While the borders of today's Benin encompass a number of pre-colonial tribal and imperial zones, there's one in particular I want to address: the Kingdom of Dahomey. This Kingdom was made up of the Fon ethnic people and they controlled a chunk of the southern coastal area of Benin-to-be from about 1600 to 1894 when they lost the Second Franco-Dahomean War and became a protectorate of France. They were a very militaristic kingdom, their military including both men and women, and fought with two of their political rivals, the Oyo Empire and the city-state Porto-Novo, to control gold mines in the area.
They also caught and sold slaves. They were usually war prisoners or criminals who, for whatever reason, weren't chosen for their rituals involving human sacrifice. I'm not particularly equipped to deal with any nuances of the Kingdom of Dahomey's slave trade, but I bring it up for a couple of reasons - first, it does a disservice to the victims of atrocities to flinch away and ignore the worst elements of human history; second, and related, there are not a few foolhearted Euro-Americans who, out of ignorance or spite or both, cling onto African slavery as a smokescreen to deflect responsibility away from European and American crimes against humanity.
So the Kingdom of Dahomey made money by selling slaves? Ok, that's bad. But you know what? It was the Europeans and Americans who bought and sold them again, and they kept the receipts. In an uncommon instance of an African-American being able to trace their ancestry back to a particular place, the show Roots found that musician Ahmir Khalib Thompson was descended from a slave on the boat of one William Foster, the captain of the last slave ship taking slaves from the Kingdom of Dahomey to the US as part of a bet made by Timothy Meaher that he could sell them after Thomas Jefferson signed the Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves in 1808. Take a moment to let the full implications of that story sink in, and then we'll move on to more pleasant topics.
There's more to Benin than slavery, of course. Due to the country's low literacy rate, oral tradition is still alive and well, and the country has a flourishing and diverse music scene. Everything from native tribal music, Ghanian highlife, French cabaret, rock, reggae, rumba are all played in the country. For a time in the 1970's, Benin was one of the premier hotspots for funk in Africa. During my searches for Beninese music, I also came across a number of artists who are still creating new music within tribal styles and genres, which is cool to see.
During the course of writing about Africa, it occurred to me I hadn't come across anything resembling an avant garde, whatever that may mean to Africa. While I haven't found anything like that in music so far (at least, in sub-Saharan Africa; North Africa is a different story), there's plenty of visual artists and clothing designers across the continent who are experimenting with what their cultures have to offer, and what it means to be a citizen of whatever country they are in when the borders of them are so blatantly artificial. In 2010, Benin's Ministry of Culture initiated a Biennial Foundation project called Regard Benin. You can check out some of the results of the 2012 exhibit at their website here: https://www.biennialfoundation.org/biennials/regard-biennale-benin-benin/
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Today's composer is Lionel Loueke (b.1973). A guitarist and vocalist, Mr. Loueke started guitar at 17, working for a year to earn the $50 needed to buy the instrument. Poverty compelled him to try and find solutions to the problem of replacing strings, using everything from vinegar to clean his strings to using bicycle brake cables (not recommended, they broke his guitar neck). In 1990, he went to the National Art Institute in Côte d'Ivoire, then the American School of Music in Paris, Berklee College of Music, and finally the Thelonious Monk Institute (now known as the Herbie Hancock Institute of Jazz).
The list of musicians he has worked with is extensive, but he currently belongs to a jazz trio called Gilfema with Massimo Biolcati (Swedish-Italian) and Ferenc Nemeth (Hungarian). The song posted is "Wishes," from his second album Mwaliko.
Nice!
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