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Popular Arts in Africa
... This chapter also discuss three theories upon which the study is framed. The study borrows the lenses and perspectives of The African Popular Culture Theory (Barber, 1987), Alternative ...
... In order to have a better understanding of Tavirima's objectives in using traditional dance to speak out against socio-political challenges faced by Zimbabwean citizens living in Gweru the dissertation embraces the African Popular Culture by Karin Barber (1987) Zimbabwe's socio-political crisis has made most of her citizens to keenly follow political development, such that many have been made political activist by design instead of by desire. ...
... The research embraces the theory of African popular culture outlined by Barber (1987). The model presents that popular art is contemporary art for and of the layman which is a result of a mix of people's indigenous or traditional art and exotic or external cultural forms and it is used to proffer social change (Barber, 1987:11). ...
This dissertation is an ethnographic expository of how Tavirima Traditional Dance Group uses chinyambera traditional dance as a copying mechanism for marginalised communities in Gweru, Zimbabwe. This study contextualises and analyses how Tavirima’s performances of chinyambera reflect the socio-political environment in Zimbabwe and how the music works to bring about social change. It gives further insight into and analysis of how traditional songs metaphorically speak out against the authoritarian government of Zimbabwe led by Robert Gabriel Mugabe, and how dance embodies dissent against the same. The dissertation provides transcriptions and contextual interpretations of chinyambera songs which Tavirima uses as agents for social change focusing on how the songs reflect, contest, resist and mediate in the prevailing socio-political crisis in Zimbabwe. The research also discusses how chinyambera’s roots, expressiveness and energies influence Tavirima to choose the dance over a myriad of other Zimbabwean traditional dances. The theoretical framework for this study is underlined by the African Popular Culture Theory, Alternative Cultural Theory and Positive Deviance Approach creating a vantage point through which the study is framed to analyse the ability of popular arts in bringing about social change and how subalterns take charge of their destiny by defying restrictive and oppressing systems through a metamorphosis of traditional music and dance.
... Nevertheless, this staging process disconnects the musical culture from its indigenous roots, where its spiritual, social, and political essence is deeply embedded. Furthermore, this approach tends to reinforce essentialist paradigms and perpetuate colonial perspectives on indigenous traditional music, often portraying music cultures as static (Barber, 1987). Barber argues that the displacement of culture from its indigenous contexts results in the creation of an entirely new musical product. ...
... Barber argues that the displacement of culture from its indigenous contexts results in the creation of an entirely new musical product. Despite noble intentions, the tensions arising from the recontextualisation of indigenous music traditions have been critiqued in studies by scholars (Barber, 1987;Kidula, 1996;Ogude, 2012). ...
This paper aims to elucidate the sustainable systems birthed from the interaction between the kayamba instrument and its commercial elements. The paper underscores the commercial elements linked to the kayamba and how the configuration between the indigenous and contemporary economic contexts contributes to the resilience and, sustainability of the kayamba instrument. This research takes on a different approach from the ubiquitous studies of indigenous musical instruments of Africa, which have been linked to their evident endangered state. The strategies provided are mostly based on etic perspectives and outsider interventions, which more often than not lead to essentialised and ossified traditions rather than promoting healthy environments for the music traditions to thrive. This paper shifts focus from a preservation to a sustainability framework. It incorporates a qualitative research approach that highlights the Mijikenda community's perspectives and agency in facilitating the sustainability of the kayamba musical instrument. The participants of this research were purposively sampled. Data was collected through the use of participant observation, semi-structured interviews, and focused group discussions. The data collected went through thematic analysis. Findings from this research are integral to the development of initiatives linked to the sustainability of musical instruments and music traditions. The conglomeration of indigenous and contemporary economic contexts provides a holistic view of the resilience and sustainability of indigenous musical instruments of contemporary Africa.
... Scholars have debated ways in which to understand popular culture (such as popular music) as important cultural production Barber 1987;Emielu 2011). Barber's (1987) seminal work on the conceptualization of African popular culture observed that mainstream Africanist scholars use a tripartite model (inspired by the European origin of the term popular) to discuss African culture. ...
... Scholars have debated ways in which to understand popular culture (such as popular music) as important cultural production Barber 1987;Emielu 2011). Barber's (1987) seminal work on the conceptualization of African popular culture observed that mainstream Africanist scholars use a tripartite model (inspired by the European origin of the term popular) to discuss African culture. The traditional is regarded as a cultural form that is left unchanged through time and associated with rural folk. ...
This chapter examines post-2000 scholarship on gendered representations in African popular music from scholars based both in Africa and in the West. The authors explore the historical and geographical development of contemporary scholarship on the topic, and the voices and scholarly spaces that have often been centered. Numerous studies approach gender and popular music from interdisciplinary fields, such as African studies, women’s studies, and cultural studies. Methods often employed in these studies include textual analysis of song lyrics, and, predominantly, ethnographies to understand performers, performance spaces, and audiences. The authors also discuss the power dynamics of researchers and their interactions with the local African communities they work with. In addition, the authors focus on questions of access and inclusion of African based scholars and institutes.
... We defined arts in the broadest terms by adapting and synthesising the categories outlined by Fancourt and Finn (2019) and Bunn et al. (2020) in their global and African reviews, as well as Barber (1987) in her review of popular arts in Africa (see Table 1). We focused on a comprehensive range of health conditions prevalent in Ghana, including infectious diseases, chronic non-communicable diseases, reproductive health conditions, child and maternal health conditions and diseases of ageing (see Table 1). ...
Background: This review documents arts applied to health interventions and health research in Ghana, examines evidence of their impact on health outcomes, and identifies research and practice gaps.
Methods: Eight databases (MEDLINE, Academic Search Complete, CINAHL, Health Source: Nursing/Academic Edition, Humanities International Complete, Scopus, African Journals Online and PsycINFO) were searched for articles published between 2000 and 2022. Following screening, seventeen articles reporting sixteen
eligible studies were selected.
Results: Ten art forms (including comedy, music, theatre) were applied to eight health conditions (including HIV/AIDS, mental illness, COVID-19). Most studies involved artists and artist-researchers. The majority of studies were cross-sectional. Impact was reported on health education, illness management and community
health development. Some studies engaged with health policy communities, but none reported impact on health policy change.
Conclusion: Creative arts have a reported measurable impact on selected health outcomes in Ghana. Participatory arts-based projects have the greatest potential for sustainable and transformational social health impact.
... Postcolonial African regimes thrive on doubleness (see Bernal, this volume;Mbembe 1997), and cultural formats that cultivate doubleness may therefore fl ourish in such political cultures. It may not be a surprise, therefore, that humor and rumor (see Bernal, this volume) have been major themes in African studies (Barber 1987;Obadare 2016;B. White 2007;L. ...
... African popular music studies also demonstrates the importance of the urban masses in the formation of a new African culture, as popular performers have been largely drawn from the "intermediate" classes (see Barber 1987) that lie between the national elites and the traditional subsistence farmers. These intermediates include labourers, petty traders, agricultural workers, miners, artisans, new rural migrants, clerks, lorry drivers, messengers and seamen. ...
Although the teaching if of African traditional and art music in Ghanaian universities began from independence in 1957, the introduction of local popular music has taken much longer, partly a consequence of imported high-art notion that treated popular music as trivial, ephemeral and low-brow. Although Nkrumah utilised local popular, traditional and arts music in nation building after his overthrow in 1966 his vision was never fully transmitted into the universities where students were only expected to be bi-musical, i.e. familiar with traditional music and art music. The first evidence of a growing Ghanaian academic interest in popular performance studies was the pioneering work of the university lecturers Efua Sutherland, K.N. Bame and Attana Mensah during the 1960s/70s. But this area was not included in the university curriculum until the 1990s, when the University of Ghana changed its position due to several factors. One was the burgeoning local popular music industry (after the music industry decline during the 70s/80s military regimes) and the consequent job opportunities for students. Another was the rise of pop influenced local gospel music from the 1980s that sanctified the guitar and dance-band music. Thirdly there was an interest in Afropop by foreign world music students coming in large numbers after Ghana’s economic liberalisation of the late 1980’s.
... This irony is not rare in genres readily assumed as comprising the field of African literature. Studies like Shola Adenekan's African Literature in the Digital Age (2021), Akin Adesokan's 'New African Writing and the Question of Audience' (2012), Tsitsi Jaji's 'Mediating African Poetry Audiences' (2020), and the influential 'Popular Art in Africa' by Karin Barber (1987) have grappled with this irony Jaji (2020, 72) identifies as the imbrication of 'genre, literary valuation and associated reading publics'. ...
... It is important to note that our analysis of the deployment of popular songs is located within the parochial view of popular culture by ZANU-PF and also within the views of Cloonan and Johnson (2002), for whom not enough attention is paid to the darker side of popular music in particular, where it is employed as a psychological weapon. ZANU-PF saw popular culture as a 'realm for brainwashing passive actors' (Mare 2020: 84) over and against other characterizations such as Barber's (1987) site 'for political and cultural struggles' or Conboy's 'struggle for access to knowledge' (2002: 2). As argued above, we are intrigued by a darker side of popular music in the most painful period of Zimbabwe's postcolonial transition to investigate the deliberate deployment of music as an instrument of psychological torture and pain. ...
The premise of this article is that popular music was a critical space for enforcing hegemonic dominance of ZANU-PF during the first decade of its rule, as perhaps in other eras. When it assumed power in 1980, ZANU-PF did not hide its intention to establish single-party rule, which was then popular across Africa. Top among competing priorities for the new regime was removing all centres of political opposition or resistance. But PF-ZAPU, ZANU-PF’s erstwhile liberation war rival, threatened this vision in south-western Zimbabwe, where it enjoyed significant support. We analyse music that promoted ZANU-PF hegemony in the context of the Gukurahundi ‘genocide’ in the early 1980s, a campaign that was part of the desire for complete dominance of Zimbabwe. The music contained a celebratory discourse spreading fear and emotional violence, thus censoring and suffocating competing narratives about the new state.
The current buzz surrounding West African popular music in the moniker of Afrobeats has placed a global spotlight on West African artists and their music. Afrobeats was popularized among mainstream North American audiences in 2016 when world-renowned musician Drake featured Nigerian musician, Wizkid, on his song “One Dance.” The term has gone under scrutiny in various debates between critics and advocates. What exactly is Afrobeats? Is it a musical genre with distinct sonic signifiers or a socially generated term for a panoply of West African popular music genres? Is it a synonym for West African popular music? Afrobeats is an ambiguous term because it evades a definition. Perhaps, the conundrum stems from the fact that it shares the same name with a precedent (and different) musical style–Afrobeat without an ‘s’–often associated with the world-renowned Nigerian musician and activist Fela Anikulapo-Kuti. This article traces the trajectory of the term from its conception as a hypernym circulating within West African communities outside Africa to its construction as a genre in the mainstream global music industry. By analyzing the operative distinctions between Afrobeats as a hypernym and Afrobeats as a genre, I explore the amalgamation of diverse genres as Afrobeats and the ensuing genrefication of Afrobeats. I argue that Afrobeats has been conceptualized differently within various contexts in the Global North. Through a critical analysis of conventional and alternative modes of circulation and consumption of music, I expatiate on how and why the term was constructed as well as its significance. Finally, by discussing the various ways in which the distinct modes of global circulation intersect, I suggest that Afrobeats is a social and aesthetic category within a diasporic cultural framework on the one hand, and a marketing category operating within what Dave Laing (2009) calls a “genre-market” on the other.
In the 1940s pamphlet literature burgeoned into a profitable industry in the market town of Onitsha, in Nigeria. As the pam-phlets, also referred as ‘chapbooks’, were printed, and circulated in the market town of Onitsha this genre of literature came to be po-pularly known as Onitsha Market Literature. According to scholars like Obiechina (1973) Onitsha Market Literature is the ‘literature of the mass’ and it soared to popularity due to its cheap retail price and the lucidity of language. Obiechina further argues that Onitsha Market Literature represented the ‘sentiments of an emergent urban culture’. The most interesting characteristics of these pamphlets was the didactic element, which dominated the thematic core of both the fictions and non-fictions, the central concern being to educate and guide the audience. The authorial intentions were sometimes clearly identified through the titles of the pamphlets; Beware of Women, Why Boys don’t trust their girlfriends? My seven daugh-ters are after young boys, A Woman’s Pride is her husband; etc. According to Stephanie Newel (1996) Onitsha pamphlets presented a ‘new female identity’, which was a product of ‘decolonization’ and ‘urbanization’. However, what structured this ‘new female identity’? Who were the authors of these pamphlets? Were there any women authors, who were also instrumental in creating this ‘new identity’? Around the 1970s another form of ‘literature of the mass’ started making a mark in the urban areas of Kano, Sokoto, Katsina, Kaduna and Zariya. However, as Kano was the lead in the produc-tion of these texts the pamphlets, produced during this period, came to be known as the Kano Market Literature. According to Novian Whitsitt (2003) Kano market literature possessed aesthetic, thematic, and social similarities with the Onitsha ‘chapbooks’. Thus, like Onitsha Market Literature, did Kano Market Literature also aim at creating a ‘new female identity’? How did ‘decolonization’ and ‘urbanization’ affect the Market Literature of Kano? Therefore, through the methodology of Comparative Literature the proposed paper aims to find possible answers to the posed questions.
Music enhances participation in emerging democracies where the rights of association, assemblage, and and the freedom of expression are suppressed by the state apparatus meant to guarantee them in the first place. Ugandan Afropop musician and politician, Robert Kyagulanya (aka Bobi Wine), composed the song “Tugambire ku Jennifer” (Tell Jennifer on Our Behalf), which articulated the social aspirations of Kampala’s street vendors. The song’s meaning does not begin and end with the composer’s intent but stretches to its effects on the listeners. Analyzing meaning through the lens of speech act theory provides an understanding of what music means when it simultaneously reflects and shapes society.
The electric guitar is one of the most important musical instruments and cultural artifacts of the 20th and 21st centuries and enjoys popularity worldwide. Designed for students, this Companion explores electric guitar technology and performance, and the instrument's history and cultural impact. Chapters focused on the social significance of the electric guitar draw attention to the ways in which gender and race have shaped and been shaped by it, the ecology of electric guitar manufacturing, and the participation of electric guitarists in online communities. Contributions on electric guitar history stretch the chronology backwards in time and broaden our ideas of what belongs in that history, and those addressing musical style investigate the cultural value of virtuosity while providing material analysis of electric guitar technique. The Companion's final section considers the electric guitar's global circulation, particularly in Africa, the Afro-Caribbean, and Southeast Asia.
What could be called a digital turn has amplified conversations around publics, literary cultures, and African literature’s broadened genres. Drawing on conceptual frameworks and debates from literary, cultural, and media studies, Adeoba examines the literary imaginations and ekphrastic practices that emerge from the digital cultures of African Twitter users. Adeoba argues that crowdsourced verse demonstrates the creative agency of digitally connected everyday people and newer modes of sociality enabled by African poetry in digital contexts. Crowdsourced verse presents opportunities to examine the digital publics of African literature and their contributions to the body of literary works circulating in digital spaces.
This chapter examines the effectiveness of chinyambera dance performances as a tool for social change in repressive environments, focusing on the Tavirima traditional dance group in Gweru, Zimbabwe. Through the metaphors embedded in chinyambera traditional dance and songs, Tavirima articulates issues affecting contemporary Zimbabwean society.
Sabina Yuhas (@Overszabi) and Juliana Belova (@juliewanderz or Oyibo Marlian) are Hungarian and Russian women, respectively, who are fascinated by Nigerian popular culture. Despite their successes in exploiting Black culture to attain wealth and fame in the Nigerian mediasphere, their works have hardly been studied. Close readings and nuanced analyses of their selected TikTok skits show a multiplicity of images that are neither fully European nor Nigerian—equivocal identities—mediating Otherness. However, the longstanding power asymmetries between Africa and Europe characterize their enactments as commodification of Blackness, accounting for why Nigerians who perform “Europeanness” do not attain corresponding success.
Psychiatric Contours investigates new histories of psychiatry, derangement, and agitated subjectivities in colonial and decolonizing Africa. The volume lets the multivalent term madness broaden perception, well beyond the psychiatric. Many chapters detect the mad or the psychiatric in unhinged persons, frantic collectives, and distressing situations. Others investigate individuals suffering from miscategorization. A key Foucauldian word, vivacity, illuminates how madness aligns with pathology, creativity, turbulence, and psychopolitics. The archives, patient-authored or not, speak to furies and fantasies inside asylums, colonial institutions, decolonizing missions, and slave ships. The frayed edges of politicized deliria open up the senses and optics of psychiatry’s history in Africa far beyond clinical spaces and classification. The volume also proposes fresh concepts, notably the vernacular, to suggest how to work with emic clues in a granular fashion and telescope the psychiatric within histories of madness. With chapters stretching across much of ex-British and ex-French colonial Africa, Psychiatric Contours attends to the words, autobiographies, and hallucinations of the stigmatized and afflicted as well as of the powerful. Expatriate psychiatrists with cameras, prying authorities, fearful missionaries, and colonial anthropologists enter these readings beside patients, asylums, and boarding schools via research on possession “hysteria” and schizophrenia. In brief, this book demonstrates novel ways of writing not only medical history but all subaltern and global histories.
The premise of this book is the intersection between language ideologies and language usage in South African television. This chapter aims to connect these two fields of inquiry to form a sufficiently robust theoretical framework for data analysis in the subsequent chapters. This chapter outlines theoretical issues concerning language ideologies and usage in popular culture. The chapter starts by discussing the concept of ideology. It then discusses what constitutes a language ideology and offers a few examples of language ideologies in different settings. The last section of the chapter discusses the existence and implications of language ideologies in popular culture.
Since its inception in 1992, Nollywood, the Nigerian film industry, has grown into a transnational cinema and the second largest film industry in the world thanks in large part to the popularity of the highly affective and dramatic narrative conventions the industry has perfected. In the last decade, Nollywood filmmakers have produced films that depict the African immigrant lived experience in American cities like New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Atlanta. These films are glocal in nature; while set in the United States and featuring African characters, the films combine both local and global settings, cultural attitudes, identity politics, and the protean nature of everyday life in America. By examining the films Anchor Baby and Baby Oku in America, this article analyses how Nollywood filmmakers employ the industry’s affective and melodramatic narrative practices to show African immigrant characters’ complex emotional, epistemological, and phenomenological responses to both the urban spaces they inhabit and the African spaces they left behind.
Cet article contribue au regain d’intérêt autour de la personne de Patrice Lumumba, notamment son importance dans l’imaginaire global, son ubiquité et son iconicité à travers la peinture populaire congolaise. Il ne s’agit pas ici de revenir sur la trajectoire politique de Patrice Lumumba – un thème prolifique sur lequel un nombre considérable d’études sans cesse renouvelées, s’est déjà penché – mais d’examiner l’aura prophétique et christique qui a fini par envelopper Lumumba de façon posthume. Lumumba, et non Joseph Kasa-Vubu, hérite du manteau prophétique sacralisé de la tradition messianique kongo et devient, à travers le discours de l’imaginaire populaire, le dernier maillon dans la chaîne prophétique kongo, le prophète de l’indépendance. Cependant, cette consécration, à travers la concaténation du politique et du religieux, ne lui est conférée au Congo que sur le tard, alors que la figure de « Lumumba mort » revêt très tôt sur la scène internationale un caractère canonique inouï.
This book shows how South African writing can help us to understand change after apartheid. It aims to shift the attention of literary criticism away from a narrow set of highbrow South African authors and towards a wider range of texts, including popular fiction. The object of analysis, at its largest level, is the South African polity as it veered between the hopeful optimism of the 'Rainbow nation' under Nelson Mandela, the murderous muddling of Thabo Mbeki, and the 'captured state' under Jacob Zuma. Questions of a political, economic, and sociological cast are central, with changes in the workplace, land reform, indigenous knowledge, xenophobia, corruption, and crime providing specific points of focus. Writing, Politics and Change in South Africa after Apartheid shows how creative literature of the post-apartheid period has a unique and powerful capacity to illuminate these issues and to intervene in our understanding of them.
This article examines contemporary critical positions in African literature that mark off perceptible shifts in focus from issues of primal postcolonialism to a more self-reflexive treatment of postmodernism in contemporary African literature. Contemporary African literary works, novels, and plays have become markedly self-reflexive in the way they rewrite one another and draw attention to their own functionality and fictionality. These works present stylistic and thematic departures that challenge the nationalist and realist trend of earlier writing. Creative works further depart from the tradition of “writing back” to the European colonial center by focusing their gaze on local forms of oppression that are seen to parallel classical colonialism. Yet, while critics have separately studied postmodernism and self-reflexivity in African texts, the intersection of the two has not been given sufficient attention. The purpose of this analytical paper then is to decipher postmodernist aesthetics in African literary works, novels and plays, as developed to a higher level of self-consciousness. The specific question I address is to what extent postmodernism expresses itself as an outgrowth of modernism and postcolonialism? Keywords: Modernity, postmodernism, postcolonialism, African literary theories and criticisms.
Purpose: The discourse examines the origin of Church music, its transition and reforms in the Christian church in Ghana in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The paper explores the seeming connection and embodiment of elements of Judaism as well as features characterized by the early Patriarchal Church Music policy. It also seeks to unravel the forgotten process that unpins the transition characterized by these musical reforms in the church in Ghana. Methodology: To do this, the paper engaged in a desk study review of the existing empirical literature on the origin of church music and specifically, the various transitional periods between the late 19th and early 21st Centuries. Findings: It became evident from the study that the church in Ghana, just like in many other African nations broke the imposing dictatorship of Patriarchal Church Music policy giving birth to new movements in church music reforms. This major breakthrough was achieved through the indigenization activities such as the integration of traditional features and acceptance of secular music into the church by the locally formed independent churches. Unique Contribution to Theory, Policy and Practice: The discourse, therefore, concludes that the church in Ghana made considerable strive with heavy transformation in gaining musical autonomy despite the intensity of resistance. However, ironically the Ghanaian church music scene remains the embodiment of converging cultures; partly Western, partly Ghanaian. This must be a major concern for further study.
The apartheid regime conspired to advance black ethnic divisions to facilitate the homelands and diminish the threat of black people to South Africa. From 1994, the democratic dispensation has engaged in various nation-building attempts to solidify a united South Africa that is multicultural and multilingual in conjunction with a progressive Constitution. Popular township films by Ekasi: Our Stories and Lokshin Bioskop have ventured into this arena which was the forte of the South African Broadcasting Corporation, to engage in storylines that encourage nation-building. In this article, I argue that popular films have emerged to represent cosmopolitan tropes that galvanise Black Nationalism. Also, the films engage negative black tribal stereotypes that, if not attended to, could result in black disunity. It can also be argued that the latter has been a stimulant for African conflicts, occasionally causing genocides. This article explores the role popular films play in conveying a nation-building narrative that sustains Black Nationalism and reconciliation in post-apartheid South Africa.
This book explores how the meaning listeners infer from a song audio text can be analyzed as literary stylistics.
This paper explores Fuji popular music as a tool for socialization within the current Yoruba cultural setting using the content exploration approach mode. Much of the traditional elements are embedded in the lyrics of Fuji musicians. Each Fuji musician digs experiments with the Yoruba culture to make the brand of Fuji music distinct from others. Saheed Osupa is a Fuji musician whose lyrics are laced with different sorts of Yoruba socio-cultural values. These values include proverbs, folktales, folklores, riddles, witty sayings, etc. The paper concludes that apart from being a vibrant art form in the popular literature sub-genre, the contents of the Fuji music can also serve pedagogical and other educational purposes in the present-day setup.
Literary Black Power in the Caribbean focuses on the Black Power movement in the
anglophone Caribbean as represented and critically debated in literary texts,
music and film.
This volume is groundbreaking in its focus on the creative arts and artists in
their evaluations of, and insights on, the relevance of the Black Power message
across the region. The author takes a cultural studies approach to bring together
the political with the aesthetic, enriching an already fertile debate on the era and
the subject of Black Power in the Caribbean region. The chapters discuss various
aspects of Black Power in the Caribbean: on the pages of journals and magazines,
at contemporary conferences that radicalized academia to join forces with communities,
in fiction and essays by writers and intellectuals, in calypso and reggae
music, and in the first films produced in the Caribbean.
Produced at the 50th anniversary of the 1970 Black Power Revolution in Port
of Spain, Trinidad, this timely book will be of interest to students and academics
focusing on Black Power, Caribbean literary and cultural studies, African diaspora,
and Global South radical political and cultural theory.
One of the key observations about rap music is how it has embodied a political voice for the youth. This is true of Africa as well, and of Malawi in particular. In this chapter, the aim is to examine the youth’s awareness of their political agency as articulated in several songs produced in the run-up to the 2019 tripartite elections in Malawi. The chapter has three parts, examining how the songs lament the vulnerability of the youth as they fall victim to political exploitation, how they illustrate partisan allegiance and appeal to the conscience of the politicians, and how they militate for youth agency through casting of the vote.
This chapter stems from discussions on the abuse of alcohol by the youth in Malawi. An interesting development is how hip-hop music takes on the discourse surrounding abuse of alcohol by the youth. Specifically, this chapter examines the glorification of alcohol that is prevalent in the emerging genre of hip-hop music on the Malawian scene. Drawing from the notion of the public sphere popularised by theorist Jurgen Habermas, the chapter advances the central argument that the young musicians forge an identity around alcohol and drug abuse as an escape mode into a fantasy world that elides the realities of poverty and lack of opportunities in the African nation.
How can we explain the increasing popularity of slam poetry among youth in societies colored by long histories of conflict and political repression? This article explores this question for the rise of slam poetry in Chad, since 2014, a conflict-ridden country with an authoritarian regime and deep poverty, characteristics of a society in duress. In Francophone Africa we can speak of a slam poetry movement, where slam as a form of expression and the organization of (inter)national festivals has become a space of belonging for young people in Africa who must cope with societies in duress. The article is the result of my long engagement with the slam scene in francophone Africa.
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