Highlife is one of the myriad varieties of acculturated popular dance-music styles that have been emerging from Africa this century and which fuse African with Western (i.e. European and American) and islamic influences. Besides highlife, other examples include kwela, township jive and mbaqanga from South Africa, chimurenga from Zimbabwe, the benga beat from Kenya, taraab music from the East African coast, Congo jazz (soukous) from Central Africa, rai music from North Africa, juju and apala music from western Nigeria, makossa from the Cameroons and mbalax from Senegal.

Juju music, popular in Nigeria, first emerged in the island city of Lagos during the third decade of this century. Since its beginning, however, the music has undergone changes in both concept and practice as might be expected of any dynamic musical style. These changes have arisen not only through cultural contact and creative musical innovations, but also through the musical consequences of social, political, economic and other changes in contemporary Nigerian society and culture. This article seeks to identify and evaluate the change in juju music from two vantage points: (1) that of style which identifies it and provides a foundation against which continuity or stability through time can be measured; and (2) that of innovation whose creation and diffusion are examined diachronically against the contexts of society and culture.

In his song ‘Asili ya Muziki’ (‘The Roots of Music’) Remmy Ongala, one of the most prolific singers/composers in Tanzanian music, discusses the complex and ambiguous position of music and musicians. In Tanzania musicians are commonly considered to be wahuni, i.e. vagabonds, drunkards, drugtakers, while their music, is enjoyed by the same people who call them these names.

On a Saturday night of January 1930 several thousand African men clad in loin cloths and the calico uniforms of domestic servants thronged a concert in the Workers' Hall of the Durban branch of the Industrial and Commercial Workers' Union (ICU) in Prince Edward Street. To the pounding sounds of hundreds of sticks, successive teams of dancers, some of them trained by Union officials from the rural hinterland, rushed to the stage performing the virile, stamping ingoma dance. The Zulu term ingoma (lit. ‘song’) covers a broad range of male group dances like isikhuze, isicathulo, ukukomika, isiZulu, isiBhaca, umzansi and isishameni. The kinesic patterns of ingoma are inseparably linked to choral songs in call-and-response structure and, as such, constitute a complex statement of the unity of dance and song in Zulu performance culture. The peak of Zulu-speaking migrants' dance culture, ingoma evolved out of the profound transformation of traditional rural Zulu culture through impoverishment, dispossession and labour migration around the first World War. But on that night of January 1930, at the climax of the spectacle, the ingoma dancers struck a particularly defiant note:

Who has taken our country from us?

Who has taken it?

Come out! Let us fight!

The land was ours. Now it is taken.

We have no more freedom left in it.

Come out and fight!

The land is ours, now it is taken.

Fight! Fight!

Shame on the man who is burnt in his hut!

Come out and fight! (Perham 1974, p. 196

Overland travel in Senegal and Gambia is the best introduction to local music. Blaring out from every market stall, taxi radio-cassette and record shop in every town along the trans-Gambian highway, is the music of Youssou N'Dour, Baaba Maal, Ismael Lo, Super Diamono, Toure Kunda or some kora player. The smells of perfumed incense and smoked fish mingle with the rich inflections of Youssou's voice. You stop to buy a piece of tie-dye cloth, or maybe you are waiting at Farafenni to catch the ferry across the river. ‘I like his music too much,’ says a Gambian standing next to you, listening to Youssou's latest cassette, Kocc Barma. ‘I like the tama (drum) with keyboards, it makes me want to dance.’ ‘That's deep Wolof,’ says another; ‘He's singing for Alla Seck who died, Ndyesan (alas).’ The nearby stall-owner disagrees. ‘I prefer his old tapes, like Tabaski,’ he says. ‘That was sayisayi (rascal) music, that was real Wolof music, now he's too toubab (European). Now I listen to Baaba Maal.’ A fourth person joins in. ‘Baaba only sings for his own people, the Tukulor: he doesn't care about anyone else.’

I have recently found myself reacting with some irritation on meeting such terms as ‘black music’, ‘white music’, ‘Afro-American music’ and ‘European music’. The aim of this letter, written mainly with white European or North American students, friends and colleagues in mind, is to question the validity of these terms, to bring some issues lurking behind their general usage out into the scribal daylight and, hopefully, to provide some ideas for a constructive debate on music, race and ideology.