Readings in African Popular Culture (review)

If one wishes to witness the thriving of African popular culture, one needs to do no more than open one’s eyes and ears when traveling through any region on the continent. This became obvious to me when I was traveling from the beachfront through town and then out onto the freeway in Durban, South Africa. On the columns of bridges, along concrete walls, and in taxi ranks, there is an explosion of brightly colored African paintings and mosaics that are difficult to miss. They give the impression of being the work of a teenage street artist who managed to trade in his spray cans for professional paint, but at the same time are professional and “deep” enough to be sold at a high price in an art gallery. The flaming pythons, African totem poles, Ndebele prints, and blazing suns that appear in the depictions are good local examples of what Karin Barber refers to in the introduction to Readings in African Popular Culture as the “undefined space” (1) of African arts where works do not easily fit the binary paradigm of “traditional” and “elite” or “modern.” It is such works that form the subjects for the readings in this book. The readings are reprints from a variety of journals, including Africa, American Ethnologist, passages, Ethnomusicology, Journal of Southern African Studies, Journal of Modern African Studies, and Popular Music.

Barber draws her understanding of “popular” from Pierre Bourdieu, who refers to its ambiguity as a result of its being “inscribed with the history of political and cultural struggles” (qtd. in Barber 3). Her general cultural studies perspective relocates the articles reproduced within this broad interdisciplinary framework and includes an excellent discussion of high/low culture debates, as initiated within the Frankfurt School. In the current context, this paradigm recuperates the earlier studies reproduced here into the contemporary condition, including postmodern relationships whereby global, homogenizing forces are combined with local, national ones (e.g., Erlmann’s paper on Graceland). Barber’s anthology is a valuable collection of readings, as popular forms of expression (e.g., women’s romance fiction) have been largely ignored by academia. Yet it is these popular expressions that reveal the most about the actual lives, relationships, and consciousness of peoples living on the African continent. As Barber tells us, “[T]hese texts and genres seem to be sites of emergent consciousness” (6).

Variety is important, especially in the context of popular cultures throughout an entire continent that therefore emanates from a wide spectrum of subjectivities, societies, and locations. There is, however, too large a difference in the intellectual level of certain articles. In Olatunde Bayo Lawuyi’s “The World of the Yoruba Taxi Driver,” the argument is not always clearly evident, as in the following example:

And in so far as inequality seems to exist among the various social strata of modern and traditional structures, political consciousness has derived from oppression, control, exploitation and paternalism. The resultant contradictions became a key element in political activism.

(146)

This statement, for example, is left unexplained. Further, the analysis of the vehicle slogans, the objective of the paper, seems to be secondary to a rudimentary description of the lives of taxi drivers. In contrast is Veit Erlmann’s detailed study, “Africa Civilized, Africa Uncivilized: Local Culture, World System and South African Music,” which is simultaneously theoretical and musically and historically very sophisticated.

Barber’s introduction points out that when Western paradigms, for example, those involving the “high” and “low” culture distinctions, are “transplanted to Africa [they] turn around on their axes and reconfigure themselves into an unstable, almost unusable paradigm” (4). This warning is timeous in alerting readers to the changing perspectives of history, paradigm, and interpretation. Perspective is also an issue when examining any of the translations from oral literature, reproduced in some chapters. It should be borne in mind that translations are interpretations that depend to a large extent on the personal experiences, world views, and understandings of the translator. The translations of the Lesotho migrants’ songs [End Page...