Roots in Reverse. Richard M. Shain

       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