ABSTRACT
As complex messages based on specific cultural codes, the varieties of African music known to us today may be designated as text. A text (from Latin texere meaning “to weave” and textum meaning “a web, texture”1) is something woven by performer-composers who conceive and produce the music-dance, by listener-viewers who consume it, and by critics who consti tute it as text for the purposes of analysis and interpretation. “Text” as used here goes beyond the words of a song or the written trace of a composition. Performances of any sort can be conceived as texts: concert party entertain ment, traditional drumming, or the pouring of libation. Festivals, rituals, outdooring ceremonies, the acts of medicine peddlers in public buses and at street corners, magical displays, and all-night crusades mounted by famous evangelists-these and many more count as text. Texts are thus primary data, basic resources, objects of analysis. Texts are not given but made; the conferral of textual status is a critical act. “Where there is no text,” writes Mikhail Bakhtin, “there is neither object of inquiry nor thought.”2
