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African Music, Ideology and Utopia

Nick Nesbitt

I
n a recent article entitled “Is African Music Possible?” Abiola Irele
describes the dilemma of African art music, understood by the author
as “a conscious and highly elaborated [musical] form [. . .] bound to
the musical language of Europe” (56-57). He depicts in detail the contra-
dictions of a music that, in the face of structural and experiential impedi-
ments, “has yet to take root within the contemporary culture of Africa”
(56). The article undertakes a wide-ranging description of the ongoing
dialogue between “art” and “folk” musics, tracing their intermingling in
Western music from Handel and Mozart through Schoenberg, Bartok, and
Stravinsky, and in the more recent concert music of the Nigerian com-
posers Fela Sowande, Adam Fiberissima, Akin Euba, and Ayo Bankole.
Regarding the former, he concludes that Western concert music has
backed itself into a corner of opacity, in which “serious musical composi-
tion has come to be understood in certain so-called avant-garde circles in
the West in such narrow terms that any work that makes the slightest con-
cession to tonality or that recalls the Romantic convention of musical feel-
ing is rejected out of hand” (66). Not surprisingly, given this argument, the
African composers Irele describes appear likewise unable, despite certain
limited successes, to articulate a viable musical language using Western
musical materials. Lacking workable models of “conscious and [. . .] elab-
orated [musical] form” from either the West or indigenous cultures, “they
are compelled to hover, at best, between the two traditions without achiev-
ing a satisfactory integration of both.” Irele’s pessimistic conclusion is that
African concert music “which meets a definition of individual art in the
Western sense, is not possible” (69). Rightly, I think, Irele refuses to mourn
this situation, and instead evokes in his conclusion the dramatic vitality of
indigenous African musical expression, both traditional and modern.
In this essay, I wish to expand upon Irele’s suggestion and look to
indigenous African musics fro examples of these “conscious and highly
elaborated [musical] form[s],” while arguing against any rigid distinction
between what he terms “art” and “folk” musics. For while Irele calls atten-
tion to the “disabling [. . .] opposition” between elite and popular art, and
indeed much of his essay is spent demonstrating the intermingling of these
categories in Western music, they noneless function as discrete limiting cat-
egories in the logic of his argument. My point is not to attempt a hollow
deconstruction of an argument that is already dialogical to its core, but
rather, following Irele, to describe the already complex, dialectical nature
of African “classical” (traditional) and popular musics themselves, to pur-
sue this search for a complex, self-reflexive African music beyond the limits
of a sterile model of concert music abstractly applied to a vastly different
African context. To do so, I will look to two musical fields with which I am
familiar in particular. First, traditional Mande music and its ambiguous
mid-century mutation from a vehicle of intersubjective communication

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176 Research in African Literatures

within a tradition-oriented community to a rationalized concert music in

Fodéba Keita’s Ballets Africains. Then I will turn to the musical traditions
of the African Diaspora, and jazz in particular, to conclude that the com-
positions, written and improvised, of its most radical practitioners offer pre-
cisely the model of a highly developed “art” music that yet retains its
viability as an expression of an intersubjective vernacular community
unavailable to African composers in canonical Western concert music.

If music as a language is fundamentally nonconceptual, achieving a

semblance of logic only in the formal constitution of its material, this with-
drawal from unambiguous, rationalized communication never fully real-
izes its promise. Music speaks of a realm of experience beyond mere
exchange, yet this incipient narrative remains a deceitful sleight of hand
operated behind the back of every-hopeful listeners; we are always and
ever again naive in the face of music, ready to believe its promise of a
trasncendence of a cynical (post-)modernity. Music remains utopian in its
refusal to participate fully in a violent society where unambiguous com-
munication means only the raw assent of the powerless to the dictates of
those who happen to be in power today. And yet, this very refusal of music
to assent disarms its listeners as a mere image of hope, while music itself
becomes an ideological arm of the cynics its idealism condemns. If this
paradox is repeatedly observable in the history of music, nowhere, I would
maintain, is it expressed so clearly as in the fate of the traditional music of
the Maninka.1 The destiny of this millennial musical tradition in the twen-
tieth century is complexly intertwined with the trajectory of African
nationalism, a dramatic example of the dialectic of modernization and
enlightenment that is the history of the African Independences and
Decolonization. If the Mande jeli (griot) traditionally glorified the exploits
of powerful patrons in their recounting of the Sundiata Epic, their music,
as sociohistorical construct, became all the more profoundly ideological
when Sékou Touré called for the creation of Fodéba Keita’s Ballets
Africains as an expression of Guinean nationalism in 1958.2
The appearance and transformation of classical African musics, from
their practice to their innermost forms, is bound to society. The modifica-
tions of Mande music in the twentieth century followed the movements of
the society from which it arose, without ever reproducing those move-
ments transparently. Music instead denies its historical character; if it con-
stantly misrepresents itself to us as the immediate expression of nature,
wehther the cry of a human subject or the rustle fo a presubjective noume-
nal world, it must do so, however, as the mere aesthetic semblance of this
nature. The most compelling of these musical utterances, as for example
the proto-Impressionistic, blissfully static quality of Beethoven’s Pastoral or
certain moments in Berg’s Wozzeck, achieve their affective force through a
mastery of musical materials that belies any illusion they maintain of raw,
unmediated expression.3
The development of these compositional forces in Mande music in
particular, moreover, is actuely historical. Its dynamic transformations
arose in response to the overarching historical development of the division
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Nick Nesbitt 177

of labor immanent within that society.4 The very existence of an indepen-

dent caste of jeli as musician-poet-historicans was itself dependent upon a
fundamental partitioning of Mande society. This caste system allowed for
the appearance and reproduction of fundamentally conservative bards
who could devote their entire existence to the tour de force of musical,
poetic, and mnemonic expression that is the Sundiata Epic.5 This division
is fundamental to Mande society, with its endogamous differentiation
between the free-born nobles (Horonnu) and the Nyamakalalu artisan class
(of which the jeli are a part) who serve them (Charry 48-49). The hierar-
chical, caste-based nature of Mande society, like the dominant military,
masculinist tenor of its traditional culture, has repeatedly threatened to
eclipse the imaginative, utopian quality of Mande musical expression.6
While music by its very nature describes the possibility of human relations
beyond those of abstract, anonymous mercantile exchange, the modern
stereotype of the venal jeli selling his or her praises to the highest bidder
is no anomaly or historical rupture brought on by contact with the West,
but is rather logically implicit in a traditional role that merely left this
process undeveloped wtihin a habitus of precapitalist exchange.
The rationalization of Guinean music was determined by both this tra-
ditional division of labor in Mande society and the novel transformations
of Guinean historical experience occurring amidst French colonization. In
the colonial period in French West Africa (AOF), the sites of social power
both shifted partially to the colonial authorities, while local African lead-
ers adopted and transformed these novel social formations to their own
benefit. On the one hand, the French authorities from the Popular Front
(1936-39) on strove to create a rational African worker, a productive
African subject whose behavior followed the means-end logic of mercan-
tile exchange of labor for wages. Though this historical and experiential
development was an immensely complex process of interpellation and
resistance needing much further research, certain basic tendencies are
clear.7 Already by the 1930s, the forcible recruitment of labor for colonial
works projects was widespread throughout the AOF. At the same time, per-
ception of colonized Africans on the part of French administrators began
to shift from what one government report termed “a mass reservoir of
manpower,” anonymous, passive, and only marginally humanized, to a
“community of workers,” (subaltern) human subjects able to transform
their environment through conscious labor.8 Africans were increasingly
interpellated (both physically and discursively) as conscious laboring sub-
jects by a French bureaucratic appartus, in the Ivory Coast and Guinea in
particular (Cooper 77-81). The gradual strengthening of the wage-labor
model throughout the AOF in this period, coupled with an ideology of an
“apostolat du travail,” or “apostolate of work,”9 helped transform hundreds
of thousands of colonized subjects into “income-maximizing individuals”
willing to endure physical hardship and exploitation for pay (84).
At the same time, this was no mere passive process. Instead, the cre-
ation of this self-conscious worker class rapidly resulted in a questioning
of the wage-model of colonial relations and its sacrificial, exploitative
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178 Research in African Literatures

dimensions. The 1930s saw the strengthening of an indigenous trade

union movement—spearheaded by figures such as Lamine Diallo in
Senegal and Sékou Touré in Guinea—which strove to short-circuit the flow
of social power away from the colonizer in an incipient nationalism that
culminated in Guinea’s historic 1958 “No” vote against DeGaulle.10 A deci-
sive 1946 strike in Dakar, and a 1950 strike in Conakry, confronted French
colonial officials with a transformed African worker, a worker who could
now articulate his or her claim to freedom and just living conditions fol-
lowing the European model of workers’ rights: “The growing development
of the working class in organization and consciousness permits it to play a
decisive role as the motor and guide of all the proletarian forces of French
West Africa,” wrote Diallo in his resolution of strikers’ demands sent to the
French Governor-General of Senegal (qtd. in Cooper 229).
Mande music, a fundamentally political and historical music if ever
there was one, was itself transformed by these changes in Guinean society.
Monad-like, it maintained the image of its aesthetic interiority while simul-
taneously reflecting, in highly mediated form, the furtive movement of
Guinean society towards an increasingly rationalized, bureaucratic society
organized around an abstract exchange-model of human relations. With
the creation of the Ballets Africains and their subsequent nationalization
following independence in1958, the historical transformation of Guinean
society migrated within musical production itself, and the ambiguous
dialectic of Guinean modernization played itself out on the world’s stages
as Mande music became increasingly an adminsitered, bureaucratic state
production.
Much research remains to be done on the formation of Guinea’s
Ballets Africains.11 Certain transformations of traditional Mande music
occurring in the process of its nationalization are clear, however. What was
originally a participatory music was suddenly called upon by Sékou Touré
to adapt itself to the Western stage:
In our African villages [. . .] dances are [. . .] executed in the mid-
dle of a ring of spectators who also take part almost as much as the
dancers and musicians. On the stage new conditions have to be
created by means of different devices in order, on the one hand,
to retain the freshness and reality of the dance and, on the other,
to destory the monotony which is quick to arise due to the non-
active participation of the audience.
(F. Keita 176, qtd. in Charry 212)
The process of rationalization whose occurrence Max Weber saw at work
throughout Western music transformed a rapidly modernizing Mande
music as well.12 The traditional circle of spectator-participants, a visual rep-
resentation of cyclical, natural time, was broken into the teleological
straight line of musicians spread out across a stage before the gaze of
Western spectators. Rhythms and dances that traditionally would be per-
formed in highly specific contexts and times (baptism, marriage, initia-
tion, etc.) were extracted from that milieu and choreographers brought
them together in new, discrete combinations. This move from an organic
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Nick Nesbitt 179

community to the stage, which increased the music’s formal structuration,

simultaneously undermined its place within a traditional social structure as
a dynamic, significant communal process. Mande music was suddenly
called upon to represent the Guinean nation to foreign audiences around
the globe. This process of rationalization occurred within musical struc-
ture as well. In a traditional context, pieces generally began with women
singing and clapping, and musicians gradually joined them in a gradual
process of musical accretion. In the ballet, however, pieces were separated
into differentiated units with clear beginnings and ending points that
all musicians would acknowledge in concert. Rhythmic breaks played by
drummers, which had traditionally only signaled changes to dancers
within the rhythm, were now adapted to form discrete beginning and
ending points.
A dramatic representation of this process is audible when comparing
two recent recordings by the Mande percussionist Mamady Keita. The
work of Keita, perhaps the best known musician to have come from
Guinea’s national ballets, dramatically underlines the complex mediations
of tradition and modernization at work in Mande music. In his 1999
recording Balandugu Kan, Keita’s drumming returns to the traditional
context of the Wassolon village in Eastern Guinea in which he was born.
Traditional songs ebb and flow over two hours with the voices, clapping,
and playing of dozens of singers and musicians weaving a complex musical
tapestry. In contrast, Keita’s 1998 recording Afö constructs a highly abstract
symphony of traditional Mande rhythms, in which complex rhythmic cues
and ensemble passages mark transitions within a single 75-minute “pyra-
mid of rhythms.” Here, the human voice is merely one subordinate ele-
ment appearing furtively within a predominantly rhythmic orchestration.
Keita describes in the notes to Afö how it represents the culmination of his
innovatory work as Artistic Director of Guinea’s Ballet Djoliba in the 1970s.
His invention of a “pyramid of rhythms” is successful, in my view, since it
both extends the process of rationalization of Mande drum music to its
limits, while drawing its formal procedures of orchestration from the
immanent demands of theatricalization, rather than from any abstract
importation of Western musical models. Keita thus operates his complex
encounter with the West (rationalization, theatricalization, etc.) imma-
nently, within and through traditional Mande music itself, rather than sim-
ply by pasting imported procedures atop traditional models. Whether or
not it is Keita’s most successful recording (I believe others such as
Mögöbalu and Hamanah better represent Keita’s unique exploration and
canonization of Malinké musical traditions), Afö truly stands as “a con-
scious and highly elaborated musical structure” (to recall Irele’s phrase)
that is at once modern and faithful to Mande traditions with which Keita
is as familiar as an contemporary Mande musician.
To point to this bureaucratization and rationalization of Guinean
music is not to disfigure an archetypal musical immediacy, but instead to
describe that music’s immersion within the progressive development of
human culture itself. Musical expression is inextricable from its technical
organization as form, an objective representation of subjective experience
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180 Research in African Literatures

in rhythm, harmony, melody, and timbre. To represent musically human

experience is to regain a humanity lost to barbarity masquerading as
modernity. The appearance of music, in Africa as elsewhere, amidst ram-
pant dehumanization, and as such music is ambiguously entwined in the
antinomies of historical experience. The rationalization of Mande music is
itself dialectical, no mere loss of an imaginary traditional wholeness in the
face of encraoching Westernization. Keita’s work is a compelling demon-
stration of this dialectic, perhaps unequaled in Mande music in its com-
plex relation to cultural traditions. Laurent Olivier’s 1991 film Djembefola
describes Keita’s return, after a twenty-five-year exile in the Ballet Djoliba,
to his family and birthplace in eastern Guinea (Balandugu). Along the
way, Keita recalls with his mentors the rigorous, military-style training he
and his fellow artists received as they sacrificed their private existence to
Touré’s “revolutionary” Guinean society.
Like the Guinean music they would rework onstage, artists like Keita
were themselves extracted from their regions by regional competitions. A
text by the Guinean Ministry of Education and Culture from 1977
describes this process in chilling language:
All complexes of a racial, ethnic, or intellectual nature or com-
plexes based on wealth, religion or sex are being systematically
eradicated through the educational work of the Party, which
guides and organizes all the activities of the people. At all levels,
the arts companies draw their members form a variety of occupa-
tional backgrounds, and these members freely place their knowl-
edge at the disposal of the people. (73)
The assertion of its citizens’ voluntary self-sacrifice to the demands of the
“Party” compulsively invokes the violence Sékou Touré visited upon his
country in his drive for modernization. Fodéba Keita himself was not
merely the founder of the Ballets Africains, but was an archetypal Cold War
bureaucrat; as Minister for Internal Affairs (administrative and police
affairs) and Defense in Touré’s regime, he “created the repressive system
which has characterized contemporary Guinea” (Kaba 213). In an ever-
increasing process of bureaucratization, the traditionally political nature
of Mande music was radically extended in independent Guinea. Arts com-
panies were called upon “vigorously [to] combat [. . .] the colonial com-
plex and backward ways and custom [for] the appearance of the ‘new
man’” (74). Effectively, this meant that artists such as Mamady Keita were
ideological pawns of the Guinean regime. The gap between rhetoric and
experience reached new extremes in Sékou Touré’s Guinea, and to reread
his texts and speeches today is disheartening, to say the least, recalling the
betrayed hope and promises of the Independences. “La conscience,”
Touré wrote, “est un stade, mieux, un moment du processus de la qualifi-
cation continue de l’homme animal en homme véritablement humain,
sujet et objet de l’histoire” ‘Consciousness is a stage, better yet, a moment
in the continuous process of development of animalistic man into a truly
human man, the subject and object of history’ (23).
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Nick Nesbitt 181

Such facile pieties on the transformative role of Guinean artists, which

Touré produced in endless streams of discourse, represent a nadir of philo-
sophical reflection. The hollow recourse to Hegelian language (“sujet et
objet de l’histoire”) is one more in the many sacrificial appropriation Touré
called for in the pursuit of Guinean development. Mande music, like the
rest of Guinean society, joined in the suddenly accelerated march toward
national modernization in a millennial process extending back from Sékou
to Sunjata. In so doing, music paid a price for this participation like all
interpellated members of Guinean society. The sacrifice to political and
economic autonomy that was Guinea’s 1958 “No” vote foreclosed the pos-
sibility of noncoercive intersubjective experience once the hope for inde-
pendence became the paranoid consolidation of political hegemony. A
precipitously accelerated rationalization, functionalization, and division of
labor brought, in the sphere of music as elsewhere, a liquidation of subjec-
tive experience and expression. This process paradoxically threatened to
dissolve the creative affirmation of traditional culture implicit in the cre-
ation of the Ballets Africains into the hollow technical mastery of the hyper-
kinetic, militaristic virtuosity of the national drum corps.
Perhaps no society ever gives back all it promises in extorting the indi-
vidual’s sublimation to the social totality. In Touré’s Guinea, however,
those unfortunate enough to be caught up in the process of development
too often found that it led straight from the policed village to the prison
of Camp Boiro. Fodéba Keita, while no political innocent, was himself
arrested in 1969 and condemned to death without trial in 1971 (Kaba
213). In his repeated calls for social unanimity, Touré strove to crush any
dissenting expression of human particularity; subjects were no longer
allowed to remain in conflict within that totality but instead encoutnered
a uniform and violent logic of subsumption to the needs of the State.
Sékou Touré’s revolution undertook the total instrumentalization of
human relations, where all individuals would serve as “instruments de la
Révolution” (Touré, L’Afrique 1).13 Mamady Keita was perhaps the luckiest
of those who sacrificed themselves up to Touré’s revolution, for he sur-
vived its terror to reorient the rationalizing procedures of which he was a
product to Mande cultural tradition itself.
Sékou Touré’s invocations of a “truly human animal” revall the
betrayed promise of decolonization, of an autonomous human subject
who could draw from within the paritcularity of his or her own experience
the basis of a free social existence. That this freedom remains to be instan-
tiated in postcolonial Guinea, in spite of Sékou Touré’s revolution, is
patent. And yet, Mamady Keita, perhaps unique among traditional African
musicians, has redirected the forces of reification at work in Guinean cul-
ture to further our understanding of that music itself. Since Touré’s death
in 1984, Keita, formed by the military life of the Ballet from his induction
at age twelve in 1966 into the Ballet Djoliba, has opened a series of schools
of traditional Mande percussion across Europe, Japan, and the United
States. There, he pursues the rationalization of Mande music, breaking
traditional rhythms into their individual elements, making an implicit
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182 Research in African Literatures

pulse explicit to Western ears, performing an encyclopedic analysis of

traditional West African music for a global body of students.
This process is visible in his recent publication, A Life for the Djembe:
Traditional Rhythms of the Malinké. There Keita describes in three languages
the origins and cultural heritage of his instrument, and then proceeds to
give transcriptions for the individual parts to over sixty rhythms. This
process of notation, while objectively a mere mnemonic device, is rejected
by many Western students of African musics as a sort of stigmata, serving
as a visual representation of the loss of a mythical spiritual totality. Keita,
on the other hand, unhesitatingly pursues the rationalizing logic of his
musical work. Though his own musical analysis is strictly oral (he relies on
collaborators to generate written musical notation), his recourse to tran-
scription as a means of codifying and clarifying his teaching is the logical
extension of his rationalization of Mande tradition. Like his recordings,
instructional videos, and classes, his book operates a musical reification in
the name of tradition, elucidating and systematizing a necessarily protean,
multidimensional oral tradition.
Keita’s work transforms the traditional Western ethnological classifica-
tory impulse enacted upon African musics. Indeed, Keita is a remarkable
musicologist, one who operates not as a transitory Western academic, but
instead from within a centuries-old tradition of musical practice. In contrast
with every other extended analytical study of indigenous African music of
which I am aware, Keita’s work is both thoroughly, almost obsessively rigor-
ous, and generated internally, from within the logic of the music he prac-
tices, rather than in response to external norms of academic practice. In
this respect at least, his undertaking is not unlike Schoenberg’s rationaliza-
tion of Western musical practice. For if the latter abandoned Western har-
monic practice in pieces such as his Opus 11 for piano (1900) and then
returned to an autonomously generated structural practice (Serialism), he
did so not as absolute rupture but rather as a direct outgrowth of the musi-
cal tradition he inherited; Verklärte Nacht is inconceivable without Tristan.
Similarly, Keita’s rationalization of Mande music is driven by a confronta-
tion between both the inherently logical, binary nature of percussive music
itself and the military tenor of postindependence Guinean society, on the
one hand, and the utopian character of music that promises a transforma-
tion of an alienating, totalitarian society within the recovered subjective
immediacy of musical community, on the other. Keita’s musical expression
mediates the antinomies of Guinean modernity, to combine his childhood
initiation into a millennial musical tradition with a classificatory spirit of
analysis, preservation, and dissemination.

Music as a social practice promises that we might yet attain the status
of free, creative subjects acting within a larger community. Yet this promise
necessarily enters into conflict with the interests of a larger (political) com-
munity; music is caught between a drive for unhindered subjective expres-
sion and experience and the need to sublimate individual satisfaction of
drives to the social totality. Music consequently both demonstrates and
transcends this contradiction. In the aftermath of the independences,
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Nick Nesbitt 183

amidst constantly renewed totalitarianism, music continues to pose the

vexed question of human subjects in their coexistence with nature, and the
possibility of an emergent nonviolent community. In popular Mande
music, works such as Salif Keita’s Amen (1991) articulate determinate
responses to the problem of intersubjective community not merely on an
overt thematic level (as song lyrics), but within musical structure itself.
The transatlantic encounter Keita’s album stages between his complex
modernization of Mande tradition and keyboardist-producer Joe Zawinul’s
dynamic orchestration is compelling and paradigmatic. Though a con-
crete analysis of the album’s musical semblance of intersubjective commu-
nity is beyond the scope of this article, I would offer this recording as
another masterful, immanent example of the “conscious and elaborated
[musical] form” Irele leads us to expect from autonomous African musical
practice. Music such as Salif Keita and Zawinul’s asks how a subject could
become objectified as communal intersubjectivity without being a mere
ideological deception. At the same time, this quesitoning of ideology on
the part of music itself threatens to become ideological, as mere abstract
wish fulfillment, amidst the continued infirmity of overarching, nonmili-
tarized social relations in West African society.
Yet not to pose such a question critically is to abandon hope to a real-
ity increasingly hardened against the imagination. Whether such critique
of society can occur within musical abstraction is now a new question.
Within the African Diaspora, music has repeatedly functioned as a prima-
ry vector for critical thought within vernacular communities. Jazz in par-
ticular has sought to address the problem of autonomy throughout the
twentieth century. The historical and social dynamic of jazz challenges
Irele’s conclusion that the ciris in modern concert music “leaves [African
composers] little or no scope for differentiation like that of 19th cent.
nationalist music in Europe” (66). Irele asks: “What new dimension of
artistic expression can the kora assume in the concert hall?” (70). Despite
obvious historical differences, I can imagine a European writer asking, in
the 1910s, “What new dimension of expression can the saxophone assume
in the concert hall?” at a time when the instrument was in effect limited to
Sousa compositions and a few pieces by Berlioz. And yet, becaues of its
presence in marching bands, the instrument fell into the hands of black
Americans and became one of the primary tools for social expression of a
new, revolutionary language in this century.
Jazz’s greatest practitioners constructed a vernacular modernism that
precariously balanced the competing demands of immanent social critique
and intersubjective communication. Musicians such as Duke Ellington,
Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, and John Coltrane explored the possibility of a
productive musical subject capable of recovering autonomy and truth in
the objective products of its creation. Together, they demonstrate the exam-
ples do exist for African composers of artists whose compositional practice
reflects both the developments in Western concert music since Wagner and
the possibility of adapting these developments to the imperatives of a ver-
nacular community. Their music belies the traditional division between
popular or “folk” and concert/art/avant-garde music. Of course, enormous
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184 Research in African Literatures

cultural and historical differences separate African Americans and those on

the continent and militate against any straightforward, uncritical trans-
plantation of modern jazz to African soil. That said, composer/improvisors
such as Herbie Hancock, John Coltrane, and McCoy Tyner fluidly incorpo-
rate the harmonic material of Debussy, Stravinsky, and Bartok (bi-tonalism,
modality, quartal, whole-tone, and diminished harmony, etc.) with an extra-
ordinary rhythmic and expressive dynamism and improvisitory mastery.
Cecil Taylor, Muhal Richard Abrams, and Anthony Braxton can easily hold
company with the European modernists and postmodernists. And perhaps
most impressively for the question at hand, the music of the pianists
Abdullah Ibrahim of South Africa and the American Randy Weston has for
decades combined the legacy of the vernacular community Duke Ellington
invented in his orchestra, the complex harmonic and rhythmic innovations
of Thelonius Monk, and the musical imepratives of a wide-ranging African
tradition.
This black Atlantic vernacular modernism arose from and protests
against society while steadfastly maintaining the concrete musical image of
a utopian intersubjective social experience. This music continues to pose,
at its highest levels of development, the problem of an autonomous
human subject and his or her nonappropriative relation to the natural
world. Slavery forced this diasporic community to confront early on the
problem of production as unfree labor and dehumanization. In response,
fully realized African American music produces the immanent semblance,
and perhaps something more than mere semblance, of a free subject in an
unfree society through vernacular critique. The music of the African
Diaspora calls into question a mechanized, dehumanized, sacrificial sub-
ject called upon to postpone eternally self-realization and to labor for
others. Jazz is the realization of an intensive labor that is at once
autonomous, freely chosen by and for that musical subject, and an objec-
tive product existing within a community of others consisting of both musi-
cians and listeners. African music is itself utopian precisely insofar as it
poses an aesthetic counterpoint to the violence of society; as such, it
undertakes the determinate negation of totalitarian practice. As an expe-
riential counterpoint, music allows for the persistence of differences in
which specificity of each element both persists and is transcended. If
African political reality still refuses this totality that philosophy describes as
the nonidentity of identity and nonidentity, let us not abandon hope, and
work actively to cultivate its material likeness within the sound-image of
harmony that is African music.

NOTES

1. See Charry for a wide-ranging overview of Mande music.

2. The Ballets were actually created in 1947 by Fodéba Keita in Paris, and were
subsequently nationalized by Sékou Touré upon Guinean independence in
1958 (Kaba 202, Charry 211).
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Nick Nesbitt 185

3. In Wozzeck, Marie’s passionate cry over the D minor violin theme at the open-
ing of act 3 (“Herr Gott! Sieh mich nicht an!” ‘Lord God! Look not on me!’)
is utterly compelling in its depiction of human suffering, while the chromati-
cally ascending transformations of a basic hexachord that accompany
Wozzeck’s drowning are a famous example of a virtuosic technical representa-
tion of nature (Berg 381, 457-62; Jarman 56).
4. As developed in this article, I take the phrase “division of labor” from Adorno’s
sociology of music, which of course knew nothing of African musics and cul-
tures (Adorno 8). In Telos, I examine certain aspects of the complex relation
between Adorno and jazz.
5. The often-described critical role of the jali as the one figure able to criticize
their lord is itself ambiguous, serving in the end to ensure the smooth function
of a fundamentally conservative dynasty.
6. Camara describes “une société guerrière [. . .] qui cultive chez l’homme une
sévère répression de réactions émotionnelles qui pourraient nuire à l’élan du
guerrier [. . . ]” ‘a warrior society [. . .] that cultivates on the part of men a severe
repression of all emotional reactions that could hinder the warrior’s fervor.’
Camara underlines “l’agressivité que la culture [Malinké traditionnelle]
développe en chaque individu—la colère est la seule émotion que l’homme
puisse exprimer publiquement—, les conflits de statuts et de personnalités [. . .]
enfin les exigences d’une autorité soucieuse de marquer à tout instant de la dis-
tance entre elle-même et ses subordonnés” ‘the aggressivity that [traditional
Malinké] culture develops in each individual—anger is the only emotion that
men can express publicly—, conflicts of status and personality [. . .] in sum the
demands of an authoritarianism eager to mark at all times the distance between
itself and its subordinates’ (59, 12).
7. See Cooper for an extended analysis of the historical dimensions of this trans-
formation in French West Africa.
8. “Pour la Commission d’Enquête. Note sur la colonisation européenne et la
colonisation indigène en Afrique Noire Française,” 1936, Fonds Moutet, PA
28/5/152, ANSOM. Cited in Cooper 76.
9. The phrase is that of the governor of the Ivory Goast during the Popular Front,
Mondon. Cited in Cooper 81.
10. See Cooper, ch. 11, for a discussion of the process leading Sékou Touré from
trade unionist to nationalist leader of the decolonization movement in the
AOF.
11. For further information on the subject, see Charry 211-13; Kaba; F. Keita, “La
danse”; and Rouget.
12. The concept of rationalization is notoriously fluid. Weber’s discussion of musi-
cal rationalization is limited almost exclusively to a virtuosic comparison of har-
monic systems in musical history, to the detriment of rhythm, which he
mentions only twice, and then in passing, in his study of musical rationaliza-
tion. Furthermore, his offhand dismissal of putatively “primitive” “negro”
musics, though typical of the period (1921), is both racist and utterly simplis-
tic. Throughout this essay, I will se the term in a variety of ways, applying it to
the internal structural and formal characteristics of certain musics, the classi-
ficatory impulse to organize a dynamic, vernacular musical heritage into dis-
crete canonical categories, and the analytical drive to break down an organic
musical practice into readily graspable constituent elements.
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186 Research in African Literatures

13. Writing in 1974, at the height of Touré’s repression, Lansiné Kaba concluded:
“Guinea under the P.D.G. [Touré’s single-party system] is a classic example of
what paranoia and autocracy can inflict upon a society and individual freedom.
Most of those who had the ability to criticize have been physically elminated or
imprisoned, and this has created a deep sense of insecurity among those who
are still living, and has taught them to be prudent. Instead of the question of
freedom of expression, in this context, one should rather speak of how to sur-
vive, and hence conform to a dogmatic and coercive system designed to exalt
Le Responsable Suprême et Stratège de la Révolution” (218).

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