(Original paper For Codesria/African Humanities Jan-March 2000, Legon)

 

THE DECOLONISATION OF GHANAIAN POPULAR ENTERTAINMENT   by Dr, E. John Collins  (Jan. 2000)

 

 

Published in Urbanization and African Cultures, (eds). Toyin Falola and Steven Salm. Carolina Academic Press, North Carolina, USA, 2005, pp.119-137.

 

 

 

 

INTRODUCTION

 

The colonial shock of cultural imperialism began on the African coast where it presented a total break with traditional performance norms. As a result there was no gradual straight-line adaptation and  transition of indigenous African performance to imported models, but rather the rapid initial emergence from the late nineteenth century of local imitations of western art-music, religious hymns and popular music and entertainment in the growing port-towns and cities.

 

I cannot here discuss the subsequent emergence of Ghanaian vernacular hymns and art-music, but in the case of imported popular entertainment forms  (brass bands, dance orchestras, vaudeville, music-hall, sailors sea-shanties) early coastal/urban  imitations subsequently became indigenised and thus created an artistic ‘de-colonising’ counter-current to the prevailing westernisation process going on. This paper attempts to isolate the artistic processes going on in this de-colonising counter-trend which I have divided in three: these  are two early unconscious/intuitive processes and thirdly a later conscious/ideological one.

 

Firstly when the colonialists introduced its popular entertainment forms (including early records and films) to Ghana from the late nineteenth century it included a number of Black Diasporic popular performance styles that were fashionable with whites.[1] In the  initial process of assimilation and acculturation that followed simple imitation of these imports Ghanaian popular performers artistically and intuitively  chose a high proportion of elements from the Black Diasporic derived side of the imported performance spectrum. They thus, to some extent, circum-navigated white performance norms by reclaiming back those what had been lost to Africa in the days of slavery.

 

A second intuitive/artistic way early Ghanaian popular performance was partially de-colonised was through the course  of the coastal styles diffusing  into the rural and provincial hinterlands, and amongst new rural migrants in the expanding cities. As it was a commercial entertainment, popular artists had to  adapt to the tastes, languages and artistic norms of their paying audiences by ‘vernacular-ising’ their stage productions.

 

It is only really after the Second World War with the rise  of the mass CPP independence movement and  Nkrumah’s Pan-Africanism, compounded by Afro-centric ideas coming in from the black Americas, that Ghanaian popular artists began indigenising their performances in a self-conscious ideological way. 

 

These three routes to artistic de-colonisation will be examined below in more detail.

 

 

 

A) EARLY DIASPORIC HOMECOMINGS

 

The early twentieth century saw a sequence of black diasporic popular dance-music and entertainment genres being embraced by Africans[2]. This was part of a broader black diasporic imput into Africa that also included black nationalism and   literature[3] . Other early New World influences came from freed slaves and black soldiers and missionaries – all to which we now turn.

 

1) The Freed Slave Factor

Freetown, Sierra Leone was established by the British in 1787 and in 1800 freed maroon rebel Maroon slaves were settled there bringing with them  their neo-African ritual/recreational goombay frame-drum, with its 4/4 time music and distinctive clave pattern. In neighbouring Liberia from the 1820’s freed American slaves  introduced  the quadrille dance which became the national dance of the ruling Americo-Liberian elite. However it had little impact on local popular music whereas the goombay of the maroon Krios of Freetown  subsequently spread throughout many parts of West Africa.[4]

 

Another West African[5] freed slave influence on West Africa stems from the black Brazilians who began to return there from the 1840’s on, bringing with them the samba drum[6] and dance which affected the emergence of Yoruba ‘juju’ music (Waterman, 1982, Alaja-Browne 1985):

 

2) Afro-Caribbean Regimental Bands

West Indian regiments and bands were brought by the British to Sierra Leone as early as 1819 (Fyfe, 1962:378/9), to Ghana during the 1873/4 anti Ashanti Sangreti War (Aboagye 1999) and to Lagos in the late nineteenth century (Waterman, 1990:153). These all affected popular music and in Ghana, for instance, locally trained Ghanaian  brass-band musicians were inspired by the syncopated  melodies that  the West Indian regimental bands stationed at Cape Coast Castle and El Mina played in the spare time. As a result Fanti musicians  created a local proto-highlife in the 1880’sknown as ‘adaha’ (A.A.Mensah  1969/70) : which subsequently spread though cocoa rich southern Ghana by the 1920’.

 

2) The ‘Negro’ Spirituals and Shouts

The American ‘negro’ spirituals became an international idiom from the 1860’s and spread into Africa via two routes. One was by missionaries, particularly African–American ones of whom 800 worked in Africa between 1820 and 1975 (Jacobs, 1987:123). Fyfe (1962:69’70), for instance, refers to Krio black Methodists using spiritual ‘shawts’ in the 1860’s.In the case of Ghana the Swiss Basel Mission  began bringing West Indian missionaries to Akropong as early as the 1830's’(Odamtten, 1975:128/9)[7]. Coplan (1985:42) and Kazadi (1973) both refer to missionaries introducing spirituals to South and East Africa respectively during the late nineteenth century. In 1911 the most famous American spiritual group, Fisk Jubilee Singers, actually visited South Africa (Erlmann, 1988).

 

A second avenue for the spirituals into Africa were the American post-bellum black minstrel outfits that from the late nineteenth century included this African-American religious idiom in their repertoires. African-American minstrel groups started touring Africa from the 1890’s[8]

and local minstrelsy became established soon after. Ebun Clark (1979:127) refers to a minstrel tradition in late nineteenth  Lagos whilst in Sierra Leone and Ghana it became established around World War One times.[9] The most well known impact of the spirituals in Africa, however, is the makwaya (i.e. ‘choir’) music of southern Africa that evolved in the late nineteenth century as a blend of African-American spirituals and ragtime with local music.

 

Reasons For This Early ‘Homecoming’

Various arguments have been suggested to explain the enormous artistic influence of the black Americas on Africa and these divide into two: namely, a) socio-historical similarities and b) performance similarities. I will turn to each in turn.

 

Early Socio-Historical Similarities Between Africa and the Black New World

Similarities or ‘resonances’ between the black literature of the United States and South Africa have been commented on by Jacobs (1989:6). He points out that African-Americans were, after the post-bellum Reconstruction period, placed under the repressive ‘Jim Crow’ system that Jacobs equates South Africa’s  apartheid one. Moreover, on both sides of the Atlantic black migrant labour was important. Coplan (1982:123) and Erlmann (1988:335) extends this idea to help explain the impact of African-American popular music and entertainment on the identity of black urban South Africans.

 

These arguments are less tenable in Ghana and other Anglophone West African countries where the colonial economies were based on peasant cash-crops and where there were few white settlers. However in the 1880’s there was a shift in British colonial policy that made a quantum leap in institutional racism, putting it on a par with the ‘Jim

Crow’ laws of the same period. This change occurred after the discovery of quinine and the ‘Scramble for Africa’ when The British ‘indirect rule’ policy through traditional chiefs was instituted. This denied power to the local coastal elites[10]. As a result the early West African ‘nationalist generation’[11] was born and the first wave of elite independent African churches sprang up which fostered vernacular choral hymns equivalent to South Africa’s makwaya music.

 

Performance Similarities

Many musicologists have noted the  huge impact of Black American performance on Africa. The Stearns (1968:16) call it ‘cultural feedback’[12],  whilst Professor A. A. Mensah (1971/2:124), calls it a ‘homecoming’, Roberts (1968:16) a ‘natural affinity’, Kubik (1981:16) ‘something familiar in new garment’ and Farris Thompson (1991:2) a shared ‘Afro-Atlantic world’. All these expressions help provide an answer – that African survivals and retentions [13] embedded in Black Diasporic performance  have returned to source.

 

The pioneer American ethnomusicologists into African-American performance Merriam (1955), Waterman (1952) and Nettl (1956) provide a useful concept here that they call the ‘analogue’ effect. This posits that the rate of acculturation or syncretism between two interacting cultures increases with the more common or analoguous features they share.[14]

 

In the light of what has already been said in connection with African survivals in the New World we can say that in the case of the high degree of Black Diasporic/African syncretism it is a matter of a ‘homologue’ as well as an ‘analogue’ effect.

 

Mass Communication and Developmental theorists have also come up with ideas similar to the ‘analogue/homologue’ one, such as Theodore Newcomb’s ‘cultural coordination’ concept (1953) that sees cross-cultural selection being dependent on a familiar or shared environment. From the Nigerian Luke Uche’s  work (1987) on the popular music of his own country he coins the term ‘cultural triangulation’ that emphasises the active selection of foreign elements into a host country. These ideas both help negate older ‘modernisation’ or ‘dependista’ theories ones that see development stemming from an advanced metropolitan ‘centre’ to a passive ‘periphery’.[15]

 

In short, African popular entertainers from as early as the late nineteenth century began actively selecting materials from the black side of imported  American and European performance norms, for they intuitively recognised something of their own in ‘new guise’ and were thus able to easily incorporate it back into their evolving urban idioms. Through this Black Trans-Atlantic feed-back cycle what was lost though slavery was, in various identical and transmuted ways, returned home to Africa in the twentieth century. Furthermore,  although black diasporic slaves, missionaries and soldiers were sent to Africa by whites to help colonise and christianise the continent, they ironically acted as a catalyst in the formation of ‘de-colonised’ popular music, dance drama  that reflected and articulated indigenous  ideals and aspirations.

 

B) VERNACULAR-RURAL FEED-BACK

 

The idea that social systems inevitably move in a one way direction from primitive to modern goes way back to the nineteenth century  social Darwinists and the diffusionist Kulturkreis school. This was followed by  British Structural-Functionalist anthropologists and related comparative musicologists who studied so-called ‘static’ village societies and their ‘archaic’ music.[16]  A more modern version of this model is the ‘dependista’  ones of Mass Communication and Developmental Theories that, as mentioned earlier, involves modernisation from centre to periphery.[17]

 

In the case of the evolution of western music from traditional/rural forms  to technological/urban  the above linear models do have a historical basis, as over the centuries rural folk-music did gradually die out and become replaced by the popular music of the urban masses. A similar trajectory is thought to apply to the development of the African-America blues, from rural Louisiana to the electric blues of cities such as Chicago.[18]

 

However, in Africa social change has been so rapid that both the urban popular idioms and older traditional ones co-exist together and are thus in constant dialogue with each other. What Raymond Williams (1974) would call ‘residual’ artistic features are therefore alive and kicking and so can be ‘re-worked’ (Szwed, 1970:226) into the acculturated urban context.

 

Various writers on African popular music and entertainment have noted popular performance moves simultaneously in two direction, from traditional to modern and vice-a-versa. Kubik (1981:99) talks of the ‘re-integration of traditional music’ into East African popular music, whilst Waterman (1988:52) notes the ‘rural feedback’ going on in urban Nigerian music. Coplan (1985:231) and Kayvu (1978:17) comment on  ‘reverse urbanisation’ in South Africa and Kenya and Barber (1987:15) makes similar observation concerning Yoruba popular drama.

 

In Ghana there has been a similar double process going on over the last century which I call ‘progressive indigenisation’ (1994: 250 ff.). This complex process can, furthermore, be divided into stages. Primary acculturated popular performance forms have evolved in the coastal ports and castle towns where there has been long contact with westerners. These primary ‘fusion’ styles are then introduced into the rural/provincial hinterland where they become de-acculturated as they blend with indigenous performance to create secondary and even tertiary local genres that give rise to  various regional and  neo-traditional genres. Let us take some specific Ghanaian examples.

 

 

‘Palmwine’ Guitar Music

What we today call ‘palmwine’ music evolved with the adoption of sailor’s instruments such as the guitar. The initial  indigenisation  of this music was carried out by the Kru mariners of Liberia who applied the African oppositional plucking technique to the Spanish guitar. Secondary de-acculturation took place in Ghana when the Kru/castal style moved into the Akan hinterland and fused with the  local seprewa harp-lute music whose melodies move modally[19] rather than follow western harmonic progesssions. This resulted in the 1930’s of a regionalised form of ‘palmwine’ music known as ‘odonson’ or ‘Akan blues’ . Similar coastal-to-inland guitar-style trajectories have been observed in the sukuti’ and ‘benga beats’ of East Africa by Kubik (1981:93), Kayvu (1978:116) and Low ( 1982:21).[20]

 

Ghanaian Comic Opera

The Ghanaian concert party has its origin in coastal local elite imitations of imported music-hall, particularly its, tap-dancing,  ragtime music and minstrel black-face sketches where one has the ironical situation of an African copying a white copying a black (i.e. African-American songs, dances, humour and dialect)[21].  The initial indigenisation of Ghanaian concert party took place in the 1930’s when Bob Johnson and the Axim Trio to it into the rural hinterland. As this commercial genre had to take into account a fee paying audience it began to utilise the vernacular languages and incorporate folk motives from the Akan Ananse-story tradition. As will be mentioned later, a further indigenisation or de-acculturation took place after the Second World War.

 

3) The ‘Progressive Indigenisation’ of  Ghanaian Brass Bands  

As noted earlier, local Fanti brass-band adaha music spread throughout southern Ghana between the 1880’s and 1920’s. In the 1930’s a ‘poorman’s’[22] version called ‘konkoma’ appeared that utilised local percussion and voices instead of expensive imported instruments. Konkoma in turn influenced the Akan recreational drum-dance style known as ‘akweya’ or ‘aways’ ( Opoku,1966: 25), Ewe borborbor neo-traditional drumming and the popular music of western Nigeria. Ranger (1975:112) and Mitchell (1958) note a similar ‘rural adaption’ and ‘tribalisation’ of East African ‘beni’ brass-band music as it moved inland from the coast after the First World War.

 

The Simpa Recreational Music of Dagbon

During the 1930’s coastal Ghanaian popular performance styles such as highlife, gome and  brass-band music spread into the northern part of the country. In the Dagomba traditional area this led to a new youthful ‘simpa’ drum-dance style that fused Dagomba recreational music with these southern influences. A clue to the southern imput into neo-traditional simpa music is the name itself: which is the local one for the port town of Winneba. Simpa provides an example of secondary de-acculturation and the regionalisation of primary acculturated coastal music.[23]

 

 

C) PAN-AFRICAN SENTIMENTS

 

The Second World War acted as a general catalyst for  independence movements and it is from that time that some African popular musicians and entertainers  attempted to indigenous their performances (and records)  in a self-conscious ideological way, in line  with the ‘African personality’, ‘authenticity’ and Pan-African ideals. The newly emerging nation’s independence movements was spear-headed by mass political parties consequently the popular music of the masses was drawn into the struggle.

 

In Ghana popular theatre groups such as the Axim Trio and Bob Ansah’s concert party staged pro-Nkrumah plays[24] and Bob Vans actually changed the name of his Burma Trio to the Ghana Trio in 1948, the year of the Christianburg shooting and boycott of European shops. In 1952 the highlife guitarist E.K. Nyame formed his Akan Trio concert party that for the first time fully integrated highlife into the dramas and performed exclusively in the vernacular: so completing the Africanisation of this genre begun before the war by Bob Johnson and the Axim Trio. However, E.K.’s motives were partly political for as he put it he wanted to get away from the ‘colonial ideology and British mind’. Indeed, he wrote forty highlifes in support of Nkrumah and accompanied Prime Minister Nkrumah  on a state visit to Liberia in 1953.[25]

 

Other highlife guitar bands that supported Nkrumah were those of  Kwaa Mensah, I.E.Mason, the Fanti Stars, Onyina, Bob Cole and Squire Addo.[26]   Moreover, the 1950’s neo-traditional Oge music of the Ga people and the borborbor of the Ewes became identified with Nkrumah’s Convention Peoples Party[27].

 

The famous Tempos highlife dance-band of E.T. Mensah played at CPP rallies and its brilliant blend of highlife, swing and calypsos was emulated by numerous Ghanaian and Nigerian dance bands during the 1950’s and 60’s. Infact, the Tempos jazzy highlife sound became the sound-symbol or zeitgeist of the early independence era as its use of a western jazz-combo format to play African music reflected independence itself, when the western socio-economic colonial format became Africanised.[28]

 

After independence, Nkrumah, recognising  the vital role of local popular entertainment  for the CPP mass movement and independence struggle endorsed numerous state highlife bands and concert parties.[29] Some, like E.K.Nyame’s guitar-band and the Broadway/Uhuru dance-band accompanied him on trips abroad or represented Ghana at international events and festivals. In this policy Nkrumah was very much in line with the socialist governments of Guinea, Mali and Tanzania that fostered popular music for nation building due to its non ‘tribal’ and trans-ethnic nature.[30] Nkrumah also encouraged the formation of two unions for popular musicians  and for concert party performers, which were affiliated to the Trade Union Congress and CPP.

 

From the 1960’s Pan-Africanism and ‘black consciousness’ was augmented in Africa by a new generation of Black American artists such as John Coltrane, James Brown, Aretha Franklin, Jimmy Cliff  and Bob Marley who came to the fore after the civil-rights marches in the United States and independence in the Caribbean. These musicians therefore usher in  more radical musical ideals such as the ‘Afro fusions’ of American jazz musicians, the ‘Black and Proud” and ‘Afro’ fashions of soul and funk music and the ‘roots’ and rastafarian sub-cultures of West Indians. These in turn influenced the Afro-rock and Afro-beat of Ghana’s Osibisa and Nigeria’s Fela Kuti, the Chimurenga (Struggle) music of Zimbabwe’s dread-locked Thomas Mapfumo and the African versions of reggae by Sonny Okosun, Alpha Blondy and Lucky Dube that provide   critiques of  western ‘Babylon’.

 

I will close this section by providing three specific example of Ghanaian musicians who were influenced by a combination of the independence ethos  and imported Afro-centric ideas. One is Guy Warren  who was originally the drummer of the Tempos highlife band, then moved to the United States in the 1950’s and 60’s to play jazz. But he  ended up rather introducing African elements into jazz and then went back to indigenous drums and decided to call himself Kofi Ghanaba ‘son of Ghana’.[31]

 

Another example if the highlife guitarist Koo Nimo who played with I.E Masons guitar-band. After travelling abroad he was exposed to jazz and the Brazilian bossanova which helped him in the late 1960’s to return to the roots of highlife: namely the acoustic ‘palmwine’ music which he calls ‘up and up’ .[32] A final example is the highlife dance band percussionist Nii Ashitey who in 1973  (together with the playwright Saka Acquaye) created the rootsy Wulomei band. Except for the guitar this group did away with western instruments and triggered of an explosion of similar Ga cultural groups that played a mixture of highlifes and Ga folk-songs. Ashitey told me that what prompted him to move from dance-band to cultural group was that he wanted  the youth  to forget foreign music and ‘do their own thing’: the title of one of James Browns popular soul numbers,[33]

 

 

CONCLUSION

 

Three avenue to de-colonisation of popular entertainment have been presented: namely the intuitive/artistic selection of analogues/homologues  from the black diasporic end of the imported performance spectrum. Secondly the progressive indigenisation of coastal styles as it moved into the hinterland and adapted to less westernised paying audiences. Finally, after the Second World War with independence, Pan Africanism and the black consciousness ideas embedded in imported black performance, a more ideologically conscious and political indigenisation took place. Let us conclude with a few extra points.

 

The Dual Hegemonic/anti-Hegemonic nature of Popular Entertainment

The acculturated popular performing arts of Africa is often depicted as becoming more and more westernised. However as noted earlier, an opposite process is also going on. In this case western elements  are assimilated into the local context  creating more indigenous, regional and neo-traditional genres that have helped in forging  anti-colonial, national and Pan-African identities. This double nature of African popular entertainment supports the views of Antonio Gramsci, Raymond Williams and the mass communication theorists Enzenberger (1974), Bigsby ( 1976) and Carey (1975). They opposed the Frankfurt School of Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse  that considered popular art and culture as a social narcotic and false consciousness that helped the elites suppress the masses and consolidate their ruling hegemony.[34]

 

More recent research into popular music genres undergoing Anglo-American commercial saturation also supports this double view of popular culture music. These  include Wallis and Malm (1984), Frith (1989), Featherstone (1990) and the previously mentioned Luke Uche who all believe that popular music has an anti-hegemonic function  and so can enrich local cultures as well as homogenise them.

 

Popular Entertainers as National Heroes

The fact that the development of acculturated Ghanaian popular entertainment also  includes a second de-acculturating current  has a great importance on the way local popular artists are viewed. If Ghanaian popular performance simply evolved through  the gradual accretion of western elements onto an essentially African core then local artists are nothing more than colonial stooges and  ‘bastardisers’ of African culture. If, as the paper suggests, an opposite process is going on, then these artists and groups that have indigenised and de-acculturated popular performance should be considered as cultural heroes who have helped create a modern national identity. Indeed artists such as Bob Johnson, E.T. Mensah. E.K. Nyame and other to many to mention  are just as much national heroes as are the patriotic art musicians Phillip Gbeho and Ephraim Amu: as all have artistically contributed to the de-colonisation process.

 

3) Popular Artists as Creators of  Trans-Ethnic and  Pan- 

African Identity

As noted previously the performance forms of Ghanaian and African popular artists are often super-ethnic and therefore act as an artistic lingua franca in the polyglot cities. Indeed, the African popular artist  stands at the nexus of urban and rural, the old and new, black and white, local and imported, the commercial and artistic, the elite and the masses – which as why I have referred to them as the ‘heroes of the cultural cross-roads’ (1994:chapter 15). Moreover and like art musicians, popular performers help in nation building as their genres help fashion a national rather than  ethnic or ‘tribal’ identity. The United States has its jazz, Brazil the samba, Tanzania its Swahili jazz and Ghana its highlife. Furthermore, some  African popular performance idioms have become Pan-African as they have crossed all African national boundaries. Those I am particularly thinking of are Congo jazz, Afro-beat, South African township jazz and of course Ghana's highlife.

 

 

 

The Current Ghanaian Wave of Electronic Black Diasporic Music in Ghana 

At the moment it is electronic rap and hip-hop dance-music that are the latest black diasporic inputs into Ghana and these are, amongst the urban youth, swamping the local highlife. However as our broad look at the evolution of highlife has shown acculturation and trans-culturation occurs in three stages: namely direct imitation, assimilation and re-synthesis into indigenous genres and contexts. It is likely that as time passes this process will also occur with the present youth fad for imported rap and hip-hop. Indeed local vernacular  variants  have already emerged which the youth call ‘hip-life’[35] (i.e. hip-hop plus high-life) which, like the earlier ‘burgher highlife,[36] uses few musicians and lots of electronic instruments and gadgets.

 

 Besides using local languages to some extent Ghanaian  bands have also de-contextualised local rap  from the violent and oppressive black city ghettoes of America where it is the aggressive street-music of the local ‘hood’ (neighbourhood).[37] For in Ghana hip-life is rather an identity symbol for the present generation of Ghanaian city youth who are moving  towards artistic  individualism and a rejection of all forms of live performance as old-fashioned. Because of electronic instrumentation, multi-track recording studios and lip-synching to video clips it is now possible to be a superstar without a band. Young artists are therefore able to easily become  soloists who mainly project their private feeling about romantic love.[38] Hip-Life is therefore acting as a musical barometer for the emerging individualistic ethos of Ghana[39] – and it use electronics adds an artificial flavour   that clearly distinguishes it from older forms of live local popular dance-music.[40]

 

I should conclude by saying that the decline of live  popular performance and current fashion for electronic artificiality is not a problems caused specifically by imported African-American rap and hip-hop, but rather a global one of how humanity is going to deal with machine consciousness. In the West there has already been a reaction to over-produced  ‘techno-pop’ in the form of the live ‘unplugged’ approach, the re-cycling of old hits and the general interest in ‘roots’ and ‘world music’. It may be that the next generation of Ghanaian youth, to contrast themselves from the present one, may take a similar ‘sankofa’ course of returning to live performance and older resources. In this they will have a tremendous advantage over western youth, as in Ghana folk-music and dance are not dead and gone but alive and kicking.

 

5) The West Colonised Africa: African Musically Colonises the West

Let us end on an upbeat note. As is well known the West  colonised Africa and plundered it for slaves and other resources. Furthermore the technology created by the West since the Industrial Revolution is now globally dominant. The great mystery is that why therefore does not the art music of the West, that is meant to represent the pinnacle of musical evolution, also reign supreme. Instead, during the twentieth century intellectual art music imploded into various discordant, atonal, randomised and mathematically obscure ‘isms’. Into this musical vacuum came black dance-music, first from the Americas followed from the 70’s by the international interest in Afro-pop and ‘world music’. In short,  not only has African acculturated popular performance been partially de-colonised over the last century or so, but at the same time black music has colonised the world.

 

 

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