Popular Music Censorship in Africa

Martin Cloonan, Michael Drewett

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9780754652915
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317078067
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

In Africa, tension between freedom of expression and censorship in many contexts remains as contentious, if not more so, than during the period of colonial rule which permeated the twentieth century. Over the last one hundred years popular musicians have not been free to sing about whatever they wish to, and in many countries they are still not free to do so. This volume brings together the latest research on censorship in colonial and post-colonial Africa, focusing on the attempts to censor musicians and the strategies of resistance devised by musicians in their struggles to be heard. For Africa, the twentieth century was characterized first and foremost by struggles for independence, as colonizer and colonized struggled for territorial control. Throughout this period culture was an important contested terrain in hegemonic and counter-hegemonic struggles and many musicians who aligned themselves with independence movements viewed music as an important cultural weapon. Musical messages were often political, opposing the injustices of colonial rule. Colonial governments reacted to counter-hegemonic songs through repression, banning songs from distribution and/or broadcast, while often targeting the musicians with acts of intimidation in an attempt to silence them. In the post-independence era a disturbing trend has occurred, in which African governments have regularly continued to practise censorship of musicians. However, not all attempts to silence musicians have emanated from government, nor has all contested music been strictly political. Religious and moral rationale has also featured prominently in censorship struggles. Both Christian and Muslim fundamentalism has led to extreme attempts to silence musicians. In response, musicians have often sought ways of getting their music and message heard, despite censorship and harassment. The book includes a special section on case studies that highlight issues of nationality.

PART 1
Censorship Issues

Chapter 1

Popular Music Censorship in Africa: An Overview

Martin Cloonan

Introduction

In recent years various histories of music censorship have been written about a number of places, most notably in the United States (c/f Blecha 2004, Chastenger 1999, Hill 1992, Jones 1991, Kennedy 1990, McDonald 1989, Martin and Segrave 1993, Nuzum 2001, Winfield and Davidson 1999), the UK (Cloonan 1995a, 1995b, 1996) and other western countries (c/f Dümling 1995, Johnson 2003, Sluka 1994, Starr 1985). There have also been attempts to analyse the censorship outside of the Anglophone world (c/f Baily 2001, Cloonan and Garofalo 2003, Index on Censorship 1998, Korpe 2004) and to monitor global music censorship (www.freemuse.org). Censorship within particular African countries has also been charted in various places (c/f Cloonan and Garofalo 2003, Drewett 2004a, Eyre 2001, Index on Censorship 1998, Korpe 2004, Servant 2003). However there have hitherto been few attempts to give an account of the experience of music censorship across a continent and this is what Popular Music Censorship in Africa attempts.

The rest of this chapter examines the African experience of music censorship, as documented in Popular Music Censorship in Africa and elsewhere and locates it within broader censorial trends. It begins by examining the ‘norms’ of censorship in the west as outlined in previous works and continues by looking at the African experience under colonial and post-colonial rule. It then goes on to examine in more depth the characteristics of African music censorship, before ending by drawing out the implications of that experience for more general theories of music censorship.

Popular Music Censorship in Africa breaks new ground. It is important to note here that only comparatively recently has the history of music censorship been written about in the west1 in any systematic way. While accounts of individual acts of music censorship occasionally made the music and other press, only in the last fifteen years or so have attempts been made to offer overviews.2 In addition, despite the vital contribution of Afro-American music to popular music and the particular place that music has in African society (c/f Wilson Akpan, Chapter 6 below) the history of African music has not received anything like the coverage of music made in the west. When these factors are combined it comes as little surprise that there are comparatively few accounts of music censorship in Africa. It is in this context that Popular Music Censorship in Africa makes its contribution to our understanding of both the power of music and the attempts which are made to restrict that power.

Because of the privileged position of their countries, it has been commentators in the west who have been able to tell their censorial tales and, to an extent, to place them on the international stage. Thus western versions of music censorship have become, via the accounts which exist of them, something of a ‘norm’. In this sense the African experience can be seen, as — to use a highly loaded term — ‘other’. But rather than seeing things that way, my object here is to show how Africa’s experiences of music censorship can give a fuller, more complex, view of music censorship than has hitherto been revealed. While of necessity, this chapter adopts a somewhat broad brush approach which will not always be sensitive to important local differences, it is hoped that this book itself serves at least two purposes: First it begins to redress the balance and secondly, in doing so, it provides further insight into the nature of music censorship.

The perspective of the author — that of an outsider looking in — is important here. In particular, the political implications are profound. As a white northern European living in what is generally referred to as a liberal democracy, I am only too aware of the imperial foundations of my continent’s relationship with Africa. Indeed, the politics of two white editors (one an African) editing a book on music censorship in Africa could be debated long and hard.3 However, my hope is that the outsider’s perspective can offer some useful insights. For me the African experiences of music censorship bring new lights to bear. To this outsider they reveal themselves as being simultaneously both familiar and different. Importantly there are a range of contexts and a range of censorial agencies which serve to highlight the multi-faceted nature of music censorship. But in order to further explore the idea of the outsider looking in, it is necessary to outline the story of the development of censorship closer to home.

Normalizing censorship in the west

Before proceeding it is useful to describe what might be seen as being the ‘norm’ of censorship in the west. In microcosm this can be described as a story where religion was the most important censor until the emergence of the modern nation-states from the mid-eighteenth century on. There are various examples of the importance of religion as an early censorial force of which perhaps the most famous (and, perhaps, notorious) is the Catholic Church’s Index Librorum Prohibitum. Importantly, as noted by Annemette Kirkegaard (2004: 62) the Church remains a censorial force in Africa today. More generally organized religion has sought to warn its adherents away from certain cultural artefacts and has not been slow to call for the restriction or outright banning of materials of which it disapproves.

As with organized religion, the nation state also seeks allegiance from its followers (in this case as citizens or subjects) and seeks to guide them in matters of morality. In the case of obscenity this generally meant laying down laws which proscribed certain forms of communication (pornography, racist documents, state secrets, and so on). As technology progressed it also meant regulation (and, often, ownership) of the airwaves also became the domain of the nation state. This frequently meant the formation of state-owned broadcasters whose editorial policies of necessity included forms of censorship. While the starkest examples of state remain those of Nazi Germany (c/f Dümling 1995, Levi 2001) and the Soviet bloc (c/f Starr 1985, Service 2001) western liberal democracies have also censored c/f (Cloonan 1996, Petrie 1997, Travis 2000).

In more recent years states in Western Europe have retreated from a number of their roles. As the availability of satellite television has spread alongside a growth in commercial radio, state broadcasting has been on something of a retreat. One corollary of this is that the observation of censorship has become more complicated. For example, in the UK up until 1973 when local commercial radio arrived, the publicly owned BBC was the only legal broadcaster and thus its music censorship was what any commentator needed to concentrate on. Following the first national commercial radio station, Virgin, in 1992 the UK now has a wide range of music stations with countless others available on the internet. One corollary of all this is to make the observation of music censorship more complex at a time when broadcasting is becoming increasingly important. Similar stories can be found elsewhere in Western Europe, but are just developing in Africa.

Moreover, nation states have found that one of their key strengths — control of their borders — has been complicated by the rise of the internet. Here information, including music, can be transferred across the miles and oceans without the authorities being aware. Thus far concern about this has centred on the use of the internet by criminals (especially paedophiles), but what is important for observers of censorship is that the rules of the game have changed. (Notably none of the chapters here deals with the internet.) In essence what the west is witnessing is a revolution in communications technology which has precipitated a decline in the role of the state as censor and a corresponding rise of the market as censor. One problem this brings is that if state officials can occasionally be held to account for their actions, the market never can.

Thus the history of censorship in the west can be seen as going through stages of religious, state and, now, market censorship. Within this framework the ‘norm’ of censorship has been that of competing forces trying to influence state policy in order to allow or disallow certain cultural artefacts a market and, in some cases, even the right to exist. In essence what has been at stake is the right to market products which circulate information. In more recent years marketization has proceeded apace and nation states have instituted neo-liberal economic policies which have seen them retreat from intervention in the economy. Where this retreat is arguably less advanced in the field of communications than in other areas, it still raises the possibility of censorial roles being increasingly left to the market, with the state effectively regulating between competing censorial agencies.

Censorship in colonial and post-colonial Africa

The situation in Africa is somewhat different. To begin with religion, while in the west religious groups were often competing for state approval in a political settlement which (with some notable exceptions) the majority of the contending parties accepted, in colonial Africa religion was often a battleground between oppressor and oppressed. The colonialists imported their religious beliefs and often sought to impose them on the indigenous populations, as John Collins shows here in the case of Ghana. As Ole Reitov and Marie Korpe (2004: 74) note, this often has censorial implications. The resistance to this process meant that frequently religion came to be not about different ways of living morally within a given political structure, but about competing versions of the political settlement. Resistance to colonialism often involved religion, while colonial rule often involved importing and trying to impose the religion of the colonialist.

Into this battle came musical forms which had the potential to offend traditionalists (who were often resisting colonial rule), the colonialists (who, as Collins illustrates, used music such as military bands, classical concerts, music theatre and Christian hymns to enforce imperial rule) and those leading liberation struggles (who used music as part of their struggle against that rule). In essence African music could be caught in a triple knot of censorship. Thus in their chapter on Tanzania, Kelly Askew and John Kitime show how colonialists disapproved of ngoma dances which confused traditional sex roles, while Collins’ chapter reveals that those involved in the liberation struggle in Ghana disapproved of any songs betraying the ‘foreign’ influence of the colonialists. It is also clear that traditionalists in many countries sought to control overt sexuality in music. In sum the traditionalists, colonialists and liberationists all had censorial agendas.

The legacy of colonial rule can also be seen in struggles over the role of Islam across the globe, but also particularly in Africa. Islam’s attitude towards music is contested (see Otterbeck 2004), but the potency of Islam as a censorial force has been most vividly illustrated in the (non-African) case of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan (see Baily 2001). It is also obviously an important influence in such places as Algeria (Morgan 2004, Mehdid Chapter 13 below) and Nigeria (Servant 2003). Additionally the influences of religion as a censor can be seen dramatically in the case of South Africa where Paul Erasmus, an ex-policeman who used to intimidate the political musician Roger Lucey and Cecile Pracher (who worked for the Censor Board Committee of South African Broadcasting Corporation under the apartheid regime) have both spoken of the influence of Afrikaner churches in their actions (Erasmus 2004, Pracher 1988).

If the role of religion has a particularly African twist, then so does the role of the nation state. The structure of many of today’s African states has arisen through colonial rule, rather than any geographic, ethnic or political logic. As one music commentator has noted, nation states in Africa are ‘often carelessly cobbled together from a chaotic patchwork of tribes and ethnicities by civil servants in the oak-panelled ministries of Paris or London’ (Morgan 2004: 107). This gathering together of disparate ethnic groups into one nation across a highly variegated land mass often meant that post-colonial regimes had to undertake nation-building projects. In this process those who stood outside the project or who critiqued it ran the risk of both censure and censorship. Examples of this are found throughout Popular Music Censorship in Africa.

Possibly the most vibrant example of this in contemporary Africa is postapartheid South Africa and the complications and censorial implications of this have been brought to the fore in the example of Mbongeni Ngema’s song ‘AmaNdiya’ which Gary Baines discusses in Chapter 4. Here an attempt to build a new nation united across cultural and ethnic diversity was deemed to be undermined by a music attack on one ethnic group by a member of another. For the critics of ‘AmaNdiya’ criticisms of other ethnic groups have to be circumspect if national unity is to be preserved. Here it seems that a form of ‘political correctness’ is seeking to silence a dissenting (if arguably unpleasant) voice. As Baines (op cit) notes what is at stake here is membership of the nation, of who ‘belongs’. Moreover, while the motivation might be different, there are clear parallels here with the authenticity programme carried out by President Mobutu in Zaire in the early 1970s, as documented by Graeme Ewens in Chapter 12 below. In both cases populations were being urged to take up particular sets of values. In the case of modern South Africa, this is multiculturalism; in the case of Zaire it was a mono-cultural Africanism. In both cases the result was forms of censorship.

The nations which existed in colonial Africa were also different from the ‘norm’ of the west. In effect the role of the state was assumed by the ‘home’ imperial nation state and its legal systems were imported to a greater or lesser extent. The legacy of this can still be seen by the fact that UK Commonwealth countries such as Jamaica and Belize have Britain’s Privy Council as their final court of appeal (see http://www.privy-council.org.uk/output/Page32.asp). While the depth of colonization varied across the continent, the colonial experience meant that to varying degrees the colonists sought to impose imported moral, as well as legal, codes on indigenous populations.

Inevitably the experience of colonialism shaped the post-colonial era. Many regimes appeared to have learned well from their imperial masters about the need to control their populations. Thus Africa witnessed (and continues to witness) a series of authoritarian regimes in which political dissent was often harshly punished and moral codes strictly enforced. As is illustrated perhaps most vividly by Zimbabwe today (Thram below, Eyre 2001, 2004, Palmberg 2004), liberation from colonial rule did not always imply personal liberation.

Naturally music was far from immune from these processes. Under colonial rule, the battle was two-pronged. The first battle was to preserve local cultures from dominance by imperial power. Within this struggle debate inevitably took place over what was worth preserving. For example, in Ghana Collins shows how in the 1920s dances which encouraged mixed couples to touch were frowned upon by elders, as was music which was influenced by western styles. The second battle was to use that culture to critique the colonial power and, subsequently, to assist in the battle for national liberation. Thus the famous Nigerian singer and songwriter Fela Kuti pledged that he wanted to achieve ‘the emancipation of all Africans from colonial mentality’ (cited in Santorri 1998: 67). The role of music in liberation struggles was to see it censored under both colonialism and post-colonial rule and the legacy of both these struggles are apparent throughout this book. One legacy of colonialism is that, as Akpan shows in his chapter on Nigeria, Africa today suffers from the disadvantage of having to try to get a global audience for its music in competition with powerful, entrenched, music forms from the west. Another legacy is that the sorts of political critiques which supporters of national liberation movements penned, were not always welcomed by those same national liberation movements once they had assumed power, as will be shown below.

Having thus far examined the ‘norms’ of ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Abbreviations
• List of Contributors
• General Editor's Preface
• Part 1 Censorship Issues
• Chapter 1 Popular Music Censorship in Africa An Overview
• Chapter 2 The Cultural Boycott against Apartheid South Africa A Case of Defensible Censorship?
• Chapter 3 Vocal Killers, Silent Killers Popular Media, Genocide, and the call for Benevolent Censorship in Rwanda
• Chapter 4 Racist Hate Speech in South Africa's Fragile Democracy The Case of Ngema's ‘AmaNdiya’
• Chapter 5 ZVAKWANA! – ENOUGH! Media Control and Unofficial Censorship of Music in Zimbabwe
• Chapter 6 And the Beat Goes On? Message Music, Political Repression and the Power of Hip-Hop in Nigeria
• Part 2 Case Studies
• Chapter 7 Traditional and Popular Music, Hegemonic Power and Censorship in Malawi: 1964-1994
• Chapter 8 Why Don't You Sing about the Leaves and the Dreams? Reflecting on Music Censorship in Apartheid South Africa
• Chapter 9 Popular Music Censorship in Tanzania
• Chapter 10 Silencing Musical Expression in Colonial and Post-Colonial Kenya
• Chapter 11 One Hundred Years of Censorship in Ghanaian Popular Music Performance
• Chapter 12 Where the Shoe Pinches The Imprisonment of Franco Luambo Makiadi as a Curious Example of Music Censorship in Zaïre
• Chapter 13 For a Song – Censure in Algerian Rai Music
• Chapter 14 Concluding Comments on the Censorship of Popular Music in Africa
• Index