[Conversation] Ntone Edjabe: By Breaking the Divide between the Public and the Private, he [Fela] Expanded our Vocabulary of Resistance – the Musician was no Longer Simply an Entertainer.

 

“By developing editorial projects together and assisting each other in areas such as distribution, we quietly mainstream our own aesthetics and reduce our dependency on the global publishing system” Ntone Edjabe

 

Interviewed by Dzekashu MacViban

 

 

Ntone Edjabe was born in Douala and he moved to Lagos where he began his studies. In 1993 he interrupted his studies to move to South Africa. He works as journalist, writer, D.J. and basketball coach. He became co-founder and manager of the Pan African Market in 1997, a commercial and cultural space located in Long Street in the centre of Cape Town. In 2002 he created Chimurenga Magazine. In 2004 he was facilitator of Time of the Writer and in 2007 he participated in its 10th edition at the Centre for Creative Arts of the University KwaZulu-Natal. Edjabe is co-founder and member of the DJ collective Fong Kong Bantu Sound system. In 2009 he was Massachusetts Institute of Technology Abramowitz Artist-in-Residence. In 2011 Edjabe won the Principal Award of the Prince Claus Awards, with his Chimurenga platform. Writing for The financial Times, Simon Kuper says “I’d always thought the zenith of journalism was The New Yorker, but in parts, Chimurenga is better.”

In 2002 Ntone Edjabe became founder and director of the Chimurenga magazine and curator of the series of publications African Cities Reader with Edgar Pieterse. He collaborated with radios and publications. He became co-presenter of Soul Makossa, a programme on Bush Radio 89.5, a radio station based in Cape Town. He is curator with Neo Muyanga of the Pan African Space Station (PASS). Among the publications he contributes to Politique Africaine, L’Autre Afrique, BBC Focus on Africa. In this conversation, Dzekashu MacViban discusses with Ntone Edjabe and raises issues such as Chimurenga magazine’s radical nature, Fela Kuti’s legacy and decolonization in former French colonies.

 

 

 

 

Dzekashu MacViban: Chimurenga is very different from most magazines produced in Africa; it takes liberties with wordplay in its titles, it is unapologetically pan African, its most recent issue The Chimurenga Chronicle experiments with time travel, it focuses on African politics and popular culture and it is unafraid to tackle xenophobia and black gays. What is the philosophy behind Chimurenga and why is it so radical?

Ntone Edjabe: Generally one starts a publication because they want to add something to the publishing universe they inhabit, to transform it somehow. It’s not always the case with commercial publications, but often with small magazines such as Chimurenga. I have always admired magazines that imagined a world as much as they reported it – publications such as Transition, Black Orpheus, Staffrider and even the old Drum much earlier. These publications confronted their world but also mediated and shaped it. When I founded Chimurenga I wanted to create a space where we could speak with similar force and imagination in this time.

Do you think that Chimurenga’s dynamic/radical nature has been influenced by your dynamic artistic nature? How do you manage being a journalist, DJ, basketball coach and writer?

I don’t find anything unusual about having different activities and interests. And yes, my work as DJ, this constant process of re-creating and mixing naturally influences how I edit the magazine.

Can you explain the meaning of Chimurenga, as well as its sub title “Who no Know go know”?

“Chimurenga” is a word from the Zimbabwean Shona language, drawn from the name of Murenga, a mythic Shona warrior. It has come to mean the struggle for freedom – namely during the Zimbabwean wars of liberation. It’s also the name of the music made popular by political artists such as Thomas Mapfumo. “Who no know go know” is a phrase we borrow from Fela Kuti, and exemplary of his wit. I hear Fela signaling that knowledge is something that one makes (or takes) rather than merely receive – an active rather than passive process. This guides how we approach the editorial aspect of the publication.

Tell us about Chimurenga’s other projects like the Pan African Space Station (PASS) and the Chimurenga Library.

The printed word has its limits. And Chimurenga is a very irregular publication – it appears whenever we think it’s ready. All these other projects help manifest our ideas on different and everyday platforms. Interventions can happen through very spectacular once-offs but also on the steady beat that becomes part of our daily lives. We try to play on all fronts available.

Recently, Chimurenga has collaborated a lot with other African publishers and journals, especially Kwani? in Kenya and Cassava Republic Press in Nigeria. How crucial are these type of alliances or partnerships to the publishing industry in Africa?

These are friends and like-minded publishing projects – by developing editorial projects together and assisting each other in areas such as distribution, we quietly mainstream our own aesthetics and reduce our dependency on the global publishing system. At present it is difficult for a Nigerian author to be read in Kenya unless they’re published by a London or New York based mega-house. I think it’s also important to revive the spirit of solidarity that was alive during the 1960s and 70s – and regain the capacity to imagine and shape our own futures.

In a 2010 piece on politics in Africa, Achille Mbembe states that “Here we are in 2010, fifty years after decolonization. Is there anything to commemorate, or should one on the contrary start all over again?” What can you say about this statement?

In many countries in the class of 1960 there is very little to commemorate. The decolonization process remains incomplete on both sides – the colonizer and the colonized, certainly among former French colonies. In the case of Cameroon it is important to remember that the power in place today fought against independence – those who fought for it such as Um Nyobe, Moumie and many others are still obscured by history. We have a flag and a national football team but our political and economic structures and policies are in continuation of the colonial order.

But I think Mbembe (and before him, Fanon and other thinkers) also suggests that we expand our notion of independence, beyond the right to vote for political leaders of our choice – which I must add is still missing in many countries. We must also imagine new forms of leadership and mobilization.

As a writer and journalist whose writing focuses on the intersection between music and politics, how would you evaluate Fela Kuti’s legacy?

Fela’s influence as a musician and composer is well acknowledged. But I also think his Nietzschean stance against power of all sorts was an inspiration for artists and activists. He stands out among musicians of his time as one who walked his talk – whether one agrees with the talk or not. By breaking the divide between the public and the private he expanded our vocabulary of resistance – the musician was no longer simply an entertainer.

 

 

[Commentary] Petit Pays: Nudity and the King

Kangsen Feka Wakai

Petit Pays owned the nineties.  And if he didn’t own the entire decade, then he owned the most significant part of it.  And if he didn’t own the airwaves, he certainly owned sidewalk speakers and dance floors.  The ‘matinee’ generation would come of age dancing to the sounds of  ‘Nioxxer’, ‘Maria’ and ‘Polissy’.

If Lapiro de Mbanga stormed through the gates of censorship in Cameroonian popular music in the mid-eighties with his abrasive diatribes against the socio-political order, then Petit Pays widened those walls with lyrics that were at once irreverent and suggestive.  His were songs that were layered with innuendos, social commentary and were meant to provoke.

If Lapiro was the revolutionary, Petit Pays was the provocateur.  If Lapiro got the masses dancing, thinking and angry, Petit Pays wanted them dancing, laughing, thinking and redefining their perceptions.

When trends in Cameroonian popular culture are eventually chronicled with the clarity of hindsight, Petit Pays—Lapiro de Mbanga notwithstanding—will no doubt emerge as perhaps the most influential singer of that era.

Having emerged out of the dregs of the golden era of Makossa, a genre that had dominated the Cameroonian music scene since independence—a sound born in the native quarters of Douala, Petit Pays will commandeer this ‘new’ Makossa sound across the continent all the way to pockets of African immigrant communities across the Atlantic.

Francis Nyamnjoh and Jude Fokwang have convincingly argued in their study of ‘Politics and Music in Cameroon’ that Makossa’s prominence in the local musical sphere was a consequence of both geography and history.

“Douala’s strategic position as a seaport and Cameroon’s largest commercial center gave Makossa an early lead.  The fact that this brand of music was more easily electrified was an added advantage to its rapid development and modernization.  Its gentle, bourgeois, cosmopolitan and adaptable rhythms and dance styles made Makossa the perfect music for urban Cameroon at a time when expectations of modernity were highest,” the authors suggest.

But, Petit Pays’s sound was a hybridized version that incorporated elements of Zouk and Soukous without straying too far away from its Makossa roots.

Makossa, in essence, had always been a gentleman’s affair. Makossa was Nkoti Francois in a four-piece suit, Moni Bile in a bowtie, and the avant-garde tastes of a Dina Bell.  However, Petit Pays’s sound, and eventually his image, was radically different from the unadulterated ‘old sound’ championed by the likes of purists like Toto Guillaume and Ben Decca.

It was a sound that did not confine itself to the heartbreaks, crooning, ‘bal a terre’ and relationship confessionals that had come to lyrically define the genre. It was not the youthful and soulful sound of Epee et Koum; Petit Pays crooned too, but did it while subverting decorum and offering social commentary, and unlike the gentlemen of the seventies—the Makossa nostalgists favorite epoch, he courted controversy. And controversy sells.

His apparition [without controversy] on the musical landscape would occur in 1987 with the Eyabe Kwedi produced ‘Hausa’. In the autobiographical title track he would introduce himself as the son of an Hausa father and a Douala mother.  This album, and subsequent albums by this detribalized son of Makepe would even elicit hope amongst Makossa enthusiasts in need of a messiah to counter the sonic assaults coming from neighboring Yaounde [Bikutsi] and as far away as Kinshasa [Soukous].

But it was the release of his opus, 1996′s ClasseF/M that would establish him as an icon and immovable boulder in the pop-cultural landscape.   The album came in two tapes, Classe M and
Classe F.  But, it was the cover of Classe F, which made headlines and kept flippant tongues busy—posing, like a minute old baby—think of biblical Adam before self-awareness—his hands covering his crotch, mischief all over his face.

It was an image that rattled and startled the gallery of official and unofficial censors.  It was as if he was saying “je m’en fout!”   But this act also seemed like a metaphorical meditation on the polity’s collective nakedness after the embers of liberation had died following the political euphoria of the early nineties.  It was a rebuke at the parochial and hypocritical.  It was Felaesque in its audaciousnes, jaw-dropping and shocking.  But above all, it sold 50,000 copies in a week—a record, and made him an icon.

In fact, before Petit Pays could even claim fans in places as far away as Abidjan, Ivory Coast, he had imagined himself an icon.  He had enthroned himself the King of Makossa Love.  He had even declared himself ‘l’advoacat defenseurs des femmes’ even as he objectified those same ‘femmes‘ in his lyrics.   He would claim to be ‘number one Africa!’  He became Le Turbo!  And like other legends of sound and verse sang of his death as if to remind listeners—and himself—that he was destined to be great.

Today Petit Pays lives on Rue Petit Pays in the Makepe neighborhood of Douala in a mansion inscribed with his aliases: OMEGA and TURBO.

According to most published reports, he was born in that neighborhood on June 5th of 1969.  In his late teens, he would leave for France to study law, and according to legend was repatriated. It is even rumored that his band, Les Sans Visas, owe their name to that experience.

In any case, his decision to bare it all still stands amongst his most timely and daring artistic statements.   With that act, he transformed the musical landscape from sheer entertainment stage and dancefest into a living canvass of socio-political expression.  The image uttered an ocean of words.  But it was the music that reminded those who might soon forget that, “meme les chef d’etats meurent”.

So, when he sang of ‘Polissy beat ma back oh…soldier e beat ma back oh’, it was a mere regurgitation of scenes scripted on the streets of Kumba, Bamenda, Bafoussam and Douala.  These songs and others reflected an engaged and conscious artist.

In a way, and in the context of the time, Petit Pays’s decision to bare it all could even be viewed as an act of self-sacrifice, a mutilation of mores, and an altering of perceptions and an artistic risk.  But as fate would have it, Classe F/M was not just an attention-grabbing gimmick.  It was a meticulously executed project that varied in mood that can even be credited for helping usher in the short-lived Makossa subgenre, Zengue.   But ClasseF/M would also be his last great album.

In recent years, Petit Pays has graced an album cover in drag, baptized people in his name, given himself countless aliases, kept concert goers waiting for hours, rambled through songs, shot awful videos and made many sloppy albums.

He had always sang with a hoarse, at times off-note key, but could count on stellar production for the accentuation of his sound.  His true gift was always the persona that came with the singer: a sharp wit and keen eye for the ironic.  He was an average songwriter with a knack for catchy choruses and hooks, but it was his understanding of the role of marketing and the power of the artist in society that might have been his greatest talent.

These days, the music Petit Pays makes sounds like bad samples of his earlier releases.  The crisp production of his heyday has been substituted by a crude production.  The social commentary and iconoclasm have now taken a backseat to creative monotony.  His recent releases have been at best lackluster.   It is as though he doesn’t even try.  As the social and sonic flame he helped spark fades in the dusk of our collective consciousness, one is left to wonder:  does this King still rule supreme or has he lingered to the domain of comfort-induced apathy?

 

Kangsen Feka Wakai is the author of Asphalt Effect and Fragmented Melodies. He is also the Founding Editor of Palapala Magazine. He lives in Boston, Massachusetts. You can read an interview with him here .