proved particularly fruitful, I would schedule several more sessions with that individual. As I created a place for myself among the musicians, I realized that I had too narrowly conceived my research. These artists were part of extensive overlapping networks in Dakar that went well beyond the walls of a music club or recording studio, taking in the realms of academia, the media, politics, commerce, and government. In order to comprehend the Afro-Cuban music world, I needed to chart these networks. This aspect of my research brought me into contact with a remarkable coterie of aficionados of Afro-Cuban music in Dakar (retired civil servants, journalists, recording engineers, broadcasters, media executives, record collectors, academics, and entertainment entrepreneurs). The depth and breadth of this group’s knowledge of the development of Afro-Cuban music both in Cuba and Senegal is astonishing. Fortunately they were as generous as the musicians in sharing what they knew—and they made themselves even more available when they recognized my expertise in Caribbean music (which in truth was much less extensive than theirs). Here, too, I was able to establish satisfying relationships that continue until this day. I wasn’t doing research on them but with them.
My research also involved archival work at the Senegalese national archive, perusing back issues of Dakar newspapers and looking through scrapbooks kept by local fans of Afro-Cuban music. Friends at the Senegalese broadcasting service, RTS, also made available to me tapes and DVDs of past programming or their own visual coverage of the Senegalese Afro-Cuban community at home in Dakar and on tour in Cuba.6 The colonial archive on urban nightlife was thin, showing that the French felt they had little to fear from the bourgeoning Afro-Cuban “scene.” Newspaper clippings showed that Senegalese journalists were highly proficient in writing about Afro-Cuban music. The tone of their articles was serious, and their coverage of musicians was dignified and professional. However, as a source this material was more useful for background than for detail. The visual documents from RTS, by contrast, provided essential, accurate, and detailed material unavailable elsewhere. The difference between the utility of these two sources stems from the fact that the individuals responsible for the RTS documents were long-standing participants