Happy Thursday from Jose Chameleone

Years later, and this song still cranks. I'd put it up there with Michael Jackson's "Off The Wall" as one of the greatest pop songs of all time. It has the same joyful and infectious feel of Jackson's best work.

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Toward an Acoustemology of Muslim Citizenship in Kenya

this is a great great article that, while linking music and citizenship, also provides a cultural window into Swahili coastal society. You can find out more about Andrew by going to his website. This excerpt is part of a larger chapter from a book called Music Sound, and Space: Transformations of Public and Private Experience as published by Cambridge University Press.

Toward an Acoustemology of Muslim Citizenship in Kenya

by Dr. Andrew J Eisenberg (from the December 2010 issue of Anthropology News)

The problem of Muslim belonging in predominantly Christian Kenya has taken on added urgency for academics and policymakers in recent years, in light of attacks by global Islamist militants on Kenyan soil, a massive influx of Muslim migrants from Somalia, and struggles over the future of the country’s Islamic courts system, among other factors. In my sound-centered research on social identification on Kenya’s Muslim- dominated coastal strip, I explore the contemporary conditions of Muslim citizenship—in the broad sense of social belonging within the nation-state—by taking an ethnographic ear to contestations over public space that happen in relation to public sound. My method- ological approach is grounded in Steven Feld’s (1996) acoustemology of place, which he describes as an inves- tigation into sounding and listening as ways of experi- encing and knowing physical and social environments. Here I lay out some basic coordinates for an acouste- mology of spatial politics and Muslim belonging on the Kenyan coast.

Hearing Spatial Politics

I begin with a story that crystallizes how sonorous contestations over public space articulate with larger issues of Muslim citizenship on the Kenyan coast. In July 2006, the Kenyan coastal village of Kikambala played host to a dramatic dispute between a local imam and a member of the coast’s expatriate commu- nity (a woman of apparent East Asian extraction). The dispute began after the imam’s mosque was fitted with new rooftop loudspeakers, including one aimed at the expatriate’s nearby house. The expatriate made her way over to the mosque early one morning to register her consternation at being jolted out of bed each morning by the predawn adhan (call to prayer). She arrived outside the mosque while the elongated tones of the sacred recitation were still resounding and began to shout her complaints toward the edifice. The imam soon emerged to investigate the disturbance and, on finding an angry woman vocalizing a dissonant counterpoint to the adhan, offered what he would later calmly describe as the only appropriate response: he punched the woman squarely in the eye.

The imam’s violent response was received with general approval from Muslims in the local commu- nity and beyond. Leaders of Kenya’s national Muslim organizations were soon standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the imam in hastily organized press conferences, arguing that his violent action, however regrettable, was carried out in accordance with Islamic law as well as common sense. The local community of worship- pers offered a similar defense of the imam, only in a more performative manner: in the gaze of television news cameras, a group of men began constructing a stone wall to block the footpath that the expatriate had used to reach their mosque. Given that it was only wide

enough to block the footpath, the wall was clearly a message, meant to communicate that the expatriate’s actions were an attack of an equivalent brutality to what she herself had suffered at the hands of the imam.

The clash between the expatriate and the imam in Kikambala makes visible and audible the presence of competing logics of public space on the Kenyan coast. In both the formulation and delivery of her complaint, the expatriate situated herself within the “neutral” public space of a liberal democratic nation-state, a space in which any sound may be marked as noise and any subject may address any other subject without regard to minority norms of social intercourse. The imam’s response, meanwhile, was grounded in an Islamic- Swahili logic of public space, which bears its own rules of conduct and address. By investigating epistemic disjunctures such as these through bodily practices of producing and receiving sound, I seek an analysis that stays close to the subject, one that hopefully stands in tension with the accounts of Muslim intentions and desires that pervade Kenyan (and global) media narratives.

Islam, Sound and Space

Charles Hirschkind (2006) provides an invaluable starting point for an acoustemological approach to Islamic-Swahili conceptions of public space in his discussion of Muslim subject formation as a matter of engagement with the quotidian “pious soundscape” of calls to prayer, Quranic recitations, and religious sermons. Though focused on Muslims in Cairo, Egypt, Hirschkind’s work bears directly on Muslims of the Kenyan coast (and elsewhere) who engage with similar sounds in similar ways. Through “correct” listening, Muslims in coastal Kenya, as in Cairo, cultivate bodily comportments and doxic understandings that are key to what it means to be a good Muslim. The sounding and listening practices associated with the pious sound- scape thus comprise an acousteme, a system of knowing in and through sound, within which sites of worldly action are sonically transformed into sacred topoi for the act of submission that is Islam. This idea is put forward in a hadith passage, albeit in different terms. In this passage, the prophet Mohammed is reported to have said, “When the Imam comes outside, the angels present themselves to listen to the khutba [the Friday sermon]” (Al-Bukhari 1997:23). According to this image, angels literally “present” themselves (make themselves present) in the physical world, within the space and time of the pious soundscape. Heavenly beings, that is, hear the imam’s words not through some mystical mode of listening, but by temporarily joining with human beings in their worldly environment, effecting a sacralization of space.

On the Kenyan coast, the pious soundscape’s sonic demarcation of Muslim space sets the stage for large and small struggles over conceptions of Muslim communal autonomy, even, one might argue, struggles for Muslim communal autonomy. The dispute between the expa-triate and the imam in Kikambala, which involved the participation of leaders of national Muslim organi- zations, provides an example of a large struggle over Muslim communal autonomy. One Swahili friend in the port city of Mombasa opened my eyes to a far subtler struggle, the visible evidence of which can be observed weekly during the Friday khutba, in the Muslim-Swahili neighborhood of Old Town in Mombasa. Referring to a mosque that sits just across a narrow road from a police station staffed mostly by non-Muslim, upcountry Kenyans, my friend told me, “You know, those polisi hear every word of the khutba just sitting there in the station. But if just one of them would stand outside like this”— he crossed his arms and puffed up his chest, imitating a haughty police officer’s posture—“listening. ...” He completed the thought with a simple “eh-hee,” indi- cating that such a move would certainly be taken as a serious provocation.

Doing Acoustemology

My friend’s perceptive ethnomethodological observa- tion of the social choreography that accompanies the pious soundscape in Mombasa Old Town highlights both the necessity and the difficulty of doing acouste- mology in the contested spaces of the Kenyan coast. Acoustemological research ideally generates theoret- ical knowledge through an active process of listening in, involving a personal engagement with sounds and subjects in their spatiotemporal contexts. Even at its best, this form of research is fraught with method- ological, ethical and practical challenges, all of which are amplified when a researcher from the global North works among Muslim subjects in the global South, given that the latter may reasonably fear being listened in on by the former. What precipitated my Swahili friend’s lesson on the politics of listening to the khutba was a problem that had resulted from my own inattention to these challenges: A few days earlier, some worshippers at a mosque close to my apartment in Mombasa Old Town became concerned that I was making an audio recording of the khutba, concerned enough to hold a meeting on the matter after the fact. Though I was trying not to be conspicuous in making my recording, neither was I hiding what I was doing. I was naively comfortable in the knowledge that I was not doing anything in violation of professional ethics: Not only was I recording a public broadcast in public space, I was recording a broadcast of which I would have “[heard] every word ... just sitting there” in my apartment. I failed to understand, however, that as a white foreigner, my act of “[standing] outside like this,” recording, was not only inherently suspicious but also a symbolic perfor- mance within the context of an ongoing struggle over Muslim communal autonomy. Fortunately, good friends who were respected members of the local community quickly defused tensions and allayed fears in the wake of my faux pas. But the embarrassing episode stays with me as a visceral reminder that ethnographers also carry particular understandings of publicity, privacy, sound, and space, which may be subject to contestation.

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Muthoni the Drummer Queen -Mikono Kwenye Hewa

This chune got kinda of a garage feel to it. I like.

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Khadja Nin -- Sambolera Mayi Son

Arise Magazine put me on to this beautiful song from Burundi's Khadja Nin. Enjoy!

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Hussein Machozi "Kwa Ajili Yako"

Check out the album on Bab Kubwa (click the title)

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Them Mushrooms- Kazi ni Kazi

If you don't know about Them Mushrooms, you better find out. Actually if you ever visited Kenya or Tanzania, or took Kiswahili courses, then you DO know them, you just don't know you do. They wrote the song, "Jambo Bwana", which we sang in Swahili class enough times for me to memorize the lyrics. The song was later covered by Safari Sound Band, whose CD is EVERYWHERE throughout the tourist spots in Dar and Zanzibar especially. Anyway, check this joint: Kazi ni Kazi. Enjoy!

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Book Review: Muntu by Jaheinz Jahn

I can’t say enough about this book. Over 50 years old, it is still worth revisiting for the force for which it makes its defense of African thought, philosophy and religion. Janheinz Jahn, a German scholar, originally wrote Muntu in 1958, around the time of intellectual ferment of luminaries like Fanon, Cesaire, and Senghor. The American edition first appeared in 1961 and was named book of the year by at least one major publishing organization. Jahn lays out the characteristics of African thought as illuminated through New World African religions like Santeria and Voudoun.

Unlike so much of today’s timid postmodernist theorization. Jahn is unafraid of the broad comparison and the book is infused with both an urgency born of passion for the subject matter, in addition to Jahn’s considerable erudition. He is equally at home discussing the implications of nommo, or the magic of the spoken word, as he is the function and symbols within Voudoun, or the difference between New World African religion and its parent in Africa. He also devotes a section to tracing the strands of African thought in the works of the so-called Negritude poets.

I will let William J. Austin, who has reviewed Jahn's work here, have the word on explaining the basic philosophical principles of African thought and aesthetics, according to Jahn:

The text is neatly divided into the major categories of African culture and religion, two forces which, as Jahn points out, flow in and out of one another like a river and its tributaries. Although Jahn makes mention of the cultures formed in northern Africa via the commingling of African and Arabic/Islamic impulses, his focus here is on “Black Africa,” or that larger portion of the continent below the Sahara. This section of Africa, however various in its individual cultural expressions, was surprisingly united in an overall religious structure that informed the ritual of worship, as well as the more pedestrian day to day activities. This over-arching structure contains four major forces: Muntu, Kintu, Hantu, and Kuntu. Muntu, or “human being,” finds its earliest known expression in the culture of the Bantu tribe. As a “force” it is plural, reflecting the myriad variations of humanity. Muntu, however, is not a self-activating force, but rather ‘sleeps,” dormant, while awaiting its activation via a more active sub-force known as Nommo. Nommo, quite simply, is language. The priests and elders of a tribe are most invested with Nommo, and maintain the power to enliven natural objects, and even man-made ones, through a ritualistic process of naming. But all human beings participate in Nommo to some degree. In fact, it is not until a parent names a child, that the child may be considered human, may be said to participate in Muntu. What we have, then, in the concepts of Muntu and Nommo, is not unlike the structuralist/post-structuralist emphasis on language as the begetter of personhood, of humanity. The linkage is certainly there, but it also obtains between Nommo and the Biblical declaration that “In the beginning was the word.”

In any event, Jahn’s detailed analysis makes clear the amazing similarities that reach across seemingly isolated cultures. Like Muntu, Kintu is plural, and represents the force or “spirit” in all non-human objects, animate and inanimate, including animals. Hantu is place and time, and Kuntu, perhaps the most complex concept of the four, represents modality, i.e., quality, style, rhythm and beauty. All four forces are united linguistically by the suffix and concept of NTU, or the essential compatibility and coherence of all things, human and non-human. The many in the one, the one in the many — this is familiar philosophical ground, and more evidence that Nommo does indeed unite all cultures, races, creeds, in their differences.

The one fault with the book is its almost complete lack of discussion about the impact of Islam and the Arabs on African culture and religion. No doubt there are other books that do this admirably, but it would have been quite interesting for Jahn to extend his thesis to some of the cultures of East Africa such as Somalia, the Swahili Coast or Zanzibar. Or even Ethiopia…the point being that these cultures have a much more ancient tradition of contact with Abrahamic religions, ergo we might expect to see a different kind of integration within an overall philosophy of Muntu then that which occured in the Americas under Jahn's rubric of neo-African culture.

How does Neo-African culture apply to African Islamic cultures of the East Coast, where extensive cultural mixing also took place? No doubt a variety of practices exist today which reincarnate the ancient beliefs in new forms, for example the practice of praying to Sufi saints and venerating their burial sites as holy places.

What is perhaps most interesting about Jahn’s thesis, as Austin pointed out, is that he brings out the true monotheism at the core of most African religion, explaining that this ONE God who is RULER OVER ALL is so distant from humanity that humans needs a variety of intermediaries in order to tap into the power of GOD's Being.

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Top of the Hip Hops (Afropop in Dar 2004)

It was a long taxi ride from Dar es Salaam center to the Steers hamburger restaurant outside town, and we were already late. What seemed to be a disastrous start to an interview turned out to be the beginning of a very exciting journey through the lively Tanzanian hip-hop scene. I was curious to meet them, Tanzania's Top of the Hip-hops. As it turned out it was all very easy; the hip-hop community in Dar es Salaam is small and friendly. Different from what I expected, most artists do not have a manager or agent who deals with the media. From the first contact it was a very personal encounter. In just one week, photographer Lydia Martin and I went to see more then ten of the hottest artists and groups in the hip-hop scene, producers and promoters. I was amazed how ambitious and professional the artists are. It was my second time in East Africa, and not knowing much about Tanzania's music industry I had not expected to find hip-hop such a big business. Most of the artists have been working successfully in the music scene for more than five years, and Tanzanian hip-hop, better known as Bongo Flava, continues to grow in popularity. TV and radio programs are dedicated to Bong Flava, which is also reflected in the sales figures of some of hip-hop albums, eg. T.I.D's album Sauti ya Dhahabu sold over 200,000 copies in Tanzania alone.
FOR MORE CLICK HERE

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