Condensed SOAS Essay

Discuss the emergence of new forms of popular music in 20th-century Africa.

A two-way exchange was fostered in the 20^th Century: the advent of increasingly modern recording technology introduced new influences into African music; Western artists took lead from the rhythms of Afrobeat and sun-kissed sounds of Highlife.

African musicians trained in the West - honing their craft alongside jazz musicians, returning to create something radical and distinctly theirs. Some would use this as a playful sonic template whilst others would use music as a weapon: it is impossible to ignore how Fela Kuti’s instrumentals were platforms to lament post-colonial Nigeria.

Ever the provovateur, Fela prioritised traditionally African styles and modes - his rebellious spirit transcended his music. Afrobeat was a genre born of resistance. It only takes a brief scan of the spare, caustic lyrics and the simultaneously aloof and sharply critical rhetoric of Fela Kuti on record and in conversation, respectively. Fela's own spin is that it was born of jazz through Ghanaian highlife. The influence of jazz remained throughout, however, his ever-increasing embrace of pan-African struggle was clear as day.  

South Africa was home to a particularly burgeoning jazz scene. The segregation of the 20s and ‘30s were the seeds of this. Everywhere – churches to illicit beer houses (shebeens) – that black people were separately forced to, helped conceive South African jazz. Shebeens were illegally established by clandestine female brewers; in the interwar years, these were the hotspots for the shape of South African jazz to come. Marabi culture, with its spotlight on youth and modernity, shaped the identity of South African jazz.

Towards the 1980s, SA jazz was harnessed as a tool against apartheid. The scene was bleak; gang warfare versus the military. No longer such an illicit culture, jazz bands took to wooden stages, making their voices for change heard. Emerging from the underground, jazz became just one tool with which musicians attempted to communicate. The 1980s gave rise to a braver, more confrontational breed of jazz.

Other musicians were less political. Mulatu Astatke, the father of Ethio-jazz, married Ethiopian rhythm and tonality to create a sub-genre that is both recognisably jazz and distinctly Ethiopian. His more inclusive instrumental palettes reflected his time at Trinity, splicing wah-wah guitars, electric keyboards, vibraphones, congas, and bongos. His love of native church music created almost an African response to the spiritual jazz of John and Alice Coltrane, and Pharaoh Sanders.

The sounds of the Caribbean and Latin America became accessible through records, television, and radio, starting a trend later supported by a money economy and urban centres. Young new wave, ska, and post-punk artists in the West in the ‘70s and ‘80s that took note of African sounds. Reciprocally, African musicians incorporated emerging programmed and synthesizer-based sounds.

Francis Bebey was a writer - poet, novelist, and journalist; a staunch believer in ‘Negritude’; a musician who loved synthesizers, programming, and pop melodies. Dejected by studies in Paris, his yes were opened to a global prejudice against African music. Under the shiny pop of 'The Coffee Cola Song', Bebey lamented social division; synthpop-inspired, yet distinctly African. Highlighting the social stigma against traditional values, the Cameroonian artist cemented himself in a nationwide mission: African empowerment and betterment; to highlight injustice and inequality through song.