Playing with Identities in Contemporary Music in Africa (review)

Following the anthology Same and Other: Negotiating African Identity in Cultural Production (2001), edited by Maria Eriksson Baaz and Mai Palmberg, this volume is similarly centered on exploring the ways Africans communicate ideas about themselves to each other and the outside world, yet focuses on the ways in which Africans use music to do so. As a medium of identity making, "musics"—as Kirkegaard invites readers to consider in the introduction—offer a wellspring of material on which to study the social, political, and economic issues that concern African musicians and audiences (49).

The volume offers thoughtful reflection on musics produced within the African continent: Cape Verde, Senegal, Ivory Coast, Ghana, Nigeria, Uganda, Tanzania, Zimbabwe, and South Africa, as well as musical production between Africa, the African diaspora, and the West. Most interesting, the concise chapters (ten to fifteen pages each) bring readers up to date on the African musics many are familiar with (Senegalese mbalax, Nigerian juju, Tanzanian taarab, and Ghanaian highlife) by introducing the new ways that music is being played by contemporary African artists. For example, Christopher Waterman describes the spectacular repertoire of contemporary Nigerian musician Bisade Ologunde (aka Lagbaja), whose music combines bata and dundun drum rhythms, palmwine guitar music, and highlife with jazz, soul, hip-hop, and klezmer. In another chapter, Johannes Brusila deconstructs the impetus behind the concept "modern traditional," which Virginia Mukwesha of Zimbabwe uses to describe the mbira (thumb piano) music she has recorded through what Brusila refers to as "mediaization," a process used to make it more marketable to Western listeners (39). Following in this vein is Annemette Kirkegaard's analysis of a recent collaboration between two Tanzanian taarab groups, Egyptian Musical Club and Sisi Kwa Sisi, and the Norwegian techno group Acid Queen. Kirkegaard's final critique of the crossover product, Tranzania, exposes the fact that the seemingly well-intentioned Norwegians, who explain the project in the CD's cover notes as one geared toward helping the Tanzanian musicians, do not credit their African colleagues on five of the tracks that feature Swahili lyrics and taarab melodies.

In a chapter that similarly looks at the potential pitfalls of the transition to techno-music, John Collins discusses two new musical styles that have become popular among Ghana's contemporary youth, burgher-highlife and hip-life. These forms of electronically generated techno-pop have created the latest music-inspired generational divide—this one between older-aged highlife listeners and young people devoted to techno-music. Although this analysis clearly identifies the criticism this new studio-based, computerized music has received among Ghanaians (it puts local musicians out of work, is a cheap imitation of Western techno-music, and emphasizes romantic love rather than important sociopolitical issues), Collins suggests that the phenomenon may fade, creating a backlash such as the "roots" revolution that trailed the disco era in the United States and paving the way for the world music craze.

The flow of musical inspiration between the African diaspora and the Continent is explored in several articles in the volume. Ndiouga Adrien Benga discusses the evolution of the hip-hop movement among Senegalese youth from 1988 to the present in Dakar, where thousands of rap groups (2,500 in 2002) are performing a distinct form of rap Benga refers to as the "Senegalese Touch" (81). Although it took a decade for Senegalese rap to "free itself from American and French patterns," Benga explains that Senegalese rappers draw from an oral literature that has been cultivated by preachers, storytellers, and praise-singers and make use of contemporary idioms in several languages (Wolof, Arabic, French, English, and others) to get their antiestablishment messages across (81). Indeed, Benga identifies rap as the medium through which a diverse population of young, marginalized, Senegalese urbanites identify the problems they face (unemployment, school failure, AIDS, violence, and political disenfranchisement) and demand fundamental change. These socioeconomic consequences of colonialism and racial discrimination so truthfully characterize the experience shared by Africans and African Americans (including Caribbeans...