1 00:00:00,060 --> 00:00:09,480 Thank you very much for the nattering introduction, and thanks to all the workshop participants, because this has been a really great afternoon. 2 00:00:09,480 --> 00:00:16,800 Really interesting and far in advance of anything I could imagine being able to say. 3 00:00:16,800 --> 00:00:26,040 So I'll just make some general comments, which I hope might have some bearing on the question of extractive cultures. 4 00:00:26,040 --> 00:00:35,010 So the Earth compels was the phrase I chose for my title, and it comes from a poem by Louis Magness. 5 00:00:35,010 --> 00:00:39,330 Sunlight from the garden hardens and grows cold. 6 00:00:39,330 --> 00:00:43,800 We cannot cage the minutes within its nets of gold, 7 00:00:43,800 --> 00:00:56,700 and all is told we cannot ask for pardon our freedom as freelances advances towards us and us compels upon it. 8 00:00:56,700 --> 00:01:05,220 Sonnets and birds descend, and soon, my friend, we shall have no time for dances. 9 00:01:05,220 --> 00:01:19,560 This poem was written in 1938, and it's about the feeling of doom and destruction closing in when people saw the advent of the Second World War, 10 00:01:19,560 --> 00:01:23,180 so the Earth compels upon it. 11 00:01:23,180 --> 00:01:39,030 Sonnets birds descend seems to suggest that many saw that destruction has epitomised by the World War was the antithesis of creativity. 12 00:01:39,030 --> 00:01:47,300 Kills the birds, kills the sonnets. We have no time for dances. 13 00:01:47,300 --> 00:02:03,910 But I want to start somewhere else. I want to start with a letter the Karl Marx wrote to his father in 1837. 14 00:02:03,910 --> 00:02:11,490 I'm. He says that it won't change. 15 00:02:11,490 --> 00:02:20,640 The individual becomes lyrical because every metamorphosis is partly swan song. 16 00:02:20,640 --> 00:02:26,610 Partly the overture of a great new poem that is trying to find its right proportions. 17 00:02:26,610 --> 00:02:31,800 I mean, brilliant colours, small yet distinct. 18 00:02:31,800 --> 00:02:40,890 This is quoted in professor of German parents who cried as his proa, Karl Marx and World Literature. 19 00:02:40,890 --> 00:02:50,820 Now, Karl Marx was 19 when he wrote this, and as you can tell from his love, a romantic language. 20 00:02:50,820 --> 00:03:01,080 He was a man who was at the time writing lots of romantic poems himself to his fiancee, Janey, from Westphalia. 21 00:03:01,080 --> 00:03:14,730 But in this one sentence, Lewis three ideas that I think are really fundamental to a general way of approaching pop culture, 22 00:03:14,730 --> 00:03:24,420 including popular culture in Africa, which I think are worth exploring and hanging on to the first idea. 23 00:03:24,420 --> 00:03:38,010 The most salient one in this formulation is the idea of change, and especially drastic change amounting to metamorphosis is generative. 24 00:03:38,010 --> 00:03:44,110 It gives rise to new artistic or expressive forms. 25 00:03:44,110 --> 00:03:53,400 And of course, this was developed too much and elaborated through a much greater extent in Marx's mature writings 26 00:03:53,400 --> 00:04:01,440 and became the basis of the whole tradition of Marxist sociology of literature in Lucas 15, 27 00:04:01,440 --> 00:04:11,520 Goldman, Egerton and all their successors actually back theme and Medvedev prespecified. 28 00:04:11,520 --> 00:04:17,400 The what is involved when, well, metaphor Morpheus is a little drastic. 29 00:04:17,400 --> 00:04:26,550 Change is generative. What's involved is the creation not just of new ideas, but of new genres. 30 00:04:26,550 --> 00:04:37,830 I think that's really important that new forms have to be inventive in order to cope with new experiences, with new realities, 31 00:04:37,830 --> 00:04:48,960 new lenses, active and Medvedev sort of general as a kind of lens through which you look at reality in a particular way. 32 00:04:48,960 --> 00:04:54,630 It allows you to see some things and prevents you from seeing other things. 33 00:04:54,630 --> 00:05:00,300 So if you want to cope with new experience, you need a new framework. 34 00:05:00,300 --> 00:05:17,670 You need new lenses. So changes generative is a very fundamental idea in the histories of popular culture that we have as our field. 35 00:05:17,670 --> 00:05:24,870 And with it within this history, I think you can identify what you might call hotspots. 36 00:05:24,870 --> 00:05:30,300 We were kind of sites of change which are particularly generative, 37 00:05:30,300 --> 00:05:44,190 which attracts a particular kind of creative energy and times and places where innovation new ideas were particularly strongly present. 38 00:05:44,190 --> 00:05:49,530 And I'm saying this because I want to suggest mining mining sites, 39 00:05:49,530 --> 00:05:58,230 mining labour relations and the wider populations which got drawn into mining 40 00:05:58,230 --> 00:06:07,830 enterprises were hotspots of that kind in African socio cultural history. 41 00:06:07,830 --> 00:06:16,190 So that's the first thing. The second thing is, he says that. 42 00:06:16,190 --> 00:06:24,410 Every metamorphosis, partly a swan song, partly the overture of have a great new home. 43 00:06:24,410 --> 00:06:32,750 Now setting aside the well, that inflated language understandable in a romantic 19 year old. 44 00:06:32,750 --> 00:06:50,390 What we can draw from this is that drastic change destroys older forms or encourages people to discard and to just to get rid of older forms, 45 00:06:50,390 --> 00:06:52,610 older institutions. 46 00:06:52,610 --> 00:07:05,630 And in fact, we create new forms in order to say goodbye to old forms or to say goodbye to ourselves as we change into something else, 47 00:07:05,630 --> 00:07:10,310 which is what Marx was thinking of in Africa. 48 00:07:10,310 --> 00:07:20,180 Of the last 200 years been history of such intense compact-SUV transformation that new creative forms 49 00:07:20,180 --> 00:07:27,920 springing up in continual surges of invention have always contained within themselves a swan song, 50 00:07:27,920 --> 00:07:33,030 a farewell and lament for the loss of older traditions. 51 00:07:33,030 --> 00:07:39,530 They've always in there. It's not those you can just discard your old and produce something new. 52 00:07:39,530 --> 00:07:50,480 The new forms almost always recapitulate and stand up for what they are in the very acts of superseding. 53 00:07:50,480 --> 00:07:57,620 You can see that in so many genres, which I might having a time to look at the moment. 54 00:07:57,620 --> 00:08:09,530 Thirdly, and actually most productively from my point of view is Marx's evocation in this sentence of the tentative 55 00:08:09,530 --> 00:08:19,830 emergence and experimental nature of the new form that is trying to find its right proportions. 56 00:08:19,830 --> 00:08:26,150 It hasn't found him yet. He's interested in how new things come into being, 57 00:08:26,150 --> 00:08:33,770 rather than taking art forms as fait accompli and then trying to contextualise them 58 00:08:33,770 --> 00:08:39,650 and analyse them and see what they tell us about the conditions of their production. 59 00:08:39,650 --> 00:08:44,420 He wants to start from the other side and see how they emerge. 60 00:08:44,420 --> 00:08:57,180 What are the enabling and constraining contexts which permit some things to emerge and others not? 61 00:08:57,180 --> 00:09:07,590 So Marx wants to start, and this is going on to his later work, wants to start on the ground in the real lives of men, as he puts it. 62 00:09:07,590 --> 00:09:14,700 And he wants to trace how specific historical moment constrained by circumstances, 63 00:09:14,700 --> 00:09:20,490 but also remaking those circumstances through their very acts of production. 64 00:09:20,490 --> 00:09:27,750 People try things out the group for new forms, which are adequate to their experience. 65 00:09:27,750 --> 00:09:33,570 And of course, sometimes the groping doesn't come up with anything. 66 00:09:33,570 --> 00:09:43,860 We need to look at. Performance fails. The forms did not capture the forms that were in Kuwait and never fully realised. 67 00:09:43,860 --> 00:09:58,900 If we want to understand the ones who are accomplished and passed on and spread and are accepted, that's what. 68 00:09:58,900 --> 00:10:17,530 So in now, turn to mining as sites, as a science, along with many sites of transformation seeing scenes of metamorphosis. 69 00:10:17,530 --> 00:10:19,600 Well, I don't need to say anything. 70 00:10:19,600 --> 00:10:29,170 I'm sure to this audience about colonial industrial mining because I'm sure you all know far more about it than I do. 71 00:10:29,170 --> 00:10:43,750 But what strikes me looking across some of the literature on this subject is simply how incredibly violent these transformations are. 72 00:10:43,750 --> 00:10:53,980 Mining is violence. First of all, the processes themselves, the actual work that was done was done with incredible. 73 00:10:53,980 --> 00:10:59,850 It involves incredible force, speed and noise. 74 00:10:59,850 --> 00:11:09,730 So this memoir of mine and Uncle Lewis Nesbitt knife people know that that book that's called Go Fever it, 75 00:11:09,730 --> 00:11:18,400 an Italian British mining engineer who works on the rand from 1912 to 1915. 76 00:11:18,400 --> 00:11:25,450 So they're the kind of early periods of South African gold mining. 77 00:11:25,450 --> 00:11:33,070 So in this memoir Gold Fever, he describes, first of all these shafts, 78 00:11:33,070 --> 00:11:45,280 the mine shafts thousands of feet deep and the enormous metal cages which carried 80 workers at a time down to the bottom of these shafts, 79 00:11:45,280 --> 00:11:59,500 shaking and rattling as it fell and then bouncing at each station as we went down to to let out the workers on to take in the the wall. 80 00:11:59,500 --> 00:12:05,290 He describes the gigantic machines. We got a slide of this. 81 00:12:05,290 --> 00:12:10,480 Is that visible? Oh yeah, that's so mineworkers around. 82 00:12:10,480 --> 00:12:18,340 19:00 So around this time, Nesmith is talking about talks about the ear splitting noise, 83 00:12:18,340 --> 00:12:24,130 a deafening crackling of rapid blows when the chisel becomes stuck. 84 00:12:24,130 --> 00:12:30,100 Machine could not turn it a hissing and shuddering, crunching and whistling. 85 00:12:30,100 --> 00:12:42,160 Most uneasy and terrifying, he says. And the miners themselves become part of this relentless and incessant operation of the machine. 86 00:12:42,160 --> 00:12:52,300 So he describes the way they're routinely kept up to speed so they can continue to function in a machine like manner. 87 00:12:52,300 --> 00:13:02,620 At the end of the long train comes the threatening bust by laying about him with a large, stiff piece of rubber tubing a formidable weapon. 88 00:13:02,620 --> 00:13:14,140 So the men the workers are being herded through for my to keep pace with the machinery rather than the other way round. 89 00:13:14,140 --> 00:13:24,610 So the process processes themselves a violence that then impacts on the Earth is incredibly destructive. 90 00:13:24,610 --> 00:13:34,030 Rosalind Morris, who wrote a really evocative, thought provoking piece in the in the journal Transition, 91 00:13:34,030 --> 00:13:39,580 where she she does evoke the sound from those in the mines. 92 00:13:39,580 --> 00:13:46,390 She also describes the sinkholes that could suddenly appear in the areas around the mines when the 93 00:13:46,390 --> 00:13:54,310 inner workings have become waterlogged or have collapsed so entire houses could suddenly disappear. 94 00:13:54,310 --> 00:14:00,310 You could go home in the evening and find your house had fallen into the giant chasm. 95 00:14:00,310 --> 00:14:04,120 Mining emits smoke and poisons into the atmosphere. 96 00:14:04,120 --> 00:14:19,060 Which was it, David? Yes, David was describing for oil extraction in in the Niger Delta, but also poisonous air produced by gold mining. 97 00:14:19,060 --> 00:14:26,350 Even today, if you spend too much time in Johannesburg, you begin, I feel anyway. 98 00:14:26,350 --> 00:14:28,240 I begin to feel ill. 99 00:14:28,240 --> 00:14:42,530 If you feel unwell and I try to find out why people say it's a cyanide, it's the cyanide that was used to separate the gold from the war. 100 00:14:42,530 --> 00:14:52,390 Well, after the process was over, I was just allowed to leach into the ground, stay there and it's still poisoning the violence with the Earth. 101 00:14:52,390 --> 00:14:58,230 And, of course, what has attracted most anthropological and historic. 102 00:14:58,230 --> 00:15:07,050 Potential is that is vital to the social fabric, it's the enormous demand for cheap labour, 103 00:15:07,050 --> 00:15:13,320 which was not readily available in places where subsistence agriculture meant that 104 00:15:13,320 --> 00:15:19,980 people did not have to subject themselves to badly paid and backbreaking work. 105 00:15:19,980 --> 00:15:30,720 This enormous demand for cheap labour labour sucks people in from wide regions far from the mine sites themselves. 106 00:15:30,720 --> 00:15:34,440 This is true of South Africa, Zambia, Congo. 107 00:15:34,440 --> 00:15:43,860 They all drew in populations from neighbouring countries, herding people of different languages and ethnic groups together, 108 00:15:43,860 --> 00:15:49,680 and forcing new patterns of cohabitation and communication on them, 109 00:15:49,680 --> 00:15:54,930 including new languages like the version of Bemba, 110 00:15:54,930 --> 00:16:08,280 which became called Khe Copperbelt because it was built along about this kind of lingua franca developed by the mineworkers from. 111 00:16:08,280 --> 00:16:16,710 So all these violence, all this destruction. But I'm talking about generative sites. 112 00:16:16,710 --> 00:16:25,680 So this is the first thing that struck me is something maybe we need to to think about. 113 00:16:25,680 --> 00:16:37,770 To understand better is how do we get this destructive violence and this intense generative capacity, 114 00:16:37,770 --> 00:16:45,900 this creation of new cultural forms into one month into one frame? 115 00:16:45,900 --> 00:16:53,820 Of course, having lots of ways of looking to this, 116 00:16:53,820 --> 00:17:06,480 the simultaneous twin like existence of destruction and creation of many different dimensions, including religious dimensions. 117 00:17:06,480 --> 00:17:11,490 It's a property not just of mining lots of capitalism itself. 118 00:17:11,490 --> 00:17:16,560 All that is solid melts seem to have. 119 00:17:16,560 --> 00:17:26,430 It's a shame lots amongst have to go because I was going to quote so he still this, and he said he was going to make sure that it OK. 120 00:17:26,430 --> 00:17:33,030 So with even when I do this, the song does me like, you're not criticising it. 121 00:17:33,030 --> 00:17:44,310 I'm singing a song for you, and I'm quoting a song because I can't sing by Caetano Veloso, a song about some posies from Marina as well. 122 00:17:44,310 --> 00:17:49,500 He speaks of that force, that ground, that energy destroy quasars. 123 00:17:49,500 --> 00:17:56,880 Dallas, the pile of cash, which raises and destroys beautiful things. 124 00:17:56,880 --> 00:18:05,460 So this very Marxist idea very fundamental to Marxist interpretation of capitalism. 125 00:18:05,460 --> 00:18:15,420 So what is destroying is simultaneously unleashing incredible powers and forces, which can be creative. 126 00:18:15,420 --> 00:18:29,010 So now I want to look at some of the dimensions of this, these scenes of cultural transformation, which. 127 00:18:29,010 --> 00:18:37,200 Very, very visible and striking in these hot spots, which which are mining sites, 128 00:18:37,200 --> 00:18:43,290 but which I also think applied to popular culture generally across the board. 129 00:18:43,290 --> 00:18:53,910 So if we look at the way it works in mining, it may also be illuminating to wider fields of popular cultural production. 130 00:18:53,910 --> 00:19:05,040 So the first is this idea I've already mentioned of new forms being a farewell to oh to the old, 131 00:19:05,040 --> 00:19:12,720 but also containing within them elements of the old weak recuperating and preserving memories. 132 00:19:12,720 --> 00:19:22,810 Nostalgia for the old and the example I have to give is. 133 00:19:22,810 --> 00:19:36,790 I want to show you that slide is he fell into the genre of songs of the Suta miners who migrated from 134 00:19:36,790 --> 00:19:48,710 the Sucha to the ground up from the beginning of gold mining in South Africa up until quite recently. 135 00:19:48,710 --> 00:19:58,560 Oh. The fella was new because one of the new things. 136 00:19:58,560 --> 00:20:09,580 It's produced made possible by the experience migrant labour. 137 00:20:09,580 --> 00:20:15,250 The songs are called The Songs of the Inveterate Travellers because they're songs that 138 00:20:15,250 --> 00:20:24,220 were generated in the course of the journey from their social homes to the main compounds. 139 00:20:24,220 --> 00:20:30,100 This was especially in the early days long and perilous journey. 140 00:20:30,100 --> 00:20:43,480 In fact, the earliest migrants migrated to Kimberley, so the diamond mines on the lot of the songs refer to mines as Kimberley as if all mines were, 141 00:20:43,480 --> 00:20:54,220 Kimberley says it's a that came into being with the advent of mining in the eighteen sixties. 142 00:20:54,220 --> 00:21:04,180 So is new in the sense that it's created to speak of this experience of walking and later going in the train to the mines. 143 00:21:04,180 --> 00:21:08,200 But it's old in the sense that it draws on the genre. 144 00:21:08,200 --> 00:21:21,970 De Tocqueville, which was interesting, chiefly praise poetry and the initiation self-praise poetry of a suture, which was a long standing tradition. 145 00:21:21,970 --> 00:21:29,890 So we drew on elements of the talk and incorporated them into the fela. 146 00:21:29,890 --> 00:21:38,230 But they changed the entire format and style from a fairly closed, fairly formulaic, 147 00:21:38,230 --> 00:21:46,840 fairly hierarchical genre to one that was like a long unrolling autobiography. 148 00:21:46,840 --> 00:21:56,250 Poetic autobiography to which the miners could add new elements as their experiences increase. 149 00:21:56,250 --> 00:22:10,090 They went to new places as they had new thoughts and which they could possibly pre compose, in which they could possibly improvise in performance. 150 00:22:10,090 --> 00:22:24,460 So here's an example of this seems to me like one of capturing a very moment when the new is being incorporated and domesticated. 151 00:22:24,460 --> 00:22:35,590 It's about the train. I want to praise the train, and it captures this experience of seeing the train for the first time. 152 00:22:35,590 --> 00:22:41,700 You went to new experiences. Astonishing, and you come. 153 00:22:41,700 --> 00:22:44,770 I was amazed. I was standing high on the platform. 154 00:22:44,770 --> 00:22:53,620 I was looking this way and that way on the is, it had blinkers, water pipes on its head, water tank, on its shoulders, on its back. 155 00:22:53,620 --> 00:22:57,610 It was carrying Wukong carrying coal and it goes on. 156 00:22:57,610 --> 00:23:00,100 He's describing these extraordinary things. 157 00:23:00,100 --> 00:23:14,770 But in the in the next piece of foam, he says it left us behind in the valley, but it left left its travels behind in the valley. 158 00:23:14,770 --> 00:23:18,700 It will have to come back to collect us, our train. 159 00:23:18,700 --> 00:23:28,960 So in that moment, that he's capturing the train as part of their collective experience now belongs to them. 160 00:23:28,960 --> 00:23:39,970 So it's retaining a nostalgia for the ferry, contrary to the language of chieftaincy poetry. 161 00:23:39,970 --> 00:23:57,910 He wrote poetry, poetry of herding fighting cattle raisers, but it transfers it into the context of its journey to the mind. 162 00:23:57,910 --> 00:24:03,190 So new saying farewell to a young. That's a first. Second thing is the idea, 163 00:24:03,190 --> 00:24:19,240 which we already have discussed this afternoon trying to remember which Patron was in the idea that the 164 00:24:19,240 --> 00:24:28,810 idea of tribal traditional ethnicity is given more salience and more definition in these contexts, 165 00:24:28,810 --> 00:24:37,360 mining compounds where people have different ethnic and linguistic origin origins are held together, 166 00:24:37,360 --> 00:24:52,000 and this was formally fostered and encouraged by the mining managers who put ethnic groups into dormitories together 167 00:24:52,000 --> 00:25:01,870 with their homeboys and encouraged dance competitions where each dance troupe would be representing one ethnic group. 168 00:25:01,870 --> 00:25:07,330 So it was encouraged, but at the same time, what was emerging? 169 00:25:07,330 --> 00:25:11,950 I think it was, was it in? We talked about this. Yes. 170 00:25:11,950 --> 00:25:18,460 At the same time, religion is the idea that all these so-called tribal dances all come from. 171 00:25:18,460 --> 00:25:23,120 All the people dancing have occupied parallel slots. 172 00:25:23,120 --> 00:25:28,690 They can be evaluated as a competition on an equal footing. 173 00:25:28,690 --> 00:25:42,070 So it produces a kind of supra ethnic form language for form of an easier way of thinking about tradition and ethnicity, 174 00:25:42,070 --> 00:25:53,140 which is supra ethnic and supra traditional and very well known and kind. 175 00:25:53,140 --> 00:26:04,540 And rather brilliant study of this is J.C. Mitchell's Study of the Coloured Homes 1956, 176 00:26:04,540 --> 00:26:16,920 when he describes how the dogs troops in the way I think it's the new Al Qaeda compound in in Northern Rhodesia, 177 00:26:16,920 --> 00:26:36,430 in the Zambia Copper Belt, each dance troupe where these people who, you know, mimic military and police troops there they have brass bands. 178 00:26:36,430 --> 00:26:47,470 You have official roles in dance societies such as the president from the secretary and the treasurer is very regimented. 179 00:26:47,470 --> 00:27:04,060 It looks very much like mimicry. What Terence are called part emulation and part mockery of the colonial presence, military and police. 180 00:27:04,060 --> 00:27:15,370 So each dance troupe, this kind belongs to a particular place of origin and represents a particular ethnic linguistic homeland. 181 00:27:15,370 --> 00:27:23,320 But at the same time, the colonial dance was not the property of one group. 182 00:27:23,320 --> 00:27:31,360 It was dance all over northern Zambia. I mean, Northern Rhodesia. 183 00:27:31,360 --> 00:27:37,690 The dance troupes competed against each other, and they were all dancing while they all called Camilla, 184 00:27:37,690 --> 00:27:54,300 even though they were from different places of origin. And in some of their lyrics, they would boast about this very kind of cosmopolitan. 185 00:27:54,300 --> 00:28:04,380 The ability they have to interact with people of other groups, they can both sing in tango, singing Luba sing in Zulu, uncertain. 186 00:28:04,380 --> 00:28:17,520 So while they a local troupe at the same time, they're advertising their own ability to negotiate and navigate a multi-ethnic context. 187 00:28:17,520 --> 00:28:24,870 And it's a James Ferguson talks about the different options being cosmopolitan and being local, 188 00:28:24,870 --> 00:28:33,030 which were options that could be chosen by people in these compounds according to their preference. 189 00:28:33,030 --> 00:28:37,950 But in KHALILAH and related forms, what you seem to get is both at once. 190 00:28:37,950 --> 00:28:47,820 They're being cosmopolitan and they're affirming the local ness and their home place of origin in the same genre. 191 00:28:47,820 --> 00:28:52,830 So mixing and separation, that's this. 192 00:28:52,830 --> 00:29:00,570 The second point I wanted to bring up this coming together of populations, which is highly generative. 193 00:29:00,570 --> 00:29:08,010 New forms is simultaneously affirming distinctiveness and transcendence. 194 00:29:08,010 --> 00:29:19,200 And that's very, very applicable to popular cultural forms in urban spaces and heterogeneous spaces all over sub-Saharan Africa. 195 00:29:19,200 --> 00:29:25,470 And it's not only associated with mining, but it's been particularly really well studied. 196 00:29:25,470 --> 00:29:32,580 In the case of applying compounds third theme, which I want to bring out, 197 00:29:32,580 --> 00:29:44,880 I'm actually not going to dwell on it because again, it's about travelling and about how long rose forms move through space. 198 00:29:44,880 --> 00:29:50,070 When we talk about the field of African pop culture, 199 00:29:50,070 --> 00:30:00,000 people ask me in a sense of a mosaic piece together a picture of a field by bringing examples drawn from lots of different places 200 00:30:00,000 --> 00:30:09,030 after which you attempt some kind of generalisation know that many people have tried to generalise about African popular culture, 201 00:30:09,030 --> 00:30:13,140 but those who have have often adopted this method. 202 00:30:13,140 --> 00:30:21,960 But a more of organic and potentially more rewarding method is to trace actual popular cultural 203 00:30:21,960 --> 00:30:29,310 forms as they move and try to understand why they move and how they move through space, 204 00:30:29,310 --> 00:30:36,840 how new versions of the same thing keep appearing and being adapted and really formulated. 205 00:30:36,840 --> 00:30:45,450 What is it that enables this kind of Trump's transformation and transition and transformation? 206 00:30:45,450 --> 00:30:51,360 I was going to give the example of the Benny Dance studied by Terence Ranger, 207 00:30:51,360 --> 00:30:57,990 which spread over the whole of East and Africa, of which the Cardema Dance was one manifestation. 208 00:30:57,990 --> 00:31:06,180 But we also have a Gander Dance, the only Pangaea dance and lots of others, lots of other variants. 209 00:31:06,180 --> 00:31:26,340 However, I didn't do this because I'm in it again has given us an absolutely brilliant example in Congolese rumba and other forms which were, 210 00:31:26,340 --> 00:31:31,830 you know, the conditions which made it possible for these forms to be spread. 211 00:31:31,830 --> 00:31:42,570 So to be taken off in different places. Why did so many Congolese musicians go to Tanzania to Zambia? 212 00:31:42,570 --> 00:31:51,180 Well, particular conditions which foster made made successful this spread of cultural forms. 213 00:31:51,180 --> 00:32:05,950 So it's not just the cultural forms kind of emanates and spread the mechanisms and contexts and facilitating. 214 00:32:05,950 --> 00:32:10,480 Factors which enabled some to spread about this. 215 00:32:10,480 --> 00:32:25,670 So let me get to my fourth theme, which is the most gentle well of all, this is about the artisanal. 216 00:32:25,670 --> 00:32:29,640 In the last paper we had in Dallas, no. 217 00:32:29,640 --> 00:32:38,480 David Spencer, we heard about the artisanal oil extraction in the Niger Delta. 218 00:32:38,480 --> 00:32:56,720 Actually, of course, a picture of that oh oh, go back from the second incredibly dangerous tapping oil out of the pipes or stealing it in other ways. 219 00:32:56,720 --> 00:33:11,690 Boiling is over. Fire is incredibly risky, but it's also a sign of a kind of dirty little capacity to make things on the ground in a small scale, 220 00:33:11,690 --> 00:33:23,150 using techniques, tools, methods which are locally devised and developed. 221 00:33:23,150 --> 00:33:32,720 This is a theme that's become quite prominent in studies of mining recent artisanal mining, 222 00:33:32,720 --> 00:33:38,810 and it has a new resonance for approaches to African popular culture. 223 00:33:38,810 --> 00:33:49,250 More generally, because artisanal mining seems to kind of look on the outskirts of big international and 224 00:33:49,250 --> 00:33:56,510 highly capitalised industrial mining or in its interstices or in its aftermath after, 225 00:33:56,510 --> 00:34:01,730 I mean collapses and closes down. 226 00:34:01,730 --> 00:34:05,300 And that's actually become semi-official as I understand it. 227 00:34:05,300 --> 00:34:13,640 Small scale little enterprises are allowed to carry on through shadow mining, 228 00:34:13,640 --> 00:34:21,920 with basic tools and techniques working over the site's previously abandoned by big companies. 229 00:34:21,920 --> 00:34:29,460 So shallow these river beds. 230 00:34:29,460 --> 00:34:42,060 In some cases, only young men who are involved in other sites, we see women and children, women, boys and girls doing different tasks. 231 00:34:42,060 --> 00:34:51,630 So now it's not so much a profession as another option in the endless patchwork of making 232 00:34:51,630 --> 00:35:00,940 do debris at which people in precarious situations are piecing together a living. 233 00:35:00,940 --> 00:35:18,560 And these artisanal mining enterprises have involved a lot of creative innovation at the level of social relations and codes of conduct conduct. 234 00:35:18,560 --> 00:35:30,720 Oh, there's an article which many people may be familiar with, but it's all forms of friendship amongst young, 235 00:35:30,720 --> 00:35:38,130 artisanal gold miners in makeshift camps in northern Benin, Republic of Benin. 236 00:35:38,130 --> 00:35:49,860 So they developed new codes of friendship protocols how to relate to previously unknown young men because 237 00:35:49,860 --> 00:36:00,060 they preferred working with friends rather than with kin or people from the same place of no same hometown. 238 00:36:00,060 --> 00:36:12,750 Because these people who came more people from people with previous connexions might be able to exact a difference of practical seniority 239 00:36:12,750 --> 00:36:25,800 privileges or other kind of hierarchical leverage to deprive the individual artisanal line up of his find if he finds a diamond. 240 00:36:25,800 --> 00:36:32,580 They may use their power to their privilege, their rights over him to get him off them, 241 00:36:32,580 --> 00:36:40,200 so they devise new forms of cooperation and relationship with previously unrelated people. 242 00:36:40,200 --> 00:36:46,300 So that's the kind of creativity of of inventing social protocols. 243 00:36:46,300 --> 00:36:53,730 There's creativity at the level of self-representation and performance of success, 244 00:36:53,730 --> 00:37:01,530 the kind of sap like displays of clothing, consumer goods, bodily style. 245 00:37:01,530 --> 00:37:08,790 And this has also been described in the context of artisanal mining alchemy. 246 00:37:08,790 --> 00:37:22,530 Congolese copper belt by Timothy. And the level of localised cosmology of spirits and rituals concerning the mines and the level 247 00:37:22,530 --> 00:37:34,290 of tropes and narratives about mines finds in the mines the spirits that control the mines. 248 00:37:34,290 --> 00:37:44,910 This has been an incredibly productive site of cultural generation. 249 00:37:44,910 --> 00:38:00,180 It's on to say a little bit about the paper by Lorenzo Angelo, who amongst artisanal diamond miners in Sierra Leone. 250 00:38:00,180 --> 00:38:11,880 So he talks about some of the narratives through which people describe the chances and 251 00:38:11,880 --> 00:38:22,290 missed chances of the diamond find an individual finds an exceptionally valuable stone. 252 00:38:22,290 --> 00:38:35,940 One example is the story of the young man who finds an enormous stone, the biggest ever seen in the area amidst tremendous excitement. 253 00:38:35,940 --> 00:38:41,490 He's taken to the capital city by helicopter to meet the presidents. 254 00:38:41,490 --> 00:38:50,070 He's accompanied by relatives dealers all hoping to get in on the negotiations with international traders. 255 00:38:50,070 --> 00:38:55,920 But when they reach the capital and the diamond is examined by experts, 256 00:38:55,920 --> 00:39:04,650 he's found to be just an ordinary lump of stone and the young man is sent back home with a small token payment. 257 00:39:04,650 --> 00:39:12,600 So this is the kind of story with a narrative arc which reappears and also context, 258 00:39:12,600 --> 00:39:22,410 and has some of the kind of repeated formulaic narrative tropes of a folk tale. 259 00:39:22,410 --> 00:39:34,830 But the interpretation goes on What about if the experts who examined the stone were in cahoots with the big traders and were lying? 260 00:39:34,830 --> 00:39:40,410 What if it really was the most gigantic time nothing ever been seen? 261 00:39:40,410 --> 00:39:49,200 If it wasn't, if if this was not the case, why did they give him a token fee and send him home if he just brought a lump? 262 00:39:49,200 --> 00:40:03,060 Oh no. This is corruption. There's this idea that it was all kind of double scam is taken up by the Sierra Leonean rapper Daddy Sedge, 263 00:40:03,060 --> 00:40:09,460 and he works it into his very popular and famous song Corruption. 264 00:40:09,460 --> 00:40:18,720 You do so. So the translation, which Lorenzo Dungeon gives, is How come diamonds turn to stones? 265 00:40:18,720 --> 00:40:25,290 We get diamonds, silver and copper. Tell me, why are we still dying like poor persons? 266 00:40:25,290 --> 00:40:29,280 Tell me. This is corruption. So the story, 267 00:40:29,280 --> 00:40:37,920 which emanates from the mining sites begins to circulate sometime turns into a folkloric kind 268 00:40:37,920 --> 00:40:47,860 of narrative and is then taken up by another popular rapper and made into a moral warning of, 269 00:40:47,860 --> 00:40:52,590 you know, in a rap song, which then goes international. 270 00:40:52,590 --> 00:41:03,930 He's very famous. So this is an example, not just of the idea that popular culture is made homemade. 271 00:41:03,930 --> 00:41:12,150 It's handmade, it's built from tools that are available from materials have come to have. 272 00:41:12,150 --> 00:41:17,790 But here's an example of what once was so solve nothing that's original. 273 00:41:17,790 --> 00:41:29,130 In that letter that quoted beginning, which is the idea of generation looking at culture as something that's emergent and incorrect, 274 00:41:29,130 --> 00:41:36,120 which is taking shape and which grows and is added to and finds its fourth. 275 00:41:36,120 --> 00:41:41,240 So it starts, maybe as somebody has real experience of disappointment, 276 00:41:41,240 --> 00:41:48,110 it turns into a narrative which other people can tell in quotes and cite to each other. 277 00:41:48,110 --> 00:41:55,470 It takes on more and more body until it gets taken up by a rapper and turned into a song. 278 00:41:55,470 --> 00:42:05,160 So here's an idea that you can actually trace developing this idea starting from the ground and working up. 279 00:42:05,160 --> 00:42:24,930 And I think these examples of things starting in a very informal way and emerging developing patterns being circulated and further developed. 280 00:42:24,930 --> 00:42:40,380 This example happens to come from a mining site could have come from other sites, but it's it's a it's a kind of classic case of reversing the gaze, 281 00:42:40,380 --> 00:42:48,330 reversing the direction of the analysis instead of saying, I'm going to study Sierra Leonean rap songs. 282 00:42:48,330 --> 00:42:58,780 Here are some rap songs. I'm not going to transcribe them, translate them and then explain what kind of light they shed. 283 00:42:58,780 --> 00:43:04,810 Social reality going to say, where did this thing come from, in what circumstances? 284 00:43:04,810 --> 00:43:12,270 What made it possible? Who made it possible? How did it get developed and circulated? 285 00:43:12,270 --> 00:43:23,950 I think that's. Well, I have got some saying it's now almost six o'clock, so. 286 00:43:23,950 --> 00:43:28,120 Let me just add one more thing. 287 00:43:28,120 --> 00:43:37,900 Going back to Marx's letter, why did Marx place so much emphasis on art? 288 00:43:37,900 --> 00:43:43,270 He's talking about metamorphosis, emergence of new things. 289 00:43:43,270 --> 00:43:55,720 He foregrounds the idea of a poem, but he also evokes music in the overture from painting in the word brilliant colours. 290 00:43:55,720 --> 00:44:05,860 And why does he place particular weight on form proportion measure in works of art? 291 00:44:05,860 --> 00:44:11,660 Well, the interpretation by prior is that in humans, 292 00:44:11,660 --> 00:44:20,690 a measure of proportion of art is at once an adult version and the promise of the the alienated state. 293 00:44:20,690 --> 00:44:28,900 We're hopeful in that better than just the future is not only saying that works of 294 00:44:28,900 --> 00:44:36,460 art because they involve acts of imagination can envisage alternative futures, 295 00:44:36,460 --> 00:44:44,230 which is one of the directions a lot of subsequent sociology of literature has taken. 296 00:44:44,230 --> 00:44:55,210 Oh, that art enables us to envisage a different way that society could be could be organised. 297 00:44:55,210 --> 00:45:02,890 He's not only saying that, he's also saying that the formal properties of art. 298 00:45:02,890 --> 00:45:14,770 What makes it into an aesthetic form is an experience of what it would be like to be fully human and become alienated. 299 00:45:14,770 --> 00:45:27,790 So even in an age of alienation, even in an age when people are forced to work in mines doing backbreaking labour for a force to tap, 300 00:45:27,790 --> 00:45:39,580 I'll boil it all naked flames in the bush simply to eke out a neurosis existence in a state of precariousness. 301 00:45:39,580 --> 00:45:50,770 Even in these states of intense a nation, the creation of arts may constitute a realm of comparative freedom. 302 00:45:50,770 --> 00:46:02,590 A realm in which mountain long prefer to see people's creative urges can find an outlet worthy of their humanity. 303 00:46:02,590 --> 00:46:14,830 So the creation of new locks the generation of new forms is enabled unconstrained by the specific historical circumstances in which are generated. 304 00:46:14,830 --> 00:46:29,050 Art also shape then circumstances. By creating this sense of possibility of what it would be to be fully human. 305 00:46:29,050 --> 00:46:30,896 So I stop it.