DISCUSSION 9 ARTS INITIAL AND REPLY

MANTHIA DIAWARA

The 1960s in Bamako Malick Sidibe and James Brown

I was looking at a book of Malick Sidibe's photographs, put together by Andre Magnin, with my friend Diafode, who has been living in France since 1979. As we flipped through the black-and-white photos of our teenage years in Bamako, Diafode's attention was suddenly drawn to a photo of a group of boys entitled Friends, 1969. «Les Beatles!" he exclaimed, and added, putting his index finger on the photo, "voila Ies Beatles." I looked closely at it, and before I could even say a word, Diafode started identifying them one by one: there was John Lennon, Ringo Starr, and all the other members of the Beatles of Medina-Coura, one of the hip . neighborhoods ofBamako in those days.

Diafode and I spent that evening in my Paris apartment, looking at the Beatles of Medina-Coura and reminiscing about our youth in Bamako. Sure enough, I now could see Nuhun, aka John Lennon. He's wearing a "Col Mao" jacket with six buttons, just like the one John Lennon wore on the cover of one of the Beatles' albums. Nuhun now lives in Canada. And there's Cisse, with his arm on Nuhun's shoulder. He's wearing a tight­ fitting shirt, with a scarf a la Elvis Presley, a large belt, and bell-bottom pants. We used to call him "Paris" because he was so elegant and smooth. When he lived in Bamako-Coura, a neighborhood on the southern tip of the commercial center, and did not have a motorcycle to come to Med­ ina-Coura on the north side, he would walk for forty-five minutes to cross the busy commercial center-under the hot sun at two o 'clock-to join the group at Nuhun's house listening to music, playing cards, and drink­ ing tea.

The elegance of Paris's style was also marked by a pack of "Craven A" cigarettes, which he placed in his shirt pocket while holding one unlit cig-

The 196os in Bamako 243

arette between his lips. He walked slowly through the busy crowd of the market and across the railway, without losing his rhythm and without sweating a drop. When he arrived at Nuhun's place, his shoes were always shiny and his face was as fresh as ever. He would always say, "Salut, les copains" before taking a napkin out of his pocket, wiping off a chair, apd sitting down. We used to say that one day, Paris would surely leave Bamako for Europe. With his Craven A cigarettes and tailored shirts, he looked like the actors from the Italian photo-novellas. Cisse, aka Paris, now lives in Canada too.

Other guys in the photo reminded Diafode and me of more Bamako stories. There is Addy, who went to Switzerland to study hotel manage­ ment and returned to Bamako in 1970 with the first copy of Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young's Four-Way Street. We had organized "Woodstock in Bamako" with Addy's record collection. Since then, Addy has worked for hotels in Abidjan and Bamako before opening his own business in Bamako. Niare, who's sitting on the floor and holding the album by Sly and the Family Stone that con tains "I Wanna Take You Higher," now works for the Malian government as an accountant. In the back, Amara, aka "Harley-Davidson," is wearing a flowered shirt. In those days, every­ body had to have a flowered shirt to feel part of the youth culture-not only in Bamako, but also in Paris, London, and Amsterdam. Harley is now an abstract painter and conceptual artist in Bamako. He was always a dreamer; in those days, he was convinced that he would seize history one day and become the center of it.

Malick Sidibe's photographs enable us to revisit the youth culture of the 1960s and our teenage years in Bamako. They show exactly how the young people in Bamako had embraced rock and roll as a liberation movement, adopted the consumer habits ofan international youth culture, and devel­ oped a rebellious attitude toward all forms of established au thority. The black-and-white photographs reflect how far the youth in Bamako had gone in their imitation of the worldview and dress style of popular music stars, and how Malick Sidibe's photographic art was in conversation with the design of popular magazines, album covers, and movie posters of the time. To say that Bamako's you th was on the same page as the youth in London and Paris in the sixties and seventies is also to acknowledge Mal­ ick Sidibe's role in shaping and expanding that culture. To the youth in Bamako, Malick Sidibe was the James Brown of photography: the godfa­ ther whose cliches described the total energy of the time. Today, we go back to the music and films of the sixties and seventies in order to give

244 BLACK CULTURAL TRAFFIC

meaning to the culture. We can also go back to Malick Sidibe's pho­ tographs to gain access to the style, vibrancy, and ethos of those times in

Africa. So implicated are Malick Sidibe's photographs in the culture of the six­

ties that when we look at them, our youth comes back to life. They are the gateway to everything that was fashionable then, everything that consti­ tuted our modernism. They are documents through which we can see the passage of time in Bamako as marked by dress style (from B-boys to hip­ pies), music appreciation (from Latin beat to James Brown), movies (from westerns to Easy Rider), hairstyle (from Patrice Lumumba and Marlon Brando to the Afro), and dance moves (from the twist to the camel walk).

In Sidibe's photographs, one can see the turbulence of youth and the generational conflict that characterized the sixties. The desires ofyouth are inscribed in most of the photos as a determined break with tradition and as a transformation of the meaning of the decolonization movements of the sixties into a rock-and-roll revolution. It is clear from Sidibe's pho­ tographs that what the youth in Bamako wanted most in those days was James Brown and the freedom and existential subjectivity that linked inde­ pendence to the universal youth movement of the sixties. The pho­ tographs show that, in attempting to be like James Brown, Jimi Hendrix, the Beatles, and the Rolling Stones, they were ·also revealing their impa­ tience with the political teach ings of the nationalist state and the spirit of decolonization.

As Diafode and I looked at these photographs n ow, more than a quar­ ter of a century later, I felt a strange familiarity, a simultaneous desire and repulsion. I looked intently at every photograph in the book, each more than once, looking for myself, but at the same time dreading the possibil­ ity offinding myselfthere. These photographs are speaking to me now, not only as important aesthetic documents ofsixties culture, but also as docu­ ments that both problematize the narrow meaning of nationalism extant at that time, and open the door for a pan-African and diasporic aesthetics

through rock and roll. I am proposing here to go beyond the nostalgic function that the pho­

tographs served for my friend Diafode and me that night in Paris. This is not to underrate nostalgia as a significant element in photography and the other arts. On the contrary, photo albums and home videos ofweddings and naming celebrations play an important role in the lives of African immigrants in Paris and elsewhere. They protect them from the effects of segregation in the host country by providing entertainment and pleasure.

The 1960s in Bamako 245

FIG. 1. Friends 1969 by Malick Sidibe. (Courtesy of the C .A.A.C.-The Pigozzi Collection, Geneva.© Malick Sidibe.)

They also constitute a link between the immigrants and their original homes, and thus foster a sense of community culture.

But to understand the conditions of emergence and evolution of Sidibe's formal style in these photographs, it is important to place him in the social and historical context of the sixties in Bamako. Malick Sidibe was one of the first studio photographers in Bamako to take a lighter and cheaper 35mm camera outside, to house parties and picnics, in order to take pictures ofyoung people. As he followed the youth, who themselves were following a universal youth movement, he discovered his style in what I will call rhythmic or motion photography. But how did we arrive at the finished product that we have in this book today; how did the bodily dispositions and the structure offeeling ofthe subjects in Sidibe's photog­ raphy change from those in the work ofhis predecessor Seydou Keita?

It is important to understand that at the time they were taking people's pictures in Bamako, neither Malick Sidibe nor Seydou Keita considered himself an artist. It is also important to understand that the types of pho­ tos each took and the perfection they both achieved in their work were a

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condition of the demand that existed at their respective times. Photogra­ phers in Bamako were no different than the barbers or tailors; they all beautified their clients or provided them with styles for the visual pleasure of people in Bamako. Their success depended on word of mouth, which contributed, as Pierre Bourdieu would put it, to increasing their symbolic capitals. They only became artists by first pleasing their customers, by pro­ viding them with the best hairstyles, dresses, and photographs.

Seydou Keita's photography was both enhanced and limitedby the eco­ nomic, social, and cultural conditions prevailing in Bamako between 1945

and 1964, when he had to close his studio and become a civil servant for the socialist government in Mali. The people he photographed in his studio were from the middle class. They were from traditional Bamako fami1ies: businessmen and their wives, landlords, and civil servants (schoolteachers, soldiers, and clerks for the colonial administration). As a photographer, Seydou Keita's role was to make his subjects look like they belonged to the bourgeoisie, to make them feel modern and Bamakois. The women were very beautiful, with their hair braided and decorated with gold wings, and their long dresses with embroidery at the neck. The men wore European suits or traditional boubous, and they exhibited their watches, radios, or cars. Seydou Keita produced artifice through studio mise-en-scene and n1akeup to ensure that every one of his subjects looked like an ideal Bamakois, a bourgeois civil servant invested with the authority of the colo­ nial administration.

When independence arrived in 1960 and the colonial administration had to cede its place to the new government of Mali, people's relation to ph otography, as to many other things in Bamako, began to change. Civil servants were no longer content with their intermediary roles between whites and Africans; theywere now competing with the traditional leaders for control of the country. In Seydou Keita's studio, they no longer wanted to mimic the colonial adniinistrator; they wanted to be seen occupying the colonial master's chair at the office, his house, and his p laces of leisure. As

these patterns of life changed in Bamako, new stru ctures of feeling emerged and studio photography became devalorized as something con­ servative and artificial. Soon the studio's customers would be largely com­ posed of people who needed passport and identification photos as well as visitors from r u ral areas. Seydou Keita's reaction to the changes was also conservative: not only did he have problems with the new socialist govern­ ment, but he also found women in pants, miniskirts, and Afro hairdos to

The 1960s in Bamako 247

be neither beautiful nor religiously acceptable in a predominantly Muslim country.

Thus, the ch ange in power from a colonial system to an independent state b rought about a profound transformation in people,s sense of aes­ thetics in photography. Young people especially b egan to look upon studio photography as o ld-fashioned or as something reserved for people who were pretending to be Bam akois. To b e photographed in the studio was associated with being a fake and a powerless p retender. In other words, studio p hotography was seen as unreal; realism h ad become the cri terion

for defining the new aesthetics of Bamakois photography. By insisting on realism, people wer e demanding a new photography that portrayed them as actors in situations, a photography that was n either a studio reen act­ ment nor an imitation of something previously done. T h e new Bamakois wanted to be filmed while he or she took the cen ter of the action that was unfolding. Photographers therefore had to come out of the studio and fol­ low the action wh erever it was taking place.

These limitations of studio p hotography, a genre fostered by colonial­ ism, led to Malick Sidibe>s emergence as the p h otographer of the young gen eration. While main taioioe his studio largely for passport photos and camera repair, Sidib e took his camera to w h ere the youth were and pho ­ tographed there. I will therefore define the youth,s sense of a new realism in photography less as an absence ofartifice, mise-en-sceoe, and mimicry, and more as something tied to the lpcation and historical action of the subjects in the ph otos. In other words, each ph o to tells a story located in space and time that serves to empower the subject. The emphasis on action was meant to bring photography as close to live action as p ossible.

There is, however, another p roblem , related to a change in power rela­ tions in Bamako, that needs to be addressed when discussing Sidibifs ph o ­ tography. It would seem that his photos ofyoung Bamakois are in contra­ diction not only with colonial-era studio photograph y, b u t also with the patterns of life that one would exp ect in a decolonized state. According to the famous theses on culture developed by Aime Cesaire and Frantz Fanon, it is not o nly impossible to create a national culture under colo­ nialism, b u t it is also equally evident that artifacts like these photos are signs of neocolonialism and Western imper ialism. Writing about African independence in the 1960s, Cesaire stated that whereas the colo nial era was characterized by the «reification» of Africans, the transition to indepen ­ dence would give rise to a revival of creative energies, and a recovery of

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authentic ways of being that had been forbidden by the colonizer. Inde­ pendence would awaken in the individual the African personality that had for so long been suppre~sed. For Cesaire, "after the 'moment' of precolo­ nial Africa, a moment of 'immediate truth,' and the colonial 'moment ,' a moment of the shattered African consciousness, independence inaugu­ rates a third dialectical 'moment,' which must correspond with a reconcil­ iation of the mind with its own consciousness and the reconquest of a plenitude."1

For theoretical purposes, it is important to retain Cesaire's use of the terms "moment," " imm~diate truth," "own consciousness," and "pleni­ tude." All of them refer to independence as an authentic state ofbeing, a state of genuine creative and natural harmony between the precolonial past and the present. In contrast, the colonial and neocolonial state was characterized by the assimilation, alienation, and depersonalization of the African. Authors like Cesaire expected the continent to create a new man with an African style in politics and culture. Lumumba, Sekou Toure, and Kwame Nkrumah were the prototypes of the postindependence ideal image, and they were all fiercely nationalist, authentic, and anti-imperial­ ist. That the images of the youth in Sidibe's photographs did not seem to reflect the Africa that these leaders were attempting to shape has been interpreted as an indication ofhow alienated the youth were, as a sign that the youth were not in continuity with the political history of the nation. The photos could be said therefore to reveal the presence of neocolonial­ ism among the youth.

Indeed, in Mali, the socialist government created a militia in the mid ­ sixties to monitor the behavior of the people, in conformity with the teachings of socialism. This militia was aimed not only at the abolishing of traditional chiefs and other tribal customs, but also at correcting the youth's habitus. In Bamako, curfews were set and youth caught wearing miniskirts, tight skirts, bell-bottom pants, and Afro hairdos were sent to reeducation camps. Their heads were shaved and they were forced to wear traditional clothes. The situation did not get any better for the youth after the military takeover in 1968. Even though the former regime was casti­ gated for taking people's freedom away, for being worse than the colo­ nizer in its d estruction of African traditions, and for being against free enterprise, the soldiers who replaced the militia continued to patrol the streets ofBamako in search of rebellious and alienated youth. It was clear, therefore, that to both the independence leaders and the military regime in Bamako, the youth in Sidibe's photographs were not obeying the

The 196os in Bamako 249

teachings of independence~ nationalism , and tradition. They were mim­ icking the culture of the colonizer, which shut the door to authentic self­ actualization.

Looking at Sidibe's photographs today, it is possible to see wh at was not visible then on account of the rhetorical teachings of revolution. It is indeed clear to me that the youth's refiguration of the independence movement, their appropriation of the political history of decolonization, and their representation of their freedom were all misrecognized by their elders. According to Bourdieu, one can obey the past without representing it.2 In assessing the youth's continuity with and transformation of the political history of independence in Bamako, it is therefore critical to look at the degree to which the youth had internalized and incarn ated the lessons of the revolution. The youth had quickly internalized African cul­ ture, collapsed the walls ofbinary opposition between colonizer and colo­ nized, and made connection s beyond national frontiers with the diaspora and international youth movements. That the theory of decolonization could not recognize this at the time as anything but mimicry and assunila­ tion is an indication of its failure to grasp the full complexity of the ener­ gies unleashed by independence.

First of all, the youth saw in the departure of the colonizer from Bamako an opportunity to seize the city for themselves, to become the modernizing agents of their hometown, and to occupy its leisure spaces. Independence also enabledthem to exhibit African cultures that until then had been forbidden by the colonizer. Thus, they could go back and forth in history without interruption, and without the permission of the new gov­ ernment or the traditional religious and tribal leaders. The youth in Bamako felt free to pick and choose as a prerogative of their new freedom. Their dress style, their point of view, and their corporal deportment con­ stituted a new habitus in Bamako that was misrecognized by their parents. What I call here chan ge of h abitus, following Pierre Bourdieu, can also be understood through Raymond Williams's notion of change in patterns of life. For Williams as well, the training ofyouth in social character and cul­ tural patterns may result in youth)s developing its own structures of feel­ ing, which will appear to come out of nowhere: "The new generation responds in its own ways to the unique world it is inheriting, taking u p many con tinuities that can be traced, and reproducing many aspects of the organization, which can be separately described, yet feeling its whole life in certain ways differently, and its shaping its creative response int o a new structure of feeling. "3

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Clearly, what Bourdieu and Williams are saying is that one cannot pre­ dict the outcome ofa revolution, nor the new habitus that will develop out of power relations, nor from where the youth will draw the resources for their creative and epistemological ideas. As the civil rights leaders in Amer­ ica have learned from the generation that succeeded them, it is much eas­ ier to liberate people than to tell them how to live their freedom. Unlike revolution, freedom cannot be taught; otherwise, it is a freedom that is no longer free, a freedom under siege. The youth in Bamako did not want to be restricted in their freedom, and therefore used it to express the themes and aesthetics of Pan-Africanism, the black diaspora, and rock and roll, some ofwhich were in continuity with the independence movement, and some in contradiction with it .

If one follows Bourdieu,s statemen t that _habitus plus capital equals action, the challenge in Sidibe'.s photographs becomes how to describe the components of the youth's actions, the extent to which they represent an accumulation of social and cultural capitals in relation with diaspora aes­ thetics and bodily dispositions that Bourdieu terms, appropriately, habitus-

The youth in Bamako, as in most modern African capitals in the sixties, began building their social networks in high schools and soccer clubs. High schools were important centers of intellectual and cultural life in Bamako because, in the absence of a university at that time, they consti­ tuted the sites where the future elite of the nation gathered. Most young people in those days met at high school or at soccer games organized between schools, before forming their own clubs or grins, to use the com­ mon Bamako term ofreference. By the time high school youth had formed their own grins, they had already self-selected among the masses of stu­ dents, cemented their friendships, and developed attitudes and styles specific to them- They would have already chosen a name by which they were known-the Rockers, the Temptations, the Rolling Stones, the Soul Brothers, the Beatles-and they spread their reputation throughout Bamako.

The name was not the only important thing about a club; it was also crucial to have a permanent location associated with it ( e.g., the Beatles of Medina-Coura), a sort of meeting place or headquarters for the group, with a turntable and a good collection ofrecords, magazines, and detective novels that club members exchanged among themselves. Most grins also had a shortwave radio that received BBC Radio, the Voice ofAmerica, and Radio France International. The Beatles of Medina-Coura regularly had the local newspaper L'Essor, and occasionally one could find French papers

The 196os in Bamako 251

like Le Monde and magazines like Paris-Match and Salut les copains, from which they removed the posters of the Beatles of Liverpool, Jimi Hendrix, and James Brown to put on the wall. Finally, every grin had green tea, which the members drank while listening to music and d ebating several topics of the world at the same time. Every dub built its reputation and symbolic capital by accumulating these important resources at the head­ quarters, and by organizing parties and picnics to which rival members of other groups were invited. It has been estimated that by the time Malick Sidibe was at the he ight of his career, there were more than 250 dub s in

Bamako.4

Besides debating over favorite rock star s, political discussions consti­ tuted an important characteristic of grins in 1960s Bamako. Indeed, the way the youth talked about the music, m ovies, or detective stories was always related to their own condition in Mali. They always made a com­ parison between themselves and the people they saw on album covers, magazines, and movie posters, as well as fictional characters in movies and novels. They debated the rock stars' stances against the war in Vietnam, racial discrimination in America, the peace movements associated with Martin Luther King, Jr.; and Mahatma Gandhi, and Muhammad Ali as the world's heavyweight boxing champion. Discussion ofAfrican politics was generally concerned with the heroes of independence Sekou Toure, Lumumba, and Nkrumah, who defied France, Belgium, and England, respectively. The youth elevated these freedom fighters to the rank oficons like Mao Zedong, John F. Kennedy, Andre Malraux, Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, Malcolm X, Angela Davis, Che Guevara, and Fidel Castro.

The grins were important centers of social criticism about what was lacking and wh at was needed in Bamako. People talked h eatedly about the government, the restriction of people's freedom, and the incapacity of African nations to unite. Some argued that n eocolonialism was the reason that the leaders could not get together, and that France and the CIA still had their hands in our affairs. People at the grin also saw themselves as rebels in Bamako against traditional societies, which wanted to interject more religion into their lives and control the way they dressed and behaved. The youth thought of themselves as op en-minded and tolerant toward each other, regardless of ethnic and caste origins. They therefore did not want to go back to the separation of p eople by tribe that was encouraged during the colonial era. They defined themselves first ofall as Bamakois, Malian, and Pan-African, as opposed to Bambara or Fulani. Not only did the youth in Bamako organize their own Woodstock to listen

2 5 2 BLACK CULTURAL TRAFFIC

to music in a public sphere and protest against apartheid in South Africa, Ian Smith's regime in Rhodesia, and the imprisonment of George Jackson and Hurricane Carter in the United States, but they also continued to resist the military dictators~p in Mali until its overthrow by a mass move­ ment in 1992.

When I look at Sidibe's p hotographs today, I see as political action the way in which the youth of Bamako transformed the themes of indepen­ dence and adapted them for themselves, to the point of not being recog­ nized by their elders. Because Bamako's youth could not content them­ selves with the mechanistic application of the political theory of independence, nor return to certain African traditions that would have imposed limits on their freedom, they turned to Pan-Africanism and the African diaspora as powerful sources for the expression of their freedom.

The Impact ofJames Brown

Looking back at the period between the midsixties and the early seventies in Bamako, it is clear that the single most important factor , after indepen­ dence, that introduced change into youth's habitus was their exposure to diaspora aesthetics through rock and roll and the black power movement. And in this respect, it is also clear from the visual evidence in Sidibe's pho­ tographs that James Brown was the most important reference that com­ bined the ethos of black pride with the energy of rock and roll. As inde­ pendence changed power relations in Bamako, the reception of diaspora aesthetics through popular culture opened a floodgate ofyouthful energy and creativity. The youth could see themselves more easily in James Brown or in a glossy photograph of a defiant Muhammad Ali than in any other motif of independence at that time.

This enthusiastic embrace of popular culture from the United States may seem odd in a newly independent socialist country like Mali. In Mali, as in other African countries, the United States had at that time been identified as the symbol of imperialism and capitalist exploitation. It is therefore crucial to explain what James Brown and other diaspora aes­ theticians from North America were able to provide to Bamako's youth that could escape the critical eye of anticapitalism and anti-imperialism, but that was lacking in the other independence-era social formations.

The identification with James Brown was total and uninterrupted; from the way he appeared in album cover photographs as if caught in the mid-

The 196os in Bamako 253

dle of a trance to the way his music and dance provoked the youth to action, James Brown was captivating. The dress styles that his influence popularized among Bamakois included tight turtleneck shirts with but- tons or a zipper, which the local tailors made from looking at the pictures on the album covers. The same tailors in Bamako also made the «James Brown" style of shorter, above-the-ankle bell-bottom pants; which were thought to enhance one's ability to dance the jerk or the mashed _potato.

In 1967, Malick Sidibe photographed two young women holding between them a James Brown album, Live at the Apollo, released that same year. I remember that white suits similar to the one James Brown is wear­ ing on that album cover were all the rage at dance parties in Bamako. It is also a measure of the popularity of Live at the Apollo that it appears more often than any music album in Malick Sidibe's photography. T h ere were also some songs on it, such as «Cold Sweat," "There Was a Time," " I Feel Good," and "It's a Man's World," without which no dance party in Bamako could rise to greatness. These James Brown hits, along with "Papa's Got a Brand-New Bag" and «I've Got a Feeling," remained at the top of the charts in Bamako for more than a decade.

One of the girls in the photo is wearing a sleeveless blouse and skin­ tight pants, while the other has on a checkered minidress reminiscent of the Supremes. They are both laughing and looking into the camera, each with one knee bent forward and the other leg spread back as if to mark a dance step. The girl on the left, wearing the minidress, is holding the record album in the center, between herself and her friend. The other girl is pressing her body against the album as if she were dancing with it. Live at the Apollo thus becomes an important part of the composition of this photo. Inasmuch as James Brown is clearly identifiable here by his picture and byhis name written in big letters on the album, one can say that hehas become the third person in the photograph. By putting him in the center against their hearts, the two young girls transform him from a lifeless photo on an album cover to an omnipresence in front of Malick Sidibe's camera. It is as if, in the photo, they were dancing with.the " real" James Brown.

It is also important to understand that the presence of the album in the photo helps redefine the young women. By seeing themselves in James Brown, identifying with Live at the Apollo, and becoming one with their idol through dance, they change themselves. The person looking at the picture also begins to see the two girls differently. For him, they assume a new identity that is secular and cosmopolitan. They are no longer stuck in

254 BLACK CULTURAL TRAFFIC

the Malian identities defined by the tribe or by Islam. For example, in Mali, young women were not allowed to be seen by their parents dressed the way they were in this photo. Such conduct would have been deemed indecent by Islam. When young women went to the grin or to a dance party, they smuggled their pants and miniskirts out the window before­ hand, and then walked out the door dressed in traditional clothes. They only changed into their modern outfits once they were far from home and unrecognizable.

Clearly, therefore, diaspora aesthetics were opposed to the habitus, imposed by tradition, home, and Islam, which sought to control the young girls, bodies. In this sense, identification with James Brown was an indica­ tion of where the youth in Bamako wanted to be at the time of indepen­ dence, as well as nationalist leaders, blindness to these desires. As the two young women take on a new identity, influenced by James Brown and diaspora aesthetics, that had begun to emerge at the same time in Zambia, Liberia, Harlem, Senegal, Ghana, and elsewhere, the origin of this photo becomes indeterminate. The presence of James Brown in this photo helps therefore to explain the new habitus of postindependence, why young people dressed the way they did, and how they freed their bodies from the limitations imposed by older power relations.

I call this a dias ora aesthetic, as opposed to a Malian or even an African aesthetic, because it was defined. beyond the national boundary and it united black youth. through a common habitus ofblack pride, civil rights, , and self-determination. The civil rights movement in America and the worldwide movement of decolonization were resources for this new aes­ thetic, and James Brown was the dominant symbol for the youth. James Brown, as a figure mediated through civil rights and worldwide decolo­ nization, had become for this youth the link between the new freedom and an African identity that had been repressed by slavery, Islam, and colonial­ ism. By that I mean that a storehouse of African cultural and spiritual practices, forced into silence and rendered invisible by colonialism and Islam, emerged when the youth entered into contact with James Brown's music.

It is no secret that both colonialism and Islam fought hard to rid Africans of their gods, rituals, and cultures. Colonialism impose<:! itself in a binary manner, collecting African statues and masks in order to burn them or send them to museums in Europe, replacing them with the Bible. For both Islam and Christianity, polytheism was the root ofevil, and they therefore sought to fill Africans' needs for several gods with one God. In

The 196os in Bamako 255

the process, they banned the priests who represented different gods, and left the rituals and dances unattended by an intermediary between the people and their creator. This destruction of the spiritual and technical base of African cultures is eloquently described in masterpiece after mas­ terpiece ofthe creative writing ofthe African diaspora. In Chinua Achebe's Arrow ofGod, the African priest loses his place in the harvest ritual to the Christian missionary. In Yambo Ouologuem's Bound to Violence, the anthropologist assists in the destruction ofan African kingdom by collect- ing the masks and the oral traditions. In Maryse Conde's Segu, Elhadji Oumar's army of jihad destroys the Bambara Empire, burns the fetishes, baptizes the king, and puts a Muslim priest in charge of Segu.

By the time of independence in the 1960s, therefore, what we call «African" had been changed th.rough and through b y Islam and Christian­ ity. Most importantly, the connections with the pre-Atlantic-slavery African had been destroyed or forgotten. The rituals seen today, per­ formed for tourists or at the celebrations of the anniversary of indepen­ dence, are fixed in time and devoid ofany spiritual and technical meaning. They can no longer cure an epidemic, nor teach people the meaning of a puzzle. The presence of Islam and Christianity also means that people adopt a different way ofpraying that excludes dance, as well as a different disposition of the body that involves submission to God rather than an imitation of God through dance. It is therefore safe to say that Africans, who were famous in the literature ofprimitivism for their sense of rhythm, were without rhythm at the time of independence.

James Brown's music reconnected Bamako's youth to a pre-Atlantic­ slavery energy that enabled them to master the language of ind ependence and modernity an'd to express the return ofAfricanism to Africa through black aesthetics. The term Africanism has been used in a varied manner by diaspora authors and theorists, including Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) in Blues People, Robert Farris Thompson in Flash ofthe Spirit, V . Y. Mudimbe in The Invention ofAfrica, and Toni Morrison in Playing in the Dark. My use of Africanism here is closer to the way Baraka and Thompson have adopted the term, and to Houston Baker's concept of the "vernacular'' in Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literatur~all of which indicate the survival, transformation, and influence of pre-Atlantic-slavery African cultures on modernist cultures. By subvertin g Christianity and Islam as the spiritual guardians of modernity, Africanism endows itself with dis­ tinctive resources that Clyde Taylor calls "p agan m odernism."

To understand the impact of James Brown's music on the youth in

256 BLACK CULTURAL TRAFFIC

Bamako (and what is here called pagan modernism), it is important, first, to make a detour to one of the pre-Atlantic-slavery cultures that seems to have survived in James Brown's own performance. I refer here to the Dogon of Mali. According to Marcel Griaule, in his classic book Dieu d'eau, Dogon cosmology revolved around men and women's desire to be perfect like the Nommo.5 The Nommo were twin offspring ofArnma, the Almighty God. Unlike their older brother, the incestuous jackal, who was ill-conceived through a union between Aroma and the Earth, the Nommo were perfect in everything they did. They each had male and female organs, and would therefore reproduce without the other's help. That is why the Dogon refer to the Nommo both as sin gular and plural; every Nommo is identical to the other, but also depends on the other like the left hand depends on the right. It is through their function in identity and binarism that the Dogon believe the Nommo to be part god and part human, part fluid and part solid, part water and part snake.

The symbol of Nommo, variable and unlimited in Dogon cosmology and iconography, is also the vehicle for language. For the Dogon, the Nommo revealed the secret oflanguage to men in three stages, each corre­ sponding to a specific work and form ofprayer. The first language, which is also the most abstract, came with the transformation of baobab barks into fibers with which to clothe the nakedness ofthe earth. Even today, the Dogon dress their masks and statues with these multicolored fibers that contain the most ancient language of Norn.mo, which is understood by very few people. The second language was revealed through the technique of weaving, and it was clearer, less sacred, and available to more people. Finally, the third language came with the invention of drums. It was a modern and democratic language understood by all. For the Dogon, mas­ tery of these languages brought men closer to the purity and perfection of Nommo and placed them in control of their environment.

Through imitation ofthe Nommo's language, men could therefore par­ take ofa divine essen ce and, like the eight ancestors of the Dogon, become Nommo themselves. IfNommo were in the drums that they had made to teach men language, then men, by beating drums, were speaking the lan­ guage of Nommo, and they themselves were Nommo at that moment. As Ogotemmeli, Griaule's interlocutor in the book, puts it, men were "learn­ ing the new speech, complete and clear, ofmodern times."6

When we return to James Brown in the sixties and consider his impact on the youth ofpostindependence Africa, we realize his Nommo-li.ke qual­ ity: the desire to elevate men and women to perfection. James Brown is a

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Nommo (known as "shaman" elsewhere in the world): part god and part human, who teaches the world, through his music and dance, the com­ plete and clear language ofmodern times, and who makes Bamako's youth coincide with the Dogon desire for perfection. Just like the Norn.mo was one with the drum, the beating of which taught men the language of modernity, James Brown was one with his band, though his was never complete without his red cape and his invitation to the masses to become part of his groove. People often say that James Brown, the hardest-work­ ing man in show business, does not say much in his songs, that he is noto­ rious for limiting himself to a few words like, "I feel all right," "You've got it, let's go," "Baby, baby, baby." In fact, James Brown, like the Nommo, uses his voice and vital power to imitate the language of his instruments, the trumpet and drums, to make his audiences understand better the appropriate discourse of our modern condition. James Brown's mimicry of the sound ofhis instruments- letting them speak through him as if he were one with them-communicated more clearly with his audiences the meaning of sixties social movements than any other language at the time. By subordinating human language to the language of the drums, or the language of Nommo, James Brown was partaking in the universalization ofdiaspora aesthetics, the freedom movements, and the discourse ofblack pride.

The reception ofLiv e at the Apollo in Bamako was due in part to the fact that it contained a complete and clear language of modernity with which the youth could identify. James Brown's didactic concern with history and the names of dance steps and American cities was an important factor of identification with the album for the youth who knew that their indepen­ dence was tied to the civil rights gains ofpeople in the diaspora. If we take, for example, a James Brown song, "I Feel All Right," it is easy to account for its popularity in Bamako. James Brown begins the tune in a ·ritualistic manner by addressing everybodyin the building. Like the high priest in a ritual about to begin, James Brown, calling himself the «groove maker" (as if a rainmaker, the priest of a harvest ritual or funeral), makes sure every­ one is ready for the amount of soul, or vital energy, that he is about to unleash. He even Sl.lJ11IllOns the spirit of the Apollo Theater in these terms: "Building, are you ready? 'Cause we' re gonna tear you down. I hope that the building can stand all the soul. You've got a lot of it coming." Then James Brown, at once the son ofNommo and Norn.mo himself, proceeds to explain the dance steps he is about to teach the world. He performs the dance a few times, asking the audience to repeat after him. Repetition is

258 BLACK CULTURAL TRAFFIC

the key word here for diaspora aesthetics: it marks the rhythm and accent of this new language. By imitating James Brown, one becomes James Brown, just as the imitation ofNom:mo's acts brings men closer to him.

Interestingly, as in all rituals, there is the risk of impurity, ofsomething not working properly, and therefore threatening the success of the perfor­ mance. During the song, we hear James Brown struggling with a man who was not properly following the directions he was giving: "My man always got to get his own extra thing in there," says an amused Brown. But, luck­ ily for the people at the Apollo that evening, the groove prevailed and the ritual was a success, as James Brown screams: «you got it? Yeah, you got it! Now, let's go!" It is at such moments that James Brown reminds us most of N ommo, who could empower men and women and put them in control of their environment.

In Griaule's book, Ogotemmeli states that the first dance ever was a div­ ination dance: "The son of God spoke through dance. His footsteps left marks on the dusty dance floor, which contained the meaning of his words."7 Ogotemmeli goes on to say that the masked society that performs the dance rituals symbolizes the whole system of the world. When the dancers break onto the scene, they signify the direction in which the world is marching, and predict the future of the world . Similarly, one can say that, in Live at the Apollo, James Brown, son ofNommo and Nommo him­ self, was speaking with his feet and tracing, on the floor of the auditorium, the divination language that contained the future directions of the world. The youth in Bamako as well were interpellated by this movement, the lan­ guage ofwhich was absent from the other political movements ofthe time in Mali. T hey found the political and spiritual articulation of indepen­ dence through James Brown's music, and thereby could become Nommo themselves; that is to say, connect with the African culture before Atlantic slavery.

Ogotemmeli, the Dogon philosopher, likes to state that, for human beings, articulation is the most important thing. That is why the Norn.mo provided men and women with joints, so that they can bend down and fold their arms and legs in order to work. According to Dogon cosmology, the Nommo had placed one pebble a t every joint at the waist, the knee, the ankle, the wrist, the elbow, the neck joint, and so on, to symbolize a Dogon an cestor that facilitated the articulation of the joint. The movement of every joint is therefore tied to the p resence of Nommo, who blesses and instructs it. The concept of articulation is also important for the system of language that permeates all Dogon activities. Language, for the Dogon, is

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opposed to silence and nakedness, while being at the same time the essence of action, prayer, and emancipation. Language prolongs action through prayer, and articulation provides every language system with its accent, rhythm, semantic content, and form. Ogotemmeli states that for each one of the eight Dogon ancestors, there is a language that is different from the others, and which is spoken by people in his village. The way a specific lan­ guage is articulated by a people can also be read through the way they dance and communicate with God. In a word, articulation determines for the Dogon the rhythm of the world by relating, through a system of alliance, left and right, up and down, odd and even, male and female. It is thus easy to see how important the system of articulation was for both communication and aesthetics among the Dogon people. It was that which united opposites and created meaning out of seeming disorder, enabling men and women to enlist the help of their God and prolong their action on earth.

For me, two components ofdiaspora aesthetics- repetition and articu­ lation, in other words, the incessant presence of Nomrno and the joining of opposites in time and space-were missing in Bamako before the time of independence. It obviously had been suppressed by colonialism and Judeo-Christian and Islamic religions, which understood modernism as teleological, lacking in repetition and contradiction. To state this differ­ ently: before independence, the youth in Bamako were mostly Muslim boys and girls without rhythm, because they were detached from Norn.mo and other pre-Atlantic-slavery cultures.

So imagine James Brown in Live at the Apollo when, in a song called "There Was a Time," he invokes Nommo in these words: "But you can bet I you haven't seen nothing yet/ until you see me do the James Brown!,, To "do the James Brown" in this instance is to speak a different language with one's body, to improvise a new dance different from the ones mentioned before, like the jerk, the mashed potato, the camel walk, and the boogaloo. It is to dance with Nommo's feet, and to leave on the dance floor the verb of Nommo (i.e., the complete and clear new speech of modern times). Finally, it is to perform one's own dance ofNommo, without an interme­ diary, and to become one with Nommo and James Brown.

In Bamako, in those days, James Brown's music had an intoxicating power to make you stand up, forget your religion and your education, and perform a d ance move beyond your ordinary capacities. As you move your legs and arms up and down in a scissors-step, or slide from o n e end of the dance floor to another, or imitate the blacksmith's dance with an ax,

26o BLACK CULTURAL TRAFFIC

your steps are being visited by the original dancers of pre-Atlantic-slavery African peoples. The Nommo have given you back all your articulations so that you can predict the future through the divination dance of the

ancestors. For Ogotemmeli, to dance is to pay homage to the ancestors and to use

the dance floor as a divination table that contains the secret of the new world system. Clearly, therefore, what James Brown was preparing the world for at the Apollo was the brand-new body language of the sixties, a new habitus that would take its resources from the civil rights movement, black pride, and independence. The catalog of dances that James Brown cites, from the camel walk to the mashed potato, is composed of dances that the Nommo taught men and women so they could clearly understand the language of civil rights, independence, and freedom.

In Bamako too, young men and women, upon hearing James Brown, performed dances that were imitations of the way Norn.mo swam in the r iver or the way the chameleon crawled and changed colors. The sun dance of the Great Dogon mask, the thunder dance of the Kanaga mask, and the undulating movement of the snake were included too. In this way, the Bamakois took charge of their new situation, showed how the system worked, and predicted the future. Just as the mashed potato or the camel walk were coded dances that told different sto~ies of emancipation, the dances the youth performed in Bamako were also expressions of indepen­ dence and connection with the diaspora. James Brown's music and other rock-and-roll sounds of the sixties were therefore prefiguring the secular language that the youth ofBamako was adapting as their new habitus and as expression of their independence. The sweat on the dance floor, remi­ niscent of James Brown's sweat at the Apollo, itself r eminiscent of the sweat that runs down the body ofDogon dancers possessed by Nommo, is the symbol of the new and clear language pouring out of the body of the dancers. James Brown, with his red cape, heavy breathing, and sweat, is none other than Nommo.

Looking at the Malick Sidibe photograph ofthe two young girls holding Live at the Apollo, one revisits this new language and habitus of the sixties. Curiously enough, at the same time that Malick Sidibe was taking pho­ tographs of the youth in Bamako, Ali Parka Toure, a blues guitarist from the north of Mali, was also imitating the songs from the diaspora. First, people would gather at night in schoolyards and cultural centers to dance to his modernized music. Then, Radio Mali in Bamako began to play bis music on the air. There is one particular song by Ali Parka Toure from

The 196os in Bamako 261

those days, "Agoka," which takes several riffs from James Brown's "There Was a Time." It is therefore obvious that the youth used independence as an opportunity to latch onto diaspora aesthetics-that is, a pagan mod­ ernist style opposed to religious modernism and the "nationalist" and con­ versionist modernism of Fanon, Aime Cesaire, and Jean-Paul Sartre, thinkers who considered postindependence Africans only as part of the

proletariat.

Copying the Copiers

In Malick Sidibe's photography, we see an encounter, between pre­ Atlantic-slavery Africa, post-civil-rights American culture, and postinde­ pendence youth in Bamako, that produces a diaspora aesthetic. Thus, to say that Sidibe's photographs are "black photographs," as a photographer friend, Charles Martin, bas stated to me, is to affirm his participation in shaping the new and universal look of the youth of African descent. Because Sidibe's photographs made Bamako youth so stylish, au courant, and universal, it was easy to identify with them. The youth in Bamako saw themselves in his photographs, and they wanted to be in them because the photographs made them look like the rock-and-roll idols and movie stars

tbeywanted to be. To say that the youth in Bamako saw themselves in Sidibe's pho­

tographs is to state that his style was modern, and that his photographs presented a Bamakois that was beyond tradition. By leaving the studio to follow young people outside, Sidibe was also discovering his style. At the conscious and unconscious levels, Sidibe's eye was being trained to recog­ nize the youth's favorite movements and postures during dancing as well as their preferred hairdos and dress styles. By following Bamakois youth, he began to acquire their aesthetic taste, instead of imposing old-fashioned photographic models on them. This is why the youth in Bamako consid­ ered Sidibe's photography to be realistic: he recognized their style and used his camera to immortalize it. Sidibe saw the emergence of a rebellious youth in Bamako who wanted to demarcate themselves from the rest ofthe culture through their love of rock music, dancing, and dress style. By pho­ tographing them in the manner in which they wanted to be seen, Sidibe too was able to distinguish himself from other photographers in the city.

Sidibe, then, copied the youth who themselves were copying rock stars and movie stars. And if we consider that the youth in Bamako acquired

262 BLACK CULTURAL TRAFFIC

their habitus by carefully watching images of James Brown, Jimi Hendrix, James Dean, Angela Davis, Aretha Franklin, and Mick Jagger in glossy magazines and movies and on album covers, it becomes possible to see these media outlets as important sour~es ofSidibe's style. Itis therefore no exaggeration to state that Sidibe, who never attended a photography school, had learned from the best in the field. By following the youth of Bamako, who were wearing flowered shirts made by famous designers because they saw their idols wearing them in magazine photos, Sidibe was training his eye by emulating great photographers. And by following the copy of the copy, he was internalizing the history ofphotography without knowing it.

It is possible to see the influence on Sidibe's photography of great con­ temporary photographers from Richard Avedon to Andy Warhol, as well as that of black-and-white movie images. But what .is important about Sidibe's art is its ability to transform the copy into an original and to turn the images of Bamako's youth into masterpieces of the sixties' look. Look­ ing at Sidibe's photographs today, it becomes easier to see how productive they were in the sixties in shaping the youth,s worldview and in uniting them into a social movement. In this sense, Sidibe is the James Brown of photography: he was not only the premiere photographer in Bamako, but his photographs also helped universalize the language of the sixties. Con­ sider his single portraits of young men and women wearing bell-bottom pants and flowered shirts. It seems as if the individuals in the portraits define their identities through the outfits they are wearing. In claiming its position as a signifier of the sixties and seventies, bell-bottoms become, in these pictures, as much a feature of the portrait as the person wearing them. In a way, the person wearing the bell-bottoms is, like a model, cele­ brating the greatness of the pants to the onlooker.

There is one particular portrait of five friends, all of them wearing the same color of shirt and bell-bottom pants. They are standing facing the wall, with their backs to the camera. What dominates the visual field in this portrait are the bright black-and-white colored pants, which come all the way down to the floor and cover the young models, feet. The rhetoric of the image implies that the five friends are identical and equal in their bell­ bottom pants. In fact, this Sidibe masterpiece of the representation of the sixties conveys a sense of redundancy, a mirrorlike excess that keeps mul­ tiplying the image until it produces a dizzying, psychedelic effect on the viewer.

This photograph is still remarkable for the youths, daring and eccen-

The 196os in Bamako 263

tricity in wearing the same outfit to a party. The expressionist patterns of th eir shirts and the black-and-white designs of the pants work together to produce a kitsch presentation, which e rases individual identities and replaces them with a group identity. In other words, the portrait creates the illusion that we are looking at a photograph ofa painting offive young m en in the same outfit, instead ofa live photograph. By wearing bell-bot­ tom pants and sacrificing their individual identities for that of the grin or the new social movement, the young men were indicating a break with tra­ dition and a commitment to the new ideas symbolized by their eccentric outfits. Sidibe's photograph captures a moment ofself-parodic humor and kitsch, but also a moment marked by the universalism of its language. In this photograph, we not only see the location of the sixties dress style in kitsch-the artifice associated with b ell-bottom s, tight shirts, Afro-hair, and high heels- but also the labor that went into getting it right. Sidibe's photography defined bell-bottoms for Bamako's youth and told them that they had to wear them in order to b e modern.

I have argued that Sidibe attained mastery ofhis craft by copying copies, by following Bamako's youth, who were themselves following the black diaspora and the rock-and-roll social movement. It is now important to point out the significance of movement in Sidibe's art. We have seen that the youth's desire to have Sidibe follow them at dances and beach parties was based on their belief that studio photos were not real enough. For them, the way they dressed and comported themselves at the grin and at parties was more original in terms of reproducing the energy and savoir faire of the 1960s worldwide than was the photography studio's mise-en­ scene, which was stuck in the past. Sidibe had therefore to capture them in the details of their newly acquired habitus. They wanted to be pho­ tographed looking like Jimi Hendrix, dancing like James Brown, and pos­ ing like someone in the middle of an action.

The subjects of Sidibe's portraits.look like they are posing in the middle ofa ritual. Their action can sometimes even reveal the content of the ritual they are performing. It is easy enough to imagine who was photographed in the middle of dancing the twist, the jerk, or the boogaloo. It is even pos­ sible to hear certain songs while looking at Sidibe's photographs. In a way, one can say that the postures and the forms of the body's disposition in Sidibe's portraits contain signifiers sp ecific to youth habitus in the sixties.

Space is most significant in Sidibe's shots, because the subjects are mov­ ing in different directions and the camera needs to account for the narra­ tive of their movement in the shot. A depth of field is always required in

264 BLACK CULTURAL TRAFFIC

order to reveal where the dancers are going and where they are coming from. It is therefore through the configurations of space that Sidibe cap­ tures rhythm in his photographs. We see the characters leaning backward and forward, pushing each other around, or moving in the same direction to mark the groove, as in a James Brown song. Sidibe's portraits are pos­ sessed by the space, which they fill not only with the traces of the great music of the sixties and the symbolic gestures of rock stars, but also with the spirit ofgreat dancers, from Nommo to James Brown.

There is always a narrative occurring in Sidibe's group portraits. Instead of the subjects revealing themselves for the camera to photograph, they engage in different activities, as ifsome of them were unaware ofthe cam­ era's presence. We see this already in shots with three or four people: they treat the camera more as a spectator to an unfolding story than as the rea­ son they are posing. Looking at the images taken on the beach, for exam­ ple, we can see the complexity of narrative in Sidibe's photography and how the subjects seem to invite the camera to participate in their unfold­ ing. Sometimes, each subject in a Sidibe portrait acts as if he or she were the main character in the shot. Sidibe attempts to achieve this level ofchar­ acterization by manipulating the narrative time in the shot through a behavior that differs from the others. In one of the photos at the beach, there are six persons who all seem to be engaged in different activities. Each individual is defined in space as if he were the focus of the shot and the others were there to enhance the mise-en-scene. At the same time, the facial expression of each one of the six people invokes a different emotion in the photo, whether contemplative, self-absorbed, playful, fatigued, or reacting to something off-field. At any rate, each of the characters in this shot seems to occupy a field ofhis own that is totally independent from the others.

I believe that this predilection for narrative indicates two things in Sidibe's art. First, the characters in Sidibe's photography pretend to ignore the camera, or not to act for it, or simply to be caught in medias res, because they are posing like their idols on record albums, movie posters, and magazines. They are waiting for the moment of the photo to be like James Brown and Nommo, and to become like gods of entertainment themselves. It is their belief that Sidibe's photos can transform them into stars, make them bigger than life, and that is why they act so dramatically in the photos. Each ofSidibe's portraits looks like an actor in a black-and­ white movie who has been asked to carry the action to the next level.

By capturing movement (an action caught in time and space, which

The 196os in Bamako 265

here I call narrative) in his portraits, Sidibe also enables each character to tell his own story. This act is political insofar as it allows the youth in Bamako to seize upon their own individuality, away from tradition and the high modernism of the independence leaders. By looking like the mod­ ern black image, deracinated from nation and tribe, the youth in Bamako were also showing their belonging to Pan-Africanism and the African dias­ pora. Therefore, to say that Sidibe's photographs reveal Bamako's youth as alienated is to address their politics, which were more aligned with the diaspora and the universal youth movement.

Finally, as I look at Sidibe's album with my friend Diafode, I think of the pervasive influence ofhip-hop in Africa and the rest of the world. The young people participating in the movement today in Bamako are the ages of Diafode's and my children. Sidibe's photographs teach us to be more tolerant of today's youth, to understand that their action is not devoid of politics, and to see in them the triumph of the diaspora.

NOTES

1. Aime Cesaire, "La pensee politique de Sekou Toure," Presence Africaine 29 (December 1955>-January 1960): 67.

2. Pierre Bourdieu, Seminar at College de France: Edouard Manet (Paris: 2000). 3. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Pr ess,

1977). 4. See Andre Magnin, Malick Sidibe (Zurich: Scala Press, 1998). 5. Marcel Griaule, Dieu d'eau (Paris: Fayard, 1966). 6. Griaule, Dieu d'eau, 74. 7. Griaule, Dieu d'eau, 198.