in Africa, Senegalese record clubs grew out of the coming together of new gender constructions, patterns of consumption, and imagining of communities. However, while young Dakarois men longed for the same prestige goods and were preoccupied with the same issues of cultural “sovereignty” as their counterparts elsewhere in Africa, their reformulation of manhood revolved around different axes. Reflecting local cultural practice, their modern masculinity emphasized sociality over aggression and cosmopolitanism over ethnic or regional particularism. As a consequence, in place of public displays of male power typical of Enugu and Kinshasa, Dakarois engaged in semisecluded enactments of elegance and sophistication. Rather than carve out alternative zones of male refuge and withdrawal like the musseque clubs in colonial Luanda, Dakar’s young men created arenas where they prepared for future societal leadership roles, enlarging social networks through demonstrating the latest Latin dance moves.
The Senegalese clubs were especially significant in how they pioneered modern social behaviors for men. Members at all times had to be correcte. In Senegalese terms, this word has multiple meanings and dimensions. It refers to neat and fashionable clothes, a punctilious concern with etiquette, flawless self-discipline, and a general air of refinement. Together, these qualities denote an individual with an unblemished moral reputation, as internally clean as he is externally elegant. Whether consciously or not, club members were using Afro-Cuban music to fuse elements of “traditional” Wolof/Serer/Tukolor cultures with French bourgeois mores to devise a new standard of behavior for a modern Senegal.
The clubs themselves were a bricolage of French, Cuban, and Senegalese social institutions. The club members overtly appropriated the French salon and soirée, for example. They were not the first Senegalese to do this.4 However, by holding salons and soirées far removed from the elite precincts, democratizing them, and adding Spanish to French as the languages of “high” culture, they were departing from tradition. From Cuba, the young Dakarois borrowed the idea of the rumba session in which music and dance enhanced solidarity and congealed new identities. From their own cultures, the Afro-Cuban club members recontextualized age grades and initiation ceremonies and in a altered form made them relevant to urban life. By linking expressive culture with modernity and generational differentiation, they provided fresh frameworks for thinking and feeling. These linkages created modern ways of associating with one another and their community that the club members felt were congruent with a progressive society.
CONSUMPTION, SOCIALITY, AND CULTURAL CITIZENSHIP
The record clubs thus served as workshops where Senegalese youth of the late colonial era could experiment with new forms of sociality that drew on local, Caribbean, and French traditions. For these youths, this new form of sociality with its transnational basis and its emphasis on tolerance and refinement provided a pathway to modernity that bypassed the usual colonial circuits. Consumption was central to this new notion of sociality. The young Senegalese in the Afro-Cuban music clubs consumed goods like phonographs and records to encode popular experience into self-consciously “modern” cultural forms. For them, “consumption was good for thinking,” for conceptualizing and enacting a form of cultural citizenship that would enable them to be modern and African in a postcolonial world.5
Ever since Karl Marx made commodity fetishism a centerpiece in his analysis of how capitalism shapes culture, researchers have studied how the consumption of commodities by individuals and groups transforms consciousness and alters social relations. In African and Latin American studies, researchers have often connected consumption with the global expansion and penetration of a Western-dominated capitalism.6 In this line of analysis, Africans or Latin Americans become modern through their acquisition of European industrial products. Their modernity stems both from their newly conceived desire for these goods and the ways purchased items such as bicycles, furniture, and clothes change their daily lives, their self-perception, and their worldview.
Consumption can play a vital role in the creation of identities independent of the cultural meanings originally attached to specific goods. Soap, for example, may have one meaning for the European or South African producers and quite another for Zimbabwean consumers. For the manufacturers, their merchandise is a device for becoming “clean but for the Zimbabweans, the toiletries were a tool for defining and refining personhood.”7
In the Argentine sociologist Néstor García Canclini’s work, consumption can be a means for claiming “rights to difference,” enabling a group to gain recognition “as subjects with ‘valid interests, relevant values and legitimate claims.’” By consuming, we can “distinguish ourselves … and [find] ways to combine pragmatism with pleasure.”8 Canclini maintains that consumption can have political ramifications, whether intended or not. Clusters of individuals, by preferring one commodity to another, can be both part of a society and distinct from it. How and what they consume establishes their “cultural citizenship” and has an impact on their status. For Senegalese youth growing up in 1950s and 1960s Dakar, the idea of cultural citizenship galvanized their generation. Straddling the colonial/postcolonial divide, they asserted themselves culturally and politically as a generation that was both African and modern.9
A new form of sociality provided the foundation for the cultural citizenship they were advocating. The concept of sociality has a long history in Western thought. Definitions abound, from Lord Shaftsbury to Georg Simmel. The definition that best typifies the Senegalese situation comes from the anthropologist Richard Fardon’s work on Western Cameroon. Fardon explains that sociality (or as he prefers, “sociability”) “is the behaviors and attitudes anticipated in different relationships … a framework of knowledge and organization of feeling about the way people impinge upon one another.”10 Fardon makes the important point that “since sociability identifies and models personal relations, it is related both to the conceptual and moral ordering of societies.”11
By linking the emotional textures and rhythms of daily life to the organization of societies and states on a wider scale, Fardon’s model of sociability illuminates the cultural significance of Dakar’s Latin record clubs. The sociality that typified the clubs reflected the complex realities of postwar African Dakar. New French colonial policies and internal economic changes within Senegal itself reshaped the city’s social landscape. There was an expansion of Western educational opportunities and an increased rate of migration from the rural hinterland into the capital city. These developments necessitated new “frameworks of knowledge and feeling” for young Dakarois. At the very moment when the colonial authorities were slowly easing their access to evolué status, the influx of new inhabitants from the interior who were relatively unexposed to classic French culture transformed their city. Some of the new arrivals regarded the clubs as insufficiently Islamic because of their overt secularity and kept their distance. However, many of the migrants, especially those who were students in colonial schools, joined and were welcomed. Indeed, many children of migrants established their own record clubs. The sociality of the Latin record clubs enabled their members to simultaneously embrace the culture of the wider Atlantic world represented by their European education while affirming their Africanité in solidarity with their newly urban Senegalese neighbors.
This sociality also furthered the growth of a Senegalese civic society embedded in local practice but reflecting French republican ideals. In the English-speaking world the state and civic society are separate. Civic society provides a space for individual liberty, and the state legally guarantees that freedom.12 In French republicanism, by contrast, the state is an extension of civil society. What happens in civic society shapes the state and is of great significance. In this model, civic society emerges out of citizen participation in many different realms, the cultural and social as well as the political. Indeed, “sociability and citizenship [presuppose] each other.”13 Citizenship doesn’t just entail involvement with political institutions. The correcte attitudes and behaviors arising out of intensive participation in the public sphere are also essential in defining citizenship. In fact, in the Francophone tradition, cultural citizenship lies at the heart of the republican project.
From this perspective, the Senegalese record clubs as voluntary cultural and social associations had an implicit political dimension. The behaviors and mentalités the clubs fostered were similar to