Читать книгу Roots in Reverse - Richard M. Shain - Страница 14

THREE

Son and Sociality

Afro-Cuban Music, Gender, and Cultural Citizenship, 1950s–1960s

Where there is consumption there is pleasure, and where there is pleasure there is agency.

Arjun Appadurai ¹

Mbelekete was a well-known figure in the Kinshasa (Léopoldville) of the early 1950s, despite his lack of any particular trade or talent. He stopped traffic with his acrobatic stunts on his unicycle. He delighted in cycling into areas where Congolese normally were unwelcome by the Belgian colonial state and was famous for circling around stalled traffic at busy Kinshasa intersections. Occasionally Mbelekete would take it upon himself to direct traffic, much to the amazement of his fellow Kinois. Mbelekete became a fashion leader and tastemaker in Kinshasa before his premature death in the mid-1960s as a result of a traffic accident. His attendance at a club where a band was playing always ensured a full house. Indeed, his freewheeling attitude toward colonial authority influenced such youths as the famous musician Luambo “Franco” Makiadi. Fifty years after his death, Congolese from his generation still celebrate Mbelekete as the “No. 1 Kinois,” an avatar of modernity and an author of the Kinois urban style that has so attracted international attention.²

Mbelekete’s antics, using modern products like bicycles in a culturally transgressive manner, were not unique in postcolonial Africa. This chapter looks at how in Senegal urban youth similarly rehearsed “modern” identities by purchasing newly accessible goods like radios, sunglasses, and Western clothes and listening to and dancing to recorded music. These young Senegalese were less socially disruptive than their counterparts elsewhere in Africa, such as the “Buffalo Bills” of Kinshasa or the “cowboys” of Enugu, Nigeria. However, they were just as culturally significant. Starting in the 1950s, young men in Dakar and other communities congregated in courtyards or small sitting rooms to drink tea and listen to Afro-Cuban music on portable phonographs.

These casual gatherings rapidly crystallized into clubs with distinctive identifying names, large collections of Afro-Cuban music, and lengthy meetings. As the clubs grew, they staged elaborate parties. Clubs initially vied with one another over who had the most current Cuban discs. Over time, though, competition increasingly revolved around perceived expertise and the ability to project a distinguished mien. What started out as the pursuit of sociality evolved into new ways of being in the world that departed from both the dominant local and colonial French models.

These informal associations of urban youth, like their counterparts in Nigeria, Angola, and Tanzania, constituted innovative ways of defining masculinity in Africa, “fueling the imagination of nation” in a rising generation.³ As was the case elsewhere in Africa, Senegalese record clubs grew out of the coming together of new gender constructions, patterns of consumption, and imagining of communities. However, while young Dakarois men longed for the same prestige goods and were preoccupied with the same issues of cultural “sovereignty” as their counterparts elsewhere in Africa, their reformulation of manhood revolved around different axes. Reflecting local cultural practice, their modern masculinity emphasized sociality over aggression and cosmopolitanism over ethnic or regional particularism. As a consequence, in place of public displays of male power typical of Enugu and Kinshasa, Dakarois engaged in semisecluded enactments of elegance and sophistication. Rather than carve out alternative zones of male refuge and withdrawal like the musseque clubs in colonial Luanda, Dakar’s young men created arenas where they prepared for future societal leadership roles, enlarging social networks through demonstrating the latest Latin dance moves.

The Senegalese clubs were especially significant in how they pioneered modern social behaviors for men. Members at all times had to be correcte. In Senegalese terms, this word has multiple meanings and dimensions. It refers to neat and fashionable clothes, a punctilious concern with etiquette, flawless self-discipline, and a general air of refinement. Together, these qualities denote an individual with an unblemished moral reputation, as internally clean as he is externally elegant. Whether consciously or not, club members were using Afro-Cuban music to fuse elements of “traditional” Wolof/Serer/Tukolor cultures with French bourgeois mores to devise a new standard of behavior for a modern Senegal.

The clubs themselves were a bricolage of French, Cuban, and Senegalese social institutions. The club members overtly appropriated the French salon and soirée, for example. They were not the first Senegalese to do this.⁴ However, by holding salons and soirées far removed from the elite precincts, democratizing them, and adding Spanish to French as the languages of “high” culture, they were departing from tradition. From Cuba, the young Dakarois borrowed the idea of the rumba session in which music and dance enhanced solidarity and congealed new identities. From their own cultures, the Afro-Cuban club members recontextualized age grades and initiation ceremonies and in a altered form made them relevant to urban life. By linking expressive culture with modernity and generational differentiation, they provided fresh frameworks for thinking and feeling. These linkages created modern ways of associating with one another and their community that the club members felt were congruent with a progressive society.

CONSUMPTION, SOCIALITY, AND CULTURAL CITIZENSHIP

The record clubs thus served as workshops where Senegalese youth of the late colonial era could experiment with new forms of sociality that drew on local, Caribbean, and French traditions. For these youths, this new form of sociality with its transnational basis and its emphasis on tolerance and refinement provided a pathway to modernity that bypassed the usual colonial circuits. Consumption was central to this new notion of sociality. The young Senegalese in the Afro-Cuban music clubs consumed goods like phonographs and records to encode popular experience into self-consciously “modern” cultural forms. For them, “consumption was good for thinking,” for conceptualizing and enacting a form of cultural citizenship that would enable them to be modern and African in a postcolonial world.⁵

Ever since Karl Marx made commodity fetishism a centerpiece in his analysis of how capitalism shapes culture, researchers have studied how the consumption of commodities by individuals and groups transforms consciousness and alters social relations. In African and Latin American studies, researchers have often connected consumption with the global expansion and penetration of a Western-dominated capitalism.⁶ In this line of analysis, Africans or Latin Americans become modern through their acquisition of European industrial products. Their modernity stems both from their newly conceived desire for these goods and the ways purchased items such as bicycles, furniture, and clothes change their daily lives, their self-perception, and their worldview.

Consumption can play a vital role in the creation of identities independent of the cultural meanings originally attached to specific goods. Soap, for example, may have one meaning for the European or South African producers and quite another for Zimbabwean consumers. For the manufacturers, their merchandise is a device for becoming “clean but for the Zimbabweans, the toiletries were a tool for defining and refining personhood.”⁷

In the Argentine sociologist Néstor García Canclini’s work, consumption can be a means for claiming “rights to difference,” enabling a group to gain recognition “as subjects with ‘valid interests, relevant values and legitimate claims.’” By consuming, we can “distinguish ourselves … and [find] ways to combine pragmatism with pleasure.”⁸ Canclini maintains that consumption can have political ramifications, whether intended or not. Clusters of individuals, by preferring one commodity to another, can be both part of a society and distinct from it. How and what they consume establishes their “cultural citizenship” and has an impact on their status. For Senegalese youth growing up in 1950s and 1960s Dakar, the idea of cultural citizenship galvanized their generation. Straddling the colonial/postcolonial divide, they asserted themselves culturally and politically as a generation that was both African and modern.⁹

A new form of sociality provided the foundation for the cultural citizenship they were advocating. The concept of sociality has a long history in Western thought. Definitions abound, from Lord Shaftsbury to Georg Simmel. The definition that best typifies the Senegalese situation comes from the anthropologist Richard Fardon’s work on Western Cameroon. Fardon explains that sociality (or as he prefers, “sociability”) “is the behaviors and attitudes anticipated in different relationships … a framework of knowledge and organization of feeling about the way people impinge upon one another.”¹⁰ Fardon makes the important point that “since sociability identifies and models personal relations, it is related both to the conceptual and moral ordering of societies.”¹¹

By linking the emotional textures and rhythms of daily life to the organization of societies and states on a wider scale, Fardon’s model of sociability illuminates the cultural significance of Dakar’s Latin record clubs. The sociality that typified the clubs reflected the complex realities of postwar African Dakar. New French colonial policies and internal economic changes within Senegal itself reshaped the city’s social landscape. There was an expansion of Western educational opportunities and an increased rate of migration from the rural hinterland into the capital city. These developments necessitated new “frameworks of knowledge and feeling” for young Dakarois. At the very moment when the colonial authorities were slowly easing their access to evolué status, the influx of new inhabitants from the interior who were relatively unexposed to classic French culture transformed their city. Some of the new arrivals regarded the clubs as insufficiently Islamic because of their overt secularity and kept their distance. However, many of the migrants, especially those who were students in colonial schools, joined and were welcomed. Indeed, many children of migrants established their own record clubs. The sociality of the Latin record clubs enabled their members to simultaneously embrace the culture of the wider Atlantic world represented by their European education while affirming their Africanité in solidarity with their newly urban Senegalese neighbors.

This sociality also furthered the growth of a Senegalese civic society embedded in local practice but reflecting French republican ideals. In the English-speaking world the state and civic society are separate. Civic society provides a space for individual liberty, and the state legally guarantees that freedom.¹² In French republicanism, by contrast, the state is an extension of civil society. What happens in civic society shapes the state and is of great significance. In this model, civic society emerges out of citizen participation in many different realms, the cultural and social as well as the political. Indeed, “sociability and citizenship [presuppose] each other.”¹³ Citizenship doesn’t just entail involvement with political institutions. The correcte attitudes and behaviors arising out of intensive participation in the public sphere are also essential in defining citizenship. In fact, in the Francophone tradition, cultural citizenship lies at the heart of the republican project.

From this perspective, the Senegalese record clubs as voluntary cultural and social associations had an implicit political dimension. The behaviors and mentalités the clubs fostered were similar to the republican virtues of being immersed in public life and bringing an informed, critical perspective to significant issues facing society. By creating the record clubs, the young Senegalese Latin music enthusiasts were establishing new patterns of consumption and new models of sociality. In so doing, they were rehearsing citizenship in a free African polity, organized around republican principles. However, in order for these changes to occur, Dakar in the 1940s and 1950s had to develop the physical, economic, and social infrastructures that could sustain cultural enterprises like the record clubs.

URBAN GROWTH AND CULTURAL CHANGE IN POSTWAR DAKAR, 1940S–1960S

Dakar, like many other urban areas in sub-Saharan Africa, experienced rapid growth from the 1940s to the 1960s. According to some estimates, between 1945 and 1960 the city doubled its population. Already by 1950, approximately one out of every ten Senegalese lived in Dakar.¹⁴ Such growth led to improvements in the city’s infrastructure and altered its urban identity. Dakar developed into one of the major cities south of the Sahara and the de facto cultural capital of Francophone Africa. The city became one of the major transportation centers of Africa in the 1950s, the focal point of far-flung sea, rail, and air networks. Although other African metropolises like Lagos and Kinshasa surpassed it as a business and industrial hub, Dakar’s markets and shops were filled with consumer goods of all types, sold at a price an increasing number of African customers could afford. It was indisputably the educational capital of Francophone Africa. Its population was sophisticated and multiethnic. In 1945, 43 percent of the city’s African population was Wolof; 13 percent was Tukolor; and the remaining 44 percent consisted of sizable communities of Pulaar, Serer, Cabo Verdeans, Hassaniya-speakers, and Bamana. It is likely that the city’s ethnic composition preserved this diversity ten years later.¹⁵ In addition, there were thirty-eight thousand French residents and a large concentration of Lebanese and Syrians. With its large expatriate population and its sizable communities of migrants from many parts of West Africa, Dakar had become one of the continent’s most cosmopolitan and culturally complex cities.

From the time the Free French under Charles de Gaulle wrested control of Dakar from the Vichy regime in 1943, Dakar’s economy began to revive from the doldrums of the Depression and the early years of World War II. The Free French, knowing that the city had one of the best natural harbors in Africa, undertook improvements of the port’s infrastructure. Simultaneously the Dakar airport, established in 1937, became a major refueling stop for air traffic to Africa and the Allies stationed large numbers of French and US troops in the city. The soldiers freely spent money, stimulating local commerce; but even more important, the colonial authorities strengthened the manufacturing capacity of Dakar by creating import-substitute industries.¹⁶ By 1945 Dakar had become “a naval and air base of global importance”¹⁷ and a crucial center of trade and manufacturing.

After the war Dakar developed even more rapidly. Always wary of the British, de Gaulle became concerned in 1945 that the British-controlled city of Accra in the then Gold Coast (contemporary Ghana) was overshadowing Dakar as the leading port in West Africa. To counteract this perceived threat, the French leader resolved to make the city into an imperial showcase through enlightened urban planning and an extensive public works program. De Gaulle’s plans entailed dividing Dakar into spatially distinct zones with areas reserved for administration, industry, commerce, and residential housing. His planners envisioned six residential sectors, accommodating various populations including a growing African presence. As is often the case with urban master plans, this ambitious undertaking never received a big enough budget to realize all its objectives. However, the French did spend enough money to make the port one of the leading cities in Africa, and the spatial model they imposed still shapes contemporary Dakar.

Other changes in French colonial policy promoted Dakar’s growth as well. In 1946 France established FIDES (Fonds d’Investissement pour le Développement Économique et Social), supposedly to develop their African colonies rather than exploit them.¹⁸ Between 1946 and 1956, 64 percent of FIDES’ budget went to infrastructural improvements in France’s African colonies, especially transportation.¹⁹ These improvements made the movement of goods to and from Africa more efficient, reducing costs and encouraging investment. The French also worked to improve urban housing for Africans, although their efforts fell far short of meeting local demand. At the end of World War II they founded SICAP (Société Immobilière du Cap Vert) to provide housing for both Dakar’s growing middle class and its large working-class population. In its first year of operation, it built 150 houses and 4 cités ouvrières.²⁰

During this same postwar period, French business interests found Dakar and Senegal increasingly attractive areas for investment. French capital came in two waves. Between 1946 and 1949 francs flowed into Dakar from France because investors in the metropole feared a communist takeover of the French government. Two years later, in 1951, as the French commercially disengaged themselves from Indochina, there was another significant flow of capital into Senegal, which the French business class regarded as more politically stable. Initially, French investment in Dakar provided funds for the enlargement of already existing manufacturing concerns and the establishment of new ones, a change in strategy from the 1930s, when the French had been more likely to invest in trade in agricultural commodities. By the mid-1950s French merchants and bankers were especially drawn to projects that made more consumer goods like radios, phonographs, textiles, and soft drinks available to Africans at lower prices. While Dakar never became an industrial powerhouse like Abidjan in Côte d’Ivoire, its industrial zones in the late colonial period were bustling with a number of beverage and textile concerns.²¹ It is not clear how many new wage jobs were added in the immediate postwar period, but given that gainful employment has always been scarce in Senegambia, the creation of these manufacturing jobs had a marked impact on Dakar’s hinterland and beyond. Hopeful job seekers from all regions of Senegal flocked to the city in search of work in the 1940s, forming a multiethnic labor force.²² The fact that most of these migrants were disappointed did not reverse the flow. Even if they were frustrated in their search for work, the migrants felt that ultimately there were more opportunities for them in Dakar than elsewhere in Senegal.