Popular Performance and Culture in Ghana: The Past 50 Years

Abstract

GHANA STUDIES / Volume 10 ISSN 1536-5514 / E-ISSN 2333-7168© 2007 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System 9 POPULAR PERFORMANCE AND CULTURE IN GHANA The Past 50 Years JOHN COLLINS Introduction This paper examines contemporary African culture from the mid-20th century through the lens of the popular arts. Although Ghana is the focus, first I look at some of the general features of what is a transcultural sub-Saharan phenomenon and take the story back to the late 19th century, when popular cultural forms began to be created by the newly emerging African urban masses, the maritime workers, and the cash-crop farmers, who blended or “syncretized” local forms with those of Europe and America (including its black diaspora), introduced through colonial soldiers, missionaries, and traders, as well as through then available forms of mass media. Despite their hybrid nature, these new cultural forms contained and still contain distinctive features that express the identities, symbols, and underlying value orientations of their African creators, practitioners, and audiences. The ability of these new art forms to reflect the moods and outlooks of Africans undergoing rapid sociocultural transformations is helped by their often ephemeral and transient nature, or what Karin Barber (1987, p. 12) calls their “aesthetic of change.” These new African art forms go far beyond what in the West is normally called “art,” for they embrace coffin designs (Burns, 1974; Secretan, 1994); house and barroom murals (Beinart, 1968; Szombati-Fabian & Fabian, 1976); local portrait photography (Amicchia, 1999; Hales, 1998; Sprague, 1978); sign-writing; advertisements (from barbering to bread labels 10 Ghana Studies • volume 10 • 2007 [Middleton, 1974]); wire bicycles (Jackson, 1978); lorry slogans (Kyei & Schreckenbach, 1975); comic literature;1 and local cloth designs.2 Popular performance lyrics and text also generate catch-names and idiomatic expressions , which I discuss later. Most Africanist writers on popular culture generally agree that the practitioners of popular performance and popular art are drawn largely from the “intermediate” groups in African society. These groups (consisting of urban or urbanizing Africans, skilled and semiskilled artisans, transport workers, seamen, traders, minor civil servants, cash-crop farmers, and so on3 ) have 1. Barber (1987, pp. 29, 40) provides the example of the “Onitsha market literature” of eastern Nigeria during the 1950s and 1960s, and the Kumasi-made Twi-English “Spider Man” comics of the mid-1970s (collected by Tom McCaskie), whose central character is a combination of the American Marvel Comics “Spider-Man” and the Akan Ananse-the-Spider, who from his jungle hideout assists the masses under Acheampong ’s military regime. 2. Ghanaian and Nigerian 1960s highlife songs that provided cloth names include “Yaw Berku” (a man’s name); “Aku Sika” (A golden lady called Aku); “Aban Nkaba” (Handcuffs ); “Afie Be Ye Asan” (Troublesome years); and “Joromi” (a mythical wrestler). 3. Ware (1978, p. 363) states that most of Sierra Leone’s popular musicians come from the lower/middle classes, while Alaja-Brown (1987) notes that Nigerian juju music originated with the “rascals” and “area boys” of the old Saro (Sierra Leone) Olowogbowo Collins • Popular Performance and Culture in Ghana 11 developed since the 19th century between the national elites and the vast class of subsistence peasant farmers. The intermediate status of some of Ghana’s pioneering popular performers is exemplified by the highlife guitarists Kwame Asare (Jacob Sam) and his nephew Kwaa Mensah, who also held down jobs as a carpenter, a mining surveyor’s assistant, a watch repairer , and a cocoa broker. Sutherland (1970, pp. 5, 18) also mentions that Bob Ansah and C. B. Hutton, of the 1930s Two Bobs concert party group, had been a small storekeeper and a tribunal clerk, respectively. To jump forward several decades, if indeed emergent African popular arts and culture involved the crossing and blurring of cultural boundaries (transculturation), the “aesthetic of change,” the “intermediate” layers of society, and urbanization, then one can see contemporary emergent separatist churches (spiritual, aladura, apostolic, and Pentecostal) also as manifestations of popular culture. They are transcultural or syncretic in that they incorporate African features like dancing, possession, spiritual healing, exorcism, and divination. The local church congregations are drawn from the very same “intermediate” masses as are...