by individuals and groups transforms consciousness and alters social relations. In African and Latin American studies, researchers have often connected consumption with the global expansion and penetration of a Western-dominated capitalism.6 In this line of analysis, Africans or Latin Americans become modern through their acquisition of European industrial products. Their modernity stems both from their newly conceived desire for these goods and the ways purchased items such as bicycles, furniture, and clothes change their daily lives, their self-perception, and their worldview.
Consumption can play a vital role in the creation of identities independent of the cultural meanings originally attached to specific goods. Soap, for example, may have one meaning for the European or South African producers and quite another for Zimbabwean consumers. For the manufacturers, their merchandise is a device for becoming “clean but for the Zimbabweans, the toiletries were a tool for defining and refining personhood.”7
In the Argentine sociologist Néstor García Canclini’s work, consumption can be a means for claiming “rights to difference,” enabling a group to gain recognition “as subjects with ‘valid interests, relevant values and legitimate claims.’” By consuming, we can “distinguish ourselves … and [find] ways to combine pragmatism with pleasure.”8 Canclini maintains that consumption can have political ramifications, whether intended or not. Clusters of individuals, by preferring one commodity to another, can be both part of a society and distinct from it. How and what they consume establishes their “cultural citizenship” and has an impact on their status. For Senegalese youth growing up in 1950s and 1960s Dakar, the idea of cultural citizenship galvanized their generation. Straddling the colonial/postcolonial divide, they asserted themselves culturally and politically as a generation that was both African and modern.9
A new form of sociality provided the foundation for the cultural citizenship they were advocating. The concept of sociality has a long history in Western thought. Definitions abound, from Lord Shaftsbury to Georg Simmel. The definition that best typifies the Senegalese situation comes from the anthropologist Richard Fardon’s work on Western Cameroon. Fardon explains that sociality (or as he prefers, “sociability”) “is the behaviors and attitudes anticipated in different relationships … a framework of knowledge and organization of feeling about the way people impinge upon one another.”10 Fardon makes the important point that “since sociability identifies and models personal relations, it is related both to the conceptual and moral ordering of societies.”11
By linking the emotional textures and rhythms of daily life to the organization of societies and states on a wider scale, Fardon’s model of sociability illuminates the cultural significance of Dakar’s Latin record clubs. The sociality that typified the clubs reflected the complex realities of postwar African Dakar. New French colonial policies and internal economic changes within Senegal itself reshaped the city’s social landscape. There was an expansion of Western educational opportunities and an increased rate of migration from the rural hinterland into the capital city. These developments necessitated new “frameworks of knowledge and feeling” for young Dakarois. At the very moment when the colonial authorities were slowly easing their access to evolué status, the influx of new inhabitants from the interior who were relatively unexposed to classic French culture transformed their city. Some of the new arrivals regarded the clubs as insufficiently Islamic because of their overt secularity and kept their distance. However, many of the migrants, especially those who were students in colonial schools, joined and were welcomed. Indeed, many children of migrants established their own record clubs. The sociality of the Latin record clubs enabled their members to simultaneously embrace the culture of the wider Atlantic world represented by their European education while affirming their Africanité in solidarity with their newly urban Senegalese neighbors.
This sociality also furthered the growth of a Senegalese civic society embedded in local practice but reflecting French republican ideals. In the English-speaking world the state and civic society are separate. Civic society provides a space for individual liberty, and the state legally guarantees that freedom.12 In French republicanism, by contrast, the state is an extension of civil society. What happens in civic society shapes the state and is of great significance. In this model, civic society emerges out of citizen participation in many different realms, the cultural and social as well as the political. Indeed, “sociability and citizenship [presuppose] each other.”13 Citizenship doesn’t just entail involvement with political institutions. The correcte attitudes and behaviors arising out of intensive participation in the public sphere are also essential in defining citizenship. In fact, in the Francophone tradition, cultural citizenship lies at the heart of the republican project.
From this perspective, the Senegalese record clubs as voluntary cultural and social associations had an implicit political dimension. The behaviors and mentalités the clubs fostered were similar to the republican virtues of being immersed in public life and bringing an informed, critical perspective to significant issues facing society. By creating the record clubs, the young Senegalese Latin music enthusiasts were establishing new patterns of consumption and new models of sociality. In so doing, they were rehearsing citizenship in a free African polity, organized around republican principles. However, in order for these changes to occur, Dakar in the 1940s and 1950s had to develop the physical, economic, and social infrastructures that could sustain cultural enterprises like the record clubs.
URBAN GROWTH AND CULTURAL CHANGE IN POSTWAR DAKAR, 1940S–1960S
Dakar, like many other urban areas in sub-Saharan Africa, experienced rapid growth from the 1940s to the 1960s. According to some estimates, between 1945 and 1960 the city doubled its population. Already by 1950, approximately one out of every ten Senegalese lived in Dakar.14 Such growth led to improvements in the city’s infrastructure and altered its urban identity. Dakar developed into one of the major cities south of the Sahara and the de facto cultural capital of Francophone Africa. The city became one of the major transportation centers of Africa in the 1950s, the focal point of far-flung sea, rail, and air networks. Although other African metropolises like Lagos and Kinshasa surpassed it as a business and industrial hub, Dakar’s markets and shops were filled with consumer goods of all types, sold at a price an increasing number of African customers could afford. It was indisputably the educational capital of Francophone Africa. Its population was sophisticated and multiethnic. In 1945, 43 percent of the city’s African population was Wolof; 13 percent was Tukolor; and the remaining 44 percent consisted of sizable communities of Pulaar, Serer, Cabo Verdeans, Hassaniya-speakers, and Bamana. It is likely that the city’s ethnic composition preserved this diversity ten years later.15 In addition, there were thirty-eight thousand French residents and a large concentration of Lebanese and Syrians. With its large expatriate population and its sizable communities of migrants from many parts of West Africa, Dakar had become one of the continent’s most cosmopolitan and culturally complex cities.
From the time the Free French under Charles de Gaulle wrested control of Dakar from the Vichy regime in 1943, Dakar’s economy began to revive from the doldrums of the Depression and the early years of World War II. The Free French, knowing that the city had one of the best natural harbors in Africa, undertook improvements of the port’s infrastructure. Simultaneously the Dakar airport, established in 1937, became a major refueling stop for air traffic to Africa and the Allies stationed large numbers of French and US troops in the city. The soldiers freely spent money, stimulating local commerce; but even more important, the colonial authorities strengthened the manufacturing capacity of Dakar by creating import-substitute industries.16 By 1945 Dakar had become “a naval and air base of global importance”17 and a crucial center of trade and manufacturing.
After the war Dakar developed even more rapidly. Always wary of the British, de Gaulle became concerned in 1945 that the British-controlled city of Accra in the then Gold Coast (contemporary Ghana) was overshadowing Dakar as the leading port in West Africa. To counteract this perceived threat, the French leader resolved to make the city into an imperial showcase through enlightened urban planning
