From edition

The 1960's in Bamako, Manthia Diawara

Malick Sidibé’s photographs enable my friend Diafode and I to revisit the youth culture of the 1960’s and our teenage years in Bamako. They show exactly how the young people in Bamako had embraced rock and roll as a liberation movement, adopted the consumer habits of an international youth culture, and developed a rebellious attitude toward all forms of established authority. The black and white photographs reflect how far the youth in Bamako had gone in their imitation of the world-view and dress style of popular music stars, and how Malick Sidibé’s photographic art was in conversation with the design of popular magazines, album covers, and movie posters of the time. To say that Bamako’s youth is on the same page as the youth in London and Paris in the 1960’s and 1970’s is also to acknowledge malick Sidibé’s role in shaping and expanding that culture.

To the youth in Bamako, Malick Sidibé was the James Brown of photography: the godfather whose clichés described the total energy of the time. Inasmuch as today there is a desire to go back to the music and film of the 1960’s and 1970’s in order to give a meaning to that culture, we can also go back to Malick Sidibé’s photographs to gain access to the style, vibrancy, and ethos of those times in Africa.

So implicated are Malick Sidibé’s photographs in the culture of the 1960’s that when we look at them, our youth comes back to life. They are the gateway to everything that was fasionable then; everything that constituted our modernism. They are a document through which one can see the passage of time in Bamako as marked by dress style (from B-boys to hippies, music appreciation (from Latin beat to James Brown), movies (from Westerns to Easy Rider), hair style (from Patrice Lumumba and Marlon Brando to the Afro), and dance moves (from the Twist to the Camel Walk).

In Sidibé’s photographs, one can see the turbulence of youth and the generational conflict that characterized the 1960’s. The desires of youth are inscribed in most of the photos as a determined break with tradition and as a transformation of the meaning of the decolonization movements of the1960’s into a rock and roll revolution. It is clear from Sidibé’s photographs that what the youth in Bamako wanted most in those days was James Brown and the freedom and existential subjectivity that linked independence to the universal youth movement of the 1960’s. The photographs show that, in attempting to be like James Brown, Jimi Hendrix, the Beatles, and the Rolling Stones, they were also revealing their impatience with the political teachings of the nationalist state and the spirit of decolonization.
There is a problem related to a change in power relations in Bamako that needs to be addressed when discussing Sidibé’s photography. It would seem that his photos of young Bamakois are in contradiction not only with colonial-era studio photography, but also with the patterns of life that one would expect in a decolonized state. According to the famous theses on culture developed by Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon, it is not only impossible to create a national culture under colonialism, but it is also equally evident that artifacts like these photos are signs of neo-colonialism and Western imperialism. Writing about African independence in the 1960’s, Césaire Stated that whereas the colonial era was characterized by the “reification” of the African, the transition to independence would give rise to a revival of his creative energies, and a recovery of his authentic ways of being that had been forbidden by the colonizer. Independence would awaken in the individual the African personality that had for so long been suppressed. For Césaire, “after the `moment’ of pre-colonial Africa, a moment of `immediate truth,’ and the colonial `moment,’ a moment of the shattered African consciousness, independence inaugurates a third dialectical `moment,’ which must correspond with a reconciliation of the mind with its own consciousness and the reconquest of a plenitude” (“La pensée politique de Sékou Touré, Présence Africaine 29 [December 1959-January 1960], 67).

For theoretical purposes, it is important to retain Césaire’s use of the terms “moment,” “immediate truth, ” “own consciousness,” and “plenitude.” All of them refer to independence as an authentic state of being, a state of genuine creative and natural harmony between the precolonial past and the present. In contrast, the colonial and neocolonial state was characterized by assimilarion, alienation, and depersonalization of the African. Authors like Césaire expected the continent to create a new man with an African style in politics and culture. Lumumba, Sékou Touré, and Kwame Nkrumah were the prototypes of the ideal post-independence image, and they were all fiercely nationalist, authentic, and anti-imperialist. That the images of the youth in Sidibé’s photographs did not seem to reflect the Africa these leaders were attempting to shape has been interpreted as an indication of how alienated the youth were, as a sign that the youth were not in continuity with the political history of the nation. The photos cold be said therefore to reveal the presence of neo-colonialism among the youth.


Looking back at the period between the mid-1960’s and the early 1970’s in Bamako, it is clear that the single most important factor, after independence, that introduced change into youth’s habitus was their exposure to diaspora aesthetics through rock and roll and the Black Power movement. And in this respect, it is also clear from the
visual evidence in Sidibé’s photographs that James Brown was one of the most important references that combined the ethos of black pride with the energy of rock and roll. As independence changed power relations in Bamako, the reception fo diaspora aesthetics through popular culture opened the floodgate of youth’s energby and creativity. The youth cold see themselves more easily in James Brown or in a glossy photograph of a defiant Muhammad Ali, than in any other motif of independence at that time.


The symbol of Nommo-variable and unlimited in Dogon cosmology and iconography-is also the vehicle for language. For the Dogon, the Nommo revealed the secret of language to men in three stages, each corresponding to a specific work and form of prayer. The first language, which is also the most abstract, came with the transformatin of baobab barks into fibers with which to clothe the nakedness of the earth. Even today, the Dogon dress their masks and statues with these multicolored fibers that contain the most ancient language of Nommo, which is understood by very few people. The second language was revealed through the techniques of weaving, and it was clearer, less sacred, and available to m ore people, Finally, the third language came with the invention of drums. It was a modern and democratic language understood by all. For the Dogon, mastery of these languages brought men closer to the purity and perfection of Nommo and placed them in control of their environment.   


When we return to James Brown in the 1960’s and consider his impact on the youth of post-independence Africa, we realize his Nommo-like quality: the desire to elevate men and women to perfection. James Brown is a Nommo-known as “shaman” elsewhere in the world-part god and part human, who teaches the world, through his music and dance, the complete and clear language of modern times, and who makes Bamako’s youth coincide with the Dogon desire for perfection. Just like the Nommo was one with the drum-the beating of which taught men the language of modernity-James Brown was one with his band, though his was never complete without his red cape and his invitation to the masses to become part of his groove. People often say that James Brown, the hardest-working man in show business, does not say much in his songs, that he is notorious for limiting himself to a few words like, “I feel all right,” “You’ve got it, let’s go,” “Baby, baby, baby.” In fact, James Brown, like the Nommo, uses his voice and vital power to imitate the language of his instruments-the trumpet and drums-to make his audiences understand better the appropriate discourse of our modern condition. James Brown’s mimicry of the sound of his instruments-letting them speak through him as if he were one with them-communicated more clearly with his audiences the meaning of 1960’s social movements than any other language at the time. By subordinating human language to the language of the drums, or the language of Nommo, James Brown was partaking in the universalization of diaspora aesthetics, the freedom movements, and the discourse of black pride.
So imagine James Brown in Live at the Apollo when, in a song called “There Was a Time,” he invokes Nommo in these words: “But you can bet/ you haven’t seen nothing yet/ until you see me do the James Brown!” in this instance is to speak a different langugage with one’s body, to improvise a new dance different from the ones mentioned before, like the Jerk, the Mashed Potato, the Camel Walk, and the boogaloo. It is to dance with Nommo’s feet, and to leave on the dance floor the verb of Nommo, i.e., the compelte and clear new speech of modern times. Finally, it is to perform one’s own dance of Nommo, without an intermediary, and to become one with Nommo and James Brown.



e diaspora and the universal youth movement.


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