Critical Review - Mande Music by Eric Charry

In Chapters 7 and 8 of his book Mande Music, Eric Charry writes about the process of studying and writing about music in Africa. Being a foreigner had specific advantages for Charry--because he posed no threat as a competitor to local musicians, had money to give them, and could help bring them abroad, he was able to learn musical traditions that are often kept within a particular family or social class. He was also able to learn the music at a faster pace than a normal student, because he had equipment that allowed him to record his lessons so he could master them at home. However, he acknowledges that "the time one spends learning the music of a foreign culture (both abroad and at home) rarely approaches the time spent by those who are recognized as being good at it in those foreign societies, almost never for those considered masters. [...] we may delude ourselves into thinking that our ways of learning are more effective, reinforced by local approval of our musical competence, the possible motives for which are usually not critically assessed." (p. 333).

Charry also stresses the importance of "keep[ing] track of who is doing the talking, including questioning the sources of their knowledge and their motives, and also one's own motives and critical reactions." (p.331). There is a long line of non-Africans of varying motivations and agendas who have criticized African artists for not being African enough, as well as a long line of non-Africans who have questioned the motivation of these non-African critics. Though Africans themselves have responded to these concerns, "the voices of those who might object to the packaging and export of their traditions have been underrepresented." (p.331). This is also due to the fact that most traditional musicians "have had little access or interest in thorough Western-style education. Therefore those who write about the music do it from a distance, and those who play the music do not write about it." (p.352).

Particularly among the Mande, "there are strong social expectations about who may play music, who should go through a university education, and what fields are respectable scholarly pursuits." (p.352) Because of this, "Literature about African music history lags behind that of other areas of the world [...] fueling notions that African music is timeless and static." (p. 6). However, as Charry argues, African music is anything but static. He uses the guitar as an example of "Mandenka values of change, marked by a tenacious respect for meaningful old traditions." (p.351). Initially imported from abroad, the guitar has been used by jelis, the traditional oral historians of Mande society, not just to "modernize" their traditions, so to speak, but as a "major force for expanding the language of that tradition and moving it into an international arena." (p.351).

Though sometimes it seems as if modernity and tradition in Africa are mutually exclusive, Charry points out that, as in other parts of the world,"Traditional and modern worldviews complement each other, meld together, and also remain distinct in late twentieth century western Africa." (p.27). Charry wisely writes, "Though these terms [modern vs. traditional] can conjure up outdated binary either/or ways of looking at the world, they can also provide valuable frames of reference for the very real possibility of nonexclusive dualities, with people drawing elements from here and there while forging multifarious ways of living in the world." (p.24)

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Although I have chosen to focus mainly on Mande dancing and drumming for this project, as that is what we are being taught the most about in my Mande class, there are a variety of other musical traditions in West Africa, which Charry divides into four distinct spheres:

1. music related to hunters societies and their legendary hunter heroes, sung to the accompaniment of the simbi, a seven-stringed calabash (gourd) harp.

2. music of the jelis (called jeliya) played on the bala (xylophone), koni (lute), and kora (harp), which is associated with rulers, warriors, traders, and other patrons

3. drumming related to various life-cycle, agricultural, and recreational events played on the jembe (struck with the bare hands) and dundun (struck with a stick) in Mali and Guinea or the tangtango (struck with one hand and one stick) in the Senegambia

4. modern urban electric groups (called orchestras), largely dominated by guitar-laying jelis, which draw from the other three spheres (Charry, 2-3)

Charry, Eric. Mande music : traditional and modern music of the Maninka and Mandinka of Western Africa. University of Chicago Press. 2000.