Etran Finatawa is known as a “Desert Blues” or “Nomad Blues” band from Niger. They are a well travelled group of Tuareg and Wodaabe-Fulani musicians who recently performed in several South African cities. Their official website, which makes sure the reader understands that these two communities have an antagonistic relationship, markets the band as, “a group of ten musicians who wanted to unite these two nomadic cultures as a symbol of peace and reconciliation.” I caught their performance—the touring and recording group has only five of the ten members—in Port Elizabeth on the 10th of October 2009, hosted by the Alliance Francais at Downtown in Central. In the first of these posts on the cultural politics of live music in South Africa, I try to decide if it was a good night out or not.
Selling difference and reconciliation
It isn’t that I think Herman’s Head was a particularly good television program—it was more or less watchable. It’s just that, probably due to the fact that it was aired on M-Net during developmentally formative years, it often structures conversations I have with myself. But instead of Herman’s four-part Greek Chorus—Angel, Animal, Genius, Wimp—sitting in the attic ruminating over decisions, I have three people substituted from a bench the length of popular culture. There are regulars, of course, but the combinations change. And so it was that after the Etran Finatawa performance in PE I sat on the steps outside of Downtown going over what had just happened, with Hunter S. Thompson, Woody Allen and Patti Smith in the attic.
“That guitarist was out of this universe, utterly stupendous. And the drummer on that plastic ball that looks like an old buoy…that he beats with a ring…Patti, give me a light,” Hunter S. Thompson says, with a cigarette, clamped in a sleek black filter, between his teeth, “unlaleewable.” A lung-full of smoke comes out with the second go, “unbelievable.”
“Gourd, I believe that ‘old buoy’ is called a gourd. And yes, Thompson, I’m sure you felt that it was one of those moments we were ‘riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave’ and that ‘we were winning,’ and so on. But out of this universe, are you serious? The only universe it was outside of was middle-class white Port Elizabeth. It was pure Orientalism—Edward Said would have worked up quite a froth over this. If he was here, hypothetically speaking, and we got out a sphygmomanometer it would show dangerously elevated blood pressure.”
“Edward Said…are you serious? Allen, you’re a namedropping snob. Make yourself useful and fetch us all one of those free glasses of champagne at the counter at the top of the stairs,” says Hunter S. Thompson.
“I would but I’m pretty certain they were finished during the curtain raiser. Perhaps it was because of her erotic dance moves or because nobody knew what the hell a belly dancer from Port Elizabeth had to do with a desert-blues band from Niger, but people were thirsty. Trust me on this one, the freebies are done.”
“Patti, tell this pretentious idiot the band was great,” Hunter S. Thompson says with his forehead in his hand.
“Sorry, Patti, I want to hear what you have to say and please don’t think me silencing the feminine voice here or anything, but it’s not that I didn’t like the music. The music was unbelievable. I am just not sure about how it was staged. It reminded me of when they bring kids in from communities next to game parks and dress them in skins and make them dance for the tourists. Except this was the gala version, but no matter how much you gloss something…why, for instance, did we need that old fashioned anthropological introduction to the band? Why were we given oysters and free drinks? Why the bloody belly dancer? And why, for heaven’s sake, was everyone dressed in funeral-wear to come and watch a gig? Did you see how the musicians came out afterwards? They were signing autographs in jeans and t-shirts. The guitarist played a Fender. And yet, there they were, performing and parading in full tribal uniform across the stage like ancient, nevertheless breathing artefacts. I blame their management. And, especially, the Alliance Francais. Don’t get me started on the French.”
“So tell me about the situation in Niger then, smarty pants,” says Patti Smith with her arm around Hunter S. Thompson.
“Well, I will, just let me go and make sure about those free champagnes, maybe I can get us some before this bunch finish off the lot.” Woody Allen makes his way awkwardly back into the crowd.
Just then the group I’m with amble down the stairs and onto the pavement. Discussion of the band and the evening in general continues. Michelle comments on how much she enjoyed the “rhythmic momentum” the musician playing the ankle-bells gave to each song; Clay notes that the way the guy played the guitar was like nothing he’d heard before; Phindi says that the belly dancer’s moves can be seen in late night clubs across the country: “nothing special, if you ask me” she says; my dad enquires whether we’ve bought the CD yet. The thing is that while much of the performance is perfectly ‘legible’ to the audience—a stage with a five piece band, roughly four to six minute songs, guitars, drums, vocals—something escapes our comprehension. Sure, the influence of Tinariwen, the internationally acclaimed Malian Tuareg band, is there and the songs are similarly guitar-driven. The chanting vocals do at times resemble those on, say, Talking Timbuktu, the 1994 collaboration between Malian Ali Farka Toure and Ry Cooder who, to be honest, introduced us—those brought up on rock—to Malian music. And, I suppose, Cuban as well. But Etran Finatawa is none of these. Nor is it, for the Mzansi-obsessed audience, the familiar guitar of Louis Mhlanga and it is certainly not Vusi Mahlasela. Etran Finatawa’s songs roll forward in a tightly coordinated but at the same time loose assemblage of highly affecting sounds, with interesting drum rhythms, with guitar work that while it leads doesn’t overshadow and certainly manages to be skillful without lapsing into an onanistic spectacle. I really did enjoy their music.
Woody Allen returns empty handed and slumps into his chair. “Thompson, that lot reminds me of your hotel lobby scene in Fear and Loathing. Those people are animals and someone did feed them booze.”
Patti Smith stands over Woody Allen, “Listen, you’re going to give yourself a stroke. I’ve been thinking about this while you were gone. The two tribes, right, which make up the band, are nomadic. And hear me out here…if nomadism is a kind of adaptation to the ecological conditions, to seasons, to rainfall and drought and so on, then they, the band, in an analogous way, have adapted to global conditions, they have moved into a corner of the consumerist landscape that is, for the time being, a seller’s market for the exotic. And perhaps it has been since Saartjie Baartman. Ethnicity is a commodity and they are trading on it. An audience with an old fashioned anthropological curiosity like we have here and in many places like it pay the bills. But that doesn’t mean it’s not real, that it’s only staged. The whole lot, all of it—the history of their tribes, the colonialists who provided the conditions for their feuding relationship, the global marketability of Africa—this is the real thing.”
“Can we just not call them tribes?” says Woody Allen.
In retrospect, both Woody Allen and Patti Smith had points. On the one hand, there was something rather fetishizing about the way the group were staged for their audience, something quite colonial. And if not colonial then whatever colonialism has become in the 21st century. (Inter-) nationalism? On the other hand, this may under-acknowledge the way in which the whole circuit of the performance on the evening can, as Patti Smith suggested, be read as a sublimation of the historically nomadic dispositions of these two communities in a new and extensive scene.
This is not to suggest that the performance was just a charade for their audience. But the point is that the musical arrangements—let alone their tribal identities—are not somehow before the staging, the promotion, the packaging or the portrayal of the band. The real musicians are not somehow before or outside of this representation. There is no before. The band and their music, in my view, have been formed within a global context where ethnicity is highly marketable. And, to risk being cynical here, so is reconciliation. Which we know all about. It is within this context that I think the performance should be heard and seen. The real thing is the simulation that shows this context. And the performance of ethnicity, taken as an adaptation, is not merely a colonial gaze on African musicians. Rather, the audience is, in complex ways, knotted into the broad context the performance reflects. I wish I could have asked the band. I tried, but all they had to offer was French and all I had to offer was English and a hundred and fifty bucks for their album.
On the whole, some of the performance—taken as a whole—was sad, some of it beautiful. A few of the exoticizing white people made me ashamed, but mostly it was just nice to hear such great music being made live. It is very difficult to give words to, precisely because I have very little clue of what Niger is like. And it’s difficult to find a position from which to connect with the music without doing so from some of the problematic positions described above.
What I would suggest is getting the album and finding a way to hear Etran Finatawa, whether that is as a consumer of music, a maker of music, a (South) African, a cynic or sentimentalist. Although you’ll probably struggle to find Desert Crossroads on the shelves at Musica, you can certainly order it or download it. And it’s worth it, they are out of this world. And I would far rather be sold this particular version of difference and reconciliation, than the tired motifs of suburban angst or more to the point a big night out.
To the Alliance Francais, thanks for bringing a great group of musicians, please don’t take it personally, I only mean most of what I say. Next month’s installment will take a look at BLK JKS, the band from Soweto who being hailed as the most important group of musicians to have emerged from South Africa in the past 20 years.
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