Music as Cultural Technologies of Political Mediation in Mali and Niger

Abstract

Over the past recent decades, the roles of arts and artistic performances have gained a new significance in the scholarship on social movements in Africa. This scholarship scrutinizes the political significance of arts and popular artistic performances to political mediation. Informed by these scholarly works, this article examines the narratives by which the musicians politicize two interrelated alguitara musical practices in northern Mali and Niamey, Niger. One sheds light on how the musicians of the music festival known as the festival du désert relate this event to the quest of social consensus between ethnics groups in northern Mali. They also situate the festival du désert as a political movement contesting the theocratic project of the Al-Qaida and the Islamic state-affiliated armed groups since 2012.The other alguitara practice in focus here addresses the popular performances of the music group dagh tenere by which the Tuareg refugees from Mali in Niamey call for intra Tuareg consensus in their regions of orgin. An ethnolographic analysis of these musical practices as forms of political mediation and social movement, I submit, futhers scholarly understanding of how ordinary people labor to contribute to building social consensus and assert disagreements in one of the world’s most conflicted regions today. The result of the analysis affords a non state centric perspective on civil society in Africa.