Representing Bamako

Map of Bamako's Metropolitan Area. Map design by Philip Schwartzberg.
Map of Bamako's Metropolitan Area. Map design by Philip Schwartzberg
Chapter 1: Representing Bamako introduces the reader to the city of Bamako, emphasizing popular expressions of urban culture that portray, inscribe, and resound the moral and ethical production of space. Through theoretical, sonic, textual, and ethnographic analysis this chapter explores how Bamako residents experience and express the civility and wildness of everyday life in an African city.
KEY TERMS
  • Afropolitan ethics: diverse existential projects pursued amidst everyday encounters with civility and wildness in the modern-day Afropolis
  • badenya: a term in Mande social thought (Bamana, “mother-child-ness”) that refers to a sense of domestic conviviality and, more broadly, communal solidarity
  • civil space: a sphere of sociocultural coherence and unity, associated with tradition, conviviality, stability, and security
  • ethico-moral personhood (in Mande social thought, “mɔgɔya”): the dynamic-yet-coherent fashioning of one’s self in society, rooted in patrimony and domestic intimacy and routed through individual interest and agency
  • maloya: a term in Mande social thought meaning “shame;” the psychosocial response to unethical or immoral behavior (real or imagined), understood as an existential threat to personhood (mɔgɔya)
  • wild space: a domain of alienation, exclusion, and danger that, in the postcolonial Afropolis, indexes socioeconomic precarity and anomie

WHO'S WHO
  • Aberrahmane Sissako: Malian/Mauretanian filmmaker who directed the film Bamako
  • Adama “Djo Dama” Diarra: member of the hip-hop group Tata Pound, who collaborated with Need One on the music video for “Sabali”
  • Henri Lefebvre: twentieth century French urban geographer and Marxian critical theorist whose work provides a rich lexicon of socio-spatial analysis
  • Issa “Isolmo” Cissoko: rapper, hair stylist, and member of hip-hop group Need One
  • Lassy “Basta Killa” Keita: rapper and member of the hip-hop group Need One

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
  1. This chapter describes a broad existential disjuncture between sentiments of “civility” and experiences of “wildness” in contemporary Bamako. To what extent is the socio-spatial tension between civil and wild space generalizable? Are other cities comparable to Bamako in this regard? 
  2. How does public culture (such as music videos, murals and graffiti, and the sounds of everyday life) express and produce morality in Bamako? How is such morality enforced and contested? Again, how does this compare with public culture and morality in other places?
  3. How does this chapter employ social thought and theory to elucidate the lived, conceived, and perceived spaces of urban life in Bamako? What is the relationship between theoretical and ethnographic analysis? 

FURTHER READING & DISCUSSION

 
Web design: Madeleine Fix and Ryan Skinner 2015