Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University

When Echoes Return

Author(s): Louis Chude-Sokei
Source: Transition , No. 104, Souls (2011), pp. 76-92
Published by: Indiana University Press on behalf of the Hutchins Center for African and
African American Research at Harvard University
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/transition.2011.-.104.76

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When Echoes Return
roots, diaspora and possible Africas (a eulogy)

Louis Chude-Sokei

Reggae is mine, reggae is mine, yeah, yeah…

Reggae is mine, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah…
—Lucky Dubé , “Back to My Roots”

You have fe dread a yard before you dread abroad…

—Black Uhuru, “Dreadlock Pallbearers”

A ll too often, certain genres of black music chart history and signal social
transformation through the language of murder. Murder as topic, metaphor,
and symbol. Murder also as raw product of the sharply divided and embat-
tled places from which black musical forms inevitably sound. Reggae is no
stranger to this mode of historical awareness; in fact, it has arguably been
the most prominent form of black music to narrate the postcolonial shift
from the rhetoric of revolutionary violence to the “boombastic” language
of street-level sectarianism. It told the story of how narco-terrorists and
urban “bad-manism” would emerge in the space between political “inde-
pendence” and socio-economic and cultural freedom. From revolution to
murder, one could say, as the politics of pan-African solidarity fragmented
into increasingly narrow commitments for generations armed in ways their
elders could never have imagined.
Though well known for its commitment to racial solidarity, Jamaican
reggae also harbors a not-so-secret history of intra-racial terror, violence,
and murder. Songs that memorialize the victims of gunfire are in fact a
veritable subgenre. This dark side of reggae is actually captured best in
instrumental “dub.” Its swirling echoes are metaphors of loss while the
disembodied voices and gunshots mimic the sound of ghosts, the sudden
dead. In addition to methods of sound production and a range of story-
telling techniques, reggae music has also bequeathed this dark vision of
the African Diaspora to its two primary progeny: dancehall and hip-hop.

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 Yellowman.
Digital
Photograph.
©2008
Kameelah
Rasheed.
www.
kameelahr.com

But now that an African performer of a Jamaican idiom has been canonized
by a seemingly authenticating violence, one wonders less about the fate of
reggae than about the process by which its attendant concept of black dis-
persal is appropriated, popularized, and indigenized in Africa.
Lucky Dubé (1964–2007) was a victim of the kind of gun violence that
has come to represent notions of black ghetto authenticity and manhood
alongside still incomplete notions of national “independence.” His murder
reveals a great deal about the legacies of black-on-black transnational poli-
tics in sound. This in turn reveals a great deal about the legacies of pan-
Africanism and the distinctly modern metaphor called “the Black Diaspora.”
In this particular case one must ask: how does pan-African roots music get
rooted in the place that it had long mythified as its historical origin and its
source of authenticity? The question arises because despite Lucky Dubé’s
adoption of Rastafarianism and its “back to Africa” mythos, he and other
continental reggae artists struggled for legitimacy largely due to being
merely literal Africans.
Regardless of their talent and the depth of their commitments, the primary
handicap of African reggae artists is that they are not directly produced by
the symbolic gestures and romantic themes of exile and racial trauma that
emerged as a result of the Atlantic slave trade. Here it is worth restating that
the very notion of Africa is indebted primarily to two things: first, to the
colonial vision of a conceptually containable and politically controllable
whole; and second, to Black Diaspora resistance movements like Ethiopianism,
pan-Africanism, Négritude, Black Power, Civil Rights, Negrismo, and others
which erected themselves on that primary colonial symbolic architecture.

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West Indian Day
Parade: Lady
in Red. Digital
Photograph.
©2010 Kameelah
Rasheed. www.
kameelahr.com

These multiple and competitive traditions would all feed into roots reggae
sound, ideology, and politics. What has not been explored enough is how so
many of the central tenets, assumptions, and sensibilities of these movements
were technologized, popularized, and globalized by black music. From min-
strel coon-songs to gospel, jazz, rumba, calypso, funk, and hip-hop, black
recorded sound has helped construct a contemporary cultural landscape so
sprawling that it exceeds the very possibility of a categorical Blackness or any
easy claims on solidarity.
Reggae has been Africa’s most powerful musical advocate. But reggae
has also been most powerful in replacing the Africas of colonialism and
independence with a panoply of possible Africas drawn from quite diverse
black radical traditions. More so even than earlier sounds, roots reggae
always seemed to invite itself directly to Africa, brazenly insisting upon
itself as the continent’s primary echo, if not recursive mirror.
The Rastafarian reggae that would inspire Lucky Dubé was itself delib-
erately structured as a “universal” form, and its construction of Africa was
key to an assumed and intended universality. This was due not only to its
relationship to pan-Africanism, Ethiopianism, and Civil Rights soul and
R&B, but also to the efforts of influential Rastafarian ideologues in the
1960s. There was an intense debate among the grass-roots theologians and
organic intellectuals of the movement about the use and meaning of that
Africa which had long seeped into the popular music and culture, and
which had been taken for granted as a known quantity or knowable object.
These intellectuals did not accept the semantic promiscuity of the term—as
it roamed from slave Christianity and Ethiopianism through poor and
working-class cults, sects, churches, and communities, and into pre-reggae

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musical forms like mento and calypso. Instead, in the postcolonial period,
they attempted to formalize an image of Africa.
Was Africa to be maintained as a literal space, a target for black migration,
or should it function primarily as a motivating symbol, imagined origin, and
semantic center? In short, was it a place
or a world-view? Though the rhetorical These alternate Africas produced
traces of the former would continue to in Black Diasporic sound may
motivate roots reggae—grounded in the
unshakeable legacy of Garveyism—it have been shaped by desire,
was the latter opinion that prevailed nostalgia, and trauma, but they
and guided the work of everyone from
were primarily produced and
Burning Spear to Bob Marley to Lee
Perry and their multitudinous offspring. configured by the local politics
Africa also became canonized as a spe- of America and the Caribbean.
cific experience and an orientation to
modernity. However, because this deliberately non-literal view did prevail, it
remains arguably the most fragile ideological tenet of the movement. This
construction of Africa would forever be threatened by not only the messy
presence of an actual Africa, but even more so by literal Africans.
In a sense, roots reggae was aware that its order was too tall: in song it
demanded blood citizenship, and its right to have a say in continental gover-
nance and its processes of postcolonial identity formation. In sound it claimed
a remedy for exile, and absolution for the sin of distance. In keeping with its
connection to colonialism, poverty, and a fundamentalist sense of manhood,
this millenarian and nakedly utopian music also sublimated its fantasies of
power and vengeance in its language of justice and liberation (there is always,
after all, an echo of revenge in revolution and of murder in freedom).
These alternate Africas produced in Black Diasporic sound may have
been shaped by desire, nostalgia, and trauma, but they were primarily
produced and configured by the local politics of America and the Caribbean.
And so they have been fraught with ambivalence and fear and have been
riven with class and sexual tensions. These darker motivations are as much
a part of pan-Africanism, the Black Atlantic, and the Black Diaspora as the
celebrated and often exaggerated notions of resistance, subversion, and
revolution. And all of the possible Africas proposed by music have been
grounded in the authority of the most potent, dangerous, and unstable
metaphor known to humanity: the metaphor of roots.
But since black roots music was never a given form for continental
Africans such as Lucky Dubé, perhaps in death it can give the kind of
authenticity granted those whose artifice outlives crude, simple flesh.
Lacking the geographical distance that gives gravity to longing and author-
ity to metaphor, perhaps murder will ultimately guarantee that Lucky Dubé
belongs in a Diaspora that often renders Africa secondary to its imaginings
of it, its soundings of it, and its representations of itself in relation to it.

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 In his brief but remarkably productive life, he was more than a little
aware of this curious position of being merely, literally African in a relent-
lessly poeticized Diaspora. He was deeply aware that the Diaspora required
the symbolic and moral charge of the continent but would often silence it
by subsuming its differential concerns into universalized or transnational
metonyms of racial identity. Lucky Dubé showed he understood the curios-
ity of his position by choosing roots reggae to make his claims on racial
justice in an apartheid-ridden South Africa, and to claim his place in a
Diaspora that had long announced its politics, intentions, and differential
cultural sensibilities in print, on radio, on vinyl, on screen, and eventually
on the internet. This issue of choice is important to emphasize: Lucky
Dubé’s performance of roots music was strategic; it was not the eruption of
a global sense of shared African gnosis as most within the Rastafarian com-
munity would have it.
For Lucky Dubé and a generation of musicians from West and South
Africa, reggae may have found itself back “home,” but did so as the preemi-
nent form of black popular art to define itself in diasporic, non-African terms.
Roots reggae would be chosen for its global pedigree and for what it could offer
to an Africa suffering from the legacies of colonialism and apartheid, but also
from inter-ethnic tensions exacerbated by those legacies. And Lucky Dubé
would also choose it as a native of South Africa—a nation that had erected
itself on fantasies of white African authenticity, a fantasy dependent upon a
political and historical displacement of blacks from Africa. This internal
dispersal did not require their total physical displacement, and so narratives
of nostalgia and exile would have to be borrowed. This was an Africa com-
prised of homelands, black centers scattered by the racist fantasy of a nation
that could be “in, but not of,” Africa.
For a music to begin as a statement of Jamaica and become globalized
and translated as the sound of the very world itself is perhaps not surprising
in a radically mediatized world. But given the fact that roots reggae relent-
lessly uses Africa as a symbol, how it is
To state the problem as appropriated by Africans themselves is
only one expression of a largely under-
forcefully as possible: modern explored and under-theorized current in
and contemporary Africa is often Black Atlantic thought. To state the prob-
marginalized by the increasingly lem as forcefully as possible: modern and
contemporary Africa is often marginal-
dominant diasporic framework. ized by the increasingly dominant dia-
sporic framework. It is relentlessly
celebrated for its anteriority yet surpassed by the echoes of its cultural
influence; and it is often erased by the cultural power of those who claim
it as a sign of their own historical vulnerability. This use and abuse of Africa
occurs despite the fact that diasporic influence has precipitated more than
one transformative movement on the continent itself: from the arrival of

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blackface minstrelsy, jazz and rumba, through the influence of Edward
Blyden, Marcus Garvey, Négritude, and decolonization, to the contempo-
rary world of an obscenely corporate global hip-hop/sports/media complex
with African Americans in the starring roles.
In the face of these ludic images and sounds of black possibility—which
emphasize the distance between Africa and its Diaspora—the more liberat-
ing legacies of transnational racial solidarity have diminished on the con-
tinent. These older legacies have in fact become pastiche, a form of
“afro-kitsch” sometimes evoked as performances for black tourists seeking
“home,” or used by authoritarian “revolutionary leaders” to maintain power
in the name of anti-colonial racial solidarity. On the other hand, contem-
porary Africa is presented with the seemingly limitless freedom of a hyper-
visible Western Blackness that finds its claims to marginalization belied by
its ubiquity and subordinated by its own hyperbolic performance codes.
This blackness is then consumed by a continent so destabilized by promises
of liberation that it has redefined its notion of freedom and solidarity in
almost exclusively corporate terms. Lucky Dubé’s music should be heard
in this context of a much earlier legacy of pan-Africanism. It must also be
heard against this increasingly corporate dispersal of blackness, a blackness
that emerged in the ashes of roots reggae’s failure to adapt to the Africa
that it helped invent.

•  •  •

Now it might seem obvious that an Africa-obsessed music would find a

welcome home in Africa more than other black popular musical forms. Yet
the micropolitics of how this happened, and the philosophical implications
of why, go far beyond the obvious. They tell a broader story, not just about
Africa’s place in the global Black imagination, but more importantly about
how people on the continent find their way into conversations being held
in their name, but largely without their participation. After all, these sounds
and images have provided much to a Diaspora always hungry to orient and
define itself against an African modernity. But what these sounds and
images have offered back to the continent is still unclear. The career of
Lucky Dubé ultimately shows how Africans have to find their way into the
conversations of the Black Diaspora by ironically mimicking their assertions
of African authenticity or racial utopia.
For a non-Jamaican to proclaim and appropriate that Africa of roots was
in fact no mean feat. Throughout Africa, the appropriation of African
American and Afro Caribbean styles, attitudes, ideas, and identities has not
often been seen as a glorious statement of transnational solidarity. More often,
it has been seen as curious, subversive, and dangerously inauthentic by those
for whom “tradition” is being assaulted on too many fronts to count and for

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 whom “race” is no guarantor of community or shared origins. To some ears,
Lucky Dubé’s rasta-roots performance was a gesture of colonial submission.
It signaled the weakening of indigenous African traditions, with Western
Blackness merely a mask for imperial intentions masquerading as liberationist
possibilities.
This interpretation was warranted on some level: Lucky Dubé’s quasi-
orthodox stress on the authenticity of roots was often deployed against local
tastes and the new digital authenticities being produced in township musical
culture. Take, for example, a song like “Back to My Roots,” which was a hit
in both South Africa and Nigeria and which continues to be taken at face
value, without the multiple ironies
To some ears, Lucky Dubé’s rasta-roots at work. “Back to My Roots” is
performance was a gesture of colonial paradigmatic of the context and
issues being explored here, largely
submission. It signaled the weakening due to the irony of its claim on
of indigenous African traditions, with racial authenticity and cultural
Western Blackness merely a mask orthodoxy. This song—as many
Jamaican roots tunes have done—
for imperial intentions masquerading lambasted “crackadoo” and “shoo-
as liberationist possibilities. bee doobee” music, forms that,
though popular, were “not good
for a Rasta man.” In this particular narrative, it is the presence of these other
digital sounds that compels a return to a notion of roots wired in from
Jamaica—and its over-determinations of the African continent. Despite the
long and rich legacy of anti-colonial nationalism and multiple generations of
pan-Africanism on the continent, it is arguably through music that most
Africans—the illiterate and barely literate included—have explored, weighed,
discussed, or deployed the value of race, a form of solidarity which is normally
secondary to Africa’s kaleidoscopic ethnicities.
Though not the first to employ and appropriate reggae music on the
continent, Lucky Dubé produced what was arguably the most successful
indigenization of it up to that point; he was certainly the one who had most
loudly captured the ears of Jamaican reggae musicians, promoters, and
international fans. However, beyond the crisis of authenticity, he never fully
escaped the sense that his participation in this music was merely “exotic”
to Jamaican listeners or to the global market for Jamaican sounds. Few
African reggae artists of his generation could escape this, though they were
ironically sheltered from it by a white international audience that evaluated
their authenticity by quite a different standard. It was telling that his fan-
base outside of Africa was less West Indian or African American than it
was white—the primary fan base for roots reggae from Bob Marley’s genera-
tion to the present. His global popularity emerged not only during the
death-throes of apartheid, but also during that moment when roots reggae
seemed on the decline in Jamaica and the global audiences for reggae were

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 Saundra. Digital
Photograph.
©2010 Kameelah
Rasheed. www.
kameelahr.com

quite hostile to the digitized dancehall that emerged in the wake of Bob
Marley’s death.
Lucky Dubé internationalized roots music as an African during a period
when many people heard dancehall and ragga as the sound of Jamaica
abandoning its universalizing mythologies. It seemed as though the island
was collapsing into its own hermetically-sealed, fully-digitized sound world,
locked in the rhythms of an accelerated and increasingly violent capitalism.
Although dancehall has today found itself integrated into contemporary
African cultures, at the moment of its ascendancy it was in fact heard by
the growing continental fan base the same way the global white audience
heard it: as dangerously inauthentic. Dancehall became too fiercely protec-
tive of its aesthetic and borders to provide a vision of shared cultural origins
or utopian possibilities. The music began to abandon the echo production
techniques so dear to the generation of dub-roots, so that what was heard
was not an open, shared space, but something hard, sharp, crisp, and closed.
Without echo, the metaphor of seamless distance was ruptured by the aes-
thetic of the machine. At that moment, an African roots seemed the per-
fectly hyperbolic, double-dose of the black organic necessary to counter
that digital sound. With Trinidad soca and calypso also going digital soon
after this, Caribbean sound began to explicitly ally itself with electronic
music rather than with the hippie touristic spectatorship and black national-
ism represented by analog sound.
Many still say that Lucky Dubé’s indigenizing never quite made the
transformation from a heartfelt and impassioned mimicry to the full flower-
ing of something utterly distinct in the way that, say, Jamaican Rhythm and
Blues would transcend its complex cross-cultural origins in the unique

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 Diop. Digital
Photograph.
©2010 Kameelah
Rasheed. www.
kameelahr.com

musical form called ska. In much the same way that the pre-ska, pre-inde-
pendence generation of Bob Marley, Peter Tosh, and Bunny Wailer studied
and mimicked the voices, styles, and universalizing gestures of their African
American Civil Rights-era heroes (Sam Cooke, Otis Redding, Smokey
Robinson and most certainly Curtis Mayfield), Lucky Dubé manifested the
tendency of African reggae artists to closely mimic either Bob Marley or
Peter Tosh. Prominent examples of this include Nigeria’s Majek Fashek and
Victor Essiet, and Ghana’s Rocky Dawuni, though there were and are
countless others.
In Lucky Dubé’s case the sound-mask he opted for was Peter Tosh, whose
murder strangely prefigured his own and which his death profoundly echoes.
It wouldn’t be until Ivoirian Alpha Blondy that a distinctly non-Jamaican voice
would emerge in African reggae. However, Alpha Blondy would only play
John the Baptist to the magnificent indigenization of Jamaican roots manifest
in the contemporary work of his fellow Ivoirian Tiken Jah Fakoly, an artist
who has taken on the level of political controversy that no African roots artist
has ever had and which no Jamaican artist has had since Bob Marley himself.
It is worth noting that in this Black African micro-political context this indi-
genization of roots reggae radicalism and confrontational politics was as much
a matter of translation as it was one of appropriation. With the Francophone
African reggae artists emerging from a largely Islamic context, and the
Anglophone ones largely Christian, the former has appropriated the latter’s
confrontational stance whereas the latter has been strengthened by the for-
mer’s penchant for orthodoxy.
Those critical of Lucky Dubé’s inability to fully indigenize roots reggae
remain unaware of the complexity of his very choice of mimicry and the

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depth of his ability to hold steady to an uninflected performance. For
example, very few outside of South Africa knew that he was recognized for
and successful in a variety of local indigenous musical styles and idioms all
of which had long been fusing in the crucible of apartheid’s intensely cre-
ative, competitive, and often violent township culture. He was quite famous
as a Zulu musician years before reggae or Rasta or dreadlocks. Lucky Dubé
recorded several traditional mbaqanga albums and a Zulu/Afrikaans rap
album under the name Oom Hansie before his first reggae album, Rastas
Never Die, in 1984 (banned by the South African censors) and before his
international breakthrough record Slave in 1987. Even at the height of his
popularity as a reggae artist, his local fans continued to complain that this
“world” or “Jamaican” music was too far afield for them and that they were
eager to hear him return to mbaqanga, which was much more popular and
marketable in South Africa at the time. But in Lucky Dubé’s words, “The
change was brought about by the fact that I wanted to reach the world.
With mbanqanga I would have been seen as a tourist musician.”
Though many outside of South Africa consider that multi-platinum Oom
Hansie project as a novelty (titled Help My Krap), it did emerge in the transi-
tion from mbaquanga and other township styles to roots reggae. The very
fact that roots and hip-hop had come
to share cultural space and were both Hip-hop has merely been grafted
seen as possible options in his quest for onto the structures of feeling
a global and trans-ethnic language
reminds us that despite the excitement and expanded sensibilities
and growing panic concerning hip-hop made possible by reggae.
in Africa today, reggae remains the
most popular of the forms on the continent and crucial to the very notion
of a trans-ethnic—i.e. “Black”—popular culture. Hip-hop has merely been
grafted onto the structures of feeling and expanded sensibilities made pos-
sible by reggae. Reggae had been trickling onto the continent from the
“blue-beat”/ska era, arriving with West African students and migrants from
London, where it was a significant sound in the climate of Black European
immigrant culture and provided the sonic remapping of a more expansive
black dispersal before, during, and after decolonization. Hip-hop borrows
explicitly from the fragile networks of consumption and production that
were established by reggae on the continent and which were key to its
indigenizing through the construction of local markets and local media,
particularly in West and South Africa.

•  •  •

But to return to a choice of racial essence, one expressed in black-on-black

masquerade, in his own words, Lucky Dubé switched to reggae because it

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 was not simply a Caribbean or specifically Jamaican music. It had attained
status as a global or world cultural form and had carved out a trans-cultural
and international space of popular dialogue. More than other popular
forms, this music seemed to invite pan-African participation and demand
continental echoing precisely due to its relentless references to and imagin-
ings of Africa. These were things that, say, mbaqanga could not do, rooted
as it was in Zulu culture and language and in a society that, despite the
official racial categories of apartheid, never managed to fully relinquish
earlier and possibly stronger interethnic divisions and differences.
For Lucky Dubé and the many musicians and fans on the continent,
despite its fundamentalism and deep essentialism, reggae offered not an
authentic Africa, but a series of possible Africas. Roots music may have
been inspired by a static image of an African past, but when translated,
mimicked, and appropriated
Roots music may have been inspired by a on the continent, it presented
static image of an African past, but when a praxis of cross-culturality
translated, mimicked, and appropriated and visionary possibility. This
praxis was invaluable for
on the continent, it presented a praxis of growing beyond specific ances-
cross-culturality and visionary possibility. tral tribal traditions, local
identities, or hierarchies, such
as those based on age. In short, this Africa—gloriously inauthentic as it
was—could only have emerged from outside, where black identities and
meanings had to be carefully borrowed and invented, and could never be
taken for granted since they were relentlessly embattled. This was the gift
of a diaspora not simply defined by geographical sprawl and the epic lega-
cies of racial suffering, but by its deep historical implication and involve-
ment in the technologies of sound recording and the global dispersal of
Black New World music during and after colonialism.
It is no secret that the global currency in the popular symbols of racial
slavery is in no small part due to roots reggae, which accomplishes in sound
what Edward Blyden, Marcus Garvey, W. E. B. Du Bois and generations of
Pan-Africanist literature and politics could only dream of. Indeed, as Diaspora
pan-Africanism began to fade as an active transnational political movement
in the wake of independence, civil rights, and then apartheid, roots reggae
maintained the dream of a common context if not a shared politics. And it
did so largely through its relentless remembering of slavery. As if to stress this
point, Lucky Dubé’s international breakthrough album, Slave, was a success
due in part to his appropriation of that powerful and internationally recog-
nized symbol of racial holocaust which he would superimpose upon the then-
crumbling apartheid system. This institutionally divisive system had itself
become a metaphor for colonialism’s enduring legacy, hence his consistent
name for his touring band: “the Slaves.” But though slavery may have become
a symbol of the African Diaspora, it was never a universal racial symbol on

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a continent where ethnic affiliations differ radically from those of the West
and are shaped via distinct and still underexplored processes. So to speak as
an African at home and abroad required that Lucky Dubé adopt the language
of Africa spoken by Caribbean blacks, whose Africa was radically distinct
from his struggles on the streets of Johannesburg, where he confronted pass
laws and a social world structured by the infamous Group Areas Act of 1950.
This Africa was distinct also from that of his Zulu people, who still struggled
against the legacy of apartheid as well as against the imperial tendencies of
many of Africa’s ethnic groups.
Lest it be suggested here that roots reggae was the first or only form of
Black Diaspora consciousness available or present in South Africa, it is true
that, like other places on the continent, it had long been appropriating Black
Diaspora ideas about race in limited but influential ways. Before Lucky
Dubé, there was Marcus Garvey’s Negro World, and those who imagined
African Americans as imminent liberators. There was legendary Steve Biko
and his “Black Consciousness Movement,” which was largely influenced by
the work of Aimé Cesaire and Frantz Fanon and which was seen as a potent
threat by Mandela’s African National Congress (ANC). There was the
dynamism of the “Sophiatown renaissance” of the 1950s and its mythology
of a transnational South African/African American hybrid culture through
the linking of jazz, crime, and style.
This continuum of black-on-black cross-cultural communication is not,
however, to suggest that South Africa had not also been producing its own
indigenous notions of difference due to
the system of apartheid, expressed par-
[R]oots reggae’s global
ticularly strongly in township music. popularity as a music of
Because apartheid was ultimately seen as rebellion is due precisely to
a structure of binary racial conflict (and
because binary racial conflicts are much the flexibility of much of its
privileged in the Black Diaspora, so referents and the sometimes
much so that for many the end of apart- hazy universality of its politics.
heid was the end of pan-Africanism), the
superimposition of an appropriated Africa on a quite specific South African
context was eventually sanctioned. The power of this gesture was and is
obvious: it claimed an authenticity broader and more flexible than the
specific ethnic traditions that continue to bedevil the ANC.
The acceptance in South Africa of an appropriated myth of Africa was,
though, likely due to two more practical factors: first, these imported meta-
phors and images of Africa were seen by the white power structure as
non-indigenous symbols of “outside” and were therefore ultimately non-
threatening (there were in fact many whites who found it odd but amusing
that he was singing Jamaican songs about Jamaican issues); second, because
it was so extremely metaphoric and non-specific, it was thought that few
blacks would directly connect it to the social arrangements of apartheid

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 (indeed, roots reggae’s global popularity as a music of rebellion is due
precisely to the flexibility of much of its referents and the sometimes hazy
universality of its politics). It was due to these factors that Slave and other
albums by Lucky Dubé were able to pass by the extremely rigid and
intensely paranoid South African censors despite their oppositional sound
and confrontational lyrics.
In South Africa, popular song forms exist which are critical of authority,
but very few of them are rooted as forms in explicit political protest or
outright confrontation—certainly not in racial confrontation. As is well-
known, much of the music of the continent ranges widely, from the ritual
to the historical to the incanta-
The presence of roots reggae as a tory, and features many “praise
popular form of protest song has thus song” forms that are geared
primarily towards “bigging
helped legitimize and strengthen the up” or legitimizing the status
oppositional gesture in popular African quo. Those forms that turn
their tongues to criticism are
music and culture, particularly for those
not themselves oppositional or
generations born after decolonization. protest forms, though the
public chiding or critiquing of
authority has always been a part of their social function. Nor is the singer
or poet seen as the kind of radical social outsider that is part and parcel of
the roots reggae singer’s persona, one who is as inassimilable as their vision,
and who could only be integrated if the system were restructured around
utterly different moral, political, and spiritual principles. For this persona
to function in African traditional cultural structures which are overwhelm-
ingly organized by consensus and convention and which generally frown
on rebellion, a change in the social fabric would have to occur. The pres-
ence of roots reggae as a popular form of protest song has thus helped
legitimize and strengthen the oppositional gesture in popular African music
and culture, particularly for those generations born after decolonization. It
has also helped legitimize new forms of social identity and political affilia-
tion, particularly in a context where youth must always defer to age and
where the future must often be silent before the past.

•  •  •

During the same period of Lucky Dubé’s ascendancy, Nigeria had estab-
lished itself as a roots reggae stronghold on the continent with artists such
as African China (a.k.a. Chinagoro), Ras Kimono, Victor Essiet and the
Mandators, Daddy Showkey, and Majek Fashek “the rainmaker”—to name
but a few. Here roots did not need to function in relationship to an explicitly
racist power structure coded in black and white. The long era of dictators

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 Kele. Digital
Photograph.
©2010
Kameelah
Rasheed .www.
kameelahr.com

throughout the 1980s and 1990s—from General Ibrahim Babangida to

General Sani Abacha—was perhaps the golden age of reggae in Nigeria.
The latter was a sworn enemy of a free press who ruthlessly arrested, tor-
tured, and executed dissenters while establishing one of the most feared
police states in postcolonial Africa, so the deployment of reggae’s “outside”
mythologies and often abstract metaphors of race and freedom no doubt
spared many of Nigeria’s reggae artists the kind of treatment faced by the
confrontational work of the legendary Fela Kuti. Yet because its listeners
were quite attuned to its symbols and icons (whereas the military elite
seemed so myopic as to deny the presence of a world outside), they under-
stood Nigerian reggae as music for a community under siege, colonized
from within. And for a nation for whom genocide is still a living memory,
reggae became the music of a single tribe adrift in Babylon, while still
technically imprisoned in the Zion of reggae mythology.
During this long and still scarred period, very few non-Western artists
of any sort of music toured Nigeria. This lack of external cultural interac-
tion, coupled with the danger of public protest, forced many Nigerian
musicians to reassess and redefine their roots through the already popular
form of reggae, its language of exile and protest, and its celebration of a
much different Africa than that ground beneath their feet. Though roots
reggae still remains popular in Nigeria, two things were detrimental to its
growth, suggesting that the impact of the music was largely due to its sym-
bols, its mythology, and its oppositional stance: the freeing of Nelson
Mandela in 1990, and then the death of General Sani Abacha in 1997. It
was in the space between these two drastic changes that hip-hop, dancehall,
and contemporary R&B began to emerge as the dominant forms of new

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popular music in Nigeria, complete with new mythologies, new political
sensibilities, and new orientations to what was beginning to seem, yet again,
like a different Africa.
Preceding this, the most important Nigerian musician to help establish and
indigenize reggae in the 1970s was the beloved Sonny Okosun, who passed
away much more recently than Lucky Dubé. Okosun blended reggae with
many Nigerian and Ghanaian popular forms and used it as one of many
musical vehicles of social and political criticism. Despite the fact that his music
was much more light-hearted than that of Fela and much less dread than those
who would become reggae artists in his wake, Okosun would do more to
Nigerianize reggae than any of the singers to come after him. The target of
his critique was always twofold: first, the local post-independence elite and its
status quo, who were founded on the corruption of the “petro-naira”; second,
the apartheid system in South Africa, which had itself become a metaphor for
the state of the continent, particularly in Nigeria.
But clearly the major precedent for popular and trans-ethnic protest
music in Nigeria and therefore Africa is Fela Anikulapo Kuti, whose music,
though in no way describable as reggae, shared its pan-Africanism and its
“Third World”-centrism and who, in his long, extended instrumental
grooves, evoked the subversive psychedelia of dub reggae in an era when
the twelve-inch remix and the extended “discomix” were ascendant in
global dance music. Though Fela notably despised reggae (feeling deeply
threatened by its claim on Africa, its third-worldism and no doubt its rapid
success), after Bob Marley’s death he self-consciously embraced the mantle
of “Third World” music superstar and popular voice of Africa, if not the
African Diaspora.
As is well known, Fela’s Afrocentrism and Pan-Africanism were primar-
ily—though not exclusively—instigated and informed by his experience with
members of the Black Panthers (primarily, one Sandra Isidore) in Los
Angeles while living and working there in 1969. Some will erroneously
claim that it was this experience that encouraged him and his band to begin
to incorporate the influences of James Brown, the J.B.s, and the Meters into
his nascent “Afro-beat.” In truth, that had already been growing steadily
in his music largely due to the impact of and competition with the success-
ful Sierra Leonean bandleader Gerald Pino, “the Nigerian James Brown,”
who had been introducing the militant funk styles of black America into
West Africa on the eve of the Biafra war and the genocide of the Igbos,
and before Fela’s direct experience of James Brown and the J.B.s, who
toured Nigeria in 1970. His experience with a militant African American
pan-Africanism (particularly after reading The Autobiography of Malcolm X),
when coupled with the harder new funk styles of the time and their increas-
ing reliance on racial pride, would give his “Afro-beat” music a symbolic
charge that was paralleled only by the work of Bob Marley and others of
that generation.

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 What is generally less acknowledged in accounts of these crosscurrents,
however, is the significance of Fela and his “Afro-beat” before and after the
impact of African American radical politics and before and after the influ-
ence of James Brown and the techniques, styles, and cultural politics of
black American funk. What is in fact neglected, largely due to the obsessive
reduction of the black world to
its reactions to colonialism and It was, quite frankly, the sound of an
racism, is his impact on black- Africa that had never existed but
on-black cross-culturality in a
which could be made: one that was
Nigeria still hemorrhaging from
the genocide of Biafra. With his neither Yoruba nor Igbo nor Hausa
appropriation of an African nor Ibibio nor Ijaw nor Edo nor Fulani
American invention of Africa,
Fela and the innumerable groups nor Tiv nor any of the multitudes
that sprung up in a post-Biafra of ethnic groups in Nigeria—all of
Lagos fomented a pan-ethnic whom suffered due to the war.
sense of Nigerian community
based on what was a new notion of race and solidarity. It was, quite frankly,
the sound of an Africa that had never existed but which could be made:
one that was neither Yoruba nor Igbo nor Hausa nor Ibibio nor Ijaw nor
Edo nor Fulani nor Tiv nor any of the multitudes of ethnic groups in
Nigeria—all of whom suffered due to the war.
This new, possible Africa created a climate that welcomed and fed roots
reggae and its globalization of black radicalism in a music of popular pro-
test. This was something that the continent would forever have to contend
with, because however alien it might have seemed as a concept or value, it
ultimately authorized and authenticated itself in sound via the shared
image, symbol, and sign of Africa. Roots reggae must also be credited with
this authentication of the various cultures, politics, and identities of postco-
lonial Africa with the myth of a possible Africa. It did not initiate this
process, nor is it solely responsible for it—indeed, that process is the Diaspora
itself, structured as it is largely by sound and the black engagement with
technologies of sound modulation. Considering reggae’s often blithe indif-
ference to contemporary continental realities, it shouldn’t necessarily be
praised for it either; for one, Rastafarianism has yet to be taken to task for
its support for some of the continent’s most reactionary regimes, most nota-
bly in Ethiopia and Zimbabwe.
Perhaps due to its contradictory and sometimes fanciful notions of Black
Diasporic anciency, and despite its often spectacular failures in the realm of
the literal, Rasta roots did take root on the continent, particularly through
a language of race, belonging, and political possibility. It popularized and
updated the various legacies of black political radicalism while helping to
signal a transformation in how that continent sees itself as a whole and hears
itself across a global landscape. It is not an overstatement to say that this

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 landscape continues to prove itself more attuned to speaking about Africa
than actually listening to Africa—or multiple Africas—speak. So it is not
just sound and music here to be memorialized, nor is it simply the life of a
remarkable musician like Lucky
Like the concept of race itself, the Dubé in whose wake new producers
Black Diaspora is a constituent of culture and a new generation of
politicians redefine Africa in the lan-
element of modernity, as guage of the Black Diaspora. In
collusive as it is resistant. Lucky Dubé’s murder, what is
revealed to be at stake is how the
Diaspora hears the sounds of the continent beyond the overwhelming
echoes of its own desires and wounds, and beyond the politics of its own
dreaming. Herein lies not just centuries of the West’s complex and varied
representations of Africa, but also the Black Diaspora’s complicity in this
history of projection and construction.
After all, what we call the Black Diaspora is an intimate component of
Western modernity. It is not so much a distinct or necessarily oppositional
“counterculture,” as many argue; nor is it a dream of radical innocence
predicated by either a philosophical disavowal or a space of ineluctable
cultural and political differences. Like the concept of race itself, the Black
Diaspora is a constituent element of modernity, as collusive as it is resistant.
Because of roots reggae’s language of primal authenticity those Africans
who sought entry into the echo chamber of modernity heard in it a language
that privileged them. This Africa enabled them to make myth of their own
lives and deaths, and speak to an echoic simulacra made resonant by a
shared symbol of origins. So performers like Lucky Dubé and Sonny
Okosun did not find their roots nor even their past in reggae, especially
since so much of those were rooted in ethnically divisive and conservative
notions of African “tradition.” What they found was a future, which meant
the ability to transform their roots through the authorizing symbol of an
Africa they quickly accepted as inevitable.

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