Panel Title: Music and Publics in Emerging Democracies in Africa
Chair(s): Charles Lwanga (University of Michigan,)
Among African democracies where the “postcolonial incredible” has emerged as a regime of normalized crisis and morbidities that are “too improbable, astonishing, and extraordinary to be believed” (Olaniyan 2004), music serves as a crucial site for assembling publics who exchange information, debate ideas, and advocate for change in a variety of spaces –virtual and physical. This panel examines the nature of musical publics throughout postcolonial Africa, where the search for the meaning of democracy is ongoing in the face of challenges, including histories of trauma, dominant and subordinate linguistic regimes, neo-colonial foreign interventions, and entrenched autocratic governance. The first paper discusses how Nigerian youth are assembled through musical practices to reflexively negotiate daily permissibilities –as an avenue of evoking transformative social change. The second demonstrates how the “people power” movement and counterpublic of Ugandan youth employs Bobi Wine’s music as a site for reflecting upon and participating in civil society. The third paper reflects on the overlapping or nested character of musical imaginaries, exploring how musicians in central Cameroon attempt to create space for underrepresented languages and sounds in dominant or mainstream musical publics. The fourth paper examines how an emerging didacticism in Senegalese hip-hop responds to decades of “policy capture,” a phenomenon where critical areas of national-level decision-making are taken out of the public's hands and given to international institutions and local elites. Collectively, we engage with questions of how music is used as a site for negotiating identities, mounting political opposition, and transforming social change in contemporary Africa.
Presentations in the Session
Japa Syndrome: The 'Postcolonial Normal', Popular Music, and the Precarities of Youth Social Movements in Fourth Republic Nigeria (1999-)
Joshua Kerobo
University of Michigan
Following the #EndSARS Movement (2020), Nigerians continue to advocate against political and economic marginalization within youth social movements (Honwana 2019). In the months preceding Nigeria's 2023 elections, youth formed the Obidient Movement supporting the non-establishment Labour Party (LP) and the presidential campaign of Mr. Peter Obi, the former governor of Anambra State. While the party lost elections mired by voter suppression (Nathaniel 2023), they won one-third of states including Lagos and Abuja (FCT) through youth support. Youth organized once again in the #EndBadGovernance protests against economic hardship and corruption in the first weeks of August 2024, where 24 protestors were killed and 1200 jailed throughout the country (Amnesty International 2024). As traumatic experiences have become commonplace occurrences, popular music has played an integral role in Nigeria's youth-led social transformation of the relationship between individuals, publics, and the postcolonial state. In this paper, I discuss the sociopolitical circumstances that continue to inspire Nigerian youth social movements considering the cultural imperatives of the 'postcolonial normal', which refers to the material normalization of traumatic experience as the postcolonial state physically and socially decays. By examining interview data from time spent with students at three universities in Lagos State, Nigeria (January-April 2024), I contend that popular music discourse illuminates various youth responses to the postcolonial normal. Addressing the traumatic normalities of decay in the postcolony, Nigerian youth reflexively use popular music to negotiate permissibilities daily, discursively forming diverse and respondent publics capitalizing on shared precarities to provoke transformative change.
Music and Bobi Wine’s ‘People Power’ Counterpublic in Uganda
Charles Lwanga
University of Michigan
“People Power”, Uganda’s strongest opposition movement has since 2017 employed music to assemble counterpublicity –a mode of subordinate participation shaped by the interaction of material and expressive components. As a counterpublic, “people power” is characterized by “relations of exteriority,” at once allowing segments of the movement to be unplugged and plugged into a different public or whole. Also, its counterpublicity is at once shaped by “territorialization” and “deterritorialization” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987), stances which illuminate the movement’s fluidity and complexity. Uganda's “people power” movement is traced back to Ugandan Afropop musician and politician Robert Kyagulanyi (a.k.a Bobi Wine) whose music has been critical of President Yoweri Museveni’s ruling party, beginning before Wine’s explicit involvement in politics as a Member of Parliament in 2017, continuting to his bid for the highest politiccal office during the 2021 presidential campaigns, and currently as president of the National Unity Platform (NUP), Uganda’s strongest opposition party. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in Uganda since 2010, and the work of DeLanda (2006) I analyze “Tuliyambala Engule” (We Shall Wear the Crown) –an Afropop song by Bobi Wine –to demonstrate how music enhances publicness, thereby rendering the “people power” movement subordinate to Museveni’s ruling party. I propose a theory of musical assemblage in which the interaction of heterogenous parts shaped by material and expressive components engenders counterpublicity. I argue that “people power” is at once a music-political movement and counterpublic, the intertwining of which gives rise to authority and sonic antagonism as emergent properties in Wine’s shadow government.
Musical Publics and Counterpublics in Central Cameroon
Dueck Byron
The Open University
Two musical practices with roots in local traditions are especially prominent in the Center Region of Cameroon: a genre of popular music called bikutsi, and a form of Catholic liturgical music accompanied by a xylophone ensemble known as the mǝ̀ndzáŋ. These practices are closely associated with the Ewondo language and culture, and beyond this with a broader group of related Beti, Bulu, and Fang peoples who together exert considerable influence in Cameroonian politics and society. Given this context, bikutsi and mǝ̀ndzáŋ-based liturgical music might be characterized as dominant or hegemonic forms of musical publicness in Cameroon. But they are simultaneously sites for the articulation of counterpublicity—modes of publicness that understand themselves as in some way subordinate, oppositional, or stigmatized (Warner 2002). Drawing on fieldwork conducted in central Cameroon since 2009 and engaging with work by researchers including Anja Brunner (2021), Essele Essele Kisito (2017), and Basile Ndjio (2005) this paper explores the nested or overlapping nature of musical publics through a number of short case studies. The first considers the challenges of communicating elements of an underrepresented musical style in a studio environment where the aesthetics of bikutsi dominate. A second looks at responses to the dominance of the Ewondo language in Catholic liturgical music. A third examines how a form of musical publicness that is dominant at one level may be subordinate at another, with respect to the place of some of the aforementioned styles in international representations of African music.
Sweating the Details: Policy Capture and Protest Music in the 2024 Senegalese Presidential Election
Brendan Kibbee
University of Maryland
The 2024 election of President Bassirou Diomaye Faye represented a clear victory for Senegalese civil society, with musical artists like Gunman Xuman, Thiat, and Dip Doundou Guiss leading the charge against incumbent President Macky Sall. On one hand, these artists can be seen through a fifty-year legacy of popular African musicians and social movements that have stood against autocratic misgovernance. But such resistance narratives also carry the danger of reinforcing a “pathological view of the African state as entirely failed, violent, and predatory, to which citizens can only rise up” (Croese 2019). Furthermore, international prescriptions for African misgovernance have consistently left the door open for elite capture of natural resources and policy spaces, from Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) beginning in the 1980s to more recent moves toward “decentralization” (Reidl 2024). Analyzing two new tracks from rapper Gunman Xuman and personal conversations with the artist, this paper demonstrates how recent protest music in Senegal mixes global signs of musical resistance with didactic rapping that “sweats the details” of policy stakes, from constitutional law to monetary independence. In doing so, I argue that much recent government opposition in Senegal also seeks to reverse the tide of “policy capture” (Mkandawire 1999) in which both civil society and elected officials are shut out from critical national decisions.
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