Foreign Culture and African Music
The African continent is predominantly inhabited by black peoples. Geographers standardly partition the continent into four principal regions. North Africa comprises Mauritania, Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, Egypt, Libya, and parts of Sudan, Chad, Niger, Mali, Eritrea, and Ethiopia. Southern Africa includes the Republic of South Africa, Zimbabwe, Namibia, Mozambique, Malawi, Lesotho, Swaziland, Botswana, Angola, and Zambia. East Africa encompasses Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Somalia, Rwanda, and Burundi. Central Africa consists of the Central African Republic, Gabon, Congo, and parts of Chad, Sudan, Ethiopia, and Cameroon. West Africa incorporates Nigeria, Ghana, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Togo, Benin, Senegal, Guinea, Burkina Faso, and parts of Niger and Mali. The continent also embraces adjacent islands, including Madagascar, Cape Verde, Comoros, Mauritius, the Seychelles, and São Tomé and Príncipe.
Using criteria such as skin colour, language, musical patterns, and cultural similarities, Africa may be divided into two great zones. The boundary between them is the southern edge of the Sahara Desert. North Africa is chiefly populated by people of the Caucasian race, many of whom speak Afro-Asiatic languages according to the Greenberg classification. Arab culture overwhelmingly dominates this region. North Africa has long absorbed influences from the east and north. Phoenicians, Romans, Vandals, Byzantines, and Turks have all made contact there. Colloquially, North Africa is sometimes termed white Africa.
South of the Sahara lies the rest of the continent, which is called black Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, or the home of the Negro race.
Geographically, Africa hosts an immense variety of vegetation types. Dense mangrove swamps and tropical rain forests spread across the southern parts of the region. The Guinea, Sudan, and Sahel savanna belts cover the west, east, and central zones. The severe aridity of the Sahara Desert occupies most of North Africa. This pattern of vegetation matters for understanding the distribution of musical instruments across Africa, a distribution that largely determines each region's musical practices and styles. For instance, in the coastal mangrove swamps, where sizable trees with long tendrils grow, numerous wood and clay instruments are made. In the savanna regions, where vegetation is more sparse, instruments fashioned from millet stalks, bamboo, gourds, and dried plant seeds are more common.
Before examining the influence of foreign culture on African music in depth, it is essential to clarify what the term African music means and to grasp the idea of culture. Knowing what culture is allows us to recognize what can be considered foreign in this context. Additionally, an overview of music in prehistoric African societies — before contact with outside cultures — helps frame the changes that have reshaped African music profoundly and continue to do so.
The phrase African music may be used widely to refer to the musical traditions of people living on the African continent. Yet, for many scholars, the term more narrowly denotes the music of black Africa, the area south of the Sahara. This region is known for complex rhythms, sometimes described as hot. It is also characterized by call-and-response singing patterns, metronome sense, and the contextual integration of music into a wide array of socio-economic, religious, and political experiences of individuals and the larger society. The distinguished African musicologist J.H.K. Nketia argued that, on stylistic grounds, the music of North Africa is fundamentally Arabic. He maintained it belongs to the oriental family of modal music and thus should not be considered when discussing the music of Africa. He made a similar exclusion for music created by European settlers in southern Africa. Instead, Nketia concentrated his research on the music of black Africa, which he said not only has its roots in African soil but also forms a network of separate yet related traditions. These traditions overlap in certain aspects of style, practice, or usage and share common features of internal pattern, basic procedures, and contextual similarities.
With respect to earlier scholarly views on African music, an alternative position is taken here: no region should be excluded from a discussion of the impact of foreign culture, because every part of Africa has been subjected to foreign domination at some point — from either Europe or the Islamic world — and these influences have had a significant effect on music across the continent. It is also the contention of this writer that studies of African music should encompass not only indigenous traditional music, but also contemporary modes such as African art music, popular music, and religious music.
The most frequently cited definition of culture comes from E.B. Tylor, who described culture as a complex whole including knowledge, belief, art, law, morals, customs, and other capabilities acquired by a person as a member of society. Nevertheless, culture may be understood as the shared meanings of most individuals in a social group. Each society builds its own worldview and constructs this cultural world by creating and using meanings to represent important distinctions. The content of culture includes beliefs, attitudes, goals, and values held by a majority. Culture is learned behaviour, acquired over years; it can be transmitted from one generation to the next. Culture is not static, however. It is dynamic: both its form and content change under various influences. African culture can thus be viewed as those learned behaviours, beliefs, and arts (including music) that Africans acquire and by which they define themselves and maintain group identity. It follows then that any behaviour, belief, or art falling outside the learned pattern of a society can be deemed foreign. The process of adjusting to or conveying this new culture to indigenous people is acculturation, which initially produces a kind of cultural shock. This essay focuses on the effect of foreign cultures on African music.
The African continent is not a uniform cultural entity. Each society has developed its own distinct culture through its particular historical, environmental, economic, and socio-political evolution. More than 700 language groups thrive in Africa. As J.H.K. Nketia observed, African music, like language, is essentially tied to ethnic groups. Yet, these cultural differences do not negate the similarities and related traditions present throughout African cultural expressions. Each ethnic group practices its own variant of African culture. We can, in other words, speak of cultures and subcultures that are distinct yet interrelated across the African continent. Birth, marriage, and burial ceremonies, to take one shared similarity, remain important in African life, though procedures may differ slightly from society to society. Music-making is similarly integral to communal life; Africans articulate and objectify philosophical beliefs through music.
African Music before Foreign Contact
Two major external influences have shaped African culture and, by extension, its music. These are Islam and Arabic culture from the east, and European culture from the west.
Before European and Islamic contacts, Africa consisted of self-sustaining ethnic nations who lived in roughly homogeneous communities where life was predominantly communal. Music in these societies was woven into the fabric of life; musical performances punctuated milestones from the cradle to the grave. Music-making centered on communal activities such as farming and other economic tasks, domestic chores, religious rites and rituals, and festivals. Song texts drew from shared histories, myths, legends, and philosophies. Instruments were crafted from environmental resources. Music also functioned as an instrument of social control and a symbol of political authority. The songs were folkloric; no individual claimed authorship of any piece. Music provided recreation and worship, but never was music or musical performance sold as an economic product. This condition changed drastically with the arrival of Islam and Arabic culture, as well as with European contact.
According to R. Oliver, Islam entered Africa as early as 639 CE, when Arab armies invaded Egypt and defeated the Byzantine garrison. At its earliest stage of introduction into North Africa, Islam followed an oral tradition that sought to regulate religious practices in military camps that included allies, concubines, wives, and children. Oliver also submits that development of Islam as a universal religion capable of absorbing non-Arabs in large numbers depended on adopting Arabic as the official language of the Quran. Beyond military campaigns, missionary activity spread to slave soldiers, nomadic Arabs, and traders. The trans-Saharan trade route proved vital for spreading Islam and Arabic culture from North Africa to the Sudanese states and the Savannah belt of Africa. Holy wars called jihads extended the religion further; the most famous one in Nigeria was led by Uthman Dan Fodio. It is recorded that Islamic traders and scholars introduced Islam to northern Nigeria in the early fourteenth century and to Yoruba territory toward the end of the eighteenth century. Everywhere Islam went, it brought Arabic culture, including musical instruments, which significantly altered the face of traditional African music.
The Impact of Islamic and Arabic Culture on African Music
The Arabic-Islamic cultural wave deeply impacted African music. Nevertheless, the music of contemporary Arabic-speaking nations comprises both folk traditions — the indigenous music of these peoples before Islamization — and what we may call Arabic classical music, characterized by an Oriental flavour. From the beginning of Islam, a controversy existed regarding the use of music in worship; one divides sacred from secular music. The call to prayer and the recitation of the Quran have taken on musical characteristics that vary with the individual reciter and from country to country.
A signature musical trait of both the call to prayer and Quranic recitation is the melismatic treatment of text and monodic singing. African Muslims adopting this melisma in chanting and song could then be regarded as an infusion of Arabic-Islamic style into African music. In Nigeria, for example, this vocal quality can be heard in fuji, waka, senwele, and apala music, genres practiced predominantly by Muslims. This Arab-influenced singing manner also appears in the music of Senegalese artist Youssou N'Dour and Egyptian musicians such as Fathy Salama and Umm Kulthum.
As African leaders converted to Islam — peacefully or through holy war (jihad) — Islamic states formed. Traditional rulers adopted titles such as Emir or Sultan. Arabic musical instruments, especially earphones, became integral to court music. They replaced traditional African drums and other instruments in the palace. Other new instruments — such as cylindrical closed- or open-ended drums, lyres, and lutes — were absorbed into local musical culture. Over time, some of these were locally made and fitted to regional contexts. It is important to point out that Arab influence did not restrict itself to Islamized communities. A two-way exchange of musical ideas occurred. Consequently, Arab influence on African music reaches non-Islamized communities that shared a cultural affiliation or trade ties with Islamized neighbours.
Generally speaking, compared to Christianity, Islam demonstrated greater acceptance of African music. Most Muslim converts still practiced their traditional arts. As Akin Euba noted (referenced by Nketia), the Yoruba Islamic community employs orthodox Arabic music during worship, but performs traditional Yoruba music for social events and Muslim festivals. This tolerance and mutual respect smoothed the merging of Arabic and traditional musical resources in Islamized African communities. This fusion enriched African music and kept it alive.
European Contact and African Music
By far the most profound influence on African music, in both colonial and modern eras, came from contact with Europe. This legacy arrived through trade, Christianity, colonialism, and western education.
European trading in Africa involved legitimate goods as well as the disastrous slave trade. For several centuries until about 1807, millions of black Africans were forcibly carried to Europe and the Americas as domestic servants or plantation and industrial workers. Slavery sent African sonic idioms transatlantically. As Nketia noted, the slave trade from Africa enabled the transfer and growth of African and African-derived music in America and Europe. By adopting aspects of their masters' culture that were either agreeable with their prior learning or necessary for survival — while keeping those pieces of their heritage for which they had no substitute — African slaves carved a niche. This formed a hybridization of cultural practices fusing African and foreign influences. Cultural productions produced labels like Afro-American, Afro-Cuban, Afro-Haitian, and Afro-Brazilian, each reflecting African cultural practices reborn on foreign soil.
After the slave trade ended, ex-slaves returned to Africa and became human agents for propagating Western musical traditions on the continent. African music gained new energy as popular musicians experimented at home with fertilizing African musical material with ideas from the Diaspora. The influence of Afro-American music is particularly significant; it thrived all across Africa and continues to provide the driving force for world music in present-day times.
European trading also saw the import and marketing of Western musical instruments in European department stores such as Kingsway, UTC, and Leventis. As Western music spread — brought by sailors, traders, African elites, and the new mass media — these European instruments began to rise above traditional instruments. Western models, principally guitars, brass instruments, and drum sets, formed the basis of popular music bands once African musicians had learned to play them.
European contact ushered in a cash economy and spurred the growth of urban centers. These produced a working-class, heterogeneous population of somewhat detribalized people. City residents eagerly consumed various entertainments. Music, like other commodities, began to be sold; European contact marked the emergence of professional musicianship in Africa. Musicians now made livelihoods from performance and recordings. Music lost its entirely communal role and some cultural relevance, as it was tailored to the preferences of urban consumers, who were mostly wage earners living in mixed social groups.
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Mission schools created a natural extension of church missions. They provided a solid foundation for Christianizing Africans, where knowledge of the Bible, ability to sing hymns, and reciting catechism were seen as essential for a good Christian. Music teachers in these institutions introduced European hymns and classical music, training pupils to play European musical instruments. To be considered educated, Africans had to adopt the European way of life and reject their own cultural practices, including music.
AFRICAN MUSIC IN CONTEMPORARY TIMES
The influences discussed have transformed and continue to reshape African music. Urban growth, initially limited to coastal areas of European contact, has now expanded inland. As urbanization increases, ethnic identity and communal bonds have weakened. Consequently, contemporary African music is largely a blend of different styles. Popular music remains the most dominant form, enjoyed by the vast majority of Africans whether in cities or rural areas. Indigenous African music has survived mostly through political and social institutions that remain in villages and established Islamic states.
With improved air travel and satellite networks, music from anywhere in the world can be heard at home. This development has both positively and negatively affected African music. African pop music and musicians often imitate American and European performers. Economic factors drive the constantly shifting nature of popular music in Africa, and the music is rapidly losing its essence in a global environment. While Africans cannot remain spectators in the 21st century, there is a need to ensure that African music and musicians do not sacrifice cultural identity for globalization and capitalism.