chic and the latest style.”54
Many Senegalese of this generation that straddles the colonial and postcolonial eras associate the fluid steps and swaying motion of Afro-Cuban dance styles with a modernity that they have found culturally comfortable. The cabaret singer Aminata Laye remarked: “I started dancing to salsa music. That was the beginning of my loving the music—the rhythm. Whether it’s two-step, three step, four step—you feel at ease. There’s less noise in the music.”55
Mas Diallo, a radio announcer of Afro-Cuban music, has had a similar response to the music: “I love salsa and I find it’s one of the best musics. For the very simple reason, I choose salsa because it’s accessible and flexible (souple). As a music, it has no equal.”56
Senegalese from this generation of the 1950s and 1960s have viewed Afro-Cuban dancing as dignified and respectable as well as modern. Indeed, because it emphasizes proper comportment and courtesy toward women, many see it as having a moral dimension. The guitarist Mbaye Seck observed: “Everyone dances not only because of the rhythms—it’s the morals. It’s their [Afro-Cuban music] calm morals. They’re sensible morals. It’s a music of deep feeling and everyone loves it.”57
Seck’s observations about why so many Senegalese have loved Afro-Cuban music points to another reason for its enduring popularity: its role as a catalyst for creating a “community of sentiment” for Senegalese “entering modernity” in the last half of the twentieth century. The anthropologist Arjun Appadurai argued in Modernity at Large that mass media have been especially effective in fostering the formation of such communities. Through film, sports, or, in the case of many nations in Africa, music, “a group … begins to imagine and feel things together.”58 In Senegal, a shared enthusiasm for Afro-Cuban music has allowed the generation that came into its own after independence to coalesce and create its own cultural identity. The singer and bandleader Pape Fall commented, “when I listen to Cuban music, I feel there is a part of me in that music,”59 an experience shared by many others in the Senegalese Afro-Cuban music public. The guitarist Baye Sy talked of his engagement with Afro-Cuban music in similar terms: “To love something is a sensation. You listen to something and it touches you and you don’t even know why. As soon as I heard this music, right away I loved it.”60
Nicolas Menheim, a sonero and bandleader, has an equally emotionally charged relationship with Afro-Cuban music: “We identify with this music. It’s almost as if it was in the water.”61 Cheikh “Charles” Sow, the late writer and librarian, also pointed to the emotional immediacy of Afro-Cuban music and its ability to create “communities of sentiment”: “It’s something that people sense right away. People feel it spontaneously regardless of the fact that it comes from far away. It’s not the same thing with jazz. People love it but it’s, let’s say, something intellectual or for people who have lived a long time in France. It’s not a music that is as instantly appreciated … I don’t even understand why people love it so much. Old people love Cuban music and so do young people.”62
Sow’s statement demonstrates that for the Senegalese of his generation (those who reached adulthood in the 1950s), involvement with Afro-Cuban music was not primarily cerebral. It was not just an exercise in salon cultural politics or an intellectual gesture. Instead, it entailed a profound emotional and, through dance, physical connection with the Hispanic cultures of the African diaspora, the méttisage/mestizaje of the Caribbean and a modernity as much based in the Atlantic tropical world as in the cooler climate of Western Europe. It engendered a community of sentiment based on lived experience that has lasted for three generations and shows few signs of disintegrating.
Communities of sentiment, though, as Appadurai has observed “are capable of moving from shared imagination to collective action.”63 This potential capacity is in part responsible for this group of music lovers’ often tense and complex relationship with the Senegalese state, even though the music has never been associated in Senegal with a political position. When Senghor became head of state, negritude became the semiofficial cultural policy of Senegal until the 1980s, a period coinciding with government neglect of Afro-Cuban music. Those in power during this era regarded the Afro-Cuban music community as being potentially at odds with negritude. By depriving it of state patronage and recognition, the Senegalese government inhibited the community of Afro-Cuban listeners from developing their aesthetic preferences into a political ideology.
This official disregard did little to quiet debates about what type of modernity was best suited for Senegalese society. In new contexts with new participants, discussions continued, informed by Senghor and Socé Diop’s differing models of negritude. Afro-Cuban music lay at the core of both these models; conspicuous in one case for its absence and in the other for its animating presence. In the 1950s Senegalese urban youth took up as their generation’s bandera both Afro-Cuban music and a form of negritude closer to Socé Diop’s version. This mixture made Senghor uncomfortable, but he was powerless to prevent it. For him, the path to full cultural citizenship, both domestically and internationally, involved securing an esteemed position in the global “republic of letters,” requiring that he mask his interest in Afro-Cuban music. In the 1950s and 1960s, however, for many youthful Senegalese the struggle for full cultural citizenship entailed engaging in new patterns of consumption and mastering new forms of sociability. For this generation, Afro-Cuban music continues to embody modern sociability in a unique and powerful way.
THREE
Son and Sociality
Afro-Cuban Music, Gender, and Cultural Citizenship, 1950s–1960s
Where there is consumption there is pleasure, and where there is pleasure there is agency.
Arjun Appadurai 1
Mbelekete was a well-known figure in the Kinshasa (Léopoldville) of the early 1950s, despite his lack of any particular trade or talent. He stopped traffic with his acrobatic stunts on his unicycle. He delighted in cycling into areas where Congolese normally were unwelcome by the Belgian colonial state and was famous for circling around stalled traffic at busy Kinshasa intersections. Occasionally Mbelekete would take it upon himself to direct traffic, much to the amazement of his fellow Kinois. Mbelekete became a fashion leader and tastemaker in Kinshasa before his premature death in the mid-1960s as a result of a traffic accident. His attendance at a club where a band was playing always ensured a full house. Indeed, his freewheeling attitude toward colonial authority influenced such youths as the famous musician Luambo “Franco” Makiadi. Fifty years after his death, Congolese from his generation still celebrate Mbelekete as the “No. 1 Kinois,” an avatar of modernity and an author of the Kinois urban style that has so attracted international attention.2
Mbelekete’s antics, using modern products like bicycles in a culturally transgressive manner, were not unique in postcolonial Africa. This chapter looks at how in Senegal urban youth similarly rehearsed “modern” identities by purchasing newly accessible goods like radios, sunglasses, and Western clothes and listening to and dancing to recorded music. These young Senegalese were less socially disruptive than their counterparts elsewhere in Africa, such as the “Buffalo Bills” of Kinshasa or the “cowboys” of Enugu, Nigeria. However, they were just as culturally significant. Starting in the 1950s, young men in Dakar and other communities congregated in courtyards or small sitting rooms to drink tea and listen to Afro-Cuban music on portable phonographs.
These casual gatherings rapidly crystallized into clubs with distinctive identifying names, large collections of Afro-Cuban music, and lengthy meetings. As the clubs grew, they staged elaborate parties. Clubs initially vied with one another over who had the most current Cuban discs. Over time, though, competition increasingly revolved around perceived expertise and the ability to project a distinguished mien. What started out as the pursuit of sociality evolved into new ways of being in the world that departed from both the dominant local and colonial French models.
These informal associations of urban youth, like their counterparts in Nigeria, Angola, and Tanzania, constituted innovative ways of defining masculinity in Africa, “fueling