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Sensing the sonic and mnemonic: digging through grooves, Afro-feelings and Black markets in Ghana, 1966-present

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Sensing the sonic and mnemonic: digging through grooves, Afro-feelings and Black markets in Ghana, 1966-present

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Content SENSING THE SONIC AND MNEMONIC: DIGGING THROUGH GROOVES, AFRO-FEELINGS AND BLACK MARKETS IN GHANA, 1966-PRESENT by Sionne Rameah Neely A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (AMERICAN STUDIES AND ETHNICITY) August 2010 Copyright 2010 Sionne Rameah Neely ii For my grandmother and aunt, Queenie Mae Tillett (1914-2000) & Maggie Mae Tillett (1940-2010) iii Acknowledgements After completing such a mammoth endeavor, acknowledgements are just not enough; I have a testimony. In fact, a more appropriate heading for this section would be “How I Got Over.” Rev. W. Herbert Brewster composed this gospel hymn for singer Clara Ward in 1951. However, Mahalia Jackson’s 1961 revamp departs from the original song in a spirit of soulful connection and creative improvisation that takes over her body and voice. She exclaims, How I got over/ How did I make it over?/You know my soul looks back and wonders/ How did I make it over?/ How I made it over/ How did we make it over, Lord?/I been falling and rising all these years/ I had to cry in the midnight hour coming on over/ But you know my soul looks back and wonders/ How did I make it over?/ I feel like shouting!/ I feel like shouting! Jackson’s version vacillates between a declaration of triumph to surprising wonder to abundant praise for God’s mercy in overcoming trial and tribulation. Her remake is unique because the chorus shifts from a statement to a question, “How I got over” becomes “How did I make it over?” and then “How did we make it over?” Here, the singer revels in the mystery of the Holy Spirit to transform her material conditions. The “I” is stretched to “we” as a realization that such a journey is not taken alone but through the loving sacrifices of others. This dissertation is a testament to “getting over” as I have battled multiple illnesses while writing. Indeed, I could not have completed this work without my “we.” In this spirit, my dissertation is a communal effort. I am able to write about the magic of Black music and international kinship because I have experienced the unselfish generosity of so many. I am indebted to my iv department, American Studies & Ethnicity, for demonstrating a deep commitment to rigorous scholarship and kind collaboration. To my rockstar cohort—Imani Kai Johnson, Micaela Smith, Jesús Hernández, Nisha Kunte, Perla Guerrero, Araceli Esparza, Carolyn Dunn, Anton Smith and Jungmiwha Bullock—I am thankful for your company over these seven years—especially the grueling study sessions, dance floor takeovers at Carbon, awesome birthday celebrations, and most of all, the hugs, kisses, and enduring support through the highs and lows of grad school. I also extend gratitude to other ASE folks, particularly, Laura Fugikawa, Emily Hobson, Wendy Cheng, Tasneem Siddiqui, Anjali Nath, Cam Vu, Sharon Luk, Anthony Rodriguez and Gretel Vera Rosas for their loving friendship. I thank my graduate student mentors, Jennifer Stoever- Ackerman and Nicole Hodges Persley for sound guidance and charitable support. A special thanks to Mrs. Sandra Hopwood for honoring the promise she made to my mother to take care of me like her own daughter. I love you dearly. To JuJuana Preston, thank you for the hugs and encouragement when I became anxious about paperwork and deadlines. Thanks also to Kitty Lai for an unwavering commitment to providing the administration needs of ASE’s students. I am most grateful to my committee for their brilliant scholarship, fostering spirit, and diligent nurturing of my work. Thanks to Ruth Wilson Gilmore for insisting on precision when writing and generosity when reading critically; to Fred Moten for demonstrating out-of-the-box thinking by always providing a remarkably fresh approach to historical problems; to Dorinne Kondo for your careful edits, considerable attention and sincere excitement for my project since the very beginning; to Taj Robeson Frazier for your advocacy of my v work and willingness to share your time and energy towards its completion; and finally, to my advisor, Curtis Marez, for a persistent faith in my ability to write even when I was uncertain, unmotivated, or just plain scared. I also would like to thank Macarena Gomez-Barris, Jane Iwamura, Lanita Jacobs-Huey and Clyde Woods, for their mentorship and cheerful support for my writing. Thanks also to Josh Kun for modeling how to write inside sound. I am deeply grateful to my sister, classmate and former roommate— Michelle Denise Commander—for the random tomfoolery (AyiBOBO!); dissertation dance breaks; 7-Eleven, Starbucks and donut shop runs; last-minute getaway trips; and YouTube video sessions over this past year. Thank you for being my ace-boon-coon from L.A. to Ghana and back again. I appreciate your compassionate friendship, silliness, and brilliance. Thanks also to Perla for her wonderful company—in coffee shop writing, Inglewood marathon writing sessions, and over yummy food and a movie. Friend, I will miss you next year! Blessings to my sister Terrion Williamson for her unconditional kindness, care and concern for my spirit, mind and body. To my erudite comrades—Ricardo A. Wilson, Jr., Uri McMillan, Cassandra Lord, Matiangai Sirleaf, Natasha Himmelman and Connie Rapoo—I thank you for the loving attention to my work and health. To my ride or die sister friends—my support system who cheers me up when I am down; lovingly encourages me to be better; celebrates my joys with shouts of their own; and with tender sympathy, prays with me through hard times—Angel Monique Nash, Erin Monét Cooper, Candice Turner, Mary Antoine, Fiona Riviere, and Kimberly Walker—words cannot express how much you mean to me. I love you! Thank you also to Gina and Yanira Ramirez, my former Pico-Union neighbors, for their vi love and encouragement for my wellbeing. Yanni, I am so proud of the young woman you have become. To my wonderful family, I say thank you—The Tilletts in Elizabeth City, North Carolina; Donna Faye & Carlton Drew; my beloved aunties—Kathy, Teenie and Pat; and cousins Eric Curtright, Jerry, Ari and Elyceia Dortch. I also thank cousin Arthur Curtright and Sandra--though it might take me two months to return a phone call, your door was always open when I needed a retreat from L.A. To my godparents, Venson and Brenda Davis, thank you for the unwavering support and encouragement over these many years. Much appreciation to Aunt Judy and Uncle Vaughan, and Eric, Melissa, L.B. and London Hopkins for their love. Many thanks to my West Coast parents, José and Sandra Smith, for their considerate and loving thoughtfulness, to my family and I, throughout graduate school. To mon soeur, Mica, you are my bright light in a dark tunnel. I am ever amazed by your spiritual fortitude and sagacity. I know you are taking S.A. by storm! To my Ebenezer Baptist Church family in Richmond, Virginia, I am grateful for the splendid homecomings I receive with each visit, and the sincere hugs, kisses, prayers and well wishes. My eternal gratitude to Deacons Andrew Green, Shirley Beale, Lillian Carter, and Sandra Reed; Pastor Levy and Aretha Armwood; my big sisters, Sanita Walker-Resper, Kim Lacy, Dr. Karen Lacy, Andrea Crump, and Reverend Qasarah Bey; Ethel Odell; Samuel and Juanita Walker; Ron and Leslie Lewis; LeVonne Johnson, Sr.; Reverend Brenda Summerset; Dr. Mabel Wells; Cassandra Calendar-Ray and Maya Ray. Thank you also to Reverend Ellen Blount and the Good Shepherd Baptist Church Senior vii Bible Study class for showering me with cards, phone calls and prayers during my illness. I am forever grateful to Elizabeth and Sabrina Bawuah for extending their home and family to me when I began research in Ghana. Without their hospitality, this project would have been quite different. I am blessed to count as friend and sister, Dedo Azu, who with a bright smile and open arms welcomed me into her home in Accra. Shout-out to the whole Azu family! I thank Moms Aryeequaye for also opening her home to me—for the big hugs, laughs, cooking lessons and market runs—I love you! My sincerest appreciation to the amazingly talented musicians in Ghana who granted me time to discuss and record their music and life experiences, particularly Bibie Brew, Gyedu Blay Ambolley, Jazzi, GQ George, The African Showboyz, Kwau Kese, Scizo, and Reggie Rockstone. I extend thanks to my younger brother, Joshua Blake Neely and sister-in- law, Renay Patterson Neely, for their camaraderie. I am so fortunate to not only know you but to have you as constants in my life. You inspire me to be better, to work harder, to give more—these are the things I witness you doing each day for your family. To my beautimous nephews, Matthew Morgan Monroe and Jasiah Christopher Neely, “Auntie Si” is so proud of how you are growing every day. I cannot wait to see how you will, one day, take on the world and win. With great humility, I acknowledge my amazing parents—Reverend James and Geraldine Neely—for continually encouraging me to fly while giving me the space to soar. You are, truly, the DOPEST people on the planet. You have loved me past fault and beyond condition. This is the very foundation of your being—loving, patient, compassionate and enduring sacrifice. I am so very blessed to call you parents and friends. Finally, to my beloved Nii, this dissertation is as much yours viii as mine. Thank you for your careful attention to this project, for a constructive criticism towards filling in gaps and holes, for producing new questions for me to consider, for sustaining me with a well of confidence that springs eternal. Even when I could not see it, you believed in my capacity to write well. Your enchanting spirit (or ghost?) fills each page. You are the spaces binding each word to the next, here and always. ix Table of Contents Dedication ii Acknowledgements iii Abstract x Introduction: Are You Here? 1 Chapter One: Do the Hustle? Black Market Politics, 40 1966-Present Chapter Two: I Know You Got Soul! Pan-African Possibilities, 102 State Shock and Musical Moxie Chapter Three: “You Really Got a Hold on Me”: Tracing the Grooves 155 Of History, Memory and Performance in the Slave Dungeons Chapter Four: “Listening to Another’s Wound”: The Kologo 196 And Auto-Tune as Black Sound Technologies Coda: Slip of the Tongue—The Politics of “Ecomini” 247 Bibliography 258 x Abstract This study considers how the burgeoning popular music industry of Ghana becomes particularly vulnerable after Kwame Nkrumah's administration is deposed in 1966. Situated in the breach between the succeeding military regimes’ occlusion of western businesses and tourists and the post-Rawlings civil governments’ appeal to transnational financiers to invest in “modern” nation building, this project interrogates how Ghanaian musicians acquire pursuits of happiness outside the state, particularly in encounters with African American tourists for widespread distribution of music, tour bookings and access to sophisticated sound technologies. Throughout these political shifts, the lives and work of highlife and hiplife artists remain fraught with unstable wages, payola to radio DJs and conflicts with the Copyright Office over music piracy. Alliances between African American tourists and Ghanaian musicians are persistently negotiated through the transfer of a desirable “home”—in Ghana through a reclamation of racial and cultural identity in heritage performance events, sites and objects and in the U.S. and U.K. with sustainable wages through entry in the international music market. From 2009-2010, I conducted over seven months of field research including more than 70 audio- and video-taped interviews with musicians, music producers, radio and television deejays, music union representatives, tour operators and government officials. I consider how the compelling and elusive quality of Black sound and music performance is imprinted with the peculiar and enduring mechanisms of slavery and colonization, dispossession and disfranchisement, myth and mayhem. I interweave the concepts of grooves, xi Afro-feelings and Black markets through the wounded natal condition of African diasporic being and the spectacular production of music in the capture/the captives/the captivating: 1) capture, a persistent historical force that dispossesses Black subjects by turning them into 2) captives, confined or restrained persons, enslaved by another against their will and the 3) captivating, how the enchanting and compelling properties of Black music and racial kinship have been used to resist and reinterpret such repressive agencies while remarkably sustaining life in the midst of it all. 1 Introduction: Are You Here? From the beginning, this project has been haunted. Ghosts have popped up intermittently, and loudly, throughout my research and directed me to seemingly unconnected events—market exchanges, slave castle tours, digital sound technologies and soul music. At times while writing, my fingers, as if disconnected from my body, type in a flurry of words coming from somewhere outside of my consciousness. I never glimpse these specters but I hear their shadows on walls and across floors. I feel their coarse whispers brush my skin. Their shocking sighs sit in my hair. I’m enamored with the silence of empty rooms weighted down by sharp corners and deep folds. Their haunting presence is made audible through a vibrating invisibility. It is happening now…and now…and now. Ghosts take shape through burdening processes that split life and death into remarkable relief. These hauntings are the bending of time and space through compression and elasticity—a delicate interweaving of past, present and future events into what Saul Williams terms “an ever-present now” or Nathaniel Mackey calls “an insistent previousness evading each and every natal occasion.” 1 This study unfolds within the enigma of such spectral forces. My dissertation considers how the compelling and elusive quality of Black sound and music performance is imprinted with the peculiar and enduring mechanisms of slavery and colonization, dispossession and disfranchisement, myth and mayhem. Sensing the Sonic and Mnemonic: Digging Through Grooves, Black Markets and Afro-Feelings in Ghana, 1966-Present examines the imbrication of racial and 1 See Saul Williams, "Sha-Clack-Clack," Slam Soundtrack, by Saul Williams, Epic Records, 1998 and Nathaniel Mackey, Bedouin Hornbook (Los Angeles: Sun and Moon Press, 1997): 42. 2 historical memory in the creative labor of Black Ghanaian musicians and how acoustic remembrances act as directives for individual and collective futures. Futurity is also determined through encounters between these musicians and African American travelers to Ghana in exchanges of cultural crafts and performances for money; different racial perspectives on colonial and postcolonial history, politics, and social reciprocity; and the transfer of international desire and suffering in the utopic possibility of somewhere else, where Ghanaian musicians can experience greater mobility, sustainable wages and creative autonomy for their work in the west and African Americans can develop an intense connection to a racial and cultural “home” in Ghana. Are You Here? (Refrain) While writing, I have been reminded of Corinne Bailey Rae’s title track, “Are You Here?,” from her album, The Sea, released in January 2010. The song is dedicated to Rae’s late husband, who died two years ago from a drug overdose. In the song, her voice wilts and blooms. It is a wispy yet robust echo that reverberates through the eardrums like bright shards of stained glass on the verge of breaking. Singing from within the cracks of vulnerability, Rae calls out, Are you here?/Are you here?/Are you here?/Cause my heart recalls that it/All seems like/All looks like/ It all feels like/It tastes like/It's hard to recall the taste of summer/When everywhere around, the chill of winter/It gets so far away/When he comes to lay me down in a garden of tuberoses/ When he comes around there's nothing more to imagine/Just tuberoses. 2 2 Corinne Bailey Rae, "Are You Here?" The Sea, by Corinne Bailey Rae, EMI Records, 2010. 3 Rae is on the precipice between enthralling loss and ecstasy as the reality of a world without her husband gives over, in sweet relief, to the memories of their love. She plods through astounding heartbreak with a sensual remembering of her lost love’s presence—the sight of him, his smell, taste and touch, which has taken up residence in her body. Not sure if her senses are betraying her, she chants and begs to his ghost for a more tangible response, “Are you here? Are you here?” For Rae, the erasure of the body through death has not diminished the feelings her husband generated through life. The memory becomes a living archive—and relation—to recall his presence, a presence that endures through her senses and offers the possibility of continued contact, only now through alternative, and metaphysical, means. Similarly, Sensing the Sonic and Mnemonic lives in the space between the ghostly and ghastly where the imprint of slavery and colonization on postcolonial, racial and historical memory also creates opportunities for Ghanaian musicians and African American tourists to develop new discourses, collaborative performances, financial security, travel, and alternative pursuits to happiness. As Nathaniel Mackey notes, music is a phantom limb that repeatedly signals the traumatic wound. Music is also a tool of radical hope in understanding the conditions that produce loss and its aftermath. 3 The primacy of aurality in Black cultural practices can offer new inroads into the body’s epistemology. Music, as a phantom limb, is a channel for understanding the importance of sight, smell, taste and touch and their interdependence as racial and mnemonic devices. 3 See Mackey: 7. 4 Initially, this project interrogated how U.S. hip hop has critically shifted Ghanaian youth identities in productive and harmful manners that pump up the volume of struggles over citizenship with the nation-state while also disrupting local cultures through the brute force of imperialism. Like the record scratch, beat sampling and chorus lifting in hip hop music, western imperialism has appropriated the laboring bodies, mineral resources and cultural practices of Ghanaians since, at least, the early fifteenth century. 4 The breach between West Africans and African diasporic peoples—like the break looped continuously in hip hop music—makes all “strangers.” Such fractures were instituted with the transatlantic slave trade, and again with segregation, apartheid, colonialism, the U.S. war on drugs, ethnic strife, disease and famine, and overwhelming debt loans. 5 The breach binds strangers together even as it strips them apart. It is multi-sited, continuous, and contains an infinite number of cuts, rips, tears, fissures, lacerations, and splits. As some are sutured, others break open. These ruptures are not always moments of crisis and dispossession but also the possibility for affirmation, renewal and other routes to happiness not available through existing trajectories. As Alexander Weheliye muses, “The vexed intersections of sound, technology, and black subjectivity…render futurity audible.” 6 Similarly, I argue that with deep structures of listening, the ear and 4 See Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1982). 5 See Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), for an examination of the progeny of slaves as strangers and Josh Kun, Audiotopia: Music, Race, and America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005) who examines music consumption as an encounter between strangers (listeners and performers) through sounds. 6 Alexander G. Weheliye, Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005): 11-12. 5 body operate as a sound chamber. The body is porous, with open circuits that allow different kinds of listening through channels between individual, communal and institutional bodies. I consider how Black music resists the gaps in western discourses of modernity, where Ralph Ellison writes of Black peoples constituting an excess “outside of the groove of history.” 7 Black sonority also composes rupture as an epistemological rhythm for alternative amplifications of social life. This led me to consider how African Americans visit Ghana, primarily through heritage tours of the slave forts and other sites their ancestors possibly traveled before boarding ships for the Americas. 8 In many ways, these visitations, or rewinding of the record to carefully trace its grooves, is a remixing of historical time as the progeny of the enslaved attempt to insert their bodies within the annals of the past. The Slave River is where the needle digs most in the groove. This is where the enslaved were made to perform a cleansing of their former lives, by walking through the water, which “transformed” them into saleable property. Here is where the captive body was born. I extend Ralph Ellison and Alexander Weheliye’s sonic conceptions on the groove of modern history by considering how the channels of capture (from the village, slave dungeon, and trading ship to the plantation) are replayed and circulated through the channels of the body as many African American tourists to the castle cells 7 See Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (New York: Vintage Books, 1990). 8 See Hortense J. Spillers, "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book," Diacritics 17.2 (1987): 65-81; Edward Bruner, "Tourism in Ghana: The Representation of Slavery and the Return of the Black Diaspora," American Anthropologist 98.2 (1996): 290-304; Jennifer Hasty, "Rites of Passage, Routes of Redemption: Emancipation Tourism and the Wealth of Culture," Africa Today 49.3 (2002): 47-76; Anne C. Bailey, African Voices of the Atlantic Slave Trade: Beyond the Silence and the Shame (Boston: Beacon Press, 2005); Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007). 6 remark of hearing screams and groans, tasting blood, smelling feces and urine and seeing thick shadows. Such sensual devices jog the memory and provide an ontological code for grappling with modernity’s counterpart—racial dispossession—and its extent in their own lives. Hence, the primary contact zone for African American tourists and Ghanaians is through the marketplace—of historical memory (slave castles), cultural rituals (naming ceremonies, libation rituals, drum and dance events) and craft shops. When I interviewed more than forty highlife and hiplife artists during summer 2009, I began to muse on the ways young Ghanaians, musicians and non-musicians, participate in material barters and trades, particularly in craft markets with African American tourists. Markets, no matter where they are located, are often a site of struggle between buyers and sellers, where easy collaboration and permanent contention are not viable options. These marketplaces range in size, location, goods and services. In material exchanges— paintings, masks, sculptures, jewelry and cloth are swapped for baggy jeans, fitted baseball caps, jewelry, sneakers, magazines and music. This in turn highlights particular ideas about dispersed racial geographies and what it means to be African American (read rich and urban) and Black Ghanaian (read poor and rural). Marketplaces are the nucleus of Ghanaian metropolises and rural towns where daily transactions circulate around tourist crafts, laundry soap, spices, fish, flip flops, batteries, beads, hair weaves, tupperware, CDs and DVDs. Markets constitute the meeting point for exchanges between Ghanaians, Ghanaians and other African nationals, and Ghanaians and western visitors. Marketplaces comprise fascinating scales of intertwined activity between buyers 7 and sellers over material commodities for money but necessarily also concern the exchange of ideas about one another in intersecting cultural perspectives, needs, desires, expectations, promises, and disappointments. I interrogate how Ghanaian cultural experiences are sold to diasporic tourists in the form of heritage tours, folk ceremonies, and the teaching of proper social etiquette by examining the marketplace as not just a site of economic or political exchange but as a constellation of cultural networks. Sensing the Sonic and Mnemonic explores how the marketplace sounds out diverse Black social experiences in overlapping, frenzied, conflicting and collaborative meetings, particularly among market sellers, musicians and African American tourists, where interpretations of African history and Ghana’s future, social and economic accountability, and proper cultural etiquette, bubble to the surface. During 2009, I became a videographer for Bless The Mic, a weekly open mic event in the touristy Osu District where local rappers, singers and spoken word artists perform for an eclectic audience of African American, white American and white European tourists; Ghanaian professionals; working class youth; diasporic Ghanaians from North America and Europe visiting family on holiday; and primarily male underground artists. This allowed me to think through the fusion of music being produced by young local musicians—hip hop, hiplife, roots reggae, dancehall, R&B, and AfroBeat—and how they were using sonic performance to address globally incorporated, locally situated subjectivities out loud for an ethnically, racially and geographically diverse audience. I interviewed artists who would discuss at length a common conundrum—how to reach the western music market as a means of acquiring a viable professional wage and greater mobility like that experienced by tourists to Ghana. 8 With each listening to the music and experiences of Ghanaians, I am presented with different perspectives on how history matters, how racial memory is preserved, and how cultural expectations can cause conflict and collaboration between Black peoples. However, as Ghana presents possibilities of new life for me as a privileged U.S. citizen completing research, I am aware that for many Ghanaians, particularly musicians, the nation-state represents restricted mobility, wahala and repression. 9 I contemplate how the seemingly disparate practices of the marketplace, the current state of the music industry and the heritage tours of Elmina and Cape Coast Castles, together comprise an interlaced, sometimes conflicting soundtrack of West African sociality. The castles once operated as former markets of Black flesh. The tourist marketplaces, some situated in the castles, now sell culturally significant objects to diasporic tourists, which amplify their racial identity as more “real” upon returning home. Many young musicians are involved in these tourist marketplaces as drum and dance instructors, art traders or unofficial tour guides to researchers, students, or African American civic groups. Music artists then use these encounters to sell their music inter-continentally, secure sponsorship for music promotion or performance tours, or investment in album and music video production. Finally, Sensing the Sonic and Mnemonic: Digging Through Grooves, Afro- Feelings, and Black Market in Ghana, 1966-Present examines the relationship among grooves, Afro-feelings, Black markets and noise in reverse—as a way to discuss the nonlinearity of history and how memory rewinds to unconsecutive events that can drum up stunning loss and ecstatic pleasure. I link the wounded natal 9 Wahala is a Nigerian pidgin term for “pressure or drama.” This word has migrated into the everyday conversations of Ghanaians. 9 condition of African diasporic being to the spectacular production of music in the capture/the captives/the captivating: 1) capture, a persistent historical force that dispossesses Black subjects by turning them into 2) captives, confined or restrained persons, enslaved by another against their will and the 3) captivating, the enchanting and compelling properties of Black music and racial kinship that have been used to resist and reinterpret such repressive agencies while remarkably sustaining life in the midst of it all. This interdisciplinary project intervenes in American Studies, African and African American Studies, Cultural Studies, Media Studies, Sensory Studies and Anthropology by examining new connections among race, music, markets, internationalism and historical memory as intertwined processes that provide maps of possibility, engagement and enactment for dispersed Black peoples. What follows are: 1) explications of the key terms animating this study; 2) brief histories of Ghana’s popular music industries of highlife and hiplife; 3) a detailing of my archives and methodologies; 4) chapter summaries. Black Markets & Noise I examine the formation of black markets as historical effects of unruly and uneven global capitalist production. I interrogate the Black market in two ways: 1) market practices between Black Ghanaians and tourists of African descent over the exchange of racially and culturally significant objects and ideas, and 2) market practices that are informal, extralegal and unstable. Black markets are generally defined as illegal. These nomadic formations are always under the threat of danger and are composed of fragile associations. Black markets, 10 through a lack of regulation, are congealed global economies. 10 As a threat to official discourse, Black markets are often represented as immoral, untrustworthy, and illicit through the production and reproduction of commodities not regulated by governmental agencies. However, Black markets also afford protection against the excesses of the colonial and postcolonial state by providing the unmet needs and desires of its participants. Black markets extend the discourse on Reparations by repatriating labor power to the continent through the use of technologies in cyberfraud scams and digital piracy. You hear the rush of feet as hands grab you in different directions, “Please, sister, have a look at my shop!” Tourists equal big money and for market sellers, this competition for foreign dough can easily turn into shouting matches about somebody’s mama. Other market sellers chew the fat with one another, in jolly banter, laughter, gossip or political discussions about corrupt state leaders. On the far left side of Arts Centre, the main crafts market for tourists, young men play a vigorous game of football as the Atlantic Ocean, just beyond the market, roars against the thick, black rocks. At the front left of Arts Centre, a sleepy restaurant’s speakers are tuned into a local radio station playing U.S. hip hop and R&B music. Rastafarian market sellers line the benches or are propped against shop walls, intermittently watching the football game as they pass the day in casual conversation. A couple in the group beat djembe drums out of boredom or to draw the attention of backpackers who might want lessons. The 10 See also Linda J. Seligmann, “Between Worlds of Exchange: Ethnicity Among Peruvian Market Women,” Cultural Anthropology 8.2 (1993): 187-213; Diane M. Nelson, “Maya Hackers and the Cyberspatialized Nation-State: Modernity, Ethnostalgia, and a Lizard Queen in Guatemala,” Cultural Anthropology 11.3 (1996): 287-308; James Ferguson, Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006) and Jonathan Xavier Inda and Renato Rosaldo, eds., The Anthropology of Globalization: A Reader (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2008). 11 Rastafarian-run Akuma Village, which includes a juice bar, bookstore, restaurant and lodging for westerners, produces its own set of distinct noises that both conflict and support Arts Centre, partly because of a rigorous self-discipline, religiosity and pan-African ideology. The market is not only a physical site that customers visit—like the densely packed three-story structures of Kaneshie Market in Dansoman or Makola Market in downtown Accra—but is also an embodied practice where commodities are attached like appendages to the human body, as market women and young girls sell bags of water, yogurt snacks, plantain chips and oranges in large basins atop their heads. Centuries later, the market still adheres to Black bodies, where labor power is made spectacular as an extension of the skin. The mobile market women are stationed along major roads and dodge in between traffic selling their wares. Along these vehicle-clogged streets are young men who sell phone credit, children’s books, rabbits and puppies, shower cloths, chewing gum and flashlights, among other things. This gendered division of labor is sounded out—in distinct, slow high- pitched calls by the women and rapid baritone chants by the men—for potential customers to try their products over their competitors. These soundings are interrupted by the social life of the market, which is everywhere, persistent and always on the move. The market travels through the air, in the loud honking of taxis looking for pick-ups, riders hissing for cab stops, horns blaring by speeding tro-tros (public bus transportation) to assess who needs a ride, between tro-tro drivers as they talk shit—playfully and seriously—to one another and car drivers who interfere with their route, the quick opening of the Winnebago door for customers or its slamming shut when all have boarded or departed, the clanking 12 of coins by the mate—the driver’s sidekick—to alert customers it is time to pay up, and the sucking of teeth in spats between riders, mates, drivers and other clients over money owed, seating availability, and windows open too much or not enough. Black markets are composed of noise—multiple simultaneous and overlapping structures of sound—that emphasize normative and alternative conceptions of dispersed African sociality. The word “noise” comes from the Latin word “nausea,” meaning seasickness, where a sensation of unease and discomfort overwhelms the body and can produce vomit, a bodily excess. 11 Noise is generally defined as undesirable, meaningless and offensive just like Black markets and those who fill them. These polluted sounds are intensely regulated by the state, which differs from the industrial noise of state-sponsored development projects that possibly have more damaging health effects to land, resources and people. Scholars such as Jacques Attali and Tricia Rose argue that noise disrupts and agitates hegemonic structures that shape uneven material conditions of existence. 12 For Attali, music represents the site where new orders can be established, new theoretical forms can speak to new realities—music is a mystical and enigmatic property that has social purchase with the capacity to transform power relations. Music constitutes forms of knowledge where power 11 See Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1938); George Bataille, The Bataille Reader, Fred Botting and Scott Wilson, eds., (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd., 1997); Hillel Schwartz, "The Indefensible Ear," Michael Bull and Les Back, The Auditory Culture Reader (Oxford: Berg, 2004); Luigi Russolo, "The Art of Noises: Futurist Manifesto," Christopher Cox and Daniel Warner, eds., Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music (New York: Continuum, 2004); John Cage, "The The Future of Music: Credo," Christopher Cox and Daniel Warner, Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music (New York: Continuum, 2004); and Michael Taussig, What Color is the Sacred?(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). 12 See Tricia Rose, Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1994); Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003). 13 differentials can be reconfigured, imaginatively and physically. For Rose, noise is a racial and class practice in music production and consumption that provides stability for young African Americans and Latino Americans against the shock of urban poverty and state repression. Noise can be read in the collapse of a functioning music industry with the presidential coup of Kwame Nkrumah’s administration in 1966 and a succession of military regimes that have abandoned the development of national culture, leaving young artists to alone confront payola to radio DJS and television networks and exploitative arrangements with managers, producers, and venue promoters. Artists also contend with music unions and copyright agencies over the protection of their work against street and digital piracy and the collection of royalty payments. Because of this, the western market is perceived by many performers as a way to revive Ghana’s music as it was during the heyday of highlife from the 1920s through the early 1960s, to secure international and domestic recognition for their sonic craft, and to experience greater consumer power, travel and artistic creativity through collaborations with inter- and intra- continental musicians. These musicians indicate what Arjun Appadurai calls imagination at work, by demonstrating how creativity provides alternative forms of labor than those made available by the state. 13 The imaginative labor of young Ghanaian musicians takes the shape of the “hustle,” where innovative connections are made with tourists to access greater financial resources not afforded through the state. Here, imagination is something more than an individual faculty used to escape reality but is, rather, a participatory tool that 13 See Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). 14 can be used to transform social reality and to produce multiple perspectives of possibility. Grooves Packed in tightly like human cargo, the tro-tros miss cars, other tro-tros and street vendors, persistently dodging between life and death as everyone tries to make their daily bread. As a passenger, I struggle for more oxygen, my long legs go stiff from the lack of room, and my nostrils take in the mix of human aromas as dust and sweat cover my face. My bum becomes raw with each speed bump carelessly raced over. I am reminded of Black bodies cruelly crammed on ships, stacked one on top of the other, shackles coated in urine, feces and vomit linking limb to limb. Because of unimaginably tragic conditions on these ships, identities based on language, custom, age and gender were rendered indecipherable and irrelevant. While the social arrangements of the tro-tros aren’t anywhere near as volatile as ships coursing the Middle Passage, I can’t help but make the comparison. Perhaps some things take on enduring forms. 14 With the concept of grooves, I bridge Saidiya Hartman’s work on racial and historical memory and redress with Brent Hayes Edwards and Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s work on the friction of international engagements. 15 I refer to a different notion of roots and routes in grooves—any space where sounds are primary and require a particularly sound relation between vibrations, memory, 14 It is fascinating how the history of underdevelopment transposes onto the Middle Passage, point made in conversation with Dr. Dorinne Kondo. 15 See Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003); and Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005). 15 place and the body. 16 Grooves can be fluid and smooth or unsettling and awkward. As Anna Tsing details, “Zones of awkward engagement [are] where words mean something different across a divide even as people agree to speak.” 17 These zones, or grooves, refer to historical tracings of racial and cultural genealogies and alternative psychic and social spaces where utopian possibilities are sought out, where being “in a groove” reflects an alternative condition. Grooves operate as a grammar of unsettledness, of untoward and complicated relations of rootlessness. Grooves are always on the move because the home is in constant upheaval. As Louise Meintjes writes about creating a Zulu groove in a South African recording studio, “Different modes of mediation overlap, interpenetrate, and comment on one another in the production process.” 18 Here, tensions, or grooves, play out during the recording process where local identity is made a state production and then continentally and inter-continentally distributed. However, the studio is not a controlled atmosphere but full of antagonisms. Similarly, interactions between dispersed Black peoples are unpredictable and can be affirming, frustrating, hopeful, and terrible. The multiple exchanges between Black Ghanaian artists and diasporic tourists suggest a complex presence of specters, or rather an active economy of ghosts where everywhere historical memory is produced and reproduced in modernization projects that seek tourist dollars and western corporate finances. 16 See James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997. 17 See Tsing: xi. 18 Louise Meintjes, Sound of Africa: Making Music Zulu in a South African Studio (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003): 8. Also see Charles Keil, “Participatory Discrepancies and the Power of Music,” Cultural Anthropology 2.3 (1987): 275-283. 16 Discourses on industrial development and cultural heritage industries rely on these hauntings to attract tourists and bring in major profits. I often meditate on my guided tours of Elmina and Cape Coast slave dungeons on the southern coast of Ghana. I visited these sites on a number of occasions but was continually frustrated with why I always felt so compelled to return. The dungeon pens are eerily absent of human sound but I would revisit in hopes of hearing something other than my own mortality—my beating heart, pumping blood and internal voices. I wanted to feel the texture of the enslaved and their singular pain, to inhabit that terror for only a moment with the selfish hope that it would provide some direction for my life. The caves are cruel in their dismissive silence, in an overwhelming refusal to sound. The silence, however, speaks volumes. Silence allows for a frustrating or patient articulation of that which seems to be invisible and inaudible in public discourse—racial and class hierarchies, white supremacy, colonial debt loans and the exploitation of land and labor resources hidden within global narratives of African underdevelopment. In this regard, Avery Gordon’s work on the complicated textures of social life and how literary fiction can fill in the gaps of sociological analysis through a vivid re-membering of “hauntings, history and horrors” in enslavement and torture, is useful to consider. 19 These social hauntings are purposeful and cautionary and must be reckoned with if such traumas are to ever be diminished or eradicated. 19 See Kathleen Stewart, “Nostalgia—A Polemic,” Cultural Anthropology 3.3 (1988): 227-241; King- Kok Cheung, Articulate Silences: Hisaye Yamamoto, Maxine Kong Kingston, Joy Kagawa, (Ithaca: Cornell University, 1993); Jack Kugelmass, “Bloody Memories: Encountering the Past in Contemporary Poland,” Cultural Anthropology 10.3 (1995): 279-301; and Avery F. Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997). 17 Similarly, music is a ghostly character that is elusive and dispersed, with the capacity to invade and inhabit the body’s many porous channels. As Josh Kun writes, “Something outside of you is entering your body—alien sounds emitted from strangers you sometimes cannot see that enter, via vibration and frequency, the very bones and tissues of your being.” 20 Music gains intensity through its mobility. It is an immaterial force that can appear and disappear without a trace or being connected to the body of a performer. Music, as Kun argues, is a relation that like ghosts, haunts us to do something more, to think deeper, to try harder. In Ghana, haunting is a sonic agency where the singular histories of enslavement, colonization, religious repression, and debt peonage directly and indirectly figure into the music performances of many contemporary Ghanaian artists. The terror of these processes seep into everything and is absorbed in objects and bodies. Therefore, Ghana’s historical crises of enslavement and colonization extend into the contemporary moment. I maintain that music attempts to remake, recover or rehabilitate social life by amplifying counter- memories of these official histories. The West African technique of polyrhythm is a particular structure of temporality that facilitates such counter-narratives. Polyrhythm provides a meter for understanding time as nonlinear through a collapse of the past, present and future into one beat. It is how African American soul singer, Georgia Anne Muldrow proclaims, It's all happening at the same time. That's why I have the gift of rhythm. When I give praise and give homage to my ancestors, time combines into one moment. 20 Josh Kun, Audiotopia: Music, Race, and America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005): 13. 18 I would not have rhythm if it weren't for the ancestors. I just open myself up like a candle and let it rip. 21 Through a flexible understanding of time in the practice of polyrhythm, history becomes a series of disruptions and interruptions, where the past persistently pops up as a critical interpretive frame for helping to determine the future of dispersed African peoples. Afro-Feelings I am enthralled with the absent presence in the slave cells, with Ghana’s buzzing market activity and its people. As much as I can critique the hold of African diasporic romanticism for the “homeland,” I also return again and again to Ghana, in some small part because it represents some utopic possibility for sanity, comfort and happiness that I don’t imagine to be available in the U.S. It is my great escape where reality can be something else, where I imagine alternative trajectories for my life. Ghana, like music, is captivating. Plainly, it is my private and now public “audiotopia,” where Kun argues, “music functions like a possible utopia for the listener, that music is experienced not only as sound that goes into our ears and vibrates through our bones but as space that we can enter into, encounter, move around in, inhabit be safe in, learn from.” 22 The country captures me in new and thrilling ways with each visit. Carolyn Cooper writes about this captivation with kinship as “a genealogy of ideas, a blood-line of beliefs and practices that are transmitted in the body, in oral discourse” that 21 See Ben Westhoff, "Who Are...Georgia Amme Muldrow and Dudley Perkins," 4 March 2010, www.emusic.com, <http://www.emusic.com/features/spotlight/2010_201003-wa- declaime.html>. 22 Kun: 2. 19 “establishes an alternative psychic space.” 23 As I listen to Ghana—to its deep structures of noisy sociality—it is never the same. Listening affords the possibilities of new insights, ideas, perspectives and shifts for social life. Listening is an articulation with others outside of one's own experience, a channel that can hook up to other bodily and machine technologies. The body is a technology filled with porous channels. Music represents an interactive space between internal and external technologies, it is a relation between different networks--of bodies, histories, memories, ideas, dreams, longings, pain, and hope. 24 I examine how intra-African contestations and collaborations attempt to suture the wound/womb of estrangement through the legacy of Kwame Nkrumah, in his democratic inclusion of diasporic Africans in Ghana’s postcolonial development, racial self-determination, and creative autonomy from western institutions. The charismatic quality of Nkrumah’s pan-Africanism or what I call, Afro-feelings, is used to spread a message of intra-racial camaraderie as a means of contending with the torturous projects of enslavement, colonialism and new forms of dispossession. This racial sentiment, or kinship, is derived and revived from pre-colonial Ghanaian folk rituals that rely on the phantasm, magic or mystery of the metaphysical realm to resist opposition, in this case, western imperialism and corrupt military governments. 25 The supernatural, or the 23 Carolyn Cooper, Noises In the Blood: Orality, Gender, and the "Vulgar" Body of Jamaican Popular Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995): 4. 24 See Steven Feld, “Dialogic Editing: Interpreting How the Kaluli Read Sound and Sentiment,” Cultural Anthropology 2.2 (1987): 190-210 and Michael Taussig, “Tactility and Distraction,” Cultural Anthropology 6.2 (1991): 147-153. 25 See Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000). 20 dynamic activity of the spirits, is also what calls many African Americans to Ghana, through an insistent, internal re-membering of what once was and could be again in a far away land, or an acknowledgement that as Fred Moten argues, “this sound was already a recording.” 26 As Nathaniel Mackey indicates, “The ear is a kind of womb,” and listening can provide a particular understanding of the universal pained condition through Black music. 27 Kinship is based on a European construct for categorizing paternity and property. Under slavery, kinship was pronounced as the lack of ownership of one’s self and family with the persistent breaking up of familial members. 28 Following from this, the multi- scalar encounters between Ghanaians and African Americans are also subject to mistranslations, solipsisms, and tensions over differing cultural perspectives, expected responsibilities, and lofty promises. I examine how contemporary music in Ghana reflects and responds to local disjunctures under global racist capitalism in the jagged interactions between the voice, instruments and beat production. This rhythmic disc(h)ord is represented 26 Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003): 11. Also see Jacques Derrida and Avital Ronell, “The Law of Genre,” Critical Inquiry 7.1 (1980): 55-81, and the discussion on invagination. 27 Mackey: 7. 28 Sarah Franklin and Susan McKinnon, eds., Relative Values: Reconfiguring Kinship Studies (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001): 16. Kinship Studies, in many ways, is the cornerstone of anthropological study. There are hundreds of works that, over the last two centuries, have grappled with what kinship in various ethno-cultural contexts mean. Some of the works that I find meaningful for this work are Elliot Liebow, Tally’s Corner: A Study of Negro Streetcorner Men (Lanham, M.D.: Rowman & Littlefiled Publishers, Inc., 1967); Meyer Fortes, Kinship and the Social Order: The Legacy of Lewis Henry Morgan (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1969); John Langston Gwaltney, Drylongso: A Self-Portrait of Black America (New York: Random House, 1980); Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard, Kinship and Marriage Among the Nuer (Gloucestershire: Clarendon Press: 1990); Bernhard Helander, “Words, Worlds, and Wishes: The Aesthetics of Somali Kinship,” Cultural Anthropology 5.4 (1990): 113-120; Carol B. Stack, All Our Kin: Strategies for Survival in a Black Community (New York: Basic Books, 1997); and James Ferguson, Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meanings of Urban Life on the Zambian Copperbelt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). 21 in the instability of citizenship, particularly for young musicians, and the lack of copyright protection and livable wages for their work. This audible mark also signifies the disappointment, frustration and longing under post-colonialism where the dreams of Independence have not been fully realized as a national project. As Sarah Franklin and Susan McKinnon write, “Kinship can be said to be subject to the same globalizing effects that are transforming definitions of the nation-state, through an intensification of transnational flows of labor, capital, information and media.” 29 The local specificity of one traumatic event can conjure up that of global diasporic events. 30 Alliances are made with African American tourists in particular ways that amplify kinship through a common history of racial suffering as a way to combat such predicaments and to gain increased mobility. This kinship is not always happy but also has the marks of a deep sense of rupture and indifference, of marginality in a hostile nation-state and world market, and the enduring unknown. As Franklin and McKinnon note, “Kinship can be mobilized to signify not only specific kinds of connection and inclusion but also specific kinds of disconnection and exclusion.” 31 In other words, African diasporic meet-ups suggest the formation of dynamic networks of alliance and resistance that are crosscut by deep webs of desire, loss, fantasy and intense labor. Such complex negotiations mirror how highlife and hiplife music—as sonic encounters between racially dispersed sounds—is also composed of overlapping expressions, intentions and objectives. In particular, highlife and hiplife music are exchanges in sound, language and gesture among 29 Franklin and McKinnon: 9. 30 See Cooper. 31 Franklin and McKinnon: 15. 22 Black West Indians, African Americans, Ghanaians and other West African nationals. Up Above My Head: A Brief History of Highlife Music The early years of British colonization was established through the presence of western missionaries in Ghana who would convert African “heathens” into Christian believers. During this period, folk instruments were strongly prohibited in favor of western instruments, such as the guitar, horn and piano. Pre-colonial tonal and rhythmic patterns were forbidden and classical harmony compositions were instituted. Highlife music—an evolving mix of calypso, jazz and African folk—fast became a local entertainment staple, first in the form of military brass bands, and then, palm wine trios, acoustic guitar bands, ballroom and dance orchestras, and concert theater parties. Highlife was music for the “high ups,” white British settlers, tourists and Black Ghanaian elite, performed to dances such as the fox trot, waltz and quickstep. Highlife music, although always in process, can be divided into specific historical iterations: 1) 1880s-early 1940s; 2) 1945-1966; 3) Late 1960s-1970s; 4) 1980s-Present. 32 One of the earliest forms of contact between Ghanaians and African diasporic visitors occurred in the 1880s, when the British government stationed 6,000 West Indian soldiers at Cape Coast and Elmina Castles. The soldiers brought their native music with them, which served as a source of nostalgic camaraderie and live entertainment on nights and weekends. The soldiers formed military brass bands, whose calypso rhythms were then incorporated 32 See John Collins, "Brief History of Ghanaian Highlife" (Accra: Ghanaian Ministry of Tourism, 2004): 1-6. 23 into indigenous traditional music, particularly that of local sea merchants and fishermen playing what is called adaha brass band music. 33 Following, fanti osibisaaba music developed, combining traditional percussive instruments with the guitar and accordion, introduced by military sailors. Highlife music was also influenced by sound innovations in neighboring West African countries. Coastal fanti osibisaaba music moved further inland during the 1930s and was combined with the Akan seprewa instrument (harp lute). This bluesy music was termed odonson, or palm wine music. Beginning in 1914, large ballroom and ragtime dance orchestras such as the Rag-a-jassbo of Cape Coast and the Excelsior Orchestra and Jazz Kings of Accra and the Winneba Orchestra dominated the highlife scene. 34 In fact, this period is how the name of highlife music came about as the poor and working class would gather in the street outside these orchestra parties and create their own celebrations. During World War II, British and American servicemen (Black and white) completed tours of duty in Accra and Takoradi and introduced swing music to highlife dance orchestras. Highlife became a favored global export as the western record companies of Odeon, Zonophone, HMV and Columbia established branch offices in the capital city of Accra, releasing albums for artists from the 1920s-1940s, such as Emmanuel Tettah Mensah, “The King of Highlife.” This artist and bandleader of the Tempos and Drum and Fife Band, was heavily influenced by Afro-Cuban percussive instrumentation—maracas, congas and bongos—and the calypso records of Black Londoners. Also, African American musician Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong jammed with Mensah during a tour of Africa in 1956. During the 33 John Collins, "Ghanaian Highlife," African Arts 1976: 62-68. 34 Ibid. 24 1950s, highlife guitar bands merged with traditional popular theatre in the concert party, a vaudevillian performance attended primarily by the working class. Musician E.K. Nyame led this collaboration between highlife bands and concert parties. Duke Ellington and Dizzy Gillespie also toured Ghana as jazz ambassadors during the 1950s as a part of the U.S. government’s Cold War campaign against the Soviet Union, ironically, showcasing the States as democratic and racially egalitarian, even as Jim Crow and de jure segregation practices were overwhelmingly in effect. On March 6, 1957, Kwame Nkrumah became the first Black African president of Ghana signaling national independence from the British colonial regime. Highlife bands such as King Bruce and The Black Beats, Rhythm Aces, Red Spots, The Axim Trio and Kwaa Mensah recorded pro-Independence records and worked in concert with Nkrumah on national cultural arts projects. 35 Toward the end of his administration, Nkrumah developed state highlife bands that would tour with him on international visits. As the first postcolonial administrator, Nkrumah is popularly heralded as “The Father of Pan- Africanism” for an ardent philosophy of racial solidarity among Africans on the continent and in the diaspora through economic, political, social and artistic cooperation. Nkrumah advocated a message of racial resistance to western imperialism, liberation and self-autonomy for all Africans on the continent and throughout the diaspora. This position was built through his sojourn in the U.S. Nkrumah received his bachelor’s degree at Lincoln University, a historically Black college, and his master’s at the University of Pennsylvania. Nkrumah also began a doctoral program in Philosophy at Oxford University but returned to 35 Ibid. 25 Ghana before finishing. Throughout Nkrumah’s stay in these western nations, he witnessed the Great Depression, Jim Crow segregation and racially restricted covenants, all of which helped to determine his course once in Ghana. Through a shared sense of subjection stemming from slavery and colonization, Black Ghanaians’ struggle against imperialism and African Americans’ fight against segregationist practices served to bolster racial and political networks of hope and transformative change. With the dismantling of Nkrumah’s administration in 1966, many highlife musicians found themselves without work. During the 1970s and 1980s, the country experienced two exoduses of musicians, among other creative laborers and professionals, to bordering West African countries and the western nations of Germany, France, Belgium, Denmark, Italy, the United Kingdom, Canada and the United States. These departures were attributed to military governmental corruption, escalating rates of unemployment and national security crises. For those musicians who stayed in Ghana, highlife music exhibited an explicitly political texture—stitched with sounds of Congolese soukous, South African patha patha or township jazz, African American jazz of John Coltrane and Miles Davis and the soul ideology of James Brown. 36 In 1970, London-based Ghanaian band Osibisa fused highlife and rock music, representing their diasporic identity through sound. This group shifted music production in Ghana, influencing other Afro-rock groups such as Hedzolleh Sounds, the Psychedelic Aliens, Boombaya and Zonglo Biiz. With former Nigerian highlife musician Fela Anikulapo Kuti’s creation of Afro-Beat music—a blend of traditional folk, jazz, and soul—this 36 Ibid. 26 heavily politicized music influenced such groups as the Big Beats, Sawaaba Sounds and Nana Ampadu’s African Brothers. Ghana experienced a grueling food/fuel crisis from 1982-1984, which raised security concerns for the country and resulted in stringent curfew laws. Out-of-work musicians were driven into the charismatic churches where jobs were available. Highlife music morphed into gospel and continues to outsell any other genre of music. Secular highlife music is still produced but is not as popular as gospel highlife. Some highlife artists have experimented with reggae, like the City Boys, Classic Handels/Vibes, Roots Anabo and Rocky Dawuni. In Germany, burgher highlife music developed as many Ghanaian musicians moved to the country in the 1980s and blended folk rhythms with disco and techno-pop sung in local Ghanaian languages. Popular burgher highlife artists include George Darko, Charles Tetteh, Pat Thomas, Bob Pinado, and Amakye Dede. As Ghana became more economically stable during the late 1980s and early 1990s, these musicians began to move back to Ghana. The production of burgher highlife was less expensive and did not require a number of participants like a live band, which was profitable for entertainment venues. Younger people embraced the electronic production as something novel and distinct from the old-fashioned highlife music of their parents’ generation. It’s Not Hip Hop!: A Brief History of Hiplife In the 1970s and 1980s, Ghana experienced major deindustrialization and a subsequent decline in foreign investment, resulting in the loss of western record companies. Highlife music was no longer a viable commercial export—except in localized networks of Ghanaian immigrant communities in major western cities. 27 The gospel revival of highlife music was reinforced by the escalation of western mission visits to Ghana, the construction of western Christian seminary satellite campuses and church buildings, as well as the dense concentration of Mormon and Catholic institutions—academies, housing, worship centers and businesses—across Ghana. Black Ghanaian youth began forging fresh identities of their own choosing and localized networks of meaning outside of their parent generations’ fixed expectations of how they should live. In 1990, legend has it that Reggie Rockstone authored a bold, new hodgepodge of hip hop and highlife music, appropriately termed “hiplife.” Hiplife combines the heavily syncopated electric beats of hip hop and dancehall with West African folk instruments and rapping/singing in local dialects (Twi, Ga, Ewe, Akan, Fante, etc.), pidgin (a mix of English, local languages and slang), and/or standard English. 37 As the heralded “Godfather of Hiplife,” Rockstone has lived in a myriad of places that have worked their way into his music. Born in Ghana—as a descendant of the royal Ashanti—Rockstone migrated to London with his family as an adolescent. He began his rap career in London and then moved to the U.S.—Florida, Atlanta, New York—during his twenties to better secure a recording contract. After several close deals, Rockstone returned to Accra to rejuvenate his creativity and begin anew by merging his diasporic and indigenous experiences into a complicated sounding. His most recent musical collaborations have been with Jamaican dancehall star, Beenie Man; Nigerian hip hop artist, 2 Face Idibia; and Haitian-American performer, Wyclef Jean. However, fellow Ghanaian hiplife artist, Kwaku-T, hotly debates Rockstone’s founding legacy. Kwaku-T was also born into an elite family in 37 See Dick Hebdige, Cut 'N' Mix: Culture, Identity and Caribbean Music (London: Routledge, 1987). 28 Accra and subsequently moved to New York City with his family, where his father was a professor. Kwaku-T spent his growing years moving back and forth between Ghana and the U.S., with his latest stint in Atlanta. Kwaku-T returned to Accra in 2003 to refresh his approach to music by working with traditional Ghanaian folk artists such as King Ayisoba as he recorded a new album. Even though Kwaku-T has spent half of his life in the States, he is unable to obtain an American visa or passport to return to the U.S. The musician has Ghanaian citizenship, and because his family name is recognizably royal, he is expected to pay large bribes for U.S. travel privileges. Kwaku-T notes, “I’ve hustled on several occasions at the Embassy, been denied a visa even though I’ve lived there. It’s just because the Embassy here is crooked; they expect you to go through the back door. Cuz I come from a relatively good home, they expect that I can pay $5000 and get a visa, a 5-year visa, not even a green card--a visa--to go overseas and go and hustle them.” 38 The mobility of musicians in Ghana is greatly compromised because visa racketeering schemes—where people pay $5000 or more to visit the U.S. or the U.K—have made travel for honest artists nearly impossible. Hiplife artists seek travel to international countries to promote their music but how the music is defined and marketed to a wider audience is widely contested. Depending on who deploys the term, hiplife means many things. Some call it “jamma music”— a silly and vacuous music that imitates commercial hip hop with themes of cars, parties, substance abuse and girls. Others insist that hiplife is an artistic 38 Interview with Kwaku Tutu in May 2009. 29 undertaking and, therefore, commercially unviable. Hiplife artists The Mobyle Boyz make a clear distinction between jamma music and “real” hiplife: Man, if you don’t do this, you don’t make money. But you know this nigga is the real MC who can really do something. At the end of the day because of jamma, he has to forget his skills and do what the people want (so it’s like they are all fooling the crowd.) So it’s like Mobile Boyz right now are some people who are really sacrificing. We are some MCs who are really doing the wild and the best works for hip life but at the end of the day we ain’t got shit in our pockets. You know I mean? But we know what we doing, we know what we’re really heading towards and we know what we really trying to achieve, you know I mean? 39 Here, The Mobyle Boyz position hiplife as a “hustler’s art” (a popular phrase used by many hiplife artists interviewed), because it is derived from the unstable life experiences of young Black Ghanaians. Hiplife has diverged in recent years to a number of emerging genres—hip hop, jamma, GH rap, higher life music— which also in some ways determines what language such rappers use and the music’s cross-over appeal to non-Ghanaian audiences. No matter how one classifies the music of Black Ghanaian youth, it is a volatile and risky business. Hiplife is a primarily male industry with only a handful of well-known female MCs (such as Mz. Bel, who might be classified as a feminist for her popular protest anthem against the sexual molestation of adolescent girls by older men). The pay is minimal, since few artists, with the exception of VIP, Kwaw Kese, Wanlov the Kobolor and Reggie Rockstone, are popular enough to travel outside of the country. Some hiplife artists are given the rare opportunity to travel to the U.K. and the U.S., usually for diasporic Ghanaian festival celebrations. Another major problem artists encounter is 39 Interview with the Mobyle Boyz in June 2009. 30 payola given to DJS for radio airplay. Also, extraordinary financing is needed to secure a producer/manager, studio time and equipment. Radio airtime is the most viable method for making a name as an artist. More importantly, hiplife artists are largely not respected for their craft by their parents’ generation and are greatly unrecognized in national music awards ceremonies and celebrations, where gospel highlife is the big winner. Notes on Archives and Methods It is important to situate this dissertation within the context of reciprocity between informants and researcher. This dialectic provides rigorous accountability on my part and gratitude for the creative work and time of those I have interviewed. As this dissertation concerns the racial production of sound across place, it is critical that I interrogate my own position as a light-skinned, African American woman conducting research on primarily male, Ghanaian sonic practices. This requires that I be particularly attentive to how my own encounters with informants exemplify Ghanaian and African American material and affective exchange, as well as the potential for mistranslations, disappointed expectations, unmet hopes and misplaced desires. At the same time, I am thrilled by the unexpected connections, magical dialogues and spectacular collaborations that also emerge from doing such research. In fact, anthropological work increasingly since the latter half of the twentieth century—particularly, scholarship produced by academics and activists from marginalized populations—asserts a firm investment in “giving 31 voice” to those who have been historically silenced. 40 If this is the case, who are we as ethnographers to have the authority (provisional, at least) to designate what is evidential, truthful, or oppositional? Is there a fundamental difference in “giving voice” to and “speaking for” informants? 41 These questions are critical because any anthropology of sound must also consider how contemporary technologies (such as audio recorders, microphones, and video cameras) shape fieldwork experiences and data gathering as well as maintain records of cultural and historical preservation for the informants themselves. 42 Many anthropologists have argued that their discipline has a long history of “speaking for” informants by representing and objectifying indigenous peoples as exotic and primitive others. This history is imbricated within a number of colonial projects where the African continent is diametrically opposed to the west. As Achille Mbembe declares, Africa is constructed in and through a difference from the west that discursively translates as a permanent lack of modernity. 43 In these 40 See Zora Neale Hurston, Mules and Men (New York: J.B. Lippincott, Inc., 1935); Dorinne Kondo. Crafting Selves: Power, Gender and Discourses of Identity in a Japanese Workplace (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990); Renato Rosaldo, Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993); Kamala Visweswaran, Fictions of Feminist Ethnography (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994); Ruth Behar and Deborah A. Gordon, Women Writing Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996); Kamala Visweswaran, "Histories of Feminist Ethnography," Annual Review of Anthropology 26 (1997): 591-621; Erika Brady, A Spiral Way: How the Phonograph Changed Ethnography (Oxford: University of Mississippi Press, 1999); Jonathan Xavier Inda and Renato Rosaldo, The Anthropology of Globalization: A Reader (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2008). 41 See Arjun Appadurai, “Introduction: Place and Voice in Anthropological Theory,” Cultural Anthropology 3.1 (1988): 16-20; Clifford Geertz, Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988); and Dell Hymes, Ethnography, Linguistics, Narrative Inequality: Toward an Understanding of Voice (Bristol, P.A.: Taylor & Francis Inc., 1996). 42 See John T. Hitchcock and Patricia J. Hitchcock, “Some Considerations for the Prosepctive Ethnographic Cinematographer,” American Anthropologist 62.4 (1960): 656-674 and John L. Jackson, "An Ethnographic Filmflam: Giving Gifts, Doing Research, and Videotaping the Native Subject/Object," American Anthropologist 106.1 (2004): 32-42. 43 See John L. and Jean Comaroff, Ethnography and the Historical Imagination Boulder: Westview Press, 1992); John L. and Jean Comaroff, Modernity and It’s Malcontents: Ritual Power in Postcolonial 32 colonial endeavors, anthropological travel narratives and fieldwork observations have historically corresponded with other imperialist enterprises such as the eugenics movement and scientific racism, legal and illegal forms of apartheid, and racist depictions in Hollywood films and popular U.S. literature to construct cultural difference as static and non-modern. 44 There has been a concerted effort in anthropology, particularly since the anti-racist and anti-colonial movements of the 1960s, which focuses on overturning conditions of oppression, and speaks to the position of the ethnographer in relation to her informants. 45 This self-reflexive approach Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993); and Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). 44 See J.W. Powell, “From Savagery to Barbarism: Annual Address of the President, J.W. Powell, Delivered February 3, 1885,” Transactions of the Anthropological Society of Washington, 3 (1885): 173- 196; Robert H. Lowie, “Psychology, Anthropology, and Race,” American Anthropologist 25.3 (1923): 291-303; Gerald Early, “The Subdivisions of the Human Race and Their Distribution,” American Anthropologist 26.4 (1924): 474-490; George Herzog, “On Primitive Music,” American Anthropologist 34.3 (1932): 546-548; M.F. Ashley Montagu, “The Genetical Theory of Race, and Anthropological Method,” American Anthropologist 44.3 (1942); 369-375; Stanley M. Garn, “Race and Evolution,” American Anthropologist 59.2 (1957): 218-224; Ashley Montagu, “The Concept of Race,” American Anthropologist 64.5 (1962): 919-928; Frederick S. Hulse, “Race as an Evolutionary Episode,” American Anthropologist 64.5 (1962): 929-945; S.L. Washburn, “The Study of Race,”American Anthropologist 65.3 (1963): 521-531, to name a few. As a response to these earlier works, see John S. haller, Jr., “Race and the Concept of Progress in Nineteenth Century American Ethnology,” American Anthropologist 73.3 (1971): 710-724; Kamala Visweswaran, “Race and the Culture of Anthropology,” American Anthropologist 100.1 (1998): 70-83; Herbert S. Lewis, "The Misrepresentation of Anthropology and Its Consequences," American Anthropologist 100.3 (1998): 716-731; Peter Pels, "The Anthropology of Colonialism: Culture, History, and the Emergence of Western Governmentality," Annual Review of Anthropology 26 (1997): 163-183; and Gregory Castle, ed., Postcolonial Discourses: An Anthology (Malden: Blackwell Publishers, 2001). 45 See Lloyd A. Fallers, “Ideology and Culture in Uganda Nationalism,” American Anthropologist 63.4 (1961): 677-686; Dell Hymes, “Introduction: Toward Ethnographies of Communication,” American Anthropologist 66.6 (1964): 1-34; Diane Lewis, "Anthropology and Colonialism," Current Anthropology 14.5 (1973): 581-602; George E. Marcus, Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986); James Clifford and George E. Marcus, Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986); Dorinne K. Kondo, “Dissolution and Reconstitution of Self: Implications for Anthropological Epistemology,” Cultural Anthropology 1.1 (1986): 74-88; Suzanne R. Kirschner, “Then What Have I To Do With Thee?: On Identity, Fieldwork, and Ethnographic Knowledge,” Cultural Anthroplogy 2.2 (1987): 211-234; Arturo Escobar, “Power and Visibility: Development and the Invention and Management of the Third World,” Cultural Anthropology, 3.4 (1988): 428-443; Timothy Maliqalim Simone, “Metropolitan Africans: Reading Incapacity, the Incapacity of Reading,” Cultural Anthropology, 5.2 (1990): 160-172; Vincent Crapanzano, "The Postmodern Crisis: Discourse, Parody, Memory," Cultural Anthropology 6.4 (1991): 431-446; 33 examines how the ethnographer and her informants are embedded in power relations that partially determine anthropological findings. For example, ethnographies with a feminist, postcolonial, and transnational methodology, actively critique and counter earlier anthropological work grounded in the juxtaposition of difference between the non-west and west as unalterable. Anthropological reflexivity also indicates how uneven social experiences are negotiated, particularly in relation to unbalanced representations that have global purchase and real effects on peoples’ lives. Ethnography can be haphazard and unwieldy. This cultural terrain can also be slippery for anthropologists who are reflexive about how they are being observed in the field by those they observe. Ethnographic engagements are structured through hegemony and determined by differential access to power. The political and intellectual commitment to publicize absented histories, and by extension, the complicated structural mechanisms working to keep these accounts at bay, not only indicates the privileged capacity of the writer to render these negated life experiences visible but also presents particular concerns around translation, interpretation, accuracy, and selectivity. Such dilemmas can Kirsten Hastrup, “Out of Anthropology: The Anthropologist as an Object of Dramatic Representation,” Cultural Anthropology, 7.3 (1992): 327-345; Alessandro Duranti, “Truth and Intentionality: An Ethnographic Critique,” Cultural Anthropology, 8.2 (1993): 214-245; Claudia Strauss, “Partly Fragmented, Partly Integrated: An Anthropological Examination of ‘Postmodern Fragmented Subjects,’” Cultural Anthropology, 12.3 (1997): 362-404; Alexandra Bakalaki, “Students, Natives, Colleagues: Encounters in Academia and in the Field,” Cultural Anthropology, 12.4 (1997): 502-526; Kadiatu Kanneh, African Identities: Race, Nation and Culture in Ethnography, Pan-Africanism and Black Literatures (London: Routledge, 1998); George E. Marcus, Ethnography Through Thick & Thin (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998); Lanita Jacobs-Huey, "The Natives Are Gazing and Talking Back: Reviewing the Problematics of Positionality, Voice, and Accountability among 'Native' Anthropologists," American Anthropologist 104.3 (2002): 791-804; Michael Burawoy, "Revisits: An Outline of a Theory of Reflexive Ethnography," American Sociological Review 68.5 (2003): 645-679; George E. Marcus, James D. Faubion and Michael M.J. Fischer, eds., Fieldwork Is Not What It Used To Be: Learning Anthropology's Method in a Time of Transition (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009); and Kamala Visweswaran, Un/common Cultures: Racism and the Rearticulation of Cultural Difference (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010). 34 reify cultural difference as unbridgeable if the researcher does not examine how locally situated difference is mobilized as a process, both productive and repressive, of individual and collective meditation. 46 Along with native ethnographies and self-reflexive anthropological work, I concur with J.H. Kwabena Nketia’s formulation about the importance of conducting ethnomusicology in African countries. Nketia, possibly the foremost authority of researching African music, argues that such work must be highly contextual and situational as music is interwoven with African social life in a “plurality of statements.” 47 Nketia maintains that research becomes problematic when African music is considered as a pre-cursor to European music instead of its own complex historical and social process. Nketia points out a hierarchy within western Music Studies departments that does not examine African music cultures within dominant discourses of modernity. I consider how Ghanaian music constructs an alternative modernity that is radically African-centered in its rhythmic construction and simultaneous petitioning by musicians to enter the 46 On Anthropology and Culture: See Paul Rabinow, Reflections of Fieldwork in Morocco (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977); Vincent Crapanzano, Tuhami: Portrait of a Moroccan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); Kevin Dwyer, Moroccan Dialogues: Anthropology in Question (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982); Richard G. Fox, Recapturing Anthropology: Working in the Present (Sante Fe: School of American Research Press, 1991); Vincent Crapanzano, Imaginative Horizons: An Essay in Literary-Philosophical Anthropology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); George E. Marcus and Marcelo Pisarro, "The End(s) of Ethnography: Social/Cultural Anthropology's Signature Form of Producing Knowledge in Transition," Cultural Anthropology 23.1 (2008): 1-14; and Michael M.J. Fischer, Anthropological Futures (Experimental Futures) (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009). 47 J.H. Kwabena Nketia, Ethnomusicology and African Music: Modes of Inquiry and Interpretation, Vol. One (Accra: Afram Publications, 2005): 32. See also John Miller Chernoff, African Rhythm and African Sensibility: Aesthetics and Social Action in African Musical Idioms (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981); Steven Feld, "Sound Structure as Social Structure," Ethnomusicology 28.3 (1984): 383-409; Steven Feld, "Aesthetics as Iconicity of Style, or 'Lift-up-over Sounding': Getting Into the Kaluli Groove," Yearbook for Traditional Music 20 (1988): 74-113; Kathyrn Linn Geurts, Culture and the Senses: Bodily Ways of Knowing in An African Community (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); and Steven J. Morrison, Munir N. Beken, Denise Jungbluth Steven M. Demorest, "Lost in Translation: An Enculturation Effect in Music Memory Performance," Music Perception 25.3 (2008): 213-223. 35 “world music” market. This demand for inclusion within western categories of music performance and distribution produces limits on sound and an adherence to strict formulas for achieving financial prosperity. The danger is that western discourse can reduce Ghanaian music to its components of rhythm, meter and tone without acknowledging the full complexity of the music and African social life. Additionally, Diana Taylor advocates that we work from a position of incommensurability, untranslatability and indecipherability because these are constructive sites that persistently track the work of performance as process. 48 Taylor, situates performance as an epistemology, a way of knowing, not just an object of analysis. Through a conjoining of theories animating Performance Studies and (Latin) American Studies, the author suggests that performance (as expressive behavior) transmits cultural memory and identity and functions as a mode of historical consciousness. In examining music, which can be verbal and non-verbal, this provides a contextual framework for exploring the intricacy of Black affectivity through sound. Many scholars who study sense and perception critique studies that privilege visual forms of epistemology over other senses. As Richard Leppert details, the body is a sight/site that “relates sonority to the sight of its production.” 49 My dissertation argues that the senses of sound, sight, touch, smell and taste work together as a mode of cultural and historical memory as performance, identity and place, as sensuous geographies. I advocate the need to 48 Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003). See also Marta E. Savigliano, Tango and the Political Ecnomoy of Passion (Boulder: Westview Press, 1995) and E. Patrick Johnson, Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003). 49 Richard Leppert, The Sight of Sound: Music, Representation, and the History of the Body (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993): xxi. 36 explore sight, in conjunction with, not at the expense of, sound. The encounters between Ghanaian musicians and African American tourists can be read at multiple scales—global, nation, local, body—that situate performance as not just physical but theoretical, epistemological and historical embodied knowledge that together articulate the process of racial and historical re-membering. Between 2009 and 2010, I have conducted over seven months of field research including more than 70 audio- and video-taped interviews with musicians, deejays, music producers, managers, government officials, music union representatives, travel operators and tourists in Ghana. I have also archived over 30 video –tapes of highlife, hiplife, hip hop, and reggae artists in concert and rehearsal performances. I conducted dissertation fieldwork on hiplife music in Ghana with Professor John Collins of the University of Ghana at Legon. Dr. Collins granted me access to the Bokoor Popular Music Archives which houses thousands of music recordings, journal articles and photographs and The Gramophone Records Museum and Research Centre of Ghana, with holdings of over 20,000 music recordings, interviews and oral histories. I also researched the archives of the Anyah Arts Library in Accra North which houses traditional African instruments and folklore music, sonic sculpture exhibitions, and offers music theory workshops and instrumental technique demonstrations, as well as regular cultural entertainment programs. With great care and attention I have compiled my findings and musings into this study. What follows are brief summaries of the chapters included in the dissertation. 37 Chapters on the Move Chapter One provides a political history of Ghana by examining the postcolonial structure of the country’s music industry. In particular, Ghana’s fragile music industry is a result of the post-Nkrumah militarization of the state; international debt policies that overtax music companies and entertainment venues; increasing piracy from Nigeria and China that undercut the local music market; and under-regulated copyright protection laws. This chapter asks, what can be learned from approaching the black market as a cultural formation? If we could hear the black market…what would it sound like? I interrogate the Black market as unstable, volatile and illicit while also exchanges between Black buyers and sellers that are collaborative, affirming and hopeful. Also, I consider the “hustle”—the legal and extralegal ways Ghanaian artists make alliances with western tourists to produce and distribute their music to the U.S. and U.K., set up import/export businesses or secure investment in cyberfraud schemes. Chapter Two examines what Kwame Nkrumah called “the anxiety of work” in anti-colonial resistance that, literally, transformed the Gold Coast colony into Ghana, once an ancient Sudanese empire, and now “an inspiration for the future.” This chapter interrogates how “the anxiety of work” in cultural performance, or the embodied production of knowledge and historical memory, operates as a continuing practice of resistive politics to imperialist power and as a trans-regional enactment of racial solidarity. I explore Nkrumah’s soul ideology and the extension and revision of his life’s work in three specific cultural performances: 1) the music of Ghanaian artist, Kweku Ananse, as an audible mark of Nkrumah’s pan-African philosophy at work; 2) the 1971 38 documentary film, Soul II Soul, a spectacular concert featuring celebrity African American soul musicians and Ghanaian artists; and 3) ”Bless the Mic,” a present- day organization of Ghanaian and African diasporic musicians and spoken word artists who sponsor a weekly performance event in Accra. I also examine the failures of Nkrumah’s ideology of non-violent, Black egalitarianism that was, at times, in conflict with the state, a colonial formation that partly manages citizens through coercion. Chapter Three focuses on how the body, as an epistemology, performs racial and historical re-membering. While many U.S. scholars who examine heritage tourism to Ghana critique the lack of verbal discourse on the country’s participation in the slave trade, it is important to consider multiple ways to re- member slave histories that are outside language. I muse on how the body sounds out history, invokes remembrances and performs cultural perspectives where the transatlantic slave trade is an incomprehensible phenomenon that exceeds verbal language. In this chapter I thus ask, can one’s DNA be an embedded and embodied soundtrack that charts particular and interconnecting nodes of history? Are those memories, experiences, dreams and longings then “recorded on my body?” To answer this, I examine music performances in Elmina and Cape Coast slave castles and the diverse affective responses by African Americans and Ghanaians to such remembrances. Chapter Four illustrates how digital sound technologies employed by peoples of African descent as modes of travel, embodiment and connectivity express utopian and dystopian imaginings over time and space. I analyze how King Ayisoba, a Northern Ghanaian throat singer, and T-Pain, a U.S. R&B artist who became popular for his use of the auto-tune, both affect a robotic, or rather 39 alien sounding, voice. Even though they are thousands of miles apart and have never met each other, they simultaneously articulate a sound that is centuries old and not yet here. This chapter considers history as a series of records, or rather recordings, where contemporary Black music presents an infinite remix of sound documents from the past, present and future. Such sound technologies enact multiple meanings of alienation and dispossession as a condition of feeling abnormal and out of place while also possessing the sense that “home,” where one feels comforted, is somewhere else, a different place either real or imagined. Finally, I conclude with some thoughts on the future of the national music industry of Ghana and how musicians are articulating their struggles for greater citizenship through popular music. I examine hiplife rapper, Kwaw Kese’s “Ecomini,” a remix of President Atta Mill’s mispronunciation of “economy” during the swearing-in ceremony on Inauguration Day, January 2009. Ecomini, in the Akan language, means “here is hunger.” I examine the multiple meanings of hunger and how this remix signals artist demands for the government to provide sustainable wages and enforced copyright protection of their work. I also consider how Rastafarians, as a spiritual, political and intellectual community, can provide the way forward for best connecting Kwame Nkrumah’s pan-Africanism to a grounded practice between Ghanaian musicians and African American tourists. 40 Chapter One: Do the Hustle? Black Market Politics in Ghana, 1966- Present “You know, Nana came by today,” my best friend and one of Ghana’s top media journalists, Melvin Osei said. 50 “Oh, how is he?” I asked. “Fine, but…” All of a sudden, the line cut. I wasn’t alarmed since this happens frequently when talking with friends in Ghana on Skype. I phoned again. “Hello? Hello?” I bellowed into the phone. I listened intently and was greeted by muffled sounds in the distance, a gradually ferocious rumbling. Something was awry. A disturbance was brewing. “Get yoUR HAnDs OFF ME!” Melvin shouted as my heart sank. “You have no right to stop and search me. I have done nothing wrong!” There was more tussling on the other end, followed by a cacophony of voices. “Melvin! Melvin! What’s going on?” I tried, with great difficulty, to cut through the discord. Finally, he whispered into the receiver, “The police have stopped my taxi. They want to conduct a search and I refuse. They won’t let me go now. I told them if they want to make an arrest, take me to the station. I know the only reason they’ve stopped me is because of my hair.” This wasn’t hard to believe. Ghana has a reputation for being remarkably conservative. Much of this is fashioned from a history of indirect British colonial rule established through the traditional authorities of local chieftaincies and elder councils. These bodies legitimized European standards of moral decency in language, dress, and 50 Name has been changed. 41 comportment that endure today through an overwhelming number of churches, international missions and Catholic schools. 51 Melvin wears his hair in a fantastic maze of braids and a mohawk that is often viewed by older generations and state officials as indecent, obscene, and downright insane. This hairstyle is associated with “rastas,” who wear their hair in locs and are popularly thought to be criminal, lazy good-for-nothings. Melvin’s hair marked him as different—an outsider with the potential to start trouble—reason enough for a police search. Since such hairstyles are associated with marijuana consumption, the police possibly hoped to find some contraband and extort money from Melvin in exchange for his release. Melvin continued, “I keep telling them I’m a journalist and they won’t listen. I beg—tell them you are my boss. Please have a word with them for me.” My brain tried to keep up but it was all happening so fast. My tongue thickened in my mouth as I heard an unfamiliar, gruff voice on the other end. “Yes, hello?” I hurriedly cleared my throat and prayed for a convincing story to come out. “Yes, hello Boss. Mr. Melvin Osei is a colleague of mine. I work in Los Angeles, California…in the United States. Mr. Osei is a widely respected journalist. Surely, you know this? I do not understand why you have detained him but you must either let him go or charge him with a crime. If you do not unhand him, I will make sure that the major newspapers in Los Angeles and Ghana know about this!” Gulp. Would he call my bluff? The officer interjected, “Please, madame, we 51 See Edward H. Berman, “African Responses to Christian Mission Education,” African Studies Review, 17.3 (Dec. 1974): 527-540; Ruth Marshall, ‘"Power in the Name of Jesus": Social Transformation and Pentacostalism in Western Nigeria "Revisited," T. Ranger and O. Vaughan, eds. Legitimacy and the State in Twentieth Century Africa (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1993): 213-246; Paul Gifford, "Ghana's Charismatic Churches," Journal of Religion in Africa 64.3 (1994): 241-265; and Birgit Meyer, "Commodities and the Power of Prayer: Pentecostal Attitudes Toward Consumption in Contemporary Ghana," Birgit Meyer and Peter Geshciere, eds., Globalization and Identity: Dialectics of Flow and Closure (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2003): 150-176. 42 are trying-oh. He is not being nice. The man won’t cooperate with our search.” I shot back, “Why have you stopped him? You have no legal right to do this. I’ll have your badge, sir!” I was raising hell now and totally unaware that he had passed the phone to another officer who I had to explain myself to all over again. Meanwhile, Melvin phoned another friend, a high-level executive at one of Accra’s major radio stations, who also talked with the detaining officers and managed to get him released after a couple of hours of this back and forth. Police checkpoints such as this are routine yet erratic seizures that partly determine the everyday life of Ghanaians traveling by car, taxi or tro-tro (public bus). 52 They occur on main and shortcut roads where armed robbery is allegedly most rampant. Usually 2-4 policemen are at designated points throughout metropolitan areas—particularly, Ghana’s largest cities of Accra, Kumasi and Takoradi—and with full military regalia, a flashlight and rifle are pointed towards the car’s driver and passengers as a terrifying reminder of who’s in charge. Travelers can be made to wait in traffic for hours as vehicles ahead are pulled over. Police stops can occur for small infractions like a broken taillight or a cracked side mirror or to check a driver’s license or vehicle registration. This can quickly turn into searches of the vehicle or the persons inside for contraband. Many times, if nothing can be found, bribes are demanded to deter even longer delays, a possible trip to the police station where more palms will have to be greased or jail time. Such bribes are supported by intricate networks of state and international inequality that determine the meager incomes of police officers who 52 See Eboe Hutchful, "New Elements in Militarism: Ethiopia, Ghana, and Burkina," International Journal 41.4 (Autumn 1986): 802-830; J. Appiahene-Gyamfi, "Violent Crime in Ghana: The Case of Robbery," Journal of Criminal Justice 26.5 ( Sept. 1998): 409-424; Alice Hills, "The Dialectic of Police Reform in Nigeria," The Journal of Modern African Studies 46.2 (2008): 215-234. 43 usually do not receive salaries on time. As former president Jerry Rawlings finds, “It [corruption] is undermining international political morality and it is percolating downward, every mistake you [western countries] make—by the time it gets to my country it is multiplied by five times.” 53 To make up for the inadequacy of their wages, many police officers coerce citizens into helping “sponsor” their livelihoods. Most Ghanaians take issue with such arbitrary criminalization, where payment is exacted for one’s release. This chapter asks, how do black markets function as postcolonial formations? This study will examine how Black markets—material and affective exchanges between persons of African descent that can mitigate or increase the vulnerability of urban social life—take shape in contemporary Ghana. In recent years, Ghana has been praised by the international news media as a model nation-state for the rest of the continent. This partly stems from the country’s legacy as the first sub-Saharan country to gain independence. However, Ghana’s reputation is attributed less to the absence of long-term civil war conflict, ethnic strife and governmental corruption and more to how neighboring western African countries—Sierra Leone, Cote d’Ivoire, Liberia and Nigeria—have overwhelmingly represented these problems in global popular memory. 54 While Ghana’s reputation of warm and hospitable people, job stability and choice schools is not pure fable, the country cannot be seen outside a regional context. 53 Jerry Rawlings Interview, “Africa's Ills,” by Flavio Marinoni (1/14/2007), 67:33 min. Interview can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sjm_ZJZGCtw&feature=related. 54 Sierra Leone, Liberia and Cote d’Ivoire have been embroiled in civil war conflicts during the latter part of the 20 th century. Nigeria suffered from the Biafran War (1967-70), which split the northern and southern regions of the country. Nigeria also has a global reputation for corruption, Internet scams and other forms of financial extortion. 44 Although Ghana’s political independence was hard-won, struggles continue against a myriad of world, state and local forces that threaten basic citizenship rights in access to daily self-care—food, water, shelter, healthcare, education and livable wages. Consequently, many Ghanaian musicians build relationships outside of the state—particularly with western tourists to Ghana— to obtain what is needed to reproduce daily life. Tourists, primarily African American, white American and white European, also seek out Ghanaians to act as cultural guides during their visits. These cultural brokers provide instruction on local etiquette and national history, language lessons and translation, guides to popular attractions and nightlife, and act as liaisons in market bartering. The encounters between Ghanaians and western tourists are performances in expectation, promise and reciprocity. In the opening example of my friend Melvin, I as a tourist/foreigner was persistently drawn in against the state to help petition for rights against illegal search and seizure and extortion that should be afforded to him as a Ghanaian citizen. 55 During my research work in Ghana, Melvin and other informants helped me greatly to negotiate daily life in Accra, by providing thorough instructions for traveling around the city and country efficiently, teaching me conversational pidgin, Ga and Twi for transactions with taxi and tro-tro drivers, and bartering on my behalf with market sellers over masks, statues, fabric, paintings and jewelry that would eventually become gifts for family members and friends and “authentically” mark my time in Ghana. Similarly, music artists seek wage security and other 55 These notions of legality and citizenship are often based on what is appropriate and reasonable by North American or European standards and are not particular to the local specificities of Ghanaian citizenship. 45 pursuits of happiness, such as license to travel internationally, networking contacts, distribution channels and studio production equipment, through associations made with visitors from North America and Europe. 56 A number of studies evaluate the black market from a primarily economic or political science perspective. 57 However, what can be learned from approaching the black market as a cultural formation? If we could hear the black market…what would it sound like? How can the black market be amplified to examine its disjointed relations under capital? This chapter will provide a political history of Ghana by examining the postcolonial structure of the country’s music industry. In particular, Ghana’s fragile music industry is a result of the post-Nkrumah militarization of the state; international debt loan policies that overtax music companies and entertainment venues; increasing piracy from Nigeria and China that undercut the local music market; and under-regulated copyright protection laws. Also to be considered is the “hustle”—the legal and extralegal ways Ghanaian musicians make alliances with western tourists to produce and distribute their music to the U.S. and U.K. Black market hustles are both local and global. What must also be considered is how the hustle permeates 56 See Aihwa Ong, Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999) and May Joseph and Jennifer Natalya Fink, Performing Hybridity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999). 57 See Victor Azarya and Naomi Chazan, “Disengagement From the State in Africa: Reflections on the Experience of Ghana and Guinea,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 29 (1987): 106- 131; Colin C. Williams and Jan Windebank, "Black Market Work in the European Community: Peripheral Work for Peripheral Localities?" International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 19.1 (1995): 23-39; Curtis Marez, Drug Wars: The Political Economy of Narcotics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2004); R.T. Naylor, Wages of Crime: Black Markets, Illegal Finance, and the Underworld Economy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004); Eric Schlosser, Reefer Madness: Sex, Drugs, and Cheap Labor in the American Black Market (New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2004); Michele Goodwin, Black Markets: The Supply and Demand of Body Parts (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006); and Peter Andreas, Blue Helmets and Black Markets: The Business of Survival in the Siege of Sarajevo (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008). 46 life for Ghanaians, in general, and how investment networks with westerners are also sought in import/export businesses, cyberfraud schemes and fraudulent visas, which critically affects the livelihood of Ghanaian artists and the national music industry. The most widely understood definition of the Black market is a site that is persistently under threat, instability and illegitimacy. 58 The Black market is always on the move as a means of maintaining its existence. In Ghana, Black markets take on a physical space in makeshift kiosks and shops that line busy streets and the bodies of mobile sellers. The market is embodied in a spectacular extension of the self, particularly as market women sell a variety of goods from atop their heads. The city is packaged as a commodity to be experienced by the tourist. 59 However, the Black market possesses a second meaning as the meetings between buyers and sellers of African descent, particularly over culturally significant objects. 60 These interactions are structured in mendacity, suspicion and betrayal, which can increase the vulnerability of participants and/or trust, sincerity and camaraderie, which can intensify racial affiliation and cross-cultural appreciation. 58 This definition is largely based on K.E. Boulding’s foundational work on the black market, “A Note on the Theory of the Black Market,” The Canadian Journal of Economic and Political Science, 13.1 (Feb. 1947): 115-118. 59 Notes derived from a lecture by Prof. Joseph A. Damptey at the University of Ghana, Legon in June 2008. 60 See Rosemary J. Coombe and Paul Stoller, "X Marks the Spot: The Ambiguities of African Trading in the Commerce of the Black Public Sphere," The Black Public Sphere Collective, The Black Public Sphere: A Public Culture Book (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995): 253- 278. These authors discuss the reverse of this chapter, with exchanges between African Americans and Africans in “Little Africa,” a trading market in Harlem, NY. 47 The Black market is both performative and performance. 61 The black market is not always threatening and can be an affirming space that provides a material and ideological site for the realization of common goals. The Black market is a compound of intersecting desires, promises, agonies, hopes, frustrations and fulfillments that challenge and confirm one another. The Black market resists the contradictions of capital and the nation-state by critiquing absolute citizen protection as a myth. 62 The Black market as a structure in crisis mirrors state practices, where the privileges of citizenship can be retracted at any moment without explanation. 63 Intra-racial, transnational alliances are formed as protection against the excesses of the state. Cooperatives are attempted with Ghanaians to provide secure travel, tours and business negotiations while in Ghana and with western tourists for travel and financial opportunities, often to the U.S. or U.K., where it is imagined that life is better. These exchanges, especially with African American tourists or Ghanaians living abroad, take shape through strategies of racial kinship. Such encounters are structured through an ideology of family based on a shared sense of racial suffering. These intra-racial, cross-cultural exchanges take on the historical character of patron-clientism, a 61 See Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex”, (New York: Routledge, 1993). I find Butler’s definition of performativity useful: “performativity must be understood not as a singular or deliberate ‘act,’ but, rather, as the reiterative and citational practice by which discourse produces the effects it names…the understanding of performativity not as the act by which a subject brings into being what she/he names, but, rather, as that reiterative power of discourse to produce the phenomena that it regulates and constrains” (2). 62 See Lisa Lowe and David Lloyd, The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), particularly Lloyd’s essay, “Nationalisms Against the State,” 173-198 and Jacqueline Urla, “Outlaw Language: Creating Alternative Public Spheres in Basque Free Radio,” 280-300. 63 See Giorgio Agamben, Means Without End: Notes on Politics, trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino, Vol. 20 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000) for formulations of the relationship between the people and the state. 48 network between the rich and the poor to ensure a more equal distribution of resources, with which many African Americans might not be familiar. 64 At times these alliances falter due to differing cultural perspectives or misunderstandings over one’s intentions, fall short of intended goals or exact unexpected outcomes. I define Black markets as the postcolonial materiality of disappointed outcomes and unmet expectations. They are tenuous social formations that are determined by exclusion; therefore, Black markets exist outside the law. After Kwame Nkrumah was deposed in 1966, a series of military governments took hold in one coup after another. During his tenure, Nkrumah expressed a commitment to sustaining cultural arts as a national program. Highlife artists during this time were well-paid and enjoyed worldwide travel and record contracts with major music labels. The president promoted national solidarity through a widespread cultural agenda, and he would often tour with bands and advocate music education, theater programs and concert parties as a way to advocate a Ghanaian national identity. After Nkrumah’s overthrow, artists were unable to sustain their music as a primary profession with British companies closing their branch offices in Accra, and record pressing plants and recording studios shutting their doors. For those wanting to work during this volatile period, often the only available option was the churches. Hence, Black markets are crises of governmentality that point to the failures of Ghana’s colonial and post-colonial administrations. They are a response to the government’s treatment 64 See Bruce J. Berman, "Ethnicity, Patronage and the African State: The Politics of Uncivil Nationalism," African Affairs 97.388 (1998): 305-341; Daniel Jordan Smith, “Kinship and Corruption in Contemporary Nigeria,” Ethnos 66.3 (Nov. 2001), 344-364; Glenn Adams and Victoria C. Plaut, "The Cultural Grounding of Personal Relationship: Friendship in North American and West African Worlds," Personal Relationships 10 (2003): 333-347; and Kate Meagher, “Social Capital, Social Liabilities, and Political Capital: Social Networks and Informal Manufacturing in Nigeria,” African Affairs, 105.421 (May 2006): 553-582. 49 of its citizens in vague promises of higher wages, lower school fees, more affordable healthcare, and cheaper prices for food and fuel. Increasingly from the late 1960s, encounters with those who live and/or work outside Ghana become important for improving one’s livelihood. The Black Market Hustle In July 2009, Ghana was the first African country Barack Hussein Obama visited as President of the United States of America. Pundits worldwide wondered why Ghana was so fortunate. Was it because Mrs. Obama’s ancestors passed through Cape Coast Castle? Or perhaps because oil had been struck on the coast of Ghana? Or possibly as a way to commemorate the legacy of Kwame Nkrumah and his call to the diaspora to consider Ghana home? The Obama administration’s response to these queries has remained ambiguous. In a speech given to Ghana’s Parliament, President Obama stated, Ties between our two countries are strong. Conflict is a millstone around Africa’s neck. Africa’s diversity should be a source of strength not division. The 21 st century will be shaped by what happens in Accra. The future of Africans left to Africans. Ghana, freedom is your inheritance. 65 The speech, a mix of pan-African philosophy and U.S. liberalism, was noncommittal toward any direct political objectives to be undertaken in Ghana or on the continent, yet it was full of feel-good rhetoric. Ghana’s president, John Atta Mills, echoed Obama’s sentiment, pronouncing, “President Obama’s visit suggests Ghana as a stable economy and model democracy for the rest of 65 President Barack Obama’s speech to Ghana’s Parliament, Saturday, July 11, 2009, http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/remarks-president-ghanaian-parliament. 50 Africa.” 66 However, in a 2002 interview with the Italian news media, President Mills’ NDC party predecessor Jerry Rawlings declared, My country is involved in the most massive corruption, some of the brutal killings that have taken place, and yet BBC, CNN, SKY News are all quiet. They want to portray the image of that fine Ghana as a showcase for the rest of Africa so that they can use Ghana. They are keeping quiet about the atrocious image of the government because they don’t want to undermine—they have enough problems in Afghanistan—so they do not want to lose the situation in Africa in terms of the new world order. 67 Additionally, Rawlings implies that under J.A. Kufuor’s presidential term from 2001-2009, Ghana became the #2 transit point in Africa for the transportation of cocaine. 68 In fact, the FBI, DEA and U.S. Army have established training commands and military bases in Ghana over the last several years. Pres. Obama’s visit points less towards the country’s stability and more to its vulnerability to western interests as the civil liberties of Ghanaian citizens become even more curtailed. These U.S. organizations are assisting local police and military forces to combat intensified drug trafficking—in marijuana, heroin and cocaine—and to secure the country’s coastal borders and oil reserves. 69 President Mills ran his 2008 campaign by taking a public stance against governmental corruption. During Obama’s visit he remarked, “Our world is 66 President Mills’ remarks to Pres. Obama at the departure ceremony, Kotoko International Airport, Accra, Ghana, Saturday, July 11, 2009, http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/Remarks-By-President-Obama-And-President- Mills-Of-Ghana-At-Departure-Cermony/. 67 See Rawling’s interview. 68 Ibid. 69 See Emmanuel Akyeampong, "Diaspora and Drug Trafficking in West Africa: A Case Study of Ghana," African Affairs 104.416 ( Jul. 2005): 429-447. 51 becoming more vulnerable to international crime. It is a threat to sovereignty.” 70 However, as the food and fuel crisis and unsustainable labor escalates and already scarce resources become even more scant, Ghanaians are turning more towards the illicit economy to provide for their needs and desires. Furthermore, what is obscured in state discourse even as there are promises of transparency, are the collusions between police and state officials in Ghana and internationally that disrupt the capacity of working class and poor Ghanaians, the vast majority of the country, to make livable wages. It has been more than nine months since President Obama’s visit, and the pristine banners welcoming him still drape the side walls of the police barracks. Billboards announcing the Obama family visit surround the city as if residents are still anticipating their arrival. New paint has settled into the old cracks of the hospitals, orphanages, schools and state buildings the Obamas toured last summer. The makeshift stands have reassembled around the motorway exchange near the new shopping mall after being burned down by police in preparation for the U.S. president. Such a Black market, also defined as a shadow or irregular economy, constitutes activities that exist outside law. The law, like a viscous substance, shifts and molds around its creators’ objectives. Recently, The Daily Graphic, Ghana’s most widely read local newspaper, produced a series of articles entitled, “Dealing With the Filth in Accra,” which demands the Accra Metropolitan Assembly issue an ultimatum to displaced traders to relocate once 70 See President Mill’s remarks. 52 again to “The Hawkers Market” in Kwame Nkrumah Circle. 71 The vendors were moved twice from the Pedestrian Shopping Mall to the Central Business District and then to the Hawker’s Market because the surrounding communities resisted their presence, protesting the noise, smells, congestion, and being harassment by sellers. The author writes, “An unprecedented resurgence of a new breed of hawkers and traders cascading onto the streets and pavements of Accra are generating garbage all over the place.” 72 The newspaper’s reference to the traders reflects a dehumanizing national agenda, where filth not only pertains to the vendors’ goods but also their person. 73 The article represents a sustained attempt in public discourse to dismiss hawkers as a problem without any governmental or communal analysis of the conditions that produce such sites. With Obama’s visit, state authorities worked in earnest to reiterate Ghana’s image as a safe and stable country by sanitizing the areas the president would visit with hasty surface makeovers of fresh paint, glossy billboards, public sewer cleanings and waste removals. What has not been addressed are the multiple ways Ghanaian citizens are made vulnerable and unsafe by state agencies, religious infrastructures, international financial institutions and western governments. The Black market responds to exclusion from the category of human being and the expression of worth and value, and of living happily as a natural right. 71 Naa Lamiley Bentil, "Dealing With the Filth in Accra: Hawkers Dare Accra Metropolitan Assembly," The Daily Graphic 10 Aug. 2009. See also Vassos Argyrou, “Keep Cyprus Clean: Littering. Pollution, and Otherness,” Cultural Anthropology 12.2 (1997): 159-178. 72 Ibid: 7. 73 See Steven Gregory, Black Corona: Race and the Politics of Place in an Urban Community, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998) for similar formations within African American neighborhoods. 53 Ghana’s national media absorbs and reproduces the antagonisms between citizens and the nation-state. 74 The Black market comprises an infinite number of overlapping hustles. Hustles are similar to what Paulla Ebron terms the “personalistic economy” and Paul Steege calls, “the history of everyday life,” where scarcity and the struggle to survive dominate all aspects of social, cultural, and political life in the city. 75 It also signifies what Ann Cvetkovich notes as, “a sense of trauma as connected to the textures of everyday experiences” or what Walter Benjamin terms as the “shock” of modern life that reverberates through the human senses. 76 The Black market is made real by the hustle—they are entangled forces that signify relations of dependency. Hustles are “interstitial” places, as Hamid Naficy defines as operating “within and astride the cracks and fissures of the system, benefiting from its contradictions, anomalies, and heterogeneity.” 77 With hustles, the primary source of income is inefficient, so one must expend more energy to acquire an advanced position. Through hustles, one is in the process of acquiring what is needed to live well through concerted effort in one or more endeavors. 74 Homi K. Bhabha, "Arrivals and Departures," Hamid Naficy, ed., Home, Exile, Homeland: Film, Media, and the Politics of Place (New York: Routledge, 1999), ix. 75 See Ebron, Paulla A., Performing Africa (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002): 25 and Paul Steege, Black Market, Cold War: Everyday Life in Berlin, 1946-1949 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007):19. 76 Ann Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003): 3-4 and Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," Hannah Arendt, ed., Illuminations (London: NLB, 1973): 217-242. 77 Hamid Naficy, "Between Rocks and Hard Places," ed. Hamid Naficy, Home, Exile, Homeland: Film, Media, and the Politics of Place (New York: Routledge, 1999): 134. 54 To this end, GQ, an arts dealer and back-up dancer for hiplife artists, V.I.P., answers, I’m a hustler. I be hustling for my whole life selling artworks at a place called the Arts Centre. That’s where tourists from all over the world—America, Europe, Caribbean, Jamaicans—that’s where they all come to buy artworks when in Ghana on tour. When I see Americans, I can tell…I can tell they are coming from America. How they look. When I see them on the tour bus, most of them look ‘brightened’. I can tell they are coming from America but you never know so I have to go close to know what language they’re speaking. So when I go close to them they got a slang, they speaking that slang. Back in the day, when I was 15 selling my artworks, I used to be wildin’, buckwildin’ chasing that money so fast. I used to rush them and talk to them come to my shop and buy. I used to chase them so hard, so fast, so fast and let them buy my things like I was moving by force. (laughs) They got the money flowing, they come down here with a lot of cash dollars and they be shopping crazy, shopping, they buying stuff. My eyes were wide with dollar bills, chasing it…it was crazy. 78 With hustling there is a need to be alert, flexible, aggressive, and determined. Secondary forms of labor may be exercised to make ends meet, sustain or ameliorate social life. 79 GQ exhibits willful connections with African Americans, who have access to particular privileges, in the hopes that it will transform his labor power. Hustling is about creatively and resourcefully finding ways to increase one’s income and/or social status by putting imagination and the body to work. 80 78 Interview with GQ, May 2009. 79 See George Lipsitz, "World Cities and World Beat: Low-Wage Labor and Transnational Culture," The Pacific Historical Review 68.2 (1999): 213-231. 80 See Robin D.G. Kelley, Chapter Two: “Looking to Get Paid: How Some Black Youth Put Culture to Work,” Yo' Mama's Disfunktional!: Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America (Boston: 55 The Black market in Ghana is pervasive, because there are few alternatives. The Black market calls into question how state authorities presume control over imported goods, their use and distribution, even as some government agents facilitate these exchanges. 81 It provides immediate and convenient access to the larger world—the international market outside of Ghana—through a circulation of import goods. Other commodities on the Black market include fuel sold to Francophone countries from Ghana; pirated movies and electronics from Nigeria, China and India, and printed fabric cloth from China and Holland. The Black market is the primary source for media consumption. Media goods exchanged on the Black market are open and public due to lax regulatory laws, unlike other transactions in prescription and illegal drugs, currency and fuel. Ghanaians also engage in Black market exchanges, because they have the potential to be more financially beneficial than legitimate work. Since the supplier does not have to pay for production costs or taxes, Black market goods may be cheaper than legal market prices. Black market goods are stolen or manufactured illegally and sold below the legal market price, but there is no guarantee of its efficiency. The commodities may be more expensive than legal market prices because the product is difficult to acquire or produce, dangerous to handle or not easily available. The Black market is the motor for obtaining privileges that should be afforded naturally by the state. It is about what is absent more than what is present, what goes unseen rather than that which is Beacon Press, 1997): 43-77 and Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). 81 Steege: 49. 56 noticeable, what is unavailable not what is accessible—it is a practice of active desiring and consumption. Music is primarily consumed through the Black market. Music is most widely circulated as burned CDs or digital files on a flash drive among friends, free file-sharing or inexpensive downloading sites in internet cafes or one’s home, or by sellers and shops on busy streets. As in many other countries, music is made available for street purchase, for there is no infrastructure readily present to buy albums that are not funneled through the pirate industry—unless of course, the artist makes the music available for sale at concerts, through individual contact or online purchases such as I-Tunes. However, since Black markets are local and global phenomena, its effects on Ghanaian musicians are experienced outside of the country. For example, rapper Promzy, on a visit to the Bronx where the largest Ghanaian community in the U.S. resides, witnessed the pirating of his group’s CDs. 82 While the hiplife artist was ecstatic that an inter- continental audience would be able to experience his music, such piracy does not allow for a proper recourse for artists to receive royalties, album or distribution sales for their work. Additionally, there is scant enforcement of copyright laws in Ghana and musicians rarely reap the benefits of their labor. Street vendors sell deeply discounted copies of Hollywood, Nigerian, Bollywood and Ghanaian films, CDs, and computer software such as video games, sometimes even before the official release of the title. Copies can easily be produced that are digitally identical to an original and suffer no loss in quality. Since digital information can be duplicated repeatedly with superior visual and acoustic quality, the media is distributed 82 Interview with Promzy, June 2009. 57 electronically at little to no cost. This is the result of innovations in consumer DVD and CD writers, and the widespread availability of cracks on the Internet for most forms of copy protection technology make this inexpensive and simple to perform. This has proved difficult for local and international copyright holders to combat through the courts, because such operations are vastly distributed and widespread. This issue is compounded by widespread indifference to enforcing copyright law in Ghana, both within government and among the consuming public. Ironically, many musicians enjoy the benefits of piracy—particularly international music and films—even as they contest the illegality of their work being duplicated without permission or proper payment. Often, the argument is that Hollywood studios and western record companies can afford such losses in ways that they, as independent and struggling artists, cannot. From Nkrumah to Rawlings Kwame Nkrumah is, perhaps, most widely recognized for a postcolonial presidency that wedded pan-African philosophy to Marxist socialism. During his tenure, Nkrumah embarked on an ambitious agenda of “ideological education” and material development that would ensure Ghana’s self-sufficiency from western government and financial interests. 83 In concert with other African nations struggling toward independence, Nkrumah declared that Africans should “assume the public ownership of the means of production—the land and its resources—and the use of those means of production that will bring benefit to 83 Kwame Nkrumah, "The Kwame Nkrumah Institute: Laying of the Foundation Stone of and the Inaguration of the First Course of the Ideological Section of the Institute," Samuel Obeng, Selected Speeches of Kwame Nkrumah Vol. 2 (Accra: Afram Publications, 2007): 5. This speech was given in the province of Winneba on February 18, 1961. 58 the people.” 84 Nkrumah also expressed solidarity with the Soviet Union, Cuba and African Americans in their similar plights under western embargos, racist imperialism and colonization. While in office, Nkrumah spearheaded a number of infrastructural projects, most notably, the founding of the University of Cape Coast and the Institute of Science and Technology, as well as the construction and rehabilitation of hospitals, primary and secondary schools, bridges and railway systems, the creation of Ghana Airways and The Black Star shipping line, and the building of the Akosombo dam and hydro-electric project. While Nkrumah’s social and economic policies of rapid industrialization, agricultural expansion and import substitution have long been under debate, his critical alliance with Ghana’s artists and musicians has been underexamined. 85 In fact, Nkrumah’s political affiliation, the Convention People’s Party (CPP), worked closely with highlife musicians in the ten years prior to independence in an effort to mobilize Ghanaians against British occupation. 86 Once in office, Nkrumah began setting a comprehensive national agenda with particular economic, educational, political and cultural objectives that would inculcate Ghanaians into a national structure of racial self-determination. Cultural arts 84 Kwame Nkrumah, "Africa Must Be Free," Ibid, 72. This speech was given on April 15, 1961 which is also Africa Freedom Day. In this speech, Nkrumah outlines his definition of African socialism. 85 See Kwame Arhin, The Life and Work of Kwame Nkrumah (Trenton: Africa World Press, 1993); David Birmingham, Kwame Nkrumah: The Father of African Nationalism (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1998); A.B. Assensoh, African Political Leadership: Jomo Kenyatta, Kwame Nkrumah, and Julius K. Nyerere (Malabar: Krieger Publishing Company, 1998); Charles Adom Boateng, The Political Legacy of Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, Vol. 66 (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 2003); June Milne, Kwame Nkrumah: A Biography (Bedford: Panaf Books, 2006); David Rooney, Kwame Nkrumah: Vision and Tragedy (Legon-Accra: Sub-Saharan Publishers, 2007). Basil Davidson, Black Star: A View of the Life and Times of Kwame Nkrumah (Oxford: James Currey, 2007). 86 See Kwame Botwe-Asamoah, Kwame Nkrumah's Politico-Cultural Thought and Policies: An African-Centered Paradigm for the Second Phase of the African Revolution (New York: Routledge, 2005). 59 were used to galvanize the public around an African socialist agenda based on swift development. This program included an extensive exhibition of indigenous arts—drumming, traditional folk music, praise poetry, storytelling, highlife music and concert parties—endorsed by the government in state ceremonies, presidential visits with other country leaders, and public holiday celebrations. As historian Kwame Botwe-Asamoah develops, “Consistent with his ideas on the resurrection of African arts, Nkrumah urged drumming and dancing at the Accra Sports Stadium and other public parks or facilities in the country and art exhibitions to mark Ghana’s Independence Day celebrations.” 87 Native artisans producing sculptures, paintings, masks and other crafts were also incorporated in the administration’s plans for nation building. 88 By reclaiming the cultural life of Ghanaians from British censure, Nkrumah legitimized and celebrated the country’s pre-colonial history and its significance in grappling with Ghana’s postcolonial identities. Nkrumah also mandated an arts education curriculum for public schools with a focus on teaching students traditional instruments, dance and dramatic performance. In 1965, he instituted the Osagyefo Players, a theater troupe that performed African and African American plays. With the National Theater Movement, Nkrumah mandated the importance of performance as The Arts Council of Ghana (later named the Institute of Arts and Culture) set up eight regional committees throughout the 87 Ibid: 155. 88 See Janet Hess, "Exhibiting Ghana: Display, Documentary, and "National" Art in the Nkrumah Era," African Studies Review 44.1 (2001): 59-77 and Janet Berry Hess, Art and Architecture in Postcolonial Africa (Jefferson: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 2006). Hess discusses how Asante artists and culture were privileged over other ethnic artists in Ghana dring Nkrumah’s tenure. 60 country to ensure equal citizen participation in arts creation. 89 The aim of Nkrumah’s cultural agenda was to unite the country’s more than a dozen ethnic groups through a revitalized appreciation for indigenous knowledge and its centrality for accomplishing Ghana’s future development initiatives. As Nkrumah took office, the highlife music recording industry was alive and well. Africa’s first permanent recording studio set up shop in Accra in 1948. 90 Thereafter, British record companies Zonophone, Odeon, Columbia & HMV built branch offices in Accra to compete with French record labels cashing in on the West African market. Highlife musicians were making decent salaries by touring frequently throughout Western Africa and Europe. Most famous was E.T. Mensah, the “King of Highlife,” who sold more records than any Ghanaian musician during this period and jammed with Louis Armstrong, a good friend and supporter of Nkrumah on several occasions. 91 In addition to the many construction projects transforming Ghana’s landscape, Nkrumah, an avid supporter of highlife music and concert parties, set up twenty bands to play at state events and on national radio broadcast and television programs to stimulate a feeling of camaraderie, pride and excellence among the people. Some critics have noted that these bands were propagandistic, uncritically praising 89 See Botwe-Asamoah, particularly Chapter Seven: “Nkrumah’s Cultural Policy: The National Theater Movement.” 90 See John Collins, "The Ghanaian Music Industry: A Quarter Century of Problems," West Africa 19-25 August 2002: 8-9. 91 See Edmund John Collins, "Jazz Feedback to Africa," American Music 5.2 (1987): 176-193 and John Collins, "The Impact of African-American Performance on West Africa From 1800," 19th International Biennial Conference of the African Studies Association of Germany (VAD) on Africa in Context: Historical and Contemporary Interactions with the World (Hannover: VAD, University of Hannover, 2004): 1-6; Penny M. Von Eschen, Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006). 61 Nkrumah as Osagyefo, i.e. “the Leader” or “the Redeemer.” 92 Nkrumah carefully cultivated his connections with musicians and would call on artists to use their influence to rally people, domestically and worldwide, around Ghana’s national agenda. The president also encouraged the development of two independent music unions. Even with the close affiliation between highlife bands and Nkrumah, the music’s deeply political history continued to mediate the relationship between citizens and the government by expressing the diverse sentiments of Ghanaians, ranging from celebration to frustration. Highlife bands such as Saka Acquaye and His African Ensemble would act as cultural ambassadors touring with Nkrumah on international state visits, particularly through western countries. Following Nkrumah’s famous Independence speech, Uhuru’s Band took over the airwaves with “Africa Must Unite, Africa Must Be Free.” 93 Thereafter, it became hip to make Nkrumah music, and a number of bands followed suit, recognizing how such political affiliation could accord monetary and social privileges —The Ramblers’ Dance Band released “Work and Happiness,” an upbeat tune that quickly testified to socialism as a cheery alternative to capitalism. West Indian musician, Lord Kitchener’s, “Sixth of March, 1957,” was in diasporic tribute to Ghana’s Independence Day, along with E.K. Nyame’s music, who over his lifetime composed more than 40 praise songs for Nkrumah. 94 Several of these songs were 92 These critiques came from Nkrumah’s primarily from the western educated, Ghanaian elite such as J.B. Danquah and Kofi Abrefa Busia. 93 See Kofi E. Agovi, "The Political Relevance of Ghanaian Highlife Songs Since 1957," Research in African Literatures 20.2 (1989): 194-201. 94 See Michael Akenoo, "The Role of Ghanaian Musical Artistes,” 1/7/2008, www.modernghana.com, <http://www.modernghana.com/music/6152/3/the-role-of- ghanaian-musical-artistes.html>. Akenoo writes, “the popular highlife composition of Jerry 62 entitled “Onimdeefo Kukukdurufo Kwame Nkrumah (Most Knowledgeable Kwame Nkrumah),” “Nkrumah Will Never Die,” “Nkrumah is a Mighty Man” and “Kwame Nkrumah is Greater Than Before.” 95 However, as more of the public became disillusioned with Nkrumah’s vision for the country, impatient with socialist independence’s slow process of change, and unforgiving of his novice administration’s mistakes, the music began to reflect the citizens’ disfavor. 96 With the ousting of Nkrumah in 1966 as he visited Hanoi on a peace- keeping mission, the first mandate issued by Major-General Joseph Arthur Ankrah’s military government was the banning of all pro-Nkrumah and CPP materials, including books, speeches, pictures, and praise songs. 97 As people took to the streets dancing and singing with joy, Nkrumah supporters were reported to the authorities and jailed, and any confiscated materials were burned in the streets. Even Nkrumah’s statue in Independence Square was bulldozed. Concert parties were banned for three months after Nkrumah was deposed. 98 This was just the beginning of an invigorated censorship, as the new military regime banned highlife songs that now criticized their government, indicting the rich Hanson and the Ramblers Dance Band titled: “Work and Happiness” greatly inspired Ghanaian workers to work very hard for the development of the nation.” Additionally, West Indian musician, Lord Kitchener, dedicated the song “Birth of Ghana” (later called “Sixth of March, 1957”) to the country on the eve of Independence in 1957, where the struggle against anti- colonialism by Nkrumah was seen as a beacon across the Black diaspora. Also see Agovi, 195-198. 95 See Agovi: 195-198. 96 Ibid. Nkrumah’s supporters began releasing politically unfavorable music during the end of his tenure, such as E.T. Mensah’s Tempos Band, “Kurow mu aye diin” (There is a lull in the country), E.K. Nyame’s “Nsu boto a, nframa di kan” (Storm always precedes rainfall) and “Abrabo ye animia” (Life is hard), and Lord Bob Cole’s “Aban Nkaba” (Detention chains). 97 Derived from a lecture at the University of Ghana, Legon, by Prof. John Collins, June 2008. 98 Ibid. 63 and politicians for “chopping big” with the poor and working classes’ tax monies. 99 A succession of military governments took over one coup at a time after Nkrumah was deposed. 100 During the 1960s and 1970s, 15% of all highlife songs were about orphans or broken homes. 101 British scholar of Ghanaian music John Collins considers these songs a reflection of the fragile state of the country under a militarized presence where fear, intimidation, harassment, suspicion, mistrust and betrayal were normalized. The songs testified to a collective feeling of isolation through the metaphor of orphans. The songs expressed hysteria about family members who were now viewed as “strangers in the city” or “others” as political affinities divided kin and desperation over scarce resources took hold. As agricultural production export prices dropped worldwide, more Ghanaians left towns and villages for the capital city of Accra to find employment. These experiences generated a new loss of familiarity and disorientation with social life and identity. Highlife songs during this period would examine city life, reflecting fears over the loss of cultural traditions, urban loneliness, congested living conditions, underpaid wages, and the toil of the city on one’s health. The focus for the succeeding military regimes was to undo the socialist policies of Nkrumah through unfettered inflation, in an attempt to make import 99 See Agovi. 100 Kwame Nkrumah (July 1, 1960-Feb. 24,1966); Major-General Joseph Arthur Ankrah (Feb. 24, 1966-Apr. 2, 1969); Brigadier Akwasi Amankwa Afrifa (Apr. 2, 1969-Aug. 7, 1970); Nii Amaa Oilennu (Aug. 7, 1970-Aug. 31, 1970); Edward Akufo-Addo (Aug. 31, 1970-Jan. 13, 1972); Colonel Ignatius Kutu Acheampong (Jan. 13, 1972-Jul. 5, 1978); Lieutenant-General Frederick Fred William Kwasi Akuffo (Jul. 5, 1978-Jun. 4, 1979); Flight Lieutenant Jerry John Rawlings (Jun. 4, 1979-Sept. 24, 1979); Dr. Hilla Limann (Sept. 24, 1979-Dec. 31, 1981); Jerry Rawlings (Dec. 31, 1981-Jan. 7, 1993). 101 See Collins, "The Ghanaian Music Industry: A Quarter Century of Problems.” 64 goods affordable for Ghanaians and to bolster the economy. However, Ghana’s number one export, cocoa, was faltering internationally, and the cedi was, in effect, uncompetitive with western currency. Other crises plagued Ghana during the late 1960s and 1970s, including rampant unemployment, a food and fuel shortage, and a general dissatisfaction and mistrust of the government’s ability to right the economy and provide for citizens’ basic needs. As Kevin Shillington illustrates, the government produced a “failure to balance government finances, falling agricultural production, loss of confidence in the cedi and unacceptably high inflation.” 102 With such large structural problems, the cultural arts agenda was abandoned and unfinished, much like Nkrumah’s infrastructural and ideological projects. Under the leadership of Colonel Acheampong (1972-1978), the country took a turn for the worse. During the mid-1970s there were four recording studios and two recording press plants that produced over 500,000 records a year. 103 However, this production came to a screeching halt with the kalabule practice. Kalabule is an economic arrangement where a middleman acts as a liaison between the producer and retailer, causing the sale price of imports to go beyond market controls. Kalabule devastated market relations, as many retailers began to hoard everyday imports and sell them for exorbitant prices. During Acheampong’s term, 3 million Ghanaians left to find work in other West African countries, the U.K., North America and Germany, among other nations in Europe. A large number of musicians migrated to Germany because of relaxed 102 Kevin Shillington, Ghana and the Rawlings Factor (London: Macmillan Education Ltd, 1992). 103 See Collins, "The Ghanaian Music Industry: A Quarter Century of Problems.” 65 immigration labor laws when Margaret Thatcher tightened British channels in the late 1970s. In fact, many Ghanaians living in Germany would send goods to Ghana for re-sale, as an income source for struggling family members remaining in Ghana. 104 During this time, “burgher” highlife developed, a mix of Ghanaian highlife, disco, electronic and rock music. By 1979, there was a feverish resistance, led by University of Ghana at Legon students, against governmental corruption causing poor and working class citizens to suffer. Jerry John Rawlings, a former military pilot officer, responded by taking over the presidency with an Nkrumah-inspired socialist agenda in 1981, which became democratic in 1992, and spanned the next twenty years. Early in Rawlings’ term, he decentralized the Arts Council, enacted new copyright legislation and revitalized MUSIGA, which shut down after Nkrumah’s overthrow. However, as armed robberies increased over scarce resources, Rawlings instituted a night curfew law that lasted from 1982-1984, a total of two and a half years. Food and fuel were rationed. Musicians living in Ghana were suddenly out of work, as entertainment venues, nightclubs, restaurants and bars closed shop. Tourism dwindled to a near standstill, as western businesses rapidly pulled out of the country. Budgets for arts education in the public school system were slashed, as parents struggled to pay school fees, and extracurricular instruction was no longer available. Western musical instruments used for highlife performances were classed as luxury imports and incurred a 160% duty, a price that was generally unaffordable for already out-of-work musicians. This spawned a second flight of musicians, intellectuals, journalists and other artists 104 See Shillington. 66 out of Ghana. 105 During the mid-1980s, Francophone Africa began to dominate the African “world music” market with artists such as Salif Keita, Alpha Blondy, Baaba Maal and Youssou N’Dour, making it increasingly difficult for Ghanaian artists to find their niche. Many of the musicians who stayed in Ghana held day rehearsals in their homes in the hope that the curfew laws would be abolished, and nightlife would resume. After the curfews were lifted, many leisure venues switched to a cheaper mode of entertainment in the form of “spinners.” Spinners are sound systems with pre-recorded cassettes of contemporary popular music, sometimes be staffed by a DJ. This option was much less expensive than hiring a live highlife band to play for customers. Electronically produced music also gained popularity as burgher highlife and U.S. hip hop cassette tapes circulated throughout the country from Ghanaians living or visiting abroad in western nations. During this restrictive period, the membership in Christian churches escalated as Ghanaians searched for ways to survive the economic downturn. God is big business in Ghana. Those who identify as Christian total 69% of Ghana. 106 Churches provided one of the few outlets for musicians to find work. As Carlos Sakayi, a popular music producer of highlife and gospel in the 1980s and 1990s, explains, The curfews virtually killed the music business in Ghana. Most of the dancehalls were shut down and taken over by churches, which gave rise to gospel. Most of the musicians had to take refuge in the 105 See Collins, "The Ghanaian Music Industry: A Quarter Century of Problems.” 106 According to the U.S. Department of State, http://www.state.gov/g/drl/rls/irf/2007/90100.htm. 67 church. There were no instruments, so people went to church to look for God and to practice. 107 The record music industry was displaced to the churches, where an audience was already available and growing. As Mantse Aryeequaye, a media journalist, music video director and filmmaker in Ghana, relates, “All the nightlife moved into the church and gave it a totally different dynamic. The music from outside came into the charismatic church, and it was okay because it was praising God.” 108 More than anything, musicians were able to make a living from their craft in the church by giving gospel music a funkier, more danceable edge. In the 1980s, the church became producer, manager and consumer with, a continual supply of domestic and international sponsors. Many churches are affiliated with western congregations, missions, NGOS or charities and receive regular donations in the form of money, clothing, computers, books, and other equipment. Church musicians—instrumentalists, singers, choir directors, composers and arrangers—were provided steady work at their home church and other churches for special services, conferences, seminars and concerts. The opportunities for church musicians could be quite profitable, as performers go on tour throughout Ghana, neighboring African countries and western nations. Many secular highlife musicians such as Daddy Luumba, Papa Yankson, A.B. Crentsil and Kofi Sammy recognized the financial viability and social approval of church work and began to record gospel music. 109 Several church organizations even began their own record labels, artist management firms and recording 107 Interview with Carlos Sakayi, June 2009. 108 Interview with Mantse Aryeequaye, December 2009. 109 See John Collins, "The Gospel Boom," West Africa 19-25 August 2002: 12-13. 68 studios. 110 Since churches in Ghana are considered charitable institutions, they are exempt from paying duties on imported goods such as guitars, saxophones and trumpets. Through the church, musicians are able to use instruments and production equipment needed to perform. Gospel is the most dominant form of highlife in Ghana today. Today, 60% of all music sold in Ghana is gospel music. The remaining 40% comprises western pop, hiplife, hip hop, reggae and dancehall. 111 The shift from military to civilian government under President Rawlings was propelled by international pressure, particularly the creation of structural adjustment programs under the International Monetary Fund and The World Bank. Unfortunately, for structural adjustment programs to work they require private support which demands a disavowal of and disinvestment from public social programs, which administer the needs of the very people the SAPs proclaim to benefit. 112 In 1995, the radio airwaves were fully liberalized. Prior to this, there were three radio stations: GAR, GB1 and GB2 that primarily played gospel highlife and U.S. music—country, pop, easy listening and hip hop. With a liberalized media, stations such as Joy FM, Choice FM, Peace FM and Groove FM began to surface on the air, names that, no doubt, express this newfound democracy and freedom of expression. With Groove FM, in particular, many of the radio presenters such as Ms. Naa, G.I. & Woodman, and Bushke have lived in the U.S. or U.K., and their playlists reflected these experiences abroad, often 110 Ibid. 111 Ibid. 112 See Paulla A. Ebron, Performing Africa (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002). 69 exposing Ghanaian listeners to lesser-known hip hop artists, alternative rock and indie folk musicians. 113 MUSIGA & The Copyright Law The most popular music union, MUSIGA, began in 1964 with 10 members from the band, Uhuru. “Uhuru” means togetherness, which exemplifies their egalitarian philosophy for developing the music protection organization. The band toured in Kenya, Nigerian and Zambia, then decided to split, as members formed their own bands. Jerry Hansen, lead member of the Ramblers International Dance Band, was the union’s first president. The union disbanded from 1967-1981, partly because their biggest champion, Kwame Nkrumah, had been deposed, and the group was largely unsuccessful in obtaining support from the succeeding military governments. During the latter part of Rawlings leadership, MUSIGA was rigorously restored. Throughout the 1990s, Sidiku Buary was president of the music union. Buary’s reputation is marred by charges of embezzlement, bribes, rigged elections and tax evasion. Buary was in collusion with state officials and the Copyright Office to grant particular artists privileges of travel, funding and shows over others. 114 It is common knowledge among local musicians, young and old alike, that Buary promoted his own self-interest, using the music collective as a front. During the mid-1990s, there was a division of the union when opponents to Buary’s rule developed their own organization, PROMA. Exiled musicians who had supported the music union’s restart in the 1980s formed part of this 113 Information derived from multiple interviews with Mantse Aryeequaye. 114 Interview with MUSIGA marketing executive, Mark Hansen, July 2009. 70 new organization. Many of these musicians were not given the chance to vote under Buary. The other claim against Buary was that he deliberately misinformed artists about their rights in receiving royalty payments from the Copyright Office and, effectively, used this money for himself. According to Carlos Sakayi, who was also the former head of PROMA, restaurants, nightclubs, hotels and other leisure venues nationwide pay the Copyright Office between 10- 100 cedis in entertainment tax to play music registered through either of these music unions. Since the 1990s, millions of dollars in royalties from these venues has gone unaccounted. 115 According to Mark Hansen, a marketing manager with MUSIGA and the son of the union’s first president, today the association is much different from the scandals ensued during Buary’s term. There are now more than 1000 members who pay monthly dues. Any musician can join—producer, composer, manager, arranger, dancer, singer, etc. Most of MUSIGA’s clients are hiplife and gospel artists. MUSIGA is often contracted for state functions and pays 90% of royalties to artists for these events. One of the union’s main objectives is to obtain international tour contracts for members through the organization’s many networking contacts in Europe. MUSIGA has established a school of music to train musicians and provide them with rehearsal grounds and a recording studio. The music union also taps into the tourist market by working with students from Denmark, Switzerland and Greece, who study and practice music at the school, paying $4000 each for 3 months of instruction. According to Hansen, the VMA (Veteran’s Music Association), a branch of MUSIGA, solicits funds to aid musicians in legal battles 115 Sakayi and Aryeequaye echoed this sentiment in different interviews. 71 over royalty payments. The VMA is a welfare organization to support a member who is in need of some legal counsel because of stolen music, copyright issues, payola and piracy. MUSIGA also works with police task forces and the Copyright Office to combat piracy. However, many of the young musicians interviewed believe these isolated performances not a sustained investment in eradicating piracy. But Hansen maintains that the music union appeals to media stations to stop piracy and will conduct public forums on the subject. Similar to contestations between artists and MUSIGA, The Copyright Collection Society Association (CCSA) proclaims to register entertainment centers that pay a set fee annually, but there is no public account or transparency in terms of the distribution of money to artists. Prior to independence, British copyright laws extended to its colonies. 1961 marked the first official copyright protection law for intellectual property in Ghana. According to Ben Nyadje, a senior folklore officer with the Copyright Office, this law was not tightly enforced, nor was it formulated for the works of Ghanaian artists, as it was based on British law. 116 The PNDC Law110, was the first progressive copyright law passed in 1985. This amendment came about as Ghanaian highlife musicians lobbied against pirated music in the record bars since they were not collecting royalties from this popular distribution. As Mr. Nyadje states, “Technology compels people to insist on the protection of their work.” This explains why there wasn’t a lot of contestation around the copyright laws before this period. 1985 was the year after the curfew laws were lifted, and spinner electronic production became a popular practice. 116 Interview with Ben Nyadje, June 2009. 72 The copyright law was updated in 2005 and further amended in 2008. There is no clear definition of folklore in the law, which can lead to arbitrary violations, depending on the authority. When asked, Mr. Nyadje defined folklore as “Productions consisting of characteristic elements of the traditional artistic heritage developed and maintained by a community in the country or by individuals reflecting the traditional artistic expectations of such a community— music, dancing, weaving cloth, etc.” However, it is difficult to define which individuals or groups have designed certain folkloric practices, particularly as most are inherited, i.e. passed down from one generation to another. Mr. Nyadje continues, “What belongs to the community is for the whole nation, so no individual should claim ownership to the folklore, and it should be held in trust by the president. If you want to commercialize folklore, you must ask for permission.” This has caused major contestation among musicians who believe that folkloric performances are outlawed, since what constitutes folklore and its use is not clearly or uniformly defined in the bylaws. Also at issue is the enforcement of security devices that must be purchased and affixed to media goods to validate copyright protection. Many musicians, already concerned with increasing rates of street piracy, are even more disillusioned, as they assume that pirates could access these security devices and take the artists’ rightful profits. The 2008 amendment on security devices states, A manufacturer, importer or publisher of sound or audio-visual recording shall [purchase a monitor] on the approval of the Minister [President of Ghana]. A person shall not sell or exhibit for sale a copyright work that requires a security device, without a security device affixed to it. 117 117 The Ghana Copyright Office, Copyright Regulations, 2008, Amendment, The Copyright Office (Anti-Piracy) (Accra: Republic of Ghana, 2008): 16. 73 However, it is not clear how this allows artists to receive rightful proceeds for their work. Mr. Nyadje reassuringly states that, “There will be a way to identify the original work and distinguish the original from the pirated work. The measures we put in place now, it would be very difficult. We will make sure that the features of the security device will be so complex, so advanced that anybody who tries to duplicate it, there will be a difference.” Many musicians are doubtful about the Copyright Office’s capacity to honor such intentions, as media piracy is conducted so publicly without any kind of censure from the Copyright Office or the government. The law states, A person who purchases, rents or borrows a sound recording or audiovisual work which does not have a security device approved by the Minister affixed to the sound recording or audiovisual work commits an offence under section 25 (4) of the Act. 118 Therefore, most of Ghana is committing such crimes daily. Indeed, there are, also, countless stories about copyright officials spending artists’ royalties. Musicians are entitled to 30% royalties for songs played on the radio and in entertainment venues throughout the country. The copyright law proclaims, Where in any public place by means of broadcasting, cinematography, jukebox or other apparatus, a sound recording or audio visual work shall be entitled to royalty in accordance with this act. 119 118 Copyright Amendment: 7. 119 The Ghana Copyright Office, Copyright Act, 2005, The Copyright Office (Anti-Piracy) (Accra: Republic of Ghana, 2005): 8. 74 Of more than 30 hip hop and hiplife artists interviewed at variable levels of popularity, none has received royalties from the Copyright Office. 120 The state’s regulation of folklore suggests an attempt to discipline subjects into proper roles of citizenship, even as media goods continue to be pirated openly in busy districts throughout Accra with no immediate indication that this will come to an end. Contemporary Configurations Record bars were a popular practice in Ghana from the early 1980s through the early 2000s. 121 These businesses started by renting out sound systems for private parties, weddings, and funerals. Much like spinners, record bars would make available pre-recorded playlists and, if requested, DJs for private events. This practice evolved into a consumer demand for playlists for personal home use. Customers would choose from a list of local, western and African popular songs that would be recorded onto cassettes, and later CDs. Although there are a few record bars still in existence today, most were forced to close due to the popularity of digital downloading and music file sharing. For example, the record bar Prime Cut was renowned in Accra during the 1980s and 1990s for having rare African music but went out of business as hard-to-find music became increasingly available on the Internet. Digital downloading primarily takes place in Ghana’s many Internet cafes, where users browse on computers for about $1 an hour. These cafes can be found on practically every corner of Ghana’s major cities. Predominantly a young, 120 See John Collins, "The Problem of Oral Copyright: The Case of Ghana," Simon Frith, Music and Copyright (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993): 146-158. 121 See John Collins, "HiTechnology, Individual Copyright and Ghanaian Music," Helen Lauer, ed., Ghana: Changing Values, Changing Technologies (Washington, D.C.: The Council For Research in Values and Philosophy, 2000). 75 urban male practice, users download songs, television shows and movies from free file sharing websites often before such media is released in the U.S. This certainly counters popular discourse on Africa as underdeveloped and unsophisticated. Perhaps illegal downloading is due to the lack of stores that sell brand new media goods, especially since Ghana receives so many secondhand donations that are often re-sold for individual profit, such as clothing, shoes, computers, books, cars, car parts, etc. The primary exception is the Silverbird Cinemas and Bookstore at Accra Mall, which opened in the spring of 2009. Silverbird products are more expensive than books, CDs and DVDs in the U.S. because of import costs and a lack of competition. Here, prices are often more than the average Ghanaian can afford. Most Ghanaian consumers download media due to a paucity of alternatives or a lack of money. The prevalent mode of accessing music and movies is through street piracy. However, illegal digital downloading might soon intensify with GLO, a Nigerian multi-media company that is building an $800 million submarine fiber- optics cable network off the coast of Ghana with the capacity to reach the entire West African region. 122 This is unprecedented for Ghana telecommunications, as the company promises to bring satellite digital cable, cellular phone and wireless Internet bundles that are faster and have more stable connections than existing media providers. In fact, the cellular phone market in Ghana is already saturated as new competitors are persistently entering the market. All of the cellular phone 122 Globacom Limited is owned by the Mike Adenuga Group and provides telecommunications services in Nigeria, the Republic of Benin and will begin infrastructural work in Ghana and Cote d’Ivoire. The company began in 2003 and now has more than 25 million subscribers. The fiber- optics network will “also improve teleconferencing, distance learning, disaster recovery and telemedicine among several other benefits” (http://www.gloworld.com/Corporate/content/details/223). 76 companies in Ghana are internationally owned: MTN (South Africa), Vodafone (U.K.), Tigo (Bolivia), Zain (Kuwait) and Kasapa (U.A.E./British Virgin Islands). 123 These companies, in a rush to outsell the competition, are offering more services than ever before that make consumer technology more immediate, with radio programming, internet browsing, email, photo, music and video downloading. However, such networks also make piracy more efficient, as many of Ghana’s copyright laws are not strictly regulated and are, therefore, easily bypassed. In fact, cell phone companies are fiercely competing for young urban customers and have within the last five years tapped hiplife artists to endorse their brands. Such artists as Samini, Tinny, Tic Tac and Obour command as little as $10,000 for contracts with little to no room to negotiate. These artists are no doubt the highest paid in Ghana, but their salaries remain relatively modest when compared to major musicians in neighboring countries. As Mr. Sakayi suggests, “Because there is no proper database and the industry is unstructured and unquantified, we are unable to go to government and tell them, ‘look we are contributing so much.’ That’s what we are working on now, to have governments recognize how important the creative arts are to nation building. There is a lack of transparency in the Copyright Office, and we need to look critically at all of these revenue-generating areas and make sure they are properly streamlined.” Nigerian artists like D’banj, 2Face Idibia and P-Square are able to negotiate commercial contracts for as much as $1 million, because in Nigeria there is a more competitive music infrastructure available with a plethora of opportunities to perform on the concert stage, radio, television and 123 MTN was the first cellular phone company to conduct business in Ghana. 77 film. Nigerian record labels, artist managers and music unions often negotiate on behalf of artists’ rights for higher pay, unlike in Ghana. For example, GhanaMusic.com, a website that showcases new music from the country is sustained primarily by Ghanaians who live outside of Ghana, particularly in the U.K. and U.S. 124 The company profiles artists and their music for free in exchange for wide exposure. However, the site does not provide detailed information— outside of the artist’s name and song title—about the musicians, links to their websites, MySpace, Twitter or FaceBook pages or data on where to purchase artists’ music. Thus, the very vehicle used to promote artists does a disservice by not providing proper support for their intended exposure. Nigeria and South Africa offer the most viable options for continental African artists looking to distribute their music to an international market. In both of these countries there are extensive networks of distribution, recording facilities and production equipment access, record labels and a regular variety of small and large-scale performance events to gain exposure. Additionally, continental music awards ceremonies are usually held in Nigeria or South Africa. However, artists from Ghana are lesser known intra-continentally and must compete with Western and other African national artists for television notice. Intra-African channels such as MTV Base and Channel O, both based in South Africa, air music videos at no cost to the artist but one must know program managers at the networks and arrange shipping costs for videos to be received and shown. Artists must also utilize a video format that is consistent with MTV, VH1! or other western music video networks. This requires major funding, often at least $3000 to produce an acceptable music video that could be screened 124 For more information, see www.ghanamusic.com. 78 alongside U.S. and U.K. artists. The benefits of such intra-continental promotion are the promise of widespread exposure. If an artist succeeds by reaching the top 10 chart (voted by viewers) on these channels, there is a higher rotation of the artist’s music video with the possibility of booking shows across the continent, Europe and North America, signing a record deal or endorsement contract in one’s own country, intra-continentally or outside Africa. Unfortunately, Ghanaian artists might have more luck showcasing their videos on MTV Base or Channel O than in Ghana because of payola. Many artists pay radio DJs bribes—sometimes as much as $5000—to play their music on the airwaves. Payola has accelerated the cost of audio production. There are also no plans to set up an agency for ISRC codes in Ghana—the only agencies are in South Africa, Kenya and Nigeria—so that artists can receive royalties if their music is played internationally. For example, MTV pays royalties to African artists who have registered codes. There can be other problems for artists in getting paid on time for performances, contending with managers over the misuse of funds and not receiving royalties from the Copyright Office. Radio, the primary way Ghanaians access information and entertainment, is the most efficient tool for securing a large audience. There are more than thirty radio stations in Accra alone; most feature talk shows about the current state of Ghana’s political economy, and the global market’s effects on citizens’ welfare. As Debra Spitulnik suggests, the portability of radios, especially now on cell phones, helps to define space, one’s identity and ability to stay connected to local, state, regional and global information. This can help to determine daily interactions and participation in a persistent, flexible dialogue that is always on 79 the move and in revision. 125 Media portability reflects a mobilization and mobility of domestic and transnational desires. Ghanaian artists must also pay local television networks—Metro TV, TV3, TV Africa and GTV—to air music videos, which comprises the majority of these networks’ daily programming. Artists pay upwards of $760 for 30 days of a 3-4x daily rotation. 126 New local digital television stations, Crystal TV and Fiesta TV, now air artists’ videos for free but the majority of these tend to be low-budget productions. Several of the FM stations also have television channels that have popularized Spanish and Mexican telenovelas with English voiceovers but, ironically, do not focus on music video programming. Additionally, R&B and pop artists have the opportunity to showcase their talent on one of the many singing talent shows that air live from Accra. Shows such as Stars of the Future and Ghana’s Got Talent! draw large, enthusiastic audiences who sing along with contestants crooning mostly U.S. song selections. 127 However, these national live talent shows do not have distribution to other West African countries, like Nigeria’s Naija Idol, which is in international syndication. This show’s popularity reconfigures how Ghana’s local television programming is produced. Nigeria & Ghana In early 1970, Prime Minister Kofi Abrefa Busia signed off on the Aliens Compliance Order that expelled more than 1 million Africans from Ghana to 125 Debra Spitulnik, "Mobile Machines and Fluid Audiences: Rethinking Reception through Zambian Radio Culture," Faye Ginsburg, Lila Abu-Lughod and Brian Larkin, eds., Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002): 337-354. 126 Information derived from interviews with Mantse Aryeequaye. 127 These shows are free and open to the public. Stars of the Future! Is taped live at the National Theater, the largest auditorium in Accra and it fills up quickly for such recordings. These show contestants compete for a large cash prize and a studio album production deal. 80 their home countries in neighboring Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Togo and Burkina Faso. 128 These immigrants made Ghana home primarily during Nkrumah’s tenure because of his welcoming gesture to other Africans, but also because of the country’s more stable economy, reputation for peace, prosperity and hospitality, and for employment and education opportunities. After the coup, many migrants stayed in Ghana. Busia’s administration believed the expelling would ameliorate the unemployment rate and quell inter-ethnic conflicts over job competition between Ghanaians and African immigrants. With Nigeria’s oil boom in the 1970s and Ghana under strict military rule, thousands of Ghanaians migrated to the neighboring country with each passing year to find work. In January 1983, Nigeria’s president, Shehu Shagari, returned the favor by deporting 1.2 million undocumented Ghanaians back to their country as unemployment in Nigeria soared. Rawlings sent several Black Star liner ships to Lagos to bring home the returnees, and the presidential administration made concerted efforts to reabsorb this new population into the social economy, instructing citizens to share what they could with the returnees. Many in Ghana believe that Shagari’s deportation was part of a larger structure of active destabilization by foreign interests to counter Rawlings’ presidency. 129 It is no secret that Nigerians have a troublesome reputation, particularly with business deals, in Ghana and many parts of the world. Popular Hollywood films such as The Informant (2009), District 9 (2009) and the upcoming Help Me Spread Goodness (2011) reinforce the global popular imagination of Nigerians as 128 See Shillington. 129 Ibid. 81 deceptive, cannibalistic and malevolent. These perceptions have become even more apparent with the 2009 Christmas Day bomb attempt by a young Nigerian student, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, on a flight that began at Kotoka International Airport in Accra and ended in Detroit, Michigan. The actions of this young man have repercussions for not only Nigerians but West Africans in general, that could result in racial profiling, harassment and intimidation by state authorities, and the decreasing of visa permits to the U.S. and U.K. 130 Despite the fact that these two countries are neighbors, Nigeria and Ghana’s reputations are like night and day. Nigerians are lambasted in the everyday conversations of many Ghanaians as indecent, aggressive, duplicitous, and improper. Nigerians are seen as a disgraceful representation of what it means to be African, an embarrassment all over the world. Several Ghanaian informants have recounted being mistaken as Nigerian by non-Africans in the U.K. or U.S. and the lengths it takes to distance oneself from “the Nigerian scheme.” Ghanaians have a very different international reputation, particularly among white westerners, as unfailingly gracious, accommodating and trustworthy. However, many Ghanaians speak of their own people in polar terms—as mendacious, disloyal, and janus-faced. This is partly due to local conceptions of how corruption and bribes structure daily life in coercive ways. Due to the extreme gap between the rich and the poor, small and large forms of bribery have been normalized. These can range from dashes to outright extortion. Dashes or “put some fah de top” is money added to an agreed-upon 130 During my travels back to the U.S. from Ghana in January 2010, I witnessed several new security measures: 1) a security check of hand luggage and a body cavity search when departing Accra 2) while deplaning, certain African men were pulled aside, their passports checked, and dogs sniffed our persons as we arrived in the London Heathrow terminal 3) while re-boarding in London, passengers went through the luggage and body checks again and 4) at the boarding gate in London, we were met with yet another cavity search. 82 price that is perceived as a “gift.” These affable barters between giver and receiver are considered acceptable bribes for the completion of a service, a taxi ride, tailor-made clothes, restaurant meal, etc. Dashes are similar to service tips in the U.S. except they are persistently requested by the receiver. Dashes can also be given to street beggars, especially Nigerien street children who populate downtown Accra’s busy streets, for directing traffic, completing a menial task or engaging in entertaining conversation. 131 What is seen as burdensome are how bribes are extorted against one’s will—at police checkpoints when traveling to one’s destination; in state offices to renew licenses, pay for utility services or passports; or a principal’s offices to pay a child’s school fees. Lies, betrayal and deception are the fantastic material of everyday life in Ghana. Stories of armed robberies, houseboys stealing jewelry or money, family members doctoring wills to receive property, government officials with Swiss bank accounts, and lovers only after material wealth widely circulate in the mundane conversations of taxicabs and tro-tros, business offices and outdoor markets, schoolyards and church sanctuaries, shanties and mansions. Although these incidents occur all over the world, it is interesting to note how such events, between Ghanaians, structure beliefs about duplicity and abuse as normative, while their international reputation suggests the opposite. However, many African Americans moving to Ghana have also had unpleasant experiences 131 Children from Niger, between the ages of 4 and 12, petition strangers for money along Accra’s busiest intersections by approaching cars or grabbing one’s hands as you walk by. Their parents often sit and talk to one another, hundreds of feet away, while their children are at work. 83 with Ghanaians who have swindled money from them in land or real estate deals, businesses and Internet scams. 132 However repulsed Ghanaians may be by the Nigerian reputation, many are equally if not more fascinated by the capacity of Nigerians to command such a popular presence in the African music market. Nigerian music, also called Naija music, dominates MTV Base and Channel O music video programming. Nigeria is far more populous and wealthy than Ghana, due to the oil economy. This creates a more complex music industry where artists can demand greater earnings, perform numerous shows, score endorsement deals and record contracts, complete more polished music videos and record music with state-of- the-art studio production equipment. The music videos of Naija artists often mirror those of U.S. hip hop artists, usually set in a nightclub with a number of scantily clad women surrounding male artists who wear chains, baggy clothes, drink expensive alcohol and drive fancy cars. Since Nigerian music is omnipresent on Ghana’s television and radio networks, Ghanaian hip hop and hiplife artists mimic the style, language and gestures of these Naija artists. Often the goal of hiplife artists are to sign a record deal with a Nigerian music label, have their music played on radio stations in the country or perform shows in Nigeria. Increasingly, the music market in Nigeria is so overwhelmed that many music makers have been migrating to Ghana actively for the last ten years for business opportunities and to build up the country’s music industry. However, 132 See Harvey Glickman, "The Nigerian '419' Advance Fee Scams: Prank or Peril?" Canadian Journal of African Studies 39.3 (2005): 460-489; and Jo Ellen Fair, Melissa Tully, Brian Ekdale, and Rablu K.B. Asante, "Crafting Lifestyles in Urban Africa: Young Ghanaians in the World of Online Friendship," Africa Today 55.4 (2009): 29-49. 84 the Nigerian reputation has mired some of these persons in scandal, confirming what many Ghanaians already believe about their neighbors. Charter House, an event production firm, started in 1999 by Nigerian, Iyiola Ayoade, produces The Ghana Music Awards, the first-ever large-scale ceremony for music in Ghana. Several music industry informants have stated that the show is openly fixed, with awards going to the highest bidder. Similarly, MaddHaus, Inc., a record label started by Nigerian, Livingstone Aik Abani, gained attention in 2008. The founder bought cars, a house and other luxuries on credit. He signed some of Ghana’s biggest hiplife and highlife stars—Tinny, Nana Quame, Obrafour and Kwabena Kwabena—but he left town suddenly after falling behind on payments. Abani also went to trial for assaulting his house caretaker who he accused of stealing. Abani poured hot water on his employee and beat him severely. The company folded after less than a year in operation. 133 Nigerian films, also called Nollywood, are highly popular in Ghana. These videos are featured on local access television throughout the day, large poster advertisements that can be glimpsed throughout the city, and pirated versions of the films are available at kiosk stands and in street traffic. As Mr. Sakayi summarizes, There are a lot of cheap imports coming in, and they are undermining the local works. Nigerian films are coming in and selling 2 for 1 Ghana cedi. If an artist is selling his work for 2 or 3 cedis, the person will say, look I can buy all of Bob Marley’s songs for 1 cedi, why should I buy yours? They have these films coming from China and there are forty movies on one 133 These storied were commonly discussed among music artists interviewed during Summer 2009. 85 DVD. Some of these guys enter the police station and sell them to the police! 134 As the Nigerian, South Asian and Chinese immigrant populations in Ghana increases, so does access to pirated goods. Over the last five years, mega- DVDS from China consisting of 20-40 movies on a single DVD have critically shifted Ghanaians ‘ relationship to media technology. These DVDs along with Bollywood movies and Nigerian videos, can be found throughout Ghana as they are done cheaply for the straight-to-video market. The critical reception of these diverse films suggests a local desire for global fantasy that helps to sustain the banality of everyday life and provides cultural knowledge about social life in other countries. As Brian Larkin notes, Indian and Chinese films serve as a conduit to an imagined faraway place that can mediate local ethnic, gender, and sexual differences. 135 These Eastern hemispheric films provide a “third space” with cultural similarities to Ghana in language, custom, religion, dress, gender roles and family structures. 136 An affiliation with Nigerian media can also act as a foil to Hollywood cinema and suggests intra-African solidarity, fascination and enjoyment. The popularity of Nigerian videos offers something specific that these other regional cinemas cannot, i.e. a cultural and racial familiarity. With Nigerian videos, often the same ensemble of actors are used and storylines rarely vary from conventional themes—conflicts between the village and the city and the loss of cultural tradition, the dead returning to haunt the 134 Sakayi interview, June 2009. 135 Brian Larkin, “The Materiality of Cinema Theaters in Northern Nigeria,” Faye Ginsburg, Lila Abu-Lughod and Brian Larkin, eds., Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002): 319-336. 136 See Larkin. 86 living because of some unknown grievance, and a poor man or woman who after becoming romantically involved discloses that he/she is extremely wealthy. As Larkin writes, “The tropes of sorcery, witchcraft, and supernatural evil have provided a powerful way to express the inequalities of wealth.” 137 The acting is melodramatic and campy, with amateur cinematography and lighting, and the dialogue humorously affects a British vernacular. The videos are popular usually with poor and working class folks and are divided in parts, similar to a television serial, that can stretch to as many as six 2-hour episodes. Ghana does not have a strong film industry, but its few television shows follow the Nigerian video format with similar conventions. One exception is Shirley Frimpong-Manso’s 2009 women-centered film Perfect Picture, which focuses on heterosexual love and sex relationships from the perspective of three middle class Ghanaian women. This film is unprecedented for Ghanaian cinema because it shows women talking quite openly about their sexual desires, experiences and pleasures. The cinematography is much improved with more seamless editing, lighting, picture quality and realistic dialogue. Frimpong-Manso pursued an aggressive marketing strategy with billboard advertisements, corporate sponsorships and sellers who make the film available for purchase on the street and in traffic. 138 On opening weekend, Frimpong-Manso sold out The National Theater, the largest auditorium in Accra, three nights in a row, making Perfect Picture the highest-selling film in Ghana’s history. 137 Larkin: 179. 138 Since her first film, Frimpong-Manso has released two other films, The Sting and the Tale (May 2009) and Checkmate (March 2010). 87 Hustling & International Connections I met them my first week in town. They were posted up in Osu, slumped low, legs eagle-spread across plastic chairs, toothpicks ground down by sharp teeth in hungry mouths, elbows digging holes in the flimsy table like they’d been there all night long. Like they had just been waiting for me to arrive. They peeped me about two blocks up, long before my foot hit the curb where they sat…waiting. They greeted me with “Rasta!” flashing signs of pan-African solidarity and inviting smiles, so I thought, why not? I’ll sit and have a chat. One of them even remembered me, some three years back, when I visited a mutual friend at a nearby tourist market. The conversation was free-flowing…easy like Sunday morning. Being a researcher, I relished the opportunity to talk to these young men (also musicians) as they cavalierly divulged their experiences with white women tourists eager to map fantasies of “Tarzan and Jane” adventures and African safaris onto their Black bodies, how they chilled with Beenie Man and Bob Marley’s sons during concert tours in Ghana and how white tourists taking drum and dance lessons are hopelessly off-beat and out of step with the daily struggles of most Ghanaians. They were Rastas, not in practice but “in the heart,” and it was because of this that they stopped me. 139 They knew I had a good heart…it shone through my eyes and radiated in my smile. People tell me this all the time, so it didn’t seem strange that they would be able to detect this at first glance. At the time it all seemed so sincere. But sometimes we choose to believe in convenient myths because the complicated nature of things can be too 139 “Rasta in the heart” is a common refrain by many young, urban males in Ghana who enjoy reggae and dancehall music and weed smoking. These men do not practice the more rigorous spiritual and physical tenets of Rastafarianism (hair locking, prayer and meditation, veganism, sexual abstinence, fasting, etc.). 88 much. I was visiting Accra alone for the first time, and I was lonely. They read my need for companionship like a national bestseller. I was transparent. Our exchange was so light, facile like we had been friends forever. But I was ready to chop. Do you know of a good place to get cheap eats? Oh, yes! Of course. They jumped up quickly, so kind to escort me to a place. As we walked, they cautioned me against being too gullible—they would show me how to move about town, who was cool to associate with and who was not. I listened, shaking my head but not fully digesting it. After all, I had been to Accra before and knew a few folks. I shrugged off the advice. I gots this. We sat down in a claphouse and ordered palmnut soup with fish and banku. I was so ecstatic about the good food and company that I made up my mind to thank my new friends by paying for the $5 meal. But there was something odd about their manner that suggested they never intended to pay. Aha…I was their meal ticket for the day. Checkmate. Many weeks later, I ran into one of those cats as I was buying phone credit in the market. I didn’t respect his hustle. I heard he moved hot stuff like chefs flip pots. He wore that same eager smile, waving me over to the bar. I’ve never been good at being curt, and I suppose, he sensed this. I went over to say hello. Soon after, I’m talking and laughing like nothing ever went down. He wanted to take me to a drumming class and a reggae party at LaBadi Beach. Green like fresh-cut grass…I watched the market of sellers and buyers busy making the day with the exchange of things for things. I saw young white men with hiking shoes and bulky backpacks stroll along, and white middle-aged men in business dress purposefully striding with beautiful, young Ghanaian women in tow. The hustler and a few other men at the bar hissed at every white guy passing, calling their attention. Some ignored them altogether while others would stop over. 89 “That’s my friend, that guy. I know him,” he informed me. “I give him plenty business.” He shook his head as if possessed, his green eyes bright with intention, the broken tooth in the front appearing more jagged as his grin widened. I couldn’t help but ask, what business? He looked at me sideways and chuckled. The white men were called “Johnny-Just-Comes,” and young Ghanaian men would compete for these tourists, showing them popular sites of interest, bars, clubs, and of course, women. He laughed with hands clapping loudly, “we show them what they want to see, and then we bill you!” It was brilliant, subtle in its magic. Was I a Johnny-Just-Come? Many of the young, mostly male hip hop and hiplife musicians, work their craft full time. Due to this profession’s unstable wages, most artists live with parents or other relatives or experiment with side hustles such as drug dealing or cyberfraud scams. A few rappers have romantic benefactors in the U.S. or U.K. who provide money, clothing, digital technologies and other resources between gigs or help fund the musician’s next project. For instance, Kwazy, one of Ghana’s top hiplife artists, grew up in a small coastal fishing town in Southern Ghana. He came to Accra penniless in 2004, frequently sleeping in the recording studio while finishing his first album. 140 Kwazy’s career took off in 2006, and now he regularly sells out concert stadiums and has even recorded a song with U.S. multi-platinum artist, Wyclef Jean. In 2008, he married a visa official with the U.S. Embassy, a white woman in her early 50s from Southern California. This marriage has certain privileges such as a U.S. green card, frequent trips to the U.S. to promote his music, and a three-story townhouse in a gated community in 140 Name has been changed. 90 Cantoments, one of the most expensive neighborhoods in Accra. Kwazy has been vague about his marriage to the public. It cannot be ascertained whether this is a legitimately loving union, but it has, no doubt, provided benefits for launching his career into the western market that he might not enjoy without this relationship. Other arrangements to secure international traveling opportunities, such as visa racketeering, have become a serious enterprise in recent years. 141 As more Ghanaians move abroad, particularly to London and the U.S.—NYC/New Jersey, Washington, D.C. and Atlanta are the most populous Ghanaian centers— there has been an increasing demand for contemporary Ghanaian music at Independence Day celebrations, heritage festivals and African or Ghanaian association meeting events. Musicians such as V.I.P., MzBel, Reggie Rockstone, Tinny, and Samini enjoy regular employment on the international tour circuit. As word began to circulate that artists were making sizable wages on festival rounds, non-musicians began to take a chance at the U.S. and U.K. visa offices. During Sidiku Buary’s term as president of MUSIGA, often a letter and ID card attesting to an artist’s membership was all that was necessary for international travel. One of the charges leveled against Buary is how fake letters and IDs were made for persons posing as artists who paid handsomely for such 141 Unknown, "Kaarekyire Appiah Confesses to Visa Racketeering," 11 Feb. 1999, www.ghanaweb.com, Sport News, http://www.ghanaweb.com/GhanaHomePage/NewsArchive/artikel.php?ID=5020 . Musician, Kaarekyire Appiah, also a member of MUSIGA was charged with racketeering. MUSIGA responds with “there is no effective mechanism to control the possibility of the production of fake banderoles and MUSIGA must come out to help local artists to reach international levels. There is the need for a complete restructuring of the union in order to solve the many issues facing the music industry;” Unknown, "Ghana: Embassy Racketeers Visa for $625 in China," 25 April 2008, www.allAfrica.com, Public Agenda, http://allafrica.com/stories/200804250880.html . 91 accreditation. 142 Racketeers can now charge upwards of $5000 and work with those portraying musicians by preparing necessary documents so that these persons can travel abroad, ostensibly to play shows. Of course, these persons have no intention of returning to Ghana. Whether or not a person will return to their home country after a visit to a host nation is the determining factor for visa officials. Joanna Bailey, an African American visa official interviewed during the summer of 2009, stated that she was taught to profile persons by examining their accent, dress, profession, and previous travel to western countries as a means of deciding whether to grant a visa. 143 Over a two-year period, Joanna would see more than 80 people a day, usually granting on average about 20% of those requesting visas. She described how difficult it was at first to do this job based on five-minute meetings and how she became desensitized over time, how she would have to be escorted home after work because sometimes those she had denied would be waiting for her outside the Embassy building, of being cursed out while in town by folks she had denied or given all sorts of gifts because a friend or acquaintance’s mother’s sister’s uncle’s brother would like to come to the States, of being monitored by her boss on each interview and accused of granting too many visas because she was sympathetic to Ghanaians as an African American. “It’s a performance. You must act as if your life doesn’t depend on going,” another visa officer told a Ghanaian musician informant who has been denied twice a visit to the U.S. even with official invitations from accredited institutions. After refusing to review his 142 Information obtained from interviews with Matthew Hansen, Carlos Sakayi and Mantse Aryeequaye. 143 Name has been changed. 92 letters of invitation or accreditation, this informant was told by a visa representative that it was suspected he would not return because despite his many travels throughout the continent he had never visited any western countries. Musicians who attempt to travel to the U.S. now might endure invasive questions about their personal lives such as their diet and sex life. Some are even asked to perform on the spot to verify that they are, indeed, artists. Often artists ask for westerners to vouch for them through an official letter of invitation. However, the U.S. Embassy declares that this does not affect the decision making process. On a number of occasions I’ve been solicited to provide letters of support, collect donations, arrange shows, and set up export business contacts for acquaintances, friends and informants in Ghana. These exchanges are always interesting, because I am aware of my limits and capacity to make a material difference in the lives of these Ghanaians, which ultimately challenges their assumptions about my ability to provide opportunities for them. These encounters are impacted by traditional moral economies, where the wealthy provide opportunities in education, housing, and employment, among other things for working class or poor kin. The patron-client relationship is a common social arrangement throughout Africa that ensures that benefits are distributed more equally, regardless of class. However, such a structure also breeds favoritism, indebtedness, and exploitation for both rich and poor. As Daniel Jordan Smith shares about patron-clientism in Nigeria, “Although cases of favoritism based on kinship and other close social ties sometimes elicit discussions about conflicts of interest, by and large such instances of corruption 93 are socially accepted because they build on an established moral economy.” 144 Many African American tourists resist these kinds of exchanges with Ghanaians, as it privileges their economic capacity over shared racial or cultural traits. As GQ shares about his market exchanges with some African American tourists, Can I talk about some of the sisters and brothers? This is the way the act when they come to Ghana, like fresh in town. The tour group when they come to the art market…some of the sisters, you try to talk to them or you try to hold their hand and take them to your shop? They be like don’t touch me, don’t touch me you don’t even know me. Please, don’t arrest me, don’t touch me! Some of them are not nice, they’re not nice. 145 Ghanaians use strategies of racial kinship—an affinity through shared histories of racial suffering—to secure sustained relationships with African American visitors for international work opportunities. These connections are built on notions of reciprocity as tourists depend on Ghanaian associates to provide cultural history, language mediation, and market bartering and to make their vacation experiences line up as closely as possible to an imagined kinship. African American tourists are not fully aware of the exhaustive labor involved, on the part of Ghanaians, who are welcoming them “back home.” This is even more compounded for Ghanaians who live abroad and maintain connections with family and friends in Ghana, as it stirs up a cultural complex of expectations, desires, obligations and frustrations that they may not be able to perform. The pressure to financially support one’s family can lead one to illicit work, which offers the possibility of wealth through substantial risk. 144 Daniel Jordan Smith, A Culture of Corruption: Everyday Deception and Popular Discontent in Nigeria (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008): 35. See also Smith, "Ritual Killing, 419, and Fast Wealth: Inequality and the Popular Imagination in Southeastern Nigeria," American Ethnologist 28.4 (2001): 803-826. 145 GQ interview, May 2009. 94 Mugu & Cyberfraud In late 2008, Pope Skinny’s single, “Mugu” hit the streets and next the radio airwaves. Intended as an anti-fraud campaign, the hiplife artist states that instead “the young boys” who run Internet scams laud him with praise. Mugu refers to persons, usually white Americans, who have been tricked into a scheme. These frauds typically involve an email in which a young man requests foreign assistance to access his father or grandfather’s fortune in gold, diamonds or coal mining. The letter urgently requests the bank information of the letter receiver to deposit funds in a western bank account. For this deed the email recipient will collect a percentage of the monies. Some investment schemes are especially intricate, where dummy businesses are set up and the pawn is flown to Lagos or Accra, put up in a nice hotel, given a lavish dinner where he meets business associates, all with the intention to make this financial venture seem legitimate. Once the investor puts up his share of the funds, sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars for a deal in oil, gold or diamonds, all persons involved disappear without a trace, often leaving the person stuck with the hotel bill and no way to return home. 146 Pope Skinny smiles, “It’s an exchange of gifts.” 147 The investor gives his money for the imagined resource. He continues, “The whites—they don’t ask questions. They think they are superior and that all Africans are fools, but we show them.” Those who run mugu don’t consider what they are doing as wrong. They believe one shouldn’t be greedy and attempt to get something for nothing. 146 See Smith. 147 Interview with Pope Skinny in July 2009. 95 The idea is that whites—the term is used broadly to refer to those, regardless of race, living in North America and Europe—are in an economic position where they can easily recover such losses and that the balance has been shifted, rightfully, to those who are in need. In some ways, it is a resistive politics for folks who are intimately aware of centuries of enslavement, colonialism and imperialist debt loans that have devastated the lives of Ghanaians and the country in unimaginable ways. The ruse is successful, because the dupe does not expect that Africans would be able to pull off something with this level of cogency, intelligence and technological sophistication. Mugu is an exercise in the re-appropriation and repatriation of labor power, to make back what has been, historically, expended. The song states, 419 game/419 fame/where the internet café is the office, home, job and school/we chop your dollars and take your pounds/it no be blood money/make it rain/give to the needy and not the greedy/and I’ll claim $67 million. 148 “Mugu” directly references the practice of 419 Internet scams in Nigeria, which migrated to Ghana in force about five years ago as Ghana began to feel the effects of U.S. occupation in Iraq. GQ proclaims about the entanglement of the global and local economy: Most of my customers come from America and they don’t come down here like they come before because things be messed up about Sept. 11 th , what happened and the disaster and it make things tight for me. Clinton time, it used to be a lot of tourists from America come down here and shop, buy artworks but not anymore. When Bush came in power, things happened so people not coming like Clinton time. He make things tight in America and I think it’s affecting me and my artwork. His time a lot of disasters 148 Song lyrics quoted to me by Pope Skinny. 96 happen in America and it make things tight for the African Americans to come down here to buy artworks. I used to do export to my customers that I know in America and they would sell it for me and send me the money back. I still export things to them but they tell me things are not selling in the U.S. My exportation is not moving, it’s not working. During J.A. Kufuor’s regime (2001-2008), tourism decreased, and less foreign capital was being spent in Ghana following 9/11. To combat unemployment, young men began to find new and improved ways to create and sustain income. The song’s reference to blood money suggests that mugu schemes are not harmful like gang conflicts, murder or juju, where people are sacrificed for religious rituals. Mugu is also different from sakawa, which refers to credit card fraud usually to buy goods that can be re-sold in Ghana. Sakawa has been taken up by the local news media and in popular discourse to refer to infrequent juju rituals, in Nigeria and Ghana, where young men pay priests with the request of material wealth. 149 These spectacular legends of violence somehow are conflated with 419 scams, armed robberies, and ritual murders in local news. 150 Another popular Internet scam is the establishment of romantic relationships online followed by a solicitation of money. At Busy Internet Café, the largest web browsing business in Ghana, portals have been shut down with restricted access to the mainframe because of the prevalence of such cyberfraud scams. 151 Often young Ghanaian men pose as women in these online romance 149 See Smith. 150 Ibid. 151 Unknown, "German Embassy Worried About Cyberfraud Involving Ghana, Others," 19 March 2009, www.modernghana.com, Ghana News Agency, http://www.modernghana.com/news/207243/1/german-embassy-worried-about-cyber-fraud- involving.html; Unknown, "Ghana Can Lose Investors Through Cyberfraud--DSP Baah," 21 Jun. 97 schemes, although some women participate. Cyberfraud schemes are large, intricate networks that extend beyond the runners on the ground. Yet another fraudulent enterprise is the Johnny-Just-Come arrangement where young Ghanaian men operate as tour guides for older white businessmen from the U.S. or U.K., showing them nightlife options, restaurants, popular sites of interest and women. A few of the reasons so many young Ghanaian men participate in such schemes are to combat unemployment, to have money savings when one is not paid on time for work rendered, or to possess a higher income and live like the young Black men one sees on U.S. music videos. Pope Skinny relays, “Sometimes you have to wear a disguise to get a message out. I want to say to the young boys that you don’t need fraud. Use talent to get ahead like me.” Pope Skinny hopes “Mugu” will create a platform for a larger discussion between poor neighborhoods like Nima and Jamestown, police, government officials and artists. The rapper maintains, “The government and the police don’t want to stop these frauds because it brings them money.” Indeed, there are regular round-ups of young men at Internet cafes throughout Accra and in order to secure release, the detainees must pay the arresting officers. Once released, the young men return to their fraudulent schemes. In fact, network executives at local television stations have censored Pope Skinny’s interviews. Even though his music is being played in Nigeria and throughout Ghana, Pope Skinny has yet to see any royalties from the Copyright Office. He requests sponsors to finish his album, promote his anti-fraud cause and start citywide dialogues about corruption. The 2009, www.modernghana.com, Ghana News Agency, http://www.modernghana.com/news/223119/1/ghana-can-lose-investors-through-cyber- fraud-dsp-b.html . 98 artist had recently booked two gigs, one in Belgium and another in New York City, both for Ghanaian heritage festivals but other managers undersold him, and their artists were booked for the shows. Pope Skinny sighs, “I want to use the international to get my music out but it’s all about who you know.” Cousin Lamont & The Mugu “We got a problem,” Melvin’s text message reads. “Your cousin Lamont just showed up in Ghana and he doesn’t have any money.” 152 What? How can this be? My brain goes numb. I can’t make sense of it. Lamont, a second cousin on my father’s side, had called me several months earlier inquiring about what life was like in Ghana. Lamont, in his mid-fifties, had recently divorced his wife of thirty years. His children are all grown with lives of their own, and the only thing tying him down is a condo in Orlando. He longed to begin life anew. So, he got in touch with a Ghanaian college friend, who recently repatriated to Ghana, about job opportunities there. Lamont informs me that his friend knows a police officer who knows a high-level managerial executive at the Bank of Ghana who has the perfect position for him. “I’ll be a manager of diversity at the bank. They say they gonna pay me $2,000 a week,” Lamont reassures me. I shake my head at the telephone. “I don’t trust it, Cousin Lamont. It sounds really fishy to me. Is your experience working with Wells Fargo commensurate with what they are offering?” Lamont tells me that although he has been working as a bank teller for the past twenty years he knows a lot about how banks work and had even earned an A in an International Business class in college. Having never traveled outside 152 Name has been changed. 99 North America, he was surprised that “Africa” had such large financial institutions, Internet technology and cell phone access. I tell him, point blank, it sounds like a scam. He replies that he knows all about scams. In fact, the police officer was helping him get back several hundred dollars from a bogus online romance with a Ghanaian “woman.” I hammer off a list of questions, over several phone calls, asking about his friend, the policeman, and the mysterious bank executive named John Smith. Smith wasn’t even a Ghanaian name, which to me was a dead giveaway! 153 “Every time I call his cell phone, the line is either busy or his secretary says he’s in a meeting. Don’t worry, I haven’t given them my bank information or anything. But John says they are not allowed to send the contract over email so I’ll fill out the paperwork when I get there,” Lamont continues. Again and again, I voice my reservations—the whole thing reeked of mugu—but to no avail. He is convinced that he is doing the right thing—a decision supported by his local pastor and trusted Ghanaian friend. Months later, Lamont phones Melvin sixteen times on the day after he arrived. He is stuck in a remote hotel in Tema—about 45 minutes outside of Accra—and needs $400 to pay for his 3-day stay until he can get a flight out. He is evasive about what happened upon his arrival but the hotel attendant persistently calls Melvin about handling Lamont’s unpaid bill. Upon reaching my cousin, I am met with blissful oblivion. Why on earth are Melvin and I more concerned about his safety than he is? “Cousin Lamont, where is your friend? Why didn’t you notify me before departing for Ghana?” He skirts the issue and quickly responds that his friend does not have a car, and the electricity is not working at his house, which is why he is staying at the hotel. Apparently, the 153 English surnames, however, are popular in the Fante regions of Ghana. 100 friend spent his last money covering transportation from the airport to the hotel. I impart to Lamont that he should take a taxi to the closest ATM, withdraw enough money to pay for the ride there and to the airport, and take the first flight out since he has already purchased a roundtrip ticket. Instead, Lamont tells me that he has not been able to get through to Mr. Smith but wants to wait a couple more days to see if they could meet before leaving. Meanwhile, the hotel attendant continues to call Melvin about the bill and because what “sounds like Nigerians” keep calling his phone to find out where Lamont is located. Indeed, Lamont made an excellent mugu candidate. 154 In this illustration, Melvin as a Ghanaian was drawn into a circuit of kinship and petitioned to provide monetary support, security and emotional support for an African American tourist. Unfortunately, this particular scheme is a familiar story for many African Americans who desire to repatriate to Ghana, where their unfamiliarity with local customs, etiquette and business transactions is fair prey and an opportunity for Ghanaians to make a livable wage, of course at another’s expense. The displacement of the scheme by the hotel attendant onto the callers requesting Lamont’s whereabouts—with “they sounded Nigerian”— reinforces the idea that Ghana’s neighbor is the generator and culprit of such mayhem, even if carried out by Ghanaians. These encounters have larger repercussions with the potential to deter tourists and repatriates from travelling to Ghana, western financiers from engaging in business locally, and musicians from being able to acquire cooperatives with tourists or travel visas by western embassies. The Black market—a material and affective site embodying complicated exchanges in affirmation, deception, promises, agony and hope— 154 Lamont eventually made it back to the U.S. safely. 101 works by increasing or diminishing the vulnerability of social life for its participants. In the encounters between Ghanaians and African American tourists, this is primarily accomplished through notions of racial kinship, particularly a family-based ideology centered on shared dispossession. This concept of kinship is not free, but requires something specific from each participant. It is what rapper Pope Skinny terms “an exchange of gifts,” or rather an entanglement of capacity or talents to make life better for another. Kinship is a mutual investment, an exercise in reciprocity that can be effectively realized or a source of surprising disillusionment in the cultural and material transactions within the Black market. 102 Chapter Two: I Know You Got Soul! Pan-African Possibilities, State Shock and Musical Moxie “Though the 1970s was a decade governed by soldiers,” a female voice announces over bell chimes, “Welcome to The Voice of A People.” As the hard- hitting akumpan, djembe and congo drums filter in, the woman repeats, “Welcome to The Voice of A People.” A British lilt betrays her voice as a bright, springy children’s chorus seeps in. The youth envelop the drum pattern but their chant is indistinguishable. The kids’ words are muddled—bumping, blending and blurring—into a thick, melodious incantation that emphasizes the singsong rhythm over what is actually being said, unlike the clarity of the woman’s voice. A faint string orchestra vacillates between the drums and the chorus, providing a persistent yet conflicting backbeat for the song. Towards the end of the minute and a half long interlude, the drums and the chorus stop abruptly as a man’s voice proclaims, “My apparition rose from the fall of Land/declared I’m a civilian.” The drums resume again with even more ferocity as the strings reappear intermittently and then fade out slowly. This song illustration is from Ghanaian music producer Kweku Ananse’s 2009 limited edition LP, A Trillion Stories. Ananse is an integral part of a contemporary arts movement by young Ghanaians who are examining their porous identities through the use of local, regional, continental and global sounds. 155 Through sonic practices, these young artists contest western discourse 155 There are a number of live music and DJ party events happening in Accra, from nightclubs to lounges to open mics. The arts scene is experiencing a revival with a number of musicians 103 of Africans as static, one-dimensional and ahistorical. Ananse’s music intricately weaves West African folk, Ghanaian highlife, Nigerian Afro-Beat, African American soul, funk and hip hop, among other music, into a rich meta-narrative, or rather, a totality of diverse Black social experiences. 156 “Voice of A People” sonically demonstrates Kwame Nkrumah’s philosophy of pan-African interdependence by lacing together disparate racial geographies through sound. In fact, the above example merges four different recordings: Dutch electronica group, Owusu & Hannibal’s “Intro (Leo);” a Nigeria 70 Afro-Beat compilation song; a Ghanaian highlife song by Oscar Fulley entitled, “Bukom Still Stands;” and a voiceover by Wunmi, a Nigerian indie artist. 157 This chapter examines the extent to which Kwame Nkrumah’s ideological vision for Ghana and the continent endures in the post-1966 sonic practices of young Ghanaian and African American artists. Kwame Nkrumah exhibits what I term a soul ideology that manifests through a racial philosophy intended to mobilize colonized populations worldwide. With a rigorous program of African experimenting with various music—rock, electronica, West African folk, Afro-Beat, highlife, soca, dub, etc. A number of these artists have either traveled extensively to or lived in western countries, resulting in musical collaborations with Ghanaian diasporic, African American, and African Caribbean artists. Some of these Ghanaian and Ghanaian diasporic artists are J-Town, Kwaku TuTu, Jayso, Wanlov the Kubulor, Reggie Rockstone, Mensa, Doneo, Rocky Dawuni, Santee, Tawiah, Blitz the Ambassador, M.anifest, and Sway. 156 See Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000). Robinson’s definition of ontological totality is critical: “…granted by a metaphysical system that had never allowed for property in either the physical, philosophical, temporal, legal, social, or psychic senses” (168). Robinson indicates the importance of mysticism for radical Black thought which is similar to Kwame Nkrumah and Black music’s soulful or magical capacity, as I will discuss. 157 See Owusu & Hannibal, "Intro (Leo)," Living With..., by Phillip Owusu and Robin Hannibal, Ubiquity Records, 2006, Owusu is half-Ghanaian; Oscar Fulley, “Bukom Still Stands,” Bukom Mashi, Bukom is a slum in Accra. Kweku Ananse as a musical producer downloads many songs every day. As such, he does not know the title of the Nigeria 70 Afro-Beat compilation song or where the Wumi vocals are from. Wunmi, a popular Nigerian indie artist, has spent considerable time living and working in the U.K. His adaptation of these recordings together creates a specific narrative of Ghana’s history even as only one of the songs is from a Ghanaian artist. 104 socialism, Nkrumah prioritized the dynamic preservation of African cultural idioms and rituals, socialist independence from western imperialism and an intermutual struggle for self-determination among dispersed Black peoples. Soul is a magical charisma, metaphysical aura, or spectacular presence that is most popularly associated with African American musical practices but can also be extended to food, dress, language, gestures, and ideas. While Nkrumah’s pan- African theoretical practice was activated specifically through the state, he was also committed to working with non-Ghanaians against the coercive forces of imperialism and capitalism. The compelling life and work of Nkrumah is similar to the captivating quality of Black music. The ideologies of Nkrumah and the epistemologies of Black music have fascinated people across the world, particularly, by stimulating the development of tangible, intellectual and affective sites of engagement based on shared dispossession and the collective need for redress, relief and release. This chapter examines the paradox of the Ghanaian state—its magical capacity to determine social life and death—as cultural performance. Particularly, I am interested in how these two categories, Ghanaian and the state, inform one another. However, Kwame Nkrumah’s pan-African socialism seems to be at odds with the magical capacity of the state to discipline its subjects into acceptable forms of being, either through legibility (as citizens) or illegality (as foreigners/aliens). 158 In fact, the supernatural beliefs of Ghanaians were 158 See Clifford Geertz, Negara: The Theatre State in Nineteenth-Century Bali (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980); Michael Taussig, The Magic of the State (New York: Routledge, 1997); Lisa Rofel, Other Modernities: Gendered Yearnings in China After Socialism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); Kelly M. Askew, Performing the Nation: Swahili Music and Cultural Politics in Tanzania (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); Daina Stukuls Eglitis, Imagining the Nation: History, Modernity, and Revolution in Latvia (State College: Pennsylvania State University 105 outlawed under British colonization because indigenous wisdoms confronted the coercive features of the state and made Christianizing missions difficult. However, Ghanaian belief systems were not dismantled under British occupation, but were rather spoken of as “whispers” in everyday life. 159 A common belief of everyday Ghanaians is that colonial state authorities, the post- Nkrumah military governments and the African elite have used occult rituals, such as juju and black magic in evil and wicked manners, to increase their wealth at the expense of poor and working class citizens. 160 Many Ghanaians also believe that Nkrumah used magic for good, to catapult the country to independence. Towards the end of his term, this same magic was interpreted as regulating the lives of citizens in deleterious ways, under the slow course of socialism that fell short of the dreams of independence. This mysterious hold between the state and its subjects is a performance in regulation. The state can provide the daily needs of its citizens while also operating against their best interests. The postcolonial state of Ghana inherited categories of modern production from colonialism and has disciplined the lives of its subjects in affirming and compulsory ways that make life and death a reality. Even as Nkrumah struggled against racist imperialism, his administration, at times, reiterated the colonial state’s uncompromising control Press, 2005); Lisa Rofel, Desiring China: Experiments in Neoliberalism, Sexuality, and Public Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007). 159 See Jean Comaroff, Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance: The Culture and History of a South African People, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985); Eric Gable, “A Secret Shared: Fieldwork and the Sinister in a West African Village,” Cultural Anthropology 12.2 (1987): 213-233; and Clifton Crais, The Politics of Evil: Magic, State Power, and the Political Imagination in South Africa (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). 160 Ahmad A. Rahman, The Regime Change of Kwame Nkrumah: Epic Heroism in Africa and the Diaspora (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). 106 over social life. Additionally, highlife, hip hop and hiplife artists remember the excesses of the state either firsthand under the military regimes of the1970s or through its aftermath in the 1980s under President Jerry Rawlings, when the food and fuel crisis and night curfew laws threatened daily life and the national music industry. These experiences under Ghana’s postcolonial governments have produced individual and collective responses to enduring state abuses against citizenship—particularly, the capacity to make a livable wage, to enjoy transcontinental mobility, and to regulate the unlawful usage of one’s music by sellers and consumers through enforced copyright protection. What Nkrumah called “the anxiety of work” in anti-colonial struggle, literally transformed the Gold Coast colony into Ghana, once an ancient Sudanese empire and now “an inspiration for the future.” 161 In fact, Nkrumah’s comrades often described him as an anxious man who “would work himself and others into a state of exhaustion” and “was hurrying too fast for his people.” 162 As Nkrumah himself professed, “I must go on, time is against me.” 163 Anxiety is not only the work of anti-imperialist forces, but also of living under the brunt of such forces, of inhabiting the narrow space between African and Western. Anxiety is amplified through the human body and between social bodies at local, state, regional and global scales. Cultural performance is the physical labor of the 161 Kwame Nkrumah, "Casablanca Conference," Samuel Obeng, Selected Speeches of Kwame Nkrumah, Vol. 2 (Accra: Afram Publications, 2007): 2, and F.K. Buah, A History of Ghana (London: Macmillan, 1980): 166. Also see Richard Slobodin, “Some Social Functions of Kutchin Anxiety,” American Anthropologist, New Series 62.1 (1960): 122-133 on how the northeastern Athapaskan- speaking Indians use magic to reduce everyday anxiety; 162 Kwame Botwe-Asamoah, Kwame Nkrumah's Politico-Cultural Thought and Policies: An African- Centered Paradigm for the Second Phase of the African Revolution (New York: Routledge, 2005): 13. 163 Genoveva Kanu, Nkrumah the Man: A Friend's Testimony (Enugu Delta of Nigeria, 1982): 20. 107 imagination that works in concert with or in opposition to the creative and destructive work of colonialism, war, westernization, and imperialism. Nkrumah deployed cultural performance, specifically, to inspire Ghanaians with a past that could sustain their present and carry them into the future. The nervous work of culture is in anticipation of some spectacular or mundane social event, like postcolonial independence or being able to make ends meet each day. 164 It is a restless agitation related to a distressing condition, oppressive circumstance or threatening event that is not always forthcoming but could be past or present, and therefore, haunting. It is a nauseating practice, which means that culture is noisy—with intersecting, and at times, conflicting desires and objectives—and full of struggle. Anxiety is not always a bad thing but can be a fruitful performance by producing bodies in motion directed towards particular, purposeful social change. As Michael Taussig reveals of “the nervous system,” that it: …stared at me in the fullness of its scrawled, enigmatic, might. A portent? A voice from nowhere tugging at my distracted attention…a nerve center and hierarchy of control…might not the whole point of the NS be it’s always being a jump ahead, tempting us through its very nervousness towards the tranquil pastures of its fictive harmony, the glories of its system, thereby all the more securely energizing its nervousness? 165 Taussig muses on the nervous system as a complex of interpenetrating state and corporate practices—national and international—that produce control, fear, intimidation and terror for its citizens. These discourses are produced and 164 See Michael Taussig, The Nervous System (New York: Routledge, 1991). 165 Taussig: 1-2. 108 regenerated through social and cultural institutions—schools, churches, labor sites, telecommunication networks, families, etc.—to maintain normative limits for subjects and to protect existing systems of social order. 166 The capitalist state thrives on the anxieties of citizens who defend, worship, resist and contend its mechanisms with their bodies, dreams, hopes, promises, worries, frustrations, and loyalty. Through myth, history and imagination, citizens strive for the fictive condition of success promised through state and corporate discourses. The nervous system is a throbbing organism made up of organisms. It absorbs, consumes, regurgitates, bleeds, and breathes life. It is porous and seeps in as it seeps out. The nerves pulse with restless energy that always requires more and more to sustain itself. It is pervasive, persistent, and unrelenting. There is no outside as it is everywhere and nowhere all at once. This nervous condition is difficult to describe because it is subtle and shocking, mundane and spectacular, invisible and transparent, benevolent and malevolent. The nervous condition has become normalized in everyday life, so much so that anxiety makes bodies feel alive and well. Anxiety propels us forward—and backward— just as long as we are not standing still. The capitalist state requires its citizens to be anxious, and thereby, to seek happiness, health and stability through its agencies. Citizens must depend on the state and capital for their welfare even as instability is produced unevenly across race, class, gender, sex, and ethnicity. To counteract such mechanisms, bodies must produce their own nervous practices that will work against those of the capitalist state. However, is such resistive anxiety productive for subjected 166 See also Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, (New York: Penguin Books, 1978). 109 peoples? If so, how does anxiety enable racial connection? How does racial kinship, or a cosmic affiliation between dispersed peoples based on a shared dispossession, provide possibilities of individual and communal self-realization not afforded through the state? Finally, how does “the anxiety of work” in cultural performance, or the embodied production of knowledge and historical memory, operate as a trans-regional, intra-racial politics that is aligned with or opposed to imperialist power? Kwame Nkrumah’s pan-African interdependence both work within the state formation while simultaneously subverting it. Nkrumah’s anxious work is represented in the sonic entanglements between Ghanaian and African American artists, or what I call Afro-feelings. The structure of racial feelings is both material and affective and can produce benefits—of economic prosperity, emotional support, travel, and artistic creativity—or conflicts around unmet promises, disappointed expectations, betrayal, mendacity and dashed hopes. 167 I consider intra-African collaboration and contestation through the extension and revision of Kwame Nkrumah’s state work in three cultural performances: 1) Kweku Ananse’s interlude as a contemporary sound meditation on, and segue into, Nkrumah’s pan-African philosophy as soul ideology; 2) the 1971 documentary film, Soul To Soul, a stunning collaboration between celebrity African American soul musicians, Ike & Tina Turner, Wilson Pickett and The Staples Singers and Ghanaian artists, Guy Warren (later Kofi Ghanaba) and Amoah Azangio, among 167 See Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), Chapter Nine: "Structures of Feeling,” where Williams writes: "It is that we are concerned with meanings and values as they are actively lived and felt, and the relations. We are talking about characteristic elements of impulse, restraint, and tone; specifically affective elements of consciousness and relationships: not feeling against thought, but thought as felt and feeling as thought: practical consciousness of a present kind, in a living and inter-relating continuity. We are then defining these elements as a 'structure': as a set, with specific internal relations, at once interlocking and in tension": 132. 110 others; and 3) ”Bless the Mic,” a present-day organization of Ghanaian and African diasporic musicians and spoken word artists who sponsor a weekly performance event in Accra. Kweku Ananse’s music articulates the sticky meshing of the Gold Coast (colonial) with Ghana (postcolonial) as an acoustic mark of the modern Ghanaian subject. Through the sampling and reworking of four different temporal recordings, Ananse interprets how the shock of colonization has interrupted, distorted, recontextualized—and made anxious—what it means to be Ghanaian. The Soul To Soul concert represents a recorded moment of spectacular interaction between Ghanaians and African American tourists. Furthermore, the concert as both a live event and recorded performance illustrates how Ghanaian musicians collaborate with African diasporic artists and consumers in contradictory and affirming ways, as both a mode of cultural resistance against and commercial affinity with state interests, in Ghana and in the global north. Bless the Mic is Accra’s primary nightlife scene that regularly advocates and features local alternative and independent music artists. Contemporary young Ghanaian musicians, through the weekly event of Bless the Mic, have worked to re-member Ghana’s music industry through a sustained re-imagining of Nkrumah’s philosophies that merge digital production and live music, as a way to recapture a national camaraderie and global profitability in Ghanaian music. Bless the Mic is a direct response to the state’s neglect of artists in copyright protection, anti-payola enforcement and sustainable wages. 111 Voice of A People Kweku Ananse’s music is imbricated with a distinct politics of racial sound that, like Kwame Nkrumah, reconfigures African folk cultures as central to the production of western modernity. Ananse remixes folk chants, drums and other traditional instruments with hip hop beats in a radical pronunciation of African sociality as complicated, flexible and determined against the brutalizing practices of the transatlantic slave trade and colonialism. The music producer’s name is derived from the popular Ghanaian folktale of the trickster spider figure, a complicated protagonist who struggled against hierarchal structures. With the transport of the enslaved to the western hemisphere, this character became re- envisioned in Afro-Caribbean and African American oral literature as Anansi or Aunt Nancy and Brer Rabbit, respectively. 168 The trickster figure does not have physical strength but possesses a strong mind that is used to outsmart his foes. In Ghanaian folklore, Ananse the spider resists divine authorities and existing social conventions through cunning schemes and witty speech. In some ways, the literary figure of Ananse gives rise to the mythical prowess of Kwame Nkrumah, a trickster protagonist in Ghana’s narrative history. Ananse’s objective is to increase his access to privilege and power or to provide material sustenance for those in need. He is depicted as both man and animal with the capacity to transform physically, to be highly mobile and varied in his methods to force social change, and to possess great mobility. The Ananse stories present different circumstances of struggle against external forces— 168 See Christopher Vecsey, "The Exception Who Proves the Rules: Ananse the Akan Trickster," Journal of Religion in Africa 12.3 (1981): 161-177. 112 spiritual, naturalistic, animal and human—where the trickster is able to outwit his opponents and generate good fortune for him and those who are disempowered. Ananse is a cultural folk hero and much like Brer Rabbit, as Henry Louis Gates argues, signifies to African and African diasporic communities the capacity to overcome persistent oppression through a twisting of official discourse into new or unconventional symbolic gestures in “the personification of the ethic of self-preservation” that is not easily recognizable to colonial authorities. 169 Another significant characteristic of the Ananse figure is his lawlessness: a blatant disregard for rules and a persistent use of tricks and thievery. This maverick tenacity to cross institutionalized social and physical boundaries is the very essence of the trickster. Kweku Ananse’s “Voice of A People” can be seen as speaking to another sort of trickery, or fraud, in the dismantling of Nkrumah’s administration and state projects. The song makes a direct reference to the coups of military regimes during the 1970s and each administrations’ creative misuse of state funds, abuse of the citizens’ trust, and overtaxation. The repetition of the phrase, “Welcome to The Voice of A People” is a break from “a decade governed by soldiers” in declaring a different socio-temporal reality where democratic notions of governmental accountability, equal citizen participation and freedom of speech are increasingly available to Ghanaians through the country’s musicians. Kweku Ananse performs a literal revision, or remixing, of Nkrumah’s pan-Africanism through music. The music producer flips traditional scripts upside down by seducing voices, instruments, and beats into new, pliable 169 Henry Louis Gates, Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of American Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989): 158. 113 narratives where rhythmic ruptures, breaks and cuts don’t only signal trauma and crisis but also birth and possibility. The term “a people” is used instead of “the people” to possibly indicate Ghana’s intimate struggle with Nigeria and the rest of the continent against European colonization throughout the 1960s and its embroilment of military coups during the 1970s. Rather than use “the,” which suggests a monolithic or fixed category of social experience, the song instead uses “a” and thus recognizes the existence of multiple struggles by referring to one experience of many possible forms of resistance. Similarly, the anonymous man’s speech, “my apparition rose from the fall of Land/declared I am a civilian,” suggests how the public commons of land and mineral resources once enclosed and pilfered by western governments, financial institutions and African elites has now opened up to the potential of a new, radical people-centered leadership headed by Ghana’s musicians. As Nkrumah declares, “whenever there has been a significant change in the social attitude of a people, it has been reflected, directly or indirectly, in the mirror of art….this means that the voice which will go out will be truly African—African in content, outlook and imagination.” 170 “Apparition” exemplifies a haunting presence that hovers around human life and how the manipulation of citizens by the state against its citizens has moral and ethical consequences. The term also signifies how such a regime change might be divinely inspired into a purposeful direction for the future of the country and continent. Apparition also speaks to the presence of the ancestors and spirits in helping to design federal mandates and 170 Kwame Nkrumah, "The Voice of Africa: The Opening of the Ghana External Broadcasting Service," Samuel Obeng, Selected Speeches of Kwame Nkrumah, Vol. 2, October 27, 1961 (Accra: Afram Publications, 2007): 138. 114 the folk rituals of libations, diviners, and oral storytelling are critical to Ghanaian progress. Through polyrhythm, multi-tone, and complex meter, the drum pattern signifies the import of local sonic traditions, as a means of exploring the mutuality of spiritual and human creativity. The drums also measure the tick of the clock in Ghana’s preoccupation, from Kwame Nkrumah to John Atta Mills, by pursuing rapid industrial development to beat back western stigmas and click faster towards modernity. Finally, the children’s chorus echoes an innocence and purity, a youthful exuberance much like what was probably experienced during the Positive Action Committee’s innovative protests against British colonialism in the ten years prior to Independence and in the early years of Kwame Nkrumah’s post-colonial administration. 171 The chorus can be read as a nostalgic call for an earlier time, during the initial days of Nkrumah, when social egalitarianism was more available as an intellectual and material practice. Kweku Ananse attests to his name through the display of remarkable skill at imagining a relationship between disparate historical records/recordings that contextualize Ghana’s history and stretch this specificity into a composite of Black social experiences. The music is overlapped and remixed into a seamless, pan-African narrative. Through the unauthorized use of these recordings, Ananse’s digital piracy has created an emergent document that reconceptualizes time, space and place through particular attention to the radicality of Black survival. Ananse’s interlude is a sonically thrilling index of African struggle and interdependence 171 See D. Zizwe Poe, Kwame Nkrumah's Contribution to Pan-Africanism: An Afrocentric Analysis (New York: Routledge, 2003). 115 through sound—among voices, beats, rhythms, languages, bodies, governments and traditions—that seeks to reinvigorate Ghana’s dilapidated music industry and a peoples’ spirits. Nkrumah’s Soul Ideology No doubt about it, Nkrumah had soul. His unique ideology of pan-African socialist independence continues to be “an inspiration to the future” and extends outside of Ghana to the African continent and people of African descent, dispersed throughout the western hemisphere. His vision stretches past his own life and finds residence in the aesthetic practices of contemporary Ghanaian and African diasporic musicians. Soul is most widely identified as a 1970s African American political and aesthetic practice based on shared racial self-awareness, determination, accountability and cultural style. Soul challenged the Civil Rights Movement generation, federal and state governments, and police authorities. Soul, as a reclamation and distortion of West African cultural practices, finds life in particular gestures (handshake), symbols (Afro, dashiki), food (ham hocks, cornbread, collard greens), media (Soul Train, Good Times, Shaft) and aesthetic expressions (dance, music, literature), among others. 172 However, soul is not the exclusive domain of African Americans. Through intense commodification, soul has lost some of its soul. With expansion into a global cultural practice also enjoyed by West Africans, soul’s links to Black nationalism was revived and recontextualized according to local realities in fragile, newly post-colonial societies. There are many iterations of soul before the 1970s in the literature of 172 "Ain't We Still Got Soul? Roundtable Discussion with Greg Tate, Portia Maultsby, Thulani Davis, Clyde Taylor, and Ishmael Reed," Monique Guillory and Richard C. Green, Soul: Black Power, Politics, and Pleasure (New York: New York University Press , 1998): 270. 116 pan-Africanist and Negritude scholars such as Marcus Garvey, Aimé Césairé, CLR James, Frantz Fanon and Stokely Carmichael. Kwame Nkrumah, through a charismatic articulation of the African personality presents an earlier variation of soul in the struggles of Black political life. The Akan word for soul is okra. Okra gives life; it is the sustaining breath of the body. It is also believed to be a “transmitter of an individual’s destiny.” 173 Similarly, Zora Neale Hurston refers to soul as “an inside thing to live by” that will reveal itself externally, even spectacularly. 174 Anthropologist John L. Jackson, Jr. defines soul as residing “within the body, or even better, is the body in a different dimension or on a different plane.” 175 Soul performance is sacred and profane, sublime and ecstatic, elusive and evocative, painful and pleasurable, private and public. The language of the body, or embodiment, is the “anxiety of work.” Soul is full of anxious bodies or what Jackson, Jr. terms “gesticulating bodies” that can’t keep still. 176 It arrests the performer and the witness in an entanglement that is necessary for its existence. Soul is the domain of Black mutuality, of Afro-feelings. These soulful bodies are emphatically expressive, ostensibly unintelligible and indecipherable because they exceed verbal language in moans, humming, wild limbs, shaking heads, bent knees, and sweaty skin. However, soul performance is ideology in motion. It revises religious symbols 173 Joseph K. Adjaye, Boundaries of Self and Other in Ghanaian Popular Culture (Westport: Praeger, 2004): 21. 174 See Soul: 2. 175 John L. Jackson, Jr., “Ethnophysicality, or An Ethnography of Some Body," Monique Guillory and Richard C. Green, Soul: Black Power, Politics, and Pleasure (New York: New York University Press , 1998): 178. 176 Ibid. 117 for a secular audience and extends “talking in tongues” to a “body in tongues.” Soul navigates the relationship between excess and containment, surplus and repression within the body and between bodies (i.e. interpersonal, traditional, communal, state, international and inter-continental). It is an exchange between giver and receiver in metaphysical and human energy. Soul performance in Ghana represents a negotiation with overlapping and contradictory transnational desires—between Ghanaians and African Americans—as it pushes its consumers to consume, or rather take in and absorb, the histories, emotions, and longings of the performer and the witness. 177 Soul in Motion September 22, 2009, marked the centenary birthday of Osagyefo Kwame Nkrumah. In commemoration, President John Atta Mills’ administration organized a month-long program of lectures, vigils, durbars, parades and concerts. The observation continued in 2010 with the 60 th anniversary of Nkrumah’s Positive Action Committee in January, an extensive arts exhibition during February and March signaling Ghana’s independence, and African Union Day concerts throughout the continent in May. 178 This widespread, public memorialization of Nkrumah’s life, work and meditation on Ghana and the African continent attempts to re-write scripts from British and U.S. federal agencies and the Ghanaian elite that reproached the leader during the final years 177 See Anne Anlin Cheng, The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001): 9, where Cheng writes: The melancholic is not melancholic because he or she lost something but because he or she has introjected that which he or she now reviles. Thus the melancholic is stuck in more ways than just temporally: he or she is stuck—almost choking on—the hateful and loved thing he or she just devoured.” 178 See http://www.kwamenkrumah.info/ for a list of events. 118 of his socialist administration. In many ways, the centenary celebration is a public acknowledgement of Nkrumah’s critical design and rehabilitation of much of the country’s infrastructure—hospitals, universities, and the Volta Region dam project that continues to provide for the needs of citizens—and his relevance in global struggles waged by disenfranchised communities against a persistent imperialism in Cuba, Algeria, South Africa, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, among other places. 179 Integral to Nkrumah’s campaign to recuperate the country’s economy through African-centered socialism was a cultural agenda to rally Ghanaians around a cohesive national identity that would oppose the performances of British colonialism. This national program was resistive to a prevailing colonial discourse about Africans as primitive and non-modern and served as a public reclamation of pre-colonial histories through creative re-enactments. Part of these anti-colonial exercises was the civil disobedience acts of Nkrumah’s Positive Action organization in strikes, boycotts and non-cooperation with colonial authorities. While imprisoned for leading Positive Action demonstrations, Nkrumah remarked, “I can hear once again the singing of the masses in the evenings outside the prison walls.” 180 In fact, music was instrumental as resistive performances against the British administration and as a source of collective inspiration, fortitude and stability for the protestors. In fact, highlife artists were critical in rallying Ghanaians to participate in anti-colonial demonstrations. 181 179 See Rahman. 180 Kwame Nkrumah, "The Kwame Nkrumah Institute: Laying of the Foundation Stone of and the Inaguration of the First Course of the Ideological Section of the Institute," Obeng: 7. 181 See Botwe-Asamoah. 119 Nkrumah used folkloric arts to stimulate Ghanaians toward particular national objectives. He approached Ghanaian traditional arts as if they were alive and dynamic, not fixed and unchanging. This belief is stimulated variably across ethnic lines in Ghana and West Africa. Such cultural traditions—in libation rituals, naming ceremonies, and consultations with griots and healers—are always in process and shift depending on a number of internal and external factors, such as a person’s mood or behavior, gender, the time of day, the weather, and the availability of certain materials to perform rites, etc. 182 Folk arts are mysterious connections between spirits and humans that depend on oral, sound and musical communication to share historical information or to shift the future direction of the participants’ lives. A significant factor of successful communication is the competence of the performer, particularly the possession of a historical knowledge about the practice and its participants and the ability to improvise well. Folk art performances are a persistent revision of the relationship between humans and the spirit realm. Upon death, the okra departs the dead body to be rejoined with the ancestral spirits. However, ancestral spirits, as former human souls, continue active communication with human beings by assisting in their social affairs, providing sustenance, petitioning on their behalf to the Divine Authority, and repairing relationships, etc. Similarly, Nkrumah as an ancestral spirit continues to be an ideological resource in official, communal and individual discourse on the direction of the country and state. Through the sonic rituals of contemporary Ghanaian artists like Kweku Ananse, Nkrumah helps to revise the relationship between citizens and the state. 182 See Adjaye. 120 Through folkloric practices, the state also activates what constitutes proper and improper Ghanaian citizenship. Nkrumah deployed certain forms of cultural performance to represent what should be important for collective Ghanaian identity. These were the symbols of royalty such as a walking stick, horsetail, and white handkerchief; the establishment of the “Dawn Broadcast” radio programs to reflect how kings and chiefs deliver messages from the ancestors and deities at dawn to their communities; the pouring of libations (theatrical prayers) before ceremonies; the inclusion of local languages in his speeches; the use of a storyteller at state events and consultation with a marabout (a diviner and seer from Guinea) in decision-making processes; the encouragement of traditional drumming and dancing during Ghana’s Independence Day celebrations; the revitalization of traditional festivals outlawed by the British during colonialism; the advocacy of traditional arts and music education in public schools; governmental support for concert parties and the highlife music industry, in the forms of finance, networking, and advocacy; and the creation of the National Theater Movement which made constituent participation possible through structured regional committees throughout Ghana and provided monetary support for local arts groups and free classes in traditional arts for the general public. 183 Although Nkrumah is now popularly referred to as “The Black Star,” “The Pride of Africa” and “The Father of Pan-Africanism,” during the final years of his presidential term he was lambasted by western and Ghanaian detractors as a 183 See Adjaye. These cultural rites have some variation across Ghana’s ethnic groups. 121 despot, dictator and egomaniac. 184 Labeled as a communist troublemaker by the U.S.’s C.I.A. and F.B.I. agencies, former British colonial administrators and the Ghanaian elite, these parties worked to depose his administration in 1966. The common fear was that Ghana would help shape politics in other African countries towards socialist independence and away from western capitalism. Nkrumah sought to combat this class elitism through a distinct pan-African ideology grounded in a humanist socialism. He imagined building a United States of Africa where borders between countries would not contribute to division and isolation. Rather, Africans across the continent and in the diaspora would share their cultural specificities by building economic, intellectual, political and spiritual coalitions of self-definition and determination. This directed action would draw from pre-colonial African histories and customs apart from the coercion of European occupation. The historical features of Nkrumah’s pan-African vision would innovate new ways of being and provide a motor for the future development of practical social initiatives. According to Nkrumah, the African personality is “the cluster of African humanist principles which underline the traditional African society.” 185 The African personality represents the enduring racial and cultural gestures of Blacks in idiom, spiritual worship, food, and arts regardless of geographical position. For Nkrumah, the African personality becomes the sustaining cultural mark connecting those on the continent to those in the diaspora. These vestiges of kinship continue, in some form, even in dispersal across the western hemisphere. 184 See Rahman. 185 Botwe-Asamoah: 79. 122 Nkrumah envisioned that through networks of egalitarianism, Africa could develop a commonwealth of states and secure a unified political presence that would be able to compete with the U.S. and U.K. Additionally, African Americans could repatriate to their cultural homeland and contribute to commerce building, through an investment of money and skills, across the continent. What makes the leadership of Nkrumah so fascinating is the combination of a radical socio-economic agenda with a charismatic, or soulful, personality. He was a populist leader and commanded a crowd wherever he went. The inclusion of cultural rites in state events was a way to promote national pride, to incite and excite the people to revive their indigenous traditions. During colonization, local chieftancies and elder councils worked with British officials to disband certain ethnic customs and celebrations that were seen as deficient and abnormal. Ghanaians were divorced from much of their cultural heritage as a deliberate tactic for spreading British enculturation. This was primarily accomplished through Christian churches, international missions and schools, which were set up by Catholic, Presbyterian and Episcopalian congregations. These institutions enforced the English language through lashings, along with restrictions against traditional dress, hairstyles, and cultural arts like drumming, dancing and drama. As Nkrumah states, Ghanaians “were studied in such a way as to reinforce the picture of African society as something grotesque, as a curious, mysterious human backwater, which helped to retard social progress in Africa and to prolong colonial domination over its people.” 186 The demonization of folk 186 Botwe-Asamoah: 13. 123 cultures was a way to make Ghanaians strangers to themselves and their history, to essentially rob their bodies of all cultural specificity by reinforcing British assimilation. Nkrumah’s understanding of the demoralization of African peoples extended to those in the Americas who were descendants of the terrifying processes of enslavement. Nkrumah was greatly influenced by Father Divine, the prophetic leader of religious farming communes in Harlem and rural upstate New York that privileged an equal distribution of social resources for all people. However, Divine was derailed by the Black intelligentsia for being flamboyant, radical, self-absorbed and having too much soul. 187 As a student at Lincoln University who also spent considerable time in Philadelphia, Harlem, Washington, D.C. and London, Nkrumah began his important work here. In fact, he was almost suspended from Lincoln for performing a libation ritual at his mentor’s memorial service. 188 Abroad, Nkrumah studied worldwide socialist and communist movements and began to build a philosophy of Black political interdependence that thrived on geographical diversity rather than it causing a hindrance. For Nkrumah, equally important to ideological education was the particular cultural knowledge of poor and working class Ghanaians—artisans, cooks, storytellers, weavers, fishermen, farmers—on the ground laborers, who would carry the movement against British colonization forward. These persons have a special relationship with soul, and in some sense are the culture-bearers maintaining such traditions. It was important to Nkrumah to develop self- 187 See Rahman and Thaddeus Russell, "The Color of Discipline: Civil Rights and Black Sexuality," American Quarterly 60.1 (2008): 101-128. 188 See Rahman. 124 sufficient and sustainable categories of expression and definition according to the life experiences of Africans. In thought and practice, Nkrumah spent his life considering the worth and intelligence of African social life in Ghana, initially, and ultimately, throughout the continent. Kwame Nkrumah integrated socialism, spiritual practice, and Ghanaian folk cultural performance into a comprehensive soul ideology. He meditated on how the processes of British colonization had transformed the social lives of Ghanaians into emerging postcolonial identities. He worked with diasporic scholars such as George Padmore, CLR James, WEB DuBois and was greatly influenced by the works of Marcus Garvey. Nkrumah maintains, “The destiny of Africans everywhere is inseparably linked by our common heritage, common ideals and aspirations. It develops upon all African leaders, and the leaders of the people of African descent, to unite in pursuit of our common objective—the total liberation of Africa and the union of independent African states.” 189 Nkrumah’s African personality signifies the importance of the global racial imagination in countering colonial pressure and distortion in the inventiveness of scientific racism, Jim Crow segregation, lynchings in the U.S., imperialism and war. By making pan-African socialism a national agenda, Ghanaians were inculcated into an innovative, self-defining principle. The African personality was re-staged through an interlocking series of cultural activisms that reclaimed history from British ownership. For example, Nkrumah advocated a critical examination of society through artists by proclaiming, “Art in all its forms is 189 Kwame Nkrumah, "Africa Must Be Free," Samuel Obeng, Selected Speeches of Kwame Nkrumah Vol. 2, April 15, 1961 (Accra: Afram Publications, 2007): 70. 125 expressive of the social conditions and social values of the people. The artist and therefore his creation as well are products of his time. In a series of artistic creations is mirrored the history of a people. The Akan people had no written record of their history and yet history is preserved in songs, dances, folk tales, dramas, music, and sculpture.” 190 Here, culture is seen as what George Yudicé terms “culture-as-resource” to articulate political life in the dynamic restoration of languages, cosmologies, rituals, dress, gestures and art. 191 This cultural revitalization refutes the colonial idea of western nations as the sole marker of civilization, advancement, and progress. Nkrumah’s accelerated agenda of modernity refuted this misnomer by asserting African cultures as not inferior or abnormal but equal, if not superior, to European humanity. The British colonial government in cooperation with the Ghanaian elite incited middle and working class Ghanaians to denounce Nkrumah, as working against their best interests, by calling him a witch doctor and voodoo priest. Accusations of witchcraft and sorcery once used in reference to the evil of colonization were now turned on Nkrumah with claims of him using magic to increase his power. As Sean Redding notes, withcraft accusations are manifestations of social anxiety over how life is shifting in uncontrollable and unforeseeable ways. 192 Such accusations were used to explain away his charismatic delivery and huge following. While Nkrumah practiced certain occult rituals, he was also trained as a Christian minister. In fact, his last sermon 190 Botwe-Asamoah: 20. 191 See George Yudice, The Expediency of Culture: Uses of Culture in the Global Era (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003). 192 Sean Redding, Sorcery and Sovereignty: Taxation, Power, and Rebellion in South Africa, 1880-1963 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2006): 13. 126 preached in U.S. was entitled, “I Saw A New Heaven and New Earth.” 193 According to his apologists, this prescient declaration was seen as a confirmation of his reliance on witchcraft. Nkrumah’s maintenance of indigenous cultural rites such as regular consultation with an Islamic diviner, his use of magic powder to dispel enemies and his proclamation of a messianic call on his life to liberate Ghana and then the rest of the African continent from colonialist oppression, gave his detractors much ammunition. As historian Ahmad Rahman argues, “This [national] myth had to project an idealized, Afrotopian future for one of the least utopian continents. Only a powerful quasi-religious Pan-African myth would galvanize the masses to loyally follow a messiah toward this Promised Land that existed only in the Messiah’s faith in its inevitability.” 194 Such national myths and symbols tapped into indigenous wisdom of magic and superstition, which is important to consider within state regulation. In fact, Nkrumah’s use of a white handkerchief came to symbolize the mythical power of the Nzima culture. According to Sam D. Nyako, a Ghanaian youth who witnessed Nkrumah in office, “They said it symbolized the dreams of the revolution that would come true, and that they were moving forward in the right way for us. And they told us that it symbolized the victories that Nkrumah had already achieved over the enemies of Africa’s liberation. But we still thought it was Nzima magic.” 195 The “mysteries” of occult beliefs were not nullified by the colonial state but continue to work in concert with or in opposition to state practices. 193 Rahman: 85. 194 Ibid: 58. 195 Ibid: 126. 127 For many Ghanaians there was a profound disillusionment with Nkrumah’s postcolonial government and the painstakingly slow progress towards economic autonomy. The peoples’ grand fervor around Independence died down as the full realization of the struggles in self-governance became apparent, animating a palpable nostalgia for the days of colonialism. The people’s disappointments stem from the paradox of the African state since the nation-state, as a European and colonial construct, was not meant to consider the full complexities of Black social life. Part of Nkrumah’s failure was in reproducing the state—even in his departure from capitalism to socialism. The state gains currency through the exploitation of difference within its citizens. As Korang argues, “Since these Third World nationalist intellectuals can activate their nationalist agency only in terms of the categories of knowledge given to them, categories not of their own direct making, their nationalist agency is fated to come, as it were, colonially prescribed.” 196 Nkrumah inherited definitions of state management from the preceding colonial administrators where patterns of intense regulation were already deeply worn in the fabric of the country. Essentially, Nkrumah was fighting an uphill battle. He responded through a pursuit of social engineering, an aggressive campaign to demand inclusion within western concepts of modernity, in the accelerated industrialization and development towards a United States of Africa. As Korang 196 Kwaku Larbi Korang, Writing Ghana, Imagining Africa: Nation and African Modernity (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2004): 3. 128 writes, “It is the force of the State, it would seem, that ‘legitimates’ the nation; and not the force of the nation, from a popular below, that confers on the state its true legitimacy.” 197 Nkrumah’s dictates against democratic voting and his passing of the Detention Act, indicates the nervous work of maintaining state sovereignty, and replicates the repressive features of the colonial infrastructure he protested. Even through a reorganizing of the country within a more liberating framework of African socialism, Kwame Nkrumah maintained the colonial vernacular of the state. As Crais notes, “The state attempts to render their communities, ultimately their very bodies, legible to state power.” 198 The state becomes the only way for the nation to move forward, to reassert humanity, to achieve sustainable lives, and to demand inclusion within the very categories of modernity that creates vulnerability and propagates from African peoples’ exclusion. As Korang argues, “What appeared to be a self-renewing possibility in a given (i.e. nationalism) has turned out more or less to be a self-confining liability.” 199 Soul to Soul Interviewer: Think you’re gonna hear some good music? Kevin Griffin (12-year old leader of The Voices of East Harlem): Yeah, everybody’s here, right? Interviewer: No, I don’t mean what you’re bringing there. I mean what you’re gonna hear there. 197 Korang: 272. 198 Crais: 2. 199 Korang: 2. 129 Griffin: Yeah, everybody’s still here. See all the good people here? Interviewer: No, I mean in Africa. Do you think they have good music? Griffin: No. 200 The “Soul To Soul” concert took place on Independence Day, March 6, 1971, in downtown Accra’s Black Star Square for an audience of over 100,000. This is the same location where Kwame Nkrumah declared national autonomy from the British colonial government fourteen years earlier. The concert marked the first time a non-military event was held in the public space. 201 The Mosks, a white American family, generated the concept for the concert. Ed Mosk was a Hollywood entertainment attorney with Slaff, Mosk and Rudman; his wife, Fern, was a novelist; and son Tom, a 24-year old graduate student. The Mosks enjoyed regular travel throughout the African continent. Fern developed a friendship with Nigerian author, Chinua Achebe, and the Mosk family secured the rights to turn Achebe’s novel, Things Fall Apart, into a feature film. The project began filming in fall 1970 during the height of the Biafran war in southeastern Nigeria. While filming several hundred miles away in Lagos, the Mosks learned that James Brown was scheduled to perform a concert. The family was amazed by the palpable influence Brown had on young Nigerians, evident in the playing of his soul music in public places, their dress and slang. Since the Mosks had a film crew and equipment at their disposal, they approached Brown’s management about filming the concert, but his people were uninterested. 200 Soul to Soul, dir. Denis Sanders, prod. David Peck and John Kanis, Reelin’ In The Years Productions, 2004. 201 See liner notes. 130 Undefeated, the Mosks considered the possibility of staging a concert composed of African American soul musicians in West Africa. Because of the unstable political situation in Nigeria, the Mosks looked to other countries in the region. They settled on Ghana, because Ed and Fern had several connections at the Ghana Arts Council. Although Ghana was under military control, it was a more secure option than Nigeria. In fact, during the mid-1960s, Maya Angelou who had lived off and on in Ghana, suggested to Nkrumah that African American artists be invited to participate in the annual Independence Day celebrations. Even with Nkrumah’s coup, Angelou was still determined to see this idea come to fruition and discussed with the new military government its possibility. The idea was deferred to Saka Acquaye, head of the Ghana Arts Council (GAC) who was enthusiastic to implement it once the Mosks began talks. Through a friend of the Mosks, Richard Bock, former head of Pacific Jazz and World Pacific Records, became producer for the documentary and chose the final roster of artists. Warner Bros. signed on to distribute the film and so did Academy Award winning director Denis Sanders, who had directed the documentary, Elvis: That’s the Way It Is. Bock reached an agreement with Atlantic Records to provide $100,000 towards production costs in exchange for rights to the soundtrack album. The GAC would take care of promotion, marketing, and governmental approvals while the Mosks’ team assumed all production costs for staging and travel expenses to Ghana. The deal was solidified because the Mosks assumed all costs of the production and promotion for the concert with all profits generated from the concert going to the GAC. Unfortunately, Warner Bros. backed out of the deal because of a number of last-minute changes made to the contract by the 131 GAC. The production company cited a lack of confidence in the Ghanaian government to maintain contractual obligations. Soon thereafter, Cinerama Releasing Corp. stepped in to distribute and partially finance the film. Soul To Soul was produced as a feature-length, first run documentary film in late August 1971 by Niagram Corporation and Aura Productions. The film had a sporadic run in mainstream theaters over the next two years, particularly in African American neighborhoods, but could not compete against the more popular Blaxploitation cinema. The film has never played in Ghanaian cinemas. During the 1980s, it was transferred to VHS and became a collector’s item for soul music enthusiasts. In 2004, Jon Kanis and David Peck co-produced the re- release on DVD under their company, Reelin’ In The Years Productions. As Rob Bowman writes in the DVD’s liner notes, “This was a journey about personal roots, the ancestral homeland, history and discovery. Still deeper yet, it was an expedition about connecting with the descendants of one’s communal ancestors; black American souls connecting with black West African souls through the power of the music of the black diaspora.” 202 But, what is the investment of these white producers (in 1971 and 2004) in producing such an event that heavily relies on categories of racial kinship? Why would these producers go to such lengths to create and re-produce a social experience in which they could not fully participate? Thirty-three years later with the DVD re-issue, Tom Mosk declares that the concert “was a challenge on every level.” 203 Bowman, the commentary moderator 202 See DVD liner notes: 3. 203 See DVD commentary for the full conversation between the producers of the 1971 and 2004 film releases, Tom Mosk, David Peck, Rob Bowman and Jon Kanis. 132 chimes in, “You had the Ghanaian government to deal with which I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy.” Mosk continues, Ghana had “No history of creating a movie. No movies were being created in West Africa in 1970.” This erroneous notion does not account for Senegalese director Ousmane Sembene was one of a handful of West African filmmakers producing work in this region. Additionally, FESPACO, is a world-renowned film festival that has showcased continental and diasporic films in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, since 1969. Such commentary also points to the maintenance of hegemonic notions of culture, modernity and resources that rely on whites to “enlighten” African peoples. The commentators understand the Ghanaian government to be utterly fallible, dysfunctional and backward. This is because there were a number of problems with the sound equipment and connectivity in Black Star Square. The main conundrum was how to power the space since the infrastructure was not built for multiple electric outlets and used a different currency than the U.S. By extension, Ghanaian people are considered to be technologically unsophisticated and the bearers of cultural traditions that are timeless, primitive and simple. In fact, the U.S. musicians were paid equal wages, $50,000 in total for the American artist salaries while $1,000 total was paid to the Ghanaian artists. The American and Ghanaian musicians’ discrepant salaries contradict the concert’s promotion of racial solidarity as a democratic concept. Clearly, the Ghanaian musicians were in a more disadvantaged financial position than their African American counterparts, especially since the music infrastructure in the country at this time began to dissolve. Another inadequacy in the arrangement of the concert performances and subsequent footage for the documentary was the 133 abundant attention given to the American artists. In the documentary film, there are only snippets of a few Ghanaian performances, while the full roster of African American artists are shown completing one or more song performances. The U.S. musicians are interviewed and shown interacting with one another and exploring the city of Accra extensively. However, not one interview with a Ghanaian musician is included. Soul to soul is not an egalitarian site as promised but one that privileges the music and experiences of the African American performers over that of the Ghanaian artists. The film represents a fantastic journey of African American tourists to the “homeland,” with Ghana as the backdrop for their adventures, a landscape to fulfill their racial desires and longings. This concert, its filming, screenings and re-release operate at multiple scales that overlap and diverge within a network of intersecting and conflicting technologies, desires, motives and objectives for the producers, musicians, concert fans and film witnesses. Furthermore, the discussion between the film producers indicates how local culture is transnationally determined, administered and invested. Also, the producers’ control over the film designates what is produced, how it is done and who has access to it. The concert was billed as “Soul To Soul With Wilson Pickett,” who was known as “Soul Brother #2” after James Brown. Pickett was wildly popular in Ghana and the producers were certain he would draw a large crowd. Advertisements announced the concert as a collaboration between “American and Ghanaian Soul, Gospel and Dance Groups.” 204 The concert was mostly attended by young people, primarily secondary and university students, and lasted for “15 continuous hours” from 3pm until 6am the next day. Admission 204 See poster in liner notes. 134 rates were inexpensive to ensure a large audience even though the GAC wanted to raise prices since they would receive the profits from the concert. Prices for students were $1, the general public $2, and V.I.P., roughly ten dollars. The other American musicians were lesser known in Ghana at this time, even though they had huge followings in the U.S. The American lineup included Ike and Tina Turner, The Staple Singers, The Voices of East Harlem, Roberta Flack, Willie Bobo, Carlos Santana, Les McCann and Eddie Harris. The Ghana Arts Council selected the Ghanaian musicians with highlife musician, Saka Acquaye, leading the process. These artists included The Accra Ga Royal Drummers, Ishmael Adams and The Damas Choir, The Aliens (also called the Psychedelic or Magic Aliens), Guy Warren (later Kofi Ghanaba), Charlotte Daddah, The Kumasi Drummers and Kwa Mensah. Along with Black American soul music, the Ghanaian musicians presented a fusion of traditional folk, orchestra, psycho Afro-Beat, highlife and rock music. Through the interactions between Ghanaians and the African American musicians, one’s national identity is solidified through a transnational desire for the other’s distinct racial and cultural performance. The encounters between the African American musicians, Ghanaian musicians and Ghanaian fans are textured with Afro-feelings, a complex desire for the other. This can be seen in the airport scene, as the artists deplane, some dropping to their knees to kiss the ground, as they are greeted by a crowd of Ghanaian fans, traditional dancers, drummers, chiefs and elders who have eagerly waited their arrival in great, anxious anticipation. A libation ritual is performed for Wilson Pickett, who takes a drink of the palmwine and collapses backward, playfully. Pickett’s new friends embrace him warmly, laughing as if they have known each other forever—it is 135 the recognition of one’s racial kindred in another. As Carlos Santana exclaims, “That’s what really touched me the most, right out of the plane how Africa had turned itself into this humongous, gigantic, electric snake parade of people welcoming us.” 205 The nation becomes the continent for Santana, a large mythical creature of vibrating bodies waiting to make the tourist musicians’ dreams come true, to satisfy their romantic notions of a homecoming not available in the same way in the U.S. During the opening night performance at the Ghana Arts Council, there is a moment of acknowledgement by the U.S. artists in the dancing performance of the Accra Nandom Bawa Group. Ike and Tina Turners’ feet begin to tap rapidly to the bawa dances of the troupe, which are reminiscent of the African American dances of the boogaloo and stomp. This starts a raucous call and response between the U.S. musicians and the Ghanaian performers. This moment of exchange produces anxious bodies as the African American artists are compelled to share the floor with the Ghanaian dancers. Similarly, with a visit to Aburi, a series of mountainous villages forty-five minutes outside of Accra, The Voices of East Harlem (VEH) request to perform Miriam Makeba’s “Jolinkomo” and a South African boot dance for the Chief of Aburi, Nana Osae Djan II. At this ceremony, a number of drummers, cymbalists, and dancing elders also play for the American musicians. This is followed by several interactions between the U.S. artists and Ghanaian musicians as a village woman teaches Tina Turner the proper pronunciation of a chant, Santana jams with local drummers, and a backup musician playfully competes in a dance-off with an elder. 205 Ibid: 9. 136 These exchanges, recorded onto film, present the possibility of equal exchange and cultural knowledge sharing between the American musicians and their Ghanaian counterparts. Although the film never mentions Kwame Nkrumah or pan-Africanist ideology, the concert attempts to inhabit this cultural space. John Collins details, “That concert and film occurred slightly outside of the epoch it should have been embedded in. It should have been the culmination of what Nkrumah was trying to do with pan-Africanism.” 206 For instance, The Voices of East Harlem were the youngest performers on the bill, and as one of the female members states the trip to Ghana was more meaningful to her, “because I’m young and my mind is more revolutionary.” VEH consists of twenty performers ranging from ages 12 to 20. VEH presents a mixture of gospel, soul, funk and traditional African folk music that can only be classified as soul. The youth while singing “Run, Shaker Life” and “Choose Your Seat And Set Down/Walk All Over God’s Heaven” gesture towards salvation while sitting squarely in suffering. During their set, 12-year old Kevin Griffin crouches down in a warrior fighting position as the other performers flail about the stage with the black power fist thrown up enthusiastically as a call, which is mirrored as a response by the audience. This connection is solidified through an understanding of shared oppression in slavery, colonization, segregation and an enduring struggle for citizen rights under mutually unresponsive governments. Soul here is an interdependent, democratic space based on racial sincerity, integrity and honesty. The concert performance acts as a medium between both groups to iron out tensions, misunderstandings, and antagonisms often sparked through 206 Ibid: 6. 137 differing cultural expectations of the other. The soul music event represents religious secularity, particularly the possibility of miraculous redemption or utopic hope through the voice and rhythmic expression. The concert is a way to re-legitimize transnational Afro-feelings in the public sphere as a national project. The concert cannot be extrapolated from the political economy of Ghana, particularly how music provides a kind of citizenship that allows travel and mobility to take place imaginatively even if physical travel outside of the country is limited for Ghanaians. There is an undercurrent of transnational desire for soul that runs throughout the film as a deep longing for what the other has—soul to soul. For African Americans, it means an origin point for racial identity through cultural practices that reinforce one’s history and for Ghanaian musicians, in signifying a license to unlimited travel and appropriate compensation for their music. Mama Nelson, who attended the show as a teenager proclaimed to the shows’ producers that “the concert literally changed his life.” 207 Similarly, I conducted interviews with highlife artists Gyedu Blay Ambolley and Bibie Brew who were in high school at the time of the concert and vividly recall how this performance shaped their understanding of transnational racial identity, creative possibility and music as modem of cultural connectivity. 208 Gyedu Blay Ambolley has played music professionally since 1968, with 23 albums to his credit and a diverse fan base that spans the globe. He has circulated in the international jazz music festival scene and has lived extensively in New York and Los Angeles. Ambolley talks fondly about falling in love with the sound of music in the Voice 207 Ibid. 208 I interviewed Gyedu Blay Ambolley and Bibie Brew during May and June 2009. 138 of America broadcasts as a child during the ‘50s. A fan of big musicals and jazz, he would later incorporate these expressions into his own sound. He describes rap as “an African thing,” where he and his schoolmates would play with their mouths, since they had no money for instruments. Putting this amusing style of rhyming to live music, Ambolley termed it simigwa, also the title of his overwhelmingly popular 1973 song. He declares, I am the father of rap. When I started rapping, no rap was coming from America or anywhere. But I wasn’t calling it rap at that time because no word had come for it. My first record, I took the bassline from a song by the Temptations called ‘Cloud Nine.’ And it was a big hit. People hadn’t heard that style of music before, and I introduced that language to music. Ambolley asserts that watching the Soul To Soul concert allowed him to see how similar African Americans were to Ghanaians precisely through their musical performances. He maintains, “When I saw my Black brothers doing it, coming from America, I said ‘wow, it’s in the blood.’ So they’re exhibiting their Africanism.” This Africanism, or what Nkrumah called the African personality, was established for Ambolley in the gestures of African American soul style and performance—the Afros, dashikis, dancing, instrument playing, facial expressions, grunts, moans, sighs, and screams that accompany the singing. Racial likeness was re-made into an undeniable blood kinship culturally available and sincere through the hyper-enactments of the Black body. Similarly, Kevin Griffith of VEH pronounced to his young friends upon returning to Harlem a mutual understanding of kinship with Ghanaians, “You dance like you 139 dance because I saw the slave castle. I smelt the blood. I smelt the death and the history of suffering.” 209 Pop singer Bibie Brew details that at age fourteen, she realized at this concert that she wanted to pursue a singing career. “It was like a light bulb went off. I saw Tina Turner onstage shaking and moving, and I became alive like never before,” Brew declares. In fact, Mavis Staples also believes that the audience was so captivated by Tina Turner and the Ikettes because of the fast-paced, exaggerated hip movements they performed and because such dancing is so similar to that done by women in Ghana. Brew, whose father was a cultural ambassador and poet and uncle, highlife musician King Bruce of The Barbeques and The Black Beats, has grown up all over the world, living and performing in Beirut, Mexico, Senegal, England, Nigeria, and Cote d’Ivoire, among other places. Maya Angelou was a good friend of her parents, who Brew still fondly calls “Auntie Maya.” The night of the concert, Brew continues, “This was the moment that changed the course of my life forever. Ghana at this time was so vibrant, so energetic, so youthful, so full of knowledge, you know?” Brew went on tour with her uncle’s band in Lome at age 15, left home at age 17 for a European tour with another band, sang back-up vocals on albums for Youssou N’Dour, Alpha Blondie and Salif Keita and performed with Fela Kuti at his Shrine. The song that made Brew an overnight celebrity, particularly in France and Francophone countries, “Tout doucement,” was recorded, remarkably, in one take. Brew inked a deal with Sony Records and in 1985 her song played 11 times a day on Europe 1 National Radio. In 1985, “Tout doucement” sold 12,000- 24,000 records each day and one million sales each month. Since then, Brew has 209 See liner notes: 18. 140 toured the world and recorded six additional albums with the latest release in 2004. Brew is now a celebrity judge on singing showcases West African Idol and Stars of the Future! filmed in Nigeria and Ghana, respectively. The American musicians featured in the Soul To Soul concert also performed the role of tourists by participating in marketplace bargaining over instruments and fabric cloth and attending tours of the slave castles in Cape Coast and Elmina. Following a film montage inside one of the slave castles, The Staple Singers perform “When Will We Be Paid For the Work We’ve Done?” an indictment of racial capitalism and a call for a common Black struggle toward peace, harmony and sweet liberty. In contradistinction, Mavis Staples is filmed on the plane ride to Ghana where she exclaims, “I’m looking forward to all the pretty materials and the pretty prints because I sew. I want to take whole batches back with me to make dashikis and different things like that there.” Through the purchasing of particular racially marked products, Staples is able to be more authentically African in the U.S. As a tourist, the journey to Ghana, in some ways, becomes reducible to what can be transported home as proof of having been there, in photographs and cultural crafts. One’s historical memory is captured in the materiality of commodities. 210 Also through her national citizenship, celebrity status and purchasing power, Staples and the other American musicians possess a mobility denied to many Ghanaian musicians then and now. 210 See Renato Rosaldo, Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis, (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993) and Janet Hoskins, Biographical Objects: How Things Tell the Stories of People’s Lives, (New York: Routledge, 1998). 141 Although Soul To Soul was billed as a collaborative performance between African American and Ghanaian musicians, jazz artist Les McCann was the only one to actually share the stage with a Ghanaian performer. Due to time constrains, a performance between the Damas Singers, The Staple Singers and Roberta Flack was also scheduled but abandoned during the concert. After witnessing Amoah Azangio perform at the concert pre-event sponsored by the GAC, McCann invited the Ghanaian musician to be a part of his set. Azangio, a witch doctor, traditional healer, chief of a small village and musician from the Northern region, performed what McCann called a mixture of “ballet and basketball” which proved to be one of the most captivating sets for the audience that night and for the U.S. musicians, in general. As Carlos Santana raves, The witch doctor was incredible. He reminded me of Miles Davis. He looked like Miles Davis, but he played that basketball, gourd kind of thing—the calabash—like Buddy Rich. It was all very magical to me. He was the supreme shaman. 211 During the lead-up to the concert, the American artists witnessed Azangio perform a number of magical rituals including healing McCann’s drummer after he became deathly sick, watching a chicken fall dead after crossing Azangio’s path and making Willie Bobo fall ill after a disagreement. In fact, Santana recognized the healing musician’s magic and refused to take off his Jesus Christ T-shirt, as protection, during the entire trip. Pickett also stayed away from Azangio, who represented to the U.S. artists a mythical African with mysterious powers and an unexplainable history. In some ways, Azangio’s magic was representative of the American musicians’ collective experiences in Ghana, where as tourists and performers their fantasies of the homeland were 211 Ibid: 15. 142 confirmed, just as the captivating presence of Black American soul music endures as compelling memories for Ghanaian witnesses of the concert: an imaginative Soul to Soul. Bless the Mic: Show Me What You Got! Rockstone: “Is it a battle lyrics or what? Is it a freestyle or battle thing you’re doing?” (No response as Pretty Dice continues rapping). Rockstone: “Who’s the judges up in this motherfucker? If I say it’s hot that’s what it is. Those aren’t new lyrics. (Pretty Dice continues rapping). Written! Written! WRITTEN! STOP, STOP STOP! Stop the press! That’s written! Gimme that freestyle.” Pretty Dice: “Let me tell you something, Hold up! Yo, that shit’s fucked up! Get off me, dawg!” Rockstone: “It’s a cipher. Do you want to freestyle? DO YOU WANT TO FREESTYLE?” Pretty Dice: “No, no, Listen up, man listen up, man. Yo, let me tell you something, man. When you come around here and you bust something and ain’t nobody ever heard that shit around here—that’s a freestyle!” “NO, IT’S NOT!” from someone else in the crowd and the onlookers “BOO!” in a unified chorus. Rockstone: BULLSHIT! Get the fuck outta here! Pretty Dice: “Get outta here man, you get the fuck outta here. You’re old now you don’t know what the young cats are doing anymore!” “RUFF! RUFF! RUFF!” (Loud dog barking from the crowd) Rockstone: “I did not disrespect you, let me judge this shit here!” 143 “Bless the Mic” (BTM) is a weekly performance event that takes place in Accra. It is an open mic format where rappers, spoken word artists, and singers showcase their talent. The event features independent artists who perform a range of music—reggae, dancehall, R&B, gospel, hip hop, highlife and acoustic guitar. The show targets a diverse audience between the ages of 18-35, particularly, university students, children of diplomats or other officials, industry professionals, tourists, African American repatriates, young Ghanaian professionals, short-term contract workers at North American and European government agencies and NGOs, and other artists. What makes BTM important to consider over other local music events is its focus on displaying local talent by providing an alternative route for independent artists to exhibit their work. Bless the Mic is a highly masculine space. The late starting time for musical performances alienates many women and those who must work the next morning, resulting in a very young and male crowd. As a woman, one becomes aware of it immediately. I am conscious of myself as I search for other women in the audience and attempt to mark out a space of polite and inviting identification. There are wandering eyes all around. I am being thoroughly monitored, surveyed carefully like an object. Being an African American woman researcher produces extra levels of examination—my intentions, motivations and ultimate objectives are evaluated. An admixture of suspicion, fascination, surprise and contemplation surface in my interactions with artists and onlookers. I look over at the woman standing at the mic. The poets always go on first. But no one’s even paying attention. Baze Lounge and Bar is not conducive to this sort of muse. People are busy at the bar ordering drinks and playing pool in the backroom, unwinding after a long workday. The place is narrow and 144 overcrowded. The speakers are too loud and cause intense echoes that make the walls reverberate. Men are talking shit to one another or sweet talking one of the few women in the room—too busy to listen to this soft-spoken, nervous poet declare a return to Nkrumahism. Besides, the room is dark and made for bumping and grinding, ball cracking, and head nodding—all to a thick, luscious beat—not for someone talking revolution. Frustrated, I go outside to get some fresh air. There are a group of about ten young men huddled together tightly in the middle of the street. I venture over, curious. They are in the throes of a cutthroat cipher. One rapper, Pretty Dice, sounds like he’s straight out of Brooklyn. I first thought he was a Ghanaian from abroad visiting family in Accra on holiday. After speaking with several friends who knew better, I found out that Pretty Dice is what is known as a LAFA (locally acquired foreign accent). Pretty Dice has never travelled outside of West Africa but has perfected his American accent through listening to U.S. hip hop over the years. The LAFA is a product of global flows of cultural commodities like cassette tapes, CDs, magazines, Internet websites and music videos. These are embedded sites of transnational desire and consumption and circuits of travel where Ghanaians abroad visit family in Ghana on vacation from the U.K., Germany, Canada and the U.S. or move back and forth between Ghana and these countries for education, job opportunities, or family migration. The mimesis of New York hip hop artists is seen as cool and enviable because of the imperial presence of U.S. hip hop music, as a hypervisible practice accessible through music videos seen daily on local and satellite television and played frequently on radio stations and in bars and nightclubs. Consequently, there are attempts, by some Ghanaians, to also occupy this space of public representation. 145 Once again, I am the only female among this homosocial circle where the rappers trade barbs about dubious pasts as drug dealers, car thiefs, pimps, Internet scammers and international pimps. The cipher participants are quite polite, which is ironic considering their subject matter, with each rapper taking his fair turn and no one hogging space with longwinded rhymes. Then things take a sudden shift. Pretty Dice is in the midst of a “freestyle” reminiscent of something 50 Cent would spit about guns, drugs, and sexual prowess, as his friend echoes the last words of each phrase. Suddenly Reggie Rockstone, the “father of hiplife,” disrupts the cipher in progress. The cipher battle represents a test of masculinity, lyrical prowess, and the ability to define what constitutes sincere hip hop expression and what does not. The disagreement between Pretty Dice and Reggie Rockstone also represents an intergenerational conflict over sonic definitions and assessments of skill level. That this happened outside the event space suggests a surplus to the original purpose of the function. It is grounded in the vernacular of U.S. hip hop—of competition on friendly and hostile terms and territory marking. This masculinist practice is in response to the structure of the heavily militarization of disenfranchised communities. However, such encounters contest camaraderie of racial and cultural affinity operating in Nkrumah’s soul ideology. This example of freestyle battling is not an exercise in solidarity but rather, individualism. The cipher becomes a circle of tension and antagonism with each participant attempting to exercise the capacity to regulate verbal expression and force these terms upon other participants. BTM also promotes graffiti art, painting exhibitions and film screenings. The films chosen, such as Letter to the President, Sankofa, and Slingshot Hip Hop, in particular, meditate on racial identity and shared forms of dispossession. BTM 146 hosts events for Black History Month, African Unity Day, and birthday celebrations for Kwame Nkrumah, Bob Marley, Malcolm X and Marcus Garvey. Such events indicate that these occasions for remembrance are not the exclusive domain of African Americans but are also important to Ghanaians. Mi Prime Entertainment’s founder and creative director, Yaw Addo Boateng Annan, has organized the show since the fall of 2006. The show was generated to create an appreciation of Ghanaian youth music with a “supportive and ever-growing local and international audience.” 212 Bless the Mic’s vision is to “enhance music, arts and culture in Ghana to revolutionary new heights.” 213 The main objectives of the event are to provide a stable outlet for artistic creation, to help artists gain business acumen, make networking connections, provide a place to improve their skills and receive emotional and financial support for their craft. Each week the show has a different theme, rotating between reggae, spoken word, and rap. As payola to radio and video deejays is an expensive practice, BTM through an open mic format allows anyone to perform. The event is particularly useful for budding artists who want to improve their skills live before an audience. The event also allows networking opportunities with other musicians, radio show hosts, newspaper and magazine journalists, producers, managers and promoters. Many tourists and foreign nationals are regulars at BTM, which also allows for connections outside of Ghana in the distribution of one’s music and the organizing of international shows. 212 Listed in the Bless the Mic marketing portfolio. 213 Ibid. 147 BTM is unique because it provides a weekly program while other events in Accra are more geared to nightclub dancing, with intermittent performances or large-scale concerts of Ghana’s most popular artists—such as V.I.P., Tinny, Samini, Kwaw Kese and MzBel. While BTM charges admission prices for audience members, it does not charge a fee for artists to perform. Soul In Motion (SIM) is another local event that promotes alternative music but is more geared towards middle and upper class professionals, or “the bougie kids,” diasporic African visitors, repatriates, short-term stay professionals, white American and white European tourists, and contract workers. 214 The audience at SIM, for the most part, has either lived abroad or visited western nations extensively, explaining the event’s discriminating audience. This free event occurs weekly at Rema’s Lounge & Bar, owned by a young Liberian woman, and is centered on various DJ sets (such as resident DJ, Kweku Ananse), lounging and dancing with friends. SIM does not play live music by local artists. The music at SIM is a fusion of African folk music with electronica, ska, Afro-Beat, hip hop, soul, R&B and jazz. It privileges African American music. In contradistinction, BTM is grounded in a local venacular. The only time foreign music is played—usually U.S. hip hop or Jamaican reggae—is before the performance starts, between sets and as the event is winding down. At most, the performers will rap over popular U.S. hip hop beats in local languages, pidgin or English. BTM exists as a way to combat dysfunctions within Ghana’s music industry by providing a platform for artists and a union of support and value for their creative labor. As a collective, Ghanaian artists can take a political stance through their cultural craft by lobbying for enforced copyright protection, timely 214 This is what the children of governmental officials and other state authorities are called locally. 148 payment for shows, access to distribution networks, promotion for their music and networking opportunities domestically, internationally and intra- continentally. BTM was set up as a familial unit to assist artists in developing their work toward becoming financially viable, individually and as a cultural institution. BTM attempts to open up new spaces for marginalized city youth who don’t have many lucrative work alternatives or cannot afford a college education. It is a safe harbor for participants to express their multi-faceted identities and to have public recognition for their lyrical prowess, talent and skill in front of an audience of their peers. It provides a cultural citizenship that is not publicly available in everyday life, a space to be free to counter the norms of intergenerational expectations and social respectability. The concept of BTM is a result of Annan’s itinerant lifestyle. His stepfather is an ambassador so he moved with his family to New Delhi, India, where he attended high school. 215 Annan would deejay reggae and hip hop parties for his international schoolmates. Annan attended college at the University of Arkansas, Little Rock, and began to work in the underground hip hop scene as a reggae deejay and sponsor for local indie hip hop shows. The board for BTM is also largely transnational and professional: Joel Amponsah, a rapper also known as Props, is Annan’s cousin and grew up partly in Canada along with fellow rapper and cousin, Ronnie-O, “Toronto’s Finest.” The two work on updating BTM’s MySpace and FaceBook pages, the main sources of marketing for the event. Props and Ronnie-O also have a spin-off organization, University Promo Paddies, which hosts parties, fashion shows and other entertainment events for university students, primarily at the University of Ghana, Legon. Other board 215 Interview with Annan, July 2009. 149 members include a psychiatrist, singer and music producer from Trinidad who has lived in Ghana for fifteen years; an assistant professor at a local university in Accra who is completing a dissertation on the hip hop scene in Accra; and a journalist/music video director/filmmaker who will soon release a documentary on hip hop in Ghana. Guest performers—primarily African American, white American and diasporic Ghanaian---also bless the mic each week as travelers stop in town on mission trips, NGO business, study programs, backpacking adventures and family visits. Event promotion occurs through FaceBook as each week updates for the next week are posted for upcoming shows. Marketing for the show takes place through text messaging, radio, magazine, and newspaper advertisements. The show has been actively covered by DJ Kwame of Atlantis Radio, Bushke, Eddie Blay and Kweku Ananse of Vibe FM and Ms. Naa of Joy FM. There has also been extensive coverage by local publications, Jive! and Enjoy Accra magazines, and international television networks such as OBE TV (UK), Channel O (South Africa), MTV Base (South Africa), The Africa Channel (U.S.), and Aljazeehra (UAE). Although the shows are slated to begin at 9pm, they don’t typically start until about 11pm. Admission for ladies is free before 11pm, while men must pay 10 cedis, roughly $7. However, not much money is generated, because the door is propped open to let in friends or many attendees boycott the show at the last minute, in favor of socializing in the parking lot in front of the club entrance. The parking lot is the real site of Bless the Mic—where conversations, joint passing, freestyle battles, networking, and political conversations take precedence. The place inside is too noisy and becomes filled with “boys boys,” a reference to the young male hip hoppers who are more raucous. Many of the 150 reggae performers, or “Impostafarians” as they are locally termed, mimic the cool patois of Afro-Caribbeans. These performers claim to be “Rasta in the heart” which signals an appreciation for popular slogans (Rastafari! Haile Selassie! I N I! Chant down Babylon!), reggae and dancehall music and weed smoking but is devoid of a sustained knowledge of Rastafarianism as a spiritual and political practice that will make a critical difference in the lives of Ghanaians. The songs of these reggae performers, for the most part, are misogynistic and homophobic, focusing more on convincingly performing something that is recognizably “Jamaican” through gestures and language. The format in which most women participate is spoken word. A few other women sing gospel or R&B songs. The regulars who perform every other week are poets Mutumbo, Sonny, DK, Jazzi, and Toke; rappers Gray, Kochoko, Illa Shazz, Macho Rapper, Wanlov the Kobolor, Reggie Rockstone, Props, Ronnie-O, Kojo King, Project Monkz, Scizo, DC, Eddie Blay, D-Black and Kweku-T; and reggae artists Tilapia, Ras Bomba and StoneBoy. 216 Unfortunately, several problems have plagued Bless the Mic since I began work with the event in May 2009. I would attend the performances each week and serve in the capacity of videographer, in exchange for being able to shadow the participants and conduct interviews. I worked with BTM in this role throughout 2009. From the first moment I met Annan, he has always responded to my requests with care, concern and a welcoming atmosphere, as have BTM’s participating artists. I have always been able to contribute to the organization by 216 Illa Shazz is reminiscent of mid-1990’s hip hop with a uniform of a long-sleeved, flannel shirt, Timberlands, one jean leg rolled up, hockey jersey, sweatband and a bookbag and is reminiscent of a cross between Busta Rhymes, Wu Tang Clan with Ghanaian folk dances thrown in for good measure. 151 suggesting possible structural changes. During my time with BTM, I was given an intimate view of the struggles of the participating artists to produce their music for an international audience, conflicts with other local artists and with Annan. These contestations between artists often were the result of sabotage and betrayal. Several artists would pay BTM’s rotating schedule of DJs to disrupt the set of other artists (a common practice in Ghana) by manipulating the sound levels in the speakers and/or mic or cutting the song off prematurely. This is done if artists have personal or professional problems with other artists (over gossip, lies, romantic deception, money, jealousy, or revenge). In fact, BTM has relocated to a number of bars/nightclubs in the Osu District of Accra. Shows began in 2006 at Chelsea Place, in 2007 the event moved to Hypnotic Lounge, in 2008 to Baze Lounge and Bar, in the fall of 2009 to Mirage Nightclub, and finally, to Cinderella’s in late 2009. This consistent reshuffling speaks to Annan’s mishandling of the event in squabbles over money with owners of each venue. Annan has also been accused of not paying artists for gigs and prioritizing certain artists over others, to which his response has been “This is business; it is not personal.” He also takes full credit for the establishment of Bless the Mic when it was a joint effort under the leadership of The Movement—a group established between Annan, Mantse Aryeequaye and Sena Deganu. Annan also showcases U.K. and U.S. Ghanaian artists (such as M.anifest, Mensa, Tawiah, and Santee) over lesser-known Ghanaian indie artists. The issues with Annan’s management came to the fore during early 2009 after a Christmas show drew thousands of concertgoers, and artists were not paid as promised. Other performances at venues in Accra, such as Alliance 152 Francaise, resulted in similar accusations. Annan’s misuse of funds was critical for these artists, who believe him now to be untrustworthy. The Board of Directors also took issue with Annan because their suggestions for improvement were not actively instituted. The central problems are that the shows begin quite late for those who must work in the morning, which alienates women from the event. The place becomes filled with young men (in their late teens to early twenties) and carries a hypermasculine energy that makes many women feel uncomfortable. However, the professional crowd provides the funding to continue BTM shows, as many of the “boys boys” are snuck in by friends and don’t pay admission. The board has suggested on multiple occasions that the venue be changed to the pool courtyard of an upscale hotel and start at 7 or 8 pm, to attract the after-work crowd. The board wanted to emphasize acoustic guitar performances, film screenings and spoken word for the professional crowd and then wind down each week with the hip hop and hiplife music that draws in young male audience members. The Board emphasized the diversity of local music available in Accra by providing something for all audience members as a way to increase attendance. They also recommended advertising the event to popular radio and television programs to increase audience numbers and corporate sponsorship as BTM sought to branch outside of Accra to other provinces in Ghana and to truly become a national project. BTM reproduces the failures of the state in a gross misapprehension of artist advocacy. Although the event publicizes a democratic agenda that is devoted to promoting the music of independent artists, there are a number of internal problems that disrupt this public persona. BTM works to build up the national music industry by informing the public about local music and the need 153 to support the country’s artists as an alternative to U.S. music, which dominates the airwaves and market kiosks within town. The event, like Kwame Nkrumah’s presidency, seeks to develop national pride in Ghanaian music. However, Annan’s organization mirrors the state’s relationship with citizens as both productive and regressive. Although BTM stresses the importance of providing a democratic space for artist inclusion as a response to the government’s inattention to the national music industry and rigorous dismantling of artists’ rights, Annan’s Bless the Mic contributes such mismanagement even as he purports to fight against it. Consequently, Bless the Mic has all but dismantled. Dwindling numbers have taken the event from a once a week schedule to once a month. BTM’s new location at the nightclub, Cinderella’s, is located in the same compound as Reggie Rockstone’s lounge, Rockstone’s Office. BTM has consistently lost its consumer base to this competitor. As BTM folds, several other Accra artists, including poet and rapper D.K. Osei, have picked up the scene in “GH Unplugged,” a bi-weekly open mic performance at Smoothy’s Café in the Osu District. The Beat Forward The paradoxes of the Ghanaian state are emerge from the contemporary musical practices of young Ghanaians, as unfair regulation of travel and limited mobility to western nations takes precedence. What has been a persistent conundrum for these musicians is the flexibility to pursue their dreams of international work, distribution and album sales, livable wages, and enforced legislation against piracy. These artists respond to the post-1966 military governments abuses against citizenship, most immediately because they have 154 experienced the crises under such leadership firsthand. Kwame Nkrumah’s legacy is a powerful narrative, handed to young Ghanaian musicians by their parent’s generation, and spoken of with nostalgic fervor. The narrative of Nkrumah and his entanglement with Ghana’s formation is filled with crisis, evil forces, courageous leadership, controversy and drama. In many ways, Nkrumah is a mythical icon and national hero in the ongoing story of Ghana’s postcolonial struggle for modernity. The myth of Nkrumah has been employed as soul ideology in the music of many young Ghanaians. Nkrumah has been used as a defense mechanism—a moral and ethical measure--against the misuse of governmental power. This enduring quest for self-determination, racial interdependence and economic support for indigenous cultural arts has been at the fore of Kweku Ananse’s music, the Soul to Soul concert and Bless the Mic. However, even Nkrumah’s philosophy when put into practice enacted particular forms of confinement and overbearing political control. It is the anxious work of music, a rhythmic collision of beats, instruments, voices and sounds, and anti-colonialism, a struggle between different bodies, ideologies and violence, that also point to social anxiety over what it means to be a modern subject, to animate the collaborations and tensions between African and state. 217 Musical performance is the magical realm of possibility where Ghanaian subjects can revise their relationship to history, imaginatively and tangibly, and mark out different paths for the future. 217 For a similar racial formation of African Americans and post-Civil Rights era rock music, please see Maureen Mahon’s Right to Rock: The Black Rock Coalition and the Cultural Politics of Race, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004). 155 Chapter Three: You Really Got A Hold On Me: Tracing the Grooves of History, Memory and Performance in the Slave Dungeons I am standing in the mouth of the female dungeon. I hesitate to breathe for fear the hole will swallow me. It is competing with a rising tide of anguish that also threatens to eat me alive. The hole is dark, dank and noisome yet oddly comforting. After all, this is why I, and others, come to this site of torture—to fill in the gaps of our history, to make better sense of our lives, to find some comfort. But how does one find home in throbbing loss? Why must one dig for answers— that, ultimately, produce new questions—within the locus of pain? I run my fingers across the length of the thick, cavernous rock. It is brown like my skin…I can’t tell where it ends or begins. In a recent interview with FADER Magazine, poet Gil Scott-Heron declared, “The spirit should be material. It’s your blood. Inside your bloodstream is your parents and their parents and their parents and their parents and they want you to make it, because when you do what you do and you’re successful, then they’re happy you made it. You’re the link with immortality.” 218 What Scott- Heron articulates here is an ontological claim to spirit as inherently material and always already victorious over life’s struggles. The answers to the puzzle are embedded underneath the skin in an internal dialogue between spirit, mind, blood, bone and mass. This same ideological force is what pulls so many African American tourists back to Elmina and Cape Coast Castles in Ghana, in search of 218 Matthew Schnipper, "No Matter How Far Wrong You've Gone, You Can Always Turn Around: Looking to the Future, Gil Scott-Heron Rejoins the Present," The FADER Feb/Mar 2010: 88. 156 what Anne Bailey calls “lingering whispers.” 219 We spin back the wheel of time to re-trace its deep grooves and recover the loss/lost in dungeons, burial sites, Donkor Nsuo (The Slave River), and the Atlantic Ocean. Side 1: Something’s Got A Hold On Me Perhaps one’s DNA is a recording that is not only biological and racial but cultural and cosmological. 220 Can one’s DNA be an embedded and embodied soundtrack that charts particular and interconnecting nodes of history? Are those memories, experiences, dreams and longings then “recorded on my body?” 221 If we broke down the strands into coherent codes, or notes, or rearranged them into other combinations, what would they sound like? Would it produce a series of mixtapes, like hip hop records that sample older Black music—blues, R&B, funk, soul and jazz—and re-articulate them with new and emerging sounds? Perhaps it’s like Nathaniel Mackey muses, “The last thing I remember is coming to the realization that what I was playing already existed on a record.” 222 It is critical to examine these ghostly encounters—between spirits, spirits and 219 Bailey, Anne C., African Voices of the Atlantic Slave Trade: Beyond the Silence and the Shame (Boston: Beacon Press, 2005): 3. 220 See Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000) where he writes: “Marx had not realized fully that the cargoes of laborers also contained African cultures, critical mixes and admixtures of language and thought, of cosmology and metaphysics, of habits, beliefs and morality...African labor brought the past with it, a past that had produced it and settled on it the first elements of consciousness and comprehension”: 121, and Carolyn Cooper, Noises In the Blood: Orality, Gender, and the "Vulgar" Body of Jamaican Popular Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995) who discusses “noises in the blood and reverberating echoes in the bone” as genealogical discourses of race. 221 Frey, Nancy L., "Stories of the Return: Pilgrimage and Its Aftermaths," Ellen Badone and Sharon R. Roseman, eds., Intersecting Journeys: The Anthropology of Pilgrimage and Tourism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004): 101. 222 Mackey, Nathaniel, Bedouin Hornbook (Los Angeles: Sun and Moon Press, 2000): 7. 157 humans, humans and humans—in the slave castles as moments of performance. Edward Bruner examines the tourist border zone at the slave castles in Ghana as an empty stage waiting for performers, the indigenous, and an audience, the diasporic visitors. 223 But such roles are improvisational, unpredictable and could be reversed with tourists as performers and native populations as the audience. Those who visit and work at the castles are both performers and witnesses who conform to and deviate from particular social scripts of the tour guide, the diasporic tourist, the market seller and the courtyard musician. In some ways, the interaction between travelers, workers, and the spirits can be seen as a call and response, the West African performance art tradition. 224 As Diana Taylor writes, “Performances function as vital acts of transfer, transmitting social knowledge, memory, and a sense of identity through ‘reiterated behavior’.” 225 The call and response sustains communal participants through active involvement, persistent communication and an ever-emerging revision of social life. It is a democratic practice that gives all participants a distinct voice and equal stake in the matters of their communities. It revolves around the heterogeneity of its participants. This performance is an invitation or 223 See Edward M. Bruner, "Of Cannibals, Tourists, and Ethnographers," Cultural Anthropology 4.3 (Aug. 1989): 438-445. See also Jonathan Friedman, “Myth, History and Political Identity,” Cultural Anthropology 7.2 (1992): 194-210; Chris Rojek and John Ury, eds., Touring Cultures: Transformations of Travel and Theory (New York: Routledge, 1997) and Michael Hall and Hazel Tucker, eds., Tourism and Postcolonialism: Contested Discourses, Identities and Representations (New York: Routledge, 2004). 224 See J.H. Kwabena Nketia, Music in Africa (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1974); John Miller Chernoff, African Rhythm and African Sensibility: Aesthetics and Social Action in African Musical Idions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981); Samuel A. Floyd, Jr., The Power of Black Music: Interpreting Its History From Africa to the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); Amiri Imamu Baraka, Black Music (New York: De Capo Press, Inc., 1998); Amiri Baraka, Blues People (New York: Perennial, 2002). 225 Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003): 2-3. 158 an emphatic call between the performer and audience to share in and respond to an evolving process. The performance is necessarily interdependent, deriving its cyclical life energy from the mutual constituency of performers and witnesses as both giver and receiver. The slave forts become the ontological point of racial and cultural identity because “the dungeon was a womb in which the slave was born” and where, by the performance of walking through the “Door of Return” one’s social life can be recovered, revitalized or remade. 226 However, performance is not always an egalitarian practice nor does it exist outside of capital relations. Performance is simultaneously real and constructed. 227 As Paulla Ebron argues, “Performance was the medium through which cultural difference was assimilated and understood...Performance becomes a frame of enactment, creating moments of ‘Africa’ not just in Africa but, most significantly, in the performance of Africa for wide-ranging audiences.” 228 These enactments point to how this culture of interconnection between African Americans and Ghanaians is born out of commodification, as slavery fueled industrial capitalism and western modernity. Today, diasporic tourists must pay a fee to visit the castles to participate in particular imaginings of historical memory. These heritage tours are, foremost, mediated by capital. The tours of the castles, the W.E.B. DuBois Center and gravesite, and participation in naming ceremonies and libation rituals stimulate certain discourses about enslaved 226 Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007): 111. 227 See Taylor. 228 Ebron, Paulla A., Performing Africa (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), xv and 1. Additionally, see Kevin K. Gaines, American Africans in Ghana: Black Expatriates and the Civil Rights Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006). 159 peoples and their lives prior to the transatlantic slave trade. Such tours cater to diasporic clients by providing selective information that blurs the line between myth and history. Part of this relies on the cultural role of the griot, a human oral archive of history who, for a price, narrates and praises one’s genealogical roots and their intersection with significant national, regional and world events. 229 Similarly, African American tourists have come to Ghana with a particular story in mind—of kings and queens, goldmines and diamonds, the selling of one’s kin, and warriors like Yaa Asantewa and Sunjata—that they are more than willing to pay for to have confirmed. These historical memories, or rather dramas of love, betrayal, war and return are the tidy, seamless narratives that many tourists expect and believe will provide them with a sense of suture. 230 As James Clifford explains, “Diaspora consciousness lives loss and hope as a defining tension.” 231 The prodigal return of African Americans, to heritage tourism sites, promises to seal the gaps in historical memory and provide a happy closure to one’s racial subjectivity. It is presumed that historical memory, racial subjectivity and kinship are static categories, not vital and dynamic processes just as mobile as the bodies of tourists. Performance is bound up with recovering that which has been lost or never had but performance can be unwieldy and imperfect. 229 See Ebron. 230 See Debbora Battaglia, “At Play in the Fields (And Borders) of the Imaginary: Melanesian Transformations of Forgetting,” Cultural Anthropology 8.4 (1993): 430-442; Lynda R. Day, "What's Tourism Got to Do With It?: The Yaa Asantewa Legacy and Development in Asanteman," Africa Today 51.1 (2004): 99-113; Robert C. Newton, "Of Dangerous Energy and Transformations: 'Nyamakalaya' and the Sunjata Phenomenon," Research in African Literatures 37.2 (2006): 15-33; and Michelle D. Commander, “Ghana At 50: Moving Towards Kwame Nkrumah’s Pan-African Dream,” American Quarterly 59.2 (2007): 421-441. 231 James Clifford, “Diasporas,” Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997): 257. 160 As Slavoj Žižek proposes, “Ultimately we hear things because we cannot see everything.” 232 I strain to hear any forms of life. I can only detect distant sounds of activity beyond the back of the castle doors and “The Door of No Return.” The predominant noise is the Atlantic Ocean, crashing against the seashore. I hear the fishermen speak in rapid, hushed tones as their bodies struggle against the tiny canoes, their oars pulse against the waves as nets are thrown in with great precision. The nets re-surface, teeming and throbbing with jerking fish. The market women hiss and suck their teeth in mundane conversation as they collect the fish from the men for cooking. Children, with closely shaved heads and matching uniforms, wander curiously inside the castle or along the beach after school—the girls laugh and play handclap and jumping games as the boys roughhouse with one another, diving between workers and on top of rocks in a game of chase. At the entrance of the castle, teenage boys patronize African American tourists with “Sister! Brother!,” “Akwaaba”(Welcome), or “Welcome Home” as they pass folded letters with requests for contact information, money, or school donations, colorfully braided bracelets to “please put your name fah de inside” or other trinkets for sale. 233 Market women pierce the air with unique calls for customers to try their products of bagged ice water, oranges, sugarcane, pineapple, groundnuts, and doughnut balls. Cab drivers compete for tourists’ attention with loud, intermittent honks, verbal petitions or hisses. 232 Slavoj Žižek, "'I Hear You With My Eyes'; or, The Invisible Master," Renata Saleci and Slavoj Žižek, eds., Gaze and Voice as Love Objects (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996): 90 and 92. 233 Hartman details similar interactions at the slave dungeons in “Come, Go Back, Child,” Lose Your Mother. 161 The shops in the courtyard just beyond the reception area are now filled with traditional instruments—drums, guitars, piano boxes, and rattles—beads, cloth, masks, paintings, rugs and postcards. It is no longer a market in Black flesh but of “African” objects, or cultural artifacts that amplify the racial identity of diasporic visitors, and make them more “real” once they return home. Shop owners busy themselves making crafts, passing the day chatting with one another and potential customers. It is just as Ann Czechovitch finds: “The affective life can be seen to pervade public life.” 234 The slave forts are stimulated with competing and intersecting structures of noise—ancestral spirits, diasporic tourists, market women, shop owners, front yard hustlers, schoolchildren, among others—who compose an intricate and complicated soundtrack of past expressions that take residence in the present and help to make sense of one’s destiny and future. What comes to the fore again and again is the failure of the political sphere to heal the psychic wound—of slavery, colonialism, ethnic conflict, government misabuse of citizen funds, poverty and debt—that is ongoing and omnipresent yet elusive. The past resurfaces because such trauma exists as a public history that is unfinished, undone and in need of sustained attention. This cell in which I stand is one of many at the Twin Castles, the gargantuan fortresses that after five hundred years continue to hold fast to the southern coast of Ghana. The intersecting trails of fine cracks rupture the once- pristine white paint on the walls…possibly one for every person stolen out of the dungeons. The hull is transfixing, the hold captivating. I lie in wait for the spirits 234 Ann Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003): 110. 162 to speak. For some reason, I am suddenly reminded of Rev. James Cleveland’s gospel song, “Somethings Got A Hold On Me” where he proclaims, “Something hit me/Up over my head/And run right to my feet.” 235 Cleveland is talking about the power of the Holy Ghost to re-fashion his troubled life through spiritual re-birth. He sings of transformation from a life of misery to a brand new liberation that is manifested like a shock through his entire being and body. 236 This new shock counters the crisis he regularly experiences “in the world.” This new bodily sensation permeates his entire being and acts as a shield against daily strife. Similarly, Etta James’ secular version, “Something’s Got A Hold On Me” attests, “My heart feels heavy/my feet feel light/I shake all over/ but I feel alright.” 237 James’ something is more possessive of her person; it is the overwhelming yoke of romantic love that seeps into her pores and won’t let up. This occupation of James’ senses is so startlingly pleasurable that she longs for and needs it. Similarly, The Miracles’, “You’ve Really Got A Hold On Me” pronounces, “Don’t want to leave you/don’t want to stay here/don’t want to spend another day here/oh, oh, oh, I wanna sit now/I just can quit now.” 238 Robinson expresses the ambivalence of love and longing—frustration, 235 Rev. James Cleveland and the Voices of the Tabernacle, "Somethings Got a Hold of Me," Somethings Got a Hold of Me/Greater Day, by Rev. James Cleveland, Savoy Records, 1959. 236 The lyrics read “I believe I’d die if I only could/I sure feel strange, but I sure feel good/I got a feeling/I feel so strange/My heart was heavy when in misery/I never thought it could be this way/Love’s sure gonna put a hurting on me.” Lyrics courtesy of www.rhapsody.com, at http://www.rhapsody.com/rev-james-cleveland/a-tribute-to-the-king-of-gospel-vol- 1/somethings-got-a-hold-on-me/lyrics.html. 237 Etta James, "Something's Got A Hold On Me," by Leroy Kirkland, and Pearl Woods Etta James, Argo Records, 1963. Lyrics can be found at http://www.answers.com/topic/something- s-got-a-hold-on-me-performed-by-etta-james. 238 The Miracles, "You've Really Got A Hold On Me," The Fabulous Miracles, by Smokey Robinson, Motown Records, 1962. Lyrics can be found at http://www.lyricsdownload.com/robinson- smokey-you-really-got-a-hold-on-me-lyrics.html. 163 disappointment, ecstasy and desire—that crowds the senses and the sheer torture of being powerless over this structure of feeling. The protagonist is unable to shake hold of the beloved object, which makes him question his own capacity. The hold exceeds western logic and reason because it is embodied and acts out in ways the mind cannot comprehend or prevent. It is the same hold the castles have on African American visitors—an enigmatic narrative of love, loss and longing that the progeny of slaves refuse to relinquish and attempt to retell by inserting their bodies into slave histories. African Americans tour the castles as a way of tracing what Ralph Ellison calls “the grooves of history.” 239 Like a phonograph record, grooves are meant to be linear and progressive, but diasporic African history is awkward, uneven and full of odd ruptures, gaps and distortions. As James Clifford insists, “Diaspora discourse articulates, or bends together, both roots and routes.” 240 These grooves consist of a series of complex and overlapping relationships that is multi-directional and non-linear. Like an album record, the records of history indicate particular events of static (crisis), interludes (junctures), and rhythms (discourse). As Steven Feld argues, “The music is mysteriously ‘in’ these physical recesses, pressed into the vinyl, and listeners may imagine journeying there to merge right ‘into the groove’.” 241 Grooves are doubly intentioned as: 1) the tracing of deep historical roots through specific routes of migration and 2) a physical and/or psychic space where utopic 239 Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (New York: Vintage Books, 1990): 443. 240 Clifford: 251. 241 Steven Feld and Charles Keil, Music Grooves: Essays and Dialogues (Tucson: Fenestra Books, 2005): 111. 164 possibilities are imagined, alternative choices can be sought out, and past and future events are persistently contextualized within the present moment. To be “in a groove” is to be in tune with multiple realities simultaneously, to compress or stretch out time and space and one’s capacity in extraordinary ways. Strangely, this cell is absent of all sound, even the static, white noise of silence. It is a shame because the cave would, honestly, have excellent acoustics. But it refuses to sound for me and tell me its history. In the absence of human bodies, does one’s memory produce sounds? I want to make it play an old, old record—to feel the grooves of its persistence in my curious palms, to travel along its routes like the thousands of African American tourists who visit each year. We come to the castles in search of roots but are denied its materiality. Perhaps it is waiting for me to make a sound? Is my presence not enough? I am frustrated, enraged, saddened, made powerless by its persistent hollowness, by its refusal to speak—the dungeon has been carved up and left for dead much like the bodies it previously stored. But this place—these holding cells and torture chambers—are not dead but alive and well. My being here attests to it. Why should this place stand the test of time and not its inhabitants? And if these forts still remain, shouldn’t they…say something? I am reminded of how “the enslaved also used silence and quietude itself to resist.” 242 I also think about how Diana Taylor discusses the indecipherability of performance. 243 Perhaps silence is a strategic device in the face of the incomprehensibility of traumatic loss. Silence can be 242 Mark M. Smith, Sensing the Past: Seeing, Hearing, Smelling, Tasting, and Touching in History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008): 51. 243 See Taylor, 6 and 15. See also Fred Moten, "Black Mo'nin'," David L. Eng and David Kazanjian, Loss: The Politics of Mourning (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003): 59-76. 165 used to enact counter-performances or to articulate a range of other possibilities than those presently available. Like myself and other African Americans, literary critic Saidiya Hartman came to Ghana looking for her ancestors in the quotidian of Ghanaian life. What she finds are ghostly imprints of the slave trade everywhere, in the eleven slave forts along the coast, and nowhere, as an invisibility within everyday conversations, popular media and official discourse. As Hartman asks, “Were gaps and silences and empty rooms the substance of my history?” 244 Hartman muses over the deep reluctance by Ghanaians and many African American families to discuss slavery, because it produces overwhelming feelings of shame, humiliation, torture and rejection that threaten the stability of the body and bodies (families, racial communities, etc.). She refers to Ghana as an “open grave,” a place that insistently reproduces a crux wrapped by a diasporic desire to re-imagine the past and suture traumatic identity. 245 Hartman finds the most enduring mark of the slave trade to be her own body. She looks for racial kinship in the sign of the stranger, the enslaved made to dis-member their formal social relations and homeland and take on the half- life marked by inhumane labor in a faraway, peculiar place. Hartman, as diasporic visitor, represents a privileged wanderer who seeks the unknown through active engagement with a past that disconnects her from what many Ghanaians see as critical issues for their existence and future, e.g., livable wages, 244 Hartman: 16. 245 Ibid: 157. 166 affordable education, and the ability to freely travel and see the world as African American tourists do. Hartman is haunted by an infinite loss of Black life that is not only irrecoverable but redoubled through discursive silence in Ghana. Similarly, Ann Pellegrini writes about these “nightmares of dis- and mis-identifications” in performance. 246 I hear nothingness in the emptied hole. All that remains is a heavy vastness of what once was. As Mackey so profoundly articulates, “I wept for the notion of kin, as though the very idea were an occasion for tears, a pitiful claim to connection, a bleeding socket whose eye’d been plucked out.” 247 Over time, the cold stone has absorbed the blood, sweat, feces and bones of its inhabitants. It is the only material trace that proves the enslaved were ever there. As Žižek suggests, the reverberating tactility of loss—the lump at the back of the throat that refuses to go down, the chills that run through the body, the hairs that stand up at the base of the neck, the firm yet warm pressure that grasps the shoulders like a hand, the sweeping gesture passing just behind you—provides the ground to render visible, or audible, the ghostly/ghastly figure of silence. 248 This haunting structure of textured feeling points toward a gap in the field of the visible, toward the sonic dimension of what eludes our gaze. 249 The relationship between the haunting and the haunted is mediated by an impossibility of fully recovering histories through practices in re-membering. History and memory are selective, forgetful and flawed. It bears repeating: “Ultimately, we hear things 246 Pellegrini: 11. 247 Mackey: 21. 248 Žižek: 93. 249 Ibid. 167 because we cannot see everything.” 250 It is difficult to give up the travail. I must remind myself, the enslaved are not a figment of my racial imagination. Because they were here, so am I now. They were ingested into this claustrophobic pit— more than two hundred at a time—before being swallowed again out to sea. According to tour guides at Elmina and Cape Coast Castles, the brick slave pens do reverberate with the loss/lost of life, particularly at night, where bodiless moans, sobbing, screams and litanies can be heard rocking through the forts. As Achille Mbembe argues, screams represent “multiple crises” and shows “what is seen (visible) and what is not seen (the invisible and the occult).” 251 On January 19, 1482, Captain Don Diego D’Azanbuja anchored his ship loaded with building materials, including stone and wood, and 200 soldiers to a site opposite of where Elmina Castle now stands. 252 The Portuguese commander came in search of gold that was reportedly in abundance in the coastal town of Edina (later named Elmina). The crew built “Sao Jorge del mina” (St. George of the Mine, now Elmina Castle), a trading post and fortress against attacks from other European traders and indigenous communities. On August 29, 1637, a Dutch army captured the fort from the Portuguese and expanded the size of the castle and product supply from gold, ivory and spices to enslaved labor. In 1872, the Dutch sold Elmina Castle to the British colonial government. It first operated as a secondary administrative center and then a training base and armory for The 250 Ibid. 251 Achille Mbembe, "Variations on the Beautiful in Congolese Worlds of Sound," Sarah Nutall, ed. Beautiful and Ugly: African and Diasporic Aesthetics (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 88. Also see Sarah Nutall’s introduction “Rethinking Beauty”: 21. 252 Leo A. Yankson, The Twin Castles, in conjunction with Fort Valley State University (Cape Coast: Nyakod Printing Works, 2001): 1. 168 West African Frontier Force serving in India and Burma during World War II. 253 Following the war, Elmina Castle served as a police training facility. Cape Coast Castle, originally called Carolusburg Castle, was built as a fort in 1652 by a Swedish army. In 1658, a Danish coup took over the castle that was then re-captured by the Dutch armed force in 1662. By 1664, the British wrestled control of the castle from the Dutch and it became the capital of the Gold Coast colony. Slavery was abolished in all British colonies by the federal government on August 1, 1834. In the following years, Cape Coast Castle became the governor’s mansion and state house and then the military headquarters. With The Bond of 1844, the British colonial administration signed an agreement with the Fante Confederacy of chiefs to protect southern coastal communities from violent occupation by northern Asante forces. This pact, in effect, made specific Fante and Ga locales allies of the British and secured British control more densely throughout the country. On March 19, 1877, the seat of government was moved from Cape Coast Castle to Christianburg Castle in the Osu District of Accra where it remains today. 254 After this shift, the castle at different junctures became a primary school, an armory, a post office and a community space for meetings, concerts and other events. The forts were open for tours beginning during Kwame Nkrumah’s postcolonial tenure and, in 1979, UNESCO recognized Elmina and Cape Coast Castles as World Heritage Sites. Indeed, African Americans were primarily behind the push to obtain the UNESCO designation for the slave castles and the multi-million dollar USAID 253 Ibid. 254 Ibid: 2. 169 grant awarded in 1989 to add libraries and museums to the sites. 255 In 1992, musician Isaac Hayes pledged to raise $10 million with his organization, African American Society to Preserve Cape Coast Castle. 256 Hayes recognized the possibilities for collaboration between U.S. and Ghanaian musicians with the Panafest cultural festival as a primary vehicle for such interaction. However there is an ongoing “conjunction of competing discourses” around how to preserve the histories of the twin castles and “offer a variety of clients what each of them desires.” 257 Many scholars usefully discuss how differing cultural perspectives of Ghanaians and Black tourists translate to misunderstandings over how historical sites, such as former slave castles, should be preserved. 258 Variant interpretations of historical preservation also suggest differing conceptions of the affective condition and particularly, the social import of history and how it is used to mediate Ghana’s present and future. Most Ghanaians view the castle tours as primarily a diasporic tourist practice, especially for African Americans. These studies have done tremendous work in acknowledging a peculiar kind of estrangement between Black Ghanaians and African American tourists—where Black vistors participate in a series of 255 Malcolm Billings, "Ghana's Slave Castles," History Today 49.8 (1999): 2-3. 256 Although the organization disbanded, Hayes did build a school in Ghana as a part of the Isaac Hayes Foundation and was made an honorary king, titled Nene Katey Ocansey I. 257 Ellen Badone and Sharon R. Roseman, eds., Introduction: “Approaches to the Anthropology of Pilgrimage and Tourism,” Intersecting Journey:, 4 and 15. 258 See Jennifer Hasty, "Rites of Passage, Routes of Redemption: Emancipation Tourism and the Wealth of Culture," Africa Today 49.3 (Autumn 2002): 47-76.; Edward Bruner, "Tourism in Ghana: The Representation of Slavery and the Return of the Black Diaspora," American Anthropologist, New Series, 98.2 (June 1996): 290-304; Benjamin W. Kankpeyeng and Christopher R. DeCorse, "Ghana's Vanishing Past: Development, Antiquities, and the Destruction of the Archeaological Record," African Archaeological Review 21.2 (June 2004): 89-128; and Lynda R. Day, "What's Tourism Got to Do With It?: The Yaa Asantewa Legacy and Development in Asanteman," Africa Today 51.1 (Autumn 2004): 99-113. 170 specialized rituals marketing a “return home” that resituate public space as one of diasporic longing, mourning and the celebration of slave ancestry. Bayo Halsey’s ethnographic research on Cape Coast and Elmina reveals that slavery is not discussed in private and public discourse because it is viewed as a northern phenomenon, as the slave trade was generated in that region as opposed to the coastal towns that served only as a brief transit point for the Americas. 259 Instead, Fante public history circulates around advancements in transportation, education and technology spurred by Portuguese and Dutch military forces and the British colonial administration. Halsey finds that national history stresses the struggle against colonialism and the subsequent founding of independence as disconnected from Ghana’s practices of enslavement. Furthermore, many Ghanaians have expressed interest in addressing the full histories of the castles and not selectively focusing on the transatlantic slave trade. Ghanaians living in Elmina and Cape Coast also have discussed refurbishing the castles through the process of whitewashing and, thereby, making them more pleasant and attractive. However, this has been met with great dissension from African American travelers and repatriates to Ghana who view plans for whitewashing as erasing the castles’ gruesome history in the transatlantic slave trade. 260 Many African Americans desire to preserve the historical character of the forts as close to their original condition as possible. There have also been disagreements over the placement of a gift shop and restaurant inside the castle, both of which were eventually removed due to 259 See Bayo Halsey, Routes of Remembrance: Refashioning the Slave Trade in Ghana (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). 260 See Halsey. 171 African American disfavor. These encounters between African Americans and Ghanaians occur over what Dean MacCannell calls “staged authenticity” and how “it is frequently the ‘natives’ who are forced dramatically to transform themselves in order to accommodate tourists.” 261 For many Ghanaians, the diasporic tourist sector provides much needed job opportunities and this takes precedence over any disputes over historical memory. As Emmanuel Hagan, the Director of Diasporic Relations in Ghana’s Tourism Office asserts, “We are very much interested in having diasporans who have their roots here to come back and help the country develop. We must make an effort to link up with our brothers and sisters over there, try to overcome all the hostilities that exist. Eventually, we will benefit from whatever knowledge you have acquired over there. It is a question of giving back to your motherland what has been taken away from us. It is an emotional and psychological thing not just tourism. There’s something more to it. We have to work at it, it is not something that just happens.” 262 Side 2: Freedom Song While many U.S. scholars who examine heritage tourism to Ghana critique the lack of verbal discourse on the country’s participation in the transatlantic slave trade, it is important to consider multiple ways to re-member enslaved histories that are outside language. Here, I interrogate how the body sounds out history, invokes remembrances and performs diverse cultural perspectives. One example is when U.S. network, Black Entertainment Television (BET), hosted a 261 Dean MacCannell, Planning for Tourism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), see especially 57-76, 91-107. 262 Interview with Mr. Emmanuel Hagan, July 2009. 172 jazz concert in the courtyard of Cape Coast Castle in February 2003. 263 Again, this event met much criticism from African Americans who regard the fort as a sacred space to mourn the suffering and loss of ancestors and not a place of leisurely entertainment. This presented an interesting moment of contestation among African Americans and points to a range of intra-racial responses to slave re-memory. Carlos Sakayi was a production consultant with the concert and remembers that BET producers, Thought it was a good idea to celebrate their ancestors and play some music there in honor of the people who were taken away. I mean people saw it from different angles. Some see the Cape Coast Castle and the Elmina Castle as sacred places. Some African Americans who went to this concert openly wept. Mike Phillips, a fantastic sax player, actually went all the way into the dungeon playing his sax. It was such a moment. I was so touched I almost nearly wept myself. And he was blowing where the people were chained and it was something else. 264 For some, the history of enslavement is an incomprehensible phenomenon that exceeds verbal language. Phillips’ sax soliloquy to the ancestors stretches the limits of the verbal to a performance of gratitude for what the enslaved endured, an attempt to grasp the unthinkable human condition in slavery and an answer to the spiritual call to do something more than talk. Phillip’s performance exhibited the tug, or the hold, the spirits had on his body and instrument. Similarly, during Roberta Flack’s visit with jazz musician Les McCann to the castles during the Soul To Soul concert tour in 1971, she wept while singing “Freedom Song” in the female dungeon. Mavis Staples recalls that this 263 Vinette Pryce, "First Ghana Jazz & Heritage Fest Caps Black History Month," New York Amsterdam News (2003): 19. 264 Interview with Carlos Sakayi, June 2009. 173 improvised performance was a response to the call of the ancestors because “sometimes late at night you can hear the moans and groans. Their spirits are still here.” 265 Okyerema Kwamina Pra is a handsome man in his mid-fifties with a muscular build that would suggest he’s fifteen years younger. He is polite, soft- spoken and smiles easily during conversation. He suffers a slight stutter, maybe it is a nervous gesture in the company of strangers, or perhaps he prefers to speak with his hands. Okyerema means “Divine” and Kwamina, “Master Drummer.” He was given these names at age fifteen by elders who recognized his gift in drumming. Pra has taught traditional drumming in primary, secondary and tertiary institutions throughout the coastal towns. As music education was disbanded in public schools, particularly with the food and fuel crisis in the early 1980s, Pra started a private organization in 1982 to continue teaching traditional music, dance and dramatic performance to neighborhood youth. He was worried that the traditional arts were experiencing a downward trend because of the popular influence of western music. Pra has rented a performance space, a former armory, in Cape Coast Castle for the past seven and a half years. You must remove your shoes at the door and duck down to enter the room. It is surprisingly light inside—unlike the dungeons, of course—because of the many windows that provide a breathtaking view of the ocean. The acoustics of the courtyard and performance space are ideal for music with the interaction of various elements--the walls, bodies, instruments, the wind, and ocean. There 265 Soul To Soul, “Mavis Staple Commentary,” dir. Denis Sanders, prod. David Peck and Jon Kanis, for Reelin' In The Years Productions, 2004. 174 are speakers, soundboards, a keyboard, electric guitar and mic stands to the left. A couple of wooden benches are perched against the wall for listeners. To the right is a desk with papers stacked high—pictures of Pra’s performance troupe, advertisements for shows and a photograph of former president, George W. Bush, Jr., clutter the wall. Beyond the rehearsal space/office is the storage room for the ensemble’s productions—various drums (atsimewu, sogo, kidi, agboba, kloboto and totodzi) from the size of a melon to a five foot tall person line the wall, along with axatse (beaded rattles), gangkogui (double iron bell), atoke (single boat shaped bell), clackers, tambourines, and seprewa (stringed harp). A couple pairs of stilts lean against the opposite wall along with racks of multi- colored rubber masks with beads and tufts of hair spilling out. Costumes of different fabric and prints sit beneath the masks. The students that form Pra’s ensemble, including his teenage son, are dancers and singers who regularly perform re-enactments of the capture, torture and departure of enslaved peoples for diasporic tourist groups. These performances occur in the male and female slave dungeons, at hotels and resorts in Cape Coast and Elmina and for events like Emancipation Day and Panafest. During the summer, students from France, Germany, England, Italy, Spain and Denmark come to learn from the master drummer. He also performs regularly, at least twice a year at concert halls, universities and museum galleries in Denmark and Belgium, a contract he worked out with white Danish visitors to the castle several years ago. Pra also released a highlife CD in 2001 with the Agoro-Band 175 entitled Edwuma Edwuma! (Work! Work!), that he sells at performances domestically and internationally. 266 Pra’s reasons for being in the castle’s courtyard are not by chance. In fact, the spirits of the ancestors drew him like a magnetic force to this strange place. He ruminates, The spirit is here and it is easier to tap in because when they were here they were singing. In those days they were using the drum language and spiritually they respond to some of my poetic words on the drum and they communicate as well. But you need to hear and understand from the spiritual point of view. It is both training and a gift. Most of our drummers because of the lifestyle they become alcoholics or use drugs and they attract negative spirits but if you refrain from that act you get a real spiritual contact. You have to develop yourself to a certain level to hear and sometimes see. You have to master courage to withstand the distance. This place is a spiritual, powerful place but if you have not developed it within yourself you will just walk around and not know anything about this place. Whenever I take the talking drum and use the poetic words you will feel their presence. Sometimes they give you certain poetic words that are not known to a normal person. Sometimes they give a message to me to be given out to the public. The ocean also has some healing powers if you know how to tap it and receive its potency. We have five different spirits and each one has it’s own code of contact. We play and we sing and use proverbs on the leading drum to contact the fairies, the elfs, the human spirits, the ancestral spirits and the gods. And you will feel a spirit from each area hover around. 267 266 Okyerema Pra & Agoro-Band, Edwuma Edwuma!, by Okyerema Pra, Cope Records, 2001. Even though formal colonialism has ceased, the travel routes between Northern Europe and Ghana are well worn. There are a number of European cultural preservation agencies in Ghana such as Alliance Francaise, The Goeth-Institut and British Council that regularly sponsor folk arts programming, particulary for audiences of tourists to Ghana, the Black elite and foreign nationals working at governmental agencies and NGOs in Ghana. 267 Interview with Okyerema Pra in July 2009. 176 Every weekday afternoon at about three o’clock, fifteen or so teenagers, mostly girls, stroll into the courtyard. They are talking excitedly, laughing possibly about the day’s events, as they take off their shoes and settle their bags before rehearsal begins. For the next few hours until sunset, the troupe will perform a number of songs and dances about daily Ghanaian life, romantic love, birth and death, strength in war and overcoming one’s enemies, divine praise for the abundance of children, and petitions to the spirits for favor in agricultural harvests. These songs and dances stem from different ethnic groups in Ghana; not just Fante, but Ga, Ewe and Akan. The songs and dances are traditional, choreographed by the ensemble or improvised. The purpose of these performances is to be in conversation with the spirits as a method for negotiating daily life. According to Pra, there is such an intensity of spirit here because of what the ancestors endured and how singing and dancing was a form of comfort and solidarity between the enslaved of different ethnic groups even as there was a language barrier. Song and dance provided a point of communion and revived the spirits of enslaved peoples for what was to come. The ensemble’s work is also cathartic and allows the youth to be connected to a history that is vibrantly alive and extended through the direct participation of their bodies. In fact, some of the young dancers move into a trance because of Pra’s “poetic words.” 268 The dancers begin to get into the drummers’ groove and are drawn higher through the shaking of their bodies offered up as a sacrifice to the ancestors and deities. Pra continues, “Sometimes the tourists will stop and watch and the Blacks, 268 Ibid. 177 because they are from here, they take part. All the rhythms and patterns are within them and they can’t hide it.” Dance is an interaction between humans and spirits, where dancers intercede with the spirits, on behalf of their larger communities, and impersonate the deities in praise and celebration. Pra sits at the lead drum with other male professional drummers and begins to tap out a melody. The youth immediately become focused on the performance space and form a circle behind the drummers. Several of the older students take turns inside the circle starting a chant that is picked up by the rest of the ensemble. An older woman in her mid- seventies is enthusiastically singing and dancing behind the drummer bench. Her feet move instinctively within the beat the group has created as she sings more for herself than to the others. She and another elderly woman have been a part of Pra’s group since the beginning. The two women are mentors to the younger dancers and instruct them in traditional music education because they know the choreography and song circle formations. The women also are in charge of organizing the costume closet. According to Pra, the women “keep the rhythmic pattern” for the group. 269 As the drums pick up in vibrato, the group migrates to the other side of the drummers. Maintaining the circle formation, they clap and dance, vigorously jumping through the air with purposeful movements. The students are in concert with one another, although each distinctly moves in her/his own way. Several of the women dancers are experts and break away from the rest of the group to perform a high energy, choreographed number. At one point, the lead dancer’s long weave ponytail falls 269 Ibid. 178 to the ground. She smiles but continues to dance, not to be outdone by her comrades. Side 3: The Sea In Marvin Gaye’s “Sexual Healing,” he moans, “Baby, I got sick this mornin’/a sea was stormin’ inside of me/baby, I think I’m capsizin’/the waves are risin’ and risin’.“ 270 For Gaye, the sea represents an overwhelming complex of longing, desire, pleasure, pain, ecstasy and excess. It navigates that narrow territory between the sticky ambiguity of affect and affection that overtakes the subject and provides limited forms of escape. This sexual pain and pleasure is an engulfing event that, like the sea, threatens to drown the body with uncontrollable emotions. The subject is made captive, stranded out at sea, by the hold. This seasickness, nausea, or noise is the overstimulation of the senses through the blurring of material and metaphysical events. For the bound subject, is escape even desirable or is the yoke more captivating? Cape Coast Castle was built on top of a sacred site, the shrine of the god Nana Tabir. The precious rocks where Nana Tabir lives and his followers made offerings were removed into the care of Fante high priests during Portuguese occupation. Nana Tabir guards the ocean and provides for the well-being of fishermen and traders. 271 In 1977, the shrine of Nana Tabir returned to the site, in one of the lower male dungeons, and there is a priest available to perform libation rituals for visitors to the castle. Ironically, these ceremonies occur mostly 270 Marvin Gaye, "Sexual Healing," Midnight Love, by Odell Brown, David Ritz Marvin Gaye, Columbia Records, 1982. Lyrics can be found at http://www.metrolyrics.com/sexual-healing- lyrics-marvin-gaye.html. 271 Sandra E. Greene, Sacred Sites and the Colonial Encounter: A History of Meaning and Memory in Ghana (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002): 160. 179 for African American tourists who eagerly participate in what they regard as a historical exercise closely resembling the lifestyles of their ancestors while Ghanaians, largely Christian and conservative, eschew this spiritual tradition as primitive and unsophisticated. 272 Sandra E. Greene discusses how the pre- colonial town of Notsie, in southeastern Ghana, was a religious center and home of the god Mawu; after colonization, it became the site for festivals and re- enactments as a way to celebrate Anlo (Ewe) ethnic identity. Gods like Nana Tabir and Mawu, in pre-colonial history, have command over all of the activities of the Atlantic Ocean. These gods possessed the power to calm the sea and facilitate the flow of trade, the economic center of coastal towns like Cape Coast and Elmina. The ocean has a mysterious aura and the capacity to take life, cleanse oneself of malevolent spirits, renew one’s spiritual character, and provide sustenance for one’s family and communities. As, Hartman claims, “The ocean never failed to remind me of the losses, and its roar echoed the anguish of the dead.” 273 In fact, Brother Shabazz, an African American repatriate to Ghana from Brooklyn, New York and the caretaker of One Africa Productions on the coast of Elmina—a resort, restaurant, travel and relocation agency for African American tourists and repatriates—talked at length about how fishermen hear moans, weeping and screams in the ocean while at work. He also detailed a story about three white young adults who were cautioned about standing too close to the tide one day a few of years ago. Brother Shabazz shares, “We know the water 272 See Halsey. 273 Greene: 32. 180 and we warned them. They laughed it off. Next thing you know that tide swooped them up. I saw one guy pulled off his feet into the air. His head hit the rocks. He was wearing a white shirt and it was soaked with blood. The other two were swept in like it was nothing. Yep, they were sacrificed that day.” 274 Brother Shabazz interpreted these bodily offerings as rightful retribution for how slavery and colonization have devastated Ghana’s land, people and resources. The ocean, as also embodying a complex presence of ancestral spirits and deities, has the power to reclaim what was taken during the Middle Passage. The sea also possesses an internal knowledge that restores order and balances the unevenness of history. Black British singer Corinne Bailey Rae laments on her 2010 album and title song, “The Sea,” initially over a family story about her great-grandfather lost at sea, and finally, about the loss of her young husband to a drug overdose: “The sea/the majestic sea/breaks everything/crushes everything/cleans everything/takes everything/from me.” 275 During the Middle Passage from the coast of Ghana to the plantations of the Americas, “dancing the slave” became a popular form of entertainment for the ship captain, slave traders, the crew and their guests. Although the ship officials wrote about this torturous practice as a healthy form of exercise used to increase jubilation for enslaved peoples as an alternative to suicide or physical resistance, it was nothing of the sort. For enslaved peoples, these coerced enjoyments were riddled with terror and intimidation, humiliation, physical and psychic trauma, as they were forced to dance in shackles, coffles and yokes by 274 Interview with Brother Shabazz, July 2009. 275 Corinne Bailey Rae, "The Sea," The Sea, by Corinne Bailey Rae, Steve Chrisanthou, Corinne Bailey Rae Steve Brown, EMI, 2010. Lyrics can be found at http://www.metrolyrics.com/the-sea- lyrics-corinne-bailey-rae.html. 181 the whip, cat of nine tails, lash or gunpoint. 276 This was for the pleasure of whites, not enslaved peoples, to safeguard against boredom out at sea but also to erase the bodily cosmologies of African life by making them forget their history through brute force. With intense mechanisms of surveillance, slaves were forced into appropriate behaviors of subservience and docility and discouraged from starting mutinous rebellions on the ship. Rewards and liquor were given to the best performers, while inculcation into a new hierarchy based on competition, betrayal and suspicion were embedded in these dances. Silence and non- participation were strategic forms of resistance by enslaved peoples to these dances but produced dangerous consequences such as beatings, rape, death, starvation and intense verbal abuse. The “limbo” dance is a Middle Passage movement that indicates a struggle of the bound subject gesturing towards freedom. 277 As Antonio Benitez-Rojo states, “Rhythm, in the codes of the Caribbean, precedes music, including percussion itself. It is something that was already there, amid the noise.” 278 This already there-rhythm is similar to Orlando Robinson’s assertion that West African captives arriving to the Americas were not empty vessels but brought with their labor rhythmic cosmologies and embedded aesthetic knowledge that have radically determined African diasporic cultures and their resistive practices 276 See Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993); Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Geneviève Fabre, "The Slave Ship Dance," Maria Diedrich, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Carl Pedersen, eds., Black Imagination and the Middle Passage (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999): 33-46 and Marcus Rediker, The Slave Ship: A Human History (New York: Penguin Books, 2007). 277 See Fabre: 41-42. 278 Antonio Benitez-Rojo, The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective, Second Edition (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001):18. 182 since. Benitez-Rojo’s rhythm is quite similar to being in the groove where “there appear to be no repressions or contradictions; there is no desire other than that of maintaining oneself within the limits of this zone for the longest possible time, in free orbit, beyond imprisonment or liberty.” 279 The limbo, much like “The Banana Boat Song” made most popular by Harry Belafonte, are the signature dance and song combination of popular tropical vacations and costume theme parties that enjoys its own traffic in privileged tourist sites throughout the Caribbean. The limbo originally began as “the performer [who] finds a way out of a desperate situation” but has, unfortunately, been radically removed from its traumatic history with the transatlantic slave trade and the exploited labor of Black bodies. 280 Furthermore, Saidiya Hartman notes how recreation for enslaved peoples was constructed through acts of regulation and discipline. 281 Methods of containment and control determined all activities on the plantation, often for the conviviality of whites. Terror and enjoyment, for the enslaved, were always mutually constitutive. The coercive manipulation of sound amusements in these violent performances is meant to redirect attention from painful torture to a public reassurance, for whites, of black pleasure. The dispossessed body of the enslaved acts as an extension of the master’s body, a visual reminder of his power and domination. As Hartman explains, “Blackness provides the opportunity for self-reflection, and the exploration of desire, longing fear, 279 Ibid: 17. 280 Fabre: 42. 183 loathing and terror.” 282 Repeated flashbacks of the pained body through memory coincide with a repetition of the traumatic sound of violence enacted on the black body, so that an emptied cell in Elmina Castle signals the moans and groans, cries and sobs of enslaved peoples. Hartman continues, “Repetition is an outcome, a consequence, or an accumulation of practice, and it also structures practice.” 283 Hartman’s use of a performative memory that is regulated through repeated intervals of remembrance, redress and reparations, suggests historically specific processes that don’t always materialize in resistive acts. Here Hartman suggests that repetition is exercised as an attempt to recognize the whole self with an acknowledgement that full restoration is impossible. This sort of bodily and psychic repetition is reproduced to the repetition of music (verse structure, repeated takes in recording, song replay) and the realization that music and memory are always disappearing and cannot ever be fully recovered. Side 4: Redemption Song We enter the castle to find the ceremony already in full procession. My friends and I are two hours late. The main reason for our tardiness is that there were no local programs advertising the events for Panafest, a biannual festival targeting African Americans and other diasporic visitors to Cape Coast for a series of concerts, durbars, vigil services, tours of the slave forts and burial grounds, wreath laying ceremonies, libation rituals and naming ceremonies. This festival began in 1992, was organized by Ghanaian playwright Efua Sutherland, as a way to create viable cultural connections between the diaspora, particularly 282 Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: 7. 283 Ibid: 76. 184 African Americans, and Ghana. I had a preliminary program from my interview with Mr. Hagan the week before. Mr. Hagan had already warned me by saying, Why don’t we develop the African music properly? Panafest was started with purely governmental support, but it wasn’t managed properly. After 1997, it was taken over by a private agency, the Panafest Foundation, but it has floundered a bit, and it hasn’t been the same. There is a strong feeling that they will have to revert back to the government to survive. The government is concerned because the image of the country is at stake. 284 Tonight’s activity was slated as a “Reverential Night” of candlelight procession, spoken word testimonies, cultural performances, a roll call of the ancestors, a reading of the proclamation and youth day that would begin at 9:00pm at Cape Coast Castle. 285 To our chagrin, the festivities had begun at 7:00pm. The audience of about seventy or eighty folks were dispersed throughout the courtyard—the white, fold up seats were occupied mostly by African Americans, Rastafarians, Ghanaian elders and a few whites, while local youth sat on the perimeter of the walls and ground. We arrived while the Cape Coast Choir performed a rather strained rendition of “Great Is Thy Faithfulness.” This seemed quite odd, considering we were in the castle courtyard. This was the same location that slave traders and castle administrators would conduct Sunday church services—just above the dungeons where enslaved peoples were shackled and chained, suffering from disease, cramped quarters, sitting in their own urine, blood and feces, and waiting some unknown and terrifying fate. During the services, the congregation’s singing of hymns drowned out the screams of 284 Emmanuel Hagan interview, July 2009. 285 Information taken from the service’s bulletin. Additionally, see Caryl Phillips, The Atlantic Sound (New York: Vintage International, 2001) for a firsthand account of his experiences at Panafest in Chapter Two: “Homeward Bound.” 185 women called into the quarters of the castle officials, where they were brusquely washed, raped and beaten. Next, spoken word was offered by Imahkus Okofo Ababio, one of the African American founders of One Africa Productions and Daveed Nelson, an original member of the Last Poets. These performances produced a number of salutes from Rastafarians of “Haile Selassie!” and “Rastafari!” Dr. Abena Busia, a professor and president of ASWAD (The Association for the Study of the African Diaspora) offered a poem to the interpretive performance of two dancers, one African American and the other, Haitian American. The ASWAD conference coincided with Panafest’s events, so a number of diasporic scholars and graduate students were in attendance this evening. Busia’s poem spoke to the tragedy of slavery that the ancestors endured and the tribulations awaiting them in the Americas. It is hard to think this performance apart from Busia’s father, Kofi Abrefa Busia, a well-known adversary of Nkrumah who helped to depose him in 1966. Interestingly enough, during Busia’s poem the speakers began to reverb because the microphone volume was too loud, which illuminated how constructed performance is and made her speech seem insincere, affected and dubious. Many of the Ghanaian audience members looked on uninterested, choosing rather to make small talk with their neighbors, while most of the African American witnesses paid close attention to this performance. The Central Resurgent drama troupe from Accra staged a re-enactment of the encounter between white traders and Ghanaian chiefs and the sale of persons into slavery. What was fascinating about this performance is how these mimed gestures were interpreted by different segments of the audience. The exchange between the white men and chiefs was an exercise in exaggerated comedy, to 186 illustrate how different they were to one another—the Ghanaian actors wore suits and pointy shoes, carried fancy watches and walked expeditiously as if they were very important. Because of the lack of costumes, it was difficult not to imagine them as contemporary well-to-do Ghanaian men. The chiefs were depicted as pampered, greedy men willing to sell off their women lovers. The subsequent enactment of the beating and rape of women by slave traders produced a ripple of laughter from many Ghanaian adults and children. Many African Americans responded with somber and sullen expressions, not speaking a word. What caused even more laughter was the ability of the actors to deviate from the script and improvise through exaggerated facial expressions or bodily movements when beaten. The very moments which should have produced the most pain for both performer and audience created moments of enjoyment. Was this an instance of laughing to keep from crying or were folks’ sensual wires crossed? For African American audience members, the performance was a comedy of errors—full of historical inaccuracies, omissions and slippages. The puzzling responses by Ghanaians also indicate a different contextualization of dramatic performance, where local codes don’t quite translate across cultures. 286 Ghanaian dramatic performance operates on different terms than those African American audiences are most familiar with, specifically the skill of the actor to improvise and provide relief for the audience when enacting difficult subject matter. However, at the end of the skit, one rather impassioned young male actor recovered the performance for African American witnesses in a weeping speech that attested to their sentiment, “This is the plain truth, brothers and sisters-- 286 See Catherine M. Cole, Ghana's Concert Party Theatre (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001). 187 reparations, the IMF and the World Bank loans—no amount can replace our blood suffering.” 287 The ceremony closed with a libation ritual performed in English, for the benefit of the predominantly English-speaking audience. Hon. Juliana Azumah-Mensah, Ghana’s Minister of Tourism, proclaimed the start of Emancipation Day at 11:55pm. Then we were asked to greet our neighbors with “Akwaaba!” and embrace one another. This romantic gesture was accompanied by Bob Marley’s “Redemption Song,” which was played roughly and half- heartedly in one of the speakers (the other had blown out earlier) in the background. Performances like this one exemplify what Joseph Roach terms “circum- Atlantic memory,” which references the centrality of diasporic and genocidal histories of Africa and the Americas in the creation and contribution of cultures of modernity to the “invented” New World. Performing memory through a selective forgetting, genealogies of performance are constructed from “counter- memories” or the disparities between official accounts of history and memory as it is publicly enacted through bodily epistemologies. Roach considers that “performance genealogies draw on the idea of expressive movements as mnemonic reserves, including patterned movements made and remembered by bodies, residual movements retained implicitly in images or words (or in the silences between them), and imaginary movements dreamed in minds not prior to language but constitutive of it, a psychic rehearsal for physical actions drawn from a repertoire that culture provides.” 288 For example, African American Saul 287 Quote taken from the performance. 288 Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996): 16. 188 Williams’ poem, “Sha-Clack-Clack” signifies the collapse of the temporal and spatial modalities of the past, present and future in racial memory. The poem bridges the gap between time, timelessness, space and place. A main section of the poem professes, If I could find the spot where truth echoes I would stand there and whisper memories of my children's future I would let their future dwell in my past so that I might live a brighter now Now is the essence of my domain and it contains all that was and will be And I am as I was and will be because I am and always will be that nigga I am that nigga I am that nigga I am that timeless nigga that swings on pendulums like vines through mines of booby-trapped minds that are enslaved by time I am the life that supersedes lifetimes, I am It was me with serpentine hair and a timeless stare that with immortal glare turned mortal fear into stone time capsules They still exist as the walking dead, as I do The original sulphurhead, symbol of life and matriarchy severed head Medusa, I am I am a negro! Yes negro, negro from necro meaning death I overcame it so they named me after it And I be spitting at death from behind and putting "Kick Me" signs on it's back because I am not the son of Sha-Clack-Clack I am before that, I am before I am before before Before death is eternity, after death is eternity There is no death there's only eternity And I be riding on the wings of eternity like HYAH! HYAH! HYAH! Sha-Clack-Clack! 289 289 Saul Williams, "Sha-Clack-Clack," Slam Soundtrack, by Saul Williams, Epic Records, 1998. Lyrics can be found at http://bmajnun.wordpress.com/2007/11/30/sha-clack-clack/. 189 Williams’ poem addresses the persistent violence meted on Black peoples that has been measured by time, where there is no arc of history or a progression towards something better. Rather, an eternal restlessness or schizophrenia overwhelms time and place where: 1) the selective value attributed to Black bodies through racist capitalism are innovated in new, exploitative ways simultaneously as, 2) a resistive politics of polyrhythmic or nonlinear structures of African social life are articulated as cultural ideology. Roach juxtaposes places of memory (artificial sites of modern national and ethnic memory such as museums) to a living, embodied memory that “remains variously resistant to this form of forgetting, however, through the transmission of gestures, habits, and skills.” 290 This transmission is connected to mnemonic devices, which seems to suggest the significance of conscious and unconscious genealogical, cultural reserves. William’s poem presents a romantic interpretation of African history that is eternal, infinite and indestructible despite traumatic encounters. Sha- Clack-Clack is also undeniable, persistent and unrelenting and represents the whip cracking down on Black backs, the ticking clock in capitalist labor and western modernity that only takes away bits of life, making all into machines that must produce beyond human limitations. The psychic space is managed through a lingering trauma that is sporadic in its intensity and dullness. What “Sha-Clack Clack” depicts is the struggle, a tug of war between what is and what can be. It calls for new imaginings of old revelations that can transform present realities. Similar to “Sha-Clack-Clack,” Ghanaian hip hop group, Project Monkz’ music attests to the traumatic violence of slavery on racial memory and 290 Roach: 16. 190 subjectivity. Also called Black Shaolin Monkz, the group recorded the music video for “Never Again (Once A Slave)” in 2005. The video was directed and edited by two African American travelers to Ghana who enjoyed the music of the group and wanted to promote the group’s music to a global audience. 291 To date, the music video has enjoyed more than 65,000 plays on YouTube. Fauzy of the three-member group asserts of the song, “I never knew about my ancestors’ history until I met Dr. Maulana (an African American repatriate to Ghana). He took me back to times of years way back and how my ancestors were and how life was before we met Europeans. That changed up my psyche of thinking. I later on realized that slavery was one of the biggest atrocities ever to happen to the whole of humanity. From our perspective we say never again to slavery.” 292 What is fascinating about the group is how the video was filmed. Project Monkz, scheduled to perform at Panafest, shot the video by sneaking into Elmina Castle afterward. Fauzy continues, “We didn’t even have fees to get into the castle so we went in the back door, behind the castle. We didn’t have costumes so we did it bare-chested, behind bars and in chains and we started shooting the video. That was the gate of no return and that’s how we got in, our entrance was through the back door of the castle. The video is done and the revolution is started.” 293 With no money, “their bodies were all they had.” 294 The group used 291 “Never Again (Once A Slave),” dir. By VKC JLove, Eli JF and Kudjo, perf. Black Monkz (Project Monkz), Alpha Label, 2005. Video can be seen at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j737oYS9xys. 292 Ibid. 293 Ibid. 294 See Stuart Hall, "What is This 'Black' in Black Popular Culture?" eds. David Morley and Kuan- Hsing Chen, Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies (London: Routledge, 1996), where he writes: “the people of the African diaspora have, in opposition to all of that, found the deep form, the deep structure of their cultural life in music..think of how these cultures have used the 191 their limited resources to contemplate how enslavement practices continue to compel, coerce and trouble contemporary Ghanaian subjectivities. Black, one of the members of the group, raps about the imprint of slavery on historical memory, “I wept tears that made me remember my Black anger.” 295 Through a creative articulation of cosmology and labor, Project Monkz redefined the slave castles as not just diasporic African space but also Ghanaian. By sneaking into the back door, “The Door of Return,” the group exhibits a remix of stealing away—not from the plantation, the slave ship, and the cotton field—but into the male dungeon as the necessary context for their music video. Not only does this site make the song more legitimate but provides an apparatus—or hold—to convey how such loss continues to invade the present. Dr. Maulana conducts the Afrikan Conscious Study Group meeting every Sunday afternoon in the courtyard of the W.E.B. DuBois Center, which is where Project Monkz became friends and formed their group. Maulana is from South Central Los Angeles, has lived in Ghana for more than twenty years on the African continent since 1963. He is an independent scholar and has worked extensively with the Ghana @ 50 committee and The Joseph Project. He is also a regular liaison between the Ghanaian government and African American repatriates and tourists. 296 Maulana consults with the Panafest Foundation and assists African Americans to relocate to Ghana, particularly by providing real estate advice and other resources. In Project Monkz’ music video, Maulana opens body—as if it was, and it often was, the only cultural capital we had. We have worked on ourselves as the canvases of representation”: 221. 295 Rap taken from the YouTube music video. 296 Interview with Dr. Maulana, May 2009. 192 with, “The Black man and the woman have not always been a slave. Blacks were the first humans on planet earth and have defined the laws of the universe that still govern man’s behavior even until this very day.” 297 Maulana continues on the importance of educating youth of the “210 million” who were taken away in the transatlantic slave trade. At the end of the music video, the all-male youth chant in a call and response with Dr. Maulana, “Sankofa! Go back to your roots!” and “Proper knowledge is power!” 298 Maulana heralds “Mother Ghana as the only country on the continent to celebrate Emancipation.” This group, although influenced by the teachings of an African American, has firmly taken control of its own historical knowledge concerning the transatlantic slave trade. They perform a different kind of re-enactment than that of Panafest, as an interesting counter to the Central Resurgent’s re-enactment. In the music video, slave pens are filled with the rappers and other young Ghanaian men who look steadily and unwaveringly at the camera and declare war on any renewed efforts at enslaving forces and, by extension, colonial and imperialist occupation. This group, reminiscent of the U.S. hip hop duo Dead Prez, is a radical example of the group’s ideology, which is not popularly represented in either Ghana’s music or political landscape. The video contests the crack of the whip, the fiddle and coffle, screams, the tearing of flesh, and the auction block call with new images of radical, Ghanaian defiance. The group shots are juxtaposed with images from Haile Gerima’s 1993 film, Sankofa, and archival footage of Nkrumah at the 1957 Independence ceremony, which 297 Quote taken from the YouTube music video. 298 Ibid. 193 reiterates the grotesque mechanisms of slavery with a modern critique of its enduring legacies. 299 The video interweaves multiple Black struggles—of colonialism and slavery—to show the importance of global solidarity between Ghanaians and diasporic peoples. It also squarely addresses the history of slavery as not just a diasporic phenomenon but also Ghanaian. It reclaims enslaved peoples as ancestors and as necessary communal members by sharing quite publicly and adamantly in the trauma of slavery as something also deeply experienced by Ghanaians. Outro The terrible processes of slavery and its enduring mark on the living are what causes thousands of African diasporic visitors to tour Elmina and Cape Coast Castles each year. These dungeons are archives of life and death that resound with multiple, overlapping and contesting histories of thought, experiences and possibility. It is through participation in these rituals of remembrance that tourists experience, as intimately as possible, what their ancestors withstood. There are a range of responses to these tours by African American travelers—weeping, indifference, silence, rage, frustration, melancholia, laughter, nervousness—that explain how differently affect is experienced and managed in everyday life. One African American friend who visited the castles felt she became someone else upon entering the site—she was aggressive, angry and intolerant—and refused to pay the non-Ghanaian fee for entry. “My ancestors suffered here, some died, and you want me to pay to 299 See Sankofa, dir. Haile Gerima, 1993, 124 minutes. 194 enter?” she exclaimed to the cashier. 300 While going back and forth, several white North American women, in line behind her, began to sigh loudly and complain that she get to the back of the line as they wanted to begin their tour. She stared down the women and said, “Do you know where we are? This is Ghana. Look around you. You don’t run shit here.” The women were startled by her rebuttal. My friend continued, “You know I should sacrifice you to the ancestors. I think they would be pleased. Watch your back!” 301 This illustration brings up how variably castle visitors—not just African Americans but also white North Americans and Europeans, African Caribbeans, and African Europeans, respond to the institutional exhibit of national and inter- continental trauma that is locally administered but internationally financed. What are the objectives for UNESCO and the Smithsonian Institution, among other investors, in maintaining such archives? What are the individual and collective responses, across race and place, to such tragedies? I continue to interrogate how the past and future configure around the present to produce meditations on what historical memory means for racial subjectivity across dispersed geographies. Through a tracing of the nonlinear grooves of history, African Americans and Ghanaians have grappled with the incomprehensibility of how such tragedies continue to “hold” them. 302 The response to this ongoing, and at times unspeakable, loss takes shape in verbal and non-verbal expressions. 300 Quote taken from a conversation with an unnamed African American friend who has lived in Accra, Ghana for the past two years. 301 Ibid. 302 See Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, The Shell and the Kernel: Renewals of Psychoanalysis, Volume 1, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994) and Gary B. Palmer and William R. Jankowiak, “Performance and Imagination: Toward an Anthropology of the Spectacular and Mundane,” Cultural Anthropology 11.2 (1996): 225-258. 195 These performed responses are critical embodied practices that must be acknowledged in the negotiation of everyday life and possibilities for future coalition-building. 196 Chapter Four: Listening to Another’s Wound: The Kologo and Auto-Tune as Black Sound Technologies King Ayisoba was born with an elongated loc in the center of his head. Over time, it became the medium connecting him to his deceased grandfather, who also possessed this birthmark. At 34, his locs now splinter in multiple directions—up, down and out—they are antennas attuned to the ancestors and spirits, roots that firmly anchor his place in the world, and twine that grasps listeners like his peculiar sound. King Ayisoba is a world-renowned kologo artist, a Northern Ghanaian music tradition that includes singing, banjo playing and dancing. What distinguishes this music culture from other popular Ghanaian music like highlife and hiplife is the unusual vocal strategy employed by kologo players. King Ayisoba never has full control over his voice. At various points while performing, the singer shifts from his primary alto to a blended bass and falsetto. It sounds like…the gasp that accompanies needles pricking the skin, surprisingly sharp icicles that fall suddenly under a new-morning sun, the deafening roar of ocean waves that crash, wail then fizzle into the dense, brown sand, a thousand echoes in an empty hall, newly-cut diamonds grating against vocal cords. He is carrying what Saidiya Hartman calls “a history that hurts” in his voice. 303 It is all things at once—simultaneous, overlapping yet divergent tones that consume the throat and all who hear it. 303 Saidiya Hartman, "The Time of Slavery," South Atlantic Quarterly 101.4 (2002): 772. Here Hartman riffs off Fredric Jameson’s famous phrase, “history is what hurts.” See Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981): 102. 197 King Ayisoba pronounces simply, “My father’s spirit catch me. Heat catch like fire and I want my father to take over.” 304 The musician insists that what you hear in that strange, robotic voice are the spirits—his grandfather and otherwordly beings—at work. While playing, he is arrested by haints that use his voice as a channel to provide caution, praise or encouragement to the living. This sonic entwinement that “catches” King Ayisoba, off-guard and willingly, is the very thing that captures the listener’s attention. His sound is human and non- human, warm and frigid, vulnerable and indifferent. While interviewing King Ayisoba during the summer of 2009, I was reminded of old folks in my southern Baptist church chatting casually about someone “catching the spirit” or another who “cut up”—or showed off—and “caught the Holy Ghost.” 305 Growing up, this was always an enthralling sight as a church member bolted up suddenly and commenced to “catching,” flailing about with no one able to control the erratic motions of limbs everywhere at once and the rapid-fire gumbo of sobbing, moaning, praying, whispering, chanting and shouting in a bizarre, indecipherable language. This cut up speech and body movement was provoked, or maybe seduced, by time—the in-between breath/break of the drumbeat or the staccato of the preacher. The cut up—a rumbling excess where the body can no longer contain the nervous frequencies within—is the condition of being caught. 306 It reminds me of King Ayisoba and his grandfather’s spirit catching him by the throat, which takes me back—now to highly popular U.S. 304 Quotes taken from an interview with King Ayisoba in July 2009. 305 See John L. Jackson, Jr., Real Black: Adventures in Racial Sincerity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), Chapter Four: “Real Bodies” for an analysis of how Black spirituality’s imprint on the body is policed. 306 I am indebted to my friend and comrade, Rev. Qasarah Bey and our discussion on “catching the spirit” within Black protestant church praise and worship. 198 R&B artist, T-Pain’s use of the auto-tune. This electronic device, attached to a microphone, produces a steely yet vibrating monotone sound that T-Pain debuted on the semi-hit 2005 single, “I’m Sprung.” 307 “Sprung” is slang for being romantically infatuated with someone, to be hooked, ensnared or entangled by the affections (or its lack) of another. Conversely, the condition of being sprung also means to be released from a constricted position, to grow into full being, to shift something out of place. To be sprung is to be caught by some unexplainable thing. Although King Ayisoba is caught by a love once had but now gone and T- Pain by a love never reciprocated, both artists use sound technologies to mediate the relationship between being caught up—by ghosts, bodies and systems—and being captivating—the capacity to shift the listener and one’s self to a different place. This chapter marks out a trajectory between Black subjectivity and sound technologies as embodied practices that are deeply historical and unquestionably ontological. This is a heavily treaded path and the works of Nathaniel Mackey, Edward Kamau Brathwaite, Lindon Barrett, Fred Moten, Carolyn Cooper and Saidiya Hartman, among others, are indispensable in this regard. 308 These scholars acknowledge how Blacks have, over time, used sound technologies to articulate humanity persistently denied under the interdependent agencies of 307 See T-Pain, "I'm Sprung," Rappa Ternt Sanga, by Faheem Rasheed Najm, Konvict Muzik/Jive Records, 2005. 308 See Nathaniel Mackey, Bedouin Hornbook (Los Angeles: Sun and Moon Press, 2000); Edward Kamau Brathwaite, History of the Voice (London: New Beacon Books, 1984); Lindon Barrett, Blackness and Value: Seeing Double (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003); Carolyn Cooper, Noises In the Blood: Orality, Gender, and the "Vulgar" Body of Jamaican Popular Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995); and Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). 199 racial capitalism. These sound technologies always carry multiple meanings for its Black producers, never functioning as simple entertainment. Black sound technologies represent historically complicated modes of expressive being, with West African drums ushering the call-and-response in exchanging news between members of different communities while amplifying life-changing events within these collectives; enslaved bodies that moan, wail, chant and cry out against repressive violence; overturned pots that would catch the sounds of the enslaved sneaking away to meet lovers, friends and family; and field songs and protest songs that spoke of actively reaching the “Promised Land” both in heaven and on earth. Stephen Best and Alexander Weheliye have written extensively about the immense contribution Black performers have made to western notions of modernity through technologies such as the phonograph and the vocoder, while simultaneously being positioned by such discourses as anti-modern, backward and primitive. 309 Other forms of sonic technologies such as speaker systems, car stereos, boomboxes and the auto-tune critique the selective histories of western modernity by bearing the audible mark of Black social life. 310 Through the use of such mediums, Black producers and consumers articulate their entanglement with place and U.S. citizenship. The makers of these technologies have, 309 See Stephen Best, The Fugitive's Properties: Law and the Poetics of Posession (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), Chapter One: “Fugitive Sound: Fungible Personhood, Evanescent Property,” and Alexander G. Weheliye, Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005). 310 See George Lipsitz, Dangerous Crossroads: Popular Music, Postmodernism and the Poetics of Place (New York: Verso, 1994); Michael Bull, Sounding Out the City: Personal Stereos and the Management of Everyday Life (Oxford: Berg, 2000); Kyra D. Gaunt, "The Two O'Clock Vibe: Embodying the Jam of Musical Blackness In and Out of Its Everyday Context," The Musical Quarterly 86.3 (2002): 372- 397; and Charles W. Schmidt, "Noise That Annoys: Regulating Unwanted Sound," Environmental Health Perspectives 113.1 (2005): A43-A44. 200 undoubtedly, enjoyed overwhelming financial success and promotion in popular discourse through such consumption. However, sonic technologies also serve a critical social function for Black peoples by providing networks of communication and comfort, collectivity and cooperation, pleasure and release, desire and emancipatory hope and in some ways, subterfuge. Subversion is the not the main objective for Black folks’ use of sound technologies but one of the many facets of such use. As Clyde Wood’s critical treatise on blues music notes, Black music is ideological, epistemological and organizes social relations. 311 It is an unwieldy complex of living expression that absorbs and reverbs with the shock, longing, melancholia and numbness of life and labor under capitalism. Music provides a singular space for Black people to sound out their complicated histories through the multi-layered interactions between rhythm, tone, meter, instruments and bodies. Black musicians have been central to the construction of U.S. popular music since its inception, despite institutional attempts to place Black peoples outside modern technologies, citizenship and the category of the human. One way to examine the relationship between Black producers and sound technologies is in a special intimacy with property, i.e. Black people once considered the objects of another through enslavement and the sonic machine, whose sole purpose is to speak for its engineers. This chapter will conceptualize the alienating or dispossessing voice, produced by King Ayisoba’s kologo and T- Pain’s auto-tune, as entangled forces congealed into sound that articulate the particular, volatile histories of being Black in Ghana and the U.S. 311 See Clyde Woods, Development Arrested: The Blues and Plantation Power in the Mississippi Delta (Brooklyn: Verso, 1998). 201 The alienating/dispossessing voice reflects at least two processes: 1) the continuation of violent practices of racial capitalism and 2) how the object, person once deemed property, enacts an alternative voice through an instrument. A way to think of these processes together is to consider the history of lynchings in the U.S., particularly, how this barbaric practice was racially marked by roping, or rather, catching the throat—the very vehicle to express opposition and articulate counter-narratives against official myths and omissions, institutional and extra-legal violence. The boundaries between the lynched throat, voice and body become blurred—irretrievably damaged and irrevocably disrupted yet provide an index for understanding how the technology of lynching, and other agencies of dispossession, give way to technologies of resistance, here, in Black music performance. It must be said that the grain of difference in Black music is not always oppositional, or against the meta-voice. 312 Black music is an ongoing, intricate engagement between the affective and material that pushes against itself (performers, instruments, rhythmic patterns) or other systems of social production—governments, corporations, consumers, fellow musicians— sometimes allied and other times colliding, causing friction. Affiliation, or kinship between subjects, is not blood bound but a fluid concept that includes affective connections between people of dissimilar experiences. Kinship can be productive and retrogressive by generating new forms of inclusion and 312 See Roland Barthes, “The Grain of ‘The Voice’” in Image, Music, Text (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977). 202 egalitarianism or re-innovating existing hierarchies. 313 Kinship is composed of bodies of networks—made of individual bodies that are also networks—that operate in multi-scalar, intersecting manners across local, regional, state and international places. Kinship is important to consider in the interactions between Ghanaians and African Americans as a shared history of racial suffering that produces a range of affective responses to public, communal and individual archives of historical memory. Friction, and all of its structural antagonisms, is also an integral part of racial kinship. Friction, grain or noise is partly what you hear in the voice of King Ayisoba and T-Pain. The concepts of friction and kinship represent an aural contact zone, an encounter made audible between contrasting and similar subjects, objects or forces. 314 I analyze friction within racial kinship through the alienating/dispossessing voice in Black sound technologies. I use the terms “alienating” and “dispossessing” to suggest that domination and subjugation are not static and closed but diffuse with power that coagulates in intermittent nodes. The work of subjection is ongoing like the work of resistive performance. These processes—struggles to make life and death—are unfinished, alive and well. As Hamid Naficy formulates, “Both the physical violence and the psychic ruptures of war, exile, rapid change, disease, and other factors have led to a crisis of the body, where the first and most intimate, home of the humans—namely, 313 See Sarah Franklin and Susan McKinnon, eds., Relative Values: Reconfiguring Kinship Studies (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001). 314 See Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005). 203 our bodies and skin—doesn’t feel like home anymore.” 315 If, as Naficy argues, under crisis “our bodies and skin” no longer offer refuge, how do Black musicians seek comfort and home through a machine? Given the historical associations between Black folks and property, what does it mean to make an object sound, i.e. an instrument speak—to endow property with life, to pursue one’s happiness and other structures of feeling through a thing? 316 Additionally, how does diaspora, as a network of persistent dispossession and remaking, provide a way for understanding the kinship or connection between bodies—i.e., technologies or networks made of porous channels—and machines, i.e. networks of technology? 317 This chapter examines the historical progression of specific sound reproductive technologies and their relation to Black musicians as both property and producer, from the plantation era to the present. If we consider history as a series of records, or rather recordings, then contemporary Black music should present an infinite remix of sound documents from the past, present and future. What is compelling about King Ayisoba and T-Pain’s use of a robotic, or rather alien, voice is that they are thousands of miles apart, have never met each other, and yet are articulating a sound that is both centuries old and not yet here. They are pronouncing a racial kinship through sound linked by a spectacular 315 Hamid Naficy, "Home, Exile, Homeland: Film, Media, and the Politics of Place," Hamid Naficy, ed. Framing Exile: From Homeland to Homepage (New York: Routledge, 1999): 8. 316 See Moten’s formulation of the shrieking commodity. 317 See Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (London: Free Association Books, 1991), Chapter Eight: A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist- Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century. See also N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999) and Robert Mitchell and Phillip Thurtle, eds., Data Made Flesh: Embodying Information (New York: Routledge, 2003). 204 condition of suffering that continues to produce friction between dispossessed subjects and the state, domestic and international. However, this is not all that defines their similarities or an idea of racial kinship. Also embedded in the music are overlying expressions of desire, hope, frustration, passion, indifference, and ecstasy, that animate Black sociality across dispersed geographies. Particularly fascinating is how the auto-tune has exploded throughout the U.S., and global popular music with T-Pain’s revival of the sound technology following Cher’s use of it in the 1998 multi-platinum single, “Believe.” 318 Perhaps a better term for this mechanical voice is the “Afro-tune” with a special use by African American performers that has, in recent years, transformed a common sound engineering practice of erasing human frailty in the voice into a cultural practice that amplifies racial vulnerability. Is it a coincidence that auto-tune production intensified as Barack Obama’s presidential campaign gained momentum in mid-2007 along with the haunting news of the financial crisis? What does this suggest about our contemporary moment, as the world is ravaged by the percussive repercussions of the recession? How does T- Pain’s Fall 2009 release of the “I Am T-Pain” auto-tune application for I-Phone, which sold 300,000 downloads in its first three weeks, indicate a democratic affinity, or kinship, with racial structures of feeling, particularly the historic condition of Black suffering? 319 318 Cher, "Believe," Believe, by Stuart McLennen, Paul Barry, Steven Torch, Matthew Gray and Tomthy Powell Brian Higgins, Warner Bros., 1998. 319 See I Am T-Pain: Smule Is Sonic Media, “I Am T-Pain”, Sept. 2009, <http://iamtpain.smule.com/>. The website is interactive with a listening feature to hear recordings from users across the world, a newsletter, a catalogue of songs, updates available on FaceBook, MySpace and Twitter, and a karoake contest feature. The website advertises, “You are T-Pain. Have you always wanted to become famous? Now you can become a superstar…employing the authentic auto-tune.” 205 The music of T-Pain and King Ayisoba can also be read as a reverberating echo, a cross-cultural meditation or a transatlantic dialogue on Black subjectivity across geographical distance. King Ayisoba’s 2000 single “My Friend, Don’t Forget Me,” and T-Pain’s 2008 hit “Chopped ‘N’ Skrewed,” muse the meanings of unrequited love, raw desire and throbbing pain on larger scales of racial kinship across communities, nations and capitalist economies. 320 This chapter grapples with the contradiction between sound reproduction technologies and Black producers as mutual, dispossessed entities whose interdependence illustrates notions of the ephemeral and eternal, embodiment and disembodiment, presence and absence, dismembering and re-membering, erasure and excess, invocation and evocation, sex and death. The sound reproduction technologies employed by Black musicians, from the phonograph’s capture of fugitive sound waves to the auto-tune’s appeal to global democracy, mediate the relationships among feeling alien, a history of alien-nation and surviving alienating processes of violence through enslavement, Jim Crow segregation, lynchings, colonization and debt peonage. Sound reproduction technologies are used to enact multiple meanings of alienation and dispossession as a condition of feeling abnormal, out of place and isolated from one’s surroundings while also possessing the sense that “home,” where one can feel familiar and comforted, is somewhere else, a different place either real or imagined. The technological voice operates as a productive site of engagement with what it means to be Black, to feel otherworldly, to endure 320 See King Ayisoba, "My Friend, My Friend, Don't Forget Me," Modern Ghanaians, by Alpert Apozori, Pidgen Music, 2000 and T-Pain featuring Ludacris, "Chopped 'N' Skrewed," Thr33 Ringz, by David Balfour and Christopher Bridges Faheem Rasheed Najm, Konvict Muzik/Jive Records, 2008. 206 inhumane conditions over time, to make life in the midst of it all, to carve out a more livable space through sound and to root/route out a different groove of racial feeling on the recording cylinder. What follows are some discursive possibilities for Afro-diasporic sound; a meditation on Blacks as property and producer within hostile capitalist economies; a conceptualization of the alienating voice in the sound reproduction technologies of the phonograph, vocoder, talkbox and auto-tune; and an analysis of King Ayisoba and T-Pain’s music and that of other auto-tune users, rappers Lil’ Wayne and Kanye West. The Sound Possible Many scholars have lamented the loss of the live music event to the music recording. 321 Usually this is an argument over authenticity, superiority and singularity, as the live event is thought to be in constant tension with the recorded event. To understand their distinction, music and performance scholars interrogate the breach between the timeless recording and the disappearing live event. However, the live event is also a recording that takes form as enduring memories in sound, image, smell, taste and touch. 322 With both, the original moment of performance is unrecoverable, even in the recording, because the relationship between the listener and the sound event is always on the move and, inevitably, must take on a new shape. The way one hears, interprets, and experiences sound shifts with each play since the listener is continually changing. There is always a loss, a moment that can never be recaptured; the irretrievable haunts the listener who returns to the sound event, again and again, by listening 321 See works by Theodor W. Adorno, Jacques Derrida, Amiri Baraka, Jacques Attali, and Paul Gilroy. 322 See Nathaniel Mackey, Fred Moten and Josh Kun. 207 to the recording, remembering or re-imagining the live event recorded in the brain. With time, sonic imprints fade or become forgotten, or sounds are reinvigorated or remade, giving new life to old memories. Such sonic dis-membering and re-membering can be pleasantly comforting or terrifyingly haunting. Avery Gordon’s reckoning with the “ghosts” of historical memory explains social representations of violent and involuntary labor and migration, institutional processes of torture, intimidation, disfranchisement and incarceration, which one might rather forget. 323 However, these traumatic stains are historical records or rather, sound recordings. These bodies refuse to stay buried much like the psychic return to the sonic event. Such aural ghosts announce what is missing in the visual frame, what appears to be invisible or in the shadows. 324 Ghosts are alienating presences that live just beneath the surface and pop out suddenly during the most surprisingly mundane moment. Ghosts are spectacular beings that are embedded in everyday life. It is through banal social relations that ghosts voice their presence, inhabit history and reinvigorate human life. Listening practices are also about capture. In a circular groove, the consumer is made captive by sound as ghostly remembrances are also ensnared through sound. Listening can simultaneously be a grieving and recuperative process. Just as something is lost, something else can be gained with each listening, possibly a novel insight, experience, recognition or remaking of consciousness. Nostalgia is stirred by sounds and music, a re-membering device that takes one back to a 323 See Avery F. Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997). 324 Gordon: 15. 208 particular place and time to relive a certain experience which can be comforting and/or painful. Possibly, the repetition in Black music through the bass beat, voice echo, chant, rhyme, and record scratch is to jog the memory, to serve as an epistemological device or a way of knowing. It helps to re-member with practice, with repetition one attempts a restoration of fragmented historical memories, and effectively “puts Humpty Dumpty back together again.” Black music can be seen as modes of racial and cultural logic that help to form a deeper understanding of one’s place in the world. Black music also enacts a methodology of racial kinship where, despite one’s geographical position, an affinity can be marked out through sound that can travel more immediately than bodies can. This kinship is as complicated as social life—it runs the gamut of emotionality from indifference, frustration, rage, and melancholia to rapture, amusement, happiness, and familial comfort. While kinship is secreted through a history of racial suffering that endures, one’s reckoning with this history and its vestiges, with Black people as family, friend, foe, nothing at all or all the above, and one’s position inside this intricate web of expectant hopes and failures, is nothing short of complex and perplexing. The expression of kinship in King Ayisoba and T-Pain’s music is a remix of historical time embodying past and future in the present through the alienating voice. As South African scholar Achille Mbembe writes, “The present as experience of time is precisely that moment when different forms of absence become mixed together; absence of those presences that are no longer so and that one remembers (the past), and absence of those others that are yet to come and 209 are anticipated (the future).” 325 King Ayisoba and T-Pain call out how frightening and beautiful Black social life can be with their vulnerable and oscillating voices. These artists each sound out a past and future meditation on alienation, property, and historical memory in a fraught present. The voice is melancholic, dispersed yet intermittently melodious with jagged shifts from harmonious to anti-phonal to a vibrating echo. It is through the devices of the kologo and auto-tune that these artists articulate a kind of alienation that is both an other-worldly being (King Ayisoba) and a dehumanized machine (T-Pain). The auto-tune represents this moment of Afro-futurity, a kind of postmodern expression that reaches beyond the limits of hip hop music. However, King Ayisoba’s use of the same technique with his own voice demonstrates the historicity of Black alienation as a centuries-old performance practice in Northern Ghana. With the kologo and auto-tune, the strange voices are all clamoring to say something at once in a simultaneity of expression, a soundscape of different emotions, a mumbo jumbo gumbo of Black sociality all fighting to be heard. It is within what Lindon Barrett calls the “sly alterity” of the voice—that strange, eccentric property that resonates with overlapping structures of the present, past and future that both tell it like it is and how it should be. 326 Black musicians use inanimate sound objects to fill up disembodying histories, to act as moral machines where wrongs that must be redressed echo, reverb, and ultimately, haunt this moment. 325 Mbembe, Achille, On the Postcolony (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001): 16. 326 Barrett: 58. 210 It is through history, the purposeful absenting or repression of African narratives and discourses by racist, colonizing forces that the dispossessing voice finds its life. The motor of time and space regulates the Black mechanical voice. Time and space are compressed through the ticking of the clock as the measure of modernity. It is against a soundscape of impossibility where according to Mbembe, “all…is incomplete, mutilated, and unfinished” and “Africa is essentially, for us, an object of experimentation” that the alienating voice emerges. 327 The Black mechanical voice absorbs the brutalities of occupation and dispossession of bodies, land and resources while also swelling the long- exploited congealed labor lodged in the throat. The voice also partakes in experimentation, in rearranging the shards of memory, identity, and geography into “a collective enunciation of pain.” 328 Since collectivity is heterogeneous, it also resounds with belonging, hope, pleasure, desire and above all, the capacity to imagine an alternative life. Mbembe further suggests “The breach over which there is apparently no going back, the absolute split of our times that breaks up the spirit and splits it into many, is again contingent, dispersed, and powerless existence.” 329 The alienating voice, in part, takes up the “sudden and abrupt outbursts of volatility” while also countering such processes. 330 It produces some outbursts of its own that are also contingent, dispersed and invested in reconfiguring power relations by giving “voice” to silenced and unavailable accounts. 327 Mbembe: 1-2. 328 Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: 52. 329 Mbembe: 13. 330 Ibid: 16. 211 A Case for Noise The relationship between Black performers and sound reproduction technologies can be seen in a condition of noise, or being caught/captured/captive/captivating —i.e. the phonograph capturing fugitive sounds and the western conquest of African land and resources; the carving of sound into grooves on the recording cylinder and the carving up of Africa by European nations; the scrambled codes embedded in Black music to preserve enslaved life and the scramble across Africa for colonial territories; African captive bodies transported across the Atlantic and bodies enduring captivity in the Americas; and the captivating sounds and gestures of Black performance that mystify audiences worldwide. A central feature of noise is a recapitulation of existing power relations by excluded and exploited populations into new arrangements that are less painful and more liberating. 331 As Elaine Scarry details, “The noises and cries in turn produced by the person in pain are already audible in the [object] itself.” 332 For Scarry, the failure to produce words, or decipherable enunciations, is the domain of noise that extends from persons to property. Similarly, Fred Moten insists that Frederick Douglass’ account of hearing his enslaved Aunt Hester scream as she is being beaten is a testimony to her humanity. 333 This scream from an object, or a 331 For an extended analysis of noise and capitalism, see Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003); noise’s articulation with race in U.S. hip hop, Tricia Rose, Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1994); and noise as a global hip hop practice, Tony Mitchell, ed., Global Noise: Rap and Hip-Hop Outside the USA (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2001). 332 Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985): 16. 333 See Moten, In the Break, “Resistance of the Object: Aunt Hester’s Scream”: 1-24. 212 commodity, is the deepest expression of pain or a violated self. Western discourses evaluate noise as a verbal goulash of untranslatability where cries, moans, chants, whispers, wails, humming, hushing, and clucking by bodies represent the lack of reason. Noise constitutes a disturbance, an unnerving nuisance, an incessant buzzing that must either be tuned out or silenced. Black peoples have been represented within western discourse as a condition of noise, as noisy things, as properties filled with noise. But as Edouard Glissant asserts, “Din is discourse. This is how the dispossessed man organized his speech by weaving it into the apparently meaningless texture of extreme noise.” 334 Enslaved peoples used noise to their advantage because slaveowners and overseers assumed that their sounds were irrelevant, negligible and without meaning. Therefore, enslaved peoples were able to embed messages of caution and celebration, strategy and escape within song. Noise intently scrambles hegemonic norms by articulating a radical alternative to existing social life. As Moten puts forth, “Blackness is always a disruptive surprise.” 335 Black noise is necessarily furtive and doubly intentioned, so Black subjectivity is partially available in order to survive white supremacist structures while more fully accessible within intimately fashioned racial and/or class collectives. Silence also possesses a structure of noise as a kind of echo chamber presenting a number of possible conclusions for why such silence is being enacted. Hush harbors were designated markers for enslaved peoples who would meet secretly for pleasurable or grave affairs where “large wash pots 334 Glissant, Edouard, Caribbean Discourse, trans. J. Michael Dash (Charlottesville: Universit of Virginia Press, 1999): 123. 335 Moten: 255. 213 would be positioned at the door of enslaved residences to keep their voices from escaping.” 336 This shows the historical precedence of Black subjects manipulating objects to make them serve a different purpose than its original function much like the auto-tune. The West African Orisha tradition of overturned pots signifies the strength of the departed and their enduring presence on behalf of the living. The purpose of hush harbors were to enforce solidarity among enslaved peoples, to pass on pertinent information learned about whites or other enslaved peoples, to maintain some semblance of privacy, to plan ways to formally resist, and to have some relief from the stringent forms of plantation life. As Lindon Barrett asserts, for Black subjects subversion becomes a mundane strategy in living. Singing “provides a primary means by which African Americans may exchange an expended, valueless self in the New World for a productive, recognized self.” 337 Orality in West African cultures operates as the mouth of experience, history, valor, value and provides a sense of identity for Black persons, individually and collectively. Similarly, the singing voice represents “the preeminent sign of the production of cultural value in African American communities.” 338 Singing contests literacy as the only indication of human rationality and signifies a disturbance of Western forms of value. The voice can be seen as a stand-in for the body where stealing the master’s property was the most radical means of establishing the enslaved body’s desires, needs and pleasures. 339 The songs of enslaved peoples carried double meanings. For the 336 Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: 73. 337 Barrett: 57. 338 Ibid: 58. 339 See Hartman, Scenes of Subjection and Moten, In the Break. 214 slaveowners these songs were the meaningless noise of happy laborers but for enslaved peoples these songs represented a reaching out to somewhere else. They were a collective dream in action, strategies that could be enacted to get some heaven on earth, to steal one’s self away, to be reunited with love ones, to pursue happiness, and to secure one’s own destiny. The Human Phonograph On November 21, 1877, Thomas Alva Edison declared to the world that “fugitive sound waves” could be captured, once and for all, with his invention of the phonograph. Also termed a “sound writer,” the phonograph works by snatching energy waves transmitted through the air and churning these vibrations into a series of cyclical disturbances. Through this new technology, sound is transduced from an elusive property into a thing that can be pinned down, examined with human eyes and hands. As Alexander Weheliye interprets, “Sound necessitates transposition into writing to even register as technology.” 340 Sound, an immaterial substance, is made legible—literally carved into grooves on the recording cylinder—with the phonograph. Furthermore, sound must be legitimized as writing for it to constitute a record, or intelligible document. 341 The phonograph marked a radical shift in public listening practices by reproducing the voice in a machine totally divorced from the human body. During the late 1870s, the phonograph was used to record and preserve court 340 Weheliye: 25. 341 See Weheliye for a thorough discussion of sound as writing, and therefore, a legitimized public discourse. 215 proceedings and business letters. 342 Throughout the 1880s, phonographs could be found in traveling exhibitions, train stations and arcades. Phonograph machines were then stationed at major department stores and for a coin, customers could listen to songs individually or in small groups. 343 As phonographs became affordable, listening transformed from a collective endeavor in the public sphere, particularly in Victorian parlors, concert halls and vaudeville venues, to a communal space in the home. By 1920, nearly half of all U.S. homes had phonographs. 344 Media scholar Jonathan Sterne explores how “the talking machine” was popularly advertised in newspapers and journals as a medium between the living and the dead that could account for a more domestic use of the phonograph during this period. Sterne observes, “Fantasies of speaking to the not yet born and hearing the dead cast phonography as a species of biopower, a modification of the relations between life and death.” 345 In 1920, Edison told a reporter, B.F. Forbes, that he was working on a newer version of the phonograph that could make contact with the spirits of the dead. 346 This period is indicative of how the phonograph radically reshaped social relations while also providing a 342 Ibid. 343 These public listening practices continue today in record stores and even Wal-Mart and Target music sections where customers can listen to song tracks before purchasing CDs. Consumers can also sample songs online before buying on a variety of music hosting sites such as iTunes and Amazon. 344 See Lisa Gitelman, "Recording Sound, Recording Race, Recording Property," Mark M. Smith, ed., Hearing History: A Reader (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004): 279-294. 345 Sterne, Jonathan, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 294. 346 This story was later revealed as false but this indicates how popular such myths about the phonograph were during the late 19 th and early 20 th century. 216 new way of imagining life and death as not permanently fixed states. Around this time, techniques for preserving food and corpses were transitioning from the private to the public domain and influenced how the phonograph was marketed to potential customers. Sterne denotes how phonograph records were mass produced as “canned music” and the “embalmed voice” was preserved in wax for listeners to enjoy beyond the musician’s own life span: “Recording was the product of a culture that had learned to can and to embalm, to preserve the bodies of the dead so that they could continue to perform a social function after life.” 347 Sound recordings were the result of the corporatization of the public’s desires to preserve historical memories through new, technological archives that could be conveniently accessed over time. The problem of sound is intimately bound up with the problem of race and place. Anxieties over shifting technology production during the late 19 th century mirrored white unease over increasing immigrant populations who made the United States home. 348 The phonograph and successive modern technologies not only record sounds of the body but also time and place, in what Southern sound scholar, Mark M. Smith terms “aural history,” as “record companies helped accelerate a racial politics of sound, popularized the idea of the disembodied voice…and thereby, endorsed the notion that racial identity could be heard, sold and consumed.” 349 Phonograph recordings did not occur only within the recording studio but also in everyday life where the tense intersections of race, 347 Sterne: 292. 348 See Weheliye. 349 Mark M. Smith, Sensing the Past: Seeing, Hearing, Smelling, Tasting, and Touching in History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008): 55. 217 class, and gender were experienced and amplified through the voice. Many of the early phonograph singers were former slaves under contract with multiple record companies during the 1890s. This period marks the height of coon songs, popularized during Reconstruction in minstrel performance. 350 As Lisa Gitelman notes, “Slavery, abolition and Dred Scott helped form the context and complexion of the minstrel shows; Plessy vs. Ferguson (1896) would be context for the recorded coon song.” 351 The phonograph created the first mechanized American popular music culture with the minstrel song hits of African American entertainers. What is fascinating about the phonograph is its ability to steal away the voice from its body and give it an altogether different host, if only temporarily. The phonograph frees the voice from the body and simultaneously imprisons the voice in a different body. Quite similar to critiques of the visual gaze by scholars working to open up Sensory Studies, the phonograph can also be read as a colonizing tool that captures indigenous sounds, bodies and histories and flattens them into a one-dimensional groove. However, the phonograph cannot be separated from its laboring bodies and their complex social histories. As cultural ethnographer Erica Brady reveals, the phonograph was used to record the “exotic” sounds of indigenous peoples studied by anthropologists to measure their civility. 352 The sounds of these ostensibly non-modern peoples were trapped within the recording wax. In contrast, Brady also points out that the 350 In addition to Gitelman, see Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). 351 Gitelman: 286. 352 See Erika Brady, A Spiral Way: How the Phonograph Changed Ethnography (Oxford: University of Mississippi Press, 1999). 218 technological sophistication of the phonograph allowed for the preservation of diverse cultures of non-European peoples. The phonograph shifted the means of communication and how anthropologists interpret and document their field data. Still, the phonograph and anthropology became mediums championing western discourses on Enlightenment, Christianity, colonialism and eugenics while also operating as complicated archives of human expression. 353 That the phonograph and its injured subjects could contribute to official narratives of history while at the same time pronouncing their own excluded stories demonstrates the imaginative possibilities of sound technologies. 354 One of the greatest phonograph performers, George Washington Johnson was an African American singer who sold hundreds of thousands of copies of “The Whistling Coon” and “The Laughing Song” in the mid-1890s. 355 Johnson recorded song masters, i.e. original recordings, as contract labor for several major phonograph companies. However, by 1920 these companies shifted to the cheaper, mass production retail model and Johnson, a former slave, was out of a job. With the rapid reproduction of the song masters, slaves—i.e., copies of the original recordings which are indistinct and easily replaceable—were a dime a dozen. This breach between master and slave is reproduced within the early music industry where exploited black labor is reiterated, i.e. “play it again, Sam!” The logic of the plantation economy is also the catalyst for industrial capitalism and the mass production of sounds. The voice stands in for the black cultural 353 Ibid. 354 The phonograph allowed the researcher and her documentation to be more precise, accurate and efficient; these records also preserve the cultural rituals of those recorded (albeit, for different purposes, their own self-preservation and historical documentation). 355 See Best. 219 body, an object of exchange that once on the black market, where production is already illegal, volatile and immoral, becomes doubly alienated from the self. 356 As historian Stephen Best details the story of blind slave Tom Wiggins who was coined the “human phonograph,” “wonder of the world” and “marvel of the age” because he could master complex musical scores without the help of literacy or sustained practice. Long Grabs, a reporter for the Fayetteville Observer wrote of Tom: “He resembles any ordinary negro boy, 13 years old, and is perfectly blind and an idiot in everything but music, language and imitation, and perhaps memory. He has never been instructed in music or educated in any way…this poor blind boy is cursed with but little of human nature; he seems to be an unconscious agent acting as he is acted on, and his mind a vacant receptacle where Nature stores her jewels to recall them at her pleasure.” 357 By this account, Wiggins was made a passive witness to his own self-making. Wiggins was reduced to mere mimicry—he was the slave, an unoriginal and inferior copy of the real thing—white musicianship. Black music can take on the shape of an enigmatic property where a complex of fascination, repulsion, wonder, desire, and fear emerge between listener and performer. Tom as property and producer is seen as superhuman— his talent and body are from another world—and inhuman—primitive, childlike and uncultured, justifying the need for civilization through the violent logic of enslavement and colonialism. This discourse is used to continue illegitimate treatment of Black peoples and not accord these subjects the full rights of 356 Derived from a graduate seminar discussion, COMM 680, with Professor Josh Kun. 357 Best: 54. 220 citizenship. As Best maintains, “Tom the machine, the mere ‘vacant receptacle,’ duplicated and copied another technological interface, specifically the written score, merely ‘animating’ the written sound notations of an original ‘author’. Tom became, in the act of repetition, a creative human subject.” 358 Wiggins was not just a vacant receptacle but possessed his own ideas, passions, desires, history and memories. Even occasions of enjoyment are riddled with anxiety for performers like Wiggins where it becomes necessary to reveal what should already be audible—the human spirit of creative Black labor. 359 King Ayisoba’s Kologo He matches his sound. His face is deeply angular, thick cuts mark each cheek and his nose is sharply vertical. The musician’s eyes are intensely edged like daggers that can go cold or hot at a moment’s notice. He is both here and somewhere else at once. Strange that this small man can produce such sounds that are vast like the Atlantic and the thick black rock lining Cape Coast and Elmina castles, which formerly caged enslaved peoples. In his voice, you plummet suddenly to some unknown depth and then skyrocket upward to an even stranger place. You get the feeling you’ve been here before, that you miss this place even though you don’t remember ever visiting. His possessing tone draws you in deeper to try to understand this enigma, this magical property of sound. The musician flips from a high robotic register spoken in Twi to a deep vibrato in English to a steady alto voice in pidgin. When the dispossessing voice is improvised, it is indicative of the spirits taking over, desiring to get a message 358 Best: 56-57. 359 See Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, for a more detailed explication of surveillance and its relationship to enjoyment. 221 of caution out to the people. So, it is necessary that they take on such a big sound that will stop you dead in your tracks wondering how a human being can naturally produce such noise. It sounds like the vocal cavity is crowded with multiple voices at once. The voice is haunted. It is multi-tonal with three or more simultaneous vocal registers. The Middle Passage is lodged in his throat—along with echoes or what historian Anne Bailey calls “lingering whispers” of continual wars over land, resources and ethnicity in Northern Ghana, histories of colonization and disenfranchisement, the loss of Nkrumah and his vision for the country, overwhelming IMF and World Bank loans that must be repaid, the aftershock of his grandfather’s death, the incessant hustle to get one’s music out in Ghana. 360 These heavy processes are noisy, filling up every available space in the body. It is an excess that must be disgorged. King Ayisoba was born in 1975 in Bongo SOE near Bolgatanga in the Upper East Region of Ghana. He is the most popular kologo musician in Ghana, a tradition of throat singing, string instrument playing and dancing that is native to this region of Northern Ghana. King Ayisoba carries a walking cane and dons traditional clothing from his hometown. He speaks limited English and seems more comfortable playing his kologo than talking. Not unlike many performers, he exhibits a sort of verve when performing that is more understated in conversation. On his kologo are painted the words, “Modern Ghanaian,” the same moniker for his debut album in 2000. The self-proclaimed “Afro hero,” King Ayisoba uses the historical technology of kologo to assert Ghana as not newly modern as many of the last decades’ studies on globalization, hybridity, 360 Bailey, Anne C., African Voices of the Atlantic Slave Trade: Beyond the Silence and the Shame (Boston: Beacon Press, 2005): 3. 222 and transnationalism would suggest, but as always already so. Kologo is a historical practice that is several centuries old and is considered to be a medium between ancestral spirits and the living to transmit messages of warning, praise and healing for physical and mental illnesses. Kologo music is a necessary part of the agricultural communities of the North where musicians are relied on to communicate the messages of the spirits and ancestors for daily living. As King Ayisoba declares, “[They say] come help me with the farming, we give them strength to do work. If something happens, then they don’t go. We have our traditions. We travel to different places. The spirit comes special for some reasons. It can’t come everywhere.” The living look to kologo musicians to determine when to pursue mundane and spectacular activities. More than anything, King Ayisoba’s hi-jacked voice is a corrective for all who listen to live more happily by treating family, friends, neighbors, and even enemies with abiding love. The purpose of kologo music is to ameliorate social relations, to provide special healing to the ills of body, mind or spirit, and to recover human life regardless of race. There are two legends that circulate around how King Ayisoba began playing kologo music. One claims that three years after King Ayisoba’s birth, he was still not able to walk. A traditional priest told his father that the boy was born a fetish priest with special powers and to give him a kologo instrument. Shortly after, King Ayisoba began playing the instrument and walking. The other, told to me by King Ayisoba himself, is that he began to play the kologo after his grandfather, a traditional healer and kologo musician, passed away. King Ayisoba maintains, “My father’s spirit catch me. I think at that time I’m getting to 6 years and I start playing, going around to the place we sell to— 223 market, funerals, parties and people also in love. I be small but if you play they put money for the guitar inside.” The musician continues to play the music as a way to remain close to his grandfather. He continues, “I take kologo from my grandfather. My grandfather play it. He’s a spiritual man. In dey house and people come there. If you sick or you be madman or woman and your period is no come, if you go to my father and my father took kologo playing and the spirit will come and it’ll tell you do like this and everything will be okay for him.” King Ayisoba details how the playing is natural and directed from the ancestral spirits. He is the medium, the technology for the message to reach the listener. He does not practice or rehearse before performances. It is music for the world, born out of the loss of his grandfather since the gift has been passed on to him with this death. Alienation, or the purposeful invoking of another time/space, is taken up as a means toward feeling fully human as the musician taps into another reality to shed light on our world. Alienation manifests in the strange voices of the spirits embedded in the musician’s vocal cords that deliver messages of hope, promise, affirmation and warning to listeners. King Ayisoba states, “It just came. It’s a spiritual thing. If you hold it and play small one, you see what happen. If you start playing, the sick he hear my song, I can play, ah, and he no go sick again. It’s spiritual.” What does take time is for the message to form. The musician states that the spirits can come at any time of the day, in the middle of the night or early in the morning. Sometimes the spirits will wake King Ayisoba up in the morning, the middle of the night or during the day and he must compose the song then. The artist exclaims, “The song take time, getting to one month to two month to three month. It’s not just you talk something. It’s not a one day job, it take time. 224 My style is not one day.” He has no control over when this comes about. The message takes time since he must process what particular messages mean and how to decipher them to listeners. This message music, although made improvisational with the spiritual takeover of King Ayisoba’s body, is also not easily regulated by the measure of the clock in capitalist modernity, for “it is not a one day job, it take time.” Twi phrases that are common in King Ayisoba’s songs are "Siri na" which means "come down" and "Kai, kai, kai,” meaning "I have finished speaking." There is a strong biblical dimension to the performer’s work that comes across in a language of martyrdom, of a divine sacrifice for the healing salvation of his listeners. King Ayisoba marks his music’s beginning and end with these utterances, a call-and-response between himself and the spirits inhabiting his body. The lives of kologo musicians is itinerant as they must not only go where the spirits direct them but also where they can find work—usually for parties, funerals, weddings and other significant life events. King Ayisoba’s band of dancers and back-up singers are composed of his brothers who are fellow musicians. King Ayisoba relates, “Many people, they lost. Kologo music is spiritual music, it tell them how to live righteously. You learn from hungry inside. Hungry led to make profits. I come to south. I’m not from south. I find work. I have to get work before I play.” King Ayisoba migrated to Accra in the late 1990s and began work as a security guard at a tourist hotel. Each night, he would bring his kologo instrument and play. The artist notes, “One day some man they call him T.T., he come and run for the hotel. At night he say he hear a rhythm and the voice, he didn’t hear that style before. And he come down. Come 225 meet me for the gate. I play, ah, he like it. Panji [King Ayisoba’s music producer] give DJ cassette. Heat catch like fire and I want my father to take over.” Unlike the vocoder or auto-tune—mechanical appendages attached to human bodies—King Ayisoba’s technology is not only embodied but embedded in his throat. His voice is the technology of expression that is at once historical and modern, non-human and human, physical and metaphysical. His voice becomes the vortex for converging experiences, historical memory, passion, desire and hope. With his distinct appearance, the handmade kologo and a costume of printed cloth wrapped around the waist, King Ayisoba’s body as instrument and producer becomes a landscape for the audience’s fascination with such complex expressions—he is magical and primitive, mystic and confounding. King Ayisoba, although wildly popular in Ghana, performs mostly in Europe and the U.S. for predominantly white audiences at African music festivals, university showcases and museum exhibitions. 361 He is an enigma for western audiences unfamiliar with this particular historical craft where he comes to homogenously represent “Ghana,” or rather “Africa,” as a single entity. Possibly in response to this, King Ayisoba’s first album, Modern Ghanaians, challenges the stereotypes of Africa as primitive and pre-modern and firmly places Ghana in the present moment. Ghana, and by extension the African continent, is inserted in the landscape of modernity as a body of lively resources that are persistently excavated—uranium for mobile phone communication and computer technology, gold, oil, diamonds, land and laboring bodies used, historically, to fuel western notions of progress and productivity. King Ayisoba’s 361 See Paulla A. Ebron, Performing Africa (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002) for her discussion of Malian Jali singers on the U.S. tour circuit. 226 kologo repatriates technologies to Ghana as a rebuttal against popular and institutional assertions of the continent as the antithesis of modernity. His body like his music also circulates, confronting and conforming to western notions of what it means to be “African,” often represented in conventions of dress, religion, family structure and labor that are ostensibly static; possessing a close relationship to the earth and nature; and an innate rhythm that manifests in musical and dance performance. 362 Despite this or maybe because of it, King Ayisoba inscribes himself and his music within a logic of modernity that centers national, collective and personal histories as multi-layered, complicated and always emerging. But the catch 22 always pops up—yes, he is caught and captivating—King Ayisoba claims he would not be able to support himself if it weren’t for the international music market. He has yet to receive his rightful monies from the Copyright Office for songs played in venues and radio stations across the country. In fact, the musician pronounces, “I plan to enter the international market. I am however looking for somebody who can help me achieve my dreams of promoting Ghanaian cultural music abroad and raise Ghana’s flag high.” Here, western tourists to Ghana are central in assisting artists like King Ayisoba to acquire show contracts and a wider distribution of music outside Ghana. 363 More importantly, such assistance sustains his craft by providing a viable income for his family, who are also his band and back-up dancers. These alliances support his very reason for becoming a kologo musician in the first 362 See Ebron, Mbembe, and Louise Meintjes, Sound of Africa: Making Music Zulu in a South African Studio (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003). 363 See Steven Feld, "Notes on World Beat," Public Culture 1.1 (1988): 31-37; Martin Stokes, "Music and the Global Order," Annual Review of Anthropology 33 (2004): 47-72. 227 place by supplying greater avenues for his mediation between the ancestral spirits and the living. King Ayisoba’s use of the kologo is historical, where the past informs the present, while also a technology and spiritual medium of communal connection and healing for listeners. The kologo is an active re-membering of his relationship with his grandfather through an improvisational performance which vacillates like his voice between innovation/invocation/evocation of something otherwordly and the effects of affect, of being alienated after his grandfather’s death. King Ayisoba conjures up his grandfather each time he plays and this repetitious practice allows a re-connection that is never complete or recoverable but does not stop the musician from continuing the exchange; if anything it’s maintained in hopes of reaching a totality of feeling. His music also generates its own limits where the messages between the spirits and the living risk being mistranslated or dismissed as phantasmic noise. King Ayisoba, a third world citizen whose wages are primarily generated from tours in western countries, is dependent on an international market that is volatile, exploitative and deeply invested in popular representations of Africans that don’t always allow full flexible identities. Auto-Tune as Afro-Tune Similar to King Ayisoba’s voice—a medium or vehicle for the spirits to speak—the auto-tune produces another kind of alienating voice that is non- human but intensifies the emotional feelings of its singer. The phonograph was heralded as a device that captures sound. The auto-tune is the progression of such technology that captures and manipulates the voice, which becomes lost 228 and scrambled up in the device. It is most recognizable as an effect that deliberately distorts the human voice by pushing sound through the auto-tune at the point of excess. The effect is a disrupted, fragmented voice that sounds non- human and mechanical. The auto-tune is used for pitch correction in vocal and instrumental performances. It has been a trade secret for years, used by sound engineers for country singers to fill in harmony without revealing the singing as processed. It is used to disguise inaccuracies and mistakes, and has allowed many artists to produce more precisely tuned recordings. T-Pain, an R&B artist, revived the use of the auto-tune in the mid- 2000s. He primarily performs with the electronic device and his commercial success has spawned the use of the auto-tune by other hip hop, R&B and pop artists such as Lil’ Wayne, Kanye West, Ron Browz, Jamie Foxx and Britney Spears. Part of the conditions that have produced such immense popularity for the auto-tune, also termed “The T-Pain effect,” are the diverse range of established and emerging artists using the technology. It is through African American musicians’ manipulation of the auto-tune from a technical practice that perfects human pitch to a cultural practice that amplifies racial affectivity that the device can be read as an “Afro-tune.” For example, mega-star Afro-Canadian rapper, Drake exclaims to listeners on a recent mixtape single, “No auto-tune but you can feel the pain.” 364 The auto-tune can be seen as an Afro-tune where the spectrum of Black emotionality—particularly, numbness, frustration, pain, passion, fear, desire, hope and longing are amplified. The auto-tune’s alienating 364 Drake, "Fear," So Far Gone, by Aubrey Drake Graham, Universal Motown/Young Money Entertainment, 2009. 229 voice calls out for others to participate in a range of feelings through a collaborative zone of passionate performance. There is a great deal of confusion about modern sound reproduction technologies in popular discourse, particularly the distinctions between the vocoder, the talk box and auto-tune. The vocoder made popular by artists such as Kraftwerk, Herbie Hancock, Stevie Wonder and Peter Frampton was popularized during the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s. The voice encoder, or vocoder, is a microphone attached to an amplifier that analyzes and synthesizes speech. During the 1930s, the U.S. federal government used the vocoder as a speech scrambler to ensure secure radio communication. The speaker’s voice would be analyzed, encrypted and enveloped by the noise of a number of different yet simultaneous signals. Transmitted on the lowest possible frequency that could carry a human voice, the vocoder produces a steely monotone. The talk box, made popular by R&B artists, Zapp & Roger and Teddy Riley during the 1980s and 1990s respectively, is a plastic tube connected to a foot pedal amplifier, a keyboard or guitar and the performer’s mouth. 365 With the talk box, the performer mimes the words of the song. The manipulations made with the mouth and tongue distorts the sounds produced by the instrument. The sound is shaped by the contortions of the mouth that synthesize and amplify the vibrations, in effect making the instrument “speak.” This produces an electronic, robotic voice since the instrument is actually making the sound, not the performer. The performer uses the throat as a filter by distorting the shape of the sound, thereby, making sound legible. 365 See Alexander G. Weheliye, "Feenin: Posthuman Voices in Contemporary Black Popular Music," Social Text : AfroFuturism, 71.2 (2002): 21-48. 230 What makes Black performers’ use of mechanical sound technologies so compelling is how racial memory is embedded in the shape of the sounds produced. Alexander Weheliye’s study of R&B musicians’ use of sonic technologies explores these soundings as an inscription within yet indictment of U.S. discourses on modernity. For Weheliye, such artists trouble the color line. He stresses, “the audibly machinic black voice amplifies the vexed interstices of race, sound and technology.” 366 The author critiques scholarship celebrating the contemporary moment as post-human by arguing that such reasoning is based on the maintenance of the white liberal subject where “freedom is the function of possession” and is always already pronounced. 367 For many white musicians, sonic voice technologies are used quite differently since the emphasis is often on sounding non-human, on detaching all human emotion and feeling from the performance. In effect, these vocalists flat line, their voices become without affect, absent of all human feeling. And this is the point—to become the object or the thing or nothing at all—to empty out all meaning, possibly as a critique of human vulnerability. The Black subject, who is reduced to the physicality of the body in dance, music, sports and sex within such discourses, operates as the limit case for what constitutes human. Black singers often use mechanical sound technologies as a means of emphasizing their humanity by re-contextualizing the past and organizing the future through living in the present. With the auto-tune, notes are deepened, hollowed out yet also vibrantly full of complex human soundings that 366 Weheliye, “Feenin”: 22. 367 Ibid: 23. 231 encompass desire, regret, mourning, sadness, torture, ecstasy, pleasure, joy and hope. 368 This mechanical device produces a future that informs the present through an intimacy between technology as property and histories of dispossessed Black subjects made into the objects of another. Weheliye further notes that the vocoder carries undertones of nostalgia and an impossible return. Black sound technology is used to “unearth the ‘humanity’ of machinic affections” as the singer’s desires are privileged and foregrounded, becoming an over-desiring machine whose longings are pushed to the excess. 369 Even as the auto-tune is used to correct mistakes in the voice, to straighten out pitch and tune, when Black artists use this device it displays the work of eradicating such imperfections without completely removing them. The human stains are simultaneous with the fixing device. The impurities of the voice, body and historical memory are not meant to be erased but stand as a testament that the subject is alive and here while reaching for something else, possibly better, out there. The mechanical apparatus allows for the sounding out of multiple past and future scenarios where the musician and listener can individually or mutually experience different outcomes than those available in one’s reality. The Afro-tune provides a technology for time travel and the capacity to re-imagine past events or create happier futures within the present. Reviving the use of the auto-tune with his 2004 record, “I’m Sprung,” Faheem Rashad Najm, i.e. T-Pain (Tallahassee Pain), debuted with meager commercial success. However, with his second album released in 2007, Epiphany, he became a pop phenomenon. T-Pain’s name is derived from the struggles he 368 Ibid. 369 Ibid: 36. 232 endured as a youth who dropped out of school in the eighth grade to pursue his music full time. In interviews, the artist often discusses the difficulties he encountered in securing a record deal while growing up in a small, southern town. When a record deal turned sour with his manager-father, T-Pain ran away from home at age 17 and was homeless, sleeping in cars and on friends’ couches for the next two years. T-Pain’s aesthetic, much like his sound, is eccentric and excessive—the artist owns a collection of over 300 top hats for his hair locs, he often sports coattails, neon clothing, sunglasses, platinum teeth, a walking stick and a bejeweled goblet. He has also spoken very publicly about a sex obsession with daily expenses in the thousands for pornography video downloads and stripper entertainment. 370 Speaking about his reliance on the auto-tune, T-Pain proclaims, “It’s making me money so I ain’t gonna stop.” 371 Although T-Pain and other auto- tune users possibly do not consider the complex dimensions of their performance practice, this does not rid the mechanical voicing of multi-layered significance. Even an allegiance to capitalist production and material excess is a political practice that is bound up with the scarcity of lived experience, of knowing what it means to go without basic human needs and desiring consumption that, in public discourse, is promoted as a national birthright. T-Pain’s dependence on the auto-tune could critique our society’s growing dependence on machines while displaying an identification with this product and Black people once seen as property, as abject objects. Auto-tune use by Black producers asserts the 370 “T-Pain”, The Howard Stern Radio Show with Howard Stern, Sirius Satellite Radio, 14 November 2008. 371 Ibid. 233 absence of personhood while also being its vibrant expression. It is a response to the denial of humanity—which sometimes is conflated with material consumption—while also its ultimate expression. With the auto-tune there is a simultaneous attempt to erase human mistakes, traumatic histories and their memories, while also making sure these experiences are detectable. The real work of the Afro-tune is shown in redressing errors while still showing the undeniable presence of such frailties. For instance, another auto-tune user, rapper Lil’ Wayne, frequently collaborates with T-Pain, and the duo was set to release an album in late 2009 called “T-Wayne.” 372 Lil’ Wayne has employed auto-tune on a number of songs particularly on his 2008 multi-platinum album, Tha Carter III. 373 In an interview with Katie Couric, the rapper maintains that in his hometown of New Orleans “reality is handed to you very early.” 374 As Clyde Woods argues “the Katrina tragedy was a blues moment.” 375 The possession, dislocation and loss of property during Hurricane Katrina, the collective feeling of abandonment by the federal administration, the affective mourning of a home now lost and never to be regained in the same way, and the persistent fragmentation of family units into a new, sprawling diaspora across the U.S. is deeply embedded in the post-Katrina music of Lil’ Wayne. The artist exclaims, “I don’t write anything down. I just 372 The album has been put on hold as Lil’ Wayne serves a one-year jail sentence. 373 Lil' Wayne, Tha Carter III, by Dwayne Michael Carter, Jr., Cash Money/Young Money/Universal Records, 2008. 374 Lil' Wayne, All Access: Lil' Wayne with Katie Couric, CBS News, 4 Feb. 2009. 375 Woods, Clyde Adrian, "Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans?: Katrina, Trap Economics, and the Rebirth of the Blues, " American Quarterly 57.4 (2005): 105. 234 record it. It’s because I really am it…I am music.” 376 These events are recorded in the technology of expression of Lil Wayne’s music as racial and historical memory. As producer and instrument, the narrative of aftershock is inherent and always emerging as a confluence of past and present with a future that has the capacity to repair. The future, presented through the innovative technology of the Afro-tune, gives its users a modicum of control over their lives with the capacity to re-imagine the past and present. The tragedies and fallacies of Hurricane Katrina can never fully be erased from popular consciousness. Although this is exactly what is attempted by the auto-tune—to correct the mistakes of this grave natural and social disaster, to return to the event and erase the persistent errors of the local, state and federal governments’ response to the needs of the predominantly African American poor and working class folk left behind. Similarly, Kanye West’s use of the auto-tune for his 2008 album, 808 + Heartbreaks was produced in the context of his mother’s death and breakup with his fiancée. 377 During a press conference in New Zealand, West spoke about discovering his mother’s death, by saying, “It was like losing an arm and a leg and trying to walk through that.” 378 The album is redolent with trauma, melancholia and longing, particularly over the loss of his mother who the performer has indicated, in many interviews, was also his best friend. His Afro- tuned voice is not perfect or even better, but rather distorted, strange and ghastly. 376 Lil’ Wayne interview. 377 Kanye West, 808s & Heartbreak, by Kanye Omari West, GOOD Music/Roc-A-Fella, Def Jam Records, 2008. 378 Tardio, Andres, "Kanye West Speaks Candidly About His Mother, Religion, Rap," December 2008, www.hiphopdx.com, <http://www.hiphopdx.com/index/news/id.8186>. 235 West’s Afro-tune is not a corrective device, but rather, a phantom limb that amplifies his vulnerability. West’s inability to rewrite the past and reclaim an unrecoverable past and to re-inhabit the maternal womb does not stop the mediation/meditation process of song. This album, unlike his others, could not be rapped because it needed to be sung. West’s voice is wrung out and exhausted, the throat swells with robotic emotion as a traumatic archive of historical remembrance needs emptying out. West’s Afro-tune is both distant and immediate—the needle is stuck on a particular groove as the listener hears him discover, again and again, the original moment of his mother’s death. Similarly, with Kanye West’s famous outburst during the Hurricane Katrina pledge drive of “George Bush doesn’t care about Black people” and the interruption/irruption/disruption of Taylor Swift’s acceptance speech at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards, West was, in effect, auto-tuning. 379 He attempted to correct the imperfections of official narratives of U.S. modernity, to rewrite hegemonic scripts of white privilege and Black neglect by stepping out of place and giving voice to a different set of historical realities that have purposely been excluded. Auto-tune use echoes complicated structures of feeling within this moment of global recession where the market is particularly hostile to poor and working class populations. With T-Pain’s release of the “I Am T-Pain” application on the I-Phone, customers can also give voice to the auto-tune for a mere $2.99. Auto- tune use rose to great popularity in 2007 as the presidential campaign of Barack 379 See Red Cross Telethon for Hurricane Katrina Victims, “Kanye West Katrina's Red Cross”, 3 Sept. 2005, CBS, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jBvl7zEXf_o and Jayson Rodriguez, "Kanye West Crashes VMA Stage During Taylor Swift's Award Speech," 13 Sept. 2009, www.mtv.com , <http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1621389/20090913/west_kanye.jhtml>. 236 Obama began to take root and the recession rose to crisis proportions. The auto- tune, in the fractured, alienating voice, presents the tension between personhood and subjectivity. Through the universalization of particular racialized feeling, the speaking commodity of the auto-tune is made democratic and the self is amplified simultaneously as it ceases to exist. As Laura S. Brown asserts, the “damaged voice becomes a powerful symbol to a society suffering from ‘insidious trauma,’ that is, a society that is forced to recognize its proximity to traumatic events and their arbitrariness that threaten to afflict any individual at any time.” 380 The Afro-tune has become grossly popular during this global recession because it publicly voices damaging social conditions. Through the Afro-tune, the voice mirrors the ruptures of political crises in citizenship, mobility and productive self-care. The Afro-tune’s popularity exhibits an affinity with the condition of Blackness, as machines rule and replace workers and corporate takeovers escalate. Perhaps, popular fascination with the Afro-tune effects a grappling with our contemporary social condition as the dispossessing processes of unemployment, foreclosures, fuel and food prices, insurance and loan rates, and programming cutbacks for the poor skyrocket. The historical character of Black suffering becomes the baseline/bass line for the world’s, particularly the western hemisphere, moaning and mourning over the loss of property, healthcare and livable wages. The historical condition of Black folks has been the soundtrack for such phantasmic loss since, at least, the founding of the United States. Is it any 380 Laurie Stras, "The Organ of the Soul: Voice, Damage, and Affect," Neil Lerner and Joseph N. Straus, eds., Sounding Off: Theorizing Disability in Music (New York: Routledge, 206): 181. The term “insidious trauma” comes from Laura S. Brown, “Not Outside the Range: One Feminist Perspective on Psychic Trauma,” Cathy Caruth, ed., Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press): 100-112. 237 wonder that the world turns to the Afro-tune and Barack Obama with cries for change and stability, to correct our surprisingly imperfect infrastructures, to recover social life and return to financial viability? Effectively, the Afro-tune is being used to sound off that we’re all in this bag together, that there are alternative conditions of possibility available, that life can be made in the midst of astounding tribulation. The alienating voice produced by the Afro-tune has the capacity to make the audience and performer closer. Empathy and identification between performer and listener is manifested through the disrupting voice, i.e. a physical archive of complex social narratives. The voice is not a conduit of the affective but the thing itself, the emotion in the voice is raw, porous and vulnerable. The ravaged, pained body is embedded in the voice where “vocal damage has acquired the status of a culturally inscribed desirable mutilation.” 381 As Cathy Caruth explains, “We can also read the address of the voice here, not as the story of the individual in relation the events of his own past, but as the story of the way in which one’s own trauma is tied up with the trauma of another, through the very possibility and surprise of listening to another’s wound.” 382 This “listening to another’s wound” is a testimony to the presence of one’s own wounded experience. The alienating voice not only mirrors historical and existing social conditions but also provides a provisional catharsis in struggling with life and the capacity to shift reality to alternative scales. 381 Straus: 175. 382 Caruth, Cathy, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996): 8. 238 Chopped and Screwed The alienating voice grapples with the history of Black dehumanization and a historical association with property through mechanical sound technology. The vocal technology only amplifies what is already there in a recording of Black suffering, promise, hope and desire. Accordingly, Roland Barthes comments, “What I hear are blows: I hear what beats in the body, what beats the body, or better: I hear this body that beats." 383 Music inhabits the body and the body is embedded in music. For Barthes, grain represents the friction or breach between language and music; it is the domain of the soul. The alienating voice is a means of expressing human pain and desire. Similarly, Lindon Barrett argues that the primary articulation of Black social life is when the voice stands in for the Black subject. 384 Sound technologies used by Black producers point to the human condition as fragile and vulnerable, along with desire to radically shift present conditions to an alternatively livable space. King Ayisoba’s kologo—singing, banjo playing and dancing—signals how complicated life is for Ghanaians in general, and musicians living in Ghana, in particular. The international market—especially, the U.S. but also the U.K., France, Germany and South Africa—is the goal for Ghanaian artists aspiring to make a livable wage. It is difficult to sustain a living in Ghana because of faulty business practices such as payola given to radio DJs, late payment received for performances, cumbersome communication with the Copyright Office over due monies, street and digital piracy of music, and the lack of a functioning record 383 Roland Barthes, “Rasch,” Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977): 299. 384 See Barett. 239 promotion industry in the country. King Ayisoba’s hit song, “My Friend, My Friend, Don’t Forget Me” concerns a protagonist who has taken care of a friend during difficult times and is then dismissed by the now well-off friend. The song’s main lyrics are: “You came my place/I make you fine fine/When you see me/You no greet me/When you see me/You no greet me/My friend, my friend/Don’t forget me.” 385 “My Friend, My Friend Don’t Forget Me” examines relationships at multiple scales between the government and Ghanaians, African Americans and Ghanaians, Ghanaian friends and/or relatives. The song possesses double meaning—it can be read as a critique of Ghanaian and African American relations but also signifies the loss of King Ayisoba’s friend—as the song is dedicated to T.T., a hiplife artist, who passed away suddenly—and grandfather. “My Friend” also mirrors how African American tourists are persistently drawn in to circuits of social responsibility to befriended Ghanaians and their ability to refuse such roles. The song ushers a call for help to fully enter the international music scene and to receive what is not readily accessible in Ghana with its unstructured recording industry. It is a gesture towards establishing enduring relationships with African American tourists to buy local music, book shows in the U.S., sell and market music, assist with the U.S. visa process, and introduce artists to other influential persons. Similarly, King Ayisoba’s most popular song, “I Want To See You My Father,” is a young boy’s plea to his father to not abandon house and home for his mistress. This song also serves as an invocation of the alienating voice for his own healing as the musician continues to suffer from the loss of his grandfather. A common technique employed by King 385 Lyrics taken from King Ayisoba’s “My Friend, My Friend, Don’t Forget Me” (2000). 240 Ayisoba in both songs is the echo effect where multiple layers of his voice sing the chorus in different time speeds. They are overlapping, slightly off-beat and out of tune, effecting a totality of emotion for that which is lost and never to be regained in its original form. Here, King Ayisoba’s kologo is a sonic archive of memory, spirit, desire, fortitude and familial connection. T-Pain’s 2008 chart-topper, “Chopped ‘N’ Skrewed” registers multiple levels of dissonance in a fragmented voice, the Texan culture of chopped and screwed music and substance abuse, and a jagged beat instrumental production. The song possesses a slow motion, warped voice that surrounds T-Pain’s tortured verses on unrequited love and sexual attraction. “Chopped ‘N’ Skrewed” is about being “dissed” by a woman and is imbued with painful humiliation, surprising loss over sexual expectation and a trust misabused: “Shorty don’t chop me, shorty don’t skrew me/shorty, don’t chop me, shorty don’t skrew me/yeah, yeah, yeah/now you’ve officially been chopped ‘n’ skrewed/scr-skrewed (2x), chop-chop-chopped ‘n’ skrewed (2x).” 386 “Chopped ‘N’ Skrewed” can be understood in material and figurative terms. At a greater scale the song can be read as addressing the condition of being Black—and a Black musician—in the U.S, as chopped and screwed is often street slang for the relationship between young Black men and the legal system. The song can also be read as addressing the history of African American musicians who have long been exploited by record companies until, at least, the 386 Lyrics taken from T-Pain’s “Chopped ‘N’ Skrewed” (2008). 241 1960s when more fair practices were instituted. 387 Chopped and screwed also is masculinist terminology about sexual intercourse and one’s prowess to satisfy women’s expectations and desires. This “sexual cut”—cut also refers to betrayal, violence and sex—is also a critique of southern state discourses’ terrorizing response to African American equal citizenship and miscegenation in the inventive charges of sexual abuse committed by Black men against white women and the extra-legal practices of lynching. 388 T-Pain’s 2008 album, Thr33 Ringz, poses him as the “ringleader of the music game.” 389 The music video for “Chopped ‘N’ Skrewed” positions the artist as the ringleader of a circus of freaks. It is a display of visual excess—bodies persistently pop out of mouths in endless dispersion and rejoining. T-Pain’s body is fragmented and reassembled, then his brain splits open into another copy of him as bodies gorge themselves and vomit up others. 390 T-Pain multiplies himself endlessly and his body breaks up into many shards. He is then disrupted by record scratching noise and white noise. The singer’s body breaks, never reassembling again but then multiplies. T-Pain disassembles then reappears as a whole, a head eats the singer and then shatters. He disjoins his own body and begins to grow heads out of different joints. Throughout the music video, T- 387 David Sanjek, "One Size Does Not Fit All: The Precarious Position of the African American Entrepreneur in Post-World War II American Popular Music," American Music 15.4 (1997): 535- 562. 388 See the work of Ida B. Wells. 389 Black Star Entertainment, “T-Pain Compares Music Biz to Circus, Talks 'Thr33 Ringz," 29 September 2008, www.media4i.com, <http://www.media4i.com/news/-Hip-Hop/1988.html>. 390 “Chopped 'N' Skrewed,” dir. Adam McKay, perf. T-Pain, 2008. 242 Pain’s hands are pulling the puppet strings and orchestrating new scenes of social life. Another visual signifier throughout the “Chopped ‘N’ Skrewed” music video are large elephants in the room. Can we acknowledge them? The video is a visual and aural re-membering of a dismembered Black body—its pain and torture, hope of refiguration and redemption. The music video represents an “endless reiteration and enactment of this condition of loss and displacement” because enslavement marks the ontological point where the Black subject in the New World comes into being. 391 There’s an impetus to return to this point where “the history of the captive emerges precisely at this site of loss and rupture” as an attempt to address unmet needs, disappointed outcomes and repressed desires. 392 Redress is employed as relief and release from continual terror and intimidation. Here, counter-memory serves to redress dislocation, rupture, shock, and forgetting with the modern projects of slavery, colonialism, imperialism and apartheid. Through discontinuity and crisis, repetition is an active redressing, redefinition, and regenerative process. Additionally, chopped and screwed music—also called screwed and chopped or slowed and throwed—is similar to the structuring of the African diaspora as a network of dispossession that is thrown or strewn across vast geographies. Chopped and screwed music developed in South Houston during the early 1990s and refers to a technique of remixing hip hop music. This musical sound is accomplished by slowing the tempo down to between 60 - 70 quarter- note beats per minute and applying techniques such as skipping beats, record 391 Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: 74. 392 Ibid. 243 scratching, stop-time, and affecting portions of the music to make a "chopped- up" sounding version of the original. DJ Screw, the founder of this music, dramatically reduced the pitch of a record giving it a mellow, heavy sound that emphasizes lyrics as a storytelling mechanism. Screw tapes, inspired by the slower pace of Southern life, were sold as laidback driving music primarily for young African American and Tejano males. Party DJ, Michael Watts, would cut between two copies of the same record, creating a double-time beat that is reminiscent of Jamaican dub mixes. Screwed music was created under the influence of prescription cough syrup Promethazine, which includes codeine. 393 The chopped and screwed sound spread throughout the deep South, particularly Atlanta, New Orleans, Memphis and Miami. The music is an active attempt to produce another reality, play with the temporal speed of life and create music from this alternative state of mind. This regional music is produced through a mind-altered time and space creating a slowed down, warped voice and beat instrumental. So, how does the history of Black folks indicate being chopped and screwed? The experiences of lynchings, violent fracturing of families under slavery, Jim Crow segregation and the volatile logic of racial capitalism are deeply embedded in this music and culture, already recorded even as there have been persistent attempts by state and extralegal agencies to erase such accounts. This is the purpose of hauntings, the ghostly/ghastly in the alienating voice, to show that which is missing in visual culture and material reality. Such tragic remembrances figure in the breaks and fissures of the music, 393 This substance is also called syrup or purple drank, sizzurp, lean, drank, barre, texas tea or purple jelly. 244 voice, and history perhaps as a mode to divorce oneself from the experience and the pain or to redouble such feeling. Death of the Auto-Tune Musicians T-Pain and King Ayisoba’s deployment of the alienating voice in the auto-tune and kologo operates as an acoustic mirror of disenfranchised, displaced, dislocated, and dispossessed people. T-Pain uses the future to recontextualize the present while King Ayisoba uses the past to reshape the present. Both voicings can be read as providing a way forward through the specter of violence in racial capitalism. Jay-Z’s summer 2009 hit, “Death of the Auto-Tune (D.O.A.)” marks a disgust and subsequent disavowal of auto-tune mass production through the reclamation of the live music event. 394 “D.O.A.” signifies a clever marketing strategy and Jay-Z’s power, as the most prominent rapper today, to define what constitutes legitimate hip hop music. Ironically, auto-tune user, Kanye West, conceived the song. 395 “D.O.A.” is full of nostalgia and caution for musicians and listeners by warding against a popular infatuation with dependent sound technologies to make music. Jay-Z’s rap is a recovering of authenticity through live vocal and instrumental music performance. Even though “D.O.A.” is a recording, it heralds the live music event as unparalleled. With live performance, the limits of the human body and voice are transparent—the mistakes, slippages, frailties, passion and desire of the performer are available for consumption. It is this humanness that draws in the 394 Jay-Z, "D.O.A. (Death of Auto-Tune)," The Blueprint 3, by Ernest Wilson, Garrett DeCarlo, Dale Frashuer, Paul Leka, Janko Nilovic, Dave Sucky Shawn Carter, Roc Nation, 2009. 395 Shaheem Reid, "Kanye West Promises Jay-Z's 'Anti-Auto-Tune' Blueprint 3 Will Be 'Amazing'," 26 May 2009, www.mtv.com, <http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1612158/20090526/jay_z.jhtml>. 245 listener to the live event through the ability to identify one’s own possibilities of failure in the spectacle of performance. With the music recording, production equipment can act as a blockade between the performer and listener. However, modern sound technologies can also mediate the relationship between producer and user in ways that are immediate, and therefore, particularly affective. The auto-tune performs a sociality that allows a new participatory feeling between musicians and listeners that cannot be refuted. Jay-Z can also recognize, through his own words, the work the auto-tune performs as articulated in his 2001 hit, “Song Cry”: “I can’t see it coming down my eyes so I gotta make this song cry.” 396 The auto-tune, as Afro-tune, articulates a deep democracy that has long been denied to Black peoples. It is a cry, moan or shout for an inclusion within the logic of the state. Simultaneously, the Afro-tune is a grunt, hum, or teeth sucking disavowal of a foreclosed modernity in sake of humanity more freely expressed in a material or imagined somewhere else. The alienating, dispossessing voice authors a radical imagination able to reshape what was and what can be. It reverberates with what Graham Locke calls the possibilities of a “visionary future stained with memories.” 397 Such voicing when taken up by Black producers mediates the confounding relationship between Black people and property. What is central is the work done by Black musicians to display vulnerability and error through the refinement of sound reproduction technologies. Black sound technologies strive to make this world a more livable place—where democratic notions of happiness 396 Jay-Z, "Song Cry," The Blueprint, by Douglas Gibbs, Randolph Johnson, Justin Smith Shawn Carter, prod. by Just Blaze, 2002. 397 Graham Locke, Blutopia: Visions of the Future and Revisions of the Past in the Work of SUN RA, DUKE ELLINGTON, and ANTHONY BRAXTON (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999): 8. 246 equally available to all take precedence while also striving for some other place, real or imagined. Such sound reproduction technologies employed by Black musicians perfect the sound of being both caught by historical processes of violent racial capitalism that continue to endure while also being captivating through cultural performance that captures and astounds listeners. 247 Coda: Slip of the Tongue: The Politics of “Ecomini” At precisely five o’clock p.m. each evening in Accra, bats begin to swarm the sky. It only happens in one section of the city, at the busy interchange called 37. 398 This major transit point connects to all parts of the Accra metropolitan area. The bats are such a normal part of city life that no one really seems to notice. But I am enthralled by what seems like thousands of black bats dangling from tree boughs while infinite others take to the sky, screaming and beating their wings towards some other place. It is eerie to see these nocturnal creatures in broad daylight…to think them apart from murky caves and blood-sucking vampires. I am frightened by how starkly gruesome they are in the light. The swirling wings of black flight make me wonder about fate. Perhaps the bats are signaling an impending doom through their screeching activity. Is it any coincidence that this is the place that the bats congregate? We are only yards away from the new presidential building, the Golden Jubilee House. This immaculate structure, partially made of gold, is shaped like an Egyptian pyramid. It represents one of the last projects former President J.A. Kufuor instituted before his term of office ended in January 2009. Even with severe public disfavor, Kufuor’s administration borrowed $50 million dollars from the government of India to erect the palace. The building now houses the seat of government, the president and his family and visiting international officials, diplomats and royalty. The former state building, Christianburg Castle, was 398 37 refers to 37 Military Hospital, a transportation depot where one can get a taxi or a tro-tro to points throughout the city and suburbs. 37 is a strategic transit point between the Airport, the suburbs of Tema, Adenta and Madina, the upper class neighborhoods of Cantonments and Labone, downtown and Osu, among others. 248 passed down from colonial authorities. The castle borders the Atlantic Ocean, once a market of pained flesh where the enslaved were kept in dank dungeons before being shipped out to sea. Hence, the state is also a black market, where the category of citizenship is made fragile and anxious through the legal and illegal transactions that took place inside these former holding cells, dungeon pits and torture chambers. Perhaps Kwame Nkrumah’s articulation of African interdependence was fortified through the reverberating echoes of Black loss in the castle where he lived and worked, as reclamation of a traumatic history through his own “return,” not as property but president. 399 The Golden Jubilee House sits back from the main road with heavy, ornate gating and 24-hour guards protecting the entrance. It is constructed in such a way to produce awe and wonder from passersby because of the grand and intricate architectural work and how unsuited the building is in its surroundings. Directly across the street from the palace is the police barracks where officers and their families are housed. In contrast, these structures are overcrowded and rundown. Large-scale banners advertising President Barack Obama’s visit to Ghana in July 2009 are still draped over the sides of the barracks, almost an entire year later. This is, perhaps, an attempt to hide the ugliness of such living conditions and the visible contradictions within state practices. The Obama banners are transposed over the unevenness of social life as a way to mediate tensions by imagining the state as egalitarian and just even as it is clearly not. Accra’s police officers are underpaid and overworked and must confront daily 399 I extend the exclusively African diasporic language of “return” to Ghanaians, to consider the multiple possibilities of return and psychic transformation even within locally situated contexts. 249 how their labor reinforces the sovereignty of the state through the marginalization of their lives. Unfortunately, Kufuor was not able to experience the Golden Jubilee House as president. On January 7, 2009, John Atta Mills, a member of the oppositional party of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) became the seventh president of the Republic of Ghana. Months before, Mills was embroiled in a cumbersome election process with the incumbent party’s candidate, the National Patriotic Party’s Nana Akuffo-Ado (NPP). Three rounds of voting occurred between December 7, 2008 and January 2, 2009 because both parties accused the other of vote tampering, political intimidation and physical assaults against voters. While western news media agencies like CNN, Sky News and MSNBC reported internationally that Ghana’s presidential elections were carried out fairly and peacefully, there was a much different story about the voting process on the ground. In fact, political tensions reached a fever pitch, with violence breaking out in several regions in northern Ghana. These party antagonisms amplified existing ethnic conflicts and threatened to turn Ghana’s reputation of a model African nation into severe chaos. During the first round of voting, the local news media called an early victory for Akuffo-Ado, which caused hundreds of protestors to gather in front of Christianburg Castle, to demand a recount, in a standoff with police officers. Many Ghanaians were unhappy with Kufuor’s presidency from 2001-2009, with specific complaints about inflation, higher taxes, unemployment and state corruption, believing the first election to be the incumbent party’s manipulation of the votes in their favor. John Atta Mills, a former tax law professor at the University of Ghana, Legon, was educated at the University of London and Stanford Law School. Mills 250 was vice president under Jerry Rawlings from 1997-2001. Afterward, he unsuccessfully for president, under the NDC party, in 2000 and 2004. Part of the reason Mills was seen as the rightful victor in the 2008 election was a political campaign emphasizing governmental transparency and accountability to the citizens of Ghana in viable job employment, lesser taxes, and increased national security from armed robberies. Kufuor’s administration has been duly criticized by the public for overspending, particularly with millions of dollars spent toward African American tourist recruitment for the 50 th Anniversary of Independence Celebration in March 2007. Mills successfully hinged his campaign on the heels of the Obama win and a promise to bring change to Ghana through a restoration of citizen faith and trust in the government. Mills marketed himself, particularly to poor and working class Ghanaians, in the context of Obama and articulated a position of democratic participation not experienced equally across class under Kufuor. Following Mills’ win, the excitement around the presidential election diminished considerably. Even as a lawyer and professor, Mills is often ridiculed in the public media and everyday conversations as being an incompetent speaker, and therefore, leader. During Mills’ “State of the Nation” speech and Swearing In Ceremony on Inauguration Day, he made a huge mistake. While being sworn in by her Ladyship the Chief Justice Theodora Georgina Wood, Mills exclaimed, “Our economy—ecomini—is resilient. Madame Speaker, when you are producing—uh pronouncing—such figures in billions, I want to remind you I didn’t even know how to translate them.” 400 As Mills mispronounced 400 See "Ecomini Ring Tones Affront to Presidency," 14 May 2009, www.myjoyonline.com, Joy FM, <http://news.myjoyonline.com/politics/200905/30048.asp>. 251 economy as “ecomini” and then producing instead of pronouncing, the crowd of witnesses began to react loudly in response. Because of Mills’ gaffes, he had to perform the ceremony again a few days later. However, the president suffered a stroke several years ago, which has resulted in the convolution of his words. This slip of the tongue is critical because “ecomini,” in the Akan language means, “here is hunger.” Following the ceremony, radio stations, television networks, Internet blogs and newspapers across Ghana, West Africa and the Ghanaian diaspora, ran wild with the story. The blunder was a part of an interpenetrating public discourse, particularly the everyday conversation of Ghanaians for months after. In fact, the slip was redoubled with Obama’s visit to Ghana in July 2009. While giving the purpose of the state visit, Mills mispronounced Obama as “Omama” and again this became fodder for mundane conversation. 401 Such slips question the authority of the state and its leaders and of institutional knowledge as professors are seen as critical figures of knowledge production in Ghana. On another level, speaking English fluently is viewed as a marker of intelligence and the mix-up of such signs by the nation’s leader is confounding yet amusing for citizens. The news of Pres. Mills’ slip-up spread like wildfire throughout the Ghanaian diaspora and West Africa, in a collective critique of state authority. What is even more fascinating is how this mispronunciation was appropriated by young Ghanaians, musicians and non-musicians, who began to remix, rework and re-articulate the slip-up with hip hop beats, Congolese soukous and folk 401 See The Norwegian Council for Africa, "Ghana: A Year of Presidential Humour (Opinion)," 14 January 2010, www.afrika.no, <http://www.afrika.no/Detailed/19212.html>. 252 music. The slip went immediately viral and there are a number of remixes available on YouTube and purchasable ringtones that have reproduced Mills’ slip of the tongue into various tracks. 402 Artists such as U.K. based Face-Fact and Ghana-based rappers Kwaw Kese and Asem have completed remixes of the slip in the fashion of U.S. hip hop artist, Lil’ Wayne’s, 2008 track “A Milli.” 403 This song spawned thousands of remixes internationally, including A.P.T.’s “Obama Obama,” after he won the presidential election. 404 Kwaw Kese’s “Ecomini,” released in late 2009, is a seething indictment of the intertwined political and religious systems in Ghana that partly determine life for the poor and working class through a coercion of money in church tithes and state extortion. 405 The beginning of the song states, “the government come and chop the money like that. Oh rob sef right now. Chale, the economy for worry you right now. Ok, so I for call the president.” The song refers to multiple scales of hunger: the greedy consumption of the poor by state and church officials, the physical hunger of the poor to find work and provide for their families, the drive by Ghanaian artists to distribute their music to a more global audience, to travel freely, to receive sustainable 402 See Ato Kwamina Dadzie, "Presidential Gaffes: Mills' 'Ecomini' Rington," 17 May 2009, www.modernghana.com, http://www.modernghana.com/news/216835/1/presidential-gaffes- mills-ecomini-ringtone.html; “Professor” John Evans Atta Mills (Ghana’s President)-Ecomini Remix, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iuV5z0sSoms; Atta Mills’ Our Ecomini Rmx, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KluTZDxsPXg. 403 Lil Wayne, "A Milli," Tha Carter III, by Jr. Dwayne Carter, Cash Money/Young Money/Universal, 2008. The song is in reference to the rapper publicly vowing that he could sell a million downloads of this song in one week, which he surpassed. 404 See A.P.T.’s “Obama Obama” A Milli Remix, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7RZTlzXHmo, November 2008. 405 See Kwaw Kese’s Ecomini (Feat. Prof. Atta Mills), http://beemp3.com/download.php?file=7309728&song=Ecomini+%28Feat.+Prof.+Atta+Mill, November 2009. 253 wages for their work and to have enforced copyright protection for their music. The song refers to how musicians possess limited mobility but long dreams that stretch outside of Ghana into other countries on the continent, the U.S. and Europe. It is also about the ability to create music that is free to express their lived experiences without censure, to obtain respect for their work within Ghana and internationally, and to receive the proper protection for their craft by working fairly with DJs, music producers, music union representatives, event promoters and other artists. However, as Internet blogger Solomon Sydelle remarks of the Mills’ slip: “the presence of such songs and a robust political discourse are good signs of freedom of speech - a key indicator of democracy. In neighboring Nigeria, such would possibly have been met with either arrests (as has been the case for political bloggers and journalists), detention, interrogation or accusations of treason.” 406 The hunger of local artists—to perform for wider audiences, to be paid commensurate with their creative work, to be able to travel and tour freely—is apparent with the recent visit of Jamaican artist Sizzla to Ghana. Sizzla performed for the Independence Weekend celebration on the weekend of March 6, 2010. A growing collective of Jamaican Rastafarians who have been moving to Ghana over the past decade sponsored the world-renowned roots reggae musician. Sizzla was paid $100,000 for two concerts, one was free and open to the public while the ticket prices for the other ranged between 30-50 cedis. The ticketed concert was not well attended because it was not publicized properly. 406 See Solomon Sydelle, "President 'Ecomini' of Ghana," Nigerian Curiosity, <http://www.nigeriancuriosity.com/2010/02/president-ecomini-of-ghana.html>. Sydelle is Nigerian American, which shows how the president’s blunder was a part of local, regional and international discourse. Mills has not publicly responded to the reception of his public slips, however, one of his main campaign objectives was to ensure the freedom of speech in the country. 254 The free concert took place on LaBadi Beach during the Independence holiday, which always draws record crowds. What is disconcerting is that a roster of more than ten Ghanaian artists, ranging from reggae to R&B to hiplife, performed as opening acts for Sizzla, and none were paid. Concert promoters emphasized that these artists, as opening acts, would gain exposure from a large, live audience. However, this was not the case since most people, of course, chose to attend the free concert where there were no opening acts. For Ghanaian artists, making a profitable wage from their music is the main conundrum. This is difficult, unless one is a well-known artist. Sizzla, as a Rastafarian, during the ticketed concert called for fellow Rastafarians to be the political nucleus in Ghana and to use their ideology of pan-African spirituality as a way to unite citizens around common objectives of personal, communal and national building. What is the way forward for contemporary artists? Certainly, a more detailed examination of Rastafarian communities, artists, sympathizers (“Rasta in the heart”) and ideologies must be taken into consideration to understand how these practices link up or diverge from Kwame Nkrumah’s movement. Akuma Village, a commune in downtown Accra adjacent to the Arts Centre tourist market, can be more fully considered in its interactions with tourists, particularly with white tourists to Ghana in search of cultural lessons in dance and drumming. Rastafarian communities are also quite diverse with white, African American, Caribbean and Ghanaian participants who live on the rural outskirts or within the city. Rastafarians sponsor regular events celebrating Marcus Garvey, Bob Marley and Malcolm X’s birthdays, African Unity Day, Emancipation Day and they often participate in Panafest and other heritage ceremonies. They maintain an autonomous presence but there are several vegan 255 restaurants, personalities like radio broadcaster Black Rasta and popular musicians like Black Prophet and Ras Bomba who maintain large local audiences by mixing Ghanaian pidgin with Jamaican patois. Also, Rita Marley has made a home in the hills of Aburi, about forty-five minutes outside of Accra, where she is Queen Mother of development of Konkonuru village and has constructed a primary school and medical clinic for the residents. Marley also owns a recording studio, with much of the Wailers’ original sound equipment, which she makes available for affordable use to local artists. As this dissertation argues, intra-racial collaboration among dispersed peoples of African descent can be an unwieldy yet thrilling endeavor. The exchanges between Ghanaian musicians and African American tourists to Ghana are filled with multiple perspectives on history, racial memory, social accountability and cultural knowledge. At times, these associations do not meet individual or collective expectations. One must deal with the material and psychic disappointments of post-conialism and desgregation and how notions of racial solidarity are not static concepts but enlivened through the particular experiences, hopes, longings and limits of complicated subjects. I am reminded again of those black bats swarming the sky. I think of how bats, in western popular myths, are read as horrific and ghastly creatures that terrorize and intimidate human life. 407 Bats are frightening visibilities of that which we cannot see—the red eyes, hairy bodies, fangs, claws and contorted countenances—are the manifestation of social anxiety against a plethora of internal and external 407 Depending on cultural perception, bats can mean different things such as death, disease or trauma (western hemispheric discourse), the soul, wisdom and happiness (Amerindians) or the visible presence of the metaphysical realm that provides messages of caution and warning to humans (Ghana). 256 forces that might mean us harm. Our affective responses to bats are grounded in the uneven meshing of the terrible and terrific processes of everyday life, in daily negotiations between life and death. A fear of bats is a publicly legitimized response to terror, unlike continuing discourses on slavery and reparations, colonialism and racism, dispossession and displacement. However, local responses to bats in Ghana are quite different—this eccentricity, of nocturnal mammals active during the day, has been absorbed into everyday life. The normalization of the strange in the mundane also vibrates through racial and historical memory and how dispersed Black peoples differently conceive slavery, colonization, international debt and poverty in their lives. Perhaps, the fusion-fission structure of bats can offer something to discourse on human social behavior, and more specifically, racial kinship. Here, “The term fusion refers to a large numbers of bats that congregate together in one roosting area and fission refers to breaking up and the mixing of subgroups where where individual bats switching roosts with others and often ending up in different trees and with different roostmates.” 408 Through rigorous interdependence, bats are able to manifest their daily needs. This is also done through persistent travel from one place to another and developing kinship with different sets of bats within roosting communities as “flight affords individuals distributed over large geographic areas the ability to interact.” 409 Through the exchanges in music between Ghanaians and African Americans, it is important to consider multiple, overlapping and contradictory 408 Matina C. Kalcounis-Ruepell, Craig K.R. Willis, Kristen A. Kolar and R. Mark Brigham Jackie D. 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Asset Metadata

Creator Neely, Sionne Rameah (author)

Core Title Sensing the sonic and mnemonic: digging through grooves, Afro-feelings and Black markets in Ghana, 1966-present

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program American Studies and Ethnicity

Degree Conferral Date 2010-08

Publication Date 08/09/2010

Defense Date 05/07/2010

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag 20th century African history,African American studies,African diasporic studies,African music,African studies,black popular culture,ethnomusicology,hip hop studies,myth,nationalism,OAI-PMH Harvest

Place Name Ghana (countries), USA (countries)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Marez, Curtis (committee chair), Frazier, Taj Robeson (committee member), Gilmore, Ruth Wilson (committee member), Kondo, Dorinne (committee member), Moten, Fred (committee member)

Creator Email sionnene@gmail.com,sionnene@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m3317

Unique identifier UC1428016

Identifier etd-Neely-3820 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-374698 (legacy record id),usctheses-m3317 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Neely-3820.pdf

Dmrecord 374698

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Neely, Sionne Rameah

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Repository Name Libraries, University of Southern California

Repository Location Los Angeles, California

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu