The richest print sources for this project were representations of Afro-Cuban music in Senegalese fiction and poetry, starting in the 1930s. These sources uncover a “silenced” history of Afro-Cuban music: its role in the formation of negritude. They also illuminate some of the circuits through which Afro-Cuban music reached Senegal. Perhaps most significantly, they reveal how Afro-Cuban music has been linked with Senegalese debates about cultural (and political) citizenship and modernity since before World War II. Either through its conspicuous presence or its explicit exclusion, this music has shaped how the Senegalese have defined republicanism and cosmopolitanism. Today it has little place in contemporary literature. However, as long as negritude in one form or another remains influential in Senegal, Afro-Cuban music will continue to resonate in the nation’s intellectual life.
MAPPING ROUTES IN REVERSE
This book reconstructs the history of Afro-Cuban music in Senegal from the 1930s through the beginning of the twenty-first century. The first chapter briefly surveys the history of Afro-Cuban music and identifies which of its musical traditions have most appealed to Senegalese listeners and performers. Chapter 2 begins by showing how Afro-Cuban music became a global phenomenon in the 1920s. It then analyzes how Latin music contributed to the formation of negritude in Paris in the 1930s. It concludes with Senegalese explaining in their own words why they have felt so drawn to Caribbean music. The third chapter examines the rise of a new type of cultural citizenship in Senegal in the 1950s, informed by both consumerism and Afro-Cuban music. This linkage was especially evident in Dakar’s record clubs. Made up of young men, these clubs collected Latin music discs and staged carefully organized parties. These groups pioneered innovative ways of enjoying leisure time and developed new forms of sociality tied to their conception of modernity. The fourth chapter focuses on the establishment of a Senegalese tradition of performing Afro-Cuban music. By the late 1960s Senegalese ensembles had mastered the Cuban style, and they began to incorporate indigenous languages and musical elements into their performances. The chapter also considers how new technologies and new audiences shaped the development of Senegalese Afro-Cuban music in the 1970s and 1980s. The result of these changes was an urbane style, well suited to a rapidly changing and decolonizing Dakar. The chapter concludes by telling the story of the singer and bandleader Laba Sosseh, who became one of the first Pan-African music stars and then a salsa musician in the United States. The fifth chapter surveys the debates in 1980s Senegal about authenticity and cosmopolitanism. During this period younger Senegalese began to see Afro-Cuban music as irrelevant and dated, and the music went into a temporary eclipse. Many began to buy cassettes of their favorite m’balax bands and attend their performances, participating in Afro-Cuban music and dancing. The chapter analyzes the forces that led to the music’s survival and then its resurgence in the early 1990s. Chapter 6 examines a number of recent attempts to market Senegalese Afro-Cuban ensembles as “world musicians.” These marketing campaigns reveal the diverse ways different parts of the world imagine Africa in the twenty-first century. Africa and the Caribbean have generated some of these images, but the dominant global vision stems from “Western” fantasies of tropical decay. The chapter next deals with the first tour of Cuba in 2002 by a Senegalese Afro-Cuban group. The tour was a mixed success, demonstrating how diasporic identities can become entangled in ideological conflicts and divergent institutional priorities. The chapter ends by exploring how certain musical riffs have resonated in the black Atlantic. As these riffs circulate, they acquire new meanings in different contexts. Their itineraries map the aesthetic contours of the black Atlantic. They demonstrate that the cultural conversation between Senegal and the Hispanic Caribbean endures in productive and unpredictable ways.
Roots in Reverse
ONE
Kora(son)
Africa and Afro-Cuban Music
When I listen to Cuban music, I feel there is a part of me in that music. I think I’m right because when Orquesta Aragón came here, the chef d’orchestre said they had to come back to Africa because that is where the music is from, especially Senegal. Every time I hear that music (hums a song), I hear “El Manisero.” You see—it’s the same culture.
Pape Fall, leader of the group African Salsa 1
Though Cuba has a population of less than twelve million, its cultural and political prominence in the twentieth century has far exceeded its modest size. Its impact has been particularly pronounced in the realm of music. Cuban music throughout its history has absorbed elements from numerous cultures and in turn has helped shape popular culture in many parts of the world, including the rest of Latin America and the United States. However, its influence has been most pronounced in twentieth-century Africa. Cuban music, with its variety and complexity and its profusion of genres, encouraged Africans to imagine new cultural identities and experiment with innovative forms of leisure. Indeed, it provided a template for modern popular music for most of Africa, from Guinea to the Congo to Tanzania. The guitar bands of Conakry, the rumba orchestras of Kinshasa, and even the Taarab ensembles of the Swahili coast and Zanzibar all found some of their musical roots in this small island nation. To understand why Cuban music has held sway so far from its shores, it is useful to explore its origins and examine its development. This chapter analyzes some of the most conspicuous features of the Cuban style and looks at the factors shaping the development of the Cuban genres that have had the most appeal in Africa in general and Senegal in particular.2
ROUTES OF ROOTS
Many New World musics incorporated African features as a result of the forced migration of tens of millions of Africans to North America, the Caribbean, and Central and South America during the era of plantation slavery. However, what makes Cuban music so unusual is its range of African influences, their intensity, and their revitalization through African migration throughout most of the nineteenth century. Cuba’s African population arrived in waves from different parts of the continent, starting in the sixteenth century. Each of these unwilling African immigrants brought with him or her techniques, beliefs, aesthetic preferences, linguistic practices, and types of knowledge from the “home” culture. The immigrants found themselves in a situation in which they encountered other Africans who came to Cuba with related but sometimes significantly dissimilar conceptual “tool kits.” In their struggle for survival, Afro-Cubans had to construct a culture out of bits and pieces from the “Old World,” mostly African but sometimes Spanish, using shared organizing principles.3
It is probable that creating a common musical tradition was one of the first tasks undertaken by the uprooted migrants. “Music has no frontiers” is an expression often heard in contemporary Senegal, and given the commonalties that exist among many African musical cultures, fashioning a music for their oppressive existence in colonial Cuba must have been one of the less daunting tasks facing the black Cuban community. In the process of undertaking this cultural project, the first black Cubans made one of the hallmarks of their emerging musical tradition an aesthetic conservatism that maintains aspects of the old while layering on the new.4 This tendency made the inclusion of unfamiliar musical cultures from incoming populations a much easier proposition. Because of this aesthetic conservatism, Afro-Cuban musicians frequently have staged conversations between the established and the innovative in their work, rather than submerging or eliminating older ways of playing music in the name of novelty or “progress” as is done in many other parts of the world. They may play old rhythms on new instruments; have a chorus sing in a “traditional” nasal timbre while the soloist performs in a more modern melodious style; or incorporate old instruments in new settings, as the bandleader Arsenio Rodríguez did in the 1940s when he brought conga drums previously exclusively used in religious observances into a popular music ensemble.5 This practice has meant that informed listeners from Africa can hear the many separate elements that comprise Cuban music much more distinctly than in other more streamlined New World musics. Afro-Cuban music is not only