You think you know? …but you have no idea!

Abidjan isn’t what you think it is. It is better. The trip from Charles De Gaulle started awkwardly. I found myself in an adventure involving excess luggage, hustlers selling me jute bags for 10 Euros (when it would have normally cost me about 3) and having to abandon my carry-on suitcase in the terminal. I successfully managed to board my flight without any additional incidents. My seatmate was a young Ivorian named Jean, who had just left a Swiss city and was a manager in an expensive watch store in a local Abidjan mall. He showed me pictures of his store and the mall in which he worked. First thing that struck me is how closely it matched the malls and stores I had seen in Canada and France. Unfortunately, despite my own firsthand experience of West-Africa through Benin (2 years ago) and Ghana (10 years ago), these two places have come to crystallize my vision and have frozen my view in those specific times and places. There were no malls when I left Accra 10 years ago. There are still no malls in Cotonou. However, Abidjan has at least 3 that people have told me about.

When Jean told me the prices at which designer watches in his store were sold – and they seemed quite exuberant to me (then again I am not much of a watch guy) – he mentioned that there was a huge market for these things (especially at Christmas and on Valentine’s Day). “Can you see how quickly we absorb things?”, he said, “20 years ago, no one in Abidjan knew anything about Valentine’s Day. Now we can’t go without it”. Right before our landing, he exclaimed “Zota!”. This immediately caught my attention. Was this the Zota aka La Petite Zota – i.e. Serge Beynaud’s dancer (arguably the biggest Coupe Decale star) he was referring to? Yes it was. I immediately chased after her (from my Economy seat all the way to Business Class) and obtained her number! Moments later, the pilot announced “We are about to begin our descent in Abidjan. The outdoor temperature is 28 deg C with clear skies.” The research forecast appeared hot and quite promising!

Customs were smooth and completely painless. As we arrived, medical staff systematically sprayed everyone’s hands with hand sanitizer reminding us that Ebola is still a very real threat. This offloading didn’t resemble what I had become used to in Cotonou, materializing through the heat and rude border police. My host picked me at the airport and brought me to his house. It had been 15 years since I’d last seen this city and all of its glory. We sped across the brand new highway (le pont d’ADO as it is locally called), with the Plateau (Abidjan’s business district) gleaming like a jewel in the darkness across in the distance. Yet, the thick veil of the night had not yet been pulled over Abidjan. It is in the districts of Marcory, Yopougon or Mawu that the action happens.

An array of elegant lounges called “bars climatisés” are interspersed across the city. Each of these lounges features a typical interior layout consisting of mini-living rooms and a central, but relatively small dance floor. The dance floor always features a massive mirror that dancers face as they move to the music. It is my reading that this mirror, along with the copious amounts of alcohol consumed in these places, provides a certain sense of confidence to the dancers. This is in stark contrast to other clubs and entertainment venues I have come across both in Canada and Europe. Yaya Kone, a professor of anthropology, explained this to me when we met in Calais “you see African people dance to express something and they need to be seen. It is a communicative event. In order to do this they need an audience. This is why Maquis in Abidjan are laid out in that way. Dancing in Western clubs is very different because everyone comes to enjoy themselves in a very individualistic manner”

It is in these places that Abidjan’s nightlife distills into an intoxicating brew of dancing, alcohol and sex. The parties start around 1 AM and can go up to 10 AM. As a resident of Ontario, it was quite unimaginable since last call is usually about 2.30 AM. As I appeared incredulous, a friend jokingly said “That is because you guys work the following day!”. Gazeurs (revelers) who are apparently also brouteurs (literally grazers. But it is a term to designate cyber-criminals) turn up to celebrate life by ordering buckets of beer bottles (1 bucket has about 10 bottles) accompanied by beautiful women in their entourage. I have learned that some of these women are often discrete escorts known as Kpoclés, who to the unsuspecting eye blend in perfectly with the rest of the party. A trained eye can also easily spot brouteurs from the clothes they wear, their demeanor, the cars they drive and the way they perform the “travaillement”.

On one of my very last trips to Chateau d’Eau in Paris (a place with a high concentration of West-African immigrants), I was told that Coupe Decale was dead and was being overtaken by Nigerian music. While this may be true in France, the Coupe Decale scene in Abidjan seems very much alive from what I have witnessed so far. Over the course of the following months, I believe that my primary challenge will be to retain analytic distance, scientific neutrality and enough soberness to retain all the information I am learning!

Until the lions learn to speak...

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 17^th 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.