Until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter. - Igbo Proverb that I first heard from Chinua Achebe.
A couple of weeks ago, I placed a
phone call to a famous African dance choreographer. Before fully introducing my
intentions, I was cut short by a confrontational monologue onset by my use of
the term “anthropology”. In his opinion, anthropologists often misunderstand
African dance, and consistently insist on categorizing it “ethno-“ or “folk”.
These terms, according to him, could by extension presuppose a euro-centric or
at least condescending gaze towards African culture. Moreover, it contributed
to the reinforcing of a “black skin complex” in Africans developed through
centuries of slavery, forced labor, colonization and messages encoded in
popular culture. This resulted in occidental gaze framed by a superiority
complex and centuries of asymmetrical power relations between African and the
West. As such, descriptions of African societal elements made by
anthropologists and other researchers often failed to accurately depict the
cultures they aimed to study. Despite my interlocutor’s initial abrasiveness, I
found his points to be quite pertinent. His eloquence in French further kindled
my curiosity. What encounters did this person have with anthropology to leave
him with such a negative view of the discipline? How was the concept of this
“black skin complex” linked to the theory of African dance? While these
questions were not initially related to my original topic of study, they
intrigued me nonetheless and compelled me to arrange to meet with him.
During the genesis stages of this
Renaissance project, my faculty advisor informed me that any properly designed
research project needed at least one or a few clearly defined research
questions. It hence became necessary for me to identify a gap knowledge that
needed filling. While this may seem basic to seasoned researchers, it is
important to remember that through the lens of an undergraduate student whose
major was engineering, this was a novel and quite difficult challenge. As a
result, I struggled with the formulation of my questions and they kept growing
and evolving as my own research progressed. I eventually settled on the
relationship between the factors that influenced the emergence of certain dance
styles in Ivory Coast between 2002 and 2010 (the official period recognized as
the “Ivorian crisis”). How did the dances embody some of the social and
political tensions that were palpable in Cote D’Ivoire at the time? Yet from my
literature review, I noticed that a vast majority of the research undertaken on
the subject analyzed Coupe Decale from a point of entry
that never seemed to address the “dance” dimension of the music. Yet, it has
often been recognized by others that in African modes of expression, music and
dance were intrinsically linked. Sylvia Glasser for example argues that
an inextricable link exists between dance and music in African cultural forms
of expression. The music is part of the
dance and vice versa. (Glasser, 1991). This nexus is so
intimate that often the two cannot be dissociated. How then, in addition to all
the limitations faced in the acquisition of empirical data, could Coupe Decale
deserve a complete analysis if such a core aspect of this music was omitted?
I
aim to argue that in order to completely understand this style, one needs to
consider it from a holistic music/dance approach viewed as a single continuum.
Just like Albert Einstein demonstrated that space and time were indivisibly
wrapped together in a single fabric, I am convinced that unless Coupe Decale is
analyzed by also including some of its corporeal dimensions, only a partial
picture can be painted. It is important to clarify that this picture is by no
means useless. It effectively provides answers to various questions related to
the social and economical depictions of power and social mobility expressed by
some of its actors. These answers certainly nourished my inquiries and laid the foundations for my own research. Einstein’s theory of
general relativity did not make Newtonian physics obsolete, au contraire it enriched these theories
and demonstrated that depending on the scale, both approaches could hold. It is
simply a matter of perspective.
However, both Newton and Einstein had at their disposal a kit of mathematical
tools developed over millennia of human inquiry and research in physics. In my
own case, I do not have this advantage. The study of dance in general, and
African dance in particular, is so recent and at times so subjective that it
may be impossible to favor one theoretical framework over another. My
interlocutor agreed with me. In addition, he believed that the tools currently developed
based on anthropological and ethno-musicological (a term he particularly despised)
had a certain bias and inappropriately captured various dimensions of African
music. In his opinion African music, and by essence African culture, could only
be truly be explicated if the account was told by African people. His answer to
the problem was to develop a method that attempted to codify African dance that he theorized
in his book the “Alphabet of African Dance”. He qualifies his approach as simply an avenue of research, and not a preemptory
response to the problem (Tierou, 2015). In this book, he asks among other things “Where are the works on traditional African dance produced by Africans?
Where are the analyses, the writings, the publications, the fruits of research
within the African institutions coming from African researchers and artists,
like those by the American, European, Chinese, Japanese, Russian, Canadian,
Australian researchers for their own dances? The five positions of classical
dance, for example, are the result of the reflections of Pierre Bauchamp, the
choreographer of Louis XIV in the 17th century”. (Tierou, 2015)
Such themes have been recurrent
throughout my interactions with diverse interlocutors. One Ivorian reggae artist
even told me “We’re sick of the stigma white people have looking at our cultures. Why do they call our music “ethno-“
while theirs isn’t considered such? The only reason I am talking to you is because you’re a
young African trying to write about Africa”. These words immediately stirred my stomach and gave me
butterflies. On the one hand I felt immense pride because I felt I was contributing
in part to a form of African renaissance (or at least a shift in social consciousness);
but this was associated with a very powerful sense of responsibility. For the
first time, the stakes of this project no longer felt personal or even academic.
They were suddenly global. The category of African music and dance needs deconstruction
and reconstruction. If I do a good job, I could be a part of this reshaping
process by telling the story from a different vantage point. Maybe the lions
have finally learnt to speak, and are eager to tell their own tales of the
hunt. That, in my opinion, is huge.
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