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 6 Early developments – the 19th century Freetown society grew out of a highly eclectic conflation of people settling and being settled on the peninsula from across the Atlantic world and from the African interior. This increasingly eclectic socio-cultural assembly of “overlapping diasporas” (Lewis 1995) or “diasporas within the diaspora” (Zeleza 2005: 53), eked an equivalently eclectic pastiche of music forms. The variety that marked the emergent city’s music soundscape grew proportionally to – or, in fact, exponentially with – the first main waves of settlers arriving in the Colony from the end of the 18th to the mid-19th century. These occurred in the three main phases, yielding an ever-broadened amalgamation of sources for the subsequently evolving variety of music forms present in Freetown and for the accruing practices of conflation, mixture and segregation of people and sounds. First sounds and settlers In the beginning there was the Christian hymn. After the first, rather infelicitous initiative of British philanthropists to establish a “happy asylum” (Sharp 1820: 335) for freed slaves in 1787, in which the settlement of the “Black Poor” settlers from London was burned to the ground by a local ruler, the foundations of the Freetown colony were laid in 1792. Some eleven hundred liberated American slaves who had supported Britain in the American War of Independence, the socalled Nova Scotians, were shipped to the “Province of Freedom”. Descending from generations of black slaves in the Americas who had demerged from their African cultural heritage, the Nova Scotian settlers brought with them values, behaviours, habits and musical forms evolved in adaptation to the New World. Christianity formed the focal point for their cultural – and musical – orientation. The founding myth of Freetown well underlines the strong devotion to Western cultural patterns on which the first Freetonians build the Colony. As the story goes (Elliot 1851, in Fyfe 1964: 119-120), after arrival, the black settlers had to DISCOnnections 50 clear the bush land to build their first settlement. When the toiling was done, all the Nova Scotians assembled around the big cotton tree and began singing: Awake! and sing the song, of Moses and the Lamb Wake! every heart and every tongue To praise the Savior’s name The Day of Jubilee is come Return ye ransomed sinners home’ Henceforth, Christian music traditions had a secured place in Freetown’s music landscape. The chapels became the “vital centre of public opinion and communal action, and the preachers to a large extent the key to government” (Peterson 1969: 37). Assisted by the leagues of missionaries from Europe and the Americas, the Nova Scotians organized themselves into various church-branches – mainly Methodist, Baptist, and the Huntingdon’s Connexion (Walls 1959) – through which they promulgated God’s word in devotional harmonies of psalms and hymns for Christian worship (Ingham 1968: 319-330). Reinforced by the patronage and favour of the British administration, the life style of the Nova Scotians was soon to become the high prestige cultural pattern copied and striven for by the following groups of incoming settlers (Porter 1963: 12). In 1800, the second main group of settlers arrived. These were the Maroons, blacks who had revolted against their British masters in the West Indian island of Jamaica. The Maroons were of a different cultural mould than the Nova Scotians. Instead of psalms and hymns, they brought new styles of drumming with them. The large drums of the Maroon settlers – gomes or gombeys – became not only a main new feature in the colony’s musical life but, much later on, also in the annals of African popular music forms. Collins (1989: 221), in his genealogy of highlife music, even refers to the Maroons’ gombey drumming as the source of “Africa’s very first popular-fusion music”. As Collins argues, gombey was in fact not imported to Africa but brought back to the continent. Earlier forms of gombey were first taken to the Americas by slaves who originally came from West Africa. In the New World, gombey went through various changes in adaptation to the new environment and, after some centuries, found its way back to Africa through the resettlement of freed slaves in Freetown.1 Collins calls this process “a centuries-old trans-Atlantic musical feedback cycle” (ibid.). African musical forms fed the Americas and (black) American musical forms fed back on Africa. The emergence of popular music styles out of the African heritage in the New World (e.g. ragtime, jazz, blues, swing, soul) had thus its equivalents in...

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