Kazet from Timbuktu
- By Jim Carroll
The Presence and Absence of Music in Mali Today
In a recent NPR interview with Angelique Kidjo, journalist Michel Martin prompted a discussion of Kidjo’s political concerns and advocacy. Martin asked whether the girls served by the Malian branch of Kidjo’s Batonga Foundation—an organization dedicated to realizing universal access to secondary education for girls in West Africa—have been affected by the recent struggles between secular government forces and a forceful Tuareg nationalist insurgency (Kidjo and Martin 2013). After Timbuktu was captured by Tuareg rebels in April 2012, a rapid and strict enforcement of Islamic sharia law banned music, outlawed education for girls, and, more recently, caused some to set fire to a library housing an old and irreplaceable collection of documents which do much to trace the development of Arabic and West African languages, science, history, medicine, theology… a vast range of literature which greatly illuminates the intellectual heritage of West Africa, North Africa, Europe, and beyond (Larsen and Faul 2013).
But quickly the interview steers toward a discussion of the broader social significance of music in Africa. Kidjo states that, given her experience of the 1972 coup in Benin during which the government of Lt. Gen. Mathieu Kérékou banned the performance and broadcasting of music, she fears for the status of music and musicians in Mali. When Martin asks about the significance of Malian musical artists such as Ali Farka Touré, Salif Keita, and Toumani Diabaté to the maintenance of Malian society and culture, Kidjo responds that music, in general, helps to provide a sense of solidarity, historical continuity, and cultural unity which are important to any society but which are also threatening to any group who seeks to gain or maintain political and cultural control.
When they shut the music down, they bring darkness. I don’t see any society that can live without music. Music is part of our history in Africa. We have griots in Mali. They are the ones that keep on telling us the story of our ancestors till today, and how we as musicians, we are imparting this music for the next generation. If they [the Tuareg rebels] succeed, the next generation won’t have no knowledge about Ali Farka Touré, about Salif Keita, about any other music in the world.
While from a Euro-American perspective this may seem like the least of people’s worries—why should we be concerned about people’s loss of “entertainment” when Mali is in the midst of a fight for political and economic control?—Kidjo is, in fact, expressing a very common and sophisticated attitude toward music found throughout the African continent: music acts as a means of spreading the news and inscribing history. Where Kidjo makes reference to the griots of West Africa who, in many societies, act as community genealogists and historians, recording and disseminating history in and through songs, societies throughout the fabulously heterogeneous African continent often hold similar attitudes toward the relationship between music and history despite their vast heterogeneity.
In the song “Kazet” (2006), originally recorded and released in 1987 by the South African group Mahlathini and the Mahotella Queens, the singers make a simple statement about African music’s function as a conduit for the communal sharing of stories, identifying the rhythm itself rather than the lyrics as the vector for these stories: “This is our kind of rhythm in Africa / We send our messages through music / This is our tradition in Africa.” With the word kazet simultaneously meaning gazette (printed word) and cassette (aural transmission), the song itself acts as a gazette/cassette, passing a message from place to place as an aural and material equivalent of Walter Benjamin’s traveling storyteller who spreads the news (Benjamin 1968: 83-109). The deceptively simple nature of the music’s status as “popular music” rather than some other revered form often guarantees that the music is spread widely, borne along by its infectious popularity. But the music’s popularity can also clear some space for the subversiveness of its messages. During the Rhodesian Civil War in the 1970s Thomas Mapfumo’s popular chimurenga music, sung in Shona, was broadcast throughout the country despite the Rhodesian government’s concerns that his lyrics might provide a sense of solidarity to rebel forces. Mapfumo’s music, though thoroughly modern, has always been rooted in an older proverbial Shona lyrical style, couching its politics in such ambiguous language that the Rhodesian government briefly jailed Mapfumo but then released him, not quite sure if he was more dangerous to their cause when he was inside or outside of prison (Turino 2000: 288-89).
In the interview with Kidjo, Martin asks if she ever desires to compose and perform music only for the entertainment value, leaving the politics aside. Kidjo responds that, of course we need the replenishing energy of music or art or literature, but the political content of the music, be it overt or subtle, also provides its own source of replenishment—the type of replenishment that brings communities the news and threatens the Kérékous and Taliban and Tuareg nationalists of the world.
Look at the Taliban in Afghanistan and in different places, they just take every piece of art out. And look what they did in Timbuktu. I mean, why? Because it represents something that is universal: that everybody can come around and try to trace back your roots out of that because in every piece in every place there’s a little bit of us. Because we all come from Africa. That’s what music said, and that’s what I sing too sometime.
The music, then, is the kazet, one of the more dangerous, subversive, and beautiful means of spreading the news and inscribing the history. And singing the kazet is replenishment enough.
Works Cited
Benjamin, Walter. 1968. Illuminations. Translated by H. Arendt. New York: Schocken Books.
Kidjo, Angelique and Michel Martin. 2013. For Kidjo, Musicians Must Be the Country’s Voice. Accessed February 13, 2013.
Larsen, Krista and Michelle Faul. 2013. Timbuktu, Islam's Ancient Seat Of Learning, Loses Priceless Manuscripts. Accessed February 13, 2013.
Mahlathini and the Mahotella Queens. 2006. The best of Mahlathini and the Mahotella Queens. Johannesburg, SA: Gallo Records 0120834322. CD.
Turino, Thomas. 2000. Nationalists, Cosmopolitans, and Popular Music in Zimbabwe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
