Popular Music and the Postcolonial

Oliver Lovesey, Oliver Lovesey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429895036
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music History & Criticism

Popular Music and the Postcolonial addresses the often-overlooked relationship between the fields of popular music and postcolonial studies, and it has implications for ethnomusicology, cultural and literary studies, history, sociology, and political economy. Popular music in its many forms exploded in popularity, following developments in sound technology and shifting population demographics, in the 1960s, the era of radical agitation against empires in the global south but also within the very heart of Europe. Popular music aided in fostering and documenting such resistance to violent oppression and in liberating the hearts and minds of the colonized. This collection offers a timely intervention in this field, showing popular music's role in defining or undermining certain colonial and postcolonial nations, in expanding and complicating the domain of postcolonial theorists—including the "founder" of postcolonial studies Edward Said—and in decolonizing the ears of its diverse, sometimes antagonistic, audiences.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Popular Music and Society.

Song for a King’s Exile: Royalism and Popular Music in Postcolonial Uganda

David Pier

ABSTRACT

In 1971, Uganda’s President Idi Amin arranged for the return of the body of Kabaka Edward Muteesa II from Britain, where it had been temporarily interred since the king’s death in that country two years earlier. That year, Dan Mugula, pioneer of the kadongo kamu pop music genre, composed “Muteesa, Baalaba Taliiwo Buganda,” a song that expressed the grief and resentment people of the Baganda ethnicity had been feeling since their king was forced into exile in 1966. Nearly four decades later, in 2010, this old song surfaced again on YouTube, now with a new music video showing recent acts of police brutality and the desecration of a royal monument. Focusing on this song and its recent digital re-contextualization, this article explores how music can work to bring a past historical crisis into the living present, giving the community that experienced that crisis a reassuring, if fatalistic, sense of its own historical continuity.

Music plays a key role in the formation of emotionally compelling memories; a song, or a mere hint of familiar rhythm, can convincingly draw the past into the present. Denis-Constant Martin has suggested that music’s power as a mnemonic practice resides in its being an “art of playing with time”: in the course of a performance or listening session, music’s effects of “continuity and discontinuity...acceleration and deceleration” interrupt our everyday temporality and carry us into one in which we feel a special sense of familiarity and command (22). This is reminiscent of Lévi-Strauss’s insight that music, like myth, is an “instrument for the obliteration of time.” The moment of musical experience “catches and enfolds [time] as one catches and enfolds a cloth flapping in the wind” (16)—an effect that is especially pronounced when we listen to music collectively, whether we are singing together in a religious service, gathering around the record player, or browsing mp3s in each other’s virtual company on the Internet. In our synchronized rhythmic experience of a musical trace, we enfold our ostensibly shared historical time and re-imagine ourselves as a rooted community.

In a given culture, certain musical practices or genres come to be more dedicated to collective remembrance than others. In Uganda, kadongo kamu (Luganda for “one little guitar” or “lone guitar”) is one such genre.¹ In this guitar-based, densely worded radio music singers muse sardonically and/or moralistically upon present conditions, mingling their observations with allusions to history and tradition, often in a “deep” poetic register of Luganda language that carries an aura of the deep past (Mugambi; Nannyonga-Tamusuza, “Gender, Ethnicity”; Pier, “Language Ideology”). In recent years, the reminiscence function of kadongo kamu has only intensified as the genre has entered its fifth decade of existence and several of its most beloved stars have passed away (e.g. Paul Kafeero, Herman Basudde), leaving behind their ghostly recorded voices to remind listeners of earlier times and troubles. While younger kadongo kamu singers have continued to release new songs, the Internet has put many old, obscure tracks back into circulation and enabled new creative processes of consumer re-signification. Now fans can not only access kadongo kamu oldies, but also manipulate them in new ways—by, for example, publishing digital “mashups” of old songs with new visuals on social media sites like YouTube.²

This article focuses on a Ugandan kadongo kamu song from 1973, Dan Mugula’s “Muteesa, Baalaba Taliiwo Buganda” (“Muteesa, They Saw He Was Not Here in Buganda”), which received a YouTube mashup treatment in 2010. An exegesis of this song and its recent digital re-contextualization will carry us into one of the most vexed topics of Ugandan postcolonial history: the fate of the pre-colonial Buganda kingdom within the modern, multi-ethnic nation-state. Any narrative of this east African country’s modern history must give significant weight to what historian Phares Mutibwa has termed the “Buganda factor” (xi). Since Uganda’s independence era (before and after 1962), national politics have revolved to a great degree around the question of what status should be accorded to the Buganda kabaka (king) and his traditional sovereignty over people and territory. One of the most powerful pre-colonial kingdoms in the Great Lakes region, Buganda established, over more than three centuries, a vibrant cultural and political heritage that has proved resilient in the modern era. Crucially in this regard, British colonialism in Uganda was highly favorable to the traditional kingship. Rather than stripping the kabaka of all his power, the British opted to work through him and the monarchical system, in accordance with the strategy of indirect rule. Among the many kingdoms, chiefdoms, and less centralized polities that made up the Uganda protectorate, Buganda was allowed privileged status in political, economic, and cultural affairs. This colonial privileging of the kingdom and its people, the Baganda, has had divisive after-effects. A significant bloc of postcolonial Baganda royalists has insisted that the kingdom be restored to the exceptional, semi-autonomous status it enjoyed under colonialism, downplaying the problems this might cause for the development of a democratic, multi-ethnic nation-state. In reaction, non-Baganda ethnic groups have rallied to the cause of keeping Baganda ambitions in check. As a result of this backlash, Baganda leaders have managed to occupy the presidency only briefly since independence, even though Baganda make up the largest and most economically powerful ethnic voting bloc in the country. Ironically, the Buganda factor has had the effect of keeping Baganda leaders out of Uganda’s highest office.

In recent decades, popular royalism expressed itself most politically under the banner of federo, a movement that seeks to return Uganda to a semi-federal system which would allow greater autonomy for the kabaka and his kingdom. Not all Baganda are enthusiastic about federo, some believing that the monarchy has no proper place in a democratic political system. Many have supported the modern revival of the kabakaship as a matter of culture, not politics. As Mikael Karlström has argued, however, it is difficult to divide the “cultural” clearly from the “political” in contemporary Baganda royalism (“Cultural Kingdom” 3–14). The royal heritages held up as Kiganda “culture”—dances, instruments, architecture, traditional moral concepts like ekitiibwa (“honor”)—all have, to varying degrees, the socio-political ideal of the monarchy encoded within them. Support for the refurbishment of the king’s cultural regalia is not wholly detachable from explicitly political movements like federo; rather, it serves to some degree to substantiate in cultural terms calls for a return to a system in which obedience to a hierarchical moral order is enshrined as an ideal. Patriotic Baganda decorate their homes and workplaces with portraits of the royal family, and taxi-bus and motorcycle drivers paint pro-kabaka slogans on their vehicles. Women’s associations in the countryside perform traditional baakisimba dance pieces about HIV awareness and environmental sustainability, in which the dance moves, instruments, and songs richly symbolize the old palace and its rituals of subservience.³ In Luganda-language popular music, and especially in kadongo kamu, paeans to the kabaka are common. All of these expressions have a cumulative effect that cannot be contained within the realm of the merely “cultural,” given the vocal advocacy from certain quarters of the restored monarchy as a real political solution.

Mugula’s song “Muteesa, Baalaba Taliiwo Buganda” is specifically about Kabaka Edward Muteesa II’s 1966 exile, his suspicious death in Britain, and the delayed return of his body to his homeland. Royal exile is a particularly potent theme in Baganda historical consciousness. Three times, in 1899, 1953, and 1966, a kabaka was expelled from Uganda; three times, the monarchy was restored, albeit the third time only after a three-decade long caesura. These royal exiles stand in Kiganda collective memory as periodizing markers, each with its before and after. They lend modern Buganda history a sense of tragic, cyclical recurrence: when faced with any new crisis, Baganda are prone to muse, fatalistically, “here we are again.” In its long emotional elaboration, the Buganda factor has become a kind of “structure of feeling” (Williams 132) to which modern Baganda identity is anchored. To be Baganda, for some, is to live in the ever-unfolding experience of disruption and displacement; as the kabaka has been exiled, so too have ordinary Baganda felt that they have been cast out to live as strangers in their own land. When new perceived injuries to the kabaka and Buganda occur—as, for example, in the 2009 blocking of the king’s attempted visit to the disputed “lost counties” region—these are interpreted as recent episodes in a ongoing, familiar story. Popular music, with its cyclical rhythmic aesthetic and mass-media archival dimension, helps to promote this ethnic imaginary of tragic recurrence.

Many scholars of modern Uganda have been unreservedly critical of modern Buganda royalism as a political culture. Mahmood Mamdani once characterized kabaka enthusiasm as a mere “ideology of tribalism” imposed on the Baganda masses by a class of bourgeois Baganda “kulaks” (36). Especially in the wake of Hobsbawm and Ranger’s volume The Invention of Tradition, there has been a tendency in Africanist scholarship to look askance at neo-traditional monarchical movements, suspecting that celebrated “ancient” systems of rule may in fact have been colonial inventions, originally fabricated to maintain a culture of subservience. By contrast, recent scholarship by Karlström and others, which is not so beholden to a Marxist critical paradigm, has offered less dismissive, more anthropologically complicated views on neo-traditional royalist movements. For Karlström, Baganda fervor for their kabaka is not adequately described as a false consciousness foisted on the masses by the ruling class; it is better seen through a Durkheimian lens as being part of a collective, bottom-up project of moral and social “regeneration” in the wake of the country’s economic, political, and cultural collapse in the 1970s and ’80s. The kabaka stands as a “symbolic condensation” of a rich “moral and social order” which the Baganda are attempting to reproduce after decades of deprivation (“Cultural Kingdom” 358).

This is, assuredly, a moral order based largely on the values of hierarchy (kufugibwa) and obedience (buwulize), which ultimately may not square well with liberalism. Yet it is important not to conclude, based on its illiberal qualities alone, that Baganda royalism is necessarily oppressive, inflexible, and expressive solely of the agencies of actors at the top of the hierarchy. Karlström makes the point that the hierarchical neo-traditional framework can enable modes of grassroots politicking that might otherwise have remained dormant and forgotten, especially politicking based on the reciprocal symbolic exchange of gifts for loyalties (“On the Aesthetics” 65). This is an argument I have built upon in my own book, Ugandan Music in the Marketing Era, in which I attempt to unpack the complex politics that surround, and are enacted within, contemporary performances of traditional music and dance by amateur rural dance associations. Traditional dance, or more richly, ng’oma (drum/dance/social healing), does usually serve to regale someone or something in power, be it a traditional king, president, or corporate brand. At the same time, however, traditional ng’oma performance is always an occasion for diverse other activisms on the side, which reflect the performers’ own interests. These side-politics are, in my view, the main reason why ordinary Ugandans continue to engage eagerly in songs and dances for people in power, and not so much because they are enthralled by presidents, kings, and corporations.

I thus approach Mugula’s elegy to the kabaka from a basically neutral perspective: Baganda royalism has, I submit, been a complex cultural phenomenon with both beneficial and damaging political and social effects. Yet I do intend to expose one emotional facet of this royalism to critique—namely, the structure of feeling tied to the trope of royal exile. One line of criticism may already be apparent, based on what I have revealed about this trope so far. There is a fatalistic quality to the Baganda’s narrative about their recurrently displaced king and their collective plight as his loyal, deprived subjects—a dour emotional tenor that will become more apparent with further contemplation of the song and its mashup video. Depending on historical circumstances, a certain collective fatalism—a sense of inevitable, tragic recurrence—may be warranted, psychologically therapeutic, and politically energizing for a given community. Yet there is also a danger that such fatalism might crowd out other collective emotional narratives, other images of where a community has been historically, and how it might progress in the future. The narrative that modern Buganda is stuck in a cycle of exile and (partial) restoration may engender too idyllic and static an imaginary of what Buganda’s pre-colonial past was like before this vicious cycle began. How might Baganda/Ugandan/African identities in Uganda develop differently were they to be loosed from the fatalistic story of the kabaka’s exile and the subsequent occupation of the Buganda homeland by putative “foreigners”? What other creative ways of thinking about indigenous cultural and political traditions might flourish, given adequate space to grow in the collective consciousness? Any structure of feeling, no matter what benefits it may provide its adherents can grow rigid and confining in ad nauseam elaboration. Whether such an ossification of feeling has indeed happened around the tragic story of the kabaka’s exile is a question this article must leave open for further investigation; obviously a single song offers only a minuscule window on the broad cultural issues I am raising here.

The Kabaka and His Corpse in Pre-colonial and Colonial Contexts

An understanding of the song “Muteesa, Baalaba Taliiwo Buganda” requires a further historical overview of the kabakaship and its construction in Baganda ethnic consciousness in pre-colonial and colonial times. A salient topic to be introduced is the tradition of interregnum: the period of ritualized social discontinuity following a kabaka’s death. In his song, Mugula invokes this traditional period of disorder and grief focused on the kabaka’s yet-to-be-interred corpse. The trope of exile overlaps with that of bodily absence from the grave.

Before the arrival of Europeans in the late nineteenth century, the Buganda kingdom pursued an aggressive expansionist policy against the kingdoms and less centralized societies in its vicinity, subduing some of the latter as vassal territories, its power checked only by the similarly powerful kingdom of Bunyoro to the north. The historian Richard Reid asserts that pre-colonial Buganda’s imperial attitude was motivated in part by a sense of “ethnic superiority” (115), one which did not, however, limit its absorption of ethnic foreigners, along with their skills. The kingdom developed an impressive system of roads for trade, government, and war, as well as a fleet of canoes to dominate the northern shores of Lake Victoria.

One of Buganda’s advantages was its strong and resilient institution of kingship. The kabaka himself did not belong to any hereditary clan, which meant that he could preside over all the clan heads who regularly assembled at his palace. An elaborate regalia, featuring royal drums and other musical instruments, cemented the king’s charismatic authority. He was both loved and feared by his subjects, who felt profound filial affection for him as the “father of all men” (ssabasajja), but also lived in terror of the periodic punitive “mass slaughters” (ebiwendo) that were the right and duty of his office (Low 58). The death of a kabaka was followed by a ritually chaotic interregnum period, during which, in Benjamin Ray’s description, “the kingdom was no longer at peace with itself, and the forces of anarchy were let loose. . . All the dead king’s chiefs were dismissed from office; people tried to rob one an...