3 - Challenging the Score: Francophone African Reconfigurations of Jazz Today

Summary

As we saw in the previous chapter, the works of authors such as Soce, Dongala, and Beti approached jazz in a manner that evolved over time and that reflected these authors’ particular place and form of engagement with the racial score articulated through jazz. Ousmane Soce viewed the music with suspicion; Emmanuel Dongala invested it with a profound spiritual power that nevertheless found its limit in the material world of social and ideological engagements; and Mongo Beti began to look at it from a vantage point that combined nostalgia, idealism, and pragmatism. Indeed, in Beti, we already began to see the turn toward an entirely different relationship to jazz. The Cameroonian author made it work in a manner that simultaneously deconstructed the racial score and posited new modalities of reception, deploying jazz not as a ‘thing’ or idea, but as a heterogeneous series of diaspora aesthetics and performative practices.

Kangni Alem: Mirages d'Afrique

Kangni Alem, in his short stories (collected in La Gazelle s'agenouille pour pleurer) and his two ‘Ti-Brava’ novels (set in a mythical place recognizable as Togo), shows a persistent interest in music generally and jazz in particular. Indeed, various musicians from the jazz tradition appear, and meditations on the field occur repeatedly in his writing. Likewise, as is evident if one consults his blog, the author is an avid jazz fan and at one time hosted a jazz program on the radio in his hometown of Lome. There is therefore no question that Alem is committed to the music. However, his understanding of it is not linear, nor is his approach to its practitioners hagiographic. Indeed, one of the most intriguing aspects of his writing is his simultaneously laudatory and critical approach. As the title indicates, one novel in particular offers a full-length meditation on this African-American import: Cola Cola Jazz (2002). In a sense, Cola Cola Jazz, the first of the two ‘Ti-brava’ novels, offers a counter-narrative meditation on Soce's text, which I discussed in Chapter 2.