Chapter 2

Artistiya

Exile Is Bad

Following the proclamation of the newly independent Republic of Mali on September 22, 1960, a group of young musicians in the capital’s Bamako Koura (New Bamako) neighborhood formed an orchestra.1 Their style was Afro-Cuban, consonant with the popularCaribbean and Congolese sounds that suffused the continent at this time (see Perullo 2008; Shain 2009; White 2002), with players on guitar, timbales, tumbas, horns, and vocals. They took the name Pionnier Jazz to support the work of the neighborhood Pioneers, a national Scouting group. Recruited bymunicipal officials to “perform the nation” (Askew 2002), members of Pionnier Jazz composed songs to support Mali’s nascent nation-building project. One of their first songs was “Tunga Man Ɲi” (“Exile Is Bad”). As Amadou Traoré, a founding member of the group, explained to me, “[Tunga Man Ɲi] spoke to [Malians] in other countries . . . to tell them that Mali is independent. . . . We called on them to return to Mali, to work, to build the nation.” The refrain of the song went like this:

When French West African territories became independent nations, many Africans suddenly found themselves displaced from their new homelands. Workers from the Soudan Français (now the Republic of Mali) repaired locomotives in the workshops of Senegal (Jones 2002), labored in the cocoa plantations of Ghana (Dougnon 2007), and traded in the cities of Côte d’Ivoire (Gary-Tounkara 2008). Some heeded the call to “return home.” Others remained abroad as expatriates. Still others adopted the nationalities of their host countries. Yet, the calls to return home continued. In the late 1960s, Mali’s Ensemble Instrumental National (a state-sponsored music group) once again called on Malians abroad to repatriate, using familial terms of place to inspire national solidarity. The piece was called “Yan ka di” (“Here Is Good”):

For a country like Mali, there was urgency to the homecoming calls issuing from groups like Pionnier Jazz and the National Ensemble. At independence, Mali was a poor and largely agrarian society with no major industry to speak of. Following the breakup of a federal union with Senegal on August 19, 1960, Mali was left landlocked. Unresolved political disputes with Senegal led to the stoppage of train service to the Dakar port, grossly inhibiting Mali’s prospects for economic development. The Malian government’s ambitious modernization goals required skills and manpower to overcome these immediate geopolitical deficits. State-sponsored artists were called on to inspire and mobilize a newly independent citizenry to “rise and build the nation!” (wuli ka fasobaara kɛ!), words made famous on the radio waves in the mid-1960s by artist Boubacar Traoré in his national hit “Mali Twist” (first released in 1963).

Nearly a half-century later, I sat with Pionnier Jazz founding member Amadou Traoré in his crowded Bamako Koura residence. There, where no less than fourteen people live off his modest earnings and retirement benefits, we reflected on his career as an artist, a career spanning the entirety of Mali’s postcolonial history. “Back then,” he told me, “during the independence era, there was automatically a sense of patriotism. . . . Everyone was proud. We had patriotism in our hearts.” The great burdens of nation building were met, according to him, by an equally great and homegrown nationalist fervor. At a later meeting, he explained to me that “to be an artist at that time was to be more patriotic. I worked voluntarily, without pay. We were proud to be Malian musicians. Patriotism was predominant.”

“Times have changed,” I remarked. “Yes,” he said, “they have.” “So, how would you describe Malian artists today?” I asked him. He paused, searching for words, “the artist today, in Mali . . .” He trailed off before looking at me directly, saying, “The artist in Mali, I don’t know what to call him. But, he is the most miserable of people.” He paused again, “That is, if he stays in Mali.” Here, Traoré, who as a member of Pionnier Jazz once made spirited calls on Malians abroad to repatriate, began to explain why artists today are obliged to expatriate. “One must have a group, and contracts, but not in Mali. No! Contracts abroad, official contracts, which allow groups to get out. Then, they will go and play at European festivals, or elsewhere in Africa, or in other countries. . . . But, in Mali, you earn nothing! Even if you do marriages, gigs here and there, it’s not easy.”

In this chapter, I explore the social and musical lifeworld that informs this narrative of professional crisis in postcolonial Mali. These are stories of a status and identity known locally as artistiya (literally “artist-ness”) that emerged from a burgeoning urban popular culture in the 1950s, became professionalized through state patronage in the context of postcolonial nation building in the 1960s only to be uncoupled, beginning in the 1970s (a decade of postnational statism) and accelerating through the ’80s and ’90s (decades of structural adjustment and globalization), from a narrowly nationalist mode of being (see Skinner 2012b). These are stories of being an artist in Mali—of artistiya—in what might be called the post-postcolonial era of neoliberalism (Ferguson 2006; Piot 2010). These are also stories of what AbdouMaliq Simone calls “worlding” in urban Africa (2001b): a centrifugal, deterritorialized ethos of exigency and opportunity that manifests not only in a desire to leave the abstract space of the African city but also in opportunities to push the boundaries of the social and cultural within the Afropolis; a sometimes transgressive and always playful urban ethics manifest, as we shall observe, in new modes of identification and forms of musical expression among Bamako artists.

I begin with the postcolonial ambivalence of the phrase tunga man ɲi (“Exile is bad”) in order to emphasize the continuities and disjunctures of artistic personhood in the Malian postcolony. I approach the theme of exile not as a literal index of patterns of travel to or from a perceived homeland, but as a metaphor for a salient shift in postcolonial being-in-the-world: from an ideal of repatriation bound to a strong sense of national citizenship to the necessity of expatriation in the context of diminished sociopolitical solidarity. In both cases, it is the artist who gives voice to this ambivalent exilic discourse and the precarious political subjectivity to which it refers. To encounter exile, then, is to hear the way professional artists mediate modes of identification in postcolonial Mali, including their own status and identity, or artistiya. From the musical discourse of exile, I turn to questions of what and how it means to be an artist in Bamako. I move between historical and ethnographic modes of analysis to address the identity politics and poetics of artistiya in the late and postcolonial Afropolis, through thick description of performance practice and biographical portraits across five decades of musical lives and works.

But “People Today” Are Worse

Amadou Traoré’s lament about the state of the music economy in contemporary Mali (“The artist today . . . is the most miserable of people”) is not unique. Throughout my research, whether in formal interviews or informal conversations, artists would tell me about the impossibility of earning a living as a musician in Bamako, where virtually all of the country’s on-again, off-again music industry is concentrated (about which more in chapter 5). With the exception of a select group of praise-singing divas (mainly female griots, or jelimusow; see Durán 1995a), whose takings at local life-cycle ceremonies can verge on (and sometimes exceed) the exorbitant, it is not an exaggeration to say that all artists are, in some way or another, looking to tour and record abroad, especially in Europe and the United States. For a new generation of Malian artists, the refrain “Exile is bad” continues to be sung—indeed, it is one of the most widely represented themes in Malian popular music today—but, unlike independence-era calls to “return home” and “build the nation,” modern-day songs of exile are cautionary tales, acknowledging the urgency of travel abroad while at the same time warning of the threats to local lifeworlds such travel poses. Take, for example, this lyrical exchange between singers Nana Soumbounou and Karounga Sacko from the track “Immigration” (Triton Stars 2006), in which a man (Karounga) announces his departure for France and a woman (Nana) pleads with him to not forget her when he leaves.3

Later in the song, rumors circulate that the man has married a white woman in France. Distraught, the woman wonders what has become of her husband. He has not called. He has not written. Meanwhile the man tells of his plight from afar. In France, food is hard to come by. Money is even harder. He moves from place to place. Everyday struggles make phone calls and letters impossible pleasures. At the end of the song, rumors of infidelity back home and the strains of exile abroad come together in a condemnation of “people today” (bimɔgɔw), referring specifically to the perceived duplicity of contemporary Malians (who, the singers suggest, take pleasure in spreading lies for personal gain) but also, more generally, to a modern world that enables (and even requires) such conflict and deceit—the dense bush of global modernity that, as we observed in the previous chapter, produces a surfeit of “wild space.”

“People in this country today” (Bi jamana mɔgɔw) represent a populace to be feared, whose apparent predilection to sow the seeds of dissent stands in dramatic contrast to the dignity and unity of the newly minted Malian people Amadou Traoré lyrically praised nearly five decades prior. In Traoré’s independence anthem, betrayal (janfa) belongs to those who refuse to return home, to those who reject calls to mine the “gold” and “silver” of a potentially prosperous Malian homeland. For Nana and Karounga, betrayal can be found in equal measure at home and abroad. France (and the Global North more generally) becomes, in Karounga’s lyrical experience, the “heart of darkness” for migrants struggling to endure their exile (tunga), for whom the promise of prosperity in a European elsewhere ends in a prolonged psychosocial and socioeconomic tragedy (on the inversion of Joseph Conrad’s metaphor of African obscurity, see Skinner 2010, 27, 30–33). “If I could do it all over again today,” Karounga sings, “I would not have gone away to France.” Mali, for its part, is consumed by “cruel speech” (juguya kan) and “family animosity” (balima jugu) at the heart of civil space, among brothers and sisters, whose words keep Nana’s fraught character up at night “counting the grooves in the corrugated roofing.”

“Exile knows no dignity” (tunga tɛ danbe dɔn), the saying goes, but, increasingly, neither does home (see Whitehouse 2012a). I addressed this sense of intensified wildness within the social space of the Afropolis in the previous chapter, stressing, however, the agential ethics of those who resist indignity by reinscribing a moral sense of place in the city—varied and fragmented though it may be—through public song, speech, writing, and image. For the remainder of this chapter, I further explore the constraints and possibilities of Afropolitan being-in-the-world through the particular experience of professional musicians in Bamako. I present, first, a brief history of artistiya in postcolonial Mali, a history that I have dealt with more extensively elsewhere (Skinner 2009; 2012b) and to which I return in chapter 5. Here, my intent is to provide a sense of the shifting ethos of artistiya in postcolonial Mali—across public and private, national and transnational sectors and interests—as well as offer a survey of the relevant literature. I then turn to a particular performance I observed with the nightclub singer Issa Sory Bamba and his group, which I consider both in terms of the socioprofessional concerns it evokes and as the historically layered product of (post)colonial artistic practice and identity in Bamako. Finally, I present the creative and entrepreneurial work of Dialy Mady Cissoko, a self-styled “modern griot” whose professional identity suggests a cautionary counterpoint to Amadou Traoré’s representation of the Malian artists as “the most miserable of people.” In particular, Cissoko’s rooted practice of artistic personhood nuances the claim that African socioeconomic futures are predominantly defined by “extraversion” (Bayart 2000), dependent upon a world to which access remains provisional and precarious.

The Artist in Postcolonial Mali

The concept of the artist (French, artiste; Bamana, artisti) emerged in Mali during the years following independence in 1960, initially to refer to actors, dancers, and musicians with formal (or quasi-formal) ties to the state. Artistiya, however, has its roots in the pre-independence theater troupes, military fanfares, popular youth associations, and dance bands of the post–World War II era of decolonization (Cutter 1971; Jézéquel 1999; Kaba and Charry 2000; Kanouté 2007; Meillassoux 1968; Skinner 2009). A history of the modern Malian artist thus begins in the late 1940s, when French colonial authorities could no longer contain the demands for labor reform, citizenship rights, social welfare, and cultural autonomy among their African subject populations (for examples of musical performance and politics at this time, see Camara, Charry, and Jansen 2002 and County and Skinner 2008; for a broader regional history of postwar labor politics, see Cooper 1996). Local artists—whether colonial functionaries or not—played a significant role in articulating these demands and would later make important contributions to the cultural policy of nation building in Mali’s First Republic (1960–68) through the formation of national troupes, ballets, ensembles, and orchestras (Arnoldi 2006; Bamba and Prévost 1996; Charry 2000a; Counsel 2006; Cutter 1968; Hopkins 1972; Touré 1996; Skinner 2012b).4

The social status and identity of Malian artists, defined largely by their relation to the state, would fundamentally change in the years following the military coup in 1968 that put an end to the increasingly authoritarian presidency of Modibo Keita, Mali’s first president (Bamba and Prévost 1996; Bagayogo 1992; Mamadou Diawara 2003; Keïta 2009). This was a time of widespread expatriation, with artists fleeing political and economic insecurity at home and relocating to cities with more viable culture industries, especially Abidjan (Côte d’Ivoire). As I have elsewhere argued:

Under the military junta’s rule and the nominally civilian “constitutional” form it took in 1979, political cronyism, environmental crises, regional conflict, budget shortfalls, and neoliberal economic reforms engendered new forms of artistic patronage that were outside of, or parallel to state authority, including, by the mid-1980s new international interests such as the “world music” industry (see, for example, Mamadou Diawara 1996; Eyre 2000; and Maxwell 2003). This time has been referred to as a period of artistic “effervescence” because a large number of private orchestras and ensembles were formed as national, regional, and municipal state-sponsored groups were gradually cut back or eliminated altogether (Touré 1996, 98). The 1991 fall of the military-cum-civilian junta and the democratic reforms that established Mali’s Third Republic (1992–present) intensified this transformation of Malian cultural policy, as cultural production moved from principally public interests and media (national cultural festivals, municipal dance halls, and single-channel radio and television broadcast) to private ones (world music festivals, privately owned nightclubs, and multichannel radio and satellite television).5 Malian artists, largely severed from the state, were henceforth bound to the contested and provisional space of the neoliberal marketplace (see Skinner 2012a), a space that has become even more precarious in the wake of the March 2012 coup (a topic to which I return in chapter 6).

The urban artists with whom I have worked in Bamako over the past decade are the products of this effervescent late-twentieth-century move from public patronage to private enterprise. These artists emerged from a postcolonial African history that set them apart from other sociomusical groups, particularly the clans of musical artisans known as “griots” (or, among the Mande, jeliw; see Hale 1998). As early as the 1960s, artistiya had come to signify a community of urban musicians and related set of musical practices not restricted by lineage or clan-based patron-client relations, as jeliya is. For many observers of the Mande world today, artists and griots remain strictly distinguished, generally in terms of the modernity of the artist and the tradition of the jeli (see Skinner 2004, 149–51). In practice, such distinctions are difficult to circumscribe. More and more, griots embrace artistiya to build commercial credentials as performers of modern (“popular” and “world”) music, and artists cultivate jeliya to secure ties to patrons and ground their work in tradition.6 But, this implies more professional choice than cultural affiliation. In Bamako today, the terms “modernity” and “tradition” and their related musical personifications, artisti and jeli, have become more expressive tropes than generic types (compare Charry 2000a, 24–27). Thus, most “traditional” griots are also “modern” artists, whose professional lives are wrapped up in state and commercial interests that articulate beyond local patron–client relations. And, many artists find an expedient and culturally salient mode of expression in jeliya, which, as a commoditized genre of musical expression, is among the most popular in Mali.

Further, the formal and stylistic conventions of jeliya—in which declamatory praise song and spartan instrumental accompaniments are juxtaposed with choral refrains and dense instrumental polyphony—have strongly informed the sociomusical structures of artistiya in postcolonial Mali. By the mid-1970s jeliya had become the preferred genre of the ruling elite and, by extension, the national music industry they managed. Artists, griots and non-griots alike, were called on to sing the praises of their political patrons, becoming “agents of propaganda” enlisted to flatter a nepotistic cadre of officers in high-ranking positions within the government (see Keïta 2009, 37). The status of jeliya as a national music would persist into the 1980s, though within an increasingly decentralized and privatized culture economy as the statist regime of Mali’s Second Republic (1968–91) declined. The artistic dominance of jeliya at this time is evidenced by the commercial rise of prominent female vocalists such as Ami Koita and Kandia Kouyaté, dubbed “the superwomen of Malian music” (Durán 1995a). Their work would inspire the next generation of Malian artists and open up new opportunities for women pursuing artistic careers. Though the 1990s and 2000s would see the status of jeliya as Mali’s national music challenged by other genres, notably wasulu (Durán 1995b; 2000; Maxwell 2002, 2003, 2008) and hip-hop (Schulz 2012), it is still a significant generic resource for Malian artists.

Bamako vocalist and bandleader Issa Sory Bamba’s musical work testifies to the enduring influence of jeliya in the city’s contemporary music culture. Issa is a Bamako artist who makes a living by singing for urban lifecycle ceremonies (sumuw) and at nightclubs, largely because of his talent as a praise singer (fasadala). For his patrons, Issa is, for all intents and purposes, a jeli, despite not being born into this traditional “caste” of musical artisans. What is important is Issa’s ability to perform the part, which, as we shall observe, he does just about every weekend, microphone in hand, backed by a lively group of instrumentalists (drums, keyboards, electric guitar, bass, and kora; Figure 10). Further, Issa’s music situates the generic hybridity of the Bamako art world within a broader history of popular urbanism and political patronage—a history of (post)colonial artistiya. In what follows, I begin with the latter historical resonances evident in Issa’s musical worldview, echoing from the word ambiance: a pervasive and etymologically rich term of sociomusical style used to describe Issa’s principal music venue in Bamako (as of 2007), the Komoguel II nightclub. Then, I present an extended close listening of a particular praise song Issa performed for a prominent patron at this venue, through which the singer channels the art of jeliya to make a living, but also affirm his identity as an artist—an act, I assert, of Afropolitan ethics.

“It’s the Ambiance!”

I had been following Groupe Issa Bamba’s Saturday night performances at Komoguel II, a respectable downtown nightclub in the Bamako Koura district, for several weeks when I arrived at the espace culturel on a hot night in May 2007. My intention was to record a full two-hour show for the group to use as an addendum to their application for Radio France Internationale’s Découverte Award, a highly competitive and coveted prize that promises to open the door to international recognition for francophone artists worldwide.7 Conscious of my presence and eager to give their best possible performance, the group exhibited the full spectrum of their live act that evening, including original Afropop tunes from their debut album, Siyoroko;8 spirited doses of Congolese rumba and Ivoirien couper-décaler (a popular club dance rhythm at the time); a smattering of French chanson and American pop; and lengthy excursions into orchestrated Malian “folklore” (as Issa calls it), including swinging, pentatonic “Bambara Blues” pieces from central Mali and, most prominently, electrified urban jeliya, the band’s generic forte.

Komoguel II lies in the shadows on a busy side street off the bustling Boulevard de l’Indépendence. Outside the club entrance, one finds the usual fare of cigarette, chewing gum, and hard candy vendors crammed between rows of motorbikes and cars lining the sidewalk in front of the venue. A mixture of dust, exhaust, and humidity thickens the air, which, even though the sun set hours ago, is still hot. A few clients linger outside by the curb, sharing a conversation and a smoke, or both, while others, faced with oncoming traffic, hurry inside. The interior is divided into two sections, a dimly lit open-air bar and a larger “bar-restaurant” with a stage area and dance floor. To enter the latter, one pays a doorman 1000 or 1500 CFA francs ($2 or $3), though, if you’re a friend of the band or the club management, a brief greeting and handshake may suffice. Seating in the club is in booths and at tables around the venue’s perimeter, which sits under an aluminum canopy and, given the “mixed couple” nature of some of the venue’s clientele (composed mainly of well-heeled men who bring along dates or seek the company of local escorts), remains dark and anonymous. The band sits on a raised section of the floor at the back of the venue. In front of the band is a large covered dance floor, inside of which hangs a set of speakers, colorful flashing stage lights, and a disco ball. On Saturdays, music starts at 11 P.M. By midnight, the dance floor is packed, and the band is hot. “At Komoguel, c’est l’ambiance!,” Issa exclaims.

In my field notes I write: “IT’S THE AMBIANCE!” This is not the first time I have heard Bamako music culture described in this way. Indeed, Issa’s perfunctory phrase resonates with deep popular cultural significance in francophone African cities. It qualifies a sociomusical ethos in places like Bamako (Dakar, Abidjan, or Kinshasa) that couples an Afropolitan aesthetics with urban artistiya. Before delving into the concert at Komoguel II, in which an ethics of artistiya emerges in the course of a remarkable vocal performance, it is worth digressing to attend to the historical meaning of the term ambiance and its relation to artistic personhood in late and postcolonial Bamako. We may begin with a basic definition. Ambiance is a French word implying “mood,” “feeling,” and “atmosphere,” which, in its usage in francophone urban Africa, conveys a specifically musical sense of “vibe” and a general sentiment of conviviality in public spaces of music making and listening.9 Ambiance is also the historical product of Bamako’s particular late-colonial urbanism with resonances throughout the city’s postcolonial history, of which I offer a few salient examples later in the chapter. As anthropologist Claude Meillassoux noted during his research in Bamako in the early 1960s:

The jeli-tõ (or jeli tɔn) in Meillassoux’s note referred to the Association des Artistes du Mali, l’Ambiance, a significant institution of public culture in 1960s Bamako (Meillassoux 1968, 107–12; see also Charry 2000a, 268). Stylistically, the Ambiance Association was indicative of urban trends in 1960s Bamako. Alongside popular foreign styles (from Europe, America, and the Caribbean), urban music at the time was strongly marked by jeliya. Most Ambiance musicians identified as griots, and the Ambiance ensemble included instrumentation specific to urban griot performance practice,10 including the kora, but also the bala (xylophone), dundun (bass drum), and tama (pitched pressure drum), as well as the electric guitar, which had been gaining prominence within regional griot ensembles since the 1940s (Charry 2000a, 242–307). That said, the group’s name referred not to jeliya, or griots, but to an association of Malian artists (my emphasis), a discursive move claiming a modern sociomusical identity in the postcolony: artistiya.

At Ambiance events, musicians, their friends, families, and neighbors—at its height, the group claimed more than 300 members—would gather in neighborhood streets and perform popular songs from regional repertoires for local residents. Yet, participants had another audience in mind as well. Ambiance artists self-consciously performed vocal and instrumental pieces with nationalist overtones that appealed to the ruling political party, the Union Soudanaise de Rassemblement Démocratique Africaine, or US-RDA (Meillassoux 1968, 110–11). To heighten this rapprochement with the one-party state, these urban griots amplified their performances with large speakers, carrying the group’s ambiant and ambient sociomusical message throughout the neighborhood and its environs. Significantly, the presence of electric lighting and sound amplification at these and other events in Bamako marked a shift in the visual and aural experience of urban popular culture in the 1960s, in which incandescent illumination and electrified soundscapes were becoming bound up with expressions of ambiance, or musical conviviality, at popular cultural events.11

Prior to independence, ambiance signified still other sociomusical lifeworlds. Throughout the 1950s, Bamako’s popular dance bands would perform for formal functions at the bequest of French authorities and new African elites as well as for popular neighborhood soirées. Locals referred to these informal get-togethers with the French term bals poussières, or “dust parties,” named for the effect of all-night dancing on an earthen floor. “When we didn’t have a place to play,” bandleader Panka Dembelé told me, “we’d organize a dust party.”12 These events attracted large numbers of urban youth, whose physical proximity in city wards presented new opportunities for sociocultural experimentation across domestic, clan, ethnic, racial, and political lines (Meillassoux 1968, 118; see also Manthia Diawara 1997). “There were a lot of people and a great ambiance,” Dembelé explained. “It lasted until sunrise. . . . At certain points in the night, there was so much dust all around, on our clothes and in our hair, that we had to water the grounds regularly” (P. Dembelé, cited in Mangin 1998, 168). Dembelé’s band called itself, appropriately enough, Ambiance Jazz.

Contemporaneous with the dust parties in the 1950s were neighborhood youth clubs that would organize parties named for popular African dance rhythms with origins from throughout the subregion, including gunbe, sabar, balanin, and bara.13 Together with the soirées, these clubs were the basis of a late-colonial Afropolitanism defining urban cultural life in cities throughout the region. While the neighborhood clubs emphasized regional popular culture, the dust parties were more international in scope, but the two were not mutually exclusive. On Saturdays in Bamako in the mid-1950s, Panka Dembelé remembers performing for neighborhood gunbe and sabar street parties from the morning to the evening, going home for a quick dinner with his family, and then gathering his band, Ambiance Jazz, for an all-night bal poussière elsewhere in the city. In the mid-1950s, “Bamako was great, even better than New York!,” Dembelé said. “We had everything. There were people from all over—from Nigeria, Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire, and Senegal. All day and all night, there was ambiance!”

In Bamako today, ambiance is not, generally speaking, applied as a noun to persons, songs, or things, and it isn’t nearly as popular as a band name as it was in decades past. Ambiance is still, however, widely present in discourse about music, retaining the strong semiotic connection to urban popular culture highlighted in Meillassoux’s earlier description.14 “At Komoguel,” Issa declared, “it’s the ambiance!” For a musical event to be ambiant it must evoke sociable pleasure (being “gay and lively,” in Meillassoux’s words); this is achieved as much by the music itself as by the relations between and among performers and audiences. Returning, now, to the Groupe Issa Bamba’s 2007 nightclub performance, I consider some of the performative poetics and identity politics involved in establishing sociomusical relations in Bamako’s contemporary music culture. This will necessarily move us from questions of aesthetics to ethics, from musical conviviality to musical meaning, from ambiance to artistiya.

A Praise Song for Uncle Sékou

Midway through the band’s set, and following a lively Afro-Cuban rendition of the dance band hit “Mami Wata” (a widely interpreted regional pop song named for a serpent-bearing female water deity), singer Issa Bamba called out to the audience, “Tonton Sama Sékou, this one is for you!” Naming a patron before a praise song was not surprising—Issa is well regarded by club patrons for his performance of laudatory jeliya, which makes up more than a third of his band’s sets on Saturday nights—but this particular recipient of Issa’s praise was noteworthy. Sama Sékou, to whom Issa referred affectionately as tonton (French for “uncle”), was the proprietor of Komoguel II and its larger counterpart, Komoguel I, located across the river, making him the group’s primary club patron (a song, “Komoguel,” is dedicated to Sama Sékou on the band’s second album). He was also a well-known friend and confidant of then-president Touré, himself basking in the success of his 2007 reelection campaign. Sung for a commercial patron of the arts with strong ties to Mali’s ruling elite, Issa Bamba’s praise song for Sama Sékou struck me as an evocative convergence of politics and economy in contemporary artistiya, as well as an eloquent example of how expressions of culture and identity—morality and ethics—come together in the performative production of artistic personhood in Bamako today.

Along with the patron to whom the song was addressed, Issa Bamba himself added layers of political and economic meaning to this performance. His father, Sorry Bamba was among the first generation of professional musicians identified as artists in Malian society. From his late-colonial popular youth association (then dance band), Groupe Goumbé, to his role in creating the renowned state-sponsored Orchestre Régional de Mopti, to his period of exile in Côte d’Ivoire and later migration to France where he developed his solo musical career abroad, Sorry Bamba came of age in and witnessed the passing of an era when artists, as clients of the postcolonial patron-state, were defined and judged by their national status and identity, professionalized as public servants (Bamba and Prévost 1996). His son Issa began his artistic career along similar lines, as a student at Mali’s Institut National des Arts (INA) and the principal vocalist of the school’s popular orchestra, the INA Stars. But, unlike his father, Issa’s state-sponsored education would not lead to a state-sponsored music career; nor, given the decline and neglect of Mali’s modern-day artistic institutions, would such a career even be desirable. After three years of study at INA, Issa left the school without a degree to pursue his career as an artist. “I know that I have a future in music,” he told me. “I know that one day, if I work hard and make an impression, one day I will be a great musician. That’s my ambition. The life cycle ceremonies and the club gigs, they are formalities. I am educating myself. I see the big picture.”15 For Issa, his professional future lay in the private sector music economy, with the access to global markets in the form of world music it promised. In this sense, his band’s weekly show at Komoguel II under the patronage of the wealthy and well-connected Sama Sékou was an important first step, a site of (potential) professional mobility (Figure 11).

“Uncle Sama Sékou, this one is for you!,” Issa declared, as guitarist Sékou Coulibaly picked out A minor and G Major chords in rising and falling arpeggios. “Tonton, c’est pour toi!,” Issa repeated in French, now joined by keyboards, kora, drums, and bass in lively polyphony. With the band’s instrumental accompaniment, or kunbɛn established, Issa intoned the following refrain twice, using a vocal style characterized by the regular melodic and metrical patterns typical of Mande choral song, or dɔnkili. (I deepen my discussion of contemporary Mande musical aesthetics in chapter 3, though certain features of this performance practice, introduced here, will help clarify the significance of Issa’s praise song.)

When Issa sang that he “will not flee” the “well-sharpened” knife his reference was to male circumcision, which all Mande boys must traditionally endure upon entering adolescence. The fact that Issa sang these words about himself (an initiated adult) metaphorically served to affirm the singer’s moral subjectivity, establishing his commitment to the traditions and mores of Mande society (such as gendered life-cycle rituals); that is, to the culture of civil space. In the following verse, sung twice for added emphasis, Issa again affirmed these communitarian morals, addressing the “shame” (malo) of betraying and dishonoring one’s parents (masaw):

Having grounded himself through song in the social position of Mande culture, Issa then sang a verse, following a brief guitar solo, that served to frame his praise for Sama Sékou and, as I argue, invoke his own ethical subjectivity as an artist.

“The blacksmith” (numu) to whom Issa referred was Sama Sékou, whose family belongs to this particular caste of Mande artisans (see Conrad and Frank 1995; McNaughton 1988). Issa’s vocal invocation, phrased in terms of a warning to highlight the Mande blacksmith’s social power and prestige, lyrically identified this song as a numu fasa, or praise song for the blacksmith. Though still textually rooted in cultural themes of tradition (that of the numu), this sung passage marked a formal and stylistic shift to the recitational expression of laudatory jeliya, a move signaled instrumentally by a lively and ornamented guitar solo, musically heightening, or “heating up” the performance (see Waterman 1948). Paralleling Issa’s vocal shift from the style and structure of choral song (dɔnkili) to the metrically and melodically fluid mode of vocal praise (fasada) was a subjective move from the morality of culture to the ethics of identity, that of the artist himself. What would follow was not merely a typical praise song but a unique expression of Issa’s competence as a praise singer (fasadala), an identity that, for him, as a modern artist practicing the traditional art of jeliya, was inherently ambiguous; for Issa is not, by birth, a griot. Entering this sociomusical “wild space” of subjective ambiguity, Issa began his praise song for Uncle Sama Sékou.

At this point in the piece, the instrumental accompaniment became more spartan, with the keyboards and bass guitar adopting a light staccato double pulse on the downbeat of the triple meter. Arpeggiated chord progressions from the guitar and kora dropped in volume while the drums retreated to a quiet syncopated rhythm on bass and snare. In this way, the music became “cooler,” creating a “good” ethico-aesthetic space for Issa’s praise song (see Thompson 2011), allowing the sung lyrics to take precedence over the backing instrumentation. Referring to Sama Sékou as a “hero” (ŋana), Issa proceeded to describe his patron’s accomplishments and character, highlighting the national and international scope of his career and his great financial generosity shown to friends and enemies alike.

More recitation than song, Issa’s praise narrative began with the preceding litany, articulated unhurriedly with clear line breaks, before moving to more rapid, textually dense and metrically fluid passages whose meaning was grasped by those in attendance more for its dramatic vocal effect than for its word-for-word meaning. Throughout, Issa punctuated his praise with the line “Which hero am I calling?,” sung periodically with such intensity and volume that it verged on yelling, without conceding to cacophony. This, combined with the strong reverb on his microphone, made Issa’s vocal performance resoundingly strident and impressive.

Genre Trouble

To hear (as I do) Issa’s vocal tribute as an artful commentary on the social value of existential projects in modern-day Mali is to perceive its “performativity,” what Judith Butler describes as a “dramatic and contingent construction of meaning” (1990, 139). In this way, the genre of praise song is “troubled” (in Butler’s sense of normative disruption) in the course of a performance cast in a scene of artistic role play. As a dramatic expression of contingent meaning, Issa’s praise is inherently ambiguous, addressing the ethical agency and politics of identity of both the praise recipient (Sama Sékou) and the praise singer (Issa). On the one hand, following the public affirmation of Sama Sékou’s morality as a blacksmith, the praise song highlights the ethics of Sékou’s professional and personal life. The sung and spoken words describe a man who, having built his career over time at home and abroad, has only enhanced his magnanimity and munificence. “If you come across this hero,” Issa sings, “you will find him to be kind and generous. A person of renown does not mislead.” Strongly rooted in his cultural mores and traditions, Sama Sékou has braved the “wilds” of business and politics, cultivating a successful professional identity without succumbing to self-interest or public parsimony (or so we are told).

On the other hand, Issa’s vocal abilities testify to his own ethical orientation as an artist, distinguished, but also troubled by his performative competence in the art of praise song (fasada). In the opening refrain above, Issa affirms his commitment to a morally grounded ethics by refusing culturally shameful behavior: “I will not flee and shame my mother and father. I will not do it.” Yet, as a musician who does not belong to an artisanal clan of griots, whom some may dismiss as being socially and professionally “fake” (Hale 1998, 211–12), and who practices the art of praise song, which others have condemned as distasteful and exploitative without traditional substance (Keïta 1995b), Issa’s chosen professional identity as an artist can appear unethical, and even, for conservative critics, shameful and immoral. Such existential risk is, as I have argued, an essential principle of ethical agency in Mande social thought, which is exacerbated, in Issa’s case, by the moral ambiguity of his social position as an artist. Yet, Issa is well aware of the stakes. When confronted with this criticism he tells me, simply, “I am an artist, not a griot.” Then, turning the critique on its head, he adds, “It’s good that jeliya is a part of artistiya. When you perform jeliya, it works the voice. It makes me a better musician.” Jeliya, from this perspective, becomes a generic resource, available to all who wish to explore its aesthetic nuances and complexities. Though, as a resource, it is also a source of potential value, both aesthetic and economic. As Issa puts it, “In Mali, when you sing a man’s praises, he is happy. He gives you money. We do this to make a living.”17

For Issa, there is no contradiction between his cultural values and his professional identity. Though perhaps controversial, Issa’s performance of laudatory jeliya is certainly real enough to be publicly valued. (At the end of the show that night, Issa received warm compliments and a generous monetary gift from Sama Sékou.) Moreover, Issa’s artistiya is strongly rooted in its own traditions of (post)colonial popular culture in Bamako: of an eclectic urban ambiance and the (now diminished) legacy of state-sponsored music. His work also follows the well-established practice of modern artists who have built careers through their deft mastery of traditional aesthetics: Afropop legend Salif Keita, who is an accomplished praise singer, being the most esteemed example (Keïta 2009), along with Issa’s father, Sorry Bamba, who made his career by integrating Dogon melodies and rhythms into nationalist music of the 1960s (Bamba and Prévost 1996); both of whom are major artistic influences for Issa. To call Issa’s artistic work “fake” or mere “flattery” (compare Manthia Diawara 1997) is to miss the point, by disregarding the ethical value of his vocal competence, ignoring the historical depth of his profession, and misinterpreting his artistic aspirations. Issa does not, after all, claim to be a griot, though he is interested in advancing his career, making a name for himself as an artist, and, he hopes, earning a sustainable living in the process.

Cultural purists may take issue with the foregoing statements. In the vast literature on Mande expressive culture (in which I include my own work), jeliya holds a sort of sacrosanct position of cultural authenticity, becoming the symbol par excellence of musical “Mande-ness” (see Charry 2000a; Hale 1998). Though I am not, in a Barthesian fashion, declaring here that “the jeli is dead”—though the phrase jeliya tiyɛnna (“Jeliya is spoiled”) is often heard among artists and cultural critics in Mali today—I am claiming that jeliya in the postcolonial era has become more of a generic resource from which artists may draw than an exclusive cultural type that limits expressive culture in terms of clan-based heritage. This qualification of jeliya as a generic resource is, however, not absolute. Even if practice reveals a loosening of cultural prohibitions on individual performance, discourse remains more intransigent: One does not become but is born a jeli. Further, context remains significant. At a life-cycle ritual, such as a baptism or a wedding, jeliya is expected and, generally speaking, highly valued (as we shall observe in chapter 4). Who performs the role of the jeli is, as Issa’s case suggests, more of an open question in Bamako today.

“The Artist in Mali . . .”

Yet, such performativity, as Judith Butler reminds us, remains intensely precarious for those on the socioeconomic margins (Butler 2004), representing not just a “dramatic and contingent construction of meaning,” but also “a strategy of survival within compulsory systems” (Butler 1990, 139). Thus, I return to Amadou Traoré’s grave assessment of the Malian musician (“the most miserable of people”), with which I began this chapter, and the caveat that followed it, “that is, if he stays in Mali.” From this perspective, and the postcolonial history that informs it, one might interpret Issa’s praise song for Uncle Sékou and the urban art world that is its context somewhat differently than the close reading offered earlier. Through the filter of Traoré’s socioprofessional lament, Issa’s performance resounds not as an ambiant ethics of professional and generic play but as an artful act of “extraversion” (Bayart 2000), an expression of (potential) social mobility articulated through a “global imagination” (Erlmann 1999) in a neoliberal era that has reduced Africa to abjection (Chalfin 2010; Ferguson 2006; Piot 2010). “Which hero am I calling?,” Issa asks in full song. “The hero who accomplished great deeds in France.” Meanwhile, I continue to record the performance for the group’s Radio France Internationale Découverte Award application (unsuccessful, again, that year). After the show, Sama Sékou stuffs a wad of bills into Issa’s shirt pocket, about forty dollars. “We do this to make a living,” Issa explains. In this abstract space of precarious performance, can one speak of an “Afropolitanism”—of an urban African structure of feeling—when the everyday lives of artists appear as a series of tactics to get by in order to get out? Can one affirm an “ethics”—an existential project of self-making—when the moral foundations of society seem to be in ruins? “People in this country,” Nana Soumbounou and Karounga Sacko sing, “are not good.”

Such interrogations cannot be readily dismissed, nor should they be. By rhetorically invoking these cautionary criticisms here, my intention is to let them linger; for the Afropolitan ethics I purport to represent in this book must, I believe, incorporate them and the socioeconomic tensions they highlight. Yet, too much emphasis on extraversion and abjection in urban Africa risks obscuring the coherent commitments to local lifeworlds and the innovative and industrious sociomusical practices I have observed among Bamako artists over the past fifteen years. If Issa Bamba’s praise song suggests a broadly precarious social position within the Bamako art world, it is also a highly cultivated and historically informed expression of musical subjectivity that couples a laudatory vocal aesthetics with a grounded sense of ethical being-in-the-world—what the Mande call mɔgɔya, or personhood. To conclude this chapter, I offer one more portrait of an artist, a sketch of a man whose grounded approach to the musical arts in Mali deepens the sense of artistic personhood I seek to elaborate here, and whose personal and professional history serves as a counterpoint to the “misery” of the Malian artist described by Amadou Traoré. I present the life and work of Dialy Mady Cissoko, a jeli, artist, and entrepreneur in postcolonial Mali.

Jeli Trouble

Born in Dakar, Senegal, to a family of griots with roots in The Gambia, Dialy Mady came to Bamako as a child in the early 1970s to live with his father’s elder brother and namesake, the late Jelimady Sissoko (Figure 12). The Sissokos (also spelled with an initial C), or “Susos” as they call themselves in The Gambia, are an old clan of Mande griots who trace their family lineage back to the earliest kora players, to the Kaabu Empire of the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries (located in and around today’s border between Senegal and Guinea Bissau) and to Jali Madi Wuleng (another namesake), purported to be the first kora player (Charry 2000a, 118–21). In the early 1960s, Dialy Mady’s adoptive father helped to establish the Ensemble Instrumental National du Mali (EIN), a state-sponsored music group that gathered artists from Mali’s six administrative regions to represent the diversity of indigenous musical expression in the country and create an “authentic” national music for the faso, the newly independent homeland (see Diawara 2003, 183–84). Such was the importance of the elder Sissoko’s role in establishing the EIN that he, along with percussionist Séran Kanouté and fellow kora player Sidiki Diabaté, received adjoining plots in Bamako’s Ntomikorobougou district, at the foot of Koulouba hill and Mali’s presidential palace—a gift of President Modibo Keita himself. To this day, the Sissoko, Diabaté, and Kanouté families live side by side in this neighborhood.18

In the early 1960s, the EIN developed a repertoire composed of melodies and rhythms from the Malian countryside, extending into the nation’s precolonial past with pieces commemorating the legendary Mande empire builder, Sunjata Keita, and the warrior king of Segu, Dah Monzon Jara, among others (see, for example, Ensemble Instrumental du Mali 1977a, 1977b, and 1977c). Further, the ensemble performed pieces with explicitly nationalist themes, articulating a didactic cultural policy characteristic of nation-building efforts elsewhere on the continent (Askew 2002; Ivaska 2011; Moorman 2008; Plageman 2013; Turino 2000; White 2008). Popular pieces included “Maliba” (“Great Mali”), comparing the modern nation-state to the precolonial Mali Empire; “Fasobaara” (“Nation Building”), with a refrain that affirmed, “We are nothing, without work of our homeland”; and “Yan ka di” (Here Is Good), which like Amadou Traoré’s contemporaneous piece, “Tunga Man Ɲi,” encouraged newly ordained Malian nationals displaced within the former French Empire to return “home” (Skinner 2012b, 513–14). As Charles Cutter, a contemporary observer of Malian cultural policy in the late 1960s, describes:

Such were the sentiments of national pride and patriotism that the younger Dialy Mady heard rehearsed and performed by his immediate and extended family during his youth. Yet, as a child of the 1970s, Dialy Mady also came of age in an era of postnational statism, when, in the wake of the 1968 coup d’état and the rise of a military (then civilian) autocracy, “performing the nation” became increasingly conflated with political flattery (Skinner 2012b, 525), though there was a pre-coup precedent for such performance practice. Writing just prior to the 1968 coup, Cutter observed that the EIN “employs traditional tunes to launch the directives of the party, to sing the praises of party leaders, and to glorify the success of party policy” (1968, 75). Reflecting on this period in an interview with Dialy Mady and his friend and colleague Bruno Maiga, the former director of the Théatre National du Mali (and minister of culture as of 2012–13), the two artists recalled a debate surrounding the so-called dégriotisation of the EIN in the late 1970s, a politics spearheaded by Alpha Oumar Konaré, the minister of culture (1978–80, and, later, president, 1992–2002).19 As cultural minister, Konaré advocated for a return to the nationalist agendas of the 1960s and sought to purge the ensemble’s repertoire of political praise directed toward individual statesmen and, as his neologism suggests, “de-griotize” the group. Even as the ruling junta (and many ensemble artists) opposed such cultural political intervention, the terms of this debate would themselves change during the 1980s with the growth of a private sector music economy and the prescribed “voluntary early retirement” of state-sponsored functionaries (as part of broader structural adjustment programs), including many national artists (about which more in chapter 5). This, too, was part of Dialy Mady’s upbringing in a community of musicians with professional ties to the postcolonial state.

As a child raised in a family steeped in jeliya, Dialy Mady’s musical apprenticeship began as a young man in the 1980s. At the time, though, he learned more about making the family instrument, the kora, than playing it; his younger brother Ballaké and neighbor Toumani were the heirs apparent to the families’ shared performance practice (with a young Ballaké replacing his father as the kora accompanist with the EIN in 1982). Indeed, before devoting himself to an artistic career, rooted in the family tradition of jeliya, Dialy Mady studied agronomy, perhaps given the uncertain economy of the arts he witnessed in the late 1980s and early ’90s. When, in the mid-’90s he returned to the family trade (having observed the rugged and difficult life of the agronomist), Dialy Mady turned to formal study at the Institut National des Arts in Bamako, where, after four years, he received a postsecondary diploma in music education. During his time at INA, Dialy Mady began to perform regularly at a local restaurant and espace culturel, the San Toro, owned and operated by Malian social advocate, antiglobalization activist, and future minister of culture (1997–2000) Aminata Drahmane Traoré. He also took on several kora students (among them, me). In 1999, Dialy Mady entered the Malian civil service, taking a position as an elementary music teacher in Bandiagara before moving, in 2000, back to Bamako. A year later, he was hired as the head kora instructor at INA and had formed his own band, Dialyco.

Much of my time as a participant observer in Mali in 2006 and 2007 was spent with Dialyco, with whom I frequently performed as an accompanist, backing up, or, at times, replacing Dialy Mady on kora. Dialyco specializes in the performance of jeliya, featuring music from the jeli repertoire and instruments commonly associated with contemporary jeli ensembles (kora, ngoni, bala, dundun, and jenbe along with bass and electric guitars). Unlike other purveyors of the griot arts in Bamako, praise song and speech do not normally figure into their performances. The group’s principle vocalist, Nana Soumbounou (who also sang with the Triton Stars at the time, as on the track “Immigration” discussed earlier), is particularly valued for her ability to tone down the aggressive performer–audience intimacy typical of jeliya today, exemplified by praise song and reciprocal tipping or gifting of “praise money” (jelisɔn wari). At the banquets, luncheons, and parties for which they are hired, Dialyco provides “traditional” background music, with intimate, light-hearted vocals for the elite urbanites to whom they typically cater. At life-cycle ceremonies, for which they are less frequently called upon to perform but where praise song and speech are generally the rule, Dialy Mady invites his sister-in-law, Tata Diabaté (a jeli by birth), to join the group, precisely because of her talent as a praise vocalist (fasadala). Tips collected at weddings for public praise can be quite lucrative. Bands may be hired without any fee on the basis of potential earnings from tipping alone (compare Askew 2002; White 2008).

I discuss one of Dialyco’s infrequent forays into Bamako’s economy of praise in chapter 4. Here, I draw attention to the band’s name, Dialyco, which elicits a noteworthy double entendre. Dialyco refers to both the Bamana phrase jeli ko, meaning “jeli trouble,” and the corporate slogan, “Dialy Co.,” referring to bandleader Dialy Mady’s commercial interest in promoting the group and their cultural products, including live performances and independent recordings, but also marketable material culture, like traditional music instruments. This multivalent name captures, much like Issa Bamba’s urban performance practice, the way jeliya has become embedded in the struggles and concerns of professional artists in contemporary Bamako. On the one hand, “jeli trouble” describes the ontological problems of the modern jeli lifeworld; a fraught, lived space in which griots are routinely accused of social parasitism in the form of opportunistic praise for cash and undignified (or unethical) public behavior. Griots are said to have sold out and, in Dialy Mady’s words, “sacrificed their dignity” for profit. This criticism has a particular postcolonial pedigree, echoing the sentiments of the late cultural critic and writer Massa Makan Diabaté, who once observed that “the griots of the suns of independence have traded gold for copper. They are but simple entertainers who display their flowery eloquence in order to gain small change” (Diabaté 1984, 119; as cited in Keïta 1995a, 84).

On the other hand, the title “Dialy Co.” indexes an artistic tactic to secure one’s livelihood in an art world structured and defined by neoliberal capitalism. In this way, Dialy Mady’s musical “company” attempts to change the ethical shape of discourse about jeliya from the cultural critique of selling out (as simple entertainers in search of small change) to the entrepreneurial virtue of mise en valeur, or profitability through ingenuity and development in the private sector (compare Perullo 2011; Shipley 2013). Dialyco does this by representing jeliya for the highly competitive Bamako music economy, offering specially tailored live performances (“authentic” Mande music for urban elites) and unique cultural goods (“traditional” musical instruments for local and global clients) as products in the urban marketplace. Once again, as the ambiguous sociomusical work of Dialyco and Groupe Issa Bamba suggest, artistiya and jeliya may be distinguished from each other in terms of modernity and tradition—signifying discourses that, as anthropologist Molly Roth explains, add material and cultural value to such “modernities” and “traditions” as commoditized practices (2008)—but they are not mutually exclusive. Today, these two categories of sociomusical identity, the artist and the griot, are increasingly intertwined in the lives of Bamako musicians. Urban artists adapt to the structures and strictures of postcolonial neoliberalism and globalization by discursively drawing clear boundaries between modernity and tradition, only to transgress them through hybrid, performative acts of identification. This is the Afropolitan ethics of artistiya and jeliya in Bamako today.

Possibilities and Constraints

I began this chapter by drawing attention to a particular history of this tension—of tradition and modernity, culture and economy, at home and in the world—from the perspective of a Malian artist, Amadou Traoré, and I ended with that of another, Dialy Mady Cissoko. The way Traoré tells his life story, cultivating a common cultural ethos was essential to the work of economic development in post-independence Mali. In this sense, “Tunga Man Ɲi” (and many other songs like it) represented a call to both collective action and being, of Malians coming together “to build the nation” (ka faso baara kɛ). To highlight the “misery” of the contemporary artist is, then, to lament the loss of such collectivity. Exile (tunga) has become one of the principle themes of this breakdown of economy and society in Mali today. Drawing on this theme, Nana Soumbounou’s and Karounga Sacko’s lyrics to the song “Immigration” invert Traoré’s post-independence call for expatriates to return home with an anthem for those who must leave in order to get by, only to witness the social fabric unravel as they move. “People in this country today are not good,” Soumbounou and Sacko warn us.

A history of artistiya in postcolonial Mali serves to fill in the gap between these bookended stories of exile, extending over half a century from the professionalization of an ambiant urban popular culture to a musical politics of postcolonial nation building; and from the autocratic aesthetics of public praise for the powerful to a privatized, structurally adjusted, and largely informal economy of culture. This history further contextualizes the specific generic and aesthetic choices made by artists in the course of performance, as we observed with Issa Bamba’s nightclub panegyric. It also serves to locate an existential project of artistic entrepreneurship within a postcolonial politics and economy of culture, illustrated previously through the life and work of Dialy Mady Cissoko, about whom I say a few more words.

Traditional artisan, modern artist, classroom teacher, private instructor, bandleader, and, since 2007, the president of a nonprofit organization (L’Association d’Orée, which organizes and stages didactic music and theater performances for rural audiences), Dialy Mady’s career path offers an important counterpoint to the historical portrait of artistic abjection proffered by Amadou Traoré. Born into a community of nation-building artists and raised in an era of statist retrenchment and global neoliberalism, Dialy Mady understands well the feelings of pride and patriotism that echoed from the voices and strings of his family in the 1960s, just as he understands the historical sources of socioeconomic misery that, for Traoré, defines the profession of the modern-day Malian musician. Yet, Dialy Mady also understands the importance—indeed, the necessity—of inserting oneself in and making claims on an economy and politics of culture in order to fashion a sustainable livelihood and meaningful lifeworld as an artist. In a time of economic fragmentation (of private interest and informal markets), this means being entrepreneurial; and, in the context of cultural contestation (over claims to “authentic” modes of being), this means cultivating an existential project. In the Bamako art world, both economic and social imperatives are crucial to a performative and professional ethics, through which artists like Dialy Mady negotiate the generic and fiscal troubles of musical subjectivity (of jeli ko and Dialy Co.) along the contentious boundaries of tradition and modernity.

Yet, if Dialy Mady’s story suggests a hopeful contrast to Traoré’s narrative of sociomusical hardship, it is not my intention to substitute the latter sentiment with the former. The ethics of artistiya, like any existential project, must encompass both the possibilities that inspire hope and the constraints that require struggle. Further, their stories serve to situate such possibilities and constraints within a shifting politics and economy of culture, which everyday artistic practices and performances must negotiate. Theirs are the stories, in other words, of the artist in postcolonial Mali, of artistiya in Bamako, and of a particular socioprofessional mode of Afropolitan ethics. In the next chapter, I deepen this inquiry into the ethics of artistiya by listening in to the aesthetics—or what I call, following Henri Lefebvre, the “perceived space”—of instrumental and vocal performance. I am particularly interested in the specifically musical means by which artists assert, defend, and define their social and professional status and identity. Through the refined art of a concert performance and the creative labor of a group rehearsal, I consider the musical strategies and tactics (compare de Certeau 1988, 37) through which moralities and ethics are claimed, negotiated, contested, and, as we shall observe, embodied and engendered.