Music as a site for Africanness and diaspora cultures: African musicians in the white landscape of Finland

ABSTRACT

This article looks at African musicians in Finland and the ways that they negotiate ideas of ‘Africanness’ in their professional activities. The specific environment of Finland with a relatively low number of people of African descent inevitably shapes the activities of these musicians. Our analysis, based on our many years of fieldwork among African diaspora communities, makes visible the multiplicity of sites where African music is played and performed in Finland, and the various contexts that influence the ways in which Africanness is articulated. In a predominantly white society, African musicians' roles extend from artists and ‘cultural ambassadors’ to active change agents in the fields of identity politics and anti-racism struggles.

KEYWORDS:

• African musicians
• Africanness
• Finland
• identity politics

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. For more information on the Fest Afrika festival, see www.festafrika.net/en/.

2. For more information on the action phase of the action research project on the African presence in Finland, see the home page of the exhibition project at the Finnish Labour Museum Werstas: http://www.tyovaenmuseo.fi/?q=node/870.

3. There are also some young Finnish musicians who have refused to talk about their African roots or their experiences of racism in public at all. For ethical reasons, we have excluded these people from this discussion, in order to avoid racializing people who obviously do not want to be talked about as racialized subjects in arenas where their profession is discussed. We want to respect their desire to be recognized as artists because of their talents, not their color or family histories. Categorizing European people based on their Africanness, when defined by other people, is both difficult (e.g. Gbadamosi 2011) and for ethnographers even ethically debatable.

4. This and many of the following quotes are from the workshop Being an African Musician in Finland held in Tampere 9 July 2011. However, the same musicians, and for certain topics also others, have made similar statements in other situations, too. When talking about some more delicate questions, we have chosen not to mention the name of the person speaking, and in these cases, we have also deliberately not mentioned the time and place of the statement, because otherwise it would be easy to identify the people in question due to the limited number of professional African musicians in Finland.

5. A quote from a lecture given by Menard Mponda at the University of Tampere, 1 December 2008.

6. The video is available on the Internet: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7ch4mJ51CA. The song ‘Olen suomalainen’ is a translation of an Italian hit song ‘L’ítaliano’, made popular by Salvatore ‘Toto’ Cutugno in 1983.

7. A quote from the Fest Afrika 2014 website, http://festafrika.net/en/ohjelma/seminaari/.

8. A short promo clip of The Rise of the Queens is available on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FSD-4pU2pb0, see also http://festafrika.net/en/2013/06/the-rise-of-the-queens/.