Civil taxis and wild trucks: the dialectics of social space and subjectivity in Dimanche à Bamako

Civil taxis and wild trucks: thedialectics of social space andsubjectivity in Dimanche àBamako

RYAN THOMA S S K I NN E R183 Whitegate Ln, Wayzata, MN 55391, USAE-mail: [email protected]

AbstractThis article presents a close reading (or listening) of Amadou & Mariam’s 2004 album, Dimanche àBamako, meaning ‘Sunday in Bamako’, produced ‘by and with’ world music maverick Manu Chao. Iconsider how Dimanche à Bamako musically renders, through sound and lyrical expression, the ten-sions of ‘global modernity’ in postcolonial Africa and its diaspora. ‘Global modernity’ refers to thefraught encounter between local actors and the globalised socio-economic conditions in which modernsubjects are increasingly embedded. By framing these local and global tensions in the context of a mod-ern African city, Dimanche à Bamako offers a theoretically sophisticated representation of urbanAfrican social space that, while rooted in a particular place (Bamako, Mali) attends to the widerworld in which a local sense of place gives way to the wanderlust and anxieties of living and labouringin a globalised world. Through critical application of Lefebvrian and Mande socio-spatial theory andfocused analysis of several of the album’s tracks, I argue that Dimanche à Bamako elucidates a dia-lectic of ‘civility’ and ‘wildness’ that shapes the way social space and subjectivity are conceived, lived,and perceived in urban African communities in an era of global modernity.

Introduction: a dialectic encounter1

Amadou and Mariam’s internationally acclaimed album Dimanche à Bamako (2004),2meaning ‘Sunday in Bamako’, produced ‘by and with Manu Chao’ is the product ofan unlikely encounter (see Figure 1). The Malian husband-and-wife duo AmadouBagayoko andMariamDoumbia have beenwriting light-hearted love songs and dance-able Afro-pop tunes since the late-1970s, taking their inspiration from amorous Frenchchanson, American rock ‘n’ roll, West African praise-singing, and bluesy Malian guitarmusic. Franco-Iberian musician Manu Chao has been pushing the boundaries of‘alternative’ and ‘world’ music since the mid-1980s, mixing punk rock, reggae, ska,North African raï, Latin American folk traditions, and minimalist electronica with inci-sive lyrical critiques of globalisation and political violence in the Global South. On thesurface, their musical interests and expressions present clear differences.

Political concerns are conspicuously absent from Bagayoko and Doumbia’ssentimental repertoire, though a general concern for socio-economic problems in

Popular Music (2010) Volume 29/1. Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010, pp. 17–39

doi:10.1017/S0261143009990365

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sub-Saharan Africa does inform their work (Bagayoko and Doumbia 1998, 1999,2002).3 By contrast, global political activism is essential to Chao’s hybrid, cosmopo-litan and folkloric aesthetic (Chao 2000, 2001, 2002, 2007). Yet, the unique blend ofplayful poetics and sober politics on Dimanche à Bamako makes for a compelling artis-tic dialogue, one that Bagayoko, Doumbia and Chao seem eager to cultivate. ‘Mali isa country of exchange’, Chao says. ‘There is always a tendency there to listen, toappreciate what comes from the outside, and to mix the two cultures, the differentways of seeing things’ (Brown 2005, p. 32). Emerging from this exchange,Dimanche à Bamako presents a sometimes sentimental, sometimes severe portrait ofthe Malian capital, Bamako, a city of over one million people sprawling alongthe upper Niger River, in an era of rampant globalisation. On the album, as inthe world, Bamako is familiar and foreign, proximate and distant, civil and wildall at once.

In this article, I am interested in how Dimanche à Bamako musically renders,through sound and lyrical expression, the tensions of what may be called ‘globalmodernity’ in Africa and its postcolonial diaspora. On the album, these ‘tensions’manifest in sentiments of celebration and cynicism, love and loathing, cast in aworld caught between personal desires for family cohesion and community develop-ment and the dehumanising demands of corrupt politics and an inequitable econ-omy. James Ferguson writes, ‘global modernity is characterized not by a simple,Eurocentric uniformity but by coexisting and complex sociocultural alternatives’.He asserts that the ‘successful negotiation’ of these alternatives ‘may hinge less onmastering a unitary set of “modern” social and cultural forms than on managingto negotiate a dense bush of contemporary variants in the art and struggle of living’(Ferguson 1999, pp. 251–2). By framing these tensions and alternatives in the contextof a modern African city, Dimanche à Bamako offers a theoretically sophisticated

Figure 1. The cover of Amadou and Mariam’s recording Dimanche à Bamako (2004) (Marie Dagnaux).

18 Ryan Thomas Skinner

representation of urban social space that, while rooted in a particular place (Bamako),attends to the wider world in which a local sense of place gives way to the wander-lust and anxieties of ‘the art and struggle of living’ in a globalised world.

My interpretation of the urban social spaces represented on Dimanche à Bamakobuilds primarily on the social thought and theory of the Mande world, the WestAfrican cultural group to which Bagayoko and Doumbia belong and from whichtheir music emerges.4 (Asked about their musical influences in press interviews,Bagayoko and Doumbia rattle off a number of rock and roll icons – Pink Floyd,Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, Jimi Hendrix – in addition to Cuban dancemusic, French chanson, and R & B broadcast on Radio Mali in the 1960s and 1970s.When pressed on the type of music they play, however, they are more concise:‘Bambara’, they say, referring to the predominant Mande sub-group in central andsouthern Mali [see Krukowski 2005]). On a conceptual level, Mande social space isdivided between civil space, centred on family compounds (luw) of which the city(dugu) is composed, and wild space (kungo) lying beyond the boundary of the city(dankun) and its surrounding fields ( forow) (see Figure 2).5 Broadly, it is the move-ment between civil and wild spaces that creates friction, dynamism, conflict, andcreativity in Mande society (see Bagayogo 1989), and it is precisely this movementthat Dimanche à Bamako elucidates.6

I begin my essay with a theoretical reflection on the dialectic nature of thealbum’s representation of social space, in which I offer a Lefebvrian reading of theMande spatial paradigm outlined above. Henri Lefebvre’s tripartite model of socialspace (1991) – made up of what he terms ‘lived’, ‘conceived’, and ‘perceived’space – is both consonant with and helps to elucidate the structural and processualcharacter of Mande social space represented on the album. Mande socio-spatialthought, in turn, helps to clarify and focus the conceptual density of Lefebvre’s theor-etical work. I flesh out this hybrid, Mande and Lefebvrian socio-spatial model byexamining the musical collaboration developed by Bagayoko, Doumbia and Chaofrom which representations of social space on Dimanche à Bamako derive theirmeaning. I do this by putting the artists’ personal and professional histories indialogue with the opening tracks, ‘M’bifé’ and ‘M’bifé (Balafon)’, which, I argue,introduce the dialectic ethos for the album as a whole, oriented around contrasting

Figure 2. Mande social space.7

Civil taxis and wild trucks 19

themes of intimacy (civility) and itinerancy (wildness). Applying this syncretic ethosof socio-spatial dialectics, I present a close reading of three pairs of songs fromDimanche à Bamako.

The first pair, ‘Taxi Bamako’ and ‘Camions Sauvages’ (‘Wild Trucks’), constitu-tes the narrative and analytic centre of my analysis by giving musical shape and lyri-cal substance to the socio-spatial dialectics I am proposing. Further, the personalnarratives embedded in each song elucidate the fraught character of urban Africansubjectivity, torn between the expectations of civility and the exigencies of wildnessin everyday life. In the next pair, ‘La Réalité’ (‘The Reality’) and ‘Sénégal Fast Food’, Iturn to the way these African renderings of urban space and subjectivity map ontoglobal experiences of travel and diaspora. This is where civil space (dugu, meaning‘town’ or ‘city’) indexes a sense of diasporic community and wild space (kungo,meaning ‘wilderness’ or ‘the bush’) points to the hardships of life abroad in theWest. Together, these two pairs of songs, along with the first two tracks discussedbelow, illustrate the way Dimanche à Bamako represents those who daily cultivateand negotiate the contested – civil and wild – spaces of urban Africa and itsdiasporas.

I conclude by examining a final pair of songs, ‘La Fête aux Village’ (‘The VillageParty’) and ‘Beaux Dimanches’ (‘Beautiful Sundays’), which present a kind of hope-ful synthesis of civility and wildness, spaces previously described in apparently irre-concilable opposition to each other. Together, these songs express what I am calling‘a civil space of global modernity’. Placed on either end of what may be the album’smost menacing portrayal of contemporary wildness, ‘Camions Sauvages’, the tracksfeature rich neighbourhood soundscapes, wistful and celebratory lyrics, sweet melo-dies, and cool and cadenced rhythms. Both songs call people together for commoncelebration, despite the ‘sad realities’ of global modernity, a message of hope andcommunal affection achieved both on the level of lyrical expression and recordedsound. ‘Beaux Dimanches’ (for which the album is named) is a particularly elegantexpression of this synthesis, showing how the civil pleasure of human sociability –rendered musically – can transcend life’s wild struggles.

Conceived and lived, wild and civil space

Before elaborating on the particular representations of Mande social space inDimanche à Bamako, it is necessary to consider the nature of social space in general.For this, I turn to the tripartite model of socio-spatial production outlined byHenri Lefebvre in The Production of Space (1991). This move is important for tworeasons: first, because I am positing a globalised extension of the Mande spatial para-digm, articulating dialectically between civil and wild space at home and abroad, it isnecessary to find a theoretical language that speaks to the global character of socialspace, relevant to a world of transnational migration, diaspora formation, and socio-economic globalisation; second, by putting a circumscribed ‘ethno-theoretical’ logicin dialogue with a more generalised expression of Western social thought and theory,I hope to both enrich the descriptive and analytic vocabulary the two systems indi-vidually encompass and demonstrate the epistemological consonances betweenapparently disparate conceptions of social space. While my choice of these two sys-tems of socio-spatial theory is conditioned by the particular nature of my academicresearch and training, I do believe there are strong conceptual resonances between


the two, making their juxtaposition and mutual application less arbitrary and subjec-tive, as I will show.

Lefebvre’s tripartite model differentiates between what he calls ‘conceived’,‘lived’, and ‘perceived’ space (Lefebvre 1991, pp. 38–40).8 Lefebvre describes con-ceived space as ‘the space of scientists, planners, urbanists, technocratic subdividersand social engineers, as of a certain type of artist with a scientific bent’ (ibid.,p. 39). In other words, conceived space refers to the strategic and formal orderingof space.9 On Dimanche à Bamako, these conceived spaces manifest in songs about pol-itical authority (‘La Paix’, ‘Politic Amagni’), urban (dis-)order (‘Taxi Bamako’,‘Camion Sauvages’), and the political economy of global modernity (‘Sénégal FastFood’, ‘La Réalité’). For Lefebvre, as for the artists and producers of Dimanche àBamako, conceived space tends toward the production of abstract space, a spacecharacterised by: authoritarian rule; alienation from nature, labour, society, and his-tory; the capacity for arbitrary application of violence; the decline of cultural works inthe arts; and the loss of indigenous lifeworlds through the extension of global capi-talist systems (ibid., pp. 49–52). This description of ‘abstract space’ is strikingly similarto recent characterisations of African postcolonies (Bayart et al. 1999; Mbembe 2001;Comaroff and Comaroff 2006) and directly illustrates the conception of ‘wildness’expressed in Dimanche à Bamako. This rapprochement of ‘wildness’ and ‘postcoloni-ality’ is significant. As I describe below, the wild spaces represented on the albumemerge in part from relations between a former colony (Mali) and metropole(France), articulated through inherently postcolonial struggles of global modernity,such as transnational migration.

In contrast to conceived space, lived space is ‘the space of inhabitants’ and‘users’. It describes the tactical and informal use of space. While lived space generallyoperates outside the formal, prescriptive logics of conceived space (in the privacy ofdomestic space, or on the social margins of state control), it remains subject to thelatter’s social and material prohibitions. Yet, lived space is also characterised bythe creative manipulation of the forms and structures of conceived space. InLefebvre’s words, lived space makes ‘symbolic use’ of the ‘objects’ of conceivedspace ‘which the imagination seeks to change and appropriate’ (Lefebvre 1991,p. 39). On Dimanche à Bamako, lived space figures in songs about intimacy andbetrayal (‘M’bifé’, ‘Djanfa’, ‘Gnidjougouya’), rural and urban ceremonies and rituals(‘La Fête au Village’, ‘Beaux Dimanches’), social and political solidarity (‘Coulibaly’,‘La Paix’), the value and difficulties of artistic expression (‘Artistiya’), and the natureof everyday sociability (‘Taxi Bamako’). Using the language of Mande socio-spatialthought, lived space represents the civil counterpoint to the dehumanised abstrac-tions, or wildness of conceived space.

Lefebvre’s generally pessimistic vision of the diminishing vitality of lived spacein the face of ever-expanding systems of abstract, conceived space in the context oflate-capitalism is pertinent to the socio-spatial representations in Dimanche àBamako. As I discuss in my analyses of ‘Camions Sauvages’, ‘La Réalité’, and‘Sénégal Fast Food’ below, the album evokes a real sense of socio-economic menacefrom what I am calling ‘the wildness of global modernity’, exemplified by an uncer-tain urban infrastructure, an unjust global economy, and a corrupt, repressive, andalienating post-/neo-colonial politics. Lefebvre’s language of ‘abstraction’ togetherwith his late-capitalist conception of lived space – what Ferguson describes as the‘art and struggle of living’ in global modernity – productively pushes Mande notionsof wild and civil space into a modern world of globalisation, neo-liberalism, and


postcolonial political economic relations. Though, as expressions of civility of inti-mate social relations portrayed on tracks like ‘M’bifé’, ‘Taxi Bamako’, ‘La Fête auVillage’, and ‘Beaux Dimanches’ indicate, Mande conceptions of civil space offer amore hopeful vision of lived space than the image of modern socio-cultural declineimplied in Lefebvre’s work. In Dimanche à Bamako, social space is celebrated as muchas it is cause for anxiety, so it is through the celebratory and anxious tensions of socialspace that the meaning of the album articulates. I will now consider how those ten-sions are introduced.

Intimate sounds and sentiments

Dimanche à Bamako begins with the strumming of an acoustic guitar and a child’svoice on the song ‘M’bifé’. ‘Amadou et Mariam, bonjour’, says the boy namedMamadou. ‘Comment allez-vous?’ (‘How are you?’) The guitar (presumablyChao’s) gently rocks between C major and A minor chords, sounding a sort ofmodal melancholy as an electric guitar (presumably Bagayoko’s) lightly picks outthe intervals of the chords, occasionally hammering on and pulling off on the secondfret of the G and D strings to create bluesy passing tones. After lingering on the Aminor for a measure, Manu Chao’s slightly coarse and nasal voice enters, singinga low ‘whoa’ over the song’s two chords. Light percussion from a pair of tablasjoins him. Then, Mariam Doumbia’s soulful mezzo-soprano sings the followinglines twice, in a mix of French and Bamana: ‘Chéri ne b’i fè / Kana taa ka ne to’(‘Dearest, I love you / Don’t leave without me’). Another layer is then added inthe mix with the light, warbling sounds of Mande music veteran Cheick TidianeSeck’s organ. ‘Kana ne maloya’ (‘Don’t bring shame upon me’), sings Doumbia. Asthe overall volume of the musical mix increases, with the percussion, organ, andchorus coming into dramatic relief, Doumbia implores her lover: ‘Serre-moi dansla main’ (‘Hold my hand’), ‘Embrasse-moi chéri’ (‘Hold me, [my] love’). As thesong rides over its climax, she repeats her affectionate refrain, now in French:‘Chéri, je t’aime’ (‘Dearest, I love you’).

Bagayoko and Doumbia first met in the mid-1970s at Bamako’s Institute for theYoung Blind (both lost their sight early in their lives) where they were members ofthe Institute’s Eclipse orchestra. At the time, Bagayoko had achieved local renownas a teenage guitarist for the legendary Bamako band, Les Ambassadeurs duMotel. Doumbia, who gave voices lessons at the Institute, had been singing atlocal weddings since the age of six, drawing inspiration from such singers asFanta Damba, Mokontafé Sacko, and Sira Mory Diabaté. At the Institute, they discov-ered a common passion for music and each other. As political and economic con-ditions worsened in their native Mali under the military dictatorship of MoussaTraoré (1968–1991), Bagayoko and Doumbia (now married) relocated to Abidjan,capital of neighbouring Côte d’Ivoire and home to a vibrant popular music scenein the 1970s and 1980s. There, they established themselves as ‘Amadou andMariam’, known locally as ‘the blind couple from Mali’.10

A quarter-century later, their shared personal and professional career, nowbased in Paris with major record label contracts, continues. Says Bagayoko: ‘Westill love each other, and we want to share our happiness with everyone. Many thingsbring us together: the music, the children, [and] the handicap. We always find a wayto get along. The strength of our marriage surprises people in Europe and Africa. In


twenty-five years, we haven’t been separated for more than a week’.11 The song‘M’bifé’, which in Bamana means ‘I love you’, exemplifies the twining of Bagayokoand Doumbia’s musical and marital lives, where sweet, simple melodies and tenderlyrical sentiments go hand in hand. The song is reminiscent of their first internationalhit, ‘Je Pense à Toi’ (‘I’m Thinking About You’) from Sou Ni Tile (Night and Day),released on EmArcy France in 1998. In it, Bagayoko sings plaintively, ‘Ne m’abon-donne pas, mon amour, ma chérie’ (‘Don’t abandon me, my love, my dearest’), aline echoed by Doumbia in ‘M’bifé’. ‘Don’t leave without me’, she sings. The resist-ance to separation and distance and the intense longing for togetherness and inti-macy communicated by these two songs, what Tom Cheyney of La Weeklydescribes as the couple’s ‘heartache-on-the-verge-of-heartbreak mode’ (2005), res-onates strongly with the Mande social concept of ‘badenya’.

Badenya, literally meaning ‘mother-child-ness’, denotes the shared affection feltby children of the same mother in polygamous families and connotes devotion tohome, family, and tradition. As a social concept, badenya conveys a sense of commu-nity, social solidarity, and shared intimacy that is the inter-subjective essence of civilspace. As such, badenya carries with it a strong moral valence; there is an essential‘goodness’ and ‘rightness’ to the familial collectivity badenya implies. The musicalportrayal of badenya in ‘M’bifé’ begins with a young boy greeting his elders, animportant gesture of respect in Mande society, spoken over a leisurely strummedand picked accompaniment that sounds like a pair of friends jamming in thecalm of a neighbourhood courtyard. Chao’s chorus, along with the guitars, organand percussion support Doumbia’s song and give a musical impression of social soli-darity, with her voice resting on a well-balanced foundation of steadily amplifyingbut composed sound. When she sings to her lover, ‘Don’t leave without me’,Doumbia calls for a coherent sense of place, for a shared life with her partner incivil (lived) space. Yet, the reality of an imminent departure lingers, to whichDoumbia adds, ‘Don’t bring shame upon me’. The correlation of travel abroad –what Mande people call ‘tunga’, a sort of ‘journey into the unknown’ – and shame(malo) is significant; it epitomises the psychosocial risk of choosing to venture (locallyor globally) into wild space. A Mande reading of Lefebvre’s notion of perceived spacewill help elucidate the risks and realities of confronting wildness in modern society.

The dialectics of spatial practice

As the third part of the Lefebvrian model, perceived space joins conceived and livedspace ‘in a dialectical interaction’, encompassing the subjective production, appro-priation and deciphering of social space (Lefebvre 1991, p. 38). Rendered as ‘spatialpractices’, perceived space constitutes an embodied, inter-sensual and interpretiveengagement with conceived and lived space. It represents the visible, tactile, olfac-tory and aural dimensions of social space in which the body engages with, compre-hends, and sometimes changes its social and material, lived and conceivedsurroundings.12 In the Mande spatial paradigm, the concept of subjective agency,or ‘waleya’, closely approximates the spatial practices of Lefebvre’s perceived spaceand personifies the spatial dialectics I am describing. In Mande social thought, waleyaarticulates at the socio-spatial interstices, or borderlands (dankun) of civility and wild-ness. From this space of the in-between, subjective action, or ‘kewale’, may have


socially integrative or dissociative effects on society and therefore possesses a strongethical inflection.

In Lefebvre’s tripartite model, the notion of perceived space is the least devel-oped and therefore the most ambiguous. Given this, I will emphasise here the richer(and perhaps more coherent) vision of socio-spatial dialectics offered by Mandesocial thought. My reference above to the ‘ethics’ of waleya (subjective agency)derives from the concept of ‘fadenya’. Translated as ‘father-child-ness’, fadenya refersexplicitly to rivalry between children of different mothers in polygamous familiesand implicitly to an individual’s desire to develop and refine the traditions of hisor her ancestors, expressed by the notion of fasiya, or ‘cultural patrimony’ (literally,‘father’s lineage’; the ‘paternal’ corollary to the ‘maternal’ mores of badenya). In con-trast to the relatively static space of social intimacy and morality (badenya) describedabove, fadenya is the conceptual vehicle of dynamism in Mande society. Where bade-nya works centripetally, bringing individuals bound by a common heritage ( fasiya)together in civil space, fadenya acts centrifugally, spreading subjective agency (waleya)into the potentially threatening realm of wild space (see Bird and Kendall 1980). Inethical terms, fadenya is understood to engender both ‘negative’ (shameful andregressive) and ‘positive’ (salutary and progressive) effects; it represents a kind ofethical impulse for the dissociative and socially integrative acts associated with theterm waleya (see Figure 3).

Crucially, acts of socio-cultural innovation do not imply an emphasis of indivi-dualism over collectivity. In Mande social thought, innovation, or ‘positive fadenya’,is predicated on commitment to society’s traditions ( fasiya) and social mores(badenya) and describes how such traditions and mores are reproduced, or reinvented(cf. Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983) to meet the demands of, and even develop andimprove modern social life.13 This is the active expression of civility in Mandesociety, in contrast to the more passive, habitual, and morally grounded social prac-tices of badenya. In cases where subjective agency does tend toward a more radicalindividualism, or ‘negative fadenya’, the cycle of departure (whether physical or idea-tional), innovation, and re-integration is broken and a dissociative breakdown intowildness (anomie, alienation, and sometimes violence) is manifest. This is what

Figure 3. Mande spatial practices.


Doumbia warns against when she sings ‘Don’t bring shame to me’ in the song‘M’bifé’. Engendered by unethical behaviour, shame (malo) is the most prevalentexpression of moral breakdown in Mande social life. At this point, rather than return-ing to the social comforts of civil space (the kind of celebratory rendering of Africansocial life one has come to expect from Bagayoko and Doumbia’s music), Dimanche àBamako confronts the realities of socio-spatial wildness head on. The song, ‘M’bifé(Balafon)’ musically introduces this critical move.

Sounding the itinerant subject

‘M’bifé (Balafon)’ flows directly from ‘M’bifé’, with a key change up from A-minor toB-minor, cued by the lively strumming of an electric guitar (Bagoyoko’s). Rapid andabrupt picking between the tonic and a minor third on the high E-string of an acous-tic guitar (Chao’s) provides a sense of acceleration from the previous track, movingthe time signature from 4/4 to 4/8. The tempo is itself marked by a wispy, brushed(and probably programmed) cymbal hit (first heard in the final seconds of ‘M’bifé)struck on the offbeats of a pulse created by the bass guitar. This percussive counter-rhythm represents a significant musical motif that returns throughout Dimanche àBamako. The sound of the cymbal hit has a mechanical quality to it, resembling thefiring pistons of a car engine or the steam locomotion of a train. It signifies rapidmovement on the road or the rails, and on songs like ‘Aristiya’, ‘CamionsSauvages’, and ‘Beaux Dimanches’ it is used to represent travel to and from home.The instrumental ‘M’bifé (Balafon)’ introduces this motif without lyrical reference – toconcert tours (‘Artistiya’), freight transport (‘Camions Sauvages’), or ceremonialgatherings (‘Beaux Dimanches’) – and, lacking a clear sense of destination, becomesthe musical embodiment of a more generalised sense of displacement and itinerancy.

The listener does, however, have a clear idea of the origins and direction of themovement ‘M’bifé (Balafon)’ represents: it is away from the civil space of socialityand intimacy expressed on the previous track, ‘M’bifé’; it is a move away fromhome. Juxtapose, for example, the young boy’s personal greeting at the outset of‘M’bifé’ with the verbal postcard he narrates for Chao at the beginning of ‘M’bifé(Balafon)’, inviting the world music maverick to the midland Malian city of Mopti(where some of the music and soundscapes were recorded for the album) for localfish and a chance to hear him play the ‘tam-tam’ (a hand drum). Social proximityand dialogue in the former give way to long-distance correspondence in the latter.‘Chao, bisous!’ (‘Chao, kisses!’),14 Mamadou says, concluding his invitation withhopeful affection. There is also the distinctive sound of the ‘balafon’, or ‘bala’, akind of xylophone for which the song is parenthetically named. The multi-octavepentatonic melodies suggest that the instrument is a ‘balaba’ (‘large bala’), performedby peripatetic hunters and bards among Senufo and Bamana peoples of southern andcentral Mali. In fact, the sounds are programmed into a synthesizer performed byCheick Tidiane Seck, himself a well-travelled world music veteran and a Maliannative based in Paris since the mid-1980s. Taken as a whole, the aural referents on‘M’bifé (Balafon)’ present a modern musical portrait of an age-old human condition:itinerancy.

This is a condition that Chao, the song’s principal composer, is quite familiarwith. ‘My things are in Barcelona’, Chao says, ‘but I’m not there very often’(Falling 2007). Born to a Basque mother and a Galician father, Chao was raised in


Paris where his family settled after fleeing fascist Spain under Franco. Growing upamong immigrant communities in the Parisian suburbs was formative, and Chaomade an early connection to the anti-racist, anti-fascist sentiments of the localFrench punk scene. Listening to the innovative punk rock of UK bands like Dr.Feelgood and the Clash (the late Joe Strummer was a good friend and role model),as well as the reggae of Bob Marley and the popular music of Latin America, furtherexpanded Chao’s musical horizons (Culshaw 2007). After a brief stint with the groupHot Pants in the early-1980s, Chao formed the influential French punk/worldbeatband Mano Negra in 1987 (see Rivas Gamboa 2003). Eager to cultivate a personal,political and artistic connection to South America, Chao took his band (along witha circus and theatre troupe) on a boat tour of port cities on the Atlantic and Pacificsides of the continent in 1992, performing on a stage fashioned from the ship’scargo hold. The following year, Mano Negra travelled to Colombia, where theyrode an old freight train to small towns and villages and performed for local popu-lations (including peasants, paramilitaries, and drug traffickers). These adventurousand openly anti-establishment tours would have a lasting impact on Chao’s socio-political and musical worldview. ‘In South America’, he says, ‘you can go to a lotof countries, and of course they’re different countries, but the real border, for me,is between city and country’ (Falling 2007).15

It is the condition and experience of the rural-to-urban and transnationalmigrant – the outcast, the refugee, the adventurer, the impoverished risk-taker –and the global political economy that surrounds him that becomes the principalfocus of Chao’s music and social activism. This is perhaps best exemplified byChao’s first solo album, entitled Clandestino (2000),16 a reference to the informaland ‘hidden’ status of those who travel ‘without papers’. On the album’s titletrack, Chao sings, ‘Solo voy con mi pena / Solaba mi condena / Correr es mi destino/ por no llevar papel’ (‘I go alone with my burden / My fate stands alone / I’m des-tined to keep running / because I don’t have papers’). Chao brought this message tothe fore at a June 2007 performance at the Prospect Park Bandshell in Brooklyn (oneof his rare appearances in the United States), where a banner draped across the stageread, ‘Immigrants are not criminals’ (Culshaw 2007) – a sentiment that went overwell with the principally Latin American crowd. As I will show, the theme of localand global migration and their psychosocial effects remains central to Chao’s contri-bution to Dimanche à Bamako. As Richard Gehr of New York’s Village Voice writes,‘The record ends up a nearly perfect balance of [Bagayoko and Doumbia’s]Bambara heritage and Chao’s nervous deterritorialization’ (Gehr 2005). The song‘M’bifé (Balafon)’, preceded by the familial ‘M’bifé’, musically introduces this‘nervous deterritorialisation’, representing a kind of undifferentiated fadenya, anopen-ended ethics that articulates both the possibility and the danger of venturinginto the wild.

Moving now to the core of my analysis, I will consider two pairs of songs onDimanche à Bamako: ‘Taxi Bamako’ and ‘Camions Sauvages’, and ‘La Réalité’ and‘Sénégal Fast-Food’. In the first pair, I examine how Lefebvrian notions of livedand conceived space articulate as civil and wild space in the context of contemporaryMande society. I suggest that the phenomenal movement between spaces of civilityand wildness, figured as the city (dugu) and wilderness (kungo), respectively, framesthe spatial practices that define expressions of subjectivity in Mande society. With thesecond pair of songs, I examine how Bagayoko, Doumbia and Chao map this localdisjuncture between civil and wild space onto the global context of the African


diaspora as it is conceived and lived through the political economy of global moder-nity. Here, the ‘heart of darkness’ metaphor is reversed as ideas and experiences of‘the West’ take on a savage and menacing character while ‘African’ spaces – at homeor abroad – embody the sense and sociability of everyday life in Africa.17

Civil taxis and wild trucks

As a pair, the songs ‘Taxi Bamako’ and ‘Camions Sauvages’ communicate a socialdisjuncture between control and disorder, cohesion and dislocation, civility andwildness in contemporary Mali. In Lefebvrian terms, we may interpret this disjunc-ture in relation to the dialectic of lived and conceived space: While lived spaces indexthe civility of locally cultivated social relations, conceived spaces tend toward theabstract (political despotism, cultural homogenisation, social dislocation and alien-ation, etc.) and become wild. I will first consider the songs separately to showhow they elucidate the local tensions of global modernity through their depictionsof civil and wild space in Africa today. Then, by considering the two songs together,I will critically examine the expressions of modern subjectivity they convey. How dothese songs describe the equilibrium between civil and wild space? What effects domaintaining or losing spatial balance in Mande society have on persons portrayed inthese songs? I begin with the space of urban civility presented in ‘Taxi Bamako’.

This song exudes a dreamlike calm. Chao strums an electric guitar over pro-grammed cymbal hits, creating a relaxed swinging rhythm that slowly travelsbetween the tonic and the subdominant. Riding underneath this musical structureare field recordings of a Bamako taxi ride. By acoustically foregrounding city conver-sations and cacophonies to frame musical grooves, ‘Taxi Bamako’ brings the listenerinto the lived urban space it seeks to represent: the taxicab. These recordings arepunctuated by overlaid samples of voices in French saying, ‘Bon, on y va !’(‘Alright, let’s go!’), and ‘Tu veux un taxi ici?’ (‘[Do] you want a taxi here?’). Infront of the mix are Chao’s lyrics voiced as intoned recitation in which he mimicsthe speech of a local taxi driver:

Taxi Bamako, où tu veux je t’amène. Taxi Bamako, tu m’appelles, je suis là. Je suis la plusrapide. Tu es ma seule cliente. Je fais ma course au ciel. Où tu veux, je t’amène. Tut’assoies, je conduis. Taxi Bamako . . .

(Taxi Bamako, I’ll take you wherever you need to go. Taxi Bamako, if you call me, I’ll be there.Taxi Bamako, I am the fastest. Taxi Bamako, you are my only customer. I make my rounds inheaven. I’ll take you wherever you need to go. You sit, I’ll drive. Taxi Bamako . . .)

Musically, acoustically, and lyrically, Taxi Bamako paints an auditory picture ofsocial harmony: whistles regulate traffic; the car engine purrs; the song’s swing con-tinues unperturbed; the dull din of the city hovers outside; and, Chao’s driver assureshis passenger that there won’t be any troubles. ‘I make my rounds in heaven’, hesays. The taxi and the city it navigates are made civil through material control andsociability. The taxi driver’s livelihood rests on him seeking out clients and keepinghis car running. He must manoeuvre through an uncertain urban economy, overpothole-ridden roads, and to the next city market that just might have that sparepart he needs. ‘J’évite tous les trafiques, les problèmes mécaniques’ (‘I avoid all traf-fic[king] and mechanical problems’),18 the driver proclaims, providing a steady


monologue for his anonymous passenger through the city. ‘I make my rounds inheaven’, he says. ‘You sit, I’ll drive’.

Everyday sociability is central to the maintenance of civility in Mande society.In Bamako, taking a taxi isn’t just about getting from point A to point B, it’s alsoabout establishing a social relationship between passenger and driver, if only for abrief ride into town. ‘It’s an act of solidarity’, a Malian friend of mine who lives inHarlem explained. ‘It’s not like taking a cab in New York. You can’t just open thedoor, tell the driver where to go, and stare out the window. In Mali, you have toexchange greetings. You have to talk. It’s an expression of humanity’.19 It is the‘humanity’ and ‘acts of solidarity’ that constitute the social space of the taxi thatmakes it a salient example of civil space in contemporary Bamako. In civil space,material wildness must be subdued, controlled and cultivated through humanagency defined by custom, a sense of responsibility, and prescribed moral standards(badenya, fasiya); this is as true for a cornfield as it is for a taxicab. The maintenance ofmaterial civility is always social. When material civility is neglected – when fields liefallow and cars break down – wildness settles in. This is the wild space depicted in‘Camions Sauvages’.

The song opens with the sound of a truck barrelling past a rural landscape.Unlike the sociable urban soundscapes of ‘Taxi Bamako’, those of ‘CamionsSauvages’ confront the listener with the menace of the Malian highway. As the rum-ble of the road falls back in the mix, an undulating harmonica pattern emerges, set-ting the beat. An acoustic guitar playing a G minor triad on the offbeat of anelectronic drum sequence finishes the rapid, pulsating rhythm, resembling the ham-mering of an engine – an echo of the percussive ‘travel’ motif introduced in ‘M’bifé(Balafon)’. Mariam Doumbia’s voice comes in as cadenced monotone speech, relatingthe ills of the wild truck in Bamana: ‘A bè sama faga. A bè Mali faga A bè girafew bèè faga.A bè syè faga. A bè Mali faga. A bè animaux bèè faga. Mobilikolo, ne t’a fè’ (‘It kills ele-phants. It kills Mali. It kills all the giraffes. It kills chickens. It kills Mali. It kills allthe animals. Wild car, I don’t like it’). In this litany of animals killed by the wildcar, the word ‘Mali’ is mentioned twice. Significantly, Mali can mean ‘hippopota-mus’, the contemporary ‘Republic of Mali’, or the thirteenth- century Mali Empire.Through repetition, the word ‘Mali’ evokes this range of meaning.

Through rhythm, speech and sound, ‘Camions Sauvages’ describes a destruc-tive material force that is relentless in its menace to nature and society. ‘It killsMali’, Doumbia says. The truck, making long trips between towns and cities, iscaught in the depths of wild space. In Mande society, traversing the wilderness(kungo) requires integrity, skill and strength. Hunters, with their ethic of solidarityand specialised knowledge of the natural world, are considered best equippedfor the journey between civil and wild space (Cashion 1984). For the Mande hunter,wilderness must be confronted socially. Initiates in a hunter’s society learn thesecrets of wild space in order to subdue, control and possess the vital forces(referred to in Mande languages as nyama) the wilderness contains. To hunt wildliferequires a shared understanding of the natural order that sustains it. Hunting is sys-tematic, never random; its labour and its fruits are always shared. This is theprogressive, salutary and re-integrative essence of ‘positive’ fadenya. By contrast,the wild truck represented on Dimanche à Bamako kills indiscriminately andalone; its brutish materiality barrels out of control through the countryside, threaten-ing game, livestock, children, and Malian society itself. It is the embodiment of‘negative’ fadenya.


Chao’s recitation enters with a reverb-rich electric guitar marking the metre.Chao’s French words add a subjective element to the truck’s material wildness byintroducing the dazed and fearful voice of the truck driver. He speaks, ‘la routeest longue, mes pieds sont lourds, et mes paupières, lourdes comme du plombe,s’écrasent sur la route’ (‘the journey is long, my feet are tired, and my eyelids,heavy as lead, crash against the road’), between chants, ‘le longue des longuescamions sauvages, le monde est mon camion sauvage’ (‘all along the long wildtrucks, the world is my wild truck’). Solitude in the wilderness is dangerous.Mariam Doumbia calls out in song to the lone traveller in Bamana: ‘Mobilikolotigi, itè fèrènè?’ (‘Driver of this wild car, can’t you brake a little?’) But, her call goes unan-swered. The driver rides along recklessly through the wilderness, motivated, Chaoreminds us, by other wild forces. ‘C’est la panique économique’ (‘It’s an economiccrisis’), he sings, ‘la panique en Afrique’ (‘a crisis in Africa’). African truckers are dri-ven by an economy that demands speed and efficiency despite poor infrastructure,irregular earnings, and questionable cargo. ‘It’s a crisis’, sings Chao, ‘trop de traffi-ques’ (too much traffic[king]) (see Endnote 18). The driver must race down crumblinghighways in the middle of the night to make one last delivery to earn the extraincome he needs to make ends meet. ‘The world is my wild truck’, he laments.

The song ends with the voice of a young boy (the same Mamadou from theopening ‘M’bifé’ tracks) listing off stimulants used by truckers to navigate socialand economic wildernesses: kola nuts, cigarettes and candy. Succumbing to materialdisorder and solitude in the face of economic pressure, the truck driver must keep hisheavy eyelids open and keep going, no matter what or who gets in the way. ‘It killsMali’, Doumbia says. The wild truck not only strips its occupant of humanity but alsothreatens the lives of those who encounter it, whether by force of impact or by theforces of global capital it serves. ‘It’s an economic crisis’, Chao sings, ‘a crisis inAfrica’. This is the crisis of global modernity engendered by subjective agency unteth-ered from the moral and ethical norms of society (see Mbembe and Roitman 1995).‘Too much traffic(king)’, says Chao. By putting the ideas of civil and wild spaceexpressed in ‘Taxi Bamako’ and ‘Camions Sauvages’ together, I will now considerthe effects of this socio-economic condition on modern subjectivity in Mali today.

In Mande society, the individual is caught between centripetal forces of com-munity and centrifugal forces of competition, pulling and pushing between civiland wild spaces, in and out of social balance. This is the subjective locus of person-hood, or ‘mògòya’ (literally ‘person-ness’), in the Mande world. As described above,the Mande kinship terms of badenya and fadenya elucidate these recursive spatialpractices (see Figure 3). While badenya conveys a sense of community and a commit-ment to material and social order in the civil spaces of Mande society, fadenya articu-lates an individual’s desire to compete with and transcend the traditions and moresof his or her ancestors by choosing to venture into wild space, whether material (theoutlying ‘foreign country’ or ‘bush’) or conceptual (an innovatory or polemical‘idea’). In Africa today, this wildness is increasingly defined by social discord mani-fest in political corruption, rampant globalisation, extreme poverty, and urban under-development (see Ferguson 2006), social realities that underlie the desire amongmany Malians to seek their fortunes abroad, on the road, in wild spaces.

Mande personhood (mògòya), or the achieved status and identity of the socia-lised individual in Mande society, lies in the dialectic of morality and ethics (bade-nya/fadenya), social affection and antagonism, commitment and critique, intimacyand innovation that motivates and defines subjective agency (waleya) in civil and


wild space. These subjective polarities are never mutually exclusive; it is always aquestion of balance, of seeking equilibrium between interiority and exteriority, selfand other, sameness and difference,20 like the hunter who enters the wilderness toconfront its dangers and returns to civilisation with a greater appreciation of thewilds’ proximate alterity. In ‘Taxi Bamako’, the wildness of the car is controlledand understood through sustained human agency and practised knowledge, allow-ing for the civil use of the automobile in an otherwise uncertain urban economy. ‘Imake my rounds in heaven’, the driver says, acknowledging a hopeful, but tenuousbalance between the potential of material wildness and the maintenance of socialcivility in modern-day Bamako.

Yet, global modernity presents new challenges to social stability in Mandesociety. ‘It’s an economic crisis’, Chao sings, ‘a crisis in Africa’. The continued subju-gation of African governance to the political and financial interests of global capitalin the West wreaks havoc on the saliency of local social order and makes the ‘post’ of‘postcolonial’ seem absurd (cf. Cooper 2005). As political sovereignty is usurped andlocal economies destabilised, men and women must look for ways to support theirfamilies and preserve what little civility remains in their society. In post-, or neo-colonial Mali, this has led to an exacerbation of ‘negative’ fadenya, or social dislo-cation, divorced from the grounded, re-integrative force of social cohesion, badenya.Trapped by a vicious global political economy, contemporary African societiesappear torn by clientelism, corruption and conceit, engendering a politics of exclu-sion that forces many into the wild spaces of poverty, migration, and backbreakingsolitary labour. In this space of wildness, a sense of ethics and morality lose theirmeaning. Life becomes self-indulgent and destructive. ‘All along the wild trucks’,the driver says, ‘the world is my wild truck’.

The rest in the West

Civil and wild spaces are transposed from the local to the global in the songs ‘LaRéalité’ and ‘Sénégal Fast Food’. These songs describe the condition of the Africanmigrant, potential and actual, who ventures out into the wilderness of ‘global cities’in the Global North (Sassen 1991) to make a living, support family and friends backhome, and secure personal prestige through hard work. However, while cities likeParis, London and New York present the (often tantalising) potential for wealthand prosperity, they also contain real social, political, economic and environmentaldangers to the (often undocumented and ill-prepared) African migrant. In the wildWest, one may encounter racism and social alienation, threats of deportation andhuman rights abuse, strenuous labour and paltry profits, sub-standard housingand brutal winters, and so forth.

To confront these harsh realities requires knowledge, courage and solidarity. AsPaul Stoller observed in his fieldwork among African traders in New York City,shrewd migrants learn to exploit the concentration of wealth, goods and servicesin the West by creating informal socio-economic networks on the formal marginsof urban economies (Stoller 2002, pp. 91–3, 106). Yet, even with such collective tactics,the subjective burdens of migration remain significant. ‘Immigration . . . usuallyreinforces social isolation’, writes Stoller. Isolation, in turn, inhibits participation inthe daily ‘activities and interactions’ that make an individual’s social life meaningfuland productive (ibid., p. 159). It is precisely this tension between solidarity and


solitude, prosperity and privation, work and unemployment, hope and despair that‘La Réalité’ and ‘Sénégal Fast Food’ communicate; they represent the psychosocialtensions of global modernity as conceived and lived abroad in the African diaspora.

‘Dans ce monde’ (‘In this world’), sing Amadou and Mariam, ‘triste réalité’ (‘[it’sthe] sad reality’). It’s a reality of discontinuity and injustice. Amadou laments: ‘il fautque d’autres naissent, d’autres meurent’ (‘some must be born, [while] others die),‘pendant que d’autres crient, d’autres rient’ (‘while some scream, others laugh’),‘pendant que d’autres travaillent, d’autres chaument’ (‘while some have work, othersare jobless’), ‘il faut que d’autres veillent, d’autres dorment’ (‘some must stay awake,[while] others sleep’) ‘pendant que d’autres chantent, d’autres pleurent’ (while somesing, others cry’). ‘In this world’, they sing, ‘[it’s the] sad reality’. This lyrical lamentis playfully counterbalanced with a steady house beat, blues-driven guitar riffs,disco bass lines, and tender vocal melodies, giving the song a decidedly upbeat groove.As Ian Anderson writes in fRoots magazine, ‘La Réalité piledrives like a classic R & Brevue, all wailing sirens and muscular blues guitar’ (Anderson 2005). Though, whilethe music ‘jumps at you’ with ‘a festive, celebratory vibe’ (Poet 2005), the lyrics betrayan anxious melancholy cast in plain realism. As Damon Krukowski of The BostonPhœnix writes, ‘The lyrics bewail the sadness of life while urging us to dance’(Krukowski 2005). This makes ‘La Réalité’ an example of Chao’s own oxymoronic‘Merry Blues’ (2002). ‘In this world’, Amadou and Mariam sing, ‘[it’s the] sad reality’.

The music video for ‘La Réalité’ (Bagayoko and Doumbia 2005) is set in aParisian hair salon and convenience store, two canonical sites of immigrant labourand sociability in the West African diaspora (see Skinner 2005, Chapter Four). Inthese social spaces hair is braided, merchandise is hawked, and conversations unfoldunderneath the music’s even groove. A young man in a denim jacket hovers outsidethe storefront of ‘Coiffure Afro’, wringing his hands. He tries to grab the attention ofpassers-by, though his precise intentions are unclear. Is he looking for someone inparticular? Is he trying to attract customers? Is he proffering a good or service? Ishe trying to hustle someone? Is he begging for money? Inside the salon, the spaceis convivial. Clients and their families lounge and chat as the workday proceeds.Friends at the convenience store admire athletic shoes, videos and CDs while sharinga friendly laugh. These scenes periodically cut to an intimate concert venue whereBagayoko and Doumbia perform for (what appears to be) an all-African audience.Manu Chao (who contributes backing vocals, instrumental accompaniment, andmusical programming to the song) stands inconspicuously in the background, sing-ing and strumming his guitar beside a jembe (hand drum) player (see Figure 4).

While a typical cosmopolitan ‘world beat’ narrative would argue that theEuropean production and Parisian setting of this song patinas over its exoticAfrican-ness, rendering it more accessible to a global (Western) audience, thesong’s music, lyrics and images tell a different story. In ‘La Réalité’, the West iswild; it exemplifies what Lefebvre would describe as conceived space permeatedby the abstract, the authoritarian and alienating. As the beat kicks in, a policesiren sounds, indexing the uncertain civil status and racial profiling that leavesmany immigrants (along with ethnic and religious minorities) in Europe andAmerica susceptible to excessive state surveillance, discipline and violence; it is anaural sign of wildness. The reality of such abuses has been made abundantly clearthrough the recent outbreak of civil unrest among North and West African commu-nities in France’s urban ghettos, as well as in the string of protests organised byMexican labour migrants in the United States (events which are critically related in


the lives and works of Bagayoko, Doumbia and Chao). In the midst of this repressivereality, immigrants struggle ‘to get by’ –what francophone Africans mean when theysay, ‘je me débrouille’ (cf. Bayart et al. 1999, pp. 38–9). In order to get by, personalneeds and expenses must be sacrificed to meet the expectations of financial supportfrom friends and family back home. In the video, a young man in a denim jackhovers outside the salon, trying to grab the attention of passers-by, looking for anopportunity, or just a break. In the face of such social and economic burdens, it isall too easy to succumb to sentiments of gloom and alienation. ‘While some scream,others laugh’. ‘While some sing, others cry’. ‘In this world’, sing Amadou andMariam, ‘[it’s the] sad reality’.

In spite of the troubling social, political and economic realities encountered bythe immigrant in the Western wild, African travellers still go to great lengths to pur-sue the possibility of prosperity that the West is believed to possess. The pursuit ofthis prospect is portrayed in the song ‘Sénégal Fast Food’. The music video for thissong (Bagayoko and Doumbia 2005) tells the story of a young man who is preparingto leave for a journey to Paris. We follow him, through Chao’s polyglot lyrics and thediverse social spaces of downtown Dakar, as he courts his fiancé, seeks counsel fromelders, visits family and friends, wanders the city, and anxiously anticipates hisdeparture for Europe. As the young man moves from place to place, person to per-son, the listener/viewer encounters signs of just how profoundly globalisation, asprojected from the Global North, has been inscribed on cities in the Global Southlike Dakar: the young man has a rendezvous with his fiancé at the Manhattan FastFood restaurant, they go to the movies at Cinéma Le Paris, and he watches and cheersas a Paradise Airlines flight takes off. ‘Quelle heure est-il au paradis?’ (‘What time is itin paradise?’), Chao asks wistfully.21

Figure 4. Amadou and Mariam with Manu Chao (Malick Sidibe).


The young man’s urban itinerary exemplifies a tenuous civility in the face of anencroaching modern wilderness. He encounters the conceived and abstract spaces ofthe city – marked by signs of globalisation – through interpersonal contact with hispeers, loved ones, and fellow urbanites. Yet, while social contact with conceivedspace has the potential to civilise urban wildness, concretising its abstraction, itmay also engender personal disaffection and despondency. As the young man climbsonto the back of a public van, we discover that he’s on his way to the French consu-late to solicit a visa. His grandmother is in the hospital. Exigency layers upon antici-pation. At the consulate, he joins dozens of others in line, all holding officialdocuments, waiting expectantly for a chance to travel to and work in the West.They are preparing for what Mande speakers call ‘tunga’, or ‘an adventure abroad’,a journey into the wild to seek one’s fortune, or just make a living. In the video, blackink fills the screen and the English word ‘denied’ appears. The young man is cast off,rejected, while others continue to wait, hoping to receive their ‘passport to paradise’.The young man’s fiancé sits alone at the Manhattan Fast Food while he lingers at thewaterfront, watching anonymous passengers embark on a ferry. He moves on toreceive guidance from a local soothsayer. Later, he and his fiancé have their portraittaken. He visits family and begins his journey abroad, overland, without papers. Thestory ends in Paris and Dakar. In the French capital, the young man is arrested on thecity streets. Back home, his girlfriend waits for a long overdue phone call. ‘What timeis it in paradise?’ sings Chao.

‘Cinéma Le Dakar, Bamako, Rio di Janeiro’, Chao muses. ‘Où est le problème?’(‘Where’s the problem?’) ‘Où est la frontière?’ (‘Where’s the border?’). The problemsand borders are, of course, all too real. In ‘Sénégal Fast Food’, Chao’s concern for thedivide between the city and countryside is projected onto the postcolonial riftbetween the Global North and South. ‘Entre les murs’ (‘Between the walls’) hesings, ‘se faufilent dans l’ascenseur, ascenseur pour le ghetto’ (‘[people] shuffle for-ward in the elevator, elevator to the ghetto’). Subject to the structures and stricturesof conceived space at home, eager adventurers edge by each other toward signs ofprogress and prosperity abroad. For those who make it, the reality of the modern-daymetropole is much wilder than anticipated. As depicted in ‘Sénégal Fast Food’, theAfrican’s journey to the West is an ‘elevator to the ghetto’, a desperate move intowild space. How do people confront this condition? How is it managed? How is itlived? To get by in wild space requires knowledge, courage and, most importantly,solidarity. In particular, the formation and maintenance of diasporic community isessential to the psychosocial welfare of migrant peoples.22 In ‘La Réalité’, this localspace of global community is embodied in the conviviality of work and leisure atthe Parisian hair-braiding salon and convenience store. In ‘Sénégal Fast Food’, wediscover that the roots of diasporic community emerge from intimate social relationsestablished at home in Africa. To confront ‘the sad reality’, to manage the socio-economic burdens of transnational migration, to live a meaningful life abroad, inthe midst of the Western wilderness, one must pursue ‘positive’ fadenya, by cultivat-ing community abroad with strong ties to home (see Skinner 2004, 2005, 2008).

Celebrating civility in the modern world

At the outset of this article, I asserted that subjective movement (waleya) between civiland wild space produces dynamism and discord, creativity and conflict, innovation


and intrigue in Mande society. I described such movement as articulations of ‘posi-tive’ and ‘negative’ fadenya (‘father-child-ness’), an ethical dichotomy of spatial prac-tice from which much of the meaning of Dimanche à Bamako derives. This ethicalagency was, in turn, contrasted with the morality, stability and conviviality of tra-dition and social mores, which I termed as expressions of fasiya (‘cultural patrimony’)and badenya (‘mother-child-ness’), respectively. In my analysis of Dimanche à Bamako,I considered how local and diasporic encounters with global modernity have engen-dered an intensification of fadenya in Africa today, increasing subjective moves intowild space; this was exemplified by the song ‘M’bifé (Balafon)’. More and more,the ethics of these moves tends toward the ‘negative’ as the demands of fast capital-ism and rampant globalisation threaten the saliency of local civility in African com-munities, at home and abroad; this was portrayed in the songs ‘Camions Sauvages’,‘La Réalité’, and ‘Sénégal Fast Food’. ‘An bèè bè nin ko’in na’ (‘We are all in this situ-ation’), sing Bagayoko and Doumbia in the chorus of the latter song, ‘si tè nin ko’incogo dòn’ (‘[but] no one knows what its nature is’). This critical stance toward the pol-itical economy of global modernity and its effects on African social space dis-tinguishes Dimanche à Bamako from Bagayoko and Doumbia’s previous work andhighlights the curatorial hand of Chao, whose political activism is his musicalhallmark.

Yet, as the album cover shows (Figure 1), this is ultimately an ‘Amadou andMariam’ record, and their celebratory and hopeful worldview strongly marks theaffective and semantic character of Dimanche à Bamako. A critical theme throughoutthe album is the need to foster community and affirm personhood through theconscious cultivation of what may be called ‘a civil space of global modernity’.‘Anw minw bè jamanajanw na’ (‘We who are in far-away countries’), continues thecouple’s chorus on ‘Sénégal Fast Food’, ‘kana nyinè an nyògòn ko de’ (‘don’t forgetour common cause’). This emphasis on the importance of civility in lived space(at home and abroad) comes forward in the intimacy and sociability expressed on‘M’bifé’ and ‘Taxi Bamako’ discussed above, but, elsewhere, Bagayoko andDoumbia insist on a much stronger turn toward tradition ( fasiya) and social mores(badenya) in the modern world. I conclude with an analysis of the songs ‘La fêteaux Village’ and ‘Beaux Dimanches’, which together articulate a kind of synthesisof lived and conceived space, celebrating civility in an anxious time of wildness.

The two songs highlight the character and value of local tradition and mores inMande society, expressed through the ceremony of community celebration (‘La Fêteau Village’) and the ritual of marriage (‘Beaux Dimanches’). Introduced byBagayoko’s lilting electric guitar, ‘La Fête au Village’ hovers between two chordsin D minor, punctuated by the voices and bustle of a neighbourhood soundscape.The absence of motorised noise in this aural space locates the song in the countryside,the social space of the ‘village’ to which the song title refers. This musical/acousticsetting gives a wistful intimacy to Bagayoko’s somewhat strained song, in whichhe implores his beloved: ‘Fais toi plus belle / pour la fête au village’ (‘Make yourselfbeautiful / for the village party’). Doumbia replies, with longing compassion, ‘Je seraila plus belle / pour toi mon amour’ (‘I will be the most beautiful / for you my love’).Taking on the voice of a village ‘paysan’, or peasant, Bagayoko sings of the beans hehas grown for the various families of Mande: Keita, Coulibaly, Traoré, Dembelé,Koné, Diarra, Touré and Samaké. The bean offering is a cultural reference to ‘sanan-kunya’, or ‘joking relationships’ in which public mention of another family’sbean-eating habits inspires humorous exchange and provides a dialogic means to


quell social conflict. Social harmony is further affirmed as Bagayoko describesthose who will come from afar by motorbike, bicycle, boat, train and car ‘pour lafête au village’ (‘for the village party’) – a literal image of the centripetal andre-integrative social force that is badenya. Acoustically embedded in the naturalsoundscape of the countryside and musically framed by the subtle harmonies ofguitar and voice, the song’s lyrical references to cultural traditions and socialmores, calling on displaced villagers to return to their native community for acollective fête, constitute the album’s most poignant representation of an ideal-typicalcivil space.

‘Beaux Dimanches’ takes this idyllic notion of pastoral civility into the bustle ofthe big city: Bamako. Chao’s concern for the tensions between city and countrysideare here matched by Bagayoko and Doumbia’s affirmation of rural-urban continu-ity. As the sound of a truck speeding down the road fades out, the sounds of chil-dren playing in a neighbourhood courtyard fade in. The pulsating onset of themechanised cymbal hit, first heard on ‘M’bifé (Balafon)’, indicates that ‘BeauxDimanches’ is about movement. Though, unlike Chao’s earlier meditation on traveland wildness, ‘Beaux Dimanches’, composed by Bagayoko, is a story of homecom-ings, not departures. Men and women, neighbours and eager onlookers, praise sing-ers and speechmakers, and the bride and groom are all gathered to celebrate. ‘LesDimanches à Bamako’ (‘Sundays in Bamako’), sings Bagayoko, ‘c’est les jours demariages’ (‘are the days for weddings’). Unlike the acoustically subdued sociabilityrendered in ‘La Fête au Village’, expressions of badenya in ‘Beaux Dimanches’ con-vey a frantic quality. The heavily picked guitar phrase musically articulates the bus-tle of urban space: ascending and descending, moving in and out of intervals,stopping and starting, buzzing and muting through a circular melody. Social lifein the city moves at a quickened pace, but it is no less civil. Yet, as the percussivetravel motif reminds us, social and material wildness are much closer in the civilspaces of the modern metropolis. Chao adds the sound of a mariachi trumpet toremind us of the global character of these contested urban spaces. Part of the localand global commotion in Bamako’s ‘Beaux Dimanches’ is the work of resistance,of keeping wild space at bay and bringing people together to make way forcelebration.

As a pair, ‘La Fête au Village’ and ‘Beaux Dimanches’ communicate the saliencyand significance of ceremonial tradition ( fasiya) and social mores (badenya) in therural and urban, civil and lived spaces of contemporary Africa. Yet, performedfrom the vantage of the globetrotting Malian pop duo, ‘La Fête au Village’ and‘Beaux Dimanches’ are not simply popular expressions of traditional praise forlocal civility. As Richard Gehr puts it, ‘Amadou waxes nostalgic for the country in‘La Fête du [sic] Village’ and ‘Beaux Dimanches’, gorgeous songs revealing a subtletension between the duo’s regional upbringing and international yearnings’ (Gehr2005). Together, ‘La Fête au Village’ and ‘Beaux Dimanches’ articulate a local callto action in an era of global modernity: to preserve and sustain those ritual momentsof conviviality and solidarity that remain the civil foundations of African commu-nities, at home and abroad. Placed on either end of the album’s most brutal portrayalof material wildness, ‘Camions Sauvages’, ‘La Fête au Village’ and ‘BeauxDimanches’ express the need to civilise the wild spaces of globalisation. The songsare Bagayoko and Doumbia’s own poetic act of ‘positive’ fadenya: to produce andcultivate a uniquely African civil space of global modernity through their ownbrand of world music.


Conclusion: a civil and wild wake-up call for world music

I began this article with a cursory observation of difference, juxtaposing Chao’s poe-tics of political activism with Bagayoko and Doumbia’s aesthetics of social solidarity:anxiety amidst encroaching wildness, on the one hand, celebration of enduring civility,on the other. In his article, ‘A sweet lullaby for world music’ (2000), Steven Feld usesthe same vocabulary to describe responses to the phenomenon of ‘world music’among artists, critics and academics. He contrasts ‘anxious narratives’ that questionthe authenticity and intentions of people who peddle in global sounds with ‘celebra-tory narratives’ that praise the potential of hybrid musics to promote cultural diver-sity and democracy (Feld 2000, pp. 152–4). As a world music production in whichglobal modernity – of which the world music industry is certainly a part (see Feld1994; Erlmann 1996; Stokes 2004) – is represented through the ‘anxious’ expressionsof wild space and the ‘celebratory’ expressions of civil space, Dimanche à Bamako is asalutary example of a collaborative musical recording that transcends this anxious/celebratory dichotomy (cf. Meintjes 1990). It is an ‘Amadou and Mariam’ album pro-duced ‘by and with Manu Chao’; a collaboration that bridges the Global dividebetween North and South by artfully weaving the civil and wild experiences ofAfrican communities, from Bamako to Paris (Figure 4). ‘C’est un album métissé’(‘It’s a hybrid, mixed album’), says Bagayoko, ‘with rock and roll, Africa andEurope’. ‘Ce sont des échanges permanents’ (‘These are permanent exchanges’),affirms Chao.23 I believe my foregoing analysis of the album’s socio-musical contentgives empirical credence to the artists’ professed syncretic and collaborative endea-vour. Perhaps the world music industry would be less anxiety ridden were it to pro-duce more albums like this one.

Endnotes

1. In its various forms and iterations over the pastfive years, this article has benefited from the criti-cal feedback of numerous colleagues, teachersand mentors. I would especially like to thank:Ellen Gray and Brian Larkin for their commentson early drafts of the article; Aaron Fox andChristopher Washburne, who, in addition toProfessor Gray, responded to my ideas presentedas a paper for faculty of the Dept of Music atColumbia University in 2005; Brandon County,who has discussed and debated these ideas withme for years now; Keith Negus and my two anon-ymous readers at Popular Music whose productivecriticisms broadened and re-focused my perspec-tive on the project as a whole; and Chérif Keïta,whose mentorship and support made this workpossible.

2. Dimanche à Bamako was released in Europe inNovember 2004 on the French Because labeland in the United States in August 2005 byNonesuch Records. On 5 March 2005, Amadouand Mariam won the Victoires de la Musiqueaward, the French equivalent of the Grammy,for best album in the Reggae/Ragga/World cat-egory. (The mercurial Chao was conspicuouslyabsent from the ceremony, ‘not wishing to over-shadow what he believe[d] [wa]s Amadou and

Mariam’s success’ [Brown 2005, p. 31].) By thesummer of 2005, Dimanche à Bamako had gonegold in France (selling over 100,000 copies), andAmadou and Mariam (with or without Mr.Chao) were selling out concert venues acrossEurope, on their way to the United States for afall 2005 tour. The album, now platinum, remainsone of the most popular world music releases ofrecent years. Concert tours continue worldwide.

3. As this article was being prepared for final sub-mission, Amadou and Mariam were preparing forthe November 2008 release of the album Welcometo Mali on France’s Because record label, thesame label that released Dimanche à Bamako.

4. The term ‘Mande’ refers to a broad category ofpeoples with historical ties to the thirteenth-centuryMali Empire encompassing parts of modern-daynation-states of Mali, Mauritania, Senegal,The Gambia, Guinea-Bissau, Guinea-Conakry,Liberia, Sierra Leone, Côte d’Ivoire and BurkinaFaso. Mande people make up the largest ethno-linguistic community in Bamako. My understand-ing and interpretation of Mande social thoughtand theory is indebted to the work of ChérifKeïta, whose studies of contemporary Malianliterature (Keïta 1995) and music (Keïta 2001)offer sustained ‘ethno-theoretical’ reflections,


elucidating a dialectic of conflict and creativity,stasis and dynamism, tradition and modernity inMande society.

5. Mande terms are rendered in Bamana, Mali’s lin-gua franca, using standard orthography (Bailleul2007). I have italicised Bamana terms and cita-tions to differentiate them from French andSpanish quotations.

6. For a socio-political account of Mande socio-spatial dialectics in postcolonial Mali, seeCounty and Skinner (2008).

7. This figure is based on John William Johnson’s‘Mande Village Geography’ diagram and analysis,appearing in his introduction to Son-Jara: TheMande Epic (Johnson 2003, pp. 10–11).

8. Lefebvre also employs the terms ‘representationsof space’, ‘representational spaces’ and ‘spatialpractices’ to refer to ‘conceived’, ‘lived’ and ‘per-ceived’ space, respectively. I employ the latterterms because of their clarity and consonancewith notions of wild and civil space in theMande socio-spatial paradigm.

9. In describing Lefebvre’s notions of ‘conceived’and ‘lived’ space, I employ the language of ‘strat-egies’ and ‘tactics’ introduced by Michel deCerteau (1988). De Certeau defines ‘tactics’ as‘the space of the other’, ‘a guileful ruse’, and ‘anart of the weak’ playing ‘on and with a terrainimposed on it and organized by the law of aforeign power’ (de Certeau 1988, p. 37). Tacticsare employed within and against the dominantstructures of society (states, corporations, religiousauthorities, etc.) characterised by their ‘strategies’to define, claim and uphold power. Defined inthis way, de Certeau’s ‘tactics’ and ‘strategies’ clo-sely resemble Lefebvre’s understanding of ‘lived’and ‘conceived’ space.

10. For a recent autobiographical account of Bagayokoand Doumbia’s personal and professional lives,see Amadou and Mariam, with Keïta (2008).

11. Quoted from an article written by Stéphanie Binetin the French newspaper, Libération, posted onBagayoko and Doumbia’s official website: www.amadou-mariam.com (last viewed on 10 July2008). The quote has been translated from French.

12. Lefebvre’s emphasis on the intersensuality of per-ceived space suggests an analytic move beyondthe content of the album to the recorded mediumitself. Interpreted through the senses, the per-ceived space of Dimanche à Bamako is primarilythe space of aurality. As a form of ‘spatial rep-resentation’, to paraphrase Stuart Hall (1997,p. 10), Dimanche à Bamako embodies and trans-mits the perceived space of sound for meaningfulinterpretation through listening. The album isitself the symbolic form through which principallyaural representations of conceived, lived and per-ceived spaces encounter the creative, curatorialand interpretive spatial practices of musical per-formance, production and audition. As describedin this article, such practices of spatial represen-tation include lyrical and musical expression, aswell as Chao’s soundscape recordings, whatSam Wick of Planet Magazine calls ‘the album’sfourth collaborator’ (2005). By coupling music

and lyrics with everyday sound, Dimanche àBamako provides its listeners with a live(d) senseof social space in urban Africa. This makesDimanche à Bamako an exemplary reference for anemergent ‘aural turn’ in the social sciences andcultural studies (see Bendix 2000; Bull and Back2003; Erlmann 2004; Feld and Brenneis 2004).

13. Michael Jackson, reflecting on fieldwork amongthe Mande Kuranko in Sierra Leone, capturesthe meaning of ‘positive’ fadenya when hedescribes how ‘human social life’ is made up of‘a dialectic between givenness and choice, acontinual movement between an externallyfactitious world shaped by one’s ancestors ina previous epoch and that same world recreated,reworked, and reconstrued by the living inlight of imperatives that included respect forthe past as well as the changing exigencies ofthe present’ (Jackson 1998, p. 27; emphasis inthe original).

14. There is some ambiguity in this phrase, as theItalian term ‘ciao’ borrowed into French andoften used as an informal valediction is pro-nounced exactly like Manu Chao’s last name.Given Chao’s penchant for multi-lingual word-play, the ambiguity may be intentional.

15. For a biography of Chao’s life and works, seeRobecchi (2002). For an account of Chao’s railwayjourney through rural Colombia, see Chao(Ramón) (1994).

16. Clandestino was first released in France in 1998 onFrance’s Virgin label.

17. I am thankful to Professor Brian Larkin for bring-ing the reversed ‘heart of darkness’ metaphor tomy attention in a graduate seminar discussionon 25 April 2006.

18. In this lyric, the French term ‘trafiques’ conveysthe dual sense of roadway congestion and thetrafficking of illicit substances and goods. As averb (French: ‘trafiquer’), the term also suggestsfiddling with car instruments, or, more colloqui-ally, being up to something. The French word ‘cir-culation’ is a more literal translation of motorvehicle ‘traffic’, but it does not rhyme with‘méchaniqes’, as ‘trafiques’ does. The term ‘trafi-ques’, in the sense of ‘traficking’ and ‘being upto something’, also indexes the predominantly‘informal’ and officially ‘illicit’ character ofBamako’s market economy.

19. Conversation with M. Wagué at her Harlem(New York) residence on 8 October 2005.

20. Michael Jackson’s phenomenological anthropol-ogy helps, once again, to elucidate this socio-spatial dynamic. He writes: ‘Existentially, then,equilibrium is a matter of striking a balancebetween the countervailing needs of self andother . . . Moving between these domains, playingthem off each other, negotiating the troubledboundary between them – between the worldone claims the right to call one’s own and theworld one relinquishes rights in and forfeits tootherness – constitutes the central dynamic ofhuman action’ (Jackson 1998, pp. 19–20).

21. The lyric, ‘Il est minuit à Tokyo / Il est cinq heureau Mali / Quelle heure est-il au paradis?’ first


appears in the song ‘La Vie à Deux’ on Chao’sClandestino album (2000).

22. It is worth noting here that Amadou andMariam’s second home is the Montreuil suburbof Paris, known to local inhabitants as ‘LittleBamako’ (Brown 2005, p. 31).

23. Quoted from an interview conducted by PierreRené-Worms for Radio France Internationaleposted on Bagayoko and Doumbia’s official web-site: www.amadou-mariam.com (last viewed on10 July 2008).

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Discography

A. Bagayoko and M. Doumbia, Sou Ni Tile. EmArcy France, 557118-2. 1998A. Bagayoko and M. Doumbia, Tje Ni Mousso. Polydor, 543067-2. 1999A. Bagayoko and M. Doumbia, Wati. Universal France S.A., 016858-2. 2002A. Bagayoko, M. Doumbia and M. Chao, Dimanche à Bamako. Because, BEC5772000. 2004M. Chao, Clandestino. Virgin France, CDVIR128. 2000M. Chao, Proxima Estacion Esperanza. Virgin France, CDVIR141. 2001M. Chao, Radio Bemba Sound System Live. Virgin France, CDVIR187. 2002M. Chao, La Radiolina. Because, BEC5772125. 2007

Videography

A. Bagayoko and M. Doumbia, Paris Bamako. Because, 3109227. 2005


Civil taxis and wild trucks: the dialectics of social space and subjectivity in Dimanche à Bamako

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