Kwabena Nketia Research Articles

Out of the ashes: rethinking loss in the African archive

ABSTRACT African archives were predominantly outgrowths of the colonialist machinery, essential armoury in the mechanisms of control which paid little attention to comprehensively documenting the cultures and pasts of the subjugated peoples. Consequently, the genesis of conventional African archives was constituted by loss, a fact perhaps dramatically signified by the string of fires and other disasters to have hit African archival repositories from as early as 1919. Yet still, the embers of these conflagrations provide opportunities for critical reconsiderations of loss that would lead to theoretical and practical gains in the African archive. Archival loss can prod African archivists towards new ontologies of praxis and conceptions of archive that would enable recovery of all the varied registers of the African archive. Specifically, the paper examines the creation and work of the J.H. Kwabena Nketia Archives (at the University of Ghana’s Institute of African Studies) and the Likpe Traditional Area Community Archives as archival sites of resistance and challenge to loss that leverage community and institutional partnerships to build and recover the African archive. Ultimately, these archives’ work, and the general “African archival turn” advocated for here, have implications for African Studies and the decolonising of knowledge production in and about Africa.

Sondheim’s vamps and Africanist musical practice

This article attends to what emerges as, however unlikely, Africanist musical practice in the work of Stephen Sondheim. My analysis considers Sondheim’s use of instrumental vamps as the threshold of song, the articulation of character and the means to dramaturgies of transformation and mood. I hear Sondheim’s vamps as Africanist musical practice, resonating with the African pianism articulated by Akin Euba and J. H. Kwabena Nketia, the appropriated structures of Ghanaian drumming in works by Steve Reich, and the function of African American gospel vamps theorized by musicologist and theologian Braxton D. Shelley. I linger with moments from recent Broadway revivals of Company and Into the Woods, and with feedback I received from Sondheim on my own work as a composer/lyricist and musical dramatist creating songs for West African characters.

Intercultural creativity in the Nigerian-Igbo art music of Okechukwu Ndubuisi

ABSTRACT This article examines the influence of Western art music on the founding of an art music tradition in Nigeria. While the pioneering composers were more Western in approach and style, modern composers’ creative quests for identity and relevance for a local audience have motivated their compositional experiments through intercultural creativity, which Euba [2014. J. H. Kwabena Nketia: Bridging Musicology and Composition. A Study in Creative Musicology. Point Richmond, CA: MRI Press] conceptualised as ‘creative musicology’ or ‘intercultural musicology’. These experiments have resulted in hybrids of Western and indigenous musical features, which in this paper are put in the context of the Igbo ethnic group where Okechukwu Ndubuisi thrived in his art. Indigenous folk music ideals inspired his compositions, which he created with an intercultural approach. This paper has partly emerged from existing studies on Ndubuisi and on intercultural musicology in Africa, and opens new perspectives, for example on pedagogical and performance interculturalism and on Ndubuisi’s creative frameworks, which are omitted both in the literature on him and in other discussions of intercultural and creative musicology in Africa. The study encompasses a sociological argument, theoretical conceptualisation, and musical analysis; it therefore extends the existing scholarship in intercultural and creative musicology.

Deep Ties: Cole and Ross, 1972–2020

Deep Ties: Cole and Ross, 1972–2020

Composing and Contemplating African Melo-Rhythmic Polyphony

Composing and Contemplating African Melo-Rhythmic Polyphony Bode Omojola (bio) Agawu, K. (2016). The African imagination in music. Oxford University Press, 372 pp. Introduction Growing up in the Ekiti region in Western Nigeria, home and school represented two contrasting worlds of music for me. The modal music that I sang at home differed significantly from the tonal harmonies that we performed at school and in church, two public spaces where the cultural impact of British colonial rule lingers. At variance with Handel and Bach's diatonic and triadic harmonies are the secundal harmonies of Ekiti music, sung to articulate cadential points. The cultural practice of harmonizing in major seconds was at the core of the dual consciousness that typified my childhood musicality. The minimalist use of harmony in Ekiti music raises pertinent questions. What, for example, is the significance of cadential seconds within a predominantly unisonous piece? Should the intentional nature of cadential harmony accord it more harmonic weight than parallel harmonies, which are sometimes considered to represent mere melodic duplications? However, if the aesthetic significance of cadential seconds raises questions, its utilitarian value in [End Page 82] Ekiti is indisputable. As demonstrated on many occasions that I witnessed, neighbors often harmonize with one another in songs that signal the end of a domestic altercation. Social harmony is the ultimate goal of Ekiti music. The subject of harmony is the focus of my response to Kofi Agawu's (2016) book, The African Imagination in Music. In his discussion of African "Harmony, or Simultaneous Doing" (pp. 267–304), Agawu provides a survey of harmonic environments and analyzes modal procedures and principles of part formation. He draws attention to the relative paucity of ethno-theoretical musings in Africa and tackles the issue of terminology. He prefers the use of the term harmony because it enables the interrogation of vertical and linear dimensions, undermines difference-oriented discourses, and enables cross-cultural comparisons (p. 274). His discussion of harmony is part of a wide-ranging exploration of the musical facets of the African imagination, which also includes melody, rhythm, and form. Richly illustrated with recordings, transcriptions, and analysis of musical examples from different parts of the continent, Agawu's book expands the discourse of African music far beyond the scope and depth covered in earlier textbooks by authors like Kwabena Nketia (1974) and Francis Bebey (1999). Building on Agawu's discussion of the music of Nigerian composers (see p. 300), I provide a chronological sketch of post-traditional harmonic practices in Nigeria to highlight the significance of harmony in the search by Nigerian composers for a truly African idiom of modern art music. And drawing on the critical elements of his discussion, I analyze a recent composition of mine, Dance of the Crossroads (Omojola, n. d.), to illustrate the concept of melo-rhythmic polyphony as a premise for interrogating African harmonic practices. A Chronological Sketch of Nigeria's Post-traditional Harmony Theophilus Ekundayo Phillips, one of the major pillars of modern musical composition in Nigeria, drew similarities between Yoruba music and the European harmony "of the period of the old modes, beginning with plainsong and culminating in the sixteenth century" (Phillips, 1953, p. 14). He urged his colleagues to adopt the European idiom in their compositions, adding that the "semitonal leading-note and its associated functional dominant chords" of the common practice era should be avoided. He continues: If then as I have endeavoured to prove, there is a close similarity between our present Yorùbá music and the Plainsong of the Europeans, should we not be proud of it and regard our music as a noble heritage worth preserving? This [End Page 83] is exactly what should be our aim in planning our church music (Phillips, 1953, 14). It is important to note that, despite Phillips' strong advocacy and the strong impact of modal procedures in his compositions, functional dominant chords recur in his music. In his Èmi Yíó Gbé Ojú Mi Sókè Wonnı (choir and organ), a Yoruba setting of Psalm 121, for example, pentatonic melodies are sometimes enclosed within V-I cadences, generating a mixed modal language. Some younger composers, although they may be inspired by Phillips, have charted different...

The J.H. Kwabena Nketia Archive at the University of Ghana- Legon

Abstract:This report is on the J.H. Kwabena Nketia Archive at the University of Ghana, Legon, Accra. In the light of growing destruction of public archives in Ghana, mainly due to chieftaincy and land litigation but also because of the lack of a proper maintenance culture, this report will suggest that other, non-conventional archives, such as the J.H. Kwabena Nketia Archive should be explored by historians and researchers. This report highlights the contribution of J.H. Kwabena Nketia who sought to preserve information that is crucial at a time when the world seems to be abandoning most of the most important and significant aspects of Africa’s cultural and artistic history.

African Maestro: The Life and Work of Emeritus Professor J. H. Kwabena Nketia

African Maestro: The Life and Work of Emeritus Professor J. H. Kwabena Nketia

Renewing Cultural Resources and Sustaining J.H. Kwabena Nketia's Vision for an African Music Archive in Ghana

This article examines the processes through which the J.H. Kwabena Nketia Archives has struggled to build a sustainable model for audio-visual archiving within an African university and looks to how its contents may serve future students and scholars in an effort to locate African cultural materials and knowledge production in Africa. The archive, operated within the University of Ghana’s Institute of African Studies, was named in honor of Professor Nketia in 2015 and is the realization of over six decades of gathering audio and visual data, acquiring new collections, conducting research, and preservation efforts. The core collection of quarter-inch reels were recorded by Nketia in the early decades of his extensive career shaping Ghana’s cultural policy, building teaching and research institutions, and studying music, culture, and language in Africa. As a part of the University of Ghana, the Nketia Archives provide a valuable resource for local students and scholars and creates a site in which broader conversations about the country’s cultural legacies are brought into the socio-political discourse. The archive is also a resource for housing and making available new acquisitions including over 300 recently digitized recordings of Ghanaian popular music from professor John Collins’ Bokoor African Popular Music Archives Foundation (BAPMAF). With ongoing challenges in accessibility, the Nketia Archives provides a valuable case study for how an African audio-visual archive is created and sustained.

Ghana Freedom: Ghana Pavilion at the 58th International Art Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia (11 May–24 November 2019) by Nana Oforiatta Ayim

Reviewed by: Ghana Freedom: Ghana Pavilion at the 58th International Art Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia (11 May–24 November 2019) by Nana Oforiatta Ayim Benjamin N. Lawrance Nana Oforiatta Ayim, curator. Ghana Freedom: Ghana Pavilion at the 58th International Art Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia (11 May–24 November 2019). For Ghana art specialists and Ghanaians alike, 2019 is a momentous year because it marks Ghana's debut at the Venice Biennale, arguably the world's most important international art exposition. Countless expressions of Ghanaian nationhood and nationality exist simultaneously in media, music, literature, political rhetoric, and even professional academic associations, such as our own, and our scholarly journal. The Ghana Pavilion offers its own rendition of Ghana's history, artistic expression, and contribution to global culture and ideas. As Kwame Anthony Appiah and Taiye Selasi explain in their complementary essays introducing the pavilion's purpose and gestation in the accompanying catalog, Ghana is globally recognizable as a nation and/but because a pavilion has long been considered a mark of modern nationhood, Ghana's first appearance in Venice is an occasion to rejoice. At the same time, as Appiah contends, the competing and evolving Eurocentric meanings of nationhood and nationality sit uncomfortably with Ghanaians' "relaxed and organic" projections of nation. Ghanaian nationhood is an expansive fabric constantly in a state of weaving. And while the interminable debate about the merit of national pavilions is no less prescient for a postcolonial multiethnic nation of the Global South, Selasi reminds us that this first pavilion opportunity provides six "creator-Ghanaians" with the "space to perform their interrogations on the global platform they deserve." Selasi playfully asks us to sidestep what is and is not Ghanaian art. Instead, visitors to the pavilion are encouraged to freely contemplate, celebrate, and meditate on the materiality and consequence of artistic expressions of the place that is, and the multiple experiences that are, Ghana. The very first Ghana Pavilion in Venice is housed within the long warehouse of pavilions in an L-shaped main building of the Arsenale, sandwiched between Singapore to the north and Malta to the south. For those less familiar with the biennale geography, this is the second, larger location, a short walk from the original primary location in the Giardini, where many of the historically [End Page 223] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Design for Ghana Pavilion, Adjaye Associates. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 2. El Anatsui, Earth Shedding Its Skin. [End Page 224] powerful European and globally influential nations exhibit in purpose-built pavilions. Ghana is one of eight African nations exhibiting in Venice, including some that had not exhibited previously, such as Madagascar, alongside veteran exhibitors, such as South Africa, Côte d'Ivoire, and Egypt. A third massive biennale venue, the Palazzo Mora, often overlooked by new attendees, features Mozambique and the Seychelles, among many others. Operating under the title Ghana Freedom, lifted directly from E. T. Mensah's highlife masterpiece written in 1957 to celebrate independence, the stunning pavilion structure was designed by renowned British-Ghanaian architect Sir David Adjaye. In the accompanying book,1 an anonymous Adjaye Associates representative explains that the pavilion (see Figure 1), which features "oval-shaped modules to provide a sense of fluid unity," is fabricated from Ghanaian laterite to express "the material, texture, and rusty-red coloration of 'place.' " Ghana Freedom, the exhibition itself, was curated by Nana Oforiatta Ayim. The Accra-based art historian and filmmaker also edited the book and provides a comprehensive overview of art and nationhood in Ghana from the nineteenth century to the present, dwelling particularly on the "pivotal" legacy of Kwame Nkrumah in cultivating artistic expression promoting "national and Pan-African identities," via the creative collaborative energies of J. H. Kwabena Nketia. The pavilion showcases the work of six living artists, each of whom contributes to a collective conversation about the legacies and trajectories of Ghanaian freedom. The accompanying book, by contrast, opens with an important additional photo essay celebrating the Deo Gratias Photo Studio, founded in Accra in 1922 by Koblah Bruce-Vanderpuije. This collection of ten digital black-and-white reproductions brings a groundedness to the...

‘It’s Your Story, Don’t Lose It’ – Using Sound And Image Heritage to Bridge Cultures

On 27th October, 2016, the J. H. Kwabena Archives of the Institute of African Studies at the University of Ghana joined forces with UNESCO and other audiovisual archive institutions globally to celebrate “The World Day for Audiovisual Heritage” (WDAVH), a day set aside by UNESCO to raise general awareness of the need for urgent measures to be taken and to acknowledge the importance of audiovisual documents as an integral part of national identity. The theme for that year’s celebration was “It’s your story, don’t lose it.” My outfit organized a roundtable discussion on the theme and invited three renowned professors from the University of Ghana, who have had tremendous experience in fieldwork documentation, archiving, and dissemination. The three discussants were; Professor Daniel Avorgbedor [1], Professor John Collins[2], and J. H. Kwabena Nketia, founder of what is now known as the J. H. Kwabena Nketia Archives. After the roundtable discussions, I did a solo interview with him on UNESCO’s theme for the day. This interview collates the views I gathered from Nketia from the roundtable discussion and the subsequent solo interview in the comfort of his home in Madina, a suburb of Accra.
 [1] http://www.ug.edu.gh/music/staff/prof-daniel-avorgbedor
 [2] http://www.ug.edu.gh/music/staff/prof-edmund-john-collins

Editorial

Editorial

From Ghanaian Folk Song to Contemporary Art Music for Bb Atɛntɛbɛn and Piano

In recent decades, many Ghanaian composers have incorporated traditional Ghanaian folk tunes into their western-influenced compositional works. Among them are Ephraim Amu, Joseph Hanson Kwabena Nketia, Nicholas Nichodemus Kofie, and Cosmas Worlanyo Kofi Mereku who used folk tunes as themes for extended musical compositions. These compositions represent the hybrid cultural identity of Ghanaian composers whose roots are entrenched in traditional and Western musical cultures. This article focuses on the compositional technique I, as a modern composer, utilised in integrating the musical elements and features of ‘Nyavɔ Nyee Tu Gbɔmeɖoɖoe’, a Ghanaian folk song into a new contemporary art music composition for the Bb atɛntɛbɛn (a modified traditional bamboo flute) and piano. In this new composition also titled Nyavɔ Nyee Tu Gbɔmeɖoɖoe, I extended beyond the standard tuning systems of the modified Bb atɛntɛbɛn by structuring the piece based on sonata form. The sonata form contains modulation from the tonic triggering me to include two new chromatic pitches, expanding the capabilities of the modified Bb atɛntɛbɛn. In this article, I argue for new possibilities of atɛntɛbɛn ‘neoclassical’ compositions by combining compositional techniques from western classical and Ghanaian traditional music.

West African Drumming and Dance in North American Universities: An Ethnomusicological Perspective by George Worlasi Kwasi Dor (review)

West African Drumming and Dance in North American Universities: An Ethnomusicological Perspective. By George Worlasi Kwasi Dor. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2014. [304 p. ISBN 9781617039140 (hardcover), $60; ISBN 9781496802583 (paperback), $30.] Illustrations, appendices, glossary, bibliography, index. This 300-page book was written by a Ghanaian musicologist who for many years has directed the University of Mississippi's Ole Miss African Drum and Dance Ensemble. He examines the growth of West African drumming in North American universities since the 1960s (which began in 1964 at UCLA and Columbia University). These programs were followed by Wesleyan, Berkeley, Toronto, and Tufts Universities, and drumming is now taught in approximately forty American and Canadian universities that host liberal arts, music and dance, African studies and world music programs. Dor supplies a useful table of the first such seventeen university units (p. 45). Dor first examines the reasons for the suppression of African drumming in the Americas during the era of slavery, including the Christian (and particularly Protestant) hostility to African drumming and culture in North America; however, slaves were able to perform African-influenced music within their independent black churches, with their spirituals, ring dances, and pats, in which African drum rhythms were transferred from drums to hand claps. Despite the abolition of slavery in the U.S.A. in 1865, in the Post-Reconstruction Jim Crow era with its accompanying scientific racism, the negative attitude to African performance as backwards, savage, and primitive continued to exist. Nevertheless, there was a growing interest in traditional African performance from the 1930s, reflected by six key personalities whom Dor discusses. The first was the Sierra Leonean Asadata Dafora Horton, who studied art music and opera in Europe and then in 1930 formed his Federal Theatre African Dance Troupe in Harlem. He was followed by the African American dancer Katherine Mary Dunham, who studied anthropology at the University of Chicago, researched Caribbean voudoun (voodoo) dance, became the first black choreographer for the Metropolitan Opera, and set up her own Ballet Negres in the 1940s. Pearl Primus was a dancer and choreographer from Trinidad who was born into a Santeria family and studied anthropology at New York University. She carried out ethnographic research in West and Central Africa, and her first dance production was in 1943. Dor mentions three West Africans who became important for the African drum culture in the U.S. during the 1950s and 1960s. One is the Ghanaian percussionist Guy Warren (Kofi Ghanaba), who in 1957 released the first of his several African jazz albums and worked with African American jazz musicians Max Roach and Thelonius Monk. Likewise, in the 1950s, the Nigerian drummer Michael Babatunde Olatunji set up a college African drumming group in the United States; he later released records including Drums of Passion and worked with John Coltrane and Art Blakey. The sixth pioneering figure is the djembe drummer Ladji Kamara, who came to the States in the 1960s with the Ballets Africain (of the newly-independent Guinea) and became the father of the American djembe movement. Besides the roles of these six figures, Dor offers four other reason for the acceptance of African drumming in the American academy, the first being the role of African and Africanist scholars who from the 1950s and 1960s onward reassessed the importance of African culture and music: John Blacking, David McAllister, Mantle Hood, and A. M. Jones; and the West Africans, J. H. Kwabena Nketia, Akin Euba, and Chiekh Anta Diop. Secondly, there was the impact of West African independence that resulted in Ghana's Kwame Nkrumah and Guinea's Sekou Toure establishing touring drum and dance performance groups like Les Ballets Africain and the Ghana Dance Ensemble (set up in 1962 by Kwabena Nketia and Albert Mawere Opoku). …

African Musicology: Towards Defining and Setting Parameters of the Study of the Indigenous African Music

KEYWORDS Ethnomusicology. Folklore. Musicology. Post Colonialism. mmino wa setso. Dinaka. Dipela ABSTRACT This paper is an attempt to define African musicology as a standalone discipline. The study of indigenous African music is, in the main, assumed to be the competency of ethnomusicology. That ethnomusicologists are musical anthropologists suggests that they, like anthropologists, labour at presenting the image of the African to the European as well as the American institutions for a plethora of reasons and purposes. This explains a sense of reluctance when coming to addressing the need to fashion an alternative discipline designed, to unravel the intricacies of indigenous African music for the benefit of the African processes of knowledge making. Since the efforts of one Kwabena Nketia fifty years or so ago, African musicology has not succeeded in entrenching itself. By asserting itself, African musicology could stand to benefit the study of African music, let alone its own disciplinary development into the 21 st century.

A Negotiated Tradition: Learning “Traditional” Ewe Drumming

Although [college] world music ensembles provide at best a pale simulacrum of real thing, the implicit goal is still to maximize authenticity by performing near exact replicas of musical models from other cultures. --Gage Averill (2004,100) In traditional African societies the force of tradition is naturally very strong, although it does not stifle creativity. --J. H. Kwabena Nketia (2005, 334) That which is enshrined in a sound recording, for example, is only one among several possible renditions. --Kofi Agawu (2003, 19) For six days Tim Feeney and I had been acutely focused on learning traditional Ewe drumming, sheltered in the shade of a tree outside the International Centre for African Music and Dance at the University of Ghana at Legon (a suburb of the capital city of Accra). On day seven, a July afternoon in 2008, we were taken to Dzodze, a few miles from Ghana's Atlantic coast near the Volta River delta, to attend the funeral celebration for a local Ewe woman. Here was a chance to experience firsthand the music we had so recently studied and memorized in an academic setting. However, Feeney and I bumped hard against our own neophyte assumptions; talking it over later that evening, we berated our naivete. traditional agbadza funeral music we'd heard today in Dzodze didn't match the agbadza music we had immersed ourselves in for the past week. (Pond 2008) (1) previous summer, preparing to begin his position as director of percussion at Cornell University, Feeney had studied privately with ethnomusicologist and Ewe music and culture specialist David Locke, of Tufts University, and Torgbui Midawu Gideon Foli Alorwoyie, the African ensemble director at the University of North Texas, (2) both educators of international reputation. Feeney had supplemented these studies throughout the year with ongoing lessons from James Burns, another specialist in Ewe music, and Pierrette Aboadji, a dance instructor (and former member of the Ghana Dance Ensemble), both of nearby Binghamton University. Burns provided us with the logistical support, accommodations, and access to key Ghanaian musicians for our joint trip in 2008. An ethnomusicology and musicology professor at Cornell, my own prior exposure to Ewe drumming dated back to my undergraduate (and some graduate) study with Ewe master drummer C. K. Ladzekpo at the University of California at Berkeley in the 1980s and early 1990s and to my doctoral study and subsequent research in the African diaspora, particularly as it relates to jazz. In our intensive week at the University of Ghana, Feeney and I, joined by James Gardner, a student from the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies, had been attempting to learn a half-semester's worth of drumming patterns and playing techniques in six days of lessons with Johnson Kemeh, one of the leading expert instructors in ritual and dance drumming at the university. Now, the ubiquitous trotro taxi minibus had deposited us four hours away (only 197 kilometers, or 122 miles, as the crow flies), and we were ready to learn more of what we had understood as The Tradition from Kodzo Tagborlo, a leading drummer in the Volta region and the reigning master drummer in the medium-sized town of Dzodze, a commercial hub and county seat. (3) As cultural outsiders, active musicians, and music academics, Feeney and I were anxious to get it right--to learn Ewe ritual and dance drumming techniques, repertoire, and contexts as authentically as possible. Feeney, a recent doctor of musical arts graduate in percussion from Yale, was intent on building his skills, and I was keen to build my own. Now we were taking lessons together, intending to learn the same material in three weeks of concentrated field research and lessons in Ghana, so that his World Drumming and Dance Ensemble and my music survey course, African Diaspora, could build upon and reinforce each other. …

An Interview with J. H. Kwabena Nketia: Perspectives on Tradition and Modernity

This paper presents an edited transcription of interviews between Professor J. H. Kwabena Nketia and Dr Trevor Wiggins in November 2003, with additional commentary by Trevor Wiggins. Drawing on Professor Nketia's long career and diverse engagements with many aspects of music in Africa, discussions cover a range of issues around Ghanaian traditional and contemporary music, African musicology and the International Centre for African Music & Dance. A version of this interview will also appear in French in Cahiers de Musiques Traditionelles 17, 2004, Geneva: Georg Editeur.

The Union Trade Company and Its Recordings: An Unintentional Documentation of West African Popular Music, 1931–1957

This paper introduces a unique collection of roughly 700 historical recordings of African popular music generated by a Swiss trading company, which today is located at the archives of mission 21 (formerly Basel Missioin) in Basel. The music was recorded and distributed by the Union Trade Company of Basel (UTC) during the 1930s and 1950s in the Gold Coast and Nigeria. The collection represents a rich resource for the study of African history and cultures and caters for the growing interest shown by social historians of Africa in everyday life and accordingly in leisure activities and consumption.As music and dance undoubtedly play an important role in African social and religious life, they have received much attention and there is a longstanding tradition of ethnomusicological research that has led to a great number of sound collections. The historian interested in the “modern” and “postmodern” or in popular culture, however, tends in many cases to be frustrated by the material contained in these archives. The ethnographic collectors often showed a blind eye to the modernizing forces within the African musical cultures they researched and concentrated on documenting what they perceived as the “original” or “traditional.” Furthermore the collection and documentation of the popular music of the day was rarely on the agenda of national research institutions and archives in postcolonial Africa. In the case of Ghana at least three initiatives have resulted in important collections of music that go beyond a narrow ethnographic documentation. The first, by Prof. Kwabena Nketia at the Centre of African Studies at the University of Ghana, features a mixture of field recordings and a few commercial records. The others focus specifically on the commercial and popular. These are the Gramophone Records Museum in Cape Coast, discussed below by its founder Kwame Sarpong and the Bokoor African Popular Music Archives Foundation (BAPMAF) of John Collins in Accra.

Remembering Kojo: History, Music, and Gender in the January Sixth Celebration of the Jamaican Accompong Maroons

January Sixth celebration of Maroons of Accompong, Jamaica, commemorates both birth of Maroon leader, Kojo (Cudjoe),(1) and his victory over British, which resulted in signing of peace treaty of 1739. Accompong Maroons(2) are descendants of Africans taken to Jamaica in seventeenth and eighteenth centuries who successfully resisted enslavement by British rulers of island and settled in remote, mountainous region called Cockpit Country. Accompong is town of about 1,600 inhabitants located in St. Elizabeth parish in western part of Jamaica approximately thirty-five miles southeast of Montego Bay. Much research has been done on various Maroon groups in West Indies and Latin America, and literature on Accompong (or Leeward) Maroons is particularly plentiful because of their dramatic and turbulent history. However, except for work of Kenneth M. Bilby, whose research focuses primarily on groups in eastern Jamaica, studies of Jamaican Maroon music are rare. Fragments of information about music of Accompong Maroons appear in several works, but comprehensive study on musical traditions of Leeward Maroons is lacking.(3) January Sixth celebration does not represent retention of specific African festival or event. It is performance tradition that originated in Jamaica, but music and dance performed at this event clearly are African-derived. My primary focus here is not to identify resilience or maintenance of African practices, although strong argument can be made for approaching subject in this way. Instead, I will examine how Accompong Maroons, in process of adapting to their new environment, integrated features from variety of African and European traditions to create musical culture that asserted their distinctive Maroon identity.(4) As Barbara Klamon Kopytoff (1979, 52) explains: The radical change in Maroons' existence brought about by treaties [with British] marked new beginning for their societies, and Maroons came to see treaties as marking their origin, rather than their rebirth. While they do not deny their African heritage, people of Accompong take greater pride in being Maroons and strongly challenge any institution or individual that denies their right to sovereignty. Because music event encompasses so many aspects of music culture, several scholars have used it as object of study. J. H. Kwabena Nketia (1990, 79) argues that an examination of music event provides a richer and more dynamic view of music culture than other approaches that do not integrate contextual considerations in analysis. For Marcia Herndon (1971, 340), musical occasion may be regarded as an encapsulated expression of shared cognitive forms and values of society, which includes not only music itself but also totality of associated behavior and underlying concepts. It is usually named event, with beginning and an end, varying degrees of organization of activity, audience/performances, and location. Ruth Stone (1982, 136) believes that the event is more than reflection of something else: it is processual creation within finite sphere of reality. According to Martin Stokes (1994, 3), The musical event ... evokes and organises collective memories and present experiences of place with an intensity, power and simplicity unmatched by any other social activity. January Sixth celebration represents some of what these scholars have indicated, but it also has deeper meanings. For Accompong Maroons, event is not only reminder and signifier of their collective identity, it is one of few occasions in their culture when music, history, religion, politics, and economics intersect to create an experience in which all are free and proud to actualize their heritage. As Victor Turner (1982, 16) puts it, When social group, whether it be family, clan, village, nation, congregation, or church, celebrates particular event or occasion, such as birth, harvest, or national independence, it also `celebrates itself. …

African Musicology: Current Trends. Volume I: A Festschrift Presented to J. H. Kwabena Nketia

African Musicology: Current Trends. Volume I: A Festschrift Presented to J. H. Kwabena Nketia

Book reviews

The Jesse Jackson Phenomenon: The Crisis of Purpose in Afro‐American Politics. Adolph L Reed, Jr, London: Yale University Press. 1986.170pp. £4.95pb The Struggle for the Third World: Soviet Debates and American Options. Jerry F Hough, Washington DC: Brookings Institution (Distributed in the UK by Costello) 1986. 300pp. £31.80. £12.50pb Linking the South: The Route to Economic Cooperation. Edited by Bernard Chidzero and Altaf Gauhar, London: Third World Foundation. 1986. 344pp. £20.95 The Political Economy of Development. J Faaland and J R Parkinson, London: Frances Pinter. 1986. 265pp. £22.50 Paths to Progress: Bread and Freedom In Developing Societies. William McCord and Arline McCord, New York & London: W W Norton. 1986. 352pp. £14.50 Development Economics on Trial: The Anthropological Case for a Prosecution. Polly Hill, Cambridge: University Press, 1986. 174pp. n/p Women in the World: 1975–1985, The Women's Decade. Edited by Lynne B Iglitzin and Ruth Ross, Santa Barbara, California: ABC‐Clio Press. 1986. (2nd edn, revised). 484pp. £33.00 The Latin American Women's Movement: Reflections and Actions. Isis International Women's Information and Communication Service, Rome: Isis International. 1986. 99pp. $6.00pb Big Deal: The Politics of the Illicit Drugs Business. Anthony Henman. Roger Lewis, Tim Malyon et al. London: Pluto Press. 1986. 211pp. £4.50pb Slavery and Human Progress. David Brion Davis, Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1986. 374pp. £6.95 A Year in the Death of Africa: Politics, Bureaucracy and the Famine. Peter Gill, London: Paladin. 1986. 191pp. £3.95pb The History of Famine and Epidemics in Ethiopia Prior to the Twentieth Century. Richard Pankhurst, Addis Ababa: Relief and Rehabilitation Commission. 1985.120pp. £2.50pb The Challenges of Drought: Ethiopia's Decade of Struggle in Relief and Rehabilitation. Relief and Rehabilitation Commission, London: H and L Communications. 1985. 280pp. £9.95 Mozambique: The Revolution Under Fire. Joseph Hanlon, London: Zed Books. 1984. 292pp. £18.95. £6.95pb Arms and the African: Military Influences on Africa's International Relations. Edited by William J Foltz and Henry S Bienen, London: Yale University Press, 1985. 221pp. £22.50 African Crisis Areas and US Foreign Policy. Edited by Gerald J Bender, James S Coleman and Richard L Sklar, London: University of California Press, 1985. 373pp. £33.95. £8.50pb Education Priorities and Aid Responses in Sub‐Saharan Africa. Edited by Hugh Hawes and Trevor Coombe with Carol Coombe and Kevin Lillis, London: HMSO for Overseas Development Administration and University of London Institute of Education. 1986.190pp. £4.95pb Education and Society in Africa. Mark Bray, Peter B Clarke and David Stephens, London: Edward Arnold. 1986.191pp. £6.95pb The Music of Africa. J H Kwabena Nketia, London: Victor Gollancz. 1986. 278pp. £6.95pb Iraq in Transition: A Political, Economic and Strategic Perspective. Edited by Frederick W Axelgard, London: Mansell. 1986. 111pp. £15.00pb Forbidden Agendas: Intolerance and Defiance in the Middle East. Edited by Jon Rothschild, London: A1 Saqi Books. 1984. 400pp. £6.95pb Understanding Indonesia. Edited by Leslie Palmier, London: Gower. 1975. 113pp. £13.50 An Indian Rural Economy 1880–1955: The Tamilnad Countryside. Christopher John Baker, Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1984. 616pp. n/p Gift of The Devil: A History of Guatemala. Jim Hardy, Toronto: Between The Lines. 1985. 319pp. $25.95. $12.95pb