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INTRODUCTION

Sound Track for a Black Atlantic

If a traveler goes to Cuba today to search for the burial sites of such renowned Afro-Cuban musicians as the bandleader and singer Beny Moré, the classic sonero Abelardo Barrosso, or the flutist Pancho Bravo, they will find beautiful stone markers for the graves, only recently erected. If they were to examine the markers more carefully, they would be drawn into one of the more fascinating histories of the black Atlantic. It wasn’t the Cuban government or the families of these artists who commissioned these impressive monuments. Rather, it was an admirer of these musicians from the West African nation of Senegal who financed the gravestones and insisted on their installation.

These renovated burial sites attest to the continuing passion that many Senegalese have for the music of Cuba. It is an enthusiasm that has deep roots in Senegal and has played a significant role in Senegalese history for over eighty years. By examining this francophone West African preoccupation with Cubanidad, this book extends the borders of the black Atlantic to include the Hispanic Caribbean and francophone Africa. In so doing, it documents overlooked local modernities and expands our knowledge of the different forms of resistance that Africans used to contest European cultural and political hegemony in the twentieth century.

This book is based on the premise that “people think through music, decide who they are through it … [music] is less a ‘something’ than a way of knowing the world, a way of being ourselves.”¹ As Denis-Constant Martin points out, “music is an inextricable combination of audible elements and social processes.”² From this perspective, the history of Afro-Cuban music in Senegal is more than an analysis of a marginal and “exotic” aesthetic form. Since the 1930s Senegalese have used music to imagine a new social order and engage in discussions about citizenship, cosmopolitanism, authenticity, masculinities, consumption, and the creation of local modernities. By looking at how the Senegalese deployed Afro-Cuban music in various cultural and political spheres, this book provides a history of taste and generational friction in twentieth-century Senegal and reveals the tensions involved in the Senegalese creating a postcolonial national culture.

In Senegal, listening and dancing to Afro-Cuban music created structures of feeling that united generations and bridged ethnic differences.³ In the 1930s Afro-Cuban served as a catalyst for bringing African and Caribbean intellectuals together in the negritude movement, which sought to insert African narratives into universal history and create a space for Africa in the global “republic of letters.” From the 1950s through the 1960s the movement helped the first postcolonial generation in Senegal define its cultural mission; in the 1990s it contributed to a revitalization of Senegalese cosmopolitanism. Today it helps mend frayed diasporic connections between Senegal and the Caribbean.

This abiding Senegalese affection for prerevolutionary Cuban music has an important story to tell. During the twentieth century consumption of Afro-Cuban music was integral to the imagining and embodying of Senegalese modernities. The discovery of Afro-Cuban music in Paris in the 1930s by Senegalese students inspired an entire generation of Senegalese intellectuals like Léopold Senghor to find their voice. Later in the 1950s and 1960s Senegalese youth, through the creation of Afro-Cuban record clubs, experimented with new forms of “modern” sociality. In the 1960s and 1970s nightclubs in Dakar and other Senegalese cities featuring live performances of Afro-Cuban music were laboratories for decolonizing Senegalese culture. In the 1980s Senegalese Afro-Cuban music spearheaded a growing diasporic cultural transnationalism anchored in the tropical world. In the 1990s the international impact of Senegalese Afro-Cuban music continued when one song by the group Africando became a radio hit in Latino New York and throughout the Hispanic Caribbean. During most of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, Afro-Cuban music has played a critical role in Senegalese debates about sociality, cultural authenticity, and cultural citizenship.

MYTHS ABOUT AFRO-CUBAN MUSIC IN SENEGAL

In spite of its significance, until recently Afro-Cuban music in Africa has largely been overlooked as a research subject. A number of pervasive myths about this music explain this neglect. Many believe, even in Africa itself, that Afro-Cuban music was exclusively the preserve of “Westernized” African elites in the 1950s and 1960s, listened to by only a prosperous few for a limited period of time. It also is an article of faith in some circles in Africa and abroad that Afro-Cuban music in Africa has been aesthetically stagnant, locked into clichéd covers of a handful of Cuban classics like “El Manisero” and “Guantanamera.” Perhaps most damagingly, many commentators have categorized Latin music in Africa as culturally inauthentic and inherently colonial.

This book dispels these myths. Latin music has never been limited to a privileged cadre in the capital. Its appeal for much of the twentieth century transcended class and ethnic boundaries in both urban and rural Senegal. The local musicians playing Afro-Cuban music, few of whom came from prominent Senegalese families, were attracted to it in part for its aesthetic possibilities. Over time they retained its musical structure and repertoire but remained open to artistic experimentation. After mastering the Cuban style in the early 1960s, for example, they proceeded to sing in Wolof, one of Senegal’s major languages, and integrated indigenous traditions of instrumentation, singing, subject matter, and rhythm into their performances. These musicians and their public never viewed Afro-Cuban music as “foreign,” a “Western” import. They were aware that the music arose out of the “forced migration” of Africans to the New World and that it incorporated many African elements. In playing, hearing, and dancing to it, they heard and felt their history and culture echoing from across the Atlantic Ocean. By embracing the music, they were reforging diasporic ties and proclaiming their autonomy from exclusively Western models of modernity.

PLACE(S) DE L’INDÉPENDANCE

Tracing the trajectory of Afro-Cuban music in Senegal illuminates many dimensions of that nation’s cultural history, such as gender relations, generational competition and conflict, debates over cosmopolitanism and hybridity, the role of nostalgia in Senegalese national culture, and shifting diasporic identities. The music also has provided new forms of enjoyment, a template for cultural citizenship, and a tool for creating a public sphere free from European and North American cultural hegemony. It is all too easy when writing about popular music in Africa to overlook the essential truth that its primary purpose has been to provide pleasure. For some scholars of popular culture, incorporating pleasure into their analysis would be tantamount to arguing that popular music is frivolous and devoid of significant cultural and political content. In this book I argue that examining the ways the Senegalese have experienced pleasure is crucial to understanding how they have imagined modernity and defined cosmopolitanism. The Senegalese historically have responded to Afro-Cuban music on a number of levels. In talking about their attraction to this music, they emphasize how much it has stirred them physically and mesmerized them aurally and visually. By drawing on so many of their senses, it has led them to embody new codes of behavior and new modes of enjoyment. As a consequence, in listening to how the Senegalese have listened to Afro-Cuban music, we can trace the genealogies of a modern Senegalese sensibility.

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 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.

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.