Chapter 5

Money Trouble

Wariko

In November 2006, the Triton Stars, an aspiring Malian dance band (whose work we encountered in chapters 2 and 3), finished up a four-day run at Studio Bogolan in Bamako (Figure 18). The recordings were for the band’s second album, a follow-up to their first release, Immigration, which had been on the market sinceJanuary of the same year without any sales to speak of. In an effort to rejuvenate the band’s prospects, producer Racine Dia decided to re-release the first album in January 2007, to be followed soon thereafter by the second (as yet untitled) album, building on the anticipated success of the first. The problem, Dia told me, was that nobody in Mali knew the Triton Stars. They didn’t have “a name” (or tɔgɔ, meaning “a reputation”) in the city. To rectify this, the group would play a series of weekly concerts free of charge.

On a Friday evening in early December, audience members—including friends of the band, shoppers from the nearby Sogoniko market, and a large contingent of neighborhood youth—sat noisily on plastic chairs laid out on a small grassy field in front of the concrete stage. Others stood behind them, or along the wall marking the perimeter of the Centre de Recherche Culturelle et Artistique, a privately funded cultural center. At 9:30 P.M., the Triton Stars took the stage, right on schedule, kicking off with a track from their new album, a piece called “Wariko” (“Money Trouble”), a hard-edged and fast-paced Afropop arrangement. Lyrically, the song addressed a theme to which everyone present could relate: the socioeconomic precarity inherent to a loosely regulated and generally inequitable cash economy. In the opening verse, lead singer Karounga Sacko belted out the following lines:

During my fieldwork in Bamako, the phrase wariko, much like the incessant heat of the afternoon sun (as Sacko poetically notes), was ubiquitous. When a roving hawker entered into a family compound in hopes of selling his wares, he was almost always greeted with a polite “Wariko,” meaning, “Sorry, we don’t have money to spend today.” When a friend or a relation approached her companion, brother, or sister for some extra cash to get through the week, she often heard “Wariko” in response, implying: “I’d like to help, but I have the same problem right now.” In the market, the phrase echoed in the mouths of peddlers and hagglers with such redundant frequency that it became a sort of vocal leitmotif in Bamako’s urban soundscape. Echoing this refrain, Sacko probed its psychosocial dangers. Because of money trouble, extended families, neighbors, siblings, and close friends are embroiled in argument and betrayal. Money inspires fear and kills marriage. It threatens both self and society.

Later in the show, the subject of money trouble returned, this time in the words of two emcees (French, animateurs), whose stage patter between songs playfully referenced the precarious livelihoods of professional artists in Mali. “Everyone will get together to buy this cassette,” one of the emcees announced. “So, what’s the problem? You only need to listen to the first track on the A side. Honestly, you will hear people making noise! When that track is playing, you will be pleased.” What, then, was the problem? As the second emcee explained, it was not simply social and aesthetic; it was also, and perhaps more urgently, political and economic:

In this chapter, I historicize this complex “problem” by interrogating the salient and oppositional forms wariko takes within the Malian culture industry: copyright (French, le droit d’auteur) and piracy.1 I also consider, like Sacko in his song, the socioeconomic repercussions of this “money trouble” in the working lives of professional artists. Yet, as the Triton Stars’ concert made clear, such troubles are not just about money; rather, they index a pervasive sense of precarity that triangulates social, political, and economic uncertainty for which money, and its widespread lack, is the privileged sign.2 As sociologist Franco Barchiesi describes, in a poignant critique of (neo)liberal economic rationality,

For many artists, the professional precarity signified by wariko has a clear source: music piracy. “The problem these artists face,” the emcee said. It is this qualification of piracy as an objective and strongly negative truth—what Barchiesi calls a “normative and symbolic universe” and what I have described in the present text as a moralizing “social position”—that this chapter seeks to historically contextualize and, in doing so, problematize.

As the scene described indicates, appeals to confront the problem of piracy and affirm the status and identity of local artists as rights-bearing subjects resound within the Malian public sphere. Such arguments echo anxieties about the social and economic value of music in an era of privatized markets and decentralized politics, a sentiment expressed when the emcee spoke, from the stage of a private cultural center, of “the only way artists can make a living” (my emphasis). Through such claims on sociomusical justice, a contemporary discourse of neoliberal governance takes shape around the concept of culture, defined as an expedient object of curatorial and commoditized expression (Yudicé 2004). Copyright and its ubiquitous infringement, piracy, represent the normative and aberrant forms through which culture is produced and policed in Mali, as elsewhere (see Karaganis 2011); that is, they are the categorical means by which governmentality—the regulatory and disciplinary politics of population management and control in modern states (Foucault 2007)—operates as cultural policy under the global sign of neoliberalism (see Guilbault 2007).

In practice, however, the politics of culture in Mali has succeeded neither in securing the legal and pecuniary interests of musicians nor in stemming the unauthorized reproduction of musical works. This perceived failure of neoliberal governance manifests in what I have elsewhere called an artistic “crisis of political subjectivity” (Skinner 2012a), in which musicians, caught between a dysfunctional state and an informal economy that flourishes in its midst, struggle to sustain a viable professional status and identity. In what follows, I put these artistic struggles into historical relief by tracing a genealogy of copyright and its criminalized corollary, piracy, through an emergent politics of culture in Mali. This history reveals the long-standing, though steadily deepening social, political, and economic precarity that has shaped the subjectivity of the postcolonial Malian musician. This chapter is, thus, a particular history of wariko as experienced by musicians in the Malian art world from the era of independence to the present. It is a critical inquiry, in other words, into the cultural-economic social position of the Malian artist. I begin by bringing the past to bear on this current era of neoliberalism and the pervasive “money trouble” it produces. I then interrogate the governmentalization of culture as a regime of rights and discipline in postcolonial Mali. As a cadential counterpoint, I conclude with a short reflection on what I will call “nongovernmental culture,” or the forms of expression that articulate outside—and often in violation—of the disciplinary institutions of neoliberal governmentality. Yet, as we observe in this chapter, Bamako’s nongovernmental culture can only be fully understood in relation to the history of cultural governmentalization in postcolonial Mali. The problem of governance as a crucial existential concern for contemporary Malians, artists or otherwise, is further explored in the next chapter.

Artistic Rights and Labor in Post-Independence Mali

In 1957, artists working in the French Soudan (now Mali) and other French colonies were allowed to join the Société des Auteurs, Compositeurs et Editeurs de Musique (SACEM), a French agency that managed the licensing of artistic works and the collection and distribution of royalties for affiliated artists (Diakité 2006, 54; see also Laing 2004, 71–72). This imperial affiliation did not last long. Following independence three years later, all music produced in Mali, in line with the new nation’s policy of cutting institutional ties with its former colonizer, fell under the purview of the state. Up until 1977, Mali did not have any codified copyright law or bureaucratic mechanism for distributing royalties. This meant, in practice, that the postcolonial state could act as the sole arbiter of domestic cultural production, distribution, and exploitation. In 1962, Mali did, however, ratify the Berne Convention in nominal deference to international intellectual property law, and, the same year, the government signed the continental accord creating the Organisation Africaine de la Propriété Intellectuelle (Cissé and Traoré 2001, 7). In 1963, Mali reaffirmed its commitment to “the harmonization of copyright law in Africa” at a UNESCO-sponsored meeting of the International Bureau for the Protection of Intellectual Property in Brazzaville but argued that such legislation should “take local context and popular opinion into account” (Ntahokaja 1963, 252–53),3 thereby affirming the authority of individual African states to legislate intellectual property as they saw fit. Despite the official public rhetoric of international and continental agreement, copyright in Mali remained uncodified and subject to arbitrary state interpretation for nearly two decades.

As copyright goes, so go the artists. In the 1960s, musicians in Mali were beholden to the state as clients of a nationalist politics of culture (Skinner 2012b), although until 1966 they were not employed by the state. For the most part, artists worked informally, living off a share of ticket sales from concert performances, without any formal employment contract.4 Their musical labor (performed and recorded) was considered property of the state, part of the socialist government’s reliance on citizens’ patriotic fasobaara or “work for the nation.” In the early 1960s, this could sometimes mean unpaid labor, described in terms normally associated with colonial rule: forosɛbaara and diyagoyabaara, or “forced labor” and “whether-you-like-it-or-not work.” “They couldn’t pay us,” recalls Nfa Diabaté, a retired member of the Ensemble Instrumental National, “so they called it fasobaara”—a postcolonial expression of wariko in the 1960s Malian art world.5

And, as artists go, so goes their work. In the post-independence era, musical recordings were made and archived at Radio Mali, the single, state-owned media outlet that housed the country’s only recording studio (see Mamadou Diawara 1997). These recordings were, for the most part, propagandistic in terms of content, with themes that emphasized nationalist use value, including comparisons of the modern nation-state to the precolonial Mali Empire (“Maliba,” Great Mali); calls for newly ordained Malian nationals displaced within the former French Empire to return home (Yan Ka Di, “Here Is Good”); and appeals to work for the homeland (Fasobaara, “Nation Building”).6 Exchange value was a lesser concern. Recordings of such “nationalist” music were made principally for radio broadcast. Long-play pressings of state-sponsored Malian groups did not appear until the late 1960s and were not widely distributed until the early 1970s.7 By contrast, foreign-produced LPs had long been in circulation (since at least the 1940s), especially in the capital, Bamako, where such regional and global sounds were coveted commodities within an urban popular culture that thrived throughout the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s (Manthia Diawara 1997).

A disjuncture thus emerged between the circulation and consumption of national and foreign music that, under the increasingly authoritarian rule of the single-party state in the late 1960s, also marked the fault lines of official and unofficial culture. As a young activist of the ruling party asked in December 1967, “Does the Malian revolution need James Brown [or] Johnny [Hallyday] . . . to fill the catalog of its National radio?”8 Perhaps not; yet, despite efforts to inhibit foreign (which usually meant Western and neocolonialist) cultural influence (see, for example, Arnoldi 2006, 60), such recordings continued to resonate within Bamako’s urban soundscape.9 For Malian artists, this cleavage between the national and the popular, the official and the unofficial, became a source of great frustration. With their domestic labor beholden to a single venue of broadcast distribution at the national radio, and without any legal right to their recorded work in Mali, cultural labor’s subordinate status became patent. Internationally renowned musician Sorry Bamba’s autobiography (Bamba and Prévost 1996) recounts his attempt to procure copies of an album released on the occasion of Mali’s tenth anniversary of independence for his state-sponsored band, the Orchestre Régional de Mopti (1970). His narrative captures the perceived injustice of Mali’s centralist policy toward cultural production and ownership (Bamba and Prévost 1996, 134):

As Bamba describes, Malian artists’ access to their recorded works through the 1960s and into the 1970s was restricted by a highly centralized culture economy and subject to the arbitrary decisions of local and national authorities, subverted only by the surreptitious pirating—to complicate the shades of illegality the contemporary term piracy implies—of the artists’ own music broadcast on the national airwaves.

These frustrations about cultural ownership, production, and circulation coincided with a coup d’état in November 1968, the immediate aftermath of which (following a brief period of hopeful jubilation; see Sanankoua 1990, 55) exacerbated artists’ woes. After the coup, all cultural troupes, orchestras, and ensembles were disbanded by the ruling military junta, the Comité Militaire de Libération Nationale, and remained so for more than a year.10 Without salaried contracts and with their status as unofficial agents of national culture under the previous regime, Malian artists faced a stark choice: leave the country and embark on an indefinite exile, or stay and weather the storm of military rule, hoping for the best. Many left. Abidjan, the booming capital of Côte d’Ivoire, Mali’s richer and more liberal (if not entirely democratic) southern neighbor, became the destination of choice. Sorry Bamba described sentiments shared by many Malian artists in the post-coup years:

The 1970s Ivoirian economy, bolstered by lucrative cocoa and coffee exports and President Houphouët Boigny’s clientelist politics, provided for a strong patron class in Abidjan. Some of these wealthy and well-placed entrepreneurs had personal ties to Mali and favored the arts, like Souleymane Koli, who recruited expatriate Malian artists into the famed Ballets Koteba (see Skinner 2004, 144–45). Flush with cash and a fondness for popular culture, Abidjan quickly emerged as the capital of the regional music industry. “Musicians came from the four corners of francophone Africa to try their luck in Côte d’Ivoire,” writes Chérif Keïta, in his biography of Malian singer Salif Keita, one of Abidjan’s seminal figures in the late 1970s and early 1980s. “This situation imposed a new kind of rationality on the African artist, who could no longer hope to survive by courting local audiences or counting on the patronage of the State” (2009, 76). In Abidjan’s highly competitive, market capitalist music scene, “artistic rationality” meant seeking out patrons, cutting records, and embarking on tours in the regional, continental, and increasingly international African culture industry. Back in Bamako, the state oligarchy (now in civilian guise as the Union Démocratique du Peuple Malien) maintained its grip on cultural production, patronizing select groups that practiced the art of political flattery (2009, 37); however, by the end of the 1970s, political and economic changes were underway that, within a decade, would herald the end of the centralized and authoritarian regime itself (compare Pauthier 2012).

The Neoliberal Turn

In 1977, Mali enacted its first copyright law (77–46/CMLN), providing for the protection of the “literary and artistic property” of culture producers, or “authors.” This was followed in 1978 by the creation of the Bureau Malien du Droit d’Auteur (BuMDA), whose mission was to “defend the intellectual, moral, and pecuniary interests of authors and their rights therein” (Cissé and Traoré 2001, 5). However, without a clear mandate to enforce intellectual property rights, and given the persistence of statist sponsorship of the arts through the mid-1980s (despite increasingly austere socioeconomic conditions), real changes in artists’ professional status and identity (though not necessarily those envisaged by the laws) would not come until the mid-1980s. In July 1984, in a brochure commemorating the closing of the 8th Biennale Artistique et Culturelle, a state-sponsored biannual cultural festival, the director of arts and culture, an adjunct to the minister of culture, prepared a series of responses to questions concerning the event’s successes and failures.11 His response to the fourth, penultimate question was revealing and prescient given the changes occurring not only in the Malian culture economy but in the political economy of the postcolony more broadly.

This question-and-answer passage effectively captures the shifting sociopolitical position of Malian artists and the changing perceptions of their work in the mid-1980s. The question succinctly makes the point that proponents of “free culture” (Lessig 2004) have long advocated: that cultural creativity benefits from greater public access to cultural products, in this case through increased broadcast and circulation of recorded works on the airwaves and in the marketplace. The response, however, signals the new orientation of Malian cultural policy—toward an emergent neoliberal governmentality—in a time of socioeconomic austerity: the state, no longer possessing the means to manage the production and distribution of cultural works, must privatize public culture. Written in July, in the midst of the rainy season, the director describes the state’s anxiety—“sweating in the rain”—about producing and promoting new cultural works and calls on “our businessmen both in and out of the country” to invest in the development of a private culture industry. This call to liberalize Mali’s stagnant culture economy responds to two problems that “dangerously hinder artistic creation”: (1) emigration of national artists (discussed previously), and (2) “the illicit production of discs and cassettes” (or what would later be called, simply, “piracy”), the latter being the worst of cases, suggesting the emergent state of the counterfeit market at the time.

As this statement was written, major changes in the social, economic, and political character of the arts in Mali were already underway and would accelerate by decade’s end. In June 1984 (a month before the biennial), the Malian parliament passed a law (84–26/AN-RM) to replace the 1977 ordinance defining artistic and literary property. The updated document more specifically elaborated the notion of copyright and included a statement outlining what constitutes illicit reproduction of copyrighted material (articles 31–36) and a list of sanctions for various infractions (articles 135–48)—making media piracy an object of governmental intervention. Two years later, largely in response to the exigencies of International Monetary Fund–sponsored Structural Adjustments Programs (SAPs), the government passed legislation (86–13/AN-RM) to reform the code of commerce, effecting a radical liberalization of the national economy that privatized and liquidated many state-owned businesses—making public sector retrenchment an object of governmental intervention. Enter the private sphere. In 1988, French entrepreneur Philippe Berthier, disillusioned with the punk rock scene in Lyon, shuttered his record store and moved to Bamako, where he established Mali’s first private multitrack recording studio. In 1989, Berthier opened the country’s first cassette duplication factory, which, along with his studio, formed the base of his new company, Ou Bien Productions (Maillot 2002). A private music industry was thus born in Mali, founded on the codification of copyright, the criminalization of media piracy, investment in private infrastructure, and a radical divestment in public institutions, including state-sponsored artistic groups and festivals.

Yet, expectations of a rationalized culture economy soon encountered the limits of neoliberal governmentality within the fragile Malian political economy. On March 26, 1991, following months of protests in the capital city, the dictatorial regime of Moussa Traoré fell to a coup d’état whose leaders quickly earned popular support by announcing their commitment to democratic reforms. As an interim government stepped into power, civil society expanded, signaled by the mushrooming of private radio stations in Malian towns and cities (Couloubaly 2004, 24; see also Tower 2008). Often cited as evidence of a new democratic spirit surging throughout the continent in the early 1990s, cultural authorities perceived the proliferation of these new media outlets with trepidation. The BuMDA, which was given further autonomy and greater authority to represent and defend the pecuniary interests of artists in a 1990 ordinance (90–55/P-RM), witnessed what it viewed as an unprecedented affront to artistic copyright with the sudden increase in private radio broadcasts. Recorded music of all kinds filled the airwaves as new stations vied for listening publics (see Tower 2005). However, no royalty payments were made for the broadcast of these recorded works, setting an unlawful precedent for private radio broadcast in Mali that continues to this day.13 Since 1984, in accordance with article 29 of the intellectual property law 84–26/AN-RM, the Office de Radiodiffusion et de Télévision du Mali (Mali’s national broadcaster) has paid a fixed annual sum of 5 million CFA francs ($10,000) to the BuMDA, a fee recently (2002) complemented with a further 100 million CFA francs ($200,000) annual government subsidy (Couloubaly 2004, 169). A 1994 amendment (94–043) to the 1984 copyright legislation (84–26/AN-RM) requires private radio stations to pay a similar flat annual fee for the use of musical works, although such payments remain disputed and, thus, commercial radio broadcasts in the private sphere remain, officially, unlawful.

Where media goes, the musicians follow. From the late 1980s, many state-sponsored artists were offered severance benefits, including early pensions for those who qualified, in an effort to reduce civil servant expenses in line with SAP protocols. As a matter of policy, the process of cultural privatization had been underway since the late 1970s, spearheaded by Minister of Culture (and later President) Alpha Oumar Konaré. Artists departing the state-sponsored orchestras and ensembles at this time (including popular divas Kandia Kouyaté, Ami Koita, Tata Bambo, and Nahawa Doumbia from the Ensemble Instrumental National) formed new groups and introduced the notion of the solo artist to regional audiences.14 Bolstered by the presence of a domestic and private (if limited) record industry (that is, Ou Bien Productions), the decline of Abidjan as a regional center of music production, an influx of foreign capital in the form of world music (then, a new concept; see Feld 2000, 146–51), and the subsequent proliferation of private radio following the 1991 coup (which did much to promote the work of Malian artists, despite official accusations of copyright infringement), many musicians’ careers did, in fact, take off. This has been described as a period of “effervescence” in Malian music (Touré 1996, 98). No longer bound to the state, artists were now free to explore private enterprise in an unfettered capitalist terrain. But, just as conditions were ripe for the rise of prominent solo artists in the early 1990s, so too were circumstances ideal for the further “criminalization” of the Malian culture economy (see Bayart et al. 1999) and a parallel effervescence of neoliberal wariko (“money trouble”) in the artistic community.

When musicians go, the state turns its back. In many ways, this criminalization begins, not with piracy, but with the state’s Voluntary Early Retirement (VER) programs, first authorized in August 1986.15 Between 1987 and 1989, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) sponsored a pilot program to offer civil servants (fonctionnaires) a single lump-sum pension before their anticipated retirement. Six hundred forty-four people left the civil service during this first wave of VER. A second wave, which transpired sporadically between 1991 and 1995,16 saw 5,023 state employees leave, including subventionnaires, a category of subaltern civil servants that included many state-sponsored artists. The lump sum offered to fonctionnaires was 2,500,000 CFA francs ($5,000). Subventionnaires received 1,500,000 CFA francs ($3,000).17 In the early 1990s, under the leadership of then-President Alpha Oumar Konaré, the state encouraged artists in particular to opt for the VER, using their pensions as start-up capital to form new orchestras and ensembles.18 Although many private music groups did form during the 1980s and 1990s, I found no evidence that VER funds contributed to the formation of any orchestra or ensemble. Those groups that did emerge and succeed outside the aegis of the state benefited from the renown of already established artists, as with the solo divas of the Ensemble Instrumental National mentioned earlier (see Durán 1995a). Most artists who opted for VER saw their capital disappear into extant debt, family obligations, and everyday expenses. If private sector aspirations ever were envisioned, they soon became the source of bitterness and despair.19

Anarchy and Control

As state authorities pushed artists into a growing private sector, they did little to monitor or regulate the emergent culture economy that sector fostered. Even so, state discipline, the punitive corollary to privatization, was not entirely absent and, in hindsight, seems merely to have been deferred. In June 1993, the BuMDA conducted a police seizure operation in media markets throughout Bamako and collected 39,500 cassettes, of which 12,274 were determined to be pirated. (It is not clear what happened to the remaining 27,226 “legitimate” cassettes.) As Mandé Diakité reports, “This action was condemned by the authorities, and ‘the fight against piracy,’ judged inopportune, was suspended until September 1994 due to the insecurity that reigned over punitive actions of any kind in Mali” (2006, 4). In an effort to secure the legitimacy of the new democratic Republic and distance themselves from the recently ousted junta, government authorities under the leadership of President Alpha Oumar Konaré strategically refrained from any overt acts of state intervention. Indeed, after two decades of political misrule (Diarrah 1991) the state had become a conspicuous target of popular animosity. As Diakité describes:

“Henceforth,” Diakité writes elsewhere, “piracy would take root with impunity and become habitual among merchants,” adding, more polemically, that “over the course of three years, the pillaging of artists and producers would occur everywhere and at all times without risk to the offenders” (Diakité 2006, 4).

Though Diakité’s passionate and unambiguously critical take on this history of piracy is clearly driven by his longtime work with the Malian Copyright Office, his observation of the increasingly “habitual” nature of economic informality within an unregulated media marketplace is important. This is because habit engenders assumptions of “natural conditions” and a certain acceptance of things as they are, however disquieting, dangerous, or destructive those things might be. In the context of laissez-faire capitalism, media piracy did, as Diakité argues, become an entrenched fixture of the Malian culture economy. Yet, as described earlier, this cultural economic condition—of the counterfeit reproduction and sale of commercial media—was preceded by the habit of public divestment in the arts, in line with prescribed SAPs, combined with the similarly structured habit of governmental deregulation—to say nothing of the habits of (re)production and circulation that the media themselves produced (see Larkin 2008). Later, a habit of periodic police discipline would develop to confront the counterfeit culture economy; thus, criminalizing piracy, too, became a habit. In other words, the habitual problem of piracy is rooted in the paradigmatic and hegemonic habits of neoliberalism: divestment, deregulation, and discipline. The result is a postcolonial culture economy that is torn between perceptions of anarchy and prescriptions of control (Comaroff and Comaroff 2006), a position that serves only to further entrench neoliberal habits, not redress them.

These habits would gain steam through the 1990s. In March 1994, the legal mandate of the BuMDA was once again strengthened by an amendment (94–043/AN-RM) to the 1984 copyright law (84–26/AN-RM). The same year, music critic Banning Eyre reports that the Malian government made an unsuccessful attempt to shut down Radio Kayira, a private Bamako-based radio station that was fiercely critical of the government (2000, 198), on the grounds of copyright infringement.21 The following year, global music production house EMI, affiliated with Ou Bien Productions since 1992, closed its operations on the continent (with the exception of South Africa). Ou Bien chief Philippe Berthier, lacking a strong international backer, turned to local entrepreneur and Grammy Award–winning musician, the late Ali Farka Touré (Maillot 2002). With Touré’s partnership, a move that bolstered the local legitimacy of this previously foreign-owned company, a new business, Mali K7 (pronounced, in French, Mali cassette), was created. Yet, this symbolic act of cultural political control, providing an air of authenticity to Mali’s small private record industry, materialized on the margins of a marketplace in which the perceived anarchy of media piracy predominated.

Banning Eyre’s account of record producers’ dealings with cassette piracy during his six-month research trip to Bamako in 1995–96 describes the industry’s extraordinary (and perhaps foolhardy) attempts to negotiate this disjuncture in the production and circulation of commercial culture, asserting control in the midst of anarchy:

Eyre goes on to cite Oumou Sangaré’s husband and manager, who presents his own homegrown tactic to combat piracy: “Most of the pirate copies come up from Guinea, and when the rains start, some of the main roads close. That might delay the arrival of pirate copies a week or more” (199).

Such dramatic efforts (timing a release for the onset of the rainy season) might make sense for an artist of Sangaré’s stature, who, with domestic media sales in the tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of cassettes and compact discs, has much to lose to counterfeit commerce. For most Malian musicians, however, the media market, from which earnings are either limited or nonexistent, is of far less concern than Bamako’s highly competitive live music scene and the possibility for tours and recording contracts abroad, in the music capitals of Europe and the United States. For these artists, local live performances are, at best, a way to promote themselves and their work in hopes of being discovered by industry-connected world music enthusiasts, who, during the past decade, have listened in to Bamako’s popular music culture with growing interest (see, for example, Hammer 2005). At worst, such performances represent a recurrent source of personal and professional discouragement.

While living in Bamako in the late 1990s and early 2000s, I worked closely with kora virtuoso Toumani Diabaté, whose group, the Symmetric Orchestra, played every Friday at a popular (but now defunct) nightclub, Le Hogon (see chapter 4). For Symmetric members, the professional significance of these gigs had little to do with earnings (with a nightly take per musician of around ten dollars); more important was the possibility of joining their globetrotting bandleader on one of his many concert tours abroad. Yet, to their recurrent dismay, Diabaté would leave with his Mande Jazz Trio (still together and very popular at the time), fellow kora master Ballaké Sissoko (with whom he recorded an album and toured in 1998), or foreign collaborators like blues legend Taj Mahal (whose collaboration with Diabaté in 1999 produced a global bestseller).22 For Bamako bands, like the Symmetric Orchestra, the tantalizing—though rarefied—ideal of a global music career must be weighed against the harsh reality of making do and getting by at home, scraping out a meager living at nightclubs and local ceremonies, and waiting for the next chance to get out.23 This is, perhaps, the most salient everyday condition of musical money trouble (wariko) and the cultural-economic social position of the professional musician in the late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century Malian art world.

Such professional concerns, which emphasize artistic persons over products in an otherwise depersonalized culture economy, have, since the late 1990s, gone largely unacknowledged by state and industry authorities, for whom control over the media market remains the predominant political and economic issue. Foreshadowing the piracy crises of the mid-2000s (see Skinner 2012a, 730–39), Mali K7, still the sole music production house in the country, announced in December 1999 that it would halt its operations and lay off its employees. Discouraged by what he considered to be the state’s failure to take action against the influx of counterfeit cassettes in the Malian marketplace, CEO Philippe Berthier threatened to move his company to neighboring Burkina Faso. Perhaps as a gesture of good faith, the BuMDA, in an act of punctuated police discipline, confiscated and destroyed 60,000 counterfeit cassettes on February 1, 2000 (Cissé and Traoré 2001, 24). Mali K7 reopened its doors the following March. Reflecting on these events, Berthier had the following to say:

This “crisis” did, in fact, herald a period, however brief, of greater control in the Malian culture economy. In September 2000, ordinance 00–042/P-RM established the BuMDA as a legal entity with autonomous finances equipped to “organize and represent authors of literary and artistic works as well as their beneficiaries” (articles 1 and 2). The government thus established a normative institutional framework within which the pecuniary interests of artists could, in theory, be guaranteed and the revenues derived from their works managed and accounted for. In 2002, Seydoni (a Burkina Faso–based record company) opened recording and cassette/CD duplication facilities in Bamako to become the second music production house in Mali (Traoré 2004). The same year, the BuMDA, building on the experiences of copyright agencies in Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire, and elsewhere on the continent, introduced a hologram decal designed to distinguish authentic cassettes and CDs from counterfeits. The stickers would cost sixty CFA francs (twelve U.S. cents) and be applied to album jackets prior to the duplication of the cassettes or CDs. Producers were expected to pay this fee, which would finance artists’ copyright allowances. They were also encouraged to produce only as many cassettes and CDs as they expected to sell, given the upfront copyright expense the sticker fees imposed. Yet, despite repeated televised national campaigns to educate the population about the ethics of buying marked legal media—with dramatic claims about the pauperization of artists and the decline of Mali’s cultural heritage—the stickers have not proven efficacious in the marketplace (Figure 19).24

State authorities have, therefore, turned to other modes of enforcement, largely replacing didactic discipline with martial discipline, manifest, in recent years, in periodic confiscatory raids. These acts of commercial sanction serve to dramatize state power while affirming the culture industry’s commitment to normative media production and circulation, but they do little to curb media piracy; that is, they have little impact on the nongovernmental culture economy: those performances, broadcasts, and exchanges that lie outside the purview of official culture, which neither fully accede to assertions of control nor wholly ascribe to accusations of anarchy. Rather, the most tangible effects of police raids are exacerbated socioeconomic tensions and sometimes violence between the plaintiffs and enforcers of such actions, artists and police, and their “criminal” targets, media broadcasters and vendors. Politicians, too, are lambasted for their failure to contain and suppress commercial anarchy, or media piracy, when these actions inevitably fail to produce long-term, or even short-term results (see, for example, Skinner 2012a, 734–39). Among these varied casualties of “the war on piracy” (French, la lutte contre la piraterie), we encounter, once again, the social, political, and economic distortions—the exacerbated wariko—that neoliberal governmentality engenders when applied to the culture economy.

Yet, everyday transgressions of this cultural political hegemony persist, though such persistence should not be confused with outright protest or resistance. In concluding this chapter, I briefly consider those practices of ostensible anarchy that arguably account for most cultural production and circulation in contemporary Mali (see, for a collection of comparative studies, Karaganis 2011), what I am calling “nongovernmental culture.” I do so by returning to the Triton Stars concert with which I began this chapter. To hear this band’s performance in the context of the history recounted here is to appreciate the essential ambivalence of a political economy that champions legality at the expense of livelihoods, in which a degraded public sector and an unruly private market necessitate a certain amount of creative infringement of the rule of law—that is, nongovernmental culture—in an era of neoliberal governmentality.

A Nongovernmental Mix

At the end of their set, the Triton Stars invited one of their guest emcees, animateur Man Ken, who earlier in the evening had implored the audience to purchase legal copies of the group’s new album, to join them on stage for one final song. As a radio and television personality, Man Ken is known for his admiration for and spot-on musical impersonation of Ivoirian reggae superstar Alpha Blondy. “Reggae-manw bɛ yan wa?” (“Are there any reggae fans here?”), he asked the crowd, eliciting a collective “Awɔ!” (“Yes!”) and a volley of applause. As the noise died down, he proceeded to sing the unaccompanied introduction to Blondy’s “Silence Houphouët d’Or” (1996)—a tribute to the late Ivoirian President, Félix Houphouët Boigny (1905–93).

With this final, cadenced, and color-coded reference to the Ivoirian flag, repeated twice—orange, white, green—the Triton Stars joined in with the rocking accompaniment—rising and falling between A minor and G Major 7 chords—to Bob Marley’s “War” (1976).25 “Houphouët! Reveille-toi!” (“Houphouët! Wake up!”), wailed Man Ken, as the group fell into a sustained reggae groove. “Sabali! Sabali! Sabali! Sabali!” Man Ken sang, repeating the Bamana word for “patience and tolerance” over and over again in an improvised verse. Now, with the crowd on their feet, some spilling over onto the stage, the inspired vocalist layered Marley upon Marley, singing, “Get up! Stand up! Stand up for your right!” At this point, it was no longer apparent what song the group was playing, but it didn’t matter—or did it? The mix of Blondy’s lament and Marley’s musical and lyrical calls to arms offered a clear enough commentary on the civil war raging in Côte d’Ivoire at the time (see McGovern 2011), and the energy of the performance delivered this message with a sonic vibe that brought artist and audience together in soulful communion. But, whose song was it exactly?

The Triton Stars’ curtain call performance offers a good example of nongovernmental music culture in contemporary Mali. No permissions were sought, nor royalties paid for the copyright-protected sounds and lyrics the group performed. The music and words were likely learned through repeated listening to other unlicensed shows, unauthorized broadcasts on the radio, or playback of cassettes and CDs, themselves copied and recopied at home, or pirated in the marketplace. Yet, this dramatic display of musical and lyrical borrowing, embedding, and layering is haunted by a culture economy that proscribes such practice, an official discourse echoed, ironically, in same group’s calls, made earlier in the show, to buy legal cassettes and save artistic livelihoods (their own in particular). So, is this a case of cognitive dissonance, or just plain hypocrisy? With regard to the history of cultural policy and intellectual property in Mali, I would say “Neither.”

When, in the 1980s, the logic of structural adjustment was applied to a postcolonial economy largely divested of its public servants and resources, through gross domestic mismanagement and the global vogue of privatization, the conditions were created for a radical disjuncture between the unregulated free market, on the one hand, and disciplinary state institutions, on the other. In the Malian art world, this division would manifest in the perceived anarchy of the informal marketplace (piracy) and the prescribed control of intellectual property (copyright), resulting in a culture economy of endemic money trouble (wariko). In this context, nongovernmental culture, such as the Triton Stars’ reggae jam, routinely refuses the neoliberal dichotomy of anarchy and control, without, however, altogether refuting its governmentality. In a world of wariko, in which “everything is tied to money trouble,” as singer Karounga Sacko earlier proclaimed, groups like the Triton Stars must continually cross the threshold between the licit and illicit, the formal and informal. There, in the everyday interstices of neoliberal governmentality, commitment to copyright and its performative violation are less conflictual than contrapuntal, keeping multiple means to secure artistic livelihoods, however precarious, at play and in the mix.

This too is an Afropolitan ethics. Read in relation to the subjects of previous chapters, nongovernmental culture in the Malian music economy echoes the Bamako urbanite’s assertion that “if it’s not mixed up, it will never work out” (chapter 1). It is the cultural-economic expression of artists’ socioprofessional interest in maintaining a mutable status and identity (chapter 2). Further, like principles associated with aesthetics and religion, nongovernmental culture is not antithetical to normative (economic) morality, but, like situated expressions of musical style and religious faith, it draws on such normativity selectively, creatively, in the course of performance and in defense of local lifeworlds and global aspirations (chapters 3 and 4). Finally, nongovernmental culture is not (necessarily) antigovernmental. Indeed, the apparent transgressions of nongovernmental culture are frequently bound up with calls for a more assertive and progressive cultural-economic governmentality, as the case study of the Triton Stars presented here suggests. It is in this sense that I turn, in the next and final chapter, to the musical morality of national politics. In particular, I consider what it means to make Malian music in times of national celebration and crisis. As a mode of being that continues to shape African futures, I examine how national affiliation has been mobilized musically to promote (and contest) a variety of political agendas, global and local, elite and subaltern. This, too, is an Afropolitan ethics.