Kabelo Chirwa

University of Cincinnati, CCM

“So, for the African… it is that whatever happens there [in the United States], we get the heat worse. Like, we’re being hit worse.” 

I found myself speechless after Malvina’s poignant statement, listening to the calming jazz piano backdrop in Utazi Kitchen & Bar in Lagos. She was building on the observation Moses previously made that, “assets [streaming royalties, music licensing/publishing splits, copyright revenue] are not getting paid as they ought to. And I think they’re looking to put down some laws to help curb that now, I think, in the States. I mean, you know, it affects the States then it affects almost the entire globe, because most of these companies are there.”  

In this article, I interrogate how my position as a researcher reflects and reverberates the consequences of empire. As I analyze my conversations with industry executives, musicians, and music fans in Lagos, I conduct analyses on global capitalism and explore how foreign investment shapes and is shaped by Nigerian popular music. I assess my experiences in Lagos to better understand how ethnomusicology can interrogate imperial violence. While my goal here is not to offer solutions, as I am primarily reflecting on my own fieldwork experiences as a way of rethinking my processes of field working and engaging in community, I hope that my reflections resonate with other researchers. Through this collective renegotiation of how researchers impact communities, I hope that this generation of scholars might find ways to no longer contribute to oppressive systems that empire and capitalism produce. 

In this paper, I position myself at the center of tensions that can emerge while doing ethnomusicological work. My research on Nigerian Urban Popular Music examines how African musicians and music fans navigate the structures of global popular music. Specifically, I take interest in how the borders of indigeneity, locality, and diaspora are blurred in Nigerian popular musicking to produce complex narratives of identity formation. Though I am not Nigerian, I—like many within the Black diaspora—have found refuge in Nigerian popular music. I have found solidarities among the celebrations of  traditions that, to varying degrees, find their roots in Sub-Saharan Africa. And I have seen myself reflected when these traditions are reimagined as part of cosmopolitan experiences. Nigerian popular music, in this way, builds an African world—which M. Ron Karenga (2019, Public Lecture Eight, para. 7) describes as sharing “a common origin, a common experience at the hands of capitalism and racism…” Though I am committed to embrace Karenga’s call to “reclaim and reconstruct our history and humanity self-consciously and in our own image,” I also worry about whether, and if so to what extent, I may be complicit in structures that disadvantage musicians in Nigeria.      

Malvina continued, elaborating on important questions regarding the role of corporations in the music business, how an artist navigates commercialism, and what an artist’s responsibility is—in the face of this complicated landscape—to their community and their art. I asked Malvina Umal Patrick and Moses Audu, “What do you envision for music in this space [in Lagos]? As an industry and as commerce, where do you see it [the music] going? And then what do you envision is your responsibility or your place in the community and music?” I wanted to know how these two musicians sitting across from me responded to the capitalist structures of the music industry while grounding their musical activities in communities of fellow musicians and fans. Malvina noted, “It’s like almost everything about you right now, whether it’s in a picture form…your picture…or your album cover…can just be stolen by one guy…and is making millions of dollars.”

The disenfranchising of African musicians was a common thread throughout the final hour of our conversation. To those seen in the margins of where global power operates, “the financialization of everything,” or the ways that neoliberalism (re)writes value systems, rarely produces positive results (Harvey 2019, 28). In the context of Nigerian popular music, the problems that new technologies design—for example within discourses of A.I.—reinforce the exploitative patterns performed by colonial institutions and known centers of neoliberalism. 

Timothy D. Taylor argues for a study of capitalism that narrows its scope from broad systems to social actors, thus understanding how their practices might change the ubiquity of capitalism. Similarly, my work demonstrates how, in relationship to social actors, the ethnographer and author plays a similar role—particularly in “forms of complicity and resistance” (Taylor 2024, 15). Malvina argues that the limited power of African musicians puts them in a precarious position. She considered the consequences of technology and theft for musicians, saying, “And you hear that it’s in this place. You’re not having access to what he has. So, you don’t even know that you’re being stolen from…You’re scared of putting your music out there, scared of putting your sound out there, before it gets duplicated by one A.I. robot somewhere, right?” Malvina’s fear of losing agency informs how she approaches community engagement and songwriting. 

Field work sometimes forces ethnographers into deeply uncomfortable circumstances. In all my encounters with the U.S., my reflections on what it means to be a US-ian,[1] and conversations about how the U.S. relates to the rest of the world, I am uncertain if what I am discovering, reaffirming, and contributing to is for better or for worse. 

During some of these reflective moments, I remember my own naturalization ceremony fondly. In 2015, I shared with my mother, father, and many other immigrants the joyful transition when we were embraced by a nation and culture that we had devoted ourselves to, found community in, and expected a future from. Yet, nationalist ideologies—possibly interpreted as anti-imperial strategies—further encouraged my complicated attitudes of living in between Africanness and Americanness because naturalization required me to renounce my Malawi citizenship (Makossah 2021).[2]

In Lagos, I have silently compared and judged my experiences with that of other U.S. visitors. I learn small details of their patterns and day-to-day life and imagine the ways it must be different from mine. And, as I walk to the supermarket, I wonder how many other U.S. visitors walk out onto the streets, beyond the walls of their wealth and experience the same Lagos I have experienced. I ask if they truly see Lagos or if their only encounters with the community are behind windows of armored vehicles, in spaces where armed guards “protect” them, or in the interactions they have with people they employ. 

I consider that I too, with my Fulbright Study/Research grant, have come to Nigeria existing in a much different social and economic class than I am used to in the U.S. Despite my bodily discomfort from being looked at as an “employer” or “resource,” and the uncertainty that constantly fills my voice when I am heard as an “authority,” I admit that I cannot distance myself from imperial systems, as much as I might want to. 

Multiple conversations in Lagos prompted questions about my own potential complicity in empire: When I hear about the conversation that my wife had with a young US-ian, in which this young person began to generously “teach” my wife about how Nigerian employees can be deployed to our benefit, I become uneasy. Or when the security guard for our apartments whom we have befriended speaks to me with determination about his dreams to go to the U.S.—to take advantage of the opportunity of being in a country where the economy might allow for more success—I too become determined to help him. Yet when I consider how race and identity exist in a completely different context in the U.S., I also cannot help but imagine how this young security guard will start learning to reshape himself to confront whiteness, using a similar strategy that he developed to confront wealth. I become disheartened. 

While I sit in conversations with musicians and executives who are shaping and navigating the industry, I become increasingly uncertain of the extent to which, as Chinedu Chukwuji argued in our interview, a cultural infrastructure attuned to the financial needs of African musicians can be established to benefit or help the Nigerian music industry and Nigerian musicians. Many of my discussions tend to gravitate towards this ambivalent relationship between Nigerian popular music and the histories and industries that connect it with European and American power. During these conversations artists and industry insiders at times criticized foreign institutions, but more frequently accepted the logic of such exploitative capitalist systems and sought to position themselves strategically in relation to them, despite simultaneously holding an interest in dismantling or reforming them. These participants of the Nigerian popular music scene investigate the relationship to non-Nigerian institutions as part of an insistence that the industry in Lagos has the capacity to be self-sufficient and would thrive from imagining a system that was constructed with African communities in mind. Bayo Akomolofe (2024) argues that the agents of power that produce systems like democracy through a process of “manufacturing” subjects uphold a form of whiteness that informs the mission of the system and its subjects. Similarly, the music industry and the power within the system uphold whiteness that exploits, tokenizes, and eventually displaces African musicians and industries. Thus, defining who is allowed to operate within the global music industry as a subject vs. non-subject, who exists as an investor vs. investment revolves around the industry’s construction of whiteness (Akomolafe 2024). Or, one might revisit the work of Frantz Fanon, mirroring his suspicion that “without a black past, without a black future, it was impossible for me to live my blackness” (Fanon 2008, 117). 

The structures of the global music industry—of which many Nigerian musicians envision themselves as a part of or aspire toward—has been built in the image of whiteness. Timothy D. Taylor and David Brackett[3] offer examples of “western” facing institutions that dominate popular music discourse, both acknowledging racial and ethnic biases and the construction of “otherness” in music categories (Taylor 1997; Brackett 2016). Furthermore, due to the nature of empire and capitalism, systems designed to dominate, infiltrate, and conquer these institutions absorb the work of non-U.S. musicians. In conversations that I have participated in, the threat of cultural imperialism certainly occupies the minds of many participants of Nigeria’s popular music industry. However, through the process of centering indigeneity—by preserving and presenting the Yoruba, Igbo, and Hausa languages, traditions, and cultural/ethnic values—and activating community spaces, these participants embrace a path towards resisting assimilation into a force that expects an unsuspecting musical resource to extract (Ojebuyi and Fafowora 2021).[4]

Moses and Malvina shared with me how, from a Nigerian musician’s perspective, North American neoliberalism reverberates to spaces beyond the empire’s borders. For example, when an artist takes a stand to own their recording masters or creatives go on strike to demand regulations on A.I., there are financial repercussions. David Harvey (2019, 29) articulates this issue, observing that, “internally, the neo-liberal state is hostile to (and in some instances overtly repressive of) all forms of social solidarity…that put restraints on capital accumulation.” Malvina and Moses share the ways that this internal hostility, repressing solidarities among participants of U.S. popular music, can be felt in other parts of the world. Yet, there also exists another layer of imperial violence enacted upon the rest of the world. 

Harvey explains further that, “externally, neoliberal states seek the reduction of barriers to movement of capital across borders and the opening of markets…sometimes competitive but more often monopolistic (though always with the opt-out provision to refuse anything ‘against the national interest’)” (2019, 29-30). Joey Akan shared with me his worry about not necessarily adopting the systems established by neoliberal elites but being content with their active presence in Nigerian music structures. Akan informed me that “Nigeria is treated as kind of a crude cash camp. So even the major label…they’re not here to improve the space or invest in the space and generate anything from here. They’re simply here because there are some global attention or there are foreign markets that somehow like our music and so they’re here to exploit that.”[5] 

In my exploration of community spaces within Nigerian popular music, I often get stuck on the question of value. In popular music making, it seems necessary to link what is culturally valuable to what becomes financially valuable. When seeking connection with a community, it seems necessary to identify and offer value that you can fulfill to the community. When weighed down by ethical implications of your proximity to oppressive systems and when determining that your voice is entangled within systems of harm and imperial violence, it seems necessary to evaluate—for those that most directly feel that harm—where your voice has value. 

During my conversation with Malvina and Moses, I remember the way Malvina’s tone shifted as she was concluding her thoughts.  

Malvina: …Because there will be a rise in agitation in people. People will be tired and the music will become a revolution. That is where we are going. We are going back to that place.” 

Moses: “The revolution will not be televised.”

And so, I ask myself if I am part of the revolution or if I am an obstacle to the coalition. 

Notes:

References

Akan, Joey. 2024. “‘There’s Never Been a Greater Time to Be a Nigerian Artist’: But Is There Room for the next Burna Boy?” The Guardian, August 26, 2024, sec. https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/article/2024/aug/26/afrobeats-afropop-music-genre-nigeria-youth-burna-boy-tems-ayra-starr-rema.

Akomolafe, Bayo. 2024. “The Children of the Minotaur: Democracy & Belonging at the End of the World.” Democracy & Belonging Forum, February 7, 2024. https://www.democracyandbelongingforum.org/forum-blog/the-children-of-the-minotaur.

Brackett, David. 2016. Categorizing Sound: Genre and Twentieth-Century Popular Music. Oakland, CA: University of California Press.

Fanon, Frantz. 2008. Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by Richard Philcox. New York, NY: Grove Press.

Harvey, David. 2019. Spaces of Global Capitalism: A Theory of Uneven Geographical Development. Brooklyn, NY: Verso.

Karenga, M. Ron. 2019. “Relations Between Africans on the Continent and Africans in the Diaspora: History and Possibilities.” In Festac ’77: 2nd World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture, edited by Ntone Edjabe and Akinwumi Adesokan. Cape Town: Afterall Books. 

Madden, Sidney, Sam Leeds, and Rodney Carmichael. 2020. “‘I Want Us To Dream A Little Bigger’: Noname And Mariame Kaba On Art And Abolition.” NPR, December 19, 2020. https://www.npr.org/2020/12/19/948005131/i-want-us-to-dream-a-little-bigger-noname-and-mariame-kaba-on-art-and-abolition.

Makossah, Peter. 2021. “Malawi Gazettes Dual Citizenship into Law.” Malawi Nyasa Times, November 18, 2021. https://www.nyasatimes.com/malawi-gazettes-dual-citizenship-into-law/.

Ojebuyi, Babatunde Raphael, and Bimbo Lolade Fafowora. 2021. “Contesting Cultural Imperialism: Hybridisation and Re-Enactment of Indigenous Cultural Values in Nigerian Hip-Hop Music.” Muziki 18 (1): 59–81. 

Taylor, Timothy D. 1997. Global Pop: World Music, World Markets. New York, NY: Routledge.

Taylor, Timothy D. 2024. Making Value: Music, Capital, and the Social. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.