Studia Europaea, 2015

Hiring local artists to collaborate on efforts intending to change values and alter behavior is an approach used by aid organizations in international development. Soft-power campaigns targeting local attitudes are often seen by the development institution as positive collaborations between foreign humanitarians and local artists. “Song for Hawa,” a 2013 collaboration between Liberian artist/rapper Takun J, and the international NGO PCI Media Impact, is a cultural diplomacy campaign intending to engage Liberians about the difficult topic of child rape. This paper discusses concerns with this instrumental approach to culture in development, and difficulties with the impact evaluation of using art to affect social change.

African Music: Journal of the International Library of African Music, 2016

This article investigates the display of power relations in the production of health knowledge about HIV/AIDS through music that addresses the HIV/AIDS pandemic in Tanzania. It specifically looks at the intersection of the state and religion in both shaping culture and influencing decision-making in the production of health knowledge on HIV/ AIDS. I argue that the study of HIV/AIDS and the creative process of music about HIV/ AIDS is also the study of power relations at multiple levels. Using two recordings, 'Mambo kwa socks' (Things with socks on) and 'Usione soo, sema naye' (Do not feel shy, speak to him or her), which have been forbidden from public broadcast by the government of Tanzania as evidence, I suggest that musical performances that focus on HIV/AIDS involve the production of multiple, often dissonant and antagonistic interpretations among individuals because of the musical styles employed and because of the interpreters' different ages, social positions, context, social and historical spaces.

2020

This dissertation project is a historical and analytical examination of how popular music has participated in the transformation of Uganda's public sphere into a more participatory space since the early 1990s. Popular music has rendered previously marginalized publics audible and visible. By marginalized, I refer to the trivialization of the social aspirations of collectivities by the state or the dominant public. By publics, I refer to collectivities that exchange information, debate ideas, and advocate for change in physical and virtual spaces. "Marginalized publics" are thus, collectivities identified by processes of sharing information, debating ideas, and advocating for social change. When president Yoweri Museveni and his National Resistance Army/Movement (NRA/M) took over power from General Tito Okello Lutwa in 1986, he promised fundamental change. Although Museveni has tried his best, most of his promises about change have not yet been delivered. Moreover, Museveni's ruling National Resistance Movement (NRM) party has since the early 1990s, increasingly been hostile to the basic rights of assemblage, association and the freedom of expression. Ironically, the hostility of Museveni's government has promoted rather than prevented the rise of multiple publics that are advocating for social change in the country. v Drawing on fieldwork in Uganda's capital, Kampala, this dissertation project examines the rise of popular music in rendering five marginalized publics audible: Buganda kingdom, the LGBT collectivity, the Kampala street laborers, Besigye's "peoples' government," and Bobi Wine's "people-power" public. I argue that the rise of marginalized publics was simultaneously enhanced by the return to relative (but precarious) peace in the early 1990s, the establishment of democratic organs such as the Uganda Human Rights Commission (UHRC) to act as a watch dog against human rights violations, as well as the liberalization (and privatization) of media in the country, which promoted more public avenues of participation (such as privately-owned radio and television stations, and the internet/social media). Through a music-cultural analytical lens, my dissertation project contributes to an understanding of power and representation among emergent democracies. It enriches the growing body of regional studies about music and its dynamic creation of cultural and historical meanings within particular social-cultural contexts. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS

In Mozambique, development programmes have traditionally drawn on music as a means to promote social transformation by educating citizens on key social development issues. Shifting the focus from music as a teaching medium to music as a rich source of information can provide vital insights into public opinion and political ideas, and significantly impact the development of citizen engagement projects. Maximum gains for development and civil society agencies can be achieved by mainstreaming gender into mutual learning activities between singers, audiences, and academics. The composition, performance, and shared experience of protest songs constitutes political action.

Communicatio, 2020

The aim of this article is to analyse protest popular music representing and communicating the captured media space in Zimbabwe. The article argues that the media space in Zimbabwe in the post-1990 period has been constricted, projecting a silhouette of a public service communication and information system that has long been dysfunctional. Leonard Zhakata's song Sakunatsa decries unequal treatment before the laws that regulate the media of the country and the impartiality of the regulatory system under the ZANU-PF government. The article adopts a qualitative research approach that is rich in description to analyse how music as a form of media represents and communicates captured communication space in a country where human rights such as freedom of expression and access to information have suffered still birth. The article argues that the government used the law as an instrument of coercion to advance its hegemony and thwart media democracy in Zimbabwe. The emerging patterns after the discussion in this article point to the fact that when communication is captured, culture is under siege and the upshot is a combination of (media) activism, spiral of silence and suffocation of the masses.

Social Activism - New Challenges in a (Dis)connected World, 2023

After a general introduction to music censorship in sub-Saharan Africa and the concept of social artivism, this chapter presents three case studies of African musicians-namely Hachalu Hundessa (Ethiopia), Bobi Wine (Uganda), and Miriam Makeba (South Africa)-who, because of their political activism and the critical nature of their lyrics, were persecuted, imprisoned, exiled, or even killed. Drawing on existing studies, autobiographic material and interviews, the chapter discusses the difficulties and dangers faced by musical activists in their respective countries of origin when practicing cultural and political rights as well as the "freedom of speech" that is guaranteed in many countries and assumed a global standard of our times, but is still a utopia in many regions of the world. The chapter inquires about the motivations of the artists to take the risks involved in publishing their music, and into the impact their works have on individuals, groups, and the society at large.

Nordic Journal of African Studies, 2020

The political agency of musicians in Africa has been analysed in terms of patronage, as either praising or protesting against political leaders. However, in the last few years, musicians across the continent have also become leading political figures themselves, with Bobi Wine and the People Power Movement in Uganda as the most prominent example. This article examines the changing relations between popular music and politics by focusing on how musicians engaged with the general election campaigns in Uganda in 2011, 2016, and beyond. Their engagement with formal politics cannot be characterised as political activism, patronage, nor as market relations. To understand this ambiguous political agency, I offer the notion of cultural brokerage as a way of approaching the plural strategies and indeterminate actions of young musicians on the political scene. Ultimately, the "bigness" of music stars has a different relational form than conventional patronage politics, and this may be changing how politics is done in Uganda.

Social Activism - New Challenges in a (Dis)connected World [Working Title]

After a general introduction to music censorship in sub-Saharan Africa and the concept of social artivism, this chapter presents three case studies of African musicians – namely Hachalu Hundessa (Ethiopia), Bobi Wine (Uganda), and Miriam Makeba (South Africa) – who, because of their political activism and the critical nature of their lyrics, were persecuted, imprisoned, exiled, or even killed. Drawing on existing studies, autobiographic material and interviews, the chapter discusses the difficulties and dangers faced by musical activists in their respective countries of origin when practicing cultural and political rights as well as the “freedom of speech” that is guaranteed in many countries and assumed a global standard of our times, but is still a utopia in many regions of the world. The chapter inquires about the motivations of the artists to take the risks involved in publishing their music, and into the impact their works have on individuals, groups, and the society at large.

Soundings: A Journal of Interdisciplinary Humanities. Vol. 96, No. 2., 2013

This article will demonstrate, via a series of seven music-related vignettes gathered from archival research and oral history, aspects of the historical relationship between resistance expressed via "musicking," and "official culture" expressed via the use of force, spectacle, policy, and the rule of law. The relationship between power and musical resistance is treated as a dance: one partner in this dance is the "controlling mechanism" inherent and always implied in the expression of power and the entire spectrum of behavior that power encompasses. The other partner is the spectrum of resistive musical responses that includes everything from blatant protest via public performative "spectacle," "hidden resistance," accommodative resistance, and subtle and blatant complicity. The majority of the historical vignettes come from the Sukuma region of western Tanzania, taking place during the German and British colonial periods (from the late 1900s up to the early 1960s).

African Music: Journal of the International Library of African Music, 2014