In this essay I will discuss three ways in which the colonisation of Africa and the subsequent division of its lands into 53 states, by European administrators in 1884-85, impacted on the music of Africa. I will show this by looking at: the political effects of colonisation on music, the western perception, in regard to scholarly research and commercial globalisation, and finally through the forceful effects of western musicality.
Firstly, I consider how the political elements of colonisation have had an effect on the music emerging from Africa. The continent was divid ned by European outsider forces in the Berlin Conference of 1884 (also known as the Congo Conference) in order to regulate trade and to adapt it to the new imperial powers. Fourteen countries sent representatives including the United Kingdom, the United States, Portugal and Belgium. This whole process became known as ‘The Scramble for Africa’. In so doing, the imperial forces managed to ‘divide and conquer’ by strategically imposing strains in intertribal relations. For example, in 1894, the British Empire strategically imposed boundaries, playing on existing economic conditions, splitting the North of Uganda from the South, thus giving the Southern Bantu people political and economic advantages over the people of North Uganda. This strategy of divide and conquer is mirrored throughout colonised Africa as it was a powerful tool in breaking identity, tribal communities and the pattern of ‘family’ strongly associated with the Africans (DJYK, 2016). This destroyed the unified identities of thousands of individual tribes with their individual cultures, and by extension their music. Tearing the tribes apart from the inside forced these new states, with their various languages, ideas, cultures and traditions, to find new ways to live together. Also this created less space for their music to be heard and practised, thus oppressing the production of music.
Secondly, the globalisation of African, and other music from undeveloped countries, through a Western ideology and from a Western perceptive, is in itself a reflection of colonial oppression. For example, Kofi Aguwa, a Ghanian ethnomusicologist, comments in his book ‘Representing Africa’:
“This book is written in English by a Ghanian whose first language, Siwu (spoken by the Akpafu people), is not a written language; whose first written language, Ewe, has no currency as a medium of scholarly exchange in Europe or America; and whose schooling facilitated familiarity with French as well as two other Ghanian language, Twi and Ga.”
In the western hemisphere, oral history is yet to become a viable form of academic exchange in the ways that would be necessary to understand the complex, near on elusive, oral historical accounts of much African music. Furthermore, Aguwa comments that perhaps this is the reason why “historians of Africa have ignored its music”. The western decision to formally rely on a written notation for music, and written modes of archiving history, means that we create an exclusivity over that history. Therefore. even when studying, for example, an indigenous music ritual, the West then proceeds to make that academia unattainable in any other sphere than that of the West (Smith, 2002).
Furthermore we can look into the contemporary effects of the coloniser’s perspective on African music by understanding the oppression that comes with the paradigm of internationalising their music. Simon Frith says:
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“These tables specialised in non mainstream “roots rock” and were interested in marketing more ethnomusicological oriented music that exuded an air of “authenticity”, at the same time as they perceived as “pure” from Western contamination.”
There has been an ongoing debate around the term ‘world music’, which was originally coined as an archiving solution in an attempt to make it easier for the West to find this music in our record shops. The term itself exudes cultural imperialism as it manages to umbrella vast quantities of music from the entire non-western world into one ‘world music’ category. This exploitation is the highest form of binarism and oppression that further commodifies and grossly generalises African, and all non-western music, into a pigeon hole of western perspective (MACAMO, 2012). I spoke to N’faly Kouyate of ‘Afro-Celt Sound System', a Mandinka West African griot maestro of traditional kora and balafon, and teacher of traditional polyphonic singing, about his perspective on the term ‘world music’:
“To be honest the term ‘world music’... I don’t think I perceive very much from that... because they choose to leave jazz out, and French music out, pop and rock music out and the rest...what do we have to do with this? I don’t understand the music, and therefore it is ‘world music’. In Africa they can sing very nice R&B, or soul, or rock, but they say ok... ‘world music’, because he’s from Africa. Then the base of all jazz music is in Africa, and the blues is from Africa, as is the pentatonic, but still we call it all ‘world music’.”
The capitalist, globalised Western world is simply a contemporary form of colonisation and oppression in the way it can force a distorted perception of what the western consumer expects from ‘world music’, whilst discarding the less ‘pop’ more discreet and foreign sounding traditional music. Almost so as to not allow its progression.
Which leads to the third point of the impact of colonialism on music from Africa: the literal musicality. Aside from an extremely unbalanced academic focus, the way the West has managed to take wrongful ownership of, for example, the pentatonic scale, among other musical elements, is also how we suppress African music by imposing a Western musicality. With the colonisation of the African lands, came the boosting of the ideology that the West needed to “Christianise and civilise the savage”: so we built churches and schools and enforced missionaries. However, despite this, under Belgium colonial rule, by 1956, out of fifteen million people, only seventeen had graduated (DJYK, 2016). In these places, the ways of the African were dismissed and in its place, they were taught a western religion, and a western musicality. An example is the establishment of the Christian church in the early 19th century in Nigeria; a critical look at the curriculum reveals a shocking dominance of western classical music over the traditional music of Nigeria (Godwin Sadoh, 2010). As in the contemporary Western educational system, music is taught in terms of Mozart and Bach, and neglects the musical history Africa, that most ancient of civilisations. Take the Pygmies, the earliest inhabitants of Africa found in the Congo forest, to whom ‘music’ such as the tapping of sticks, stamping of feet, or the rattling of seeds in gourds, was as much a ritualistic part of their civilisation as eating or sleeping. If we further consider the pygmies, their localised polyphonic hocketing vocal techniques ensured, in their inclusive way, that everyone was a musician within the tribe, thus reinforcing the family. We can trace Latin music all the way back to the tribes of Yoruba and the Congo but we refuse to teach this or elaborate on Africa’s musical importance (Roots of Rhythm: Part 1 of 3, 2017). In this sense we remain ignorant to these systems of music making and oppress the knowledge production of the music of Africa.
Kofi Aguwa says “we might say that the one of the greatest colonising powers is harmony.”(Agawu, 1992), meaning that in our literal colonisation of Africa and the trade diaspora,
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the European influences within African music are irreversible and inescapable. Such as forcing the colonised to attend Christian churches in order to “save the savages”, and, once there, have them sing in western diatonic melodies, with a preference to the major. It is here the colonisers force the African to discard his “preference to consonance at phrase ends, such as unison, octaves of thirds” amongst many other conflicting forms of musicality (Agawu, 1992). Here oppressing and colonising the growth and education of indigenous African musicalities.
A perfect example of all three of these impacts would be the somewhat hybridised internationalised South African group ‘Lady Smith Black Mambazo’. Their songs follow a western diatonic structure and yet the group have fallen under the political blanket of ‘world music’ and further, disturbingly, they now for the otherwise ignorant many, wholly represent South African music. Therefore oppressing, to a western perspective, the multitude of indigenous musical practises that have yet to been researched and solidified in history and further promoting the acceptance of a Western sound over that of an African sound.
In conclusion I have pointed out that, through political oppression, an imposed western perspective and colonial enforcement of western musicality, the colonial powers have oppressed the progression and historical documentation and globalisation of traditional music in, and from, Africa. Furthermore, through a dominant western perception, we are neo-colonising the expression of musical forms that are foreign to our spectrum of perception and so oppressing non-Western musical production.
References
Agawu, K. (1992). Representing African Music. Critical Inquiry, 18(2), pp. 245-266.
DJYK, T. (2016). Black People Before Slavery (Euorpeans Takeover Africa). [video] Available at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8M8N23VK-s [Accessed 6 Nov. 2017].
Godwin Sadoh (2010). Modern Nigerian Music: the Post Colonial Experience. Notes, 66(3), pp. 485-502.
MACAMO, E. (2012). FERNANDO ARENAS, Lusophone Africa: beyond independence. Minneapolis MN and London: University of Minnesota Press. Africa, 82(03), pp. 507-508.
Muller, S. (2017). The Lasting Impact of Colonialism.
Roots of Rhythm: Part 1 of 3. (2017). [video] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=R0vtyTD1kus [Accessed 4 Nov. 2017].
Smith, D. (2002). Colonial Encounters through the Prism of Music: A Southern African
Perspective. International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music3(1), p.31. 4 of 4
