Chapter 6

Afropolitan Patriotism

A Matter of Musical Life and Death

Beginning in June 2012, international news reports about the crisis in the West African Sahel frequently gathered around a common theme: what anthropologist Paul Stoller called, in a recent editorial, “the death of music in Mali” (2013). In the context of an aggressive and expansive Islamist occupation of northern Mali, these stories coupled harrowing testimonies of corporal punishment (including public floggings, stonings, and amputations) with personal accounts of the extreme cultural austerity of everyday life in cities like Gao, Timbuktu, and Kidal. We read of the desecration of medieval mausoleums and manuscripts, the strict enforcement of ostensibly “Islamic” modes of dress and behavior, and, with greater and greater frequency, the absolute silencing of a once vibrant music culture. Cell phones with melodious ring tones were confiscated; musical instruments and equipment burned; rituals and ceremonial gatherings prohibited; artists forcedinto exile through fear and intimidation; and so on.1 These reports multiplied as varied factions of Jihadists (some with ecumenical aspirations for a greater Islamic orthodoxy, others with more profane affiliations with smuggling rings and kidnapping cartels) displaced a motely crew of secular Tuareg separatists, who had only a few months prior declared an independent ethnic homeland called “Azawad” following an armed uprising that precipitated a military coup in the country’s southern capital, Bamako.2

As the political geography of ethnicity gave way to the zealous hegemony of religion—when media reports turned from Tuareg nationalism to Islamist militancy—the plight of an occupied and exiled people found voice in narratives of musical loss. The headlines read, “No Rhythm or Reason as Militants Declare War on Music”; “Music Silenced as Islamists Drive Out Artists”; “Mali’s Music Has Been Muzzled”: and so on. In May 2013, sociologist Sujatha Fernandes, writing for the New York Times under the rubric “The Day Music Died in Mali,” reflected on current events in Mali in an impassioned defense of music as a mode of cultural coherence in the face of the socially destructive geopolitics of the present.

In the same month, Oxfam International, in collaboration with filmmakers from Sahel Calling, released a video titled “Mali in Crisis: The Power of Music.”3 The video begins with the staggered rhythms and gritty timbres of takamba, a genre of popular music prominent in and around the city of Gao in northeastern Mali. Images cut between a map of Mali, bound together by the long arch of the Niger River, and artists in the midst of performance, resonant icons of the country’s social fabric. Statements and songs of artists fade into scenes of and testimonies from refugee camps. And, messages of national pride and hope in the country’s capital give way to the filmmakers’ own geopolitical statement of purpose: “It is time for governments to harness the power of Mali’s people and work together toward a future of peace and prosperity for all.”

Music has long been a privileged signifier of status and identity in postcolonial Mali, serving as a primary expressive vehicle of nation building and statecraft through successive periods of postcolonial governance (see Skinner 2012b). With the international success of artists such as Salif Keita, Habib Koité, Oumou Sangaré, Toumani Diabaté, Rokia Traoré, and the late Ali Farka Touré (among many others) music has also raised the international profile of a country more widely known for its extreme poverty and harsh climate. Through music, live and mediated, global audiences have encountered and celebrated Mali’s rich cultural heritage, its deep sense of history, its principles of social cohesion, and, as many recent articles and opinion pieces have noted, its traditions of tolerant piety. As Malian rapper Amkoullel affirms, “Mali is a secular country, tolerant, where everyone declares their religion according to their feeling, and in any case, they know that a Mali without music is an impossibility” (cited in Morgan 2013: 82). Malian music has become synonymous, in other words, with an inclusive and extensive—tolerant and global—sense of morality that equates good sounds with good sociability and, in the world music market, good fortune. To threaten this music is, thus, a menace to culture itself, its virtue and value, and, more specifically, to the nation that culture is called on to imagine, represent, and perform.

Music as Biopolitical Culture in Contemporary Mali

In this chapter, I propose three things. The first is that we think of the musical morality I have just described, with its strong associations with national identity, as a social position: a normative framework for social action and community formation within a geopolitical sphere shaped by commercial, developmental, and security interests. As such, this musical morality suggests specific parameters of enactment that define what it means to be a Malian artist and make Malian music in the world today. As a mode of transnational identification, this musical morality manifests among artists who actively appeal to a discourse of cultural authenticity qualified by assertions of national provenance in representing their work to audiences at large. It appears in media reports that characterize the music within their purview as Malian, cast within narratives both celebratory and, as we observed, anxious. And, it resounds through the rhythms, tempos, textures, and timbres that are presented to listening publics, near and far, as quintessentially Malian.4 In the words of Grammy-nominated artist Bassékou Kouyaté, uttered above a soundtrack of plucked strings and slapped gourds on the Oxfam video discussed previously, “Mali is known because of its music. Music is the heart of Mali. . . . If someone wants to stop music in Mali, that would be saying he wants to stop the heart of Mali. . . .” Then, the soundtrack to his statement abruptly stops, and he continues to speak amid a seemingly unnatural silence: “Because Mali is known for its music throughout the world.”

Second, I suggest that this Malian morality of music represents a specifically biopolitical social position through which populations in the western Sahel assert their right to live in the world. If biopower operates, in Michel Foucault’s terms, by creating “caesuras” between social life and political death, between legitimate and aberrant social positions in modern states (2003: 255–56), then the idea of “Malian music” becomes a means by which people may publicly claim their vitality, viability, and, in a neoliberal world order, the marketable value of their lives as essentially cultural—and, more specifically, musical—subjects. In the context of the current crisis in the Sahel, I further suggest that this biopolitical social position has become increasingly conflated with what Achille Mbembe calls “necropolitics,” describing

With the increased militarization of the Sahel as “the new front in the war on terror,”5 populations across the region—in Mali, Niger, Algeria, and Mauritania—have become more and more susceptible to death, and more and more distant from social, political, and economic life.

In the contemporary Malian art world, this conflation of the biopolitical and necropolitical—of musical morality and global security—has created its own sociomusical caesura, between a vital and vocal musical elite and a stagnant and silent artistic underclass. On the one hand are the musical lives of those with access to transnational networks of circulation, for whom tours abroad and an established social media presence offer viable platforms for artistic agency; on the other are those whose creative work remains beholden to local music economies, of nightclub performances, freelance recording, and life-cycle ceremonies—all greatly diminished during this ongoing crisis: provisional work from increasingly precarious lives. My observations of this fragmented music culture, the focus of the final section of this chapter, are admittedly partial, based as they are on my long-standing work with musicians in the south of Mali, and the capital, Bamako, in particular. The desires, struggles, and expressions of artists in northern Mali—before, during, and following the crisis of 2012–13—adds yet another dimension to the politics of belonging and dispossession I elaborate here.6 Still, the sounds and statements of my Bamako interlocutors do represent an important counterpoint to narratives that tend to equate the apparent “death” of public culture in Mali with the rise of Islamic radicalism in the Sahel. Their music and words bear witness to a broader biopolitics of culture in a necropolitical world, in which the lives and works of Malian artists are deeply implicated, even as they remain divided.

Yet, the story of this biopolitical music culture is not only one of conflict and division, it is also a story of unity and celebration. I turn, thus, to the sounds and images of an apparently proud postcolonial nationalism, appearing in the weeks prior to Mali’s fiftieth anniversary of independence from colonial rule (French, Cinquantenaire). Through a close reading of two music videos circulated on YouTube in August 2010, I reflect on a particularly patriotic sense of Afropolitanism among Malian musicians—at home and abroad—during a time of nationalist fervor. Seen and heard, however, from the perspective of a country caught in the throes of profound social, political, and economic turmoil—in the wake of the March 2012 military coup and its aftermath—such celebratory works seem to confirm the postcolonial critic’s dismissal of patriotic zeal and statist authority within an insufficiently decolonized Africa. Reflecting on my own recent fieldwork in Mali, I acknowledge this criticism, appreciating its tenor while not wholly subscribing to its prognoses. I ask, Is there a place for the nation and a sense of patriotism within an emergent structure of Afropolitan feeling? It is with this question in mind that I return to the reported “death of music in Mali” in 2012–13 to observe a clearly divided and greatly diminished—though not (yet) deceased—national music culture.

Which brings me to my third and final proposition: that current divisions within the Malian art world are best addressed by the artists themselves and the political society of which they are a part.7 In other words, I suggest an (intentionally provocative) inversion and revision of the thesis proposed by Oxfam: “It is time for Mali’s people to harness the power of government and work together toward a future of peace and prosperity for Mali, Africa, and the world.” To more expansively mobilize the biopower of Malian music, one must think and act beyond a cosmopolitanism that seeks to intervene in foreign affairs in the interest of ideals deemed universal. For “peace and prosperity for all” to be contingent on “governments” harnessing “the power of Mali’s people” rings of a “civilizing mission” that is as untenable as it is unreasonable. Rather, my attention turns to the performances and politics of a more recent cohort of Afropolitan patriots, for whom the nation-state, Africa, and the world do not represent mutually exclusive scales of place, but mutually constitutive spheres of moral concern; who recognize the biopolitical necessity of national identification in the world today, but insist that claims on African states be grounded in the lived and varied experiences of African subjects.

The Art of Afropolitan Patriotism

It is August 2010, and two music videos appear on the newsfeed of my Facebook account, both commemorating Mali’s Cinquantenaire, one month before the September 22 national day. Both videos take the generic form of hip-hop, though both gesture beyond this genre in important ways. The first video, “Cinquantenaire du Mali” by the young Malian rapper Iba One, features the music of Sidiki Diabaté, son of kora virtuoso Toumani Diabaté. Representing a new generation in an old lineage of instrumental griots (see chapter 3), the video shows Diabaté carrying on his family tradition and pushing its boundaries as he plays his kora with beats and backing tracks that he himself has programmed, arranged, and mixed.8 As I watch the video for the first time, I am deeply moved. Sidiki, whom I have known since he was six years old, when his apprenticeship with the kora was just beginning, has become an accomplished musician, a professional title he prefers to the clan-based and artisanal moniker jeli, indicating a more broadly defined African art world with which his generation of artists increasingly identifies—not to the exclusion of family heritage, but in addition to it.

The second video, “Mali Debout” (“Stand Up Mali”) appeals to a different kind of African heritage, that of the diaspora. Mokobé Traoré, born to Malian parents and raised in France, is a former member of the French hip-hop trio 113. Since the release of his album Mon Afrique in 2007, Mokobé has cultivated a successful solo career by drawing attention to and celebrating his African roots, and his Malian heritage in particular. Yet, Mokobé is Malian in much the same way as Sidiki Diabaté is a jeli; there’s an irreducibility to his identity that embeds his African identity within post-imperial France—a hybrid subject position evoked by notions of L’Afrance and La Françafrique and located in the segregated urban and suburban social spaces featured in his work (see Mazauric 2007). A third point of reference for Mokobé is hip-hop itself, binding him to the contemporary Black Atlantic and providing him with a playful medium of sonic, linguistic, gestural, and sartorial expression through which his many filiations and affiliations take shape (Figure 20).9

At first glance, the two videos represent a plurality of what we might call the “qualified cosmopolitanisms” that constitute the modern African world, where an increasingly urbanized and globalized continent meets an increasingly provincialized—decolonized and diasporic—Euro-American North. Broadcasting from African cities at home and abroad, the videos represent what Paul Gilroy has called the “cosmopolitanism-from-below” of urban popular culture, in general (2004), and Manthia Diawara’s “homeboy cosmopolitanism” of hip-hop cultural style, in particular (2004). They manifest what Mamadou Diouf describes as the “vernacular cosmopolitanism” of a deterritorialized social and cultural heritage (2000), and they evoke Kwame Anthony Appiah’s “cosmopolitan patriotism” of postcolonial and diasporic pride (1997). It is this qualified—rooted and routed—cosmopolitanism, articulated from a global city in an African world (Bamako) that I have critically elaborated in the present text with the term “Afropolitanism.”

Of the aforementioned Afropolitan qualifiers, I am most interested, in this chapter, in the latter “patriotic” sentiment, what Kwame Anthony Appiah describes as a moral concern for the nation, manifest in a common commitment to the institutions and governing principles of the state (1997, 623–24). As expressions of what I will call “Afropolitan patriotism,” both videos present multimodal and intergeneric expressions of Malian being in the African world. In them, the artists publicly manifest their international orientations (toward the African world) while still claiming intranational solidarities (within African states). They do so by drawing on expressive modes of sound, verbal art, gesture, and sartorial style within and beyond hip-hop to evoke what Iba One calls Maliba, or “Great Mali.” Here, Mali is “great” because of its transnational scope, representing a homeland that exceeds its geopolitical frontiers. Through Diabaté’s kora, an instrument his family has performed for generations across West Africa, we see and hear the Old Mali Empire, which, from the thirteenth to sixteenth centuries, stretched from the arid plains of the Sahel to the Senegambian coast. And through the expatriate expressions of Mokobé, we perceive the modern postcolony, with its myriad diasporic enclaves the world over.

This greatness is also rooted in Malian values—the patriotic principles of which Appiah writes so poignantly. As Iba One waits for the beat to drop in “Cinquantenaire du Mali,” he stands near the Monument de la Paix in downtown Bamako, formed of two concrete arms supporting a globe on which a dove rests, a symbol of continental peace. Such urban monuments, signs of nation building and Mali’s place in a postcolonial world, populate the video. As Iba raps and Sidiki plays his kora over a steady reggae rhythm, we see the Mémorial Modibo Keita, in honor of Mali’s first president; the Monument de l’Indépendence, a tribute to African sovereignty; the Pont des Martyrs, memorializing the massacre that precipitated the downfall of Mali’s authoritarian Second Republic; and the Monument de l’Hospitalité, showing a kneeling woman offering a calabash of water to her onlooking guests—a act of generosity and welcome in western Africa that, among the Mande, is a sign of hope (jigiya) that only a good host (jatigi) can offer (see Arnoldi 2007).

Patrimonial pride and hopeful hospitality are echoed in “Mali Debout.” As the track begins, a Malian speaker, Mamadou Diabaté (aka “21 DG”), prefaces Mokobé’s principally French rap with expressive oratory in Bamana and Soninke, a language from Mali’s westernmost region and also spoken in Senegal and Mauritania where Mokobé has family ties. “Malians follow their fathers. They follow their mothers,” he chants. “God has blessed the children of Mali. We will not be left behind. . . . Hard work is better than no work at all.” Throughout his laudatory and didactic speech, reminiscent of the griot’s verbal art, a block-party dance beat punctuates a series of portraits that capture the beauty and vitality of Europe’s African community and the Malian diaspora in particular. We see men and women carefully groomed and adorned in all manner of haute couture, from colorful kaftans to tailored suits. Women’s faces are artfully accented in makeup and embellished in fine jewelry and vibrant headscarves. Juxtaposed with these portraits are scenes from a neighborhood square, where people sing, dance, and socialize in a space that proclaims itself Malian in an otherwise anonymous French suburb (banlieue). “Mali is beautiful,” Mokobé tells us.

The two videos’ celebratory representation of Mali and its fifty years of postcolonial independence has not been widely shared among contemporary continental critics. On October 19, 2010, two months after the YouTube release of “Cinquantenaire du Mali” and “Mali Debout,” historian and cultural theorist Achille Mbembe appeared on the Paris-based radio program France Culture to discuss the legacy of a half-century of African sovereignty and promote his new book on the topic, Sortir de la grande nuit: un essai sur l’Afrique décolonisée (2010).10 When asked about the festivities surrounding the African Cinquantenaire, Mbembe is unequivocal, stating “the celebrations lack both symbolic form and content.” Instead of engaging in a broad-based “critical reflection” on and toward African futures, he says, “we are trying to dress up . . . ‘the Shameful State’ in rags.” In an earlier article, excerpted from Sortir de la grande nuit and widely circulated online, Mbembe deepens this critique, in a passage worth citing at length:

In short, for Mbembe, the Cinquantenaire inspires little reason to celebrate, particularly as concerns the contemporary state of the postcolonial nation.

In these recent critiques, there are echoes of Mbembe’s earlier indictment of political and popular culture outlined in his essay, “The Banality of Power and the Aesthetics of Vulgarity in the Postcolony,” first published two decades ago (1992). As a postcolonial corrective to Bakhtin’s Rabelaisian vision, Mbembe locates “the grotesque and the obscene” not among plebeian culture, but “in 1) the places and times in which state power organizes the dramatization of its magnificence, 2) the displays in which it stages its majesty and prestige and, 3) the way it offers these artifacts to its ‘targets’ [cibles]” (4). Such dramatizations of state power (real or imagined) are not merely imposed, Mbembe argues; they are also internalized. In the postcolony, “officialdom and the people share many references in common, not the least of which is a certain conception of the aesthetics and stylistics of power, the way it operates and the modalities of its expansion” (13). Mbembe characterizes the postcolonial relationship of the political and the popular as “promiscuous,” calling it “a convivial tension between the commandement and its ‘targets’” (5) that has led to “mutual zombification.”

Indeed, there are signs of such promiscuity in the work of the artists we have thus far considered. Midway through “Cinquantenaire du Mali,” an image appears of a map titled “Le Mali nouveau,” in which Sidiki Diabaté and his instrument are superimposed on Mali’s southern territory, while Malian soldiers are shown to march across the Saharan north. The graphic reifies the ethnopolitical hegemony of the Malian South. There, a privileged (Mande) cultural heritage and identity finds expression in the griot and his twenty-one-string harp and political authority manifests in a militarized north. This image is doubly troubling with regard to the March 2012 military coup, an event that was preceded by an escalation of armed conflict in northern Mali between Tuareg militants and the Malian Army and followed by the de facto splitting of the country, right where the artist meets his comrades in arms. In “Mali Debout,” we are confronted with the “convivial tension” of popular and political culture in the postcolony through images of Mokobé’s own rapprochement with state power. The rapper is shown rubbing shoulders with now-deposed President Amadou Toumani Touré after having received the country’s highest civilian honor, the Chevalier de l’Ordre National. In another image, contemporaneous with the release of the track, Mokobé wears his flag-ribboned medal on the breast pocket of a dark tailored suit. His gaze is cast stoically outward with hands pressed together in a chiefly gesture—the embodiment of the “aesthetics and stylistics” of presidential portraiture (and power) in the (African) postcolony.12

The Ambivalence of Afropolitan Patriotism

If, at first glance, we perceived the art of what I have called Afropolitan patriotism in “Cinquantenaire du Mali” and “Mali Debout,” we are now confronted with its ambivalence, if not its outright antithesis. For as ostensibly vulgar expressions of a glorified state power, the two videos would seem to betray their rooted cosmopolitanism with an underlying commitment to postcolonial provinciality. In my first attempt to synthesize this material, in a presentation to colleagues at The Ohio State University in January 2012 (two months prior to the military coup), I acknowledged this critique, and, weighing it against the otherwise proud performances, asked, “Can one wear ‘the flashy rags of power’ with pride?” and, “Are postcolonial celebration and criticism mutually exclusive?” My analytic aim was to “develop a concept of Afropolitan patriotism that acknowledges national celebration as it accommodates postnational criticism.” I clung to this attempt to reconcile the social critic’s anxiety with the popular artist’s pride right up until the end of March, when, after a week of violence and uncertainty, it became clear that the Malian state had collapsed.

Perhaps I should have known better. Between national celebration in the fall of 2010 and state crisis in the spring of 2012, I made three trips to Mali. In December 2010, with signs of the Cinquantenaire still prevalent—on the radio and television, on street signs and urban landmarks, and on reams of thematized cloth adorning people’s bodies—I attended Mali’s Biennial Arts and Culture Festival, held in the southern city of Sikasso. At the festival, which features musical, choreographic, and theatrical performances from Mali’s nine administrative regions, national pageantry predominated, a celebratory façade that barely masked criticisms of the state’s inability to fund its own cultural initiatives. In Sikasso, the festival relied on the provisional efforts of local authorities to make do with paltry resources and the goodwill of foreign benefactors—a cohort represented for the first time at the Biennale by the Malian community in France, on whose remittances the country significantly depends (see Azam and Gubert 2006). A sign of this diasporic reliance, the 2010 Biennale was made possible by substantial support from Franco-Malian entrepreneur Malamine Koné, who, at the festival’s opening ceremony broadcast on national television, received lavish praise from one of Mali’s celebrated—and, on this night, clearly intoxicated—international divas. On stage and on television screens across the country, the aesthetics of vulgarity were at play in a clientelist drama of laudatory Afropop within an increasingly privatized postcolony, in all its banality.

I returned to Mali in August 2011, at a time when domestic, regional, and international attention was focused squarely on Libya. There, rebel forces continued to make significant gains against regime loyalists along the coast and, by the end of the month, the endgame in Tripoli had begun. Two thousand miles to the southwest, in Bamako, reactions to these events tended toward the negative, with angry criticisms leveled, principally, against France, Mali’s former colonizer, and its Western allies for their intervention in Libya’s internecine conflict. Indeed, most people I talked to considered the NATO blockade and bombardment to be a neocolonial power-play, orchestrated by former French president Nicholas Sarkozy to undermine regional stability by targeting one of the continent’s most generous benefactors, Muammar Gadaffi.

Evidence of Gadaffi-backed Libyan beneficence was plentiful at the time in Bamako. Libya’s name decorated the façades of banks and prominent hotels, including the iconic Hotel de l’Amitié, one of the city’s few high-rises. A new district of government offices on the city’s left bank bore the name “Malibya,” a sign intended to inspire a sense of pan-African solidarity, though more than a few saw it as an affront to Malian sovereignty—once again, anxiety mixed with celebration. This was particularly true in the region of Ségou, some 200 miles north of the capital, where “Malibya” signified a furtive bilateral agreement to cede, virtually free of charge, 250,000 acres of land in Mali’s prime zone of industrial agriculture, the Office du Niger, to Libya for the development of export crops and livestock (see Whitehouse 2013d, 42) (Figure 21). This was part of a broader—dare I say “neocolonial”?—trend in sub-Saharan of selling (or conditionally conceding) rights to domestic land production to foreign interests (see Martiniello 2013).

Thus, as bombs fell north of the Sahara in August 2011, and as Malians debated the precarious status of their postcolonial alignments, I recalled another ambivalent scene of national celebration presented a year earlier on Malian television. There was Gadaffi, nestled between Malian president Amadou Toumani Touré and his wife—the patron and clients of Malibya—at an event commemorating Mali’s Cinquantenaire at the presidential palace on Koulouba, Mali’s “hill of power.” Before the assembled crowd of elite African celebrants, Djeneba Seck, one of Mali’s finest vocalists, sang her informal anthem “An Ka Maliba” (“Our Great Mali”). In counterpoint to the opaque, undemocratic clientelism that facilitated the expropriation of Malian territory to Libya, Seck counseled her audience, near and far, to go to their polling stations, listen carefully, and vote for those who inspire confidence and present good ideas for a homeland that belongs to “us,” she sang, the children of a great Mali, Maliba.13

In February 2012, I was back in Mali, this time to attend a privately sponsored international music festival, Le Festival sur le Niger, in the riverine town of Ségou in Mali’s agricultural heartland. Celebration was in the air, but crisis loomed all around. An emboldened ethnic-nationalist insurgency in the north—fueled by heavy weapons that arrived in Mali along with returning mercenaries, ethnic Tuareg men who had fought for Gadaffi before his fall in October 2011 (see Lecocq 2004)—had asserted control over several towns and villages in Mali’s vast Saharan territories. The region’s major urban centers (Gao, Kidal, and Timbuktu) were threatened as the Malian military struggled to repel rebel advances, often conceding tactical retreats as they complained of a lack of resources, including ammunition and proper shelter in the harsh desert environment. Earlier in the month, a protest movement initiated by the widows of Malian soldiers—whose husbands had died in an apparent massacre at the hands of rebel fighters in the town of Aguelhok, near the Algerian border—seemed to gain popular sympathy in Bamako as participants openly condemned president Touré’s management of the conflict, hurling stones and epithets at his residence (Lecocq et al. 2013). People around me spoke of a coup, as yet in the abstract, though with an air of anxiety. One of those people was a musician friend. I attempted to explain to him my current work on the music of Mali’s Afropolitan patriots, who, I argued, frequently give voice to a pluralist, worldly, and unified Mali. To this, he replied, simply, “We’ve had enough of songs about Mali” (French, “On a trop chanté le Mali”). One month later, in the throes of a post-coup crisis, with an occupied north and a power vacuum in the south, there was hardly a Mali left to sing about.

Afropolitanism: Beyond the Nation or Within?

Perhaps, then, it is best, as Achille Mbembe counsels, to start all over again.14 Indeed, evidence of continental transformation is increasingly apparent. In Mbembe’s words,

It is in the burgeoning context of this mutual embedding of Africa in the world and the world in Africa that Mbembe calls for a “formidable remodeling of mentalities” and “a new intellectual and political imagination” with regard to African modernity and the prospect of an African renaissance.15 The promise of such transnational and anti-essentialist shifts in the African episteme “after the postcolony” (to coin a phrase à la Mbembe) is a source, for the African historian and social theorist, of “paradoxical optimism” (compare Mbembe 2001). Mbembe qualifies this new and cautiously hopeful reconfiguration of African space and subjectivity with the term “Afropolitanism.”

In many ways, Mbembe’s idea of the Afropolitan resonates with Kwame Anthony Appiah’s earlier understanding of the postmodern, the latter defined as a space-clearing conceptual tool—something with which to start all over. “Postmodernism can be seen,” Appiah writes, “as a new way of understanding the multiplication of distinctions that flows from the need to clear oneself a space; the need that drives the underlying dynamic of cultural modernity” (1992: 145). Mbembe’s Afropolitan subject also bears a certain resemblance to Appiah’s postcolonial novelist, who is “no longer committed to the nation” and who chooses “instead of the nation . . . not an older traditionalism but Africa—its continent and its people” (152). Further, both Mbembe and Appiah share the ethics of the postcolonial theorist, whose criticism “is based . . . in an appeal to a certain simple respect for human suffering, a fundamental revolt against the endless misery of the last thirty [now fifty] years” (152). But, beyond this point, Appiah’s and Mbembe’s intellectual paths diverge.

In Appiah’s book, In My Father’s House (a useful bookend to Mbembe’s Sortir de la grande nuit), a chapter on the present condition and future prospects of African states follows the aforementioned chapter on the postmodern and postcolonial. There, Appiah observes, “despite all their limitations, African states persist,” from which point he is able to envision the possibility of an end to a politics of postcolonial decline. Appiah’s observance of the persistent presence of the state suggests a cautionary endorsement of political society within the nation, embedded, as it is, in a broader critical history of the Ghanaian postcolony. Indeed, Appiah rejects the nationalist fervor of the post-independence era (and its subsequent postcolonial revivals), rooted, in Ghana as in Mali, in the racial essentialisms of a pan-Africanist ideal (see Hall 2011). “African unity, African identity,” he writes, “need securer foundations than race.”16 But, Appiah is less interested in “starting over” in light of the postcolonial state’s apparent (and genuine) failures; rather, Appiah appeals, in a later essay, to what he calls a rooted cosmopolitanism, in which a critical, though no less proud patriotism reflects a commitment “to the conditions necessary for a common life” (1997, 629). In defense of the polis, in Africa as elsewhere, he writes, “What is required to live together in a nation is a mutual commitment to the organization of the state—the institutions that provide the overarching order of our common life” (629).

“Nations matter morally,” Appiah writes, “as things desired by autonomous agents, whose autonomous desires we ought to acknowledge and take account of, even if we cannot always accede to them” (624). In the final section of this chapter, I return to the idea that, in the world today, among artists and audiences across multiple scales of place, Malian music (still) matters morally; not as a celebratory expression of a postcolonial artifice, but as an acknowledged mode of African being in the world; not as a vulgar mimicry of state power, but as a vital signifier of popular politics; not as a sign of nativist authenticity, but as a variegated practice of imagining community; not as a static traditional essence, but as a dynamic and resonant Afropolitanism. Though I attend to the agency and desires of the artists who assert the morality of this social position, I also observe the hardships and struggles of musicians whose moral claims on Malian music remain provisional, precarious, and, in a time of regional crisis, proscribed. It is this biopolitics of culture—in which the sounds of political belonging too often conceal the silences of dispossession—that highlights the existential problem of Afropolitan patriotism in contemporary Mali. If Malian music matters morally in Africa (and the world) today, who has the right to speak and sing of it? Does this social position represent an exclusive mode of being—the prerogative a privileged elite—or does it invite a more inclusive moral community? Is the Afropolitan patriot merely a poor imitation of her cosmopolitan counterpart, or is there substance to her claims to human rights, continental renaissance, and national reconciliation?

Musical Life after Death?

In the afternoon of January 9, 2013, several hundred militants poured into the village of Konna in central Mali, a farming community on the border between the occupied north and the government-controlled south. The Malian soldiers stationed to defend the town were caught off guard. Dozens were killed in heavy fighting that lasted into the night. Outnumbered and outgunned, the government lines broke. In retreat, some soldiers discarded their fatigues in an attempt to blend in with local residents; others fled in jeeps to the military base in Sévaré 30 miles to the south, the last major outpost of Mali’s armed forces north of the capital, Bamako. On January 10, Interim President Dioncounda Traoré made a desperate plea to his counterpart in France, François Hollande, to intervene or witness the former French colony fall to Islamist rule. France responded. Beginning on January 11, French gunships and fighter jets launched attacks on insurgent positions advancing on the riverine town of Mopti, 7 miles west of Sévaré and 285 miles north of Bamako along a two-lane highway (see Hammer 2013; Whitehouse 2013b).

The following day, the Malian government declared a state of emergency, enabling “the government to take extraordinary measures to deal with the crisis in the North” and setting strict limits to public gatherings in towns and cities across southern Mali.17 As a result, cities like Kayes, Ségou, Sikasso, and Bamako, already muted by months of political instability and economic uncertainty, fell silent. Whereas the muzzling of public culture in the north elicited loud indignation from foreign observers, with many announcing the “death” of Malian music and culture, the state’s crackdown on civil life in the south went largely unremarked; this silence, it seemed, was justified. Meanwhile, with all eyes on France’s “Operation Serval,” the military mission “to ‘eradicate’ terrorism in Mali,”18 ears tuned in to those frequencies where Malian music still maintained an audible presence, on the airwaves and online. On January 16, Malian singer Fatoumata Diawara, a rising female star on the world circuit, released the track “Mali Ko” via SoundCloud on Public Radio International’s nationally syndicated program, The World19 (Figure 22). With its call for national solidarity in the face of a common existential threat—echoing geopolitical condemnations of a radical and militant Islam—“Mali Ko” quickly became an Internet sensation, posted on YouTube under the rubric “Voices United For Mali” with the word “Peace” added parenthetically to its title. In the Western media, “Mali Ko” (meaning, in Bamana, “For Mali,” but also “Mali Trouble”) became a key cultural counterpoint to the escalating violence in the Malian north. Against the rise of repressive religiosity, here was a call for tolerance and unity; in the face of civil war, here was a call for peace and reconciliation.

Back in Mali, the globetrotting Diawara, recently returned from a tour in the United States (performing at globalFEST in New York City the Sunday prior), organized a press conference on January 17 for the official domestic release of “Mali Ko”—a musical event “For Mali,” and, now, for Malians. She, along with several of the forty artists featured on the track (including Ségou bluesman Bassékou Kouyaté, featured on the May 2013 Oxfam video), repeated the message of peace and unity broadcast to international audiences but added a call to arms intended especially for their Malian listeners. “We have found ourselves in a war in which others are fighting each other in our own country, even before we have taken up arms to fight,” Diawara told Mali’s national television, a reference to France’s military intervention against apparently foreign Islamist fighters.20 This sentiment of patriotic mobilization echoed two other notable online releases from established artists in the weeks surrounding the battle of Konna and France’s military intervention in early January.21

On December 30, Ivorian reggae star and vocal pan-Africanist Tiken Jah Fakoly circulated the single “An Ka Wili” (“Let’s Rise Up”), drawing on references to Mali’s precolonial past to urge present-day Malians (and their neighbors) to come together in defense of their country’s cultural and territorial integrity. At the outset of the track, Fakoly warns his listeners, “If we don’t rise up, Mali will slip away from us.” He invokes the names of great regional warriors, conquerors, and kings—from Sunjata Keita and Sonni Ali Ber, champions of medieval empires, to Samory Touré and Babemba Traoré, remembered for their resistance to colonial rule—and asks, “Where have [their] descendants gone?” Sung in Bamana, and addressed to Mali’s contemporary citizens, “An Ka Wili” resonates with a broader regional significance. As imagined through its pantheon of historical leaders, Fakoly’s “Mali” includes precolonial political geographies that encompass much of present-day West Africa. Fakoly is himself a citizen of neighboring Côte d’Ivoire, though he has lived in exile (mainly in Bamako) since 2003, when death threats followed his vocal criticism of the xenophobic “Ivoirité” politics of the Bedié and Gbagbo regimes (see Reed 2012). In “An Ka Wili,” Fakoly sings from Mali, as a resident guest, but also (like Diawara) for Mali, as a concerned neighbor. In this way, Fakoly’s music exhibits a kind of regional “double-consciousness,” rooted and routed in and through Mali, and mediated by a palpable pan-Africanism—sounded through the diasporic rhythms, timbres, and textures of reggae—which is the artist’s ideological and generic trademark (see Gilroy 1993).

On January 19, Malian M.C. Master Soumy released “Sini Ye Kèlè Ye” (“Tomorrow Is The Fight”), “dedicated to the Malian army and destined to mobilize the population behind its army.”22 This was the latest of several tracks of pointed political commentary released by the young rapper since the outset of the current crisis. In the weeks following the March 2012 military coup, Soumy joined the ranks of a Bamako-based hip-hop collective known as Les Sofas de la République (“The Soldiers of the Republic”). The Sofas were among the first public figures to vocalize a critique of the unfolding social, political, and economic crisis in the country, drawing attention not only to failures of governance among political elites but also to widespread social apathy and acceptance of an entrenched culture of corruption. Expressed through hip-hop and circulated online, their message—demanding political accountability, civic engagement, and collective action to confront Mali’s pressing problems—reached a broad listening public (and caught the attention of several international observers), highlighting the relative lack of substantive critical commentary from the local press and political leadership. It is for this reason that Bruce Whitehouse, in his widely read Bamako-based blog (bridgesfrombamako.com), characterized the group as a unique and vital manifestation of civil society in Mali (2012b). In “Sini Ye Kèlè Ye,” Soumy speaks in rhymes and over beats from this platform of public criticism and proclaims his call to arms. “In a time of war,” he raps, “every Malian should take action as a soldier. . . . Tomorrow is the fight.”

Released over three weeks in the midst of intense internecine warfare, “Mali Ko,” “An Ka Wili,” and “Sini Ye Kèlè Ye” not only shared the common theme of performing the Malian nation in patriotic—even jingoistic—terms, they also represented a resonant and explicitly moral counterpoint to perceptions of a moribund music culture. In Fatoumata Diawara’s words, “We artists cannot remain indifferent to what is happening in Mali, we must help to restore a patriotic spirit.”23 For Diawara and others like her, a renewed sense of nationalist urgency would require a revitalized Malian art world. Yet, this world of Malian art resounded from a new location of culture. In addition to their themes and purpose, these tracks also shared a common platform to communicate and circulate their message: social media. Launched on SoundCloud and YouTube and spread through Facebook and Twitter, Malian music, at the moment of its apparent death, seemed to come alive once again, not on stage but online. Older media frequencies spread their sounds as well, on television and the radio, but, as captured by the name of the program that first broadcast “Mali Ko” in the United States, this music “for Mali” arrived via “The World.”

Beneath these digitally coded frequencies of musical activity and activism, a quieter, more somber, and more analog art world languished. From Timbuktu to Bamako, whether by virtue of repressive acts of violence in the name of religion or checkpoints and surveillance in the name of civic order, Mali’s once-renowned live music culture settled into an anxious silence. In Bamako, the sounds of outdoor dance parties, drumming ceremonies, ambulant chants, and bands playing into the night—sonic emblem’s of the city’s renowned musical ethos—became casualties of war and their purveyors, Mali’s urban artists, de facto prisoners of war. While arguments could be made to justify a reining in of public culture in a time of heightened domestic conflict, many within Bamako’s artistic community cast doubt on and openly criticized the state of emergency, though their grievances attracted little media attention. A rare public criticism came from the voice of Madina Ndiaye, Mali’s most famous female kora player and a vocal advocate of Mali’s domestic music culture. In a May 2013 interview with a Bamako weekly newspaper (Bamako Hebdo), Ndiaye said:

It is important to note that the artists of and for whom Ndiaye speaks are not those with the international profiles of Fatoumata Diawara and Tiken Jah Fakoly, or the social media presence of young and generally affluent rappers like Master Soumy (see Schulz 2012, 134). These are not the artists who spoke and sang in praise of the nation in August 2010, when the Cinquantenaire anthems of Sidiki Diabaté, Iba One, and Mokobé drew my attention online. Rather, these are artists whose everyday livelihoods depend on local economies of culture, on public and private patronage of ceremonial and recreational performance. These are artists who tell me they’ve “had enough of songs about Mali,” enough of dressing up the shameful state in rags. These are the sidemen, backing vocalists, and aspiring stars whose music accompanies baptisms and marriages, animates nightclubs and bars, and, for the past two decades, has captivated the interest of adventure tourists, amateur sound recordists, travel writers, and ethnomusicologists. Yet, unlike their cosmopolitan peers, their work reflects both the ambiguity and anonymity of their vernacular status and identity.

If these artists play a vital role in serving the social needs of their communities, as ritual participants and entertainers, they must also confront local stereotypes of socioprofessional vagrancy and parasitism. In his reflection on popular musicians who peddle in praise in contemporary Bamako, Manthia Diawara laments that these modern-day griots too often prey upon the pride and passions of their patrons, invoking a traditional artifice that “bar[s] the door to any sense of cosmopolitanism, any profound mixing of cultures” (1997, 27). And, if artists’ cultural output represents a draw for international tourism, it is also frequently conflated in popular accounts of Malian music culture. Take, for example, the itinerant observations of a travel article in the New York Times from 2006, which begins with the following line: “We were walking down a dirt road in a neighborhood of Bamako with the mellifluous name of Badalabougou, following the rhythmic beating of a bongo drum.” Later, the author describes the Malian capital as a “cultural hothouse and melting pot on the Niger River . . . reminiscent of the Mississippi Delta,” where “public open-air performances . . . are as much a part of life . . . as pickup games of le football” (Hammer 2005). Here, individual artistry melts away in the swelter of city sounds, producing an essentialist sense of place in which local artists are heard but rarely listened to, in which they sing, but, to paraphrase Spivak, do not speak.

Toward a Musical Politics of the Governed

Between the months of February and July 2013, I collected seventeen testimonies from Malian musicians, primarily in Bamako, who responded to several questions about the current state of the arts in Mali, the particular difficulties faced by performing artists during the state of emergency (which ended on July 6, 2013), and the prospects for the future of Mali’s music culture.25 In concluding this chapter, I share some of their words:

If we consider the musical morality I described at the outset of this chapter as a social position among artists in contemporary Mali, one that stakes a claim on political subjectivity in the world through expressions of cultural authenticity and accrues its moral significance by intimately coupling an idea of nationhood with the globalization of a music culture (“Music is the heart of Mali,” Bassékou Kouyaté told Oxfam. “Mali is known for its music throughout the world.”), then the testimonies of the Bamako artists I cited earlier suggest a subjectivity that lacks such positionality. In their claims of social and political neglect, hardship, and dispossession, there is a common narrative of biopolitical loss, of a diminished and degraded artistic personhood left susceptible to the expansive necropolitics of the present. Read together, their criticisms argue for a more open and inclusive biopolitics in Africa (and the world) today, one that includes but cannot be reduced to the world of music for Mali; one that recognizes the social and professional value of artists as vital agents of musical performance and politics in Mali. Closing the gap between these global and local art worlds to pursue a more comprehensive and sustainable biopolitics of culture while resisting the balkanizing and dehumanizing logics of necropolitical hegemony represent, I believe, pressing existential conditions for the projects of national reconstruction and reconciliation in Mali today, to which Malian artists, from all walks of life, have much to contribute.

It is in this sense that I, like Mbembe, maintain a “paradoxical optimism” in observing the contemporary Malian art world and the municipal, national, and transnational spaces of which it is a part. Though I am sanguine about music as a biopolitics of culture—in the potential for a musically motivated politics of the governed—I remain cautiously critical of the particular forms such music takes in Mali today. In ending on a call for greater political accountability, popular engagement, and national unity among artists, I do not mean to suggest that Mali’s troubles can be resolved by the populist nationalism of a YouTube video, the cosmopolitan ideals of a world music act, the vocal activism of a hip-hop collective, or the late-night entertainment of a neighborhood dance band. Rather, my focus is on the fact of political subjectivity as a critical object of popular concern (see also Skinner 2012a), and my interest—here and throughout this book—is in the Afropolitan ethics that take shape through the creative expressions and public manifestations of a vibrant and vital urban African popular culture. The current crisis in Mali may persist, and divisions within the country may multiply, but the struggle for viable political communities in Africa, and for a minimum level of stability and security that is critical to a sound sense of self in modern polities (African or otherwise), will continue and, I believe, expand as long as there is a society worth defending and a better future worth fighting for. Such are the beliefs and aspirations of artists who, speaking and singing at home and abroad (in and for Mali), have had enough of exploitation in the guise of globalization, corruption in place of governance, and demagoguery at the expense of democracy. Theirs is the ambivalent art of an Afropolitan patriotism, of which we, their audiences and observers, might be paradoxically optimistic.