Jembe Hero: West African Drummers, Global Mobility and Cosmopolitanism as Status

Abstract

In Guinea, West Africa, the status attributed to the musicians who play the wooden, goat-skinned jembe drum has historically been very low. But, over the last 60 years, the jembe has progressively ‘gone global’, and today some master drummers earn a living by teaching jembe workshops to amateur aficionados everywhere. In Asia one week, Europe the next and North America the following, these masters build global social networks, opening and plying the trade routes for the commodification of their roots. In this paper, I describe how the modern fetish for African drumming has created an alternative economy of status for jembe musicians. I examine how, against significantly increasing barriers, young musicians in Guinea are leveraging this economy to follow their elders into global mobility, attempting to achieve a cosmopolitanism through which they, too, can inscribe themselves into West African imaginaries of heroism. And I show how their life paths in turn can allow us to reconsider the notion of cosmopolitan citizenship, in a very unequal world.