Roots in Reverse. Richard M. Shain
type of music that was played there in the 1930s, calling it “jazz.” While it is true that there are numerous instances of African musicians and listeners referring to Afro-Cuban music as jazz, especially in the Congo, it is much more unusual for an African resident in Europe to conflate the two musical traditions.33 Senghor listened to Duke Ellington in Paris and undoubtedly heard other US jazzmen. As an urbane sophisticate, there is little chance that the speaker would have incorrectly identified the music that was wafting out of the club. Senghor’s veiling of his experience with Afro-Cuban music demonstrates that he already considered it as lacking in cultural prestige. In his view, it was not a suitable sound track to accompany the Senegalese quest for modernity and potentially could undermine his yearning for full cultural citizenship.
In Senghor’s later years this belief grew even stronger, especially after the launching of his political career in the 1940s. As he enjoyed increasing political success, his version of negritude shifted from being primarily a literary movement with political ramifications to a political philosophy with a cultural dimension. Shaped by the exigencies of becoming a state ideology, Senghor’s negritude became intertwined with his doctrine of “African socialism.” It now had to coexist with cultural nationalism in Senegal and humanism and neocolonialism in France. It also had to compete in West Africa with the conscientism of Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah and the African Stalinism of Guinea’s Sékou Touré. Under pressure from these two new political philosophies, Senghor shifted his position and began to propagate Africanité instead of blackness. Simultaneously, his negritude evolved from a tool for achieving cultural and political citizenship into an instrument for garnering international cultural prestige, especially important for newly independent African states struggling to become full-fledged members of the international community. Promoting Afro-Cuban music had no place in this new orientation, which relied on African culture to gain global recognition. In fact, in his “state of the arts,” in which up to 30 percent of the national budget in the early 1960s went to the Ministry of Culture, Senghor relegated any type of musical expression to the background.34 Literature and “high art” painting fit much more securely into his cultural program. As new artistic forms for Senegal, they were much easier to control through state patronage and drew much more serious international attention than did African or Cuban music at the time.
In the 1960s Senghor’s hostility toward the Cuban Revolution also had an impact on his attitude toward Afro-Cuban music. Although he was an admirer of Hispanic civilization and mandated the teaching of Spanish in Senegalese schools through the university level, Senghor abhorred Fidel Castro.35 His promotion of latinité stopped short of embracing the Cuban Revolution. His antipathy toward Castro had several roots. Senegal’s neocolonial ties with France in the period after independence made establishing diplomatic ties with Castro’s communist Cuba an impossibility. Furthermore, Castro’s alliance with Sékou Touré of neighboring Guinea complicated matters. As previously mentioned, Senghor and Touré were fierce rivals for regional influence, and Senghor resented Cuba’s military support of his enemy. Though the Senegalese public’s love of Cuban music almost entirely lacked any “revolutionary” political content, Senghor largely prohibited Afro-Cuban music from being performed at the premier Festival Mondial des Arts Nègres (FESMAN) in 1966 on political grounds. Sizable demonstrations occurred in Dakar over Senghor’s musical policy, but the president stood firm.
Senghor’s public retreat from Afro-Cuban music (which according to his son he continued to listen to privately) meant that the development of Afro-Cuban music in Senegal had to proceed without state sponsorship, in marked contrast to neighboring Guinea and Mali.36 Whatever interest Senghor had in music during this period he devoted to jazz, which had a significant following in the Western European and North American art and literature worlds.37 During this same era the prestige of Latin music declined in Western intellectual and artistic circles outside of Africa as well, despite its continuing artistic excellence. With the possible exception of Tito Puente’s band in the 1950s, Afro-Cuban music lost whatever cultural cachet it had once had outside the Latin community in Paris and New York.
Observing Afro-Cuban music’s diminished status and its potentially controversial association with the Cuban Revolution, Senghor shifted from his previously ambivalent attitude toward the music to a more actively censorious stance once he became head of state. He sought to erase from his personal history his early involvement with Afro-Cuban culture. Where once he was at least willing to write about his bohemian past, with its wild nights at La Cabane Cubaine, he increasingly appeared embarrassed by it. From the postwar period onward, in his essays and poetry, Senghor replaced the few references to Afro-Cuban music with abstract paeans to rhythm and dance and passing nods to jazz. In his autobiographical musings and the reminiscences of his friends and allies during this era, Afro-Cuban music receives scarcely a nod. Senghor’s close associate Birago Diop’s four-volume autobiography, which documents both their sojourns in Paris, contains few mentions of Afro-Cuban music.38 A pervasive silence has come to envelop the important role of Afro-Cuban music in Senghor’s cultural and political development.
However, many of his countrymen did not share his increasingly negative attitude about the cultural significance of Latin music. For them, Cuban music was far from disreputable. On the contrary, they saw it as integral to the embodiment of modernity that was culturally suitable for their society. Ousmane Socé Diop’s Mirages de Paris, for example, looks at the relationship between Afro-Cuban music and modernity from a much different vantage point than Senghor’s.39 In Socé Diop’s work, Afro-Cuban music awakens the protagonist Fara to the beauty and power of his African roots and alerts him to the cultural richness and significance of the black diaspora. It accompanies him as he courts a white French woman, Jacqueline, and it underlies many of his philosophical reflections. His life in Paris would be unthinkable without it.
Socé Diop was a close associate of Senghor’s in Paris and was present at the creation of negritude. He received a scholarship to study veterinary medicine in Paris around the same time that Senghor obtained his scholarship to study literature. They studied together at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand and worked together in forming the Association of West African Students (both were among the original ten members). In 1934 Socé Diop helped Senghor and Césaire publish the shortlived journal L’Étudiant Noir. Later in his career, he was a politician and diplomat. In the 1950s he was the publisher of the important Senegalese magazine Bingo.
Mirages de Paris appeared in 1937 and is one of the earliest African novels. It is a foundational text in Senegalese literature, exploring issues such as cultural hybridity and the quest for a tropical cosmopolitanism. The book is especially significant for its explicit linkage between nightclubs, Afro-Cuban music, and Senegalese modernity. The text is a mélange of descriptions of the 1931 Colonial Exposition, philosophical discussions between Fara and his African friends, and a recounting of the troubled relationship between him and Jacqueline. It is both an African appreciation of Gustave Flaubert’s L’Éducation sentimentale and a novel of ideas, establishing a novelistic template that has been used by many other African writers, most strikingly by the Senegalese Cheikh Hamidou Kane in his L’aventure ambiguë.40 Socé Diop’s plot revolves around the experiences of Fara, a Senegalese who travels to Paris in the early 1930s. He gets a job at the Colonial Exposition and one day meets Jacqueline, a white French woman. They start dating and frequent Afro-Cuban nightclubs. Ultimately, they move in together despite her parents’ opposition to the relationship. She becomes pregnant, and problems ensue. A despondent Fara ultimately commits suicide by jumping off a bridge into the Seine.
The novel is perhaps most notable for depicting a typical evening’s entertainment at La Cabane Cubaine and for containing one of the first detailed descriptions of modern Afro-Cuban music and dance in any language (over ten pages long). Just as important, it documents the emotional response of a young Senegalese student to hearing the music, providing a unique glimpse into what the music meant for Senegalese in the 1930s. The first thing that Fara and his French girlfriend notice upon entering La Cabane Cubaine is its remarkable (for the time and place) ethnic diversity. There is an orchestra playing Latin dance music, and the dance floor is filled with couples. When the orchestra takes a break, a small Cuban combo takes the stage, performing a son number. A rumba dance display that thrills Fara completes the evening.