Afropolitan Patriotism

Malibya Sign, Ségou. Photography by Kerssen.
Malibya Sign, Ségou. Photograph by Tanya Kerssen, Food First/Institute for Food and Development Policy
Chapter 6: Afropolitan Patriotism considers what it means to make “Malian” music in times of national celebration and crisis. Charting a history of the recent past, the chapter begins with Mali’s celebration of fifty years of independence from colonial rule in 2010 and ends with the State of Emergency in 2013, a time of intense internecine conflict in the country. Through a variety of musical artifacts, artist testimonies, media reports, and scholarly commentary, the chapter explores the ambivalence of national affiliation in Mali today, a fraught and contested category that nonetheless continues to shape postcolonial futures in Africa.
KEY TERMS
  • Afropolitan patriotism: the idea that a moral concern for the postcolonial nation-state remains salient to the imagination and practice of African being in the world today
  • Azawad: the name given to a region of northern Mali that some recognize as the ethnic homeland of the Tuareg people; briefly the site of an unrecognized independent state during Mali’s recent internecine conflict (2012-13).
  • biopolitics: Michel Foucault’s term for the disjuncture (or “caesura”) between social life and political death, between legitimate and aberrant social positions in modern states
  • Cinquantenaire: term in francophone Africa for the celebration of 50 years of independence from colonial rule
  • necropolitics: Achille Mbembe’s term to describe the intensified precarity and expendability of subaltern lives, in which distance from social, political, and economic life results in greater susceptibility to death
  • Maliba: the idea of “Great Mali,” encompassing the historical memory of the Mali Empire that spread across western African (13th-16th centuries), as well as the contemporary experience of transnational affiliation and diaspora among Malians at home and abroad

WHO'S WHO
  • Amadou Toumani Touré (ATT): President of the Republic of Mali from 2002 to 2012; he was overthrown by a coup d’état on 22 March 2012
  • Fatoumata Diawara: actress and world music star whose track “Mali Ko” (“Mali Trouble”) was released online shortly after Mali declared a state of emergency that restricted public gatherings
  • Iba One: rapper whose 2010 video “Cinquantenaire du Mali” features kora player and beat maker Sidiki Diabaté (son of Toumani Diabaté)
  • Madina Ndiaye: Mali’s first professional female kora player and outspoken critic of governmental restrictions on public culture during the 2013 State of Emergency
  • Master Soumy: rapper and member of the Bamako-based hip-hop collective Les Sofas de la République (“The Soldiers of the Republic”)
  • Mokobé Traoré: French hip-hop artist with Malian roots who provided the diasporic soundtrack to Mali’s Cinquantenaire with his track “Mali Debout”
  • Tiken Jah Fakoly: Bamako based, Ivorian reggae star with cultural roots in the Mande heartland whose vocal criticism of the ethnic nationalist and xenophobic politics in his home country (Côte d’Ivoire) forced him into exile in the early 2000s 

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
  1. Throughout the modern world, and most recently in the postcolonial world, music has played an important role in what Benedict Anderson famously called, “imagining the nation.” How does Mali’s recent history reveal the ambivalence of such resonant nationalism?
  2. Beginning in June 2012, international attention was drawn to the apparent “death of Malian music” at the hands of Islamist militants who occupied significant swathes of northern Mali. Beginning in January 2013, the embattled Malian state in the south declared a “state of emergency” that significantly limited expressions of public culture, and music in particular. For many Malian artists, these events were comparably repressive of their lives and work. How might one understand such a perspective?
  3. During the 2012-13 crisis in Mali, many international organizations (such as Oxfam International) called for increased foreign aid to this worn-torn West African nation, drawing attention to Mali’s rich but susceptible cultural heritage. What ethical issues arise from such calls for international intervention in postcolonial states? 

FURTHER READING & DISCUSSION
Web design: Madeleine Fix and Ryan Skinner 2015