Suchergebnisse

This article revisits the cultural history of Guinea in the three decades following independence through focusing on the musical activity of Miriam Makeba, the exiled South African singer who resided in the country between the years 1968 and 1986. Recent scholarship has illuminated the vast investment of the Guinean state in developing modern national culture as part of the process of decolonisation as well as the limited freedom of expression, imposed by the state, that subjugated local cultural production. While these studies have concentrated primarily on Guinean cultural agents, this paper explores transnational dimensions within the cultural politics of Guinea. It highlights Makeba's emplacement in Guinea in the context of nation building, Pan-Africanism, cold war politics and black transnational cultural exchanges. By focusing on the disparity between textual sources and musically embedded meanings extracted from Makeba's music recorded in Guinea, this paper recasts Makeba as a conduit of African-American musical influences in the Guinean scene. By doing so, it uncovers cultural spaces that were not subordinated to official state ideology mediated through print culture, and thus have hitherto been unrecognised in mainstream historiography.

History and memories of African liberation cannot be complete without the mention of some women who, through many means in many places, resisted colonialism, slavery and apartheid. Prominent amongst them are Funmilayo Kuti of Nigeria, Muthoni wa Kirima of Kenya and Miriam Makeba of South Africa who all engaged in different resistance politics in ensuring that Africa was liberated. Using the life history approach, this paper takes a behavioural exploration into the similarities and distinctions in their politics, with a view to making certain generalizations considered useful for the final journey of African liberation currently being embarked upon: Decolonization. One generalization is that certain socialization patterns aided the success of these women's struggles. The other is that the different means and environments of their resistance notwithstanding, the trio of Kuti, wa Kirima and Makeba took advantage of some intertwined dominant global ideas to command local and international supports. We recommend that today's girls and women of Africa should explore both of these for achieving their diversified individual goals while at the same time emphasising the indivisibility and final liberation of Africa.

History and memories of African liberation cannot be complete without the mention of some women who, through many means in many places, resisted colonialism, slavery and apartheid. Prominent amongst them are Funmilayo Kuti of Nigeria, Muthoni wa Kirima of Kenya and Miriam Makeba of South Africa who all engaged in different resistance politics in ensuring that Africa was liberated. Using the life history approach, this paper takes a behavioural exploration into the similarities and distinctions in their politics, with a view to making certain generalizations considered useful for the final journey of African liberation currently being embarked upon: Decolonization. One generalization is that certain socialization patterns aided the success of these women's struggles. The other is that the different means and environments of their resistance notwithstanding, the trio of Kuti, wa Kirima and Makeba took advantage of some intertwined dominant global ideas to command local and international supports. We recommend that today's girls and women of Africa should explore both of these for achieving their diversified individual goals while at the same time emphasising the indivisibility and final liberation of Africa.

This article sets the itineracy of antiapartheid expressive culture to work in relation to exiled South African jazz singer Miriam Makeba. It revisits accounts of transnational cultural circulation on the part of Rob Nixon, Paul Gilroy, and others to argue that the diffusion of South African cultural formations outward from South Africa offers historiographic traction over other Cold War settings. Throughout the international antiapartheid struggle, South African expressive culture was channeled through local paradigms of reception in the world beyond, in taut negotiation with aesthetic, institutional, linguistic, and political considerations. Instances of cultural translation, catachresis, and slippage resulting from the deterritorialization of South African cultural formations can thus be contextualized, historicized, and turned back reflexively on other conjunctures, to defamiliarize existing scholarship. Makeba's long exile in Ahmed Sékou Touré's Guinea between 1969 and 1986 is examined in the light of these claims. Here, Makeba crosses a theater of intense ideological contestation following Touré's 1968 socialist cultural revolution, illuminating some of its constitutive features. The article concludes with a consideration of Makeba's agency as performer at the interface between militant cultural nationalism and state prohibition in revolutionary Guinea.