demonstrated the global reach and prestige of African civilization, especially in the Atlantic tropical world, while circumventing dominance by US popular culture. In Senegal, consumers always have viewed Afro-Cuban music as black music, originating in Africa. Balla Sidibè, a leading sonero and timbale player, stated: “Everything that comes from there [Cuba] comes from Africa. It’s the slaves. The great Cuban musicians—they’re black or mulattos.”46
Djibril Gaby Gaye, a radio and television broadcaster, made much the same point: “Black people are the foundation of Latin American music and we feel that.”47 Mbaye Seck, a guitarist who played with celebrated saxophonist and bandleader Dexter Johnson in the 1960s, like many Senegalese asserted that he finds himself reflected in the music in a diasporic mirror: “Even though it’s not sung in any [Senegalese] national language, it’s the melody that people like. In my opinion, I find there’re African roots in salsa. Africans feel salsa like they feel African music. It interests everybody.”48
Antoine Dos Reis, a retired journalist and radio personality, further developed this diasporic line of thinking: “This is not a music that came out of nothing. It was transplanted to Cuba, Brazil and other places from its native land. So this music came back to us. When you hear this music, you really feel something, the Africanness. This music is not foreign to us.”49
Pierre Gomis, a Latin music radio announcer, perhaps put it most succinctly: “In Afro-Cuban music, I find my roots.”50
For a portion of the Senegalese Afro-Cuban music public, the music has linked Senegal with other tropical societies like Cuba that face somewhat similar challenges of cultural and social development. This group views both Senegal and Cuba as products of cultural méttisage: a mixing of European and African cultural materials. For these listeners, Afro-Cuban music exemplifies a cultural “counterpoint” that illuminates a path to modernity. It enables its Senegalese audience to celebrate African civilization’s contributions to world history without lapsing into cultural chauvinism. This group regards cultural “purity” as an illusion. Instead, they believe a “modern” society selectively blends elements from a number of global “traditions.” By orienting themselves toward black Atlantic nations such as Cuba (and to a lesser extent Brazil), they have been able to practice their own form of cultural nationalism, simultaneously rooted in the African diaspora and in an expansive cosmopolitanism. Pierre Gomis, for example, declared: “In Afro-Cuban music … there’s the rhythmic inspiration of Africa, French dancing and the Spanish language. There’s nothing that can rival it. You rediscover yourself in this music—whether you’re in Havana, New York or here [Dakar].”51
Orchestre Baobab’s Rudy Gomis said to the researcher Aleysia Whitmore: “We needed something that wasn’t our folklore but that was close to our folklore. That’s why cha-cha-chá came here to Africa.… Before you could go to a bar and you danced tango, waltz, pasa doble. It was too white, too toubab.”52
Pascal Dieng, who was a singer with the group Super Cayor for many years and now leads his own ensemble, articulated why the cultural mélange of Afro-Cuban music is so important for many Senegalese: “Afro-Cuban music is a music of blacks and whites. It’s a music of méttisage. With salsa, there’s no apartheid. It’s for whites and blacks. Our grandparents who left Africa for slavery in the Americas—they sang in the sugar cane field. They mixed with white people so salsa is a music that mixes and joins white skin and black skin.”53
For the generation that came of age in the 1950s and 1960s, those who could dance well to Afro-Cuban music gained a reputation for cultural refinement. Dance for this group has been more than just social leisure. Along with expertise in Latin music, it has been a means for achieving social distinction, accumulating social capital, and embodying modernity. For this generation of Senegalese, Afro-Cuban dancing is modernity in motion. The late El Hadj Amadou Ndoye, a professor of Hispanic literature at Université Cheikh Anta Diop in Dakar, recalls: “Dancing and Cuban music go together.… Ibrahima Fall—he became Minister of Foreign Affairs—we were students then—he was a great dancer. There was a contest to see who was the best dancer. He was Dean of the Law School, a great intellectual—and he won a bunch of those dance contests. It [Afro-Cuban music] is, in fact, associated with modernity, class, education. It’s urban, modern and it goes with what’s chic and the latest style.”54
Many Senegalese of this generation that straddles the colonial and postcolonial eras associate the fluid steps and swaying motion of Afro-Cuban dance styles with a modernity that they have found culturally comfortable. The cabaret singer Aminata Laye remarked: “I started dancing to salsa music. That was the beginning of my loving the music—the rhythm. Whether it’s two-step, three step, four step—you feel at ease. There’s less noise in the music.”55
Mas Diallo, a radio announcer of Afro-Cuban music, has had a similar response to the music: “I love salsa and I find it’s one of the best musics. For the very simple reason, I choose salsa because it’s accessible and flexible (souple). As a music, it has no equal.”56
Senegalese from this generation of the 1950s and 1960s have viewed Afro-Cuban dancing as dignified and respectable as well as modern. Indeed, because it emphasizes proper comportment and courtesy toward women, many see it as having a moral dimension. The guitarist Mbaye Seck observed: “Everyone dances not only because of the rhythms—it’s the morals. It’s their [Afro-Cuban music] calm morals. They’re sensible morals. It’s a music of deep feeling and everyone loves it.”57
Seck’s observations about why so many Senegalese have loved Afro-Cuban music points to another reason for its enduring popularity: its role as a catalyst for creating a “community of sentiment” for Senegalese “entering modernity” in the last half of the twentieth century. The anthropologist Arjun Appadurai argued in Modernity at Large that mass media have been especially effective in fostering the formation of such communities. Through film, sports, or, in the case of many nations in Africa, music, “a group … begins to imagine and feel things together.”58 In Senegal, a shared enthusiasm for Afro-Cuban music has allowed the generation that came into its own after independence to coalesce and create its own cultural identity. The singer and bandleader Pape Fall commented, “when I listen to Cuban music, I feel there is a part of me in that music,”59 an experience shared by many others in the Senegalese Afro-Cuban music public. The guitarist Baye Sy talked of his engagement with Afro-Cuban music in similar terms: “To love something is a sensation. You listen to something and it touches you and you don’t even know why. As soon as I heard this music, right away I loved it.”60
Nicolas Menheim, a sonero and bandleader, has an equally emotionally charged relationship with Afro-Cuban music: “We identify with this music. It’s almost as if it was in the water.”61 Cheikh “Charles” Sow, the late writer and librarian, also pointed to the emotional immediacy of Afro-Cuban music and its ability to create “communities of sentiment”: “It’s something that people sense right away. People feel it spontaneously regardless of the fact that it comes from far away. It’s not the same thing with jazz. People love it but it’s, let’s say, something intellectual or for people who have lived a long time in France. It’s not a music that is as instantly appreciated … I don’t even understand why people love it so much. Old people love Cuban music and so do young people.”62
Sow’s statement demonstrates that for the Senegalese of his generation (those who reached adulthood in the 1950s), involvement with Afro-Cuban music was not primarily cerebral. It was not just an exercise in salon cultural politics or an intellectual gesture. Instead, it entailed a profound emotional and, through dance, physical connection with the Hispanic cultures of the African diaspora, the méttisage/mestizaje of the Caribbean and a modernity as much based in the Atlantic tropical world as in the cooler climate of Western Europe. It engendered a community of sentiment based on lived experience that
