Chapter 1

Representing Bamako

A Sense of Place

I first met Issa and Lassy through one of those moments of serendipity that crop up (or so you hope) in the course of long-term fieldwork. I had entered my second month of research in Bamako, feeling overwhelmed by the density of a project not yet distilled by time. I was sitting at a cybercafé in Bolibana, the Bamako neighborhood on the Niger River’s left bank, close to the city center, where I lived during my year-long stay in 2006–7 (Figures 3 and 4). I don’t remember to whom I was writing, but the email undoubtedly lamented the unfamiliar sameness of a place that I knew so well but had changed so much since my last extended stay five years prior. At that time, in the early 2000s, cybercafés were few and far between; by 2006, they were everywhere, with more and more people maintaining correspondence and doing business on the Internet, foreshadowing the online social networking that would flourish in the coming years.

Behind the desk by the entryway, Mohamed, the café’s manager and technical troubleshooter, clicked on an mp3 file. A hip-hop track came on over the computer speakers, the volume turned up. Amid the din of computer fans, café conversation, and my own thoughts, I heard a police siren, a simple keyboard riff, and an autotuned voice singing on the vowel sound uh. I continued to type. Then, the beat dropped with a record scratch, and I heard a chorus, chanting and singing in Bamana, the local lingua franca. “Bolibana! Come on! Let’s go!” I stopped writing. “Bolibana! Conviviality is here!” I began to listen. “Bolibana! Solidarity is here!” Who was this? “Bolibana! Don’t you know about it?” I wanted to know. The track seemed to call out from the core of my research, where music and place come together to articulate localized forms of audible aesthetics and sociality.1 I took this as a sign to more actively explore my immediate surroundings and, I hoped, track down the artists who had composed this rap about the Bamako neighborhood where I lived, Bolibana.

This chapter begins with my mediated and live encounter with this community, from which more general ethnographic and theoretical reflections on the city of which it is a part—Bamako—emerge. Throughout, I emphasize representations of urban culture—in film, public writing, and music—that elucidate, inscribe, and resound the moral and ethical production of space. Drawing on Mande social thought and an account of social space inspired by the work of Henri Lefebvre (1991), this chapter explores how Bamakois (Bamako residents) experience and express the civility and wildness of everyday urbanity, in which the “civil” and “wild” are popularly understood to signify communal solidarity and socioeconomic precarity, respectively. To navigate the city is to move in and out of civil space, in an out of the intimate, genealogical, and customary—the conviviality and solidarity about which Need One wants us to know. Wildness is understood, thus, as a mode of psychosocial exclusion, incoherence, and distance, which urban artists represent as a source of both anomie and, at times, inspiration. This ambivalence evokes, I argue, a particular Afropolitan ethics, in which encounters with wildness—whether in the form of endemic poverty, political corruption, or foreign cultural influence—entail individual agency and, to varying degrees, choice about how to avoid or embrace wild realities, reconcile them with established civilities, or, at the limits of ethical possibility, succumb to them through acts of desperation.

As evidenced in this chapter, such ethical practice, expressed through public representations of space, is an everyday feature of artists’ lives and figures prominently in the themes and styles of their work. Yet, as we shall observe in the final section of this chapter, this ethics of sociospatial practice is strongly gendered. Through image, text, and sound, Bamako is represented to its audiences, again and again, as a city divided. This division manifests, much like Hannah Arendt imagines the ancient Greek polis ([1958] 1998), as a rupture between the public and the private, between an urbanism defined by masculine agency and a domesticity that celebrates familial intimacy as it prescribes female subjugation. Thus, urban civility becomes expressly tied to ideals of feminine morality, bound to the household. “Badenya duman tunbɛ!” Need One affirms. “Conviviality,” but, literally, “mother-child-ness” (ba-den-ya), “is here!” At the same time, urban wildness appears as a problem of masculine subjectivity, in which widespread un(der)employment and the concomitant erosion of patriarchal authority present manifest threats to male personhood. There, among the young men in the wilds of the postcolonial city, the public sphere of the polis is increasingly experienced as a space of privation—of what Giorgio Agamben calls “bare life” (1998)—contrasted with the idealized (feminine) humanity of the hearth and contested through strategic acts of (masculine) moralization and ethical practice, written on, resounded in, and displayed upon the social space of the city.

Life at the End of the Road

An idiomatic translation of boli banna, which in Bamana literally means “the running has finished,” would be “the end of the road.” It implicitly refers to West African warrior Samory Touré’s surrender to the French colonial army in the late nineteenth century, which some say took place in Woyowayankɔ, to the west of the city.2 Yet, for the roughly 20,000 souls who today live in this urban district, Bolibana is simply “home,” where the road ends (Figure 5).3 With its own food market, corner boutiques, roadside restaurants, barbershops, soccer fields, pharmacies, mosques, schools, newsstands, petrol stations, mechanics, carpenters, welders, tailors, and roving hawkers, Bolibana, like most Bamako neighborhoods, is largely autonomous (which is not to say “self-sufficient,” being bound up with municipal, regional, and transnational circulations of people, capital, goods, and services). Its communal residences—characterized by large, extended families, usually encompassing at least three generations who live and labor side by side in rectangular mud-brick or cement compounds with earthen floor open-air courtyards where goats and chickens mingle with residents—gives Bolibana (like many districts in Bamako) the traditional air of a rural village, despite its apparently modern urban setting.

Back at home, I asked my friend Chaka, who was a big fan of Malian hip-hop (with various beats and flows playing from the headphones that dangled from his ears), to ask around about the group Need One. Mohamed at the cybercafé told me that they had recently released the track “Bolibana” to local radio stations and television. “Bolibana” quickly found its way onto the Internet and was being widely circulated on computers and cell phones, via Bluetooth connections, throughout the city. The next day, Chaka came over to tell me that he had found Need One. The group’s hangout was just down the street, beside a barbershop stall no more than 100 yards from where I lived (compare Weiss 2009). In fact, on the day that I went to Mohamed’s cybercafé and heard their song, I walked by and greeted these youths. A group of six or so young men sat, chatting and smoking around a charcoal stove, boiling a pot of tea outside a colorful container-like salon de coiffeur—the barbershop that belonged, I soon discovered, to group member and neighborhood hair stylist Issa Cissoko, aka Isolmo (Figure 6). From a portable cassette player came the soundtrack to their streetside gathering: hip-hop. This was their neighborhood grin, or conversational club; a social space produced at the intersection of this urban soundscape, sociability, and setting; a locus of social life in Bamako, where thousands of such groups can be found on the front stoops, along the roads, and in the parking lots of every neighborhood; a ubiquitous intersubjective presence in the city that gave tangible meaning to Need One’s lyric, which I was about to hear for the first time, “Badenya duman tunbɛ!” (“Conviviality Is Here!”).4

In West Africa, as elsewhere, greeting is a public sign of conviviality, and in Bamako one does a lot of greeting. Leaving home, you do not cross the threshold without hearing “K’anw b’u fɔ” (“Tell them we greet them”), to which there is only one response, “U n’a mɛn” (“They will hear it”). Conveying words of welcome is a part of the antiphonal phenomenology of walking the city (de Certeau 1988). There is the call, “I ka kɛnɛ wa?” (“How’s your health?”) And, the reponse, “Tɔɔrɔ si tɛ!” (“No problem at all!”). But the counterpoint is never far off. Arriving at the cybercafé, I find the power has been out all morning. “Problème b’a la de!” Mohamed says. “Now there’s trouble!” (compare Olukoju 2004). Actually living in a neighborhood like Bolibana quickly dispels any idealized notion of the persistence of rural tradition and social coherence in the midst of urban modernity in Africa today. As urbanist AbdouMaliq Simone writes, “The sense of generosity and moral responsibility evinced in African cities remains substantial.” However, “while a vital energy is mobilized to make do, the insides of associations, households and institutions seem now to live with a nearly constant sense of edginess” (2001a, 104). Indeed, signs that would indicate a more rustic and convivial residential life—communal living, household gardens and livestock, and public sociability, which, among the grinw, involves lengthy conversation and copious amounts of tea—are, by and large, tactics of “getting by” in the face of unrelenting poverty. From this perspective, families live together to better manage scarce resources. Gardens and livestock are kept to avoid food shortages and generate extra income. Neighbors spend hours together talking and drinking tea because, for the time being, they are out of work. City residents insist on greeting each other to keep their humanity intact.

A few days later, I invited Lassy and Issa over to my place, a rented two-room apartment in a large family compound, for tea and conversation. I explained to them my interest in their group, Need One, and the current Malian hip-hop scene more generally. Their enthusiasm was palpable, if oblique. “No problem,” they told me (“Problème t’a la”); a common retort in Bamako, where problems (financial, familial, and physical) are ubiquitous. (One might just as easily exclaim, “Problème b’a la de!,” like Mohamed when the lights go out at the cybercafé, but finding solutions means keeping opportunities alive.) “We’ll talk,” they said (“An bɛna baro kɛ”); the principle means by which sociability is maintained and social mobility is pursued in Bamako (see Schulz 2002).5 When Lassy and Issa arrived later that evening, I found them talking and joking with my neighbors in the courtyard while wrestling with children who scurried playfully around their legs. Of course, everybody knew each other here. In a sense, they were coming to greet me as a new member of the neighborhood. I let the two rappers into my living room, welcoming them with pious words (“Aw bisimala”) and friendly handshakes. We sat around a coffee table with shot glasses of sweet green tea and a sense of mutual interest. Lassy and Issa brought along a copy of the music video for “Bolibana.” So, with greetings exchanged and tea served, I plugged my DV camera into my laptop computer and we watched the clip together.

“Bolibana”

The video begins with Lassy Keita, aka Basta Killa, calling his partner, Issa, on a cell phone (yet another ubiquitous technology by mid-decade; five years earlier, the only person I knew with a portable was my globe-trotting host, Toumani Diabaté).6 “Hey my man, what’s up?” They plan to meet up in town. The volume increases as a keyboard and voice trace a simple repeating melody. An image of nighttime traffic resonates with the sound of a police siren. In the distance, two anonymous SUVs pull out of a parking lot. The beat drops. Need One and their posse are gathered in front of an overpass, now in broad daylight, throwing their hands up as they praise their hometown, Bolibana.

The aural and visual dimensions of the clip convey a particular sense of Afropolitan place. In Need One’s Bolibana (the neighborhood and the track), hip-hop thrives. “This is our reality,” they tell me. “This is Malian rap. . . . This is Bolibana.” The soundscape of backbeats, samples, record scratches, and verbal art couples with the gendered and generational cultural style of Afro-diasporic youth culture. Young women are dressed in tank tops, short skirts, and tight jeans. Some wear shades beneath their freshly coiffed hair. Young men are clothed in sports jerseys and baggy pants. Some have gold necklaces hanging upon muscular frames. Cyphers form around breaking and swaying dancers, performing tough and sexy gestures. Heavy shoulders, bent elbows, and extended fingers accent lyrical flows. There are signs of the postcolony as well. The video takes place in a parking lot outside of the Babemba cinema complex, near an overpass connecting the Boulevard de l’Indépendence to the road leading to Koulouba, Bamako’s “hill of power” (seen at a distance) and seat of presidential authority.

As the rap unfolds, images and lyrics cut to and comment on neighborhood sites and scenes. As we watch, Issa and Lassy draw my attention to the venues, describing them like local tour guides. There’s the Platinum Club, a nightclub formerly located above the Babemba cinema; Rokia’s grilled chicken stall and the Niamey pastry shop, good places to eat and meet up with friends; the cinema, where you can catch all the latest releases from Hollywood, Bollywood, and Nollywood; a young couple walking and whispering under streetlights and neighborhood children outside their homes, chanting “Bolibana!”

Lyrically, “Bolibana” draws attention to the phenomenological tension between communal civility (conviviality) and urban edginess (precarity) in contemporary Bamako. On the one hand, moral concepts and kinship terms are invoked to characterize the district: Dignity and friendship, they’re in Bolibana; Kinship and empathy, they’re in Bolibana; Humanity is also here. Issa raps, “The house of Bolibana has become a house of talk” (baroso), a space of conviviality.

On the other hand, vital threats to family and community are implied by frequent references to what is supposedly absent from, or not part of neighborhood social life: egotism, we don’t have it here; cruelty, we don’t have it here; nobody dies of hunger here. Lassy tells us to be calm, to be cool. Issa swears that he’s not worried. The track, thus, portrays urban African subjectivity as a problem of existential control, of life on the edge, caught “between the world one calls one’s own and the world one deems to be not-self or other,” what anthropologist Michael Jackson calls “the driving force” of human social life (1998: 18).

Civility and Wildness

In his essay on “associational life in the informal African city,” AbdouMaliq Simone argues that

Simone points to an experiential disjuncture between “morality” and “ethics,” in which moral spaces of family and community exist in tension with ethical choices made “under conditions of scarcity or social vulnerability.” Later I develop this dialectic conception of ethico-moral being-in-the-world by attending to its manifestation in the human artifice of the city. I begin with the most salient sociospatial point of reference for Bamako artists like Need One: the conviviality of a Mande sense of place. Then I turn to the “opportunistic and provisional” precarity of city life to define the principal ethical terrain of urban subjectivity: the abstract space of the Afropolis.

In Need One’s “Bolibana,” we encounter a rich lexicon of moral community taken from the annals of Mande social thought. In line after line and verse upon verse, we hear of the conviviality (badenya), empathy (sinjiya, literally “mother’s milk-ness”), friendship (teriya), kinship (balimaya), and humanity (adamadenya, literally “children of Adam-ness”) that collectively index what Simone calls “a sense of coherence,” or, in Heideggerian terms (1962), a culturally conditioned ontology of being-with-others (Mitsein) as a fundamental mode of being-in-the-world (Dasein). This centripetal morality of living among one’s kith and kin anchors subjects within a space of shared belonging, custom, and intimacy. And yet, Need One’s artistic practice—their musical being-with-others—is not so firmly bound to hearth and home. “Bolibana is getting out!,” 3-D Fariman exclaims. As a circulating product of creative agency, “Bolibana” also signifies a centrifugal ethics of subjective action; the track is, in other words, an outward expression of undertaking and initiative the Mande call waleya. Venturing to act beyond the coherence of moral community is a matter of personal interest and desire and can be existentially risky. Will this endeavor succeed or fail? In either case, what are the consequences? I have more to say about the precarity of subjective action in contemporary Bamako later. Here, I want to emphasize the specifically Mande sense of personhood (mɔgɔya) that emerges from Need One’s “Bolibana,” rooted in the intimacy and solidarity cultivated at home and routed through the deeds and works undertaken out there, in the world.

This dual, ethico-moral mode of being can also be mapped onto physical space. In an earlier reflection on space in Mande social thought, I outlined the conceptual division of society “between ‘civil space,’ centred on family compounds (luw) of which the city (dugu) is composed, and ‘wild space,’ referring to ‘the bush’ (kungo) that lies beyond the boundary (dankun) of the city and its surrounding fields (forow)” (Skinner 2010, 19; see Johnson 2003; see also Bagayogo 1989). As sites of spatial production, these categories represent the strategic, prescriptive, and formal ordering of the world that Henri Lefebvre calls “conceived space.” As forms of social design, such structural constraints (buildings, routes, borders, fields, and so on) also suggest patterns of dwelling, use, and practical activity (housekeeping, construction, commerce, farming, and so on) that shape the habitus of “lived space.” These are the sociospatial loci of civility in the Mande world. Beyond this archetypical human artifice lies, again drawing on the Lefebvrian lexicon, “abstract space”—the alien, uncultivated, and menacing “wilderness” of ante/antisocial space (1991, 37–52). Within this model of Mande cosmology, spaces of civility (the city) and wildness (the bush) represent the social and material contexts through which the morality of heritage and intimacy and the ethics of innovation and distinction articulate.

As an active ethico-moral dialectic, the subjective agency of movement into and out of civil and wild spaces (re)produces stability, friction, dynamism, conflict, consensus, and creativity in Mande society. At stake in these acts of departure, innovation, and (re)integration is the moral and ethical personhood (mɔgɔya) of the social actor. Hunters are the canonical agents of ethical action in Mande society as they deploy their knowledge of the wilderness to brave its dangers, procure its resources, cultivate its lands, and, thus, expand the scope of the civil (see Cashion 1984; Cissé 1964, 1994; Hellweg 2011). As ethnomusicologist Lucy Durán and cultural theorist Chérif Keïta have observed, Malian musicians have usefully appropriated the hunter identity to negotiate, contest, and reconfigure cultural constraints on musical practice associated with caste and gender (see Durán 2000 and Keïta 2009; I discuss such socioprofessional constraints and possibilities in greater detail in chapter 2). Yet, before an ethical action has been achieved, it remains ambiguous and potentially threatening, occupying an interstitial social space, mapped physically onto the borderlands (dankun), between societal reinvention and ethico-moral breakdown. It is not enough, in other words, to wear the hunters’ garb; one must also hunt.

In urban Africa, these spaces of interstitiality appear to be less and less the transient exception and more and more the intractable rule (Agamben 2004) as spaces of social civility become more circumscribed, more isolated, more tenuous. As Brian Larkin observes of the continent as a whole, “contemporary Africa is marked by the erosion of accepted paths of progress and the recognition of a constant fight against the insecurity of everyday life” (2008, 169). For Bamako residents, the interior of the family compound (dukɛnɛ) and surrounding neighborhood (kinda) are spaces of refuge from the dissociative commotion of the modern city (dugu) (Figure 7). Gathering and socializing (through conversation, tea drinking, domestic labor, and shared meals) in the open-air courtyard of the compound or underneath shade trees outside residences are critical to the psychosocial welfare of individuals who reaffirm moral sentiments of family and community—expressed by the notion of sigiɲɔgɔnya, or “communal togetherness” (literally, “the state or act of sitting together”)—in the socially civil spaces of the neighborhood commons.8 Such convivial spaces and sentiments of civility are contrasted to the bustling central city (dugukɔnɔ) that resembles more and more the wilds of the bush (kungo) where open sewers breed disease, congested traffic threatens lives, and markets bustle with predatory peddlers ready to swindle or “eat” (ka dun) their customers through suspect sales.

In the space of urban African modernity described by Simone and represented by Need One, we encounter, thus, an emergent ethics of urban wildness, what Gauthier de Villers calls l’ethique de l’informel (2002, 27), in which everyday interdictions, breakdowns, shortfalls, and inconsistencies must be intelligently confronted and negotiated; for as the Mande proverb states, “mɔgɔya ye hakili ye” (“Personhood is intelligence”). In Bamako today, intelligence is a matter of “getting by” and “making do” (French, se débrouiller), a tactical mindset for which the proverbial slogan on the street is, “N’a ma ɲagami, a tɛ se ka ɲɛnabɔ” (“If it’s not mixed up, it’ll never work out”). For Michel de Certeau, tactics are “the space of the other,” “a guileful ruse,” and “an art of the weak” playing “on and with a terrain imposed on it” (1988, 37). In this sense, we may situate the cultural morality of Need One’s public praise of place (“Bolibana”) within a broader tactical—which is to say ethical—space of Afropolitan urbanism. Beyond the conviviality, solidarity, and friendship of their hometown is an opportunistic and provisional social and professional terrain that includes circulating tracks online and via Bluetooth connections without concern for copyright infringement (about which more in chapter 5), drawing on networks of neighborhood solidarity to make sure there’s enough food to eat (“Nobody dies of hunger here”), sharing in a common struggle with the psychosocial burdens of endemic poverty (“Egotism and cruelty, we don’t have them here”), and always looking out for opportunities to pursue social mobility, as when a foreign ethnomusicologist stops by and shows interest in your work. “No problem,” they said. “We’ll talk.”

There is, in other words, an in-the-mix ethics that values keeping things in play (opportunistic and provisional) in order to work them out. It is this playful, guileful, and tactical ethics of African urbanism that John Miller Chernoff captures in his ethnographic (auto)biography of a barmaid in Accra, Hustling Is Not Stealing (2003). “Bolibana is getting out!,” Need One insists, affirming the observation that “in spite of the poverty of a city like Bamako, it remains . . . a space of hope” (Diarra, Ballo, and Champaud 2003, 46). As ethical expressions of sociospatial production, this hope of urban betterment (against all odds) cannot be separated from the moral imperative to root oneself in a civil sense of place. “Your home is my home,” the rappers tell us. “My home is your home.” Maintaining this ethico-moral balance serves to mitigate the potential for risk and failure in the wilds of the modern Afropolis. “I swear I’m not worried,” Issa proclaims, speaking from a grounded sense of moral certainty. Yet, despite such assurances, fears of civil dissolution, frequently voiced in terms of a breakdown of traditional social norms, are rampant in Bamako today. Thus, much ethical energy has been devoted to the defense and preservation of civil space in the city. The principle threat to such civility is what I, following Lefebvre, call the “abstract space” of the Afropolitan wilderness.

The Court(Yard)

“My ear to the ground, I heard tomorrow pass by.” It is with these words, the cadence to Aimé Césaire’s surrealist ceremony of terrestrial transcendence, “Les pur-sang” (“The thoroughbreds,” Césaire 1983), that filmmaker Aberrahmane Sissako closes his film Bamako (2006), itself a surreal impression of everyday life in urban Africa. Does the Négritude poet’s verse represent a hopeful sense of renaissance, of an “awakening” born of an earthly (African) potential (see Dayan 1983, 423), or is it a “nostalgia for the future,” a mournful memory of an African modernity that never came to pass (see Piot 2010)? In the film, Sissako does not allow us the privilege of a definitive answer. In a continental city subjected to the (neo)colonialism of “civilizing missions” and “structural adjustments,” from the imperial past to the neoliberal present, Bamako bears witness to the persistence of local entrepreneurship, communal solidarity, and grassroots politics. Yet, the film also confronts its audience with the indignity and misery of privatized redundancies, clandestine migration, preventable illness, and premature death. Such are the irreconcilable (even surreal) ambiguities of a polity embedded in abstraction, of a city in which the boundaries between the civil and the wild are no longer evident.

This, as Sissako represents it, is Bamako, the modern-day capital of Mali and an emblem of urban Africa. The film takes place almost entirely in the domestic space of an open-air courtyard. It is, in Lefebvre’s terms, a “lived space,” composed of “inhabitants and users” (1991, 39) and conceived as an ideal-typical locus of urban African civility. It is also, in reality, Sissako’s childhood home, a fact that engenders an ethos of badenya within this otherwise anonymous mise en scène. Indeed, Sissako’s original title for the film was La Cour, a reference to both the courtyard setting and the fictional court proceeding that takes place within its walls (about which more later). The lived civility of this generic-yet-intimate Bamako courtyard takes many forms: A toddler scurries about the premises (signaled by the chirp of a squeaking shoe), minded by a host of adult kin; a young woman tends to a young man (her husband, brother, or cousin) who suffers from a debilitating disease (AIDS, malaria, Ebola, or another “tropical” [read: “African”] malady); a wedding party enters, fronted by a jelimuso (female griot) who announces the marriage procession with a strident “calling of the horses” (sow wele), a canonical genre of public verbal art that draws attention to civil subjectivities (in this case, a bridal pair). There is also a woman, Saramba, who runs a cloth-dying business inside the compound. Her labor is doubly symbolic in the film. On the one hand, it produces a locally representative palette of color (ochre, indigo, green, and red) that frames civil space in an array of clotheslines and hanging fabric (Maingard 2010). On the other hand, Saramba herself embodies a local African economy that the film presents as an alternative to exogenous economic interests.

In Bamako, we are confronted with these alternatives, side by side. There, in the midst of everyday household activity, a trial is underway, in which international financial institutions (the World Bank and International Monetary Fund) stand accused of systematically underdeveloping Africa and exacerbating the suffering of its people (compare Rodney 1974). The prosecution—African civil society—calls on a series of witnesses who testify to the abjection of life on the frontiers of globalization. There is Madou Keita, who tells of his perilous journey through the Sahara en route to an impossibly distant Europe, Samba Diakité, a dispirited former schoolteacher whose testimony is consumed by a silence that embodies public sector redundancy, and Zegué Bamba, a Senufo farmer whose dramatic lament (which the film does not translate or subtitle) gives voice to what James Ferguson calls “the art and struggle of living” within the “dense bush” of “global modernity” (1999, 251–52). Their stories bear witness to the flourishing of “abstract space” in the Global South. In Lefebvre’s Marxian language, this “neo-capitalist” conception of space, “in thrall to both knowledge and power, leaves only the narrowest leeway to [lived spaces], which are limited to works, images and memories whose content . . . is so far displaced that it barely achieves symbolic force” (1991, 50). Abstract space is the social and material apotheosis of alienation and estrangement. It is the wilderness of a globalized capitalist modernity.

Even as this dramatic theater of moral contrast plays out in the court(yard)—pitting the local, lived, and civil against the global, abstract, and wild—a series of subplots creates as space of ethical intrigue that foregrounds the choices people make to negotiate urban African wildness. At the center of these narratives is Chaka, a solemn middle-aged man whose marriage is falling apart after he was laid off from his job.9 We first encounter Chaka in the film’s opening scene, as he walks alone at dawn through barren city streets, his only company being a group of workers tying bits of wood and metal beams to a scaffolding that rises without any apparent construction attached to it (compare Melly 2010). When not sleeplessly wandering the city or tending to his only child, four-year-old Ina, Chaka spends his time learning modern Hebrew from a slim, worn paperback and accompanying (equally worn) cassettes. As he explains to Falaï, a videographer documenting the ongoing trial, “One day, there will be an [Israeli embassy] in Mali, [and] I will be its security guard.” Falaï responds with bemused laughter, but, seeing the seriousness of Chaka’s claim, apologizes, his laughter unabated. Falaï has found a career niche, entrepreneurial and aesthetic, filming “the dead”; not only are funerals abundant in Bamako these days, the deceased are, as he puts it, “more true” as subjects (“Les morts sont plus vrais”). His work embodies what Achille Mbembe calls the “necropolitics” of globalized governmentality, “in which vast populations are subjected to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of living dead” (2003, 40, emphasis in the original; I return to Mbembe’s concept of the necropolitical in chapter 6). These present-day “wretched of the earth” (Fanon [1963] 2004) become the future subjects of Falaï’s urban videography, a macabre archive of an abstract space Mbembe terms “death-worlds” (see also Piot 2010, 18–19).

Chaka’s wife, Melé, presents another approach to Afropolitan ethics in the abstract. A Senegalese woman from Dakar, Melé has married into the domestic sphere of la cour and thus occupies the precarious social position of an outsider. Among the women, she remains distant and is sometimes looked upon with suspicion and scorn. When Melé calls Beï (a young brother-in-law) to tie her blouses in the morning, she appears to others as a seductive threat, whose beauty indexes potential infidelity. Her position as a domestic interloper is further exacerbated by a swiftly dissolving marriage. Early in the film, she informs her mother on the phone, “I’m coming back to Dakar.” Later, when she tells Chaka of her immanent departure (essentially, a notice of divorce), he says, simply, “But without Ina,” their daughter. She leaves, in other words, as an outsider, a foreigner, without the rights of a mother, without the bonds of badenya (mother-child-ness). Melé also works on the social margins. She is a nightclub singer. While Chaka roams the city streets, Melé entertains into the night, performing Afro-Cuban standards for (mostly) male patrons at Bamako’s Akwaba club. There, she is as much an artist as an escort. The film begins and ends with Chaka walking, Melé singing. In the final scenes, Chaka leaves the family compound to take his life with a gun he stole from a slumbering police officer. Melé cries as she sings the Ghanaian highlife standard “Naam” shedding tears for a life torn asunder by the abstract, the wild.

Earlier, in the midst of this existential descent, a reporter who has been recording the court proceedings summons Chaka for a statement. “Before, you said that ‘the greatest consequence of structural adjustment is the destruction of the social fabric.’ The passage was completely erased. Could you repeat it?” “What happened?” Chaka asks. “With all of these different cassettes, I got confused,” the reporter admits. “I must have recorded over it.” Chaka pauses. “Don’t bother. No one will listen.”

Writing Culture

In our encounters with Need One’s “Bolibana” and Sissako’s Bamako, we have observed two pronounced psychosocial modes of representing (and producing) urban space: conviviality and precarity. Neither mode, as I have noted in both cases, is absolute. There are symbolic traces of the wild (egotism, cruelty, hunger) embedded in Lassy’s and Issa’s neighborhood panegyric, and there are scenes of civility (local entrepreneurship, care for the sick, life-cycle ritual) manifest throughout the disquieting abstraction of the court(yard). Yet, considered generically, the two artistic works do communicate distinctive sentiments: of celebration, on the one hand, and anxiety, on the other. Here, I draw out and focus on the experiential middle ground of sociospatial life in Bamako, emergent at the interstices of the convivial and precarious, the celebratory and anxious, the civil and wild. It is the space of venturing out into the city, the (Afro)polis, “the space of appearance in the widest sense of the word” (Arendt [1958] 1998, 198). It is the space of being present in and perceiving an urban public, the Afropolis of Bamako. It is, in Lefebrvian terms, a “perceived space” of embodied and interpretive spatial practice (1991, 38), a phenomenology of being-in-the-world and with-others within a common urban architecture.10

To be sure, it is an ethical space, in the midst of the city, beyond the bounds of established civility (the family compound), but it is not so starkly immoral as the dystopian cityscape of Bamako would have it. Morality appears in the urban wilds of the city in generic forms of language, of countless spoken greetings, proverbs, prayers, benedictions, and praises exchanged at any given moment among itinerant urbanites, from all walks of life. “K’anw b’u fɔ,” I am told as I walk out the door (“Say we greet them”). “U n’a mɛn,” I respond (“They will hear it”). Such moralizing speech, in all its variety, is itself a part of a broader aural dimension of perceived space in the city, including (among other forms of meaningful resonance) outdoor radio and television broadcast, streetside tea conversation, ambulant Sufi chants, amplified music, and periodic calls to prayer. I examine the ethics and aesthetics of such forms of public aurality (secular and religious, live and mediated) in chapters 3 and 4 of this book. Here, I draw attention to the visual presence of vocal morality, in the form of public iconography (image and text) on walls, and placards, and public transportation. Though principally cultural and religious in content, articulated in terms of Mande and Islamic mores, such writing and related imagery frequently foreground aesthetic, political, economic, diasporic, and more broadly “global” social positions, often in a complex mix of moral signification. Such writing represents, I argue, in the spirit of an Arendtian existentialism, intersubjective “islands of security” in the city though commonly shared idioms that create, when viewed and read, “something which inter-est, which lies between people and therefore can relate and bind them together” (Arendt [1958] 1998, 182; emphasis in the original).

Outside of my compound in Bolibana, on the wall by the entryway facing the street, is the word “KEITALA.” “Keita” is the family name (jamu) of the property’s principal residents. It is a noble (hɔrɔn) name, shared by ancestors of Mali’s greatest king, Sunjata Keita, who founded the Mali Empire in the thirteenth century. The suffix -la is locative. This is the Keita’s home—Keitala—an inscribed statement binding moral sentiments of heritage, intimacy, and place. On the wall of the same compound, facing an adjacent street that leads to the Rue Kassé Keita thoroughfare, is another sign that reads “HARLEM CITY.” Harlem City is the name of a bar and eatery run by Ablo Keita, one of the residents of Keitala who has worked at the bar that adjoins his home since he was a young man (beginning as a dishwasher, then moving up the ranks as a waiter, barkeep and, now, owner; Figure 8). For Ablo, the “Harlem” reference signifies a specific kind of Afropolitanism. “Modibo (aka ‘Franky’) Keita gave it that name in the 1980s,” he explains. “It represents négritude. It symbolizes respect for the black race and African authenticity. . . . It’s a sign of the bar’s African-ness.”11 At Harlem City, the diasporic signifier thickens in a tavern soundscape that includes the latest in Malian popular music, as well as Afropop classics (from the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s) and African American soul (especially James Brown). Juxtaposed with the domestic sign, “Keitala,” “Harlem City” signifies an Afropolitan social space in Bamako, at the intersection of tradition, kinship, and diaspora.

Down the street, at Rue Kassé Keita, I hail a cab, or, rather, several cab drivers hail me, a toubab (white person) whose fare into town usually carries a privileged premium. Written on the side of the taxi is the phrase, “SEUL LE TRAVAIL LIBERE L’HOMME” (“Only work can liberate man”). The (reasonable) fare negotiated, I enter the vehicle with a flurry of greetings. As I told my housemates on my way out the door, “They will hear it,” an expression of what my Bamako friends and Hannah Arendt describe as the humanizing “faculty to make and keep promises” that provides continuity, durability, and a modicum of certainty in public life (Arendt [1958] 1998, 237; see also Skinner 2010, 27–28). “How’s your health?” “No problem.” “Yours?” “Can’t complain.” “Your family’s well?” “They have no troubles.” “And your business?” “It’s getting better, little by little.” I give him a destination. “Bon, let’s go!” We pass by the Babemba Cinema, called out in Need One’s “Bolibana” with a name meaning “the great ancestor” (ba bɛnba). We proceed toward the city center and downtown marketplace where shops bear names of “good meeting” and “positive agreement” (bɛn ka di), “friendship” (teriya), and “personhood” (mɔgɔya). On our way through the older neighborhoods, a fast-food joint praises God (Alhamdulillah) and an auto parts store claims a space of good sociability (ambiance, a French term associated with musical liveness in Bamako, about which more in chapter 2). “I’ll get off here,” I tell the driver. We stop, and I pay him. “K’anw bɛn” (“May we meet again”), he says. “Inshallah” (“God willing”), I say.

Driving through the city, everyday speech and public writing produce a punctuated ethos of morality in “the ocean of uncertainty” that is the Afropolis,12 a wild space of risk, possibility, hope, and anxiety, to which an urban poetics, spoken and written, intermittently responds. Perhaps the most striking presence of such moralizing discourse can be found in and on the city’s public transportation vehicles. The “Sotramas,” as the ubiquitous green vans are called (for the Société des Transports Maliens, the now-defunct organization that regulated them decades ago), embody an uneasy confluence of the civil and wild. As cheap modes of transportation (costing between 25 and 50 cents for a crosstown trip), Sotramas attract a large and varied clientele. Riders are seated on makeshift wooden benches that line the perimeter of the gutted vans, with upward of twenty people packed in during the morning and afternoon commutes. The vehicles themselves are old and worn, kept running day after day through the mechanical ingenuity of their drivers. They break down frequently, and (when traffic allows) they travel much too fast. Accidents are frequent and so too are the injuries. Yet, Sotramas are also intensely social spaces. As the van fills with clients, space is made for the new arrivals; children are seated in laps of perfect strangers (made less “strange” through the antiphony of public greeting); luggage is carried in and distributed to whatever space remains beneath, above, or between the riders. Material wildness is mitigated by social civility.

From the outside, the vans announce themselves through the screeches and groans of their engines, the routes called out by their attendants (“Hamdallaye!” “Magnambougou!” “Faladie!”), and the words and images painted on their frames. Some of the inscriptions are exalting (“GOD IS GREAT”); others are edifying (“PATIENCE IS GOOD”). Some inspire calm (“THE SOFT AND GENTLE ONE”); others inspire hope (“AFRICA UNITED”). Many of the messages are cautionary. “VANITY IS BAD,” reads one. “PEOPLE ARE NOT GOOD,” reads another. One vehicle warns, “WATCH OUT MY FRIEND, THEY ARE CROOKS.” Another announces, ambiguously, “PERSONHOOD TODAY.” (Is it good or bad?) There are also pictures, of a face superimposed on the map of Africa; portraits of prominent preachers, politicians, and cultural heroes; iconic images of global culture; and serene scenes of rural life. Such words and images are often juxtaposed in complex compositions on vehicular surfaces, together with decals and ornaments that produce even more layers of symbolism. On the hood of a van, on either side of a text (in French and Arabic) that gives thanks to God in the year 2011, are two identical stickers of Osama bin Laden, themselves flanked by painted images of American flags and propulsive fire. Above these external signs, lined up on the dashboard, is a collection of cassette tapes, including recordings of Islamic preachers, Malian pop divas, and hunter’s panegyric. Still higher in the interior, suction-cupped to the windscreen, are two miniature Malian flags, above which, draped over the central rearview mirror, is another American flag, framed in decorative lace (Figure 9). With this mix of visual signifiers, the audible metaphor is not so much cacophony as it is polyphony (compare Ferguson 1999, chapter 6). In other words, these multiple moral signs are not, from an ethical standpoint, contradictory, but complementary; they produce a varied civil space to which (most) urbanites can relate and find meaning. “If it isn’t mixed up,” Bamakois say, “it will never work out!”

Such symbolically dense pictorial and textual signs, inscribed on the surfaces of public transportation vehicles, act as media in the sense described by Brian Larkin; they “carry messages (signals)” amid the material “interferences” and “breakdowns” (noise) of public urban space (2008, 10). In Bamako, the signals this iconography produces communicate formulaic expressions of Afropolitan modes of being (cultural, religious, political, economic, diasporic, and so on), rendered as a variable and mixed urban pastiche. In Arendtian terms, these images and texts engender, at intervals paced by traffic, mobile sites of inter-est. They are fragmented moral ephemera through which Bamako residents appear to each other in a common public through shared (though not uncontested) social positions. This artwork represents, in other words, moral points of reference (what Arendt calls “islands of security”) for an always already ambiguous and precarious Afropolitan ethics. Yet, to whom do these moral references point? Who are the Afropolitans interpellated by this urban iconography? And, what does this say about the subjectivity of ethical agency? In the section that follows, I respond to these questions by returning to my encounter with the hip-hop group Need One, examining the (un)ethical and (im)moral subjectivities represented in a music video we produced together in Bamako: an Afropolitan hip-hop parable titled “Sabali” (“Patience”).

Engendering Ethics

Not long after our first meeting, Lassy and Issa approached me with an urgent request: they wanted me to participate in the production of their debut album. This recording project had become a frequent topic of discussion at the neighborhood grin, and I knew that, for them, the stakes were high. These young rappers were trying to establish careers as artists in Mali, but they faced, among many other challenges, a hostile industry in which producers are perceived to be untrustworthy and exploitative. My presence offered new hope, and greater expectations. Famed rapper Djo Dama of the group Tata Pound had told (but not, he insisted, “promised”) Issa and Lassy that he would personally finance the production and promotion of the album, but things were moving slowly, too slowly. With the exception of a single studio recording session, financial and material support was not forthcoming. Issa and Lassy were hard-pressed to release the album before les vacances, the summer months when the urban youth would be watching music programs, attending street parties, and buying cassettes. “We trust you,” they said to me. “You can help us.”

I could not make the argument that I lacked the means or experience to assist. I had far greater access to capital than they did, and, as far as experience goes, in Mali that is always a matter of negotiation, of one’s ability to make do and get by in any given situation. I was experienced if I was willing to play the part, to go with the flow. “Alright,” I said. “I’ll help you.” For the album to have a chance at success, Need One would need a music video for promotion. I had a camera and tapes. Tata Pound agreed to a “featuring,” which meant that Djo Dama and Dixon, two members of the hip-hop trio, would each rap a verse on the track (the third member, Ramses, was in New York City, mining material for a solo album). I also agreed to play my kora on the track, and I paid for the remaining studio time. Then, with recorded track in hand, Need One, Tata Pound, their posses, and I got together over a long weekend to film the clip.

The track begins with Lassy’s flow.13

As Lassy lyrically chastises those “who don’t respect their parents,” calling them “delinquent” and “disrespectful,” a young boy dressed in slacks, a shirt patterned with graffiti tags, and white sandals steps out onto a veranda. He listens to loud music (presumably hip-hop) through earphones. Holding his hands to his ears, he waves his elbows and shuffles his feet. Sitting underneath the grassy overhang is the boy’s father, dressed in a white cap and a long shirt. The old man calls the boy over to run an errand for him. The boy acknowledges his father but continues to listen to his music and dance as the elder speaks. When a coin is presented to the boy, he lets it fall to the ground. The old man raises a reed fan to strike the boy, but the boy runs off, leaving his flustered father behind. Later in the verse, a girl walks out into an open-air family courtyard where her mother sits beside a small wood stove. The girl wears a pink sun visor, pink T-shirt, denim miniskirt, and knee-high black boots. The mother, by contrast, wears a blue headscarf and matching robes. The mother watches silently as her daughter approaches and gestures to her, as if to say, “Can’t stay Mom, gotta go!” The mother puts her hand to her mouth in disbelief as her daughter charges off with a dismissive wave of her hand.

Need One crafted theses scenes under the direction of Tata Pound member Djo Dama. As he explained to me, both sketches are intended to contrast the brazen behavior of the youth with the demanding domesticity of their parents. The boy and girl are dressed in fashionable Western clothes while their parents wear traditional robes and headwear. The father and mother engage in everyday domestic affairs, while the boy and girl antagonistically go their own way. “I said it,” Lassy raps, “you have no shame!” The youths’ actions mirror each other in a farce of intergenerational conflict, with Western pop culture pitted against local mores and traditions. Yet, by invoking the idea of “shamelessness” (malobaliya), Need One implicitly genders their critique of Bamako youth culture, a subjective stance made apparent in the video’s subsequent scenes.

Shame (malo) in Mande society emerges as a response to an individual’s perceived unethical or immoral conduct and represents a psychosocial threat to his or her personhood (mɔgɔya) in society. Thus, an allegedly shameless individual (malobali) is often publicly criticized with the epithets mɔgɔ tɛ (“She/he is not a person”) and mɔgɔya t’a la (“She/he has no personhood”). Perceptions of shame and accusations of shamelessness are strongly tied to gendered and generational subject positions. As Lucy Durán notes, the term malobaliya “is used far more frequently in conjunction with women and children than with men” (1999, 28). This has much to do with the way gendered personhood relates to Mande social hierarchies. Many scholarly works have emphasized the division of Mande society into three discrete social categories: hɔrɔnw (free-born persons), ɲamakalaw (endogamous artisans), and jɔnw (captives and slaves).14 Linking social structure to codes of behavior, Durán, following the work of anthropologist Maria Grosz-Ngaté (1989), succinctly captures the gendering of shame in a patriarchal Mande world, writing:

As Grosz-Ngaté observes, “A sense of shame guides the actions of both women and men and orders relations in all domains of social life” (1989, 179). Yet, this sense of shame, she argues, is differently articulated among men and women. Like slaves (jɔnw), women are conceived as being inherently shameless (malobali) and, thus, childlike. Free-born men, however, embody maturity and dignity and must actively avoid conduct that may be perceived as shameful or demeaning. For men, the consequences of such shameful behavior may include social “death,” resulting in cultural stigmatization and alienation from their community.15 By contrast, women (to paraphrase Durán) are primarily concerned with overcoming their shameless nature by taking on the culture of masculine restraint.

Later in the video, Need One shift their critical commentary from youthful impropriety—shamelessly snubbing and scorning filial duty—to parental negligence. As the rappers contend, the failure to properly punish and resist youthful delinquency reveals the culpability and indignity of community elders who, lacking the respect of their children, do not command respect either. In the following verse, Djo Dama draws explicit attention to this perceived gap between discipline and laxity with a message that strongly condemns urban elders.

As Djo Dama verbally represents the conflict (conceptual and physical) between competing authorities over moral (in)discipline in society, a young man dressed in a colorful knit cap, faded jeans, and a patterned Malian dress shirt calls the young boy (described earlier) to come to him. The young man is the boy’s older brother. As before, the old man is seated with his hand-held reed fan underneath the veranda. When the boy arrives, the young man, gesturing to their father, proceeds to strike his junior for his earlier misbehavior. The old man quickly intervenes to stop the violence and chases off his elder son by threatening to hit him with his fan. The old man then comforts his younger son, apparently forgetting the boy’s prior misdeed. Suddenly, Djo Dama appears in the scene, arms spread, imploring the old man and boy with the proverb, “The horse and his master are not well!”

In this scene, the boy’s shameful act (arrogantly refusing to run his father’s errand) is met with violence, which, while diffused by the old man’s intervention, highlights the anticipated severity of consequences engendered by male shamelessness in Mande society. Djo Dama’s proverbial invocation condemns the elder’s decision to appease rather than punish the child’s impropriety, while at the same time lamenting the ambivalent and degraded social milieu in which the boy’s bad behavior is effectively deemed acceptable. “The horse and his master are not well!” Echoing this lament, and pointing toward a “moral” solution to these gendered and generational rifts, a subsequent scene shows Need One and their posse confronting a girl (the errant daughter described earlier) for insulting her mother and brazenly rejecting her moral duties as a young woman. This scene unfolds during the song’s refrain:

As featured artist Amen Fis sings “Listen to these concerns,” the girl tries to skirt past Need One and their posse. She attempts to dismiss them as she did her mother, gesturing with her hand for them to back off, but they follow her, step for step, singing, “Your parents have spoken,” and chanting, “You must chill out!” In contrast to the violence bestowed on the boy, the verbal scolding the girl receives from the male rappers emphasizes the “masculine restraint” she is expected to show to overcome her shameless “nature” and uphold her feminine morality. “Oh, young woman,” they sing, “you must chill out!”

The refrain introduces a didactic quality to Need One’s critique of the wayward morality of Bamako youth. Their prescription is inherently performative, and, like their critique, strongly gendered. “If a wife has sought the grace of her husband,” Djo Dama raps, “she has no problem. Her children will be blessed.” Playing the part of a hard-working husband, Djo Dama, wearing a dress shirt and slacks, arrives home. His (onscreen) wife, dressed in a full-length robe and matching headscarf, awaits him in the compound, bows down, and takes his briefcase. As he sits, she brings him water with which to wash his hands. His dinner awaits him on the ground at his feet. Through her dress and gesture, the woman embodies the pious obedience of the Mande wife, whose morality is confirmed by her dutiful submission to her husband. As anthropologist Kassim Kone writes, “It is believed among most Mande that when a mother is well behaved, i.e. listens to her husband, respects and treats him well, her children will escape from the problems of life” (Kone 1996, 10). In short, good wives produce good children, and, by extension, good mothers are good women (see Osborn 2011). In the video, Djo Dama’s wife embodies this sense of feminine morality, on which subsequent generations depend to “escape the problems of life” (see also Modic 1996, 185).

As freshman exponents of a global musical genre (hip-hop) that has, since the early 1990s, been considered a source of youthful misconduct and cultural degradation (Schulz 2012), Need One stylistically represents an image of urban youth culture that defies delinquency and actively seeks to reorient itself toward the moral structures of traditional society. In other words, through ethical agency (in this case, mediated hip-hop performance), they seek to represent a revitalized urban morality in Bamako, and among its youth in particular. Throughout the video, the rappers embody a cultural style of vernacular cosmopolitanism (Werbner 2006), alternately wearing sports jerseys and colorful kaftans. Their words, too, lace an informal street language with proverbial speech and esoteric knowledge normally associated with artisanal “masters of the word,” the storytelling (male) bards of jeliya. This hybrid Afropolitan style, embedding an ethical hip-hop stylistics in the moral structures of Mande society, goes for certain women presented in “Sabali” as well, who, in periodic dance sequences, demonstrate a studied proficiency of hip-hop choreography while sporting the long skirts and blouses associated with modest and dignified feminine couture. And yet, the voices of these women are loudly silent, and their dancing bodies, clothed though they may be in tradition, are more often sexualized as curved torsos, twisting hips, and big butts—gestural figures Need One made sure to catch on camera in each one of these scenes. In the end, the ethical scope of Need One’s Afropolitan aesthetics remains narrow, specifically along gendered lines.

The Ethics of Afropolitan Urbanism

In this chapter, I have presented a variety of case studies, elaborated through close listening and thick description, to elucidate the ways in which urban social space is conceived, lived, and perceived in contemporary Bamako. Moving through these texts and contexts—from Need One’s mediated urbanism to Sissako’s filmic mise en espace and the ethnography inscribed on the built spaces of the city—I have observed a pronounced discursive tension, between a popular ideal of civility, centered symbolically on the family compound (du) and its environs, and an increasingly predominant and expansive conception of wildness, conflating notions of the “the city” (dugu) and “the bush” (kungo). I have also noted the highly ambivalent perceptions of morality and ethics this sociospatial tension produces. In the creative works considered here, the domestic sphere becomes an object of celebratory and anxious interest, evoking a morality that is both deeply valued and manifestly tenuous. Across multiple media and genres of expression (in popular music videos, art film, and public writing), one encounters ample praise of the solidarity, tradition, and convivial relations particular to Bamako social life. Yet, in all cases, there is a palpable precariousness, whether implicit or explicit, characterized by forms of opportunistic and provisional agency—the tactics of getting by, making do, and mixing it up—that appear increasingly estranged from extant moralities.

As an everyday encounter with urban estrangement, such practice entails significant existential risk, intensified by the abstract space of gross poverty, political disenfranchisement, underemployment, foreign cultural influence, insalubrity, and a generalized sense of abjection. Such is the dystopian African lifeworld portrayed in Sissako’s Bamako and the deracinated urban youth culture represented in Need One’s “Sabali.” In both the film and video, urban morality appears significantly constrained and threatened. In both, the family compound is the site of intense contestation, argument, and debate. In both, exogenous influences—over domestic politics, local economies, and cultural style—are condemned for the deleterious effects they are having on local social space. And, in both, prescribed solutions posit a revitalization of traditional lifeways, characterized, in both, by a strong sense of custom and tradition. In Bamako, these traditions manifest in acts of socially constitutive ritual and calls to sustain, support, and strengthen communal labor. In “Sabali,” the call is for a patient (though no less urgent) return to established gendered and generational subject positions, particularly among the urban youth. In both, the consequences of failing to heed these calls are dire, including ongoing and persistent exploitation, alienation, and ever-greater anomie.

Elsewhere in the city, from a different existential point of view, we hear the celebratory verses of tracks like “Bolibana,” played loud over speakers in cybercafés and on stereos at street-side hangouts. And, we see the moralizing poetry written on household walls, on the signs of shops and market stalls, and on taxis, trucks, and public transportation. In both cases, the “perceived space” produced by verbal art and popular poetics resists reduction to mere hearing and seeing. In “Bolibana,” the locative poetry of Need One’s lyrics conjures image upon image of neighborhood landmarks, reinforced—not supplemented—by the visual scenes presented in the video. Through the urban iconography, we encounter words and images portraying scenes and evoking ideas that draw upon the moral lexicon of everyday life. These are signs that speak, objects that enable as they inscribe the spoken word. The urban public is, in other words, “a space of appearance” (Arendt [1958] 1998, 198) as much as it is a space of audition. In this way, recorded sound and inscribed speech deepen the moral promise made by countless Bamako urbanities as they leave home, moving between the civil and the wild. “They will hear it,” they say, entering a public space in which their antiphonal greetings coexist with the calls of icons and lyrics coming from the built space of the city itself, to which Bamakois daily respond. If morality is threatened in contemporary Bamako, it remains, nonetheless, vital, variegated, and always vocal.

Here, then, we begin to qualify an Afropolitan ethics in Bamako through the struggles engendered by urban abstraction and the sentiments cultivated through public performance. One encounters the city, thus, as both essentially immoral and potentially moral, as a menace to civility that is simultaneously a wilderness to be cultivated. It is a social space that produces, as it is produced by, a public conflation of celebration and anxiety, possibility and constraint, promise and peril. An ethics of African urbanism appears, as it resounds, through a negotiation of these fields—the civil and the wild—manifest in localized forms of urban African modernity: of hip-hop in a cybercafé, cinema in a compound, and writing on just about every wall. This is an ethics born of being an urbanite, of occupying the social position of a city resident. It is a mode of being that draws on existing moral discourses—of culture and religion, in particular—but engenders a uniquely urban ethics, an existential project of keeping constraints in check and possibilities in play. “If it’s not mixed up,” Bamakois say, “it’ll never work out.”

That such an ethics is characterized as a principally masculine project, as we observed in Need One’s “Sabali,” implies that only some people’s agency may be considered legitimately ethical and, by extension, Afropolitan. Women, in particular, would seem to be altogether excluded from ethical agency in the city, being, as the Mande cultural prejudice would have it, inherently shameless. It is with this question in mind—of who is (and is not) ethical in the Afropolis—that I turn, in the next chapter, to the social position of the urban artist. (I address the question of a feminine ethics in the Bamako art world in chapter 3.) Through ethnographic observation of performance practice and biographical portraits of particular artists, we observe the fluid (and contested) character of the musical profession in postcolonial Mali. As artists move across genres of expression and modes of identification, they produce a more expansive understanding of ethical agency, even as they confront challenges particular to their musical mode of being in the world.