As he masterfully demonstrated in his books (Blues People and Black Music) Amiri Baraka (1934-2014) when he was still called LeRoi Jones, through music one can write the history of an entire people. And Randy Weston (1926-2018) —who always declared that he was an African born in the United States— left written that he was not a musician, but a storyteller told through music. Thus, the fact that the Mozambican-Spanish Tania Safura Adam has titled her almost encyclopedic book Black voicesand not Musics black, underlines the fact that music is in the DNA, it is the DNA of all culture and constitutes a language so universal that despite having particular grammars it does not need words for its immediate receptivity.
Much of the music we hear comes directly or indirectly from the African continent, but beyond that our notions are often quite confused. This book takes us on a fascinating historical, social and spiritual journey through Africa, a vast continent inhabited by multiple communities, each of which produces its own sounds. Sounds that, like those desert tumbleweeds that in some places are very appropriately called “world tumblers”, travel incorporating the traditions they find in their path, as does any human migratory movement.
African musical traditions are essentially linked to religious practices. In the 8th century, the original animism – whose guiding thread runs through the customs of many peoples rooted south of the Sahara – saw the strong emergence of the beliefs and precepts of Islam from the north. From the 19th century onwards, the influence of European colonisers and their corresponding Protestant and Catholic cults arrived. The old and the new, the religious and the popular, the unique and the different, overlapped. It is sung in Igbo or English, Lingala or French, and then, with the arrival of the radio, Cuban, Brazilian, Indian, Arabic and one type of music are regularly heard, as well as one that will become increasingly popular, the black American music of the time of the struggles for civil rights and black pride, coinciding with the decolonisation of Africa during the 1960s. Once independence was achieved, music will protest against governments incapable of resolving the serious disagreements caused by colonialist divisions, which did not even try to respect ethnicities or territories. At the end of the 19th century, the Pan-Africanist movement promoted the political and cultural unity of Africa under a single sovereign state for all, including Africans in the diaspora. This is the spirit that permeates the social cartography displayed in pages that compile conversations with musicians and scholars, as well as countless musical recordings.
The ‘griot’, or storyteller, Fanta Cissokho clarifies to what extent oral tradition is built on deep foundations, refuting the spontaneity that is superficially often attributed to it.
The subtitle of the essay, An oral history of African popular music, presents an apparent contradiction: can something we are reading be considered oral? Precisely a conversation held with the griotor narrator, Fanta Cissokho clarifies to what extent oral tradition is built on deep foundations, refuting the spontaneity that is superficially often attributed to it. No less than a writer or an intellectual, a griot It is shaped slowly, based on cultivating various areas of knowledge.
The book’s sections help to organize—and make digestible—a topic as porous and ramified as the past of cultures, the work of successive migrations that form, inform and reform a plurality of voices. And at the end of each chapter, an important source of delight and study: a QR code that allows you to listen to each and every one of the songs and music we have just researched on Spotify.
“Even if you go hunting elephants, pick up the snail you find on the way,” says a Mbedé proverb. Tania Safura Adam seems to have had this in mind when writing this book.
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