Communities of sentiment, though, as Appadurai has observed “are capable of moving from shared imagination to collective action.”63 This potential capacity is in part responsible for this group of music lovers’ often tense and complex relationship with the Senegalese state, even though the music has never been associated in Senegal with a political position. When Senghor became head of state, negritude became the semiofficial cultural policy of Senegal until the 1980s, a period coinciding with government neglect of Afro-Cuban music. Those in power during this era regarded the Afro-Cuban music community as being potentially at odds with negritude. By depriving it of state patronage and recognition, the Senegalese government inhibited the community of Afro-Cuban listeners from developing their aesthetic preferences into a political ideology.
This official disregard did little to quiet debates about what type of modernity was best suited for Senegalese society. In new contexts with new participants, discussions continued, informed by Senghor and Socé Diop’s differing models of negritude. Afro-Cuban music lay at the core of both these models; conspicuous in one case for its absence and in the other for its animating presence. In the 1950s Senegalese urban youth took up as their generation’s bandera both Afro-Cuban music and a form of negritude closer to Socé Diop’s version. This mixture made Senghor uncomfortable, but he was powerless to prevent it. For him, the path to full cultural citizenship, both domestically and internationally, involved securing an esteemed position in the global “republic of letters,” requiring that he mask his interest in Afro-Cuban music. In the 1950s and 1960s, however, for many youthful Senegalese the struggle for full cultural citizenship entailed engaging in new patterns of consumption and mastering new forms of sociability. For this generation, Afro-Cuban music continues to embody modern sociability in a unique and powerful way.
THREE
Son and Sociality
Afro-Cuban Music, Gender, and Cultural Citizenship, 1950s–1960s
Where there is consumption there is pleasure, and where there is pleasure there is agency.
Arjun Appadurai 1
Mbelekete was a well-known figure in the Kinshasa (Léopoldville) of the early 1950s, despite his lack of any particular trade or talent. He stopped traffic with his acrobatic stunts on his unicycle. He delighted in cycling into areas where Congolese normally were unwelcome by the Belgian colonial state and was famous for circling around stalled traffic at busy Kinshasa intersections. Occasionally Mbelekete would take it upon himself to direct traffic, much to the amazement of his fellow Kinois. Mbelekete became a fashion leader and tastemaker in Kinshasa before his premature death in the mid-1960s as a result of a traffic accident. His attendance at a club where a band was playing always ensured a full house. Indeed, his freewheeling attitude toward colonial authority influenced such youths as the famous musician Luambo “Franco” Makiadi. Fifty years after his death, Congolese from his generation still celebrate Mbelekete as the “No. 1 Kinois,” an avatar of modernity and an author of the Kinois urban style that has so attracted international attention.2
Mbelekete’s antics, using modern products like bicycles in a culturally transgressive manner, were not unique in postcolonial Africa. This chapter looks at how in Senegal urban youth similarly rehearsed “modern” identities by purchasing newly accessible goods like radios, sunglasses, and Western clothes and listening to and dancing to recorded music. These young Senegalese were less socially disruptive than their counterparts elsewhere in Africa, such as the “Buffalo Bills” of Kinshasa or the “cowboys” of Enugu, Nigeria. However, they were just as culturally significant. Starting in the 1950s, young men in Dakar and other communities congregated in courtyards or small sitting rooms to drink tea and listen to Afro-Cuban music on portable phonographs.
These casual gatherings rapidly crystallized into clubs with distinctive identifying names, large collections of Afro-Cuban music, and lengthy meetings. As the clubs grew, they staged elaborate parties. Clubs initially vied with one another over who had the most current Cuban discs. Over time, though, competition increasingly revolved around perceived expertise and the ability to project a distinguished mien. What started out as the pursuit of sociality evolved into new ways of being in the world that departed from both the dominant local and colonial French models.
These informal associations of urban youth, like their counterparts in Nigeria, Angola, and Tanzania, constituted innovative ways of defining masculinity in Africa, “fueling the imagination of nation” in a rising generation.3 As was the case elsewhere in Africa, Senegalese record clubs grew out of the coming together of new gender constructions, patterns of consumption, and imagining of communities. However, while young Dakarois men longed for the same prestige goods and were preoccupied with the same issues of cultural “sovereignty” as their counterparts elsewhere in Africa, their reformulation of manhood revolved around different axes. Reflecting local cultural practice, their modern masculinity emphasized sociality over aggression and cosmopolitanism over ethnic or regional particularism. As a consequence, in place of public displays of male power typical of Enugu and Kinshasa, Dakarois engaged in semisecluded enactments of elegance and sophistication. Rather than carve out alternative zones of male refuge and withdrawal like the musseque clubs in colonial Luanda, Dakar’s young men created arenas where they prepared for future societal leadership roles, enlarging social networks through demonstrating the latest Latin dance moves.
The Senegalese clubs were especially significant in how they pioneered modern social behaviors for men. Members at all times had to be correcte. In Senegalese terms, this word has multiple meanings and dimensions. It refers to neat and fashionable clothes, a punctilious concern with etiquette, flawless self-discipline, and a general air of refinement. Together, these qualities denote an individual with an unblemished moral reputation, as internally clean as he is externally elegant. Whether consciously or not, club members were using Afro-Cuban music to fuse elements of “traditional” Wolof/Serer/Tukolor cultures with French bourgeois mores to devise a new standard of behavior for a modern Senegal.
The clubs themselves were a bricolage of French, Cuban, and Senegalese social institutions. The club members overtly appropriated the French salon and soirée, for example. They were not the first Senegalese to do this.4 However, by holding salons and soirées far removed from the elite precincts, democratizing them, and adding Spanish to French as the languages of “high” culture, they were departing from tradition. From Cuba, the young Dakarois borrowed the idea of the rumba session in which music and dance enhanced solidarity and congealed new identities. From their own cultures, the Afro-Cuban club members recontextualized age grades and initiation ceremonies and in a altered form made them relevant to urban life. By linking expressive culture with modernity and generational differentiation, they provided fresh frameworks for thinking and feeling. These linkages created modern ways of associating with one another and their community that the club members felt were congruent with a progressive society.
CONSUMPTION, SOCIALITY, AND CULTURAL CITIZENSHIP
The record clubs thus served as workshops where Senegalese youth of the late colonial era could experiment with new forms of sociality that drew on local, Caribbean, and French traditions. For these youths, this new form of sociality with its transnational basis and its emphasis on tolerance and refinement provided a pathway to modernity that bypassed the usual colonial circuits. Consumption was central to this new notion of sociality. The young Senegalese in the Afro-Cuban music clubs consumed goods like phonographs and records to encode popular experience into self-consciously “modern” cultural forms. For them, “consumption was good for thinking,” for conceptualizing and enacting a form of cultural citizenship that would enable them to be modern and African in a postcolonial world.5
Ever since Karl Marx made commodity fetishism a centerpiece in his analysis of how
