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Roots in Reverse
ROOTS IN REVERSE
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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 in Senegal’s Afro-Cuban community, who were personally invested in the stories they were covering, whereas the journalists writing on Afro-Cuban musicians were more generalists.
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