This paper examines musical and visual representations of natural resource extraction such as Copperbelt in Zambia, Gold in South Africa, and Oil in the Niger Delta areas in Nigeria. The central thesis of this paper lies in the position that the people of Nigeria, Zambia and South Africa have ideas, assumptions, and values about the environment – a form of indigenous ecological knowledge – that they express in music and visuals and bring to bear on socio-environmental problems related to resource extraction. Methods employed in this study include ethnography, archival methods, musical and textual analysis as well as visuals about extractivism. Gleaning from theories in Ecomusicology and Mobility Justice, I argue that music and visuals have the capacity to demonstrate the level of devastation done to human, environmental and natural resources. I conclude that this could be a signifier to other climes where music and visuals are yet to be used in environmental humanities, to reduce inequality, mobility injustices and environmental sustainability.

The ocean is both a border and a site of linkage between Senegal and global industrialization. Climate change—resulting largely from carbon emissions of nations like the United States and Europe—disproportionately affects non-industrialized nations, and in Senegal, escalating global temperatures are particularly associated with rising sea levels. Coastal erosion over recent decades has resulted in land loss, crumbling infrastructure, and at least one temporary “internally-displaced people” or IDP camp in Saint-Louis/Ndar, where the sea continues to eat away at the shore. Senegal’s largest cities—Dakar and Saint-Louis, along with the nation’s tourism industry primarily located in the seaside towns of Mbour and Saly—are all at risk of being inundated with seawater. In Senegal’s oceanside Layène community, a Sufi tariqa with historic ties to the coast, the ebbs and flows of the ocean are woven into spiritual history, as well as into the Layène sung practice of sikkar (from the Arabic zikr/dhikr, meaning “mentioning or remembrance of Allah/God”). Songs tell stories about what happened when the community’s founder confronted the rising sea, and the community’s hagiographic archive specifies that the neighbourhoods of Yoff and Cambérène, on the northern coast of Dakar, are uniquely and divinely protected from rising seawater. Based on the community archive and drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, this paper asks how the community makes spiritual sense—through sung sikkar—of industrialization, globalization, and climate change.

The discourse of music-making, Islam, and the lived experiences of Muslim women remains an enduring debate. Among the various arguments are often essentialist notions of subjugation, inclusion versus exclusion, and musical permissibility in framing the experiences of Muslim women. This presentation explores the connections between the musicking of Nupe women, frameworks of power—yiko, and the reinvention of spaces such as the harem within an extant ethnic minority binary, budding insurgency, and shifting gender expectations in Nupe society. Based on an ethnography of the Bumbu Women’s ensemble and the contextualization of stiwanism, I argue that while sites of Nupe women’s music-making are critical for clarifying and negotiating frameworks of socio-political hierarchy and power, they also allow for the flourishing of emerging sonic landscapes, multiple vocalities of Muslim women, and the framing of alternative modes of womanhood.

This presentation examines the appropriation of the local Arab-Islamic poetry and Rashid (sing. Rashid: hymnody) tradition by Dan Fodio, his brother ʿAbdullah b. Muḥammad and his daughter Nana Asma’u, in the 18th and 19th centuries, the Islamic Movement of Nigeria (IMN) and Boko Haram to foreground their theological positions that reject all governance systems that do not conform to the dictates of the Quran and hadith. In so doing, this study aims to survey the appropriation and transformation of the Arabo-Islamic anashid from its status that indexed the peaceful proselytization of Islam into one that calls for lesser jihad – armed struggle – against the Hausa people to reinvent the Sokoto Caliphate in modern-day Nigeria. This study argues that the creation of democratic secular states (1960 to the present), electoral fraud, the monopolization of security agencies against dissenting voices, lack of theological consensus by Islamic clerics and their followers, and the normalization of corruption by public officials indexed the calls by Islamists through poetry and nashid for the re-establishment of dan Fodio’s puritanic state in line with the Qurʾan and Hadith. Also, the radical ideologies espoused by these neo-radical movements to re-establish dan Fodio’s Islamic Caliphate through violent tactics against fellow Muslims stereotyped as murtadd (apostate). Thus, the performance of anashid by Boko-Haram connects its aims with past victories and martyrs to gain religious acceptability, creating a counter-musical culture that aims to deconstruct BH’s radical creeds through local musicians who are victims of BH’s onslaught.