Music as a space for constructing
the african modernity

Bamba and Senghor, the official modernities of Senegal

Two ways into modernity.

In historical analyses of modernity in twentieth-century Senegal, the expansion of Islam and the formulation of negritude occupy an imposing place. Sheikh Ahmadou Bamba and Léopold Sédar Senghor traced two paths for “entering modernity” in Senegal. Whether historians have characterised these paths as parallel, overlapping or divergent, an implicit dichotomy has emerged. In it, the Senegalese project of access to modernity appears as a mediation between oppositions: “the North” (Europe) and “the East” (the Islamic world), the city and the countryside, the metropolis and the colony.

An overly narrow interpretive framework.

While these approaches recognise African agency, they limit its scope. Accommodation with – or rebellion against – European cultural hegemony was extremely important in the twentieth century. In exploring the history of this creation of modernity as resistance, historians have focused either on Senegalese cultural nationalism or on cultural appropriation. There are excellent studies of how the Senegalese celebrated the aesthetic and political value of the indigenous in the face of European contempt or disinterest. In the same vein, scholars have documented how the Senegalese seized on French literary forms to turn them against their colonial oppressor.

Reinscribing modernity
elsewhere: night, dance, Cuba

Getting out of religion and literature.

The idea is to re-map the ‘terrains of contestation’ of Senegalese modernity by looking beyond the spheres of religion and literature. Critical contributions to the making of conceptions of modernity and cosmopolitanism have also come from Senegalese musicians and their audiences. Drawing on Cuban material, they have largely bypassed Europe. Their contributions show that in Africa, modernity came as much “from below” as “from above” , and that neither Europe nor North America were the only points of reference. While Senegalese intellectuals and religious leaders like Senghor and Sheikh Ahmadou Bamba were forging two types of modernity for Africa, the musicians, masons and tailors of Dakar were shaping others just as vast. Alongside literary salons and mosques, the urban nightclubs that sprang up at the end of the colonial period were also laboratories for the creation of African modernities.

The dance floor as laboratory.

It was in these clubs that Senegalese youth “took charge of the intersection of different historical temporalities and worked out a global project with them” . Their project involved respatialising leisure time, redefining the public sphere, and inaugurating new models of consumption and gender relations. For these young people, dancing to the Cuban music of the 1950s was a crucial step in enacting an alternative modernity to the Europeanised models so prevalent in post-war Senegal.

Channels of transmission of Cuban music in Senegal

Two centuries of transatlantic contact.

Two centuries of sustained, two-way cultural contact between Senegambia and the Caribbean paved the way for the popularity of Cuban music in Senegal. Until the 1920s, African and Afro-Caribbean sailors and soldiers were the main agents of these transatlantic cultural exchanges. As perpetually mobile individuals, they disseminated new cultural forms from one end of the Atlantic to the other. In doing so, they were – in Jeffrey Bolster’s words – creating “new ecological, social and racial relations” .

African and Caribbean sailors, from Grumetes to slave ships.

While many Africans were an unwitting “cargo” on ships on the slave routes from Senegambia to the Caribbean in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, some crew members on these ships were themselves wholly or partly of African descent. Several Afro-Caribbean sailors, for example, regularly worked for captains involved in the African slave trade. On the other side of the Atlantic, Cape Verdeans and Kru speakers (from southern Liberia) were employed on ships involved in the Africa-Caribbean trade. Within Senegambia itself, a specialised maritime community – the Grumetes (sailors, mousses) – emerged. For much of the eighteenth century, the Grumetes served as crew members on ships making the Senegambia-Caribbean crossing and mingled with maritime workers from all over the Black Atlantic, Cuba included (Bolster, Black Jacks).

Musical cross-pollinations on board.

As these cosmopolitan crews crossed the Caribbean and the Atlantic, they “cross-pollinated” cultural forms, particularly music. Music was an integral part of life on board and, by the 18th century, ships routinely reserved crew berths for professional musicians. Sailors, and the Kru in particular, were renowned for their love and mastery of music. They learned from the musicians they met in their various ports of call. They were in an ideal position to create new music – such as sea shanties – from disparate cultural materials and popularise it over vast areas.

Havana, hub of sugar and sounds.

After the establishment of the sugar economy in Cuba in the 1760s, Havana became an increasingly important link between the Caribbean and Africa. The rapid expansion of Cuban sugar plantations created a huge demand for enslaved African labour. To meet this demand, more and more ships sailed from West Africa to Havana, often with a few crew members of African descent. One consequence of this growing traffic was that the Spanish guitar, widely played by sailors on this route, became a familiar instrument in many coastal areas of West and Central Africa. For various reasons – cost, competition from pre-existing African stringed instruments – the guitar did not really take root in Africa until the twentieth century. But regions such as Senegambia were continually exposed to it from at least the eighteenth century. More importantly, for centuries these coastal populations heard the precursors of the Cuban genres that were to crystallise in the form of son, the Afro-Cuban sung form, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Caribbean soldiers serving in the European colonial armies also carried Cuban music to Senegal.

The Caribbean in uniform: Mohammed Sisei and the returning soldiers.

Cuban music has always enjoyed great popularity throughout the Caribbean, including in areas such as the West Indies and the West Indies where Spanish is not spoken. When soldiers from the French-speaking Caribbean served in Africa, or mingled with Senegalese soldiers elsewhere in the world, they would sing Cuban songs for their African comrades as well as their own music during periods of rest and recreation. Like the sailors’ improvisations, these moments of shared cultural exchange gradually made Cuban music less “foreign” to Senegalese ears. Caribbean soldiers born in Africa sometimes returned to Senegal for their retirement. When they returned, some of them introduced Caribbean music to the communities where they settled. A typical figure in this reverse migration was a Gambian soldier named Mohammed Sisei. Born in the late eighteenth century, Sisei was captured in battle in 1810 and sold to a French slave trader. En route to the Caribbean, the ship was intercepted by the British anti-slavery patrol. Free again, Sisei joined the Third West India Regiment and served there for fifteen years, seeing many parts of the Caribbean. He stayed for a further thirteen years after demobilisation, married a Grenadian woman and started a family. In 1838, he returned to Gambia with her. Little is known about Sisei’s musical tastes or practice, but it is certain that individuals like him were likely to have heard Cuban music, and some must have spread it to Africa. Thanks to lives like Sisei’s, when “modern” Cuban music entered Senegal in the 1930s, it was not a totally alien phenomenon for many Senegalese. Echoes of Cuban music had already been ringing out along the West African coast for centuries.

Transmission channels, 1900s-1950s: record, radio, intelligentsia

Two worlds, two listens.

In the 20th century, the advent of the record and radio in Senegal greatly facilitated the establishment of Cuban music. Access to these new modes of communication was initially limited to Senegalese who occupied privileged positions in colonial society. As a result, the new routes by which Cuban music entered Senegal now crossed a wide social spectrum, from the intelligentsia to unskilled urban workers. For much of the century, these social groups had very different understandings of what they were hearing. For cosmopolitan members of the intelligentsia, the music embodied European verve and refinement; for urban craftsmen, it was slightly disreputable “young” music, heralding changes in social mores and roles. Over time, these understandings converged, and Latin music became one of the cornerstones of Senegalese postcolonial culture

« El Manisero » : the record that changed everything.

The history of modern Cuban music in Senegal begins with a specific record. In 1930, RCA Victor released “El Manisero” (“The Peanut Merchant”) by Cuban conductor Don Azpiazu and his Havana Casino Orchestra. Azpiazu’s recording was a masterpiece, a daring combination of American-style big band jazz arrangements and authentic Cuban rhythms. The record was a surprise hit in the United States and reached Africa in 1931. It had an immediate and lasting impact. From Senegal to the Congo, it had a marked influence on the development of African popular music. It shaped regional styles (as in Ghana) and sometimes even formed the basis of a national music (as in Senegal). Distributed in French-speaking West Africa by the Compagnie Française d’ Afrique Occidentale, these records were heard in Senegal in several places.

St. Louisian shops, colonial salons and brass bands.

Some Senegalese heard Cuban music in Dakar drugstores, which had started selling records and gramophones in addition to their usual stock. To boost sales, these shops would sometimes play “the latest thing” to their customers while they did their shopping. Others could hear it coming from the windows of the residences of the French colonial administration and the West Indies. When they were posted to Senegal, these civil servants often took their record collections and gramophones with them. Colonial interracial festivals in Saint-Louis and Dakar also helped to popularise Cuban music in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s. Dancing played an important role at these parties: records were spun, or St. Louis orchestras such as Grand-Diop, St. Louis Jazz and La Lyre Africaine provided the music. These ensembles learned the repertoire by ear from records, or – when they could read music – from the printed scores of a few hits published in relatively cheap editions. Far from being musically accurate, these transcriptions at least gave the African performers a rudimentary knowledge of some of the fundamental aesthetic principles of Afro-Cuban music.

An initially limited scope.

In the first phase of Cuban music in Senegal, its reach was restricted both geographically and socially. Only those Senegalese who lived in the big cities and frequented European neighbourhoods and circles were regularly exposed to contemporary Cuban music. Most Senegalese had no access to gramophones or contemporary records. It took the development of another new medium, radio, to make Cuban music resonate beyond the European enclaves where it had taken root as a sign of refinement.

Radio Dakar, 1939: the propaganda that made the country dance.

With the arrival of radio in Senegal in 1939, modern music began to reach wider and more socially diverse audiences. The first station, Radio Dakar, unlike some of the English-speaking colonial stations, was designed to serve French interests, not the indigenous population of Senegal in any meaningful way. All programming was primarily in French and even produced in France. The station’s main function was to broadcast propaganda and official information, but it also played dance music to entertain the staff of the colonial regime. Alongside the tangos, boleros and biguines so popular in Paris at the time, Cuban music featured prominently in the programming, reflecting the enduring French enthusiasm for this repertoire. After the Second World War, the station’s relatively strong signal served to familiarise many Senegalese (and their neighbours) with the Afro-Cuban sound. Radio broadcasting, combined with the gradually wider circulation of Cuban records and the still-vibrant tradition of spontaneous performances in Senegalese ports, enabled Cuban music to take root in the emerging national culture. Its popularity continued to grow throughout the 1950s; by the time of independence in 1960, it had become the modern music of choice for many Senegalese.

Why Cuban music?

A Senegalese ear turned towards Cuba.

Through concerts, records, radio and cinema, Senegalese people in the 1950s and 1960s heard a wide variety of music from all over the world. The potpourri of sounds ranged from yéyé pop and French sentimental song to James Brown rhythm and blues and American country. There was also Berber music from Mauritania and North Africa, and classical and contemporary Arabic music from Morocco and Egypt. In the cinemas of Dakar, as elsewhere in Africa, young Senegalese were spellbound by Indian musicals. Y et the “foreign” music that most struck Senegalese ears in this period and shaped their taste in popular music came from Cuba.

The son montuno, the big band, the charanga.

Examining why this particular type of music became so important sheds light on some of the paths by which the Senegalese “entered modernity” . And then – although the Senegalese (like all Africans) tend to call Afro-Cuban music “rumba” – it was actually historically the son montuno that transformed African music, to the exclusion of almost all other Cuban forms (classical “rumba” being a very distinct Cuban genre, which has had little impact in Africa). Two types of Afro-Cuban sound ensembles particularly influenced Senegalese musicians: the brassy big bands of the 1930s and the elegant flute and violin ensembles known as charanga of the 1950s and 1960s. As elsewhere in Africa, Senegalese artists seem to have remained relatively unaffected by the son conjunto of Arsenio Rodriguez in the 1940s; the mambos of Pérez Prado, Machito and Tito Puente in the 1950s; and the salsa of Willie Colón and Eddie Palmieri in the 1960s and 1970s. Similarly, while the Senegalese knew and played merengue, Dominican and Haitian music had little lasting influence. The fact that brass instruments still feature prominently in Senegalese popular music is partly explained by the enduring impact of “El Manisero” . Most Senegalese folk musicians couldn’t read music, so they approximated Cuban brass harmonies by ear. The result was a wonderfully astringent quality in their brass work. Notwithstanding the great historical importance of “El Manisero” , the most influential and popular Afro-Cuban musical form in Senegal has been the charanga. Classical charanga ensembles feature wooden flutes backed by legato strings and a full rhythm section: timpani, congas, guiro, bass and piano. By the early 1950s, charanga had become one of the dominant ‘schools’ of Cuban music, alongside mambo big band. Charanga and its later variant, pachanga, reached Senegal just as the public was beginning to embrace Cuban music on a large scale. Its influence was immense, and its hold on popular taste in Senegal proved enduring. The popularity of charanga in Senegal has several roots.

Three roots of an affinity

Beauty

The first and most important explanation for the popularity of this type of music in Africa is its extraordinary beauty, depth and variety.

Familiarity: mirror music.

A second reason was the familiarity of the music itself. Some of the most famous Cuban musical forms derive in part from African antecedents. The Senegalese liked what they heard and identified with Afro-Cuban music such as charanga. Boncana Maïga has observed that for Africans, Afro-Cuban music such as charanga holds up a mirror to them, giving them the aesthetic shock of hearing familiar rhythms in new contexts. Several historical facts explain the shared genealogies of Afro-Cuban and urban African music. Firstly, Africans were forced to emigrate to Cuba until the 19th century. This population movement led to a continuous infusion of new African music into Cuba. The music that the Senegalese heard in the 1950s and 1960s was only three or four generations removed from Africa. Moreover, on Cuban plantations, enslaved Africans were able to play drums and maintain some of their religious traditions. Some African drum rhythms survived the Atlantic crossing and seeped into Cuban popular music in the 1920s, re-emerging in African music in the 1930s.

Colonial exteriority: “the power spoke French, the people answered in Spanish”

The dissociation of Cuban music from all the major African colonial powers also contributed to its popularity. To be African in a French colony and to listen to French music was to be culturally co-opted. As the Senegalese historian Ibrahima Thioub has noted: “Those in power in Senegal spoke French. The people responded in Spanish” . Cuban music offered a progressive alternative to both traditional African music and the hegemonic culture of the coloniser. Its language, Spanish, had no colonial connotations for most Africans. Although the majority of Africans were not motivated to become Spanish speakers, they found the Spanish language very musical. Senegalese singers such as Pape Seck sang with overwhelming intensity lyrics that were at first largely unintelligible to them. In some cases – in Sierra Leone, for example – singers went so far as to sing in an imaginary Spanish of their own invention. Faced with French and British domination, many Africans turned their attention to Latin America. Gary Stewart, a specialist in Congolese music, has argued that many Spanish words end in vowel sounds, as in most African languages. This vowel arrangement would add to the musicality of Spanish for African singers. Another attraction for the African vocalist is that Spanish has a smaller variety of vowel sounds than most other European languages, making it easier to pronounce and sing.

Cuban music as a path to modernity

“It was through Cuban music
that we were introduced to modern instruments.”

The Senegalese also embraced Cuban music because they saw it as a path to modernity. Many African musicians have insisted on this point. When the Senegalese musician Alioune Kassé, son of the famous Dakar nightclub owner Ibra Kassé, asked his father why he, as a Wolof, had to sing in Spanish in the house band, his father replied, “Because Cuban music has opened up our horizons. ” In the same vein, Salif Keïta declared: “I consider it a duty for all Malians to love Cuban music, because it was through Cuban music that we were introduced to modern instruments. ” African musicians and listeners found modern Cuban music first and foremost in its instrumentarium. Before hearing Cuban music, Africans had identified brass instruments with military and church bands. Cuban brass sections not only lacked these political and religious contexts, but their tones also reminded African listeners of their own wind and reed instruments. They were modern, not colonial.

A secular music.

The secularity of Cuban music also appeared to the Senegalese as modern. Although the music was full of religious references, it was primarily recreational music rooted in free-time activities.

The Dakar night: a new geography of leisure

Exit, circulate, dance.

For many Senegalese, particularly in urban areas, playing, listening to and dancing to Cuban music involved a reconceptualisation of the meaning and uses of leisure time. More significantly, the location of leisure activities had partly shifted from the family compound and the community meeting place to more public sites: bars, nightclubs, football stadiums. People had to go out to enjoy themselves in another part of the city, far from the familiar world of relatives and neighbours. Mobility became a sign of youth and modernity. First bicycles, then scooters and motorbikes accelerated travel, expanding social space and compressing time. Leisure time became increasingly circulatory, forming complex orbits that criss-crossed the cultural and phy sical landscape of post-war urban Senegal. Nightclubs figured prominently. Where previously the market or the mosque had been the central places for disparate groups to make contact, individuals could now meet other ethnic and social groups in the anonymous, hedonistic world of the club. These encounters frequently involved crossing spatial and social boundaries.

Tam-Tam, Shanghai, Cocotier du Sud, Yandeer.

Many of the most popular spots were located in parts of Dakar where Senegalese youth were normally discouraged from going, by both the colonial power and the post-colonial state. The more upmarket nightclubs that programmed live music – such as Tam-Tam, Shanghai, Cocotier du Sud and Y andeer – attracted an African, European and Lebanese clientele, offering them a previously rare opportunity to mingle. These clubs helped to bring about new social behaviours. As Emmanuel Akyeampong has observed in relation to Ghana, the individualised consumption of alcohol by young people, freed from the rigid control of their elders, was linked to the rise of nightclubs. Equally significant was the advent of couple dancing, a radical departure from cultures where group dancing at community events had been the norm. These Senegalese, in their clubs, saw Afro-Cuban music as a tool for forging a modern cultural identity. For them, the music and its performers signified a modernity rooted in the contemporary semiotics and imagery of the tropical world, while emerging from a localised historical experience.

Style as manifesto.

The projection – through image and sound – of a proud, modern tropical identity by Afro-Cuban musicians offered young Senegalese an important model. Individual fashion, dance, hairstyles and musical preferences all contributed to this identity. The importance of Western fashion for post-war African youth has been emphasised. But the equally important influence of Cuban fashion has been relatively neglected. African youth modelled themselves on the Cuban performers they saw on record sleeves. The youth of Dakar saw in the New York street dandyism of Johnny Pacheco, the garish attire of Conjunto Casino and the sharp uniform of Orquesta Aragón the embodiment of a modernity perfectly suited to Africa. This modernity spanned the lines of class, language and ethnicity, and reinforced national solidarity. For both the Western-educated Senegalese and the urban workers, a shared passion for Afro-Cuban music provided an important common ground. Initially, these social strata had very different understandings of what they were hearing.

From divergent understandings to convergence.

For the segment of the intelligentsia enthusiastic about metropolitan culture, music represented cosmopolitanism, a “recognition and legitimisation of heterogeneity… as a social and cultural norm” . The hybridity of Afro-Cuban music reflected the “polyvocal polity” they hoped to build. The urban artisans who migrated to Dakar from the interior of Senegal and from neighbouring countries embraced Cuban music as a conscious gesture of urban belonging. Both the intelligentsia and the artisans were coming to terms with the multi-ethnic and international culture of twentieth-century Dakar, with its new mores and new roles. The cosmopolitanism of Cuban music resonated with both groups; over time, as their understandings converged, “Latin” music became one of the foundations of Senegalese postcolonial culture.

Miami, Baobab: 1970s laboratories.

The famous Dakar nightclubs of the 1970s such as Miami and Baobab were laboratories for the creation of this culture, where different trajectories of modernity intersected and mingled. Successful local businessmen sponsored orchestras and frequented, along with leading politicians, these clubs where Afro-Cuban dancing took place, in the presence of a vast cross-section of society. In Senegal, as elsewhere in Africa, individuals and groups regularly debated issues of national importance in these new public spaces. These orchestras themselves were often a living testimony to the vitality of Senegalese national culture – they brought together musicians from all parts of Senegal, all united by their deep love of Cuban music and what it had come to represent in their country.

Evolution of styles: from reappropriation to indigenisation

A slow influence at first.

For at least a generation after “El Manisero” in 1931, the growing popularity of modern Cuban music in Senegal had little impact on local musical performances. Musicians continued to play in the ever-evolving Wolof, Sereer, Toucouleur, Diola and Mandinka styles, or tried their hand at versions of tangos, boleros, biguines and mornas. Cuban music was enjoyed as recorded music from elsewhere, and it was some time before it began to influence local styles of performance and composition. From the mid-1950s onwards, Dakar-based orchestras such as Guinea Jazz, Harlem Jazz and Tropical Jazz added cha-cha-chas to their repertoires. Their first efforts were clumsy and forced, but by the mid-1960s their work had a real Cuban sabor (an authentically Cuban “feel”) and was enjoying great success in the country.

When authenticity becomes a colonial relic.

However, as Senegalese musicians became more adept at authentically reproducing the Cuban style, many came to regard Cuban music as outdated and “colonial” . In the eyes of young musicians like Youssou N’Dour, Cuban music had come to represent a sterile aesthetic orthodoxy, to be relegated in favour of a more African-centric modernity. By the early 1980s, Cuban music had become just one dimension of a multilayered, polyvocal national music. Tracing how Senegalese musicians mastered, indigenised, transformed and ‘debated with’ the Cuban idiom sheds light on changing conceptions of the ‘modern’ and the ‘cosmopolitan’ in the postcolonial period.

1960: the Star Band and the first experiments.

The initial imitation of the mid-1950s was followed by a period of experimentation around the time of independence. In 1960, Dexter Johnson, a Nigerian saxophonist, Kerfa Diabaté, a Guinean guitarist, and several other musicians active in the Dakar scene formed the Star Band as Miami Nightclub’s house band. The band’s first recordings (1964) show how they bent Cuban music to their own needs and preferences. Finding it difficult to “swing” with the unfamiliar rhythms of sung Spanish, for example, its singers began to occasionally vocalise in Senegalese languages such as Wolof.

Castro, Pacheco, and the “new world” in Dakar.

In the 1970s, Cuban musicians began to tour Senegal regularly, as part of Fidel Castro’s cultural and political initiative in Africa. At the forefront of these ensembles were the masters of charanga and danzón: the Orquesta Aragón, who visited Africa for the first time in 1968 and would remain a perennial favourite. Then there were New York musicians like Johnny Pacheco, who began to include Africa in their tours. The invasion of Latin orchestras from the “new world” led to a redefinition, in Senegal, of the relationship between Cuban music and modernity. The Cuban orchestras on tour were associated with a revolutionary ideology, in their support if not in their music; the New York orchestras passed through a cultural nationalism more derived from the street than from the conservatory. By comparison, many Senegalese Cubanist orchestras – their strict arrangements, their apolitical repertoire, their solemn stage manner – began to sound more like colonial relics than heralds of postcolonial cosmopolitanism and modernity.

Orchestra Baobab: the re-africanization of the Afro-Cuban sound.

Faced with this challenge, orchestras like Orchestra Baobab in the 1970s responded by re-Africanising Afro-Cuban music. Stage uniforms retained a certain Cuban flamboyance, but were now redesigned with a more African look. Composers like Balla Sidibé of Orchestra Baobab drew on Senegalese folklore for new material, reworked with a Cuban accent. Other orchestras, such as the Star Band Number One, ingeniously began to substitute African instrumentation for Afro-Cuban material. Violin and piano lines were transposed for electric guitar, and saxophones replaced trumpets. The Dakar arrangers added traditional African percussion to the Cuban material. Sometimes, “traditional” singers like Laye Mboup sang guajiras and guarachas from Orchestra Baobab in “deep” Wolof. These transformations produced music that retained a pronounced Cuban sabor, but with a more African texture. Initially, these innovations proved popular with Senegalese audiences. Unlike other Senegalese musical groups up to that point, their cassettes – usually pirated – sold massively in market stalls and open-air music shops; they succeeded in uniting their fellow citizens and contributing to the construction of a post-colonial national culture.

Youssou N’Dour and the advent of mbalax

A rhythmic break.

The dominance of these orchestras was short-lived, however. In the early 1980s, popular taste swung towards the even more deliberately ” African” mbalax sound, driven by Youssou N’Dour and other pioneers. Although strongly influenced by Cuban music, N’Dour’s music was significantly different. Where the Senegalese Cubanists put guitars at the heart of their arrangements, N’Dour brought the tama to the fore. As well as adding more percussion to his ensembles, N’Dour even had his guitarists and pianists play drum lines, in the same way that Senegalese groups in the 1970s had their guitarists play the violin lines of Cuban charangas. The result is a more percussive sound, better suited, according to Youssou N’Dour, to contemporary Senegalese dance styles and sensibilities. Moreover, N’Dour’s singing drew much more on indigenous Wolof, Toucouleur and Sereer traditions than on Cuban tradition.

Islam and the electronic griot.

Another break with Youssou N’Dour is the reference to Islam in his music. He often sings devotional songs about the lives of important figures in the history of Senegalese Islam. N’Dour has presented himself as an electronic griot firmly rooted in “local” networks of clientele and praise singing.

The transatlantic link persists.

During the decade following N’Dour’s rise, Senegalese orchestras inspired by Cuban music had limited professional prospects, but the transatlantic link endured. Cuban music had become an important, if contested, part of Senegalese music – one of the two cornerstones of Senegalese popular music.

The 1990s: the Latin African revival

Africando, Laba Sosseh, Cheikh Lô.

In the 1990s, Senegalese musicians were able to capitalise on these Caribbean foundations of their own popular culture and orchestrate a significant Latin African revival. The revival involved musicians redirecting the Cuban elements of their national popular culture towards new ends, cleansing the African Afro-Cuban sound of its residual “colo” connotations. The Super Cayor mbalax/salsa orchestra from Dakar performed politically provocative material, such as a song protesting the devaluation of the CFA franc in 1994. Africando, Laba Sosseh and Cheikh Lô, the three most significant Cubanismo revivalists, attracted considerable attention. The Africando project originally brought together Senegalese salsa singers and experienced Latin musicians from New York. Organised by Ibrahima Sylla, a Senegalese producer, and Boncana Maïga, a Nigerian-Malian flautist and arranger, the group’s initial aim was to show that African musicians could compete artistically with Latin musicians on their own turf. The result was such that one of its songs became a big hit on New York’s Latin radio stations. Laba Sosseh, one of the participants in the Africando recordings, is the Senegalese musician who has maintained the closest links with the salsa communities of New York, Miami and Havana over the past forty years. In the 1970s and 1980s, he was one of the first African musicians to record with boriqueños and Cuban-American musicians for the US market.

Cheikh Lô: neither gewel nor cuban, both in dialogue.

In recent years, the most important Afro-Cuban revivalist has been Cheikh Lô. Lô uses sophisticated multi-track recording technology to capture the polyvocality of Senegalese popular music. He refuses to rely exclusively on either the Gewel or Cuban traditions; instead, in his Islamic devotional songs, he juxtaposes them, superimposes them and makes them interact. Cheikh Lô’s significant success at home and abroad indicates that the Cuban roots of post-independence Senegalese popular music remain deep and vibrant.

In conclusion, multidirectional circuits and dialogic hybridity

Against the dominant paradigms of globalized cultures.

The history of Cuban music in Senegal challenges a number of the dominant paradigms for analysing globalised cultures. Swedish anthropologist Ulf Hannerz has observed that a number of erroneous assumptions plague the study of cultural transmission. Researchers have often taken it for granted that global cultural flows follow the structures of international economic and political domination. Moreover, many infer that the content of these flows is passively received by local cultures. Afro-Cuban music in Senegal demonstrates that transnational cultural transmissions use multidirectional circuits. It is the music of Cuba – and not that of the United States, Great Britain or France – that has most stimulated the creativity of colonial and post-colonial Senegalese musicians. Rather than simply copying Cuban music, Senegalese musicians have used it as a springboard to create modern musical forms that combine the local and the global in new ways.

The hybrid is not the syncretic.

The history of Afro-Cuban music in Senegal also illustrates that hybrid cultural forms are dialogical, not syncretic. In the development of such forms, contrasting cultural elements do not synthesise or cancel each other out; they coexist in dynamic relief. In the Senegalese Afro-Cuban style, African and Cuban music are not mutually reduced to silence; they reinforce and complement each other. The songs of Cheikh Lô and Pape Fall have begun to superimpose the two sounds. As these musicians modulate their musical identities, they go beyond subverting the dualities that characterised colonial Senegalese culture. They demonstrate that in Africa, hybridity does not always imply a confrontation between, on the one hand, the West or the Islamic world, and on the other, local African cultures.

1995: Youssou N’Dour, Yandé Codou Sène, and convergence.

In 1995, Youssou N’Dour recorded a devotional song as a duet with Léopold Sédar Senghor’s griot, Yandé Codou Sène. It was here that the modern paths of Sheikh Ahmadou Bamba and Léopold Sédar Senghor converged. As N’Dour and Yandé Codou Sène called on their listeners to “interpret the silence” and “read between the lines” of a now world-famous Senegalese popular culture, they began to chart new terrains of contestation for the future.

« Cuban music is African music » : Orchestra Baobab and the Black Atlantic

From the paper by Aleysia Whitmore, “Cuban music is African music: Productive Frictions in the World Music Industry”, MUSICultures, vol. 40, no. 1, 2013, pp. 121-144.

Music Industry” , MUSICultures, vol. 40, no. 1, 2013,

“Cuban music is already us”

Latfi Benjeloune and the claim of kinship.

Discussing Orchestra Baobab’s incorporation of Cuban music, guitarist and band member Latfi Benjeloune told me, “The music didn’t come home to influence African music. Cuban music is already African. It’s African sensibilities that are being expressed… In a way, we felt like parents to this music… it comes from us” (interview, 25 October 2011). Here, Benjeloune justifies his musical métissage by positioning himself in relation to the Black Atlantic and to African and Afro-diasporic peoples. Making musical and cultural connections across the Black Atlantic is not a new phenomenon. African and Afro-diasporic musicians have long shared and taken up each other’s music – be it funk, jazz or rumba.

The uneven dynamics of musical crossbreeding.

The dynamics of musical cross-breeding, however, have varied considerably, and have been affected by power relations, histories, cultural understandings and misunderstandings, but also by access to technology, by the workings of the music industry and by distribution networks.

Anna Tsing: friction as a collaborative regime

Collaborating doesn’t mean getting along.

Collaboration and friction. Anna Tsing writes about collaboration as united work – a cooperation often steeped in misunderstandings and incompatibilities. She writes that, despite the fact that people work together to achieve a common goal, they often see their work and the reasons for undertaking it in very diffe rent ways. Less interested in the product itself than in the creative and sometimes confused work behind it, Tsing argues that we need to look at the “messy and surprising features” of connections across difference to understand cultural production (2005, p. 3).

An “opening for productive confusion.”

She argues: ‘Cultures are continually co-produced in the interactions I call friction: the awkward, uneven, unstable and creative qualities of interconnectedness through difference’ (2005, p. 4). Exploring these differences and how they affect modes of cooperation, Tsing asks: “Where does incompatibility make a difference?” (2005, p. 262). She writes: “Collaboration is not the manufacture of consensus, but rather an opening for productive confusion” (2005, p. 247). The frictions that emerge when people collaborate and connect across difference are productive. Examining the frictions of musical miscegenation and collaboration helps us to understand the various ways in which musicians understand their own identity and position in the Black Atlantic, the world music industry and the world more broadly.

Orchestra Baobab and AfroCubism: three claims

Essentialist, anti-essentialist, universalist.

Aleysia Whitmore examines the interpretive gestures that Orchestra Baobab and AfroCubism musicians make as they negotiate the ‘frictions’ of global connections in their musical collaboration and cross-fertilization across the Black Atlantic. The musicians make alternately essentialist claims about the peoples and cultures of the Black Atlantic, anti-essentialist claims about their own distinct identities, and universalist claims about the nature of music and culture in general. They mobilise these different aspects of musical métissage to signify different elements of their identity, presenting themselves in turn as modern, cosmopolitan, Malian, Senegalese, Cuban, traditional, flexible and virtuoso musicians, both to themselves and to foreign audiences. The musicians of Orchestra Baobab and AfroCubism are strategic in their combination of music and social significance, idealistic in their belief in their ability to connect people and music on both sides of the Atlantic, and pragmatic in that they work together to succeed in the music industry. The positions musicians take are not so much in tension as in constant productive friction. As they rub up against each other, Cuban, Senegalese and Malian music acquire new meanings, and the musicians reconstruct and re-imagine the Black Atlantic, global connections and métissages.

An African cosmopolitanism

Be at home in the world.

For the Baobab musicians, the qualities that came with Cuban music made the group modern, cosmopolitan and accessible to an international audience. The Baobab musicians use Cuban music to mark themselves as at home in the world, in the same way as privileged Europeans and Americans. They talk about their use of Cuban music as a way of “spicing things up a bit” , in the same way that many European and American musicians talk about their engagement with African music. Following Ulf Hannerz’s description of cosmopolitanism, Baobab musicians “embrace foreign culture, but…[they know] where the exit is” (1990, p. 240).

A cosmopolitanism “out of whiteness”.

Although Baobab musicians adopt the cosmopolitan approaches most associated with former colonial powers, they are also careful to keep their distance from colonial associations of Western-dominated cosmopolitanism. Gomis made the distinction as follows: “We are not colonising a culture. We can use a culture. You can take rock and make it into something else, but you’ll always understand where it comes from… We’re trying to go back to this culture that our grandparents brought somewhere. We’re trying to add something else to it. ” (interview, 19 October 2011). The cosmopolitanism they engage in, however, is a cosmopolitanism outside whiteness, outside colonialism. It is neither directed by nor dependent on Europeans or Americans. Gomis told me: “We needed something that wasn’t our folklore but was close to it. That’s why chacha-cha came to Africa… Before, you could go to a bar and dance the tango, the waltz, the pasodoble. It was too white, too toubab. “

A Congolese kinship.

Afro-Cuban music became popular in the Congo not only because it retained formal elements of ‘traditional’ African musical performance, but also because it represented a more accessible – and ultimately more pleasurable – form of urban cosmopolitanism than the various models of European cosmopolitanism that circulated in the Belgian colonies in Africa (White, 2002, p. 663).

Reclaim: Cuban music as African music

From the Belgian Congo to Senegal: international status by itself.

White (2002) and Richard Shain (2009) have written, respectively, that the Belgian Congo and Senegal embraced Afro-Cuban music as a marker, both, of elite international status for individual musicians, and – at the national level – of belonging to an international community of nations in their own right (in other words, not through the former colonising nations, Belgium and France). Cuban music is not only a marker of modernity and cosmopolitanism; it is also an African music that the Baobab musicians are reappropriating.

Strategic collaboration and productive friction

Debra Klein: holding her position to make common ground.

Debra Klein writes: “Strategic collaboration is… the art of occupying and performing one’s position of status in such a way as to facilitate a common project” (Klein, 2007, p. xxv). Because collaboration always involves working with others to produce something new, successful collaboration is intrinsically strategic. People need to position themselves specifically to work with different people and different music to create a product. However, while the musicians of Orchestra Baobab and AfroCubism position themselves to facilitate a joint project, they also position themselves strategically with an eye towards advancing their own careers, representing themselves authentically, and asserting political and ideological positions. Collaboration and musical cross-fertilisation allow these musicians to make these gestures in new and more complex ways.

In the end, Play for yourself, play for the world.

The musicians of Orchestra Baobab and AfroCubism strategically connect with other Afro-diasporic peoples and cultures while maintaining their distinct identities and career goals. They simultaneously highlight the traditions of African and Afro-diasporic musicians, the long history of musical exchange and cosmopolitan musical exchange, and an image of themselves and their cultures as modern, international and forward-looking. They play for themselves and for world music audiences. They play to represent themselves to the world, to make a place for themselves in the world, to earn a living and to produce something creatively and professionally rewarding.

Bibliographic references

References from the papers by Richard M. Shain, « Roots in Reverse », and by Aleysia K. Whitmore, « Cuban Music is African Music ».

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