Thank you very much for the nattering introduction, and thanks to all the workshop participants, because this has been a really great afternoon.
Really interesting and far in advance of anything I could imagine being able to say.
So I'll just make some general comments, which I hope might have some bearing on the question of extractive cultures.
So the Earth compels was the phrase I chose for my title, and it comes from a poem by Louis Magness.
Sunlight from the garden hardens and grows cold.
We cannot cage the minutes within its nets of gold,
and all is told we cannot ask for pardon our freedom as freelances advances towards us and us compels upon it.
Sonnets and birds descend, and soon, my friend, we shall have no time for dances.
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,
so the Earth compels upon it.
Sonnets birds descend seems to suggest that many saw that destruction has epitomised by the World War was the antithesis of creativity.
Kills the birds, kills the sonnets. We have no time for dances.
But I want to start somewhere else. I want to start with a letter the Karl Marx wrote to his father in 1837.
I'm. He says that it won't change.
The individual becomes lyrical because every metamorphosis is partly swan song.
Partly the overture of a great new poem that is trying to find its right proportions.
I mean, brilliant colours, small yet distinct.
This is quoted in professor of German parents who cried as his proa, Karl Marx and World Literature.
Now, Karl Marx was 19 when he wrote this, and as you can tell from his love, a romantic language.
He was a man who was at the time writing lots of romantic poems himself to his fiancee, Janey, from Westphalia.
But in this one sentence, Lewis three ideas that I think are really fundamental to a general way of approaching pop culture,
including popular culture in Africa, which I think are worth exploring and hanging on to the first idea.
The most salient one in this formulation is the idea of change, and especially drastic change amounting to metamorphosis is generative.
It gives rise to new artistic or expressive forms.
And of course, this was developed too much and elaborated through a much greater extent in Marx's mature writings
and became the basis of the whole tradition of Marxist sociology of literature in Lucas 15,
Goldman, Egerton and all their successors actually back theme and Medvedev prespecified.
The what is involved when, well, metaphor Morpheus is a little drastic.
Change is generative. What's involved is the creation not just of new ideas, but of new genres.
I think that's really important that new forms have to be inventive in order to cope with new experiences, with new realities,
new lenses, active and Medvedev sort of general as a kind of lens through which you look at reality in a particular way.
It allows you to see some things and prevents you from seeing other things.
So if you want to cope with new experience, you need a new framework.
You need new lenses. So changes generative is a very fundamental idea in the histories of popular culture that we have as our field.
And with it within this history, I think you can identify what you might call hotspots.
We were kind of sites of change which are particularly generative,
which attracts a particular kind of creative energy and times and places where innovation new ideas were particularly strongly present.
And I'm saying this because I want to suggest mining mining sites,
mining labour relations and the wider populations which got drawn into mining
enterprises were hotspots of that kind in African socio cultural history.
So that's the first thing. The second thing is, he says that.
Every metamorphosis, partly a swan song, partly the overture of have a great new home.
Now setting aside the well, that inflated language understandable in a romantic 19 year old.
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,
older institutions.
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,
which is what Marx was thinking of in Africa.
Of the last 200 years been history of such intense compact-SUV transformation that new creative forms
springing up in continual surges of invention have always contained within themselves a swan song,
a farewell and lament for the loss of older traditions.
They've always in there. It's not those you can just discard your old and produce something new.
The new forms almost always recapitulate and stand up for what they are in the very acts of superseding.
You can see that in so many genres, which I might having a time to look at the moment.
Thirdly, and actually most productively from my point of view is Marx's evocation in this sentence of the tentative
emergence and experimental nature of the new form that is trying to find its right proportions.
It hasn't found him yet. He's interested in how new things come into being,
rather than taking art forms as fait accompli and then trying to contextualise them
and analyse them and see what they tell us about the conditions of their production.
He wants to start from the other side and see how they emerge.
What are the enabling and constraining contexts which permit some things to emerge and others not?
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.
And he wants to trace how specific historical moment constrained by circumstances,
but also remaking those circumstances through their very acts of production.
People try things out the group for new forms, which are adequate to their experience.
And of course, sometimes the groping doesn't come up with anything.
We need to look at. Performance fails. The forms did not capture the forms that were in Kuwait and never fully realised.
If we want to understand the ones who are accomplished and passed on and spread and are accepted, that's what.
So in now, turn to mining as sites, as a science, along with many sites of transformation seeing scenes of metamorphosis.
Well, I don't need to say anything.
I'm sure to this audience about colonial industrial mining because I'm sure you all know far more about it than I do.
But what strikes me looking across some of the literature on this subject is simply how incredibly violent these transformations are.
Mining is violence. First of all, the processes themselves, the actual work that was done was done with incredible.
It involves incredible force, speed and noise.
So this memoir of mine and Uncle Lewis Nesbitt knife people know that that book that's called Go Fever it,
an Italian British mining engineer who works on the rand from 1912 to 1915.
So they're the kind of early periods of South African gold mining.
So in this memoir Gold Fever, he describes, first of all these shafts,
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,
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.
He describes the gigantic machines. We got a slide of this.
Is that visible? Oh yeah, that's so mineworkers around.
19:00 So around this time, Nesmith is talking about talks about the ear splitting noise,
a deafening crackling of rapid blows when the chisel becomes stuck.
Machine could not turn it a hissing and shuddering, crunching and whistling.
Most uneasy and terrifying, he says. And the miners themselves become part of this relentless and incessant operation of the machine.
So he describes the way they're routinely kept up to speed so they can continue to function in a machine like manner.
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.
So the men the workers are being herded through for my to keep pace with the machinery rather than the other way round.
So the process processes themselves a violence that then impacts on the Earth is incredibly destructive.
Rosalind Morris, who wrote a really evocative, thought provoking piece in the in the journal Transition,
where she she does evoke the sound from those in the mines.
She also describes the sinkholes that could suddenly appear in the areas around the mines when the
inner workings have become waterlogged or have collapsed so entire houses could suddenly disappear.
You could go home in the evening and find your house had fallen into the giant chasm.
Mining emits smoke and poisons into the atmosphere.
Which was it, David? Yes, David was describing for oil extraction in in the Niger Delta, but also poisonous air produced by gold mining.
Even today, if you spend too much time in Johannesburg, you begin, I feel anyway.
I begin to feel ill.
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.
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.
And, of course, what has attracted most anthropological and historic.
Potential is that is vital to the social fabric, it's the enormous demand for cheap labour,
which was not readily available in places where subsistence agriculture meant that
people did not have to subject themselves to badly paid and backbreaking work.
This enormous demand for cheap labour labour sucks people in from wide regions far from the mine sites themselves.
This is true of South Africa, Zambia, Congo.
They all drew in populations from neighbouring countries, herding people of different languages and ethnic groups together,
and forcing new patterns of cohabitation and communication on them,
including new languages like the version of Bemba,
which became called Khe Copperbelt because it was built along about this kind of lingua franca developed by the mineworkers from.
So all these violence, all this destruction. But I'm talking about generative sites.
So this is the first thing that struck me is something maybe we need to to think about.
To understand better is how do we get this destructive violence and this intense generative capacity,
this creation of new cultural forms into one month into one frame?
Of course, having lots of ways of looking to this,
the simultaneous twin like existence of destruction and creation of many different dimensions, including religious dimensions.
It's a property not just of mining lots of capitalism itself.
All that is solid melts seem to have.
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.
So with even when I do this, the song does me like, you're not criticising it.
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.
He speaks of that force, that ground, that energy destroy quasars.
Dallas, the pile of cash, which raises and destroys beautiful things.
So this very Marxist idea very fundamental to Marxist interpretation of capitalism.
So what is destroying is simultaneously unleashing incredible powers and forces, which can be creative.
So now I want to look at some of the dimensions of this, these scenes of cultural transformation, which.
Very, very visible and striking in these hot spots, which which are mining sites,
but which I also think applied to popular culture generally across the board.
So if we look at the way it works in mining, it may also be illuminating to wider fields of popular cultural production.
So the first is this idea I've already mentioned of new forms being a farewell to oh to the old,
but also containing within them elements of the old weak recuperating and preserving memories.
Nostalgia for the old and the example I have to give is.
I want to show you that slide is he fell into the genre of songs of the Suta miners who migrated from
the Sucha to the ground up from the beginning of gold mining in South Africa up until quite recently.
Oh. The fella was new because one of the new things.
It's produced made possible by the experience migrant labour.
The songs are called The Songs of the Inveterate Travellers because they're songs that
were generated in the course of the journey from their social homes to the main compounds.
This was especially in the early days long and perilous journey.
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,
Kimberley says it's a that came into being with the advent of mining in the eighteen sixties.
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.
But it's old in the sense that it draws on the genre.
De Tocqueville, which was interesting, chiefly praise poetry and the initiation self-praise poetry of a suture, which was a long standing tradition.
So we drew on elements of the talk and incorporated them into the fela.
But they changed the entire format and style from a fairly closed, fairly formulaic,
fairly hierarchical genre to one that was like a long unrolling autobiography.
Poetic autobiography to which the miners could add new elements as their experiences increase.
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.
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.
It's about the train. I want to praise the train, and it captures this experience of seeing the train for the first time.
You went to new experiences. Astonishing, and you come.
I was amazed. I was standing high on the platform.
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.
It was carrying Wukong carrying coal and it goes on.
He's describing these extraordinary things.
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.
It will have to come back to collect us, our train.
So in that moment, that he's capturing the train as part of their collective experience now belongs to them.
So it's retaining a nostalgia for the ferry, contrary to the language of chieftaincy poetry.
He wrote poetry, poetry of herding fighting cattle raisers, but it transfers it into the context of its journey to the mind.
So new saying farewell to a young. That's a first. Second thing is the idea,
which we already have discussed this afternoon trying to remember which Patron was in the idea that the
idea of tribal traditional ethnicity is given more salience and more definition in these contexts,
mining compounds where people have different ethnic and linguistic origin origins are held together,
and this was formally fostered and encouraged by the mining managers who put ethnic groups into dormitories together
with their homeboys and encouraged dance competitions where each dance troupe would be representing one ethnic group.
So it was encouraged, but at the same time, what was emerging?
I think it was, was it in? We talked about this. Yes.
At the same time, religion is the idea that all these so-called tribal dances all come from.
All the people dancing have occupied parallel slots.
They can be evaluated as a competition on an equal footing.
So it produces a kind of supra ethnic form language for form of an easier way of thinking about tradition and ethnicity,
which is supra ethnic and supra traditional and very well known and kind.
And rather brilliant study of this is J.C. Mitchell's Study of the Coloured Homes 1956,
when he describes how the dogs troops in the way I think it's the new Al Qaeda compound in in Northern Rhodesia,
in the Zambia Copper Belt, each dance troupe where these people who, you know, mimic military and police troops there they have brass bands.
You have official roles in dance societies such as the president from the secretary and the treasurer is very regimented.
It looks very much like mimicry. What Terence are called part emulation and part mockery of the colonial presence, military and police.
So each dance troupe, this kind belongs to a particular place of origin and represents a particular ethnic linguistic homeland.
But at the same time, the colonial dance was not the property of one group.
It was dance all over northern Zambia. I mean, Northern Rhodesia.
The dance troupes competed against each other, and they were all dancing while they all called Camilla,
even though they were from different places of origin. And in some of their lyrics, they would boast about this very kind of cosmopolitan.
The ability they have to interact with people of other groups, they can both sing in tango, singing Luba sing in Zulu, uncertain.
So while they a local troupe at the same time, they're advertising their own ability to negotiate and navigate a multi-ethnic context.
And it's a James Ferguson talks about the different options being cosmopolitan and being local,
which were options that could be chosen by people in these compounds according to their preference.
But in KHALILAH and related forms, what you seem to get is both at once.
They're being cosmopolitan and they're affirming the local ness and their home place of origin in the same genre.
So mixing and separation, that's this.
The second point I wanted to bring up this coming together of populations, which is highly generative.
New forms is simultaneously affirming distinctiveness and transcendence.
And that's very, very applicable to popular cultural forms in urban spaces and heterogeneous spaces all over sub-Saharan Africa.
And it's not only associated with mining, but it's been particularly really well studied.
In the case of applying compounds third theme, which I want to bring out,
I'm actually not going to dwell on it because again, it's about travelling and about how long rose forms move through space.
When we talk about the field of African pop culture,
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
after which you attempt some kind of generalisation know that many people have tried to generalise about African popular culture,
but those who have have often adopted this method.
But a more of organic and potentially more rewarding method is to trace actual popular cultural
forms as they move and try to understand why they move and how they move through space,
how new versions of the same thing keep appearing and being adapted and really formulated.
What is it that enables this kind of Trump's transformation and transition and transformation?
I was going to give the example of the Benny Dance studied by Terence Ranger,
which spread over the whole of East and Africa, of which the Cardema Dance was one manifestation.
But we also have a Gander Dance, the only Pangaea dance and lots of others, lots of other variants.
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,
you know, the conditions which made it possible for these forms to be spread.
So to be taken off in different places. Why did so many Congolese musicians go to Tanzania to Zambia?
Well, particular conditions which foster made made successful this spread of cultural forms.
So it's not just the cultural forms kind of emanates and spread the mechanisms and contexts and facilitating.
Factors which enabled some to spread about this.
So let me get to my fourth theme, which is the most gentle well of all, this is about the artisanal.
In the last paper we had in Dallas, no.
David Spencer, we heard about the artisanal oil extraction in the Niger Delta.
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.
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,
using techniques, tools, methods which are locally devised and developed.
This is a theme that's become quite prominent in studies of mining recent artisanal mining,
and it has a new resonance for approaches to African popular culture.
More generally, because artisanal mining seems to kind of look on the outskirts of big international and
highly capitalised industrial mining or in its interstices or in its aftermath after,
I mean collapses and closes down.
And that's actually become semi-official as I understand it.
Small scale little enterprises are allowed to carry on through shadow mining,
with basic tools and techniques working over the site's previously abandoned by big companies.
So shallow these river beds.
In some cases, only young men who are involved in other sites, we see women and children, women, boys and girls doing different tasks.
So now it's not so much a profession as another option in the endless patchwork of making
do debris at which people in precarious situations are piecing together a living.
And these artisanal mining enterprises have involved a lot of creative innovation at the level of social relations and codes of conduct conduct.
Oh, there's an article which many people may be familiar with, but it's all forms of friendship amongst young,
artisanal gold miners in makeshift camps in northern Benin, Republic of Benin.
So they developed new codes of friendship protocols how to relate to previously unknown young men because
they preferred working with friends rather than with kin or people from the same place of no same hometown.
Because these people who came more people from people with previous connexions might be able to exact a difference of practical seniority
privileges or other kind of hierarchical leverage to deprive the individual artisanal line up of his find if he finds a diamond.
They may use their power to their privilege, their rights over him to get him off them,
so they devise new forms of cooperation and relationship with previously unrelated people.
So that's the kind of creativity of of inventing social protocols.
There's creativity at the level of self-representation and performance of success,
the kind of sap like displays of clothing, consumer goods, bodily style.
And this has also been described in the context of artisanal mining alchemy.
Congolese copper belt by Timothy. And the level of localised cosmology of spirits and rituals concerning the mines and the level
of tropes and narratives about mines finds in the mines the spirits that control the mines.
This has been an incredibly productive site of cultural generation.
It's on to say a little bit about the paper by Lorenzo Angelo, who amongst artisanal diamond miners in Sierra Leone.
So he talks about some of the narratives through which people describe the chances and
missed chances of the diamond find an individual finds an exceptionally valuable stone.
One example is the story of the young man who finds an enormous stone, the biggest ever seen in the area amidst tremendous excitement.
He's taken to the capital city by helicopter to meet the presidents.
He's accompanied by relatives dealers all hoping to get in on the negotiations with international traders.
But when they reach the capital and the diamond is examined by experts,
he's found to be just an ordinary lump of stone and the young man is sent back home with a small token payment.
So this is the kind of story with a narrative arc which reappears and also context,
and has some of the kind of repeated formulaic narrative tropes of a folk tale.
But the interpretation goes on What about if the experts who examined the stone were in cahoots with the big traders and were lying?
What if it really was the most gigantic time nothing ever been seen?
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?
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,
and he works it into his very popular and famous song Corruption.
You do so. So the translation, which Lorenzo Dungeon gives, is How come diamonds turn to stones?
We get diamonds, silver and copper. Tell me, why are we still dying like poor persons?
Tell me. This is corruption. So the story,
which emanates from the mining sites begins to circulate sometime turns into a folkloric kind
of narrative and is then taken up by another popular rapper and made into a moral warning of,
you know, in a rap song, which then goes international.
He's very famous. So this is an example, not just of the idea that popular culture is made homemade.
It's handmade, it's built from tools that are available from materials have come to have.
But here's an example of what once was so solve nothing that's original.
In that letter that quoted beginning, which is the idea of generation looking at culture as something that's emergent and incorrect,
which is taking shape and which grows and is added to and finds its fourth.
So it starts, maybe as somebody has real experience of disappointment,
it turns into a narrative which other people can tell in quotes and cite to each other.
It takes on more and more body until it gets taken up by a rapper and turned into a song.
So here's an idea that you can actually trace developing this idea starting from the ground and working up.
And I think these examples of things starting in a very informal way and emerging developing patterns being circulated and further developed.
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,
reversing the direction of the analysis instead of saying, I'm going to study Sierra Leonean rap songs.
Here are some rap songs. I'm not going to transcribe them, translate them and then explain what kind of light they shed.
Social reality going to say, where did this thing come from, in what circumstances?
What made it possible? Who made it possible? How did it get developed and circulated?
I think that's. Well, I have got some saying it's now almost six o'clock, so.
Let me just add one more thing.
Going back to Marx's letter, why did Marx place so much emphasis on art?
He's talking about metamorphosis, emergence of new things.
He foregrounds the idea of a poem, but he also evokes music in the overture from painting in the word brilliant colours.
And why does he place particular weight on form proportion measure in works of art?
Well, the interpretation by prior is that in humans,
a measure of proportion of art is at once an adult version and the promise of the the alienated state.
We're hopeful in that better than just the future is not only saying that works of
art because they involve acts of imagination can envisage alternative futures,
which is one of the directions a lot of subsequent sociology of literature has taken.
Oh, that art enables us to envisage a different way that society could be could be organised.
He's not only saying that, he's also saying that the formal properties of art.
What makes it into an aesthetic form is an experience of what it would be like to be fully human and become alienated.
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,
I'll boil it all naked flames in the bush simply to eke out a neurosis existence in a state of precariousness.
Even in these states of intense a nation, the creation of arts may constitute a realm of comparative freedom.
A realm in which mountain long prefer to see people's creative urges can find an outlet worthy of their humanity.
So the creation of new locks the generation of new forms is enabled unconstrained by the specific historical circumstances in which are generated.
Art also shape then circumstances. By creating this sense of possibility of what it would be to be fully human.
So I stop it.