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 11 Conclusion – beyond the ephemerality of style If we are to approach Freetown society by the use of such a heuristic device as the long-termed evolutions of its changing (popular) music styles and social relations (as I just presumed to do), the city presents itself as somewhat consistently constituted by contradictions. The initial pathway for that was laid out in the founding of Freetown. It is a city firmly embedded in and connected to (black) Atlantic history and culture (or rather: histories and cultures). Arisen from allegedly philanthropic intents and utopias of freedom, Freetown’s roots were laid in the violent translocations of tens of thousands of dispossessed people. In Freetown’s founding history, figments of “enlightened” imaginations unveil the dialectics of hopes, deceptions and miscarries brought about by the spirits of (Western) modernity’s rational thoughts Horkheimer and Adorno (2002) are speaking about. And yet, in its idiosyncratic amalgam of new practices and institutions, of new ways of living, and of new forms of malaise, Freetown – and its first, truly “inveterated” citizens: the Creoles – carved their very own place in the kaleidoscope of alternative or “multiple modernities” (Taylor 2002: 91). With the turn of the 20th century and the concomitant turn of the city’s demographic relations, “upcountry people” added new dimensions to Freetown’s socio-cultural composition and orientation and created new links with its West African interiors. Freetown’s alternative modernity slowly transformed into an alter-native modernity, transfiguring new and old connections and disconnections between the Upper Guinean forests of upcountry Sierra Leone and the (black) Atlantic worlds straddled between the coasts of Britain, the Americas, Nigeria and beyond. In these states of constant flux and transition, Freetown’s (new and old) citizens were (and are) continually compelled to find new ways to live with each other, to re-structure their lives in changing social, political and economic environments, and to re-negotiate new identities for themselves and for the place Chapter 11: Conclusion – beyond the ephemerality of style 109 and space they share and create, that is the city. Freetonians were (and are) thus constantly compelled to redefine what it means to be a Freetonian. And “being a Freetonian” almost inevitably eludes definition, at least a definition that does not accomplish the feat of consistently integrating contradictions. “Being a Creole” is maybe what comes closest to this feat. Asked about “what it is today to be a Creole”, the late Freetonian comedian Chris During gave the following, consistently contradictive definition of it: Today it’s just a name; but not a form, not a way of life. Creoledom and Creole identity is (…) you should know how you came about it; what you are; what it is all about. It’s a way of life. In short, it’s not the dress you wear; it’s not the book-learning. It’s a way of life; it has it’s own (…) like I asked a chap the last time. I said, “As a Creole, what would you do if a bereavement and a wedding should take place simultaneously in a Creole home, what would you do?” He said, “Well (…) since the bereavement has taken place, we’ll postpone the wedding.” Well, he was looking at the sad part of it. But the real Creole would not postpone the wedding; they wouldn’t even announce the death of the member of the household; they would go about their wedding. And after everything is finished then they would announce the death. That’s a way of life. Other people have their own way of doing it. But with the real Creole, they’ll hide it; they’ll go about everything. (In an interview with Heribert Hinzen, March 3, 1987; in Hinzen et al. 1987: 337) Contemporary Creoledom, or “Freetoniandom”, is: going about everything but still having it your own way; being not a way of life but being a way of life; having your cake and eating it but still going hungry. Freetown’s music is in line with these ambivalences constitutive of the city’s diverse folks and character(s). As it is, there is no “Freetown music” as such. All music in Freetown is Freetonian music, but none of it is of a “genuinely” Freetonian kind. Freetown’s music is, so to say, essentially anti-essential, an expressive denominator and sonic signifié of Freetown’s genuine diversity and its implicit contradictions, which, by their very “nature”, deny any common denominator. The broad and blurred notion...

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