24. Mai 2023
Speech on the occasion of the African Music Days Munich

- The spoken word applies - 

Dear Dr Schmidt,
Dear Mr Hatitye,
Dear musicians, dear guests,

I am pleased to open the African Music Days together with you today here at Muffatwerk in Munich. We will enjoy cutting-edge musical talents that rock the African continent and are immensely popular there, but not yet sufficiently known in Germany and Europe. And we celebrate a jubilee, namely 10 years of existence of the Music in Africa Foundation, created in 2013 with the support of the Goethe-Institut and the Siemens Foundation.

Tomorrow is 25 May—an important date and jubilee in the political history of the continent. 60 years ago, in 1963, 30 leaders of the newly independent African states gathered in Addis Ababa to create the Organization of African Unity, a precursor of the African Union that was founded in 2002.
Decolonisation, resistance to all neo-colonial aspirations, a continent-wide development effort, and the necessity to forge pan-African solidarity to reach all these goals: these were the dominant themes of the 1963 conference. But a few state leaders also mentioned the importance of culture. Most prominently, the Senegalese president Leopold Sédar Senghor, advocate of Négritude, declared: “The consciousness of our community of culture, our African-ness, is a necessary preliminary to any progress along the road to unity.” And he insisted: “We must forge a common soul!” In this vein, the president of the Côte d’Ivoire Houphouet-Boigny demanded that all present at the meeting should help “open the way for fruitful exchanges between men, and in particular between young people coming from the most varied horizons, thus allowing the establishment of bonds of friendships, the comparison of different experiences and realities, a reciprocal enrichment designed to develop the feeling of jointly belonging to one and the same culture: African culture”.

This appeal, made in 1963, could almost stand as an early founding document for the Music in Africa Foundation! The transnational, continental and transcontinental networks in the field of music that the Foundation has supported and inspired are such an important contribution to African unity! Music is indeed one of Africa’s strongest resources. It is aesthetically rich; it is economically potent; and it can be politically powerful—the Nigerian Fela Kuti immediately comes to mind, but there are many others, up to the present, and also among those who will perform here today and tomorrow.
When I started my research as anthropologist in Ghana in 1987, I remember how popular audio cassettes with local xylophone music were. The xylophone tunes were tape-recorded with the simplest technologies, copied over and over, circulated among friends and sold in ordinary markets by ambulant cassette vendors. These retailers also offered cassettes from Mali, Nigeria, Côte d’Ivoire, and many other places—Alpha Blondy and his reggae were just as popular as Ebo Taylor’s highlife and Afrobeat tunes, and the local Dagara dances. When labour migrants from North-Western Ghanaian villages travelled to Ghana’s South or neighbouring Côte d’Ivoire, they invariably brought back cassettes with the newest musical trends. And local musicians incorporated some of the “foreign” styles into their own repertoire. And I also remember: when I offered my interview partners cassettes with our recorded interview for them to replay and store, on my next visit to these village elders I would find that the young people in the house had appropriated my interview cassettes and used them to record their own music or copy the latest music cassettes from their peers.

The cassette industry created pan-African cultural networks and helped musical styles to travel widely. Later, of course, the technology changed; CDs came in, much later the internet arrived, and music was played from mobile phones… But in any case: music has been and continues to be a most powerful resource that connects people across social classes and ethnic groups, across nation-states and across continents. And it has become a source of pride for Africa’s musical youth who fuses tradition and modernity, and mixes African and European, Latin American and Asian musical styles in most innovative ways.

In the past ten years, the Music in Africa Foundation has become an important supporter and organiser in this field. It now connects musicians from all 54 African countries and is Africa’s most active cultural platform, with over 260,000 users per month. It is so impressive to see how the Music in Africa network has grown from a small project into a full-fledged, African-directed pan-African organisation that strengthens the African music sector. It enables exchange and sharing of experiences, and it allows knowledge and persons to travel to other places.

The Goethe-Institut, together with the Siemens Stiftung, has accompanied Music in Africa from the beginning. It has been particularly involved in developing the Music in Africa information platform and the ACCES music conference, which annually brings together music industry actors to exchange ideas and discover new talent. It also supported the launching of the Sounds Connects Fund, which provides grants and comprehensive capacity building programs to creative and cultural industry organisations in Southern Africa.

Music in Africa is a brilliant example of the way how the Goethe-Institut works in a multilateral fashion, not only in Africa but worldwide. Together with local partners, we help identify needs and support the creation of horizontal networks, which then, as in the case of Music in Africa, develop autonomously.
There are other Goethe-Institut projects supporting African musicians. In Senegal, I had the opportunity to visit the most popular project “Sunu talents” (“our talents”), that offers professional formation to young musicians and performers from the entire country; it supports a nation-wide talent competition that enhances the visibility of the “up-and-coming”. Other Goethe-Institut programmes include a piano festival in Kinshasa, in which the classical European instrument is “Africanised”, if you like, and international pianists work here with local musicians. There are many more examples. They all illustrate the power of networks, both within countries, across continents and globally.

And of course, the Goethe-Institut will continue to accompany the work of the Music in Africa Foundation in the future. I congratulate all those involved in this network, and wish it to continue to grow, to further strengthen the African music scene and to produce even more outstanding talents.

All this would not be possible without the excellent cooperation with our partners. So, my thanks go to
- the Music in Africa Foundation
- Jens Cording and Katrin Beck from the Siemens Foundation
- Dietmar Lupfer, host and initiator of the festival, and his team from the Muffatwerk
- and, of course, all the participating musicians who have travelled from Africa.

And now I am looking forward to two musical evenings with intriguing and colourful sounds from Africa!