ABSTRACT
Popular musicians in Africa do not just entertain their listeners. They also provide ‘news’ through music (Mano 2007). African musicians inform and mobilize citizens on topical issues, including health, economic and political hot topics that are usually neglected or insufficiently covered in many fledgling democracies in modern Africa. The launch of ‘8 Goals for Africa’ on 8 June 2010, three days before the start of the World Cup tournament in South Africa, for example, show how the continent’s musicians help raise awareness in the fight against hunger and poverty in Africa. The song, copyrighted to the United Nations, was meant to popularize the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and was distributed free of charge and made available for download at www.8goalsforafrica.org. African musicians’ journalistic role, as will also be shown by the discussion below on the life and work of Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, the late popular Nigerian musician (Olaniyan 2004), is especially noticeable in times of crises, and where the political space is narrowing. Popular music’s meanings benefit from the fact that much of Africa has cultures with strong pre-capitalist peasant ‘residues’ that still have a strong belief in the word (orality), which they rightly associate with the power to change reality (Gecau 1995; Vambe 2001). Musical texts authored in upheavals and crises are invested with meanings that offer an important avenue to mediate key political topics that their public yearn for but cannot find in the mainstream media. The existence of this newsthrough-music element is crucial, because across Africa some mainstream journalists have suffered intimidation, arrest and have even been killed by undemocratic forces. The poor working conditions make African journalists vulnerable and less expressive. The journalist wanting to keep his job survives by self-censorship, which is unhealthy for most of the continent’s young democracies. Politically sensitive topics are left out and people’s democratic choices, and public dialogue in general, become narrow and unconstructive. At such times, musicians sometimes fill in this void by subtly communicating matters of the day, providing information and news that helps keep alive the hopes of African citizens. Music
with political characteristics can produce messages that foreground matters of the day in ways similar to journalism. The popularity of this music among African publics is unsurprising because it is authored within a context shared by musician and listener. Apart from entertainment, musicians on the continent have been able to effectively articulate political and non-political matters in ways that reflect and affect the concerns, fears, losses and aspirations of many Africans. Both in colonial and postcolonial Africa, there are plenty of examples of musicians who have been vocal on everyday issues. This chapter reviews issues and contexts where African popular musicians have managed to take to the streets social justice issues relevant to democracy and development.
