https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4083-5112
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ABSTRACT
The ubiquity of the jembe in western and northern Europe, as well as in North America, was instigated during the 1970s by influential West African jembe players, later developing within world music, where this drum came to represent the essence of ‘African music’. In Croatia the popularity of the jembe did not arise until the late 1990s, motivated by local Croatian musicians who shaped an African music scene in Zagreb. More than a decade later, the first performers from West Africa—specifically from Senegal—settled in Croatia and claimed a space in the limited scene that had mainly crystallised around the jembe. Albeit within a climate of open collaboration, frictions emerged between these two groups of jembe performers surrounding issues of authenticity and labour. This article focuses on the initial phases and issues at stake in this encounter between Croatian and Senegalese jembe practitioners. Although these tensions resonate with exoticising discourses and notions of appropriation that have often characterised the world music industry, it is argued that generalising interpretations as well as the actors’ subjective readings must be deconstructed in order to grasp the complexities of this encounter and the processes shaping the African music scene in Zagreb.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 According to the 2011 census, more than 90% of the population in Croatia is ethnically Croatian and most of the surveyed ethnicities are from other European countries: https://www.dzs.hr/Eng/censuses/census2011/results/htm/usp_03_EN.htm (accessed 26 February 2021).
2 Although my research also focused on dance, this article is mainly concerned with music.
3 For a detailed discussion of the formation of this scene and the various bands experimenting within and beyond it, see Cimardi (Citation2022).
4 I conducted archival research in Zagreb at the Institute for Ethnology and Folklore and at the National Library and in Belgrade at the Museum of African Art.
5 Following Eric Charry (Citation2000: 1), I employ Mande as a term that encompasses the various populations locally known as Maninka, Malike, or Mandinka that once formed part of the Mali empire (which included areas of contemporary Mali, Guinea, the Gambia, and Senegal).
6 Fodeba Keita founded Les Ballets Africains in 1947 in Paris and the troupe initially included artists from West and Central Africa as well as from the Caribbean. It was in 1958, with the independence of Keita’s homeland, Guinea, that Les Ballets Africains became the country’s national ensemble with exclusively Guinean performers (Polak Citation2010: 40).
7 Multikultura featured several musicians from Africa or of African descent and NEBO hosted Stella Chiweshe and Aly Keita. Ethnoambient hosted the concerts and workshops of famous West African musicians, such as Seckou Keita, Tonton Soryba Silla, and Mamady Keita.
8 Kovačić (interview, Zagreb, 28 May 2018) described the music played by Afion as ‘Balkan etno-glazba’. It is hard to define etno-glazba (lit. ethno music). Ceribašić (Citation2014) stresses its arrangement and elaboration of traditional repertoires of the Balkan region; Nenić (Citation2014) describes the complex plurality of local and world music styles condensed under this ambiguous label; Baker (Citation2018: 45) explains it as ‘a mode of knowingly repackaging tradition to suit the “world music” market’s Westernizing gaze’.
9 The latter mainly through the association Plavi Anđeo: https://www.plavi-andeo.hr/index.php/en (accessed 20 October 2022).
10 Iva Nenić (Citation2014: 260) reports the analogous engagement against nationalism of Serbian world music bands in Belgrade during the 2000s.
11 Casamance is a culturally and religiously diverse region: Jola people are the majority, along with Mandinga and Peul among others. Since the 1990s, Casamance has been affected by a separatist conflict motivated by the disadvantaged economic conditions of the region within Wolof-dominated Senegal (Neveu Kringelbach Citation2012).
12 Both Mandinka (or Malinke, Mande) and Peul (or Fula, Fulɓe) are ethnic groups spread across different countries in West Africa. In Senegal, the Peul are the second largest group, while Mandinka represent a small minority.
13 In the previous years, Kahithe Kiiru, Croatian-Kenyan ethnochoreologist and founder of the Dyalli Association, held African dance courses in Zagreb.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Linda Cimardi
Linda Cimardi is currently Principal Investigator of the DFG funded Research Project ‘Black Musics in the (Former) Yugoslav Region’ at the Martin Luther University in Halle-Wittenberg. She was A. von Humboldt Research Fellow at the Ethnological Museum in Berlin (2018–2021), Guest Researcher in Ethnomusicology at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Graz (2017–2018) and external researcher within the University of Turin Research Unit for the 2010–11 PRIN (Project of Relevant National Interest) in Ethnomusicology. Cimardi conducted fieldwork in Italy, Uganda, Croatia, Bosnia, and Austria. She holds a Ph.D. in Ethnomusicology from the University of Bologna (2013). Her main areas of interest are African musics, gender in music and dance, and politics and aesthetics of world music.