For many Senegalese who came of age in the 1950s, the cha-cha-chá and later its variant, the pachanga, exemplified modernity. The musical forms sounded sleek and smooth, the aural equivalent of the smartly tailored uniforms the Cuban charanga musicians wore on their record covers. Even the dance attached to the music was streamlined, shorn of extraneous movement (and easy to learn). More than listeners elsewhere, the Senegalese were aware that the cha-cha-chá and the pachanga were the result of a centuries-long interaction among Spanish, French, and African music. It was a global cultural “movement” wherein African culture met European “civilization” on equal terms, without being peripheralized or exoticized. In the words of the noted Dakar recording engineer Aziz Dieng, the cha-cha-chá “is a mix of African music and classical music. It has the ambience of classical music.”48
Just as significantly, the cha-cha-chá / pachanga phenomenon combined contemporaneity with decorum. In so doing, it inspired young Senegalese to create a “local” modernity that allowed them to be polished, worldly, and resolutely African.49 In subsequent eras, first US soul music and funk and then hip-hop similarly created spaces where African publics could explore new ways of being in the world. However, none of the subsequent waves of popular music had the enduring influence of Afro-Cuban music. It ultimately constituted a foundation that other musical genres could build on but never totally displace.
TWO
Havana / Paris / Dakar
Itineraries of Afro-Cuban Music
The history of modern Cuban music in Senegal begins with the song “El manisero” (“The Peanut Vendor”). It re-creates a Havana street peddler’s chant advertising the peanuts he has for sale. While the piece’s lyrics are not particularly memorable, its melody, rhythm, and key changes have fascinated musicians and listeners from many cultures ever since its composition in the 1920s by the Cuban musician Moisés Simons. The song’s impact was especially strong in colonial Francophone Africa and continued to resonate throughout the early phases of postindependence as well. This chapter focuses on what the Senegalese have heard in Afro-Cuban music, beginning in Paris and then in Dakar, from the 1930s onward. It examines the influence of Latin music on pre– and post–World War II Senegalese debates about the fashioning of an autochthonous modernity. Afro-Cuban music, for example, played a major role in the formation of negritude in the 1930s among Senegalese intellectuals in Paris, a relationship that many of negritude’s founders, like Léopold Senghor (1906–2001), who later became the first president of an independent Senegal, either ignored or obscured once they became prominent politicians and literary figures after World War II. This chapter also reveals why the nightclub became a site where Senegalese could formulate and contest different conceptions of negritude, the black Atlantic, and cosmopolitanism. As liminal spaces free from colonial hegemony, nightclubs allowed Senegalese to combine erotic adventure and intellectual exploration in unprecedented ways. At all points in this process of developing a modern cultural identity, Afro-Cuban music had a crucial role to play.
“El manisero” first became a hit in 1929. In that year the Cuban zarzuela singer Rita Montaner (1900–1958) traveled to Paris for her second French tour.1 France during the 1920s was cosmopolitan in its musical tastes. The French discovered jazz after World War I and were enthusiastic participants in the Charleston dance fad. Argentinean tango also acquired a sizable following. However, until Rita Montaner’s tour in 1928 and her recording of “El manisero,” Cuban music was relatively unknown to French listeners. Her first appearance at the Olympia the previous season, where she was accompanied by the dancing duo of Julio Richards and Carmita Ortiz, had piqued the Parisian public’s interest.2 Her 1928 recording of the song, released after her show at the Olympia, had raised her profile in France, and she wanted to build on her triumph there.
Montaner’s second concert in Paris, in 1929, was both a critical and popular success and brought Afro-Cuban music to the fore just as she had hoped. A highpoint of her act was “El manisero.” Her performance of the song made her the talk of Paris and promoted sales of her record. There was already a sizable community of Cuban artists, intellectuals, and musicians in Paris, and it is likely that their activity laid the groundwork for an escalating French interest in Cuban culture.3 Before long the disc circulated widely throughout France and the Francophone world.4 It ignited an enthusiasm for Cuban music in Paris that resulted in the establishment of a number of nightclubs featuring Cuban bands filled with Afro-Cuban musicians.5 These clubs formed the hub of a bohemian culture in Montmartre and the Latin Quarter in the 1930s that attracted the Antillean and Francophone African students who had come to France to obtain advanced academic training unavailable in the French colonies
The popularity of “El manisero” had ramifications even further afield. On Saturday, April 26, 1930, in New York, a sellout crowd at the Palace Theatre, the premiere venue for vaudeville in the United States in the early days of the Great Depression (1929–1939), viewed a spectacle that no local audience had seen before. The Palace had transformed its stage into a fanciful Havana streetscape. As the orchestra led by the Cuban musician Don Azpiazú (1893–1943) started playing “Mamá Inez,” one of the most famous songs in the Cuban repertoire, the audience heard instruments that were still exotic to US listeners: maracas, claves, güiros, and bongos. Then a crew of Cuban dancers bounded onto the stage, in the first documented exhibition of authentic rumba dancing in the United States. Though they created a commotion with their energetic movements, it was the orchestra’s third song, “El manisero,” sung by the Afro-Cuban sonero Antonio Machín that drove the Palace crowd wild, just as it had when Montaner sang it the year before in Paris.6 Azpiazú’s arrangement of the song, which combined complicated Cuban time signatures (the clave) with sophisticated American-style big band orchestration, immediately struck a chord with the public.7 Indeed, “El manisero” became such a hit, it sparked a passion for Cuban music that swept through North America and then Europe,8 especially after Azpiazú and his ensemble recorded the song later that year for RCA.9 By 1931 the 78 rpm recording of the song reached Africa, selling extremely well throughout the continent, especially in Francophone Africa, where it reached a far wider public than just a few African intellectuals in Paris.10
LA NOCHE CHEZ CABANE CUBAINE: LÉOPOLD SENGHOR, OUSMANE SOCÉ DIOP, AND AFRO-CUBAN MUSIC, 1930S–1960S
I feel the Other, I dance the Other, therefore I am.
Léopold Senghor 11
By the late 1920s Paris had become one of the international centers of Latin music. The vast Colonial Exposition in Paris in 1930–1931 contributed to the music’s burgeoning popularity by further whetting the French appetite for “exotic” foreign cultures like Cuba’s. This Afro-Cuban boom in Paris occurred during a period of decline on the island. The end of prohibition in the United States in 1933 resulted in a precipitous drop in US tourists traveling to Havana right at the time that the global Depression began to devastate the island nation. As the Cuban economy contracted, opportunities for Afro-Cuban musicians dried up.12 Faced with grim professional prospects, some Afro-Cuban musicians migrated to Paris, where a network of Latin music clubs had opened up to capitalize on the craze for Cuban music.13 There the musicians found the work and respect that had eluded them at home.14
This influx of Caribbean musicians coincided with the rapid expansion of the population of Antillean and African students in Paris. The 1930s saw a gradual opening up of the French higher education system to the most gifted students from throughout the French empire. The French motives in providing university