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 5 Introduction In a rather peripheral remark to Barber’s (1987: 100) seminal essay on Popular Arts in Africa, Frederick Cooper poses the somewhat rhetorical question “whether popular arts have a history as well as a sociology”. As suggestive and trivial Cooper’s question might appear (particularly to historians and sociologists , at least those after Montesquieu), as vital its implication is for the study of African popular culture and its (popular) branch of music studies. Cooper’s remark stems from the fallacy to present forms of African popular culture on superficial grounds by connecting them to the most recent social and political developments only, thereby implicitly evoking the (Hegelian) ghosts of a historicity and of an antecedent socio-political and musical stasis, or vacuum, from which popular culture evolved in Africa. Arguing in a similar direction, Collins & Richards (1989: 12) write, “the study of West African music suffers, in particular, from the fact that without their history the sounds are robbed of much of their significance and meaning”. For the understanding of a society’s contemporary (popular) music and of the social meanings and significance it yields and is ascribed, it is imperative to examine historical depths, temporal dimensions and developments, the paths and trails through which sounds evolved into their current, contemporary forms and meanings. As essential history is to sociologically inclined perspectives on contemporary (popular) music forms, as important it is, in turn, to conjoin the historical examination with sociological investigations. To borrow a phrase from Hugh Trevor-Roper (1969: 12), we need to run the sociological model through the dimension of time and the historical model through the dimension of (changing) social relations. With regard to the socio-historical perspective upon a society’s music, this exercise is then, primarily , a study of the so-called “social production of music” (Longhurst 2007); that is, of the contexts and modes in which music is produced, disseminated and consumed. DISCOnnections 46 Thus, before delving into the relations that mark Freetown’s contemporary society and (popular) music, in this second part I attempt to discuss, with the broadest of strokes, the history of changing social contexts and relations in which, and from which, the current relations emerged. For that I combine two objectives: On the one hand, I outline the history of major social developments that marked Freetown’s society from its earliest forms as a colony for freed slaves to the latest changes after the second post-conflict elections in 2007 and up to the “ethnographic present” of my fieldwork in Freetown in late 2009 and early 2010. On the other hand, I connect these broadly outlined social developments with the interspersed developments and changes that occurred in Freetown’s music life and which marked the city’s soundscapes during these two centuries. It is important to stress that in this second main part of this book my principal concerns are heuristic and my conclusions provisional. Rather than assuming anything definite, I aim to put down, firstly, some preliminary markers for further, more in-depth analyses, and secondly, to prepare the historical (back)grounds on (and against) which I will then discuss the contemporary scene in the following two parts. The body of literature on Freetown’s social and musical history is marked by a somewhat paradoxical relation. On the one hand, Freetown is one of the most thoroughly studied cities in Africa, in sociological perspective that is. Many successive generations of researchers have bequeathed piles of books and articles on the city’s social life, covering (more or less) meticulously the whole historical stretch of social developments from the emergence of the first settlement in the late (18th century up to the very present. Yet, astonishingly little has been researched and published on Freetown’s (popular) music. With a few exceptions – these exceptions being constituted mainly by the works of Naomi Ware (1970, (1978), Christian Horton (1985) and Wolfgang Bender (1985, 1987, 1988, 1989, 1991, 2002) – the study of (popular) music in Freetown is a desideratum. With regard to the daunting volume of sociologically oriented studies and the concomitant dearth of music-related works, I discuss only a narrow range of the sociological writings and pay more attention to the few accounts given on Freetown’s music life, which I will critically complement and update with findings from my own field research. Accordingly, my main contribution to a (sociologically informed) historiography of Freetown’s music life concerns rather recent developments from the 1960s onwards. However, by compiling notes...

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