Senghor shifted from his previously ambivalent attitude toward the music to a more actively censorious stance once he became head of state. He sought to erase from his personal history his early involvement with Afro-Cuban culture. Where once he was at least willing to write about his bohemian past, with its wild nights at La Cabane Cubaine, he increasingly appeared embarrassed by it. From the postwar period onward, in his essays and poetry, Senghor replaced the few references to Afro-Cuban music with abstract paeans to rhythm and dance and passing nods to jazz. In his autobiographical musings and the reminiscences of his friends and allies during this era, Afro-Cuban music receives scarcely a nod. Senghor’s close associate Birago Diop’s four-volume autobiography, which documents both their sojourns in Paris, contains few mentions of Afro-Cuban music.38 A pervasive silence has come to envelop the important role of Afro-Cuban music in Senghor’s cultural and political development.
However, many of his countrymen did not share his increasingly negative attitude about the cultural significance of Latin music. For them, Cuban music was far from disreputable. On the contrary, they saw it as integral to the embodiment of modernity that was culturally suitable for their society. Ousmane Socé Diop’s Mirages de Paris, for example, looks at the relationship between Afro-Cuban music and modernity from a much different vantage point than Senghor’s.39 In Socé Diop’s work, Afro-Cuban music awakens the protagonist Fara to the beauty and power of his African roots and alerts him to the cultural richness and significance of the black diaspora. It accompanies him as he courts a white French woman, Jacqueline, and it underlies many of his philosophical reflections. His life in Paris would be unthinkable without it.
Socé Diop was a close associate of Senghor’s in Paris and was present at the creation of negritude. He received a scholarship to study veterinary medicine in Paris around the same time that Senghor obtained his scholarship to study literature. They studied together at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand and worked together in forming the Association of West African Students (both were among the original ten members). In 1934 Socé Diop helped Senghor and Césaire publish the shortlived journal L’Étudiant Noir. Later in his career, he was a politician and diplomat. In the 1950s he was the publisher of the important Senegalese magazine Bingo.
Mirages de Paris appeared in 1937 and is one of the earliest African novels. It is a foundational text in Senegalese literature, exploring issues such as cultural hybridity and the quest for a tropical cosmopolitanism. The book is especially significant for its explicit linkage between nightclubs, Afro-Cuban music, and Senegalese modernity. The text is a mélange of descriptions of the 1931 Colonial Exposition, philosophical discussions between Fara and his African friends, and a recounting of the troubled relationship between him and Jacqueline. It is both an African appreciation of Gustave Flaubert’s L’Éducation sentimentale and a novel of ideas, establishing a novelistic template that has been used by many other African writers, most strikingly by the Senegalese Cheikh Hamidou Kane in his L’aventure ambiguë.40 Socé Diop’s plot revolves around the experiences of Fara, a Senegalese who travels to Paris in the early 1930s. He gets a job at the Colonial Exposition and one day meets Jacqueline, a white French woman. They start dating and frequent Afro-Cuban nightclubs. Ultimately, they move in together despite her parents’ opposition to the relationship. She becomes pregnant, and problems ensue. A despondent Fara ultimately commits suicide by jumping off a bridge into the Seine.
The novel is perhaps most notable for depicting a typical evening’s entertainment at La Cabane Cubaine and for containing one of the first detailed descriptions of modern Afro-Cuban music and dance in any language (over ten pages long). Just as important, it documents the emotional response of a young Senegalese student to hearing the music, providing a unique glimpse into what the music meant for Senegalese in the 1930s. The first thing that Fara and his French girlfriend notice upon entering La Cabane Cubaine is its remarkable (for the time and place) ethnic diversity. There is an orchestra playing Latin dance music, and the dance floor is filled with couples. When the orchestra takes a break, a small Cuban combo takes the stage, performing a son number. A rumba dance display that thrills Fara completes the evening. Later, Fara holds forth on why he prefers Afro-Cuban music to jazz. His discourse establishes a framework for the Senegalese appreciation of Afro-Cuban music that remains relevant to the present day: “Rumba was softer than jazz. The latter has a charm and fascination that was measured in kilowatts. Dizzying contagious, jazz had a direct effect on the nerves like an electric current while rumba echoed with the heart. When jazz is unleashed it evoked planes taking off, the frenetic turning of a transatlantic propeller. Rumba evoked a black girl swinging in her hammock at nightfall, rocked by the plaintive sounds of a guitar.”41
Fara makes it clear that he considers both jazz and Afro-Cuban music emblematic of modernity. However, for him jazz is cerebral, almost neurological. It is the music of a frenetic industrial society, powered by the most advanced technology. In contrast, Afro-Cuban music fits a developing tropical world: soft, soulful, and evocative but still modern. It appeals to the heart as well as the head and culturally straddles continents. Revealingly, jazz doesn’t strike him as particularly “black music,” while Afro-Cuban music does. Jazz may be the product of the black diaspora, but Fara implies that it has only limited “pull” outside of Europe and North America. Afro-Cuban music, he thinks, could gain popularity with a potentially much wider public in the black world. The image of a black woman in a hammock resonates in many more African cultures than the metaphor of airplanes taking off. As the subsequent history of Afro-Cuban music in Senegal and Africa demonstrates, Fara’s words were prophetic. Outside of South Africa, jazz has been a cult music appreciated by small coteries in Africa’s capital cities, while Afro-Cuban music has gone on to be the foundation of many African nations’ popular music.42
In other respects as well, Socé Diop’s novel foretells the future significance of Afro-Cuban music in Senegal. The explanation the book offers for the allure of Afro-Cuban music for Senegalese abroad in the 1930s still holds true for many Senegalese at home today. Socé Diop’s protagonist in the 1930s and the salsa musicians in 2003 express their fascination with Afro-Cuban music in much the same terms. For both groups, Afro-Cuban music, the product of méttisage, bridges the diaspora, bringing Africa and the Caribbean closer together culturally.43 Both groups also share an intense emotional connection to Afro-Cuban music. Perhaps most strikingly, both groups agree that the emphasis on dance and movement inherent in Afro-Cuban music promotes a type of modernity appropriate for Senegal.
A DISTANT MIRROR: LISTENING TO SENEGALESE LISTENING TO AFRO-CUBAN MUSIC
Cuban Music truly belongs to us.
Camou Yandè, sonero and conguero 44
When asked to describe their relationship with Afro-Cuban music, Senegalese Latin music connoisseurs and musicians respond by declaring that Cuban music is deeply pleasurable, emotionally direct, and aesthetically powerful. It is important both as a source of enjoyment and for what it signifies and symbolizes. Afro-Cuban music for them has been representative of a cosmopolitanism that is rooted in the black internationalism of the diaspora without undermining “local” norms and aspirations. It also has inculcated “correcte” modern social behaviors such as self-control and a ritualized respect for women. As a consequence, in addition to constituting a highly satisfying form of leisure, the music has been a guide to how an urbane citoyen should behave in public in a modern African state in terms of etiquette and personal style. This section explores what Senegalese have heard in Cuban music beneath its evocative melodies and compelling rhythms. Though its focus is on musicians, broadcasters, and Latin music connoisseurs, the sentiments expressed are shared by nearly anyone in Senegal who listens and dances to Afro-Cuban music.45
For many individuals in preindependence Senegal, listening and dancing to Afro-Cuban music anchored them more securely in the cultural universe of the black Atlantic. When asked why Afro-Cuban music appealed to them, Senegalese repeatedly stressed its diasporic dimension. By linking Senegal with distinguished artistic expression in the Caribbean, the music
