This article revisits the cultural history of Guinea in the three decades following independence through focusing on the musical activity of Miriam Makeba, the exiled South African singer who resided in the country between the years 1968 and 1986. Recent scholarship has illuminated the vast investment of the Guinean state in developing modern national culture as part of the process of decolonisation as well as the limited freedom of expression, imposed by the state, that subjugated local cultural production. While these studies have concentrated primarily on Guinean cultural agents, this paper explores transnational dimensions within the cultural politics of Guinea. It highlights Makeba's emplacement in Guinea in the context of nation building, Pan-Africanism, cold war politics and black transnational cultural exchanges. By focusing on the disparity between textual sources and musically embedded meanings extracted from Makeba's music recorded in Guinea, this paper recasts Makeba as a conduit of African-American musical influences in the Guinean scene. By doing so, it uncovers cultural spaces that were not subordinated to official state ideology mediated through print culture, and thus have hitherto been unrecognised in mainstream historiography.This study focuses on a relatively unknown chapter in the musical career of the South African singer Miriam Makeba. I concentrate on her musical activity in the West African country of Guinea that became her home and where she worked between 1968 and 1986. Although Makeba has been the subject of academic scrutiny in recent years, research into her work has focused mainly on her time in the United States and has thus been limited to the North American context. Research has investigated, for example, her role in the US civil rights movement within a more encompassing framework of black cultural activism (Feldstein 2013;Fleming 2016); the manner in which she came to represent the African "other" in the United States (Sizemore-Barber 2012); as well as her role in promoting resistance to the apartheid regime (Weaver 2013). Makeba's career in Guinea, however, has not yet been the focus of sustained research. On the other hand, scholarship on Guinean music has focused primarily on Guinean-born musicians and on the state cultural apparatus, and
This article seeks to reassess the role of pan-Africanism within the national imagination of postcolonial Guinea under the presidency of Ahmed Sékou Touré. By focusing on the interplay between transnational and national dynamics within two cultural festivalsthe First Pan-African Cultural Festival of Algiers in 1969 and the Guinean National Festivalpan-Africanism is recast as a constitutive component of Guinean nationalism, enduring long after independence. Through an analysis of political discourse, discourse about music and recorded music in the context of these festivals, and primarily about the participation of non-Guinean musicians, the essay identifies state-activated forms of pan-African cultural citizenship that serve the Guinean state in imagining itself as directed towards the broader political horizons of Africa. At the same time, it suggests that, under the nation-state, pan-Africanism was entangled with the nationbuilding project and national patriotism.
Ryan Thomas Skinner. 2015. Bamako Sounds: The Afropolitan Ethics of Malian Music. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 240pp. ISBN 978-0-8166-9350-4 (pbk)
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