AFRICA

African music is as varied and rich as American or European music. Africa is a huge continent— home to millions of people, with a multitude of environmental, social, economic, religious, and historical influences. Many of these factors must be taken into account when looking at the varieties of African musical genres. Some of these influences travelled overland or arrived onshore in ancient migrations; others were imposed forcibly by colonising Europeans, or were exported by African slaves to the “New World.” In turn, some of the music spawned in foreign lands came back to Africa, a process facilitated by the easier travel and electronic recording and communication of the 20th century. African nations likewise borrowed musical ideas from each other.

The resulting music continues to evolve. The listener must be prepared to forget national boundaries and historical periods because music, like some of the African peoples themselves, has a way of crossing boundaries and periods.

NORTHERN AFRICA

North Africa’s proximity to the Mediterranean, to the lands of the Near and Middle East, and to Europe, made it a centre for trade and settlement for the ancient ships of Phoenician and Greek merchants. The melodies and rhythms now associated with the Coptic Christian sects of Egypt, drawn from the people of the Nile Delta, may date back even farther to those river dwellers’ ancestors in ancient Egypt.

During the eighth century, Arab invaders crossed northern Africa, bringing with them their Islamic religion and its music. Their vocal and instrumental music sounded markedly different from what eventually prevailed in Europe and in other parts of Africa, partly because of the use of modes (sequences of tones), which seemed to slide from minor to major and back, and used intervals smaller than the half-steps in which European instruments are tuned. Accompanying the Arab singers, or performing solo or in ensembles, were instrumentalists plucking, picking, and bowing strings, blowing into reeds and flutes, and “sharking"— pounding out rhythms on drums, tambourines, and cymbals. Little is known about the region’s music preceding the arrival of the Arabs, who went on to introduce their musical idioms and instruments (including the guitar) to Europe via Spain. But, in addition to the ancient Egyptian melodies of the Copts, there was the music of the Berbers, who took their own flutes and drums for their religious and secular music when they retreated from the Arabs into the mountains of what is now Morocco. One of their contemporary performing groups, the Master Musicians of Jajouka, has recorded several albums.

Many of the Moors who settled in Andalucia in Spain developed a formalised music based on set rhythms strung together in a suite. When the Arabs were expelled from the Iberian Peninsula one of their musical styles, called andalous, spread throughout northern Africa, where it is still heard. It sounds similar to Spain’s flamenco style. Milhûn is also a particular Arab-Andalucian form of vocalised poetry which sometimes deals with some subjects taboo in Islam, including sexual love and sensual pleasures.

Along with the Berbers, there are other musically active minorities in Morocco. The Gnaoua believe themselves to be descended from an ancient Islamic leader from Ethiopia, but use instruments resembling some found in west Africa. Like another religious Moroccan brotherhood, the Jilala, the Gnaoua’s music is thought to have curative powers. Recently, young Moroccans have fused their own amalgamation of influences to create a chaabi (popular) music suitable for the cafés and other nightspots they frequent in the cities. Rai is also fashionable (see below).

Algeria, east of Morocco and larger, is another former colony of Spain. Algerians developed a fondness for andalous, which they retained when their country became a French colony. In the early decades of the 20th century, the modes of andalous were adopted into a very different form of cabaret music that is called vai (translated as “opinion” or “advice,” either because the lyrics often took a blunt approach to social and personal issues or because “Ya rat/” was a frequent audience response). Rai singers were among those agitating for freedom from France in the 1950s, which led to a prolonged, bloody, but ultimately successful war of independence. After gaining their independence, young Algerians with an affection for rock and dancing began updating rai, spawning a generation of artists who preceded their names with the honourific Cheb or Chaba, meaning “young” and “attractive.” Their instrumental ensembles became increasingly eclectic and electronic, although they retained the modes, rhythms, and timbres of the Arab musical past.

Egypt, located on the strategically powerful north-eastern shoulder of Africa, has been strongly influential on its African neighbours and beyond, with musical traditions dating back thousands of years. After liberation from Turkish rule, Egypt became a centre of Arabic culture in the early 20th century, and recordings of several celebrated performers spread their fame across northern Africa and into the Near and Middle East. Music has remained essential not only to Islamic rituals in Egypt, including the ecstatic festivals of the mystic Sufis, but also as the soundtrack to urban life, accompanying weddings and the delights of cafés with the sounds of the indigenous nay (flute), mazhar or reque (tambourine), tabla or darabucka (drum), and sagat (cymbals), as well as the violin and brass instruments brought in by the English and other colonists. As elsewhere, Egyptian young people have sought a musical expression of their obsessions and criticisms of the establishment, which is called sbaabi (people’s) because of its working-class roots.

Outside the large cities, folk traditions persist with the Coptic adaptation of felahin (farming) music; saiyidi music of the Upper Nile (played on large drums and indigenous trumpets); the Mediterranean coastal sawahili, which is accompanied by the stringed simsi-maya or accordion; Bedouin desert music, which makes use of a twin-stemmed clarinet called a mismar; and the music of Nubia, sometimes played on the duff (tambourine) or oud (lute). The country of Sudan, situated along the White Nile south of Egypt, manifests a fascinating variety of musical influences: Arabic in the north but echoing the rhythms and percussion of Kenya and Uganda in the south, as would be expected from its geographical positioning. Some Sudanese dances associated with wedding ceremonies have their own unique form of vocal and drum accompaniment, and may seem wilder and more erotic than anything found further north. The oud virtuoso Hamza el-Din, a native of the northern Nubian region (shared with Egypt) and now a resident of the U.S. and Japan, has brought world attention to his adaptations of Sudanese folk music. (For greater detail on the music of Northeast Africa, and Israel, see MIDDLE EAST.)

Ethiopia, the source of the Blue Nile to the east of Sudan, shares an indigenous pentatonic scale (based on five notes) with its neighbour. However, vocal performances of its ambaric music boast their own individual beauty, using widely spaced intervals, slithering rhythms, and subtle inflections of the language. Meanwhile, the folk sounds of the kebero (drums), wasbint (flute), and krar (a harp thought to resemble an ancient Greek instrument) and the sexy wiggles of the “Tchik-tchik-ka” dance continue to be heard and seen in the clubs of the capital city, Addis Ababa.

Mauritania is something of a musical bridge between northern Africa and the western coast, much as the Sudan relates to the sounds of the east. Southwest of Algeria, Mauritania draws its name from the Moors, who were and still are a sort of racial bridge between black and white, with skin colours varying across the vast desert country. Musicians called iggawin were inferior caste vassals of the warrior nobles and sang their leaders’ praises and their family histories, as did the griots or jali of neighbouring Mali (to the east) and west Africa. Their stringed instruments, the lute-like tidinit and the kora-like ardin, also have close relatives in Mali and west Africa, and are still in use by modern-day iggawin, who now sing in praise of political and spiritual leaders. Moorish music is based on Arabic but with its own strictly ordered modes, whose parameters differ depending on the gender of the performer.

WESTERN, CENTRAL, AND EASTERN AFRICA

It is possible that interest among Europeans and Americans in the magnificent kingdoms of west Africa that predated colonisation, has only really become widespread since the broadcast of the television adapta-tion of Alex Haley’s book Roots. That series dramatised, among many other things, the importance, within those kingdoms, of musicians called griots, who are said to have originated as Islamic hymnists (under Arab influence from the north) and who served west Africa’s Mandingo kings as courtiers, family historians, messengers, and more. Many griots accompany themselves with a large, beautifully decorated instrument called the kora, whose 21 strings are arranged along a long neck without frets (like a cello or double bass). The strings are plucked over a gourd resonator covered with animal skin, and the soothing, crystalline sound resembles a harp. Griots also play the lute-like ngoni and the balafon, a form of xylophone (the type of instruments made of tuned bars of wood, struck with mallets).

West African musicians such as Guinea’s Mory Kanté, Senegal’s Baaba Maal and Youssou N'Dour (a heredi-tary griot), and Mali’s Salif Keita (a descendant of Soundiata Keita, founder of the Mandinka Empire) have brought ancient melodies into arrangements for electric instruments with influences from the Caribbean and the U.S., thereby getting themselves and their albums in festivals and dance DJ’s charts in Europe and America. Ali Farka Touré, a native of northern Mali whose ancestors (like those of the neighbouring Mauritanians) were Moors, made the guitar his instrument of choice, and his virtuosic plaintive melodies have attracted collaborations with American bluesmen.

The music of Wassoulou, south of the Malian capital of Bamako, lies outside the griot/jali tradition, with its own pentatonic (that is, five-note) modes and unique instruments, including the donsongoni and kamalengoni (harp-like but much smaller than the kora) and the fle, a gourd strung with shells. While women are the minority among west Africa’s stars, they predominate in this lesser known musical genre.

Even more distinct from the rest of west Africa is the tiny nation of Cape Verde, 400 miles off the coast of Senegal. Remembering that this collection of islands was a colony of Portugal until 1975, it is not surprising to hear gorgeous songs called mornas and a variety of dance forms which resemble either Portuguese fado ballads or the similarly mournful choros and peppy forros of Brazil, Portugal’s stepchild on the other side of the Atlantic.

A MUSICAL HIGHLIFE

Moving south and east down the coast, “highlife” is the region’s dominant modern musical form and its chief cultural export to the rest of Africa and the world. The name derives from highlife’s association with partying, and the music is characterised by strong, simple rhythms as well as a mixture of ethnic rhythm instruments and European melodic instruments. Based in the former British colonies of Ghana and Nigeria, it began early in the 20th century in Sierra Leone, Guinea’s neighbour to the south, which came under the influence of guitar-playing escaped Jamaican slaves a century earlier. In fact, the present-day palm-wine music of Sierra Leone is said to share with Caribbean calypso a relaxed, breezy origin in the songs of sailors from Liberia, the next nation south along the African coast. The Ivory Coast has served as a recording site for much of the rest of west Africa. The tiny nation of Benin, between Ghana and Nigeria, has also spawned a global favourite, the popular singer Angélique KIDJO.

Aside from what was borrowed from Sierra Leone, Ghana added its own tribal elements to the highlife mix, which retained its imitation of indigenous instruments such as the kora and talking drum but added Euro-American dance band instrumentation to the guitar foundation after World War II.

Centuries before the advent of highlife, Ghana, Nigeria, and several other west African countries had a great impact on the music of the Western Hemisphere via the slave trade, which was particularly active in that part of the continent. Present-day instruments probably derive from that time. Since Ghana’s independence from the British in 1957, there have been attempts to promulgate indigenous music more or less free of Western influence, including the booming drum ensembles of the coastal Ga tribe and the xylophones of the northern Lobi.

Nigeria’s tribes have individual musical forms: the Mandinka Empire, centred in Mali, also extended to the land of the Hausa in present day northern Nigeria, where praise songs and ensembles of xylophone, percussion, and goje (a one-stringed fiddle) sound rather like the music of the griots, described earlier.

The Yoruba of the southwest use indigenous percussion, but their music has also absorbed influences from north Africa and Brazil and Europe. Brazil contributed the tambourine, which led to a genre of palm-wine music called juju, of whose stars guitarist King Sunny Ade now possesses perhaps the largest electrified ensemble and the widest global appeal. Yoruban Fela KUTI coined the term “Afro-Beat” for his form of insistent African soul. His political lyrics have resulted in his persecution and imprisonment.

Cameroon, where the African continent makes a turn to the south next to Nigeria, uses the talking drum and balafon found among its northern neighbours, as well as the thumb piano (tuned metal strips with a gourd resonator) found to the south in Zimbabwe, along with instruments that were imported when it was a colony of Germany, Britain, and France. Cameroonians dance to the moderate tempo of makossa, as well as to the sweatier summons of bikutsi, the source of which lies with the balafons of the Beti, in the interior rainforest.

Equatorial Guinea, south of Cameroon, and São Tomé and Príncipe off its west coast, have contributed nothing in the way of recordings or tours abroad. But Equatorial Guinea has its own variety of palm-wine music and choral groups that have been the subject of comparisons with the better-known choirs of Bulgaria.

Egyptian pipers and drummers playing at Koubbeh Palace during the wedding of 17-year-old King Farouk.

The Democratic Republic of Congo, formerly Zaire, has served as a source for much of the continent’s and the world’s music. When Europe wanted slave labour to settle and exploit the Caribbean and the Americas, this region of central Africa, which also included what is now Congo (formerly French Equatorial Africa), Rwanda, and Burundi, supplied both people and music. Although the music was often repressed by the slave owners, it eventually took hold, evolved when combined with the heritage of Spain and Portugal (see CARIBBEAN), and returned to the motherland in the form of Cuban rumba. Pygmy tribes, relatively isolated in their rainforest villages from the slave trade, colonial exploitation, and, later, mass media, have only recently had their music exposed to the world. It involves complex choral hocketing (different voices sharing a single musical line) and a unique water-filled drum.

Since the return of the rumba, other tribes have generated a wide variety of musical forms and instruments. Among them is the African percussion instrument, the conga drum (from the Bantu tribe). The Bahema of Rwanda have the ndongo (a seven-stringed harp), while Bakoga have a single-stringed violin called the ndingiti, possibly related to the ancient rebec of the Arabs that is still heard in northern Africa. Rwanda’s Tutsi and Hutu have both developed drumming ensembles, and the Hutu’s hunting bow, the umunabi, with a gourd resonator, resembles Brazil’s berimbau. Most tribes also have their own solo and choral vocal styles, in which the roots of the blues can be heard.

Many of the 20th-century Congolese musicians have adapted the sounds and techniques of bow, zither, and folk violin or thumb piano to the acoustic or electric guitar, along with traditional rhythms, and have recast the rumba as a happy dance style called soukous. After visits from American “Godfather of Soul” James BROWN in the late 1960s and early 1970s, horns (trumpets, trombones, and saxophones) became more prominent in the stream of singles that became hot sellers across the continent. During the political turmoil of this time, several Zairean artists emigrated east and south, or overseas to Paris and London.

The position of Tanzania and its tiny offshore neighbour Zanzibar on the western shore of the Indian Ocean has opened the indigenous Africans to many centuries of Arab influence, shared also by the adjoining coast of Kenya. It is heard in the scales and quarter-tone intervals of this region’s music, as well as in instruments such as the oud, the dumbak, and the tabla, all of which instruments were encountered in northern Africa. However, the 20th-century east African genre known as taarab is a very passionate form of musical poetry, usually sung by women to rhythms suited to dance.

SOUTHERN AFRICA

Zambia has also favoured the soukous of the Democratic Republic of Congo, its big neighbour to the north, as well as kwela and other popular musics of the Republic of South Africa. Encouraged by a president who was an amateur guitarist, the country nevertheless developed its own dance form, kalin-dula (a cousin of soukous). Though smaller, the nation of Malawi to the east preserves an impressive number of different dances and rhythms reflecting its ethnically diverse population.

Further south, Zimbabwe has continued to use the mbira (thumb piano) and the marimba (xylophone) in traditional ceremonies and also in urban dance-halls. Southern Zimbabwe shares with South Africa the influence of Zulu melodies and rhythms.

Angola’s kizomba style, heavy on percussion and guitars, with highlights from horns and marimba, is evocative of Brazilian samba. Mozambique is similar in its use of a xylophone, called timbila, and its updated traditional dance music called marrabenta.

Long before the first multiparty, multiracial elections of 1994, black South African music was getting noticed around the world. It had its roots in the Sotho, Xhosa, and Zulu people who settled in the area between the third and 17th centuries. Traditional choral techniques were easily adapted to the Christian gospel music that came with colonisation. During the growth of the nation’s biggest cities in the 20th century, black South Africans were exposed to European and American music, including jazz, before the policy of apartheid, established in the late 1940s, limited their access. The South Africans applied the instrumentation of these foreign bands to a simple three-chord progression in music called jive. This hybrid and more traditional forms were broadcast over radio stations aimed at urban black neighbourhoods and townships. The music included mbaqanga (meaning “stew”), a rhythmic, soulful jive set over a rhythm section, and with horns and/or electric guitars in its later versions. The best-known and one of the longest-lived acts in the latter genre is Soweto Township’s Mahlathini and the Mahotella Queens, a groaning bass vocalist accompanied by a trio of women singer/dancers. These simple, powerful, and popular genres were often dismissed by advocates of the more complex African jazz.

Gospel, as performed and sung by groups of Zulu men temporarily separated from their families living in labour camps, evolved into iscathamiya (“to step softly”). It is a lush, inspirational song style performed a cappella. Thanks partly to their inclusion on Paul Simon’s best-selling 1986 album Graceland, the group Ladysmith Black Mambazo became the style’s most successful exponents.

Madagascar has a unique language and racial make-up. Its music is equally distinct from that of mainland Africa, inexplicably evoking at different times Bulgarian choral diaphonies, Hawaiian i'i melodies, accordion tunes from the Texas-Mexico border, or Irish airs, even though it is pure Malagasy. Indigenous instruments include the sodina (an end-blown flute) and long bundles of grass shaken for percussion. Other genres include salegy, a galloping rhythm from the coast, and famadihana, a celebratory style heard when the Malagasy periodically dig up their deceased ancestors, dress them in fresh cloth, and dance with them.

OUT OF AND INTO AFRICA

Through electronic media, Madagascar has become more interested in mainland Africa and the world beyond, and the attention has been reciprocated. Despite vast differences and distances, Africa seems to be shrinking, in a sense.

“We always think we are different because we are from this or that tribe,” says Jean-Marie Ahanda, percussionist, trumpeter, and founder of Cameroon’s Les Têtes Brûlées. “But we do the same things, and sometimes we have the same words, so that there’s a unity inside that people can’t see.” Referring to his role as a musician, Ahanda points out that “What’s made me happy is that I have been touching something that we are all sharing, from South Africa to northern Africa.”

JeffKaliss