the completion of this project. Yahya Fall is a legend in the Senegalese music world. A renowned guitarist, he also has superb managerial and human relations skills. He was uncannily quick in grasping my research goals and methods and seemed to have a better idea of where my work was heading at times than I did. He taught me a great deal about music, Senegalese culture, and life. Getting to know and work with him and Dr. Sidibé was an unanticipated dividend of undertaking this research. My profound thanks to them both.
In addition, I am grateful to the following businesses, individuals, and institutions for their permission to reproduce texts and images in this book: Ken Braun of Stern’s Music for the Africando CD cover; Art Resources and the Agence Photographique de la Reunion des Musees Nationaux for the Brassai photograph; the University Press of Virginia for the Senghor poem “Comme Je Passais” in its English translation by Melvin Dixon; and Editions Seuil for the original in French.
I owe a great debt to my adopted family: Hob, Jane, and Woodie Broun. In high school, Hob shared my enthusiasm for the music of Eddie Palmieri and Willie Colon; later, in the 1980s, he introduced me to the music of Laba Sosseh. We were close friends until his tragically early death. His mother and father, Jane and Woodie, became my surrogate parents in my twenties. Until they died, they cheered me on, offered me endless hospitality at their home in Woodstock, New York, and even gave me crucial financial support. Their lives embodied the qualities that so many Senegalese admire: warmth, intellectual erudition, dignity, integrity, and generosity.
Finally, like all authors, but perhaps more than most, I have to thank my family. My daughters, Sam and Abbie, embraced Senegalese life during their year abroad and made many friends. As they have become adults, they have lovingly kept my spirits up during the many years of this project and always been great sounding boards for my ideas and arguments. I know they are relieved that the book is finished. My wife, Marcy Schwartz, willingly sacrificed her own research on Latin American literature to come and live in Dakar. Though she despaired of my idiosyncrasies as a salsa dancer, she still accompanied me occasionally on my 1:00 a.m. forays to Chez Iba. She earned the respect and affection of every Senegalese who crossed her path. She has been my partner in everything, and this book would not exist without her love, humor, zest, emotional succor, intellectual acumen, and incomparable linguistic prowess. To her, I owe more than I can express.
NOTE ON SPELLING OF SENEGALESE NAMES
Transcription of names from Senegalese languages and Arabic into Roman script can be imprecise. As a result, it is not unusual for Senegalese names to have inconsistent spellings. I have incorporated these variations in my text.
INTRODUCTION
Sound Track for a Black Atlantic
If a traveler goes to Cuba today to search for the burial sites of such renowned Afro-Cuban musicians as the bandleader and singer Beny Moré, the classic sonero Abelardo Barrosso, or the flutist Pancho Bravo, they will find beautiful stone markers for the graves, only recently erected. If they were to examine the markers more carefully, they would be drawn into one of the more fascinating histories of the black Atlantic. It wasn’t the Cuban government or the families of these artists who commissioned these impressive monuments. Rather, it was an admirer of these musicians from the West African nation of Senegal who financed the gravestones and insisted on their installation.
These renovated burial sites attest to the continuing passion that many Senegalese have for the music of Cuba. It is an enthusiasm that has deep roots in Senegal and has played a significant role in Senegalese history for over eighty years. By examining this francophone West African preoccupation with Cubanidad, this book extends the borders of the black Atlantic to include the Hispanic Caribbean and francophone Africa. In so doing, it documents overlooked local modernities and expands our knowledge of the different forms of resistance that Africans used to contest European cultural and political hegemony in the twentieth century.
This book is based on the premise that “people think through music, decide who they are through it … [music] is less a ‘something’ than a way of knowing the world, a way of being ourselves.”1 As Denis-Constant Martin points out, “music is an inextricable combination of audible elements and social processes.”2 From this perspective, the history of Afro-Cuban music in Senegal is more than an analysis of a marginal and “exotic” aesthetic form. Since the 1930s Senegalese have used music to imagine a new social order and engage in discussions about citizenship, cosmopolitanism, authenticity, masculinities, consumption, and the creation of local modernities. By looking at how the Senegalese deployed Afro-Cuban music in various cultural and political spheres, this book provides a history of taste and generational friction in twentieth-century Senegal and reveals the tensions involved in the Senegalese creating a postcolonial national culture.
In Senegal, listening and dancing to Afro-Cuban music created structures of feeling that united generations and bridged ethnic differences.3 In the 1930s Afro-Cuban served as a catalyst for bringing African and Caribbean intellectuals together in the negritude movement, which sought to insert African narratives into universal history and create a space for Africa in the global “republic of letters.” From the 1950s through the 1960s the movement helped the first postcolonial generation in Senegal define its cultural mission; in the 1990s it contributed to a revitalization of Senegalese cosmopolitanism. Today it helps mend frayed diasporic connections between Senegal and the Caribbean.
This abiding Senegalese affection for prerevolutionary Cuban music has an important story to tell. During the twentieth century consumption of Afro-Cuban music was integral to the imagining and embodying of Senegalese modernities. The discovery of Afro-Cuban music in Paris in the 1930s by Senegalese students inspired an entire generation of Senegalese intellectuals like Léopold Senghor to find their voice. Later in the 1950s and 1960s Senegalese youth, through the creation of Afro-Cuban record clubs, experimented with new forms of “modern” sociality. In the 1960s and 1970s nightclubs in Dakar and other Senegalese cities featuring live performances of Afro-Cuban music were laboratories for decolonizing Senegalese culture. In the 1980s Senegalese Afro-Cuban music spearheaded a growing diasporic cultural transnationalism anchored in the tropical world. In the 1990s the international impact of Senegalese Afro-Cuban music continued when one song by the group Africando became a radio hit in Latino New York and throughout the Hispanic Caribbean. During most of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, Afro-Cuban music has played a critical role in Senegalese debates about sociality, cultural authenticity, and cultural citizenship.
MYTHS ABOUT AFRO-CUBAN MUSIC IN SENEGAL
In spite of its significance, until recently Afro-Cuban music in Africa has largely been overlooked as a research subject. A number of pervasive myths about this music explain this neglect. Many believe, even in Africa itself, that Afro-Cuban music was exclusively the preserve of “Westernized” African elites in the 1950s and 1960s, listened to by only a prosperous few for a limited period of time. It also is an article of faith in some circles in Africa and abroad that Afro-Cuban music in Africa has been aesthetically stagnant, locked into clichéd covers of a handful of Cuban classics like “El Manisero” and “Guantanamera.” Perhaps most damagingly, many commentators have categorized Latin music in Africa as culturally inauthentic and inherently colonial.
This book dispels these myths. Latin music has never been limited to a privileged cadre in the capital. Its appeal for much of the twentieth century transcended class and ethnic boundaries in both urban and rural Senegal. The local musicians playing Afro-Cuban music, few of whom came from prominent Senegalese families, were attracted to it in part for its aesthetic possibilities. Over time they retained its musical structure and repertoire but remained open to artistic experimentation. After mastering the Cuban style in the early 1960s, for example, they proceeded to sing in Wolof, one of Senegal’s major languages, and integrated indigenous
