EUROPE AND AFRICA AND THE MUSIC BETWEEN*

Elnathan John
Jul 20, 2017 · 7 min read

The Berlin train announcements have become music to my ears. At first they were just sounds indeterminate, impersonal. But with each day I learn German, they become familiar, almost convivial. Sometimes, I mutter to myself when the doors are about to close, creating a two-man chorus in my ears — Zurückbleiben bitte. Today I am off to the library — the only place for now that inspires me to write in this country where I am still a stranger.

Less and less I have labored against the categorization “African writer”, especially while I spend more time in Europe where often, the internal borders of my Berlin-partitioned continent blur and disappear into a monolith. I have learnt, for my own peace of mind not to rail against every question or comment that forces citizenship of this country Africa on me: What African language do you speak? I love this African outfit you are wearing: what is it called? Do you miss your African food? The weather is very different from Africa no?

I began to notice a pattern in Berlin, where Europeans I visited would almost always play music by Bob Marley or Fela Kuti in the background. Or something I had never heard from Mali or Senegal. I tried not to get offended; I extenuated their actions in my head: I am a guest in this country, they want me to feel welcome or They are trying to bond with me, to show they are truly interested in me and my culture. And as I learnt to pick my cultural battles, I stopped thinking about it altogether.

I find that especially when I am in Europe, small talk can be awkward for me. I love the sometimes impressed widening of the eyes when someone asks me, what music do you like and I say, Stromae, never forgetting to add: the Belgian musician. I observe the rationalization that sometimes follows: oh, I see why, he is half African, half Rwandan — rationalization, not enunciated, but embedded in the non-lexical responses, the hmmms and ahas. I have learnt to leave it at that and not say that I do not think of him as African but as European, or to throw in the facts: Stromae barely knew his Rwandan father who died in the genocide in 1994, he was raised by his Flemish mother and his music is made in Belgium. Sometimes for fun, I add that I love The Script and Kings of Leon and Radiohead. It dissolves all the lurking remnants of the thought that somehow, an African visiting Europe comes embedded with nostalgia of drums and an addiction to call-and-response music.

Back home in Nigeria, I find I do not need to apologize for loving European artists among my educated peers. It is not uncommon for people to bond over knowledge of the newest music from abroad which, with the internet and cable television, isn’t so far away anymore: one can receive Emeli Sande’s lastest album at exactly the same time as someone from Ms Sande’s hometown of Alford in Scotland. In the circles of the “cultured” elite, it is probably less shameful to be unfamiliar with Fela Sowande than to be unfamiliar with Phillip Glass or Bach or Mozart.

I remember once at a residency in Italy, the frustration at listening to mostly American and European artists speak of contemporary musicians and composers and not knowing more than half of the people (mostly European and American) they were referring to. For a second, I faulted my education, my circles and my exposure. Then the rebel in me wanted to break up the conversation by mentioning Nigerian and Malian musicians and speaking of them as the norm; not asking: Do you know Banzumana Sissoko or King Sunny Ade — just lunging into conversation about them and contorting my face when someone says they do not know them. My eyes would say, like their eyes when I didn’t know the musicians they considered global standard bearers: Why do you not know Femi Kuti’s music (no, the son, not the father, Fela Kuti)- he was nominated four times at the Grammy Awards!

***

I am not one of those who inherited their love of music from parents or family members who collected records or sang or went to concerts. Growing up I remember only an old radio with a cassette player which very quickly became an unused item no one had the courage to discard of. I do not recall my parents owning a single music record or tape. You could call me a late bloomer in this regard, as I only began discovering music after I left home for university. I discovered music among my peers and a lot of it was foreign. My friend and fellow law student Kaahassa and I would exchange mostly rock songs, and I lived for 3 Doors Down, Coldplay, Radiohead, Goo Goo Dolls and Kings of Leon. It was fine to dance to Nigerian pop songs but even better to brag about songs that mostly happened to be from Europe and America. If you had asked me then, I’d have sworn that I did not consider European or American music to be better and I might have come up with some pretentious line about the freedom to enjoy music without the constraints of geography.

My first contact with Europe was probably in my mother’s womb as I kicked to the sounds of her speaking English with my father. As my parents’ only engagement with music was limited to the religious hymns with orchestral accompaniments they sang weekly, my eyes became familiar with musical notes from the song book they sang from. My early education, solely in English, and subsequently my time in law school studying the civil law handed down to Nigeria by Great Britain did not do much to teach Nigerian culture. It reinforced British ideals of right and wrong. I knew latin maxims more than Nigerian proverbs, learnt Nigerian law which is mostly based on British principles of justice and privately read about Greek philosophers. Early in school, there were penalties for speaking “vernacular” and the only acceptable situation for speaking Nigerian languages in class was when it was a formal subject — I always took Hausa of the three languages (Hausa, Igbo, Yoruba) available to choose from. There were no points for knowing the lyrics to the popular Nigerian Ebenezar Obey’s Juju songs or knowing of the bold, unapologetic Hausa griot Hajiya Sa’adatu Barmani Choge and her band of percussionists. You buried this knowledge deep within you if you had it and dug it out only when there were others who did not consider taking this kind of music seriously, corrosive to their education and status.

It is hard to speak of European influence without speaking of colonialism which acted in ways that supplanted the coexistence of a multiplicity of cultures and replaced it with a hierarchy or cultures as observed and judged through a Eurocentric prism and of course, placing European culture at the very top. Christianity for example was not just introduced — it dislodged what was considered pagan and gave primacy to one system of belief as not just being the superior way of seeing the world, but the only acceptable way of seeing the world. European languages had no healthy relationship with African languages and the creation of nations for the administrative convenience of colonialists saw states that had formed organically being broken into new incongruous contraptions with new imposed languages — English, French and Portuguese. In the case of Nigeria, the Hausa emirates, the Yoruba-speaking kingdoms, the Benin kingdom, the republican Igbo states and hundreds of other ethnic nationalities had to adopt a single language — English — in public life. And so, ultimately people became judged not on their proficiency of Hausa or Edo or Nupe or Igbo but on how closely they could mimic the British (or more recently the Americans).

I see a replication in the scale of values that colonialism left us — where European was best and a mimicry of European values was better than anything authentically African — in the ongoing conversations about Europe’s relationship with African migrants for example. Just like African culture on the global stage is either disregarded or spoken of in hallowed tones and then appropriated, Africans exercising their right to travel around the world are either undesirable or highly skilled exceptions that have proven their financial or intellectual value to the countries the wish to go to. You are either an exotic exception or a pest that must be contained within the borders of the region that produced you. And however exotic I am or highly skilled, I can never aspire to be called an expatriate in Europe.

I still believe that it is possible to evolve to a point where European (and American) culture is not the standard by which other cultures are judged, an evolution to a healthy respect, beyond exoticism. I believe that it is right to aspire to a normalization of music and culture from Africa so that musicians and artists can exist with dignity and complexity, not just under slivers of recognition, like “World Music”; a normalization that takes for granted that cultures are equal but different; a normalization that attempts to challenge and hopefully displace the norms left behind by colonialism — norms that create hierarchies and fetishes. I want to think of Barmani Choge the same way I think of the Irish writer Edna O’Brien — artists who challenged the gender stereotypes of their day, albeit with different language, but whose works were equally thought provoking.

For a while, I have challenged myself to learn more about Hausa music and catch up on all the music a lot of my educated peers considered beneath them and consciously coming to a place where I can honestly consider the music of the Hausa singer Mamman Shata as iconic as any of his European contemporaries. Today more than most days, I like to think that I am reaching some healthy space, where I can enjoy some Dan Maraya Jos on Youtube in the morning, then in the afternoon, while fighting writers bloc, walk out of the library to enjoy some air with Beethoven’s Symphony No 9 in my ear and in the evening walk to the train station shaking my head and giggling at old Barmani Choge singing Wakar Duwaiwai “A song about Buttocks”.

*first published in German in 128 Das Magazin der Berliner Philharmoniker No 1 2017.

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Elnathan John

Written by

Satirist ◾Recovering lawyer ◾Author, Born On a Tuesday ◾Not on any top-something list ◾ In an abusive relationship with Nigeria ◾Ungovernable

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