“Indépendance Cha Cha”: African Pop Music since the Independence Era

Abstract

Investigating why Latin American music came to be the sound-track of the independence era, this contribution offers an overview of musical developments and cultural politics in certain sub-Saharan African countries since the 1960s. Focusing first on how the governments of newly independent African states used musical styles and musicians to support their nation-building projects, the article then looks at musicians’ more recent perspectives on the independence era.

THE The Virtuosity of Traditional Africa and the Plasticity of Its Affects: The Cross-Cultural Fertilization of “Yela” in the Western Sahel and Savanah

“…Thereby, Hauke Dorsch holds the idea that: … all cultural forms of expression, they are learnedand particularly in the sphere of music there is a pronounced craving for new, hitherto unknown forms of expression that transcend boundaries. In this context, theories on the dialectic of the global and the local have shown how global forms can nevertheless be used for specific local ways of expression (Dorsch, 2010).…”

Introduction – Imagining the “Musical Memorial” Music and the (re)transmission of the memory of slaveries and the slave trades.

“…This was the case for the Congolese rumba, labelled ICH by UNESCO in 2021. Although the links between the emergence of the rumba in the 1940s and the popularity of Cuban music on the African continent in the 1930s (thanks to the series of GV Records under the RCA Victor label) were recognised locally (Dorsch 2010;Kazadi 1998;Tchebwa 1996;White 2002), any mention of these origins was missing in the nomination jointly submitted to UNESCO by the two Congo. 9 It is paradoxical that, at a time when memorial initiatives were growing exponentially, those supporting the candidature of this music did not put it forward as a musical memorial, despite the fact that it had all the potential characteristics of one.…”

‘They don’t care about us’: representing the black postcolonial subject through the appropriation of Michael Jackson in Gabonese urban dance

“…7 During this period, Libreville was also strongly influenced by the rhythms and orchestras of neighbouring Congo and by the Brazzaville musical scene. Then, after the independence in 1960, Afro-Cuban music began to exert a growing impact in Libreville, which was pulsing to the sound of cha-cha-cha and pachanga, the sounds of which incarnated the emancipation and nationhood that African musicians started to claim (Dorsch 2010).…”