Another Resonance

AFRICA AND THE STUDY OF SOUND

Gavin Steingo

PROLEGOMENA

Heading south from the suburbs of Sandton to the townships of Soweto, South Africa, one crosses a threshold of automobile habitation. In Sandton, car windows are generally closed to avoid the heckling of roadside vendors and to create an acoustic environment of one's own desire. When entering Soweto, my local friends insist, a driver must roll down his or her windows, unbuckle the seat belt, and cruise at a steadily slow pace, especially because closed windows for an outsider (and a white person) indicate anxiety and arouse suspicion. Wide-open windows — paradoxically — decrease vulnerability, signaling a familiarity with township space, on the one hand, and a non-neurotic openness to "strangers," on the others. With windows open and pedestrians constantly brushing by the sides of the vehicle, a car's boundaries become porous. Intimacies are established through sonic exchanges (greetings, whistles, shouts) between drivers and others who inhabit the township road — pedestrians, horse-cart riders, mobile fruit vendors, and herd boys, for example.

In many central African towns and cities — such as the town of Limbe, Cameroon, where I have also conducted fieldwork — motorcycle taxis carrying as many as four passengers whiz past workers traveling in the uncovered rear beds of pickup trucks, while women carrying buckets of grain on their heads call out to young boys stealthily darting between quickly moving vehicles. Having departed Limbe toward the dense rainforest region in the south, I notice one day how the driver of a shared taxi sedan mutes the sound system that has been blasting intricate weaving guitar lines of bikutsi for the past several hours. As the driver approaches each sharp turn on the muddy forest road, he honks loudly to alert the occasional car moving in the opposite direction, and because he expects other drivers to do the same, he listens carefully, cautiously, for the remainder of our trip.

Motor vehicles are crucial technologies of mobile sound. But they are not, of course, the only ones. Back in Soweto, I notice how digital formats such as MP3s are transferred through memory sticks or hard drives, but hardly ever online. I make a plan to follow a single MP3 — perhaps a short digital music composition — as it moves from a local producer through a network of friends and acquaintances. But I quickly realize that this plan is hopeless, because the digital storage devices used by my interlocutors keep breaking, getting lost (or stolen?), being misplaced.

On a trip to Cameroon in 2008, I observe a practice closely resembling one in Mali that will make international headlines seven years later. Writing for The New York Times, Lydia Polgreen (2015) describes téléchargeurs (or downloaders), who "operate as an offline version of iTunes, Spotify and Pandora all rolled into one." Téléchargeurs download large playlists, then transfer songs to consumers for a small fee via "memory cards or USB sticks, or directly onto cellphones" (Polgreen 2015). In such scenarios, music distribution oscillates between online and offline infrastructures, variously hopping or creeping, depending on the technology employed. In Cameroon, I had occasion to interact with downloaders fulfilling a role identical to téléchargeurs, as well as with young men and boys selling cheap pirated compilation CDs. (At an Internet café down the road from the abandoned monastery where I was staying, I encountered groups of young men scamming international buyers by selling purebred poodles that do not exist.)

Another aspect I have long observed during fieldwork in Africa is the fragility of technology and the concomitant (although obviously much more serious) insecurity of human life. Although there is no need to resort to theoretical extravagances such as "bare life," it is certainly the case that in many parts of Africa human bodies are forced into spaces of extreme vulnerability. In South Africa, black bodies — particularly the bodies of black women — are vulnerable to multiple forms of violence and injury. Most relevant for this chapter are injuries to the human sensorium, to those organs of sensation (such as the ear) through which humans encounter the world. I have more to say about this later.

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The varied auditory experiences and modalities of sound production mentioned in the preceding ethnographic vignettes are almost entirely absent from sound studies. Precisely why this is so, and what such a striking lacuna may mean for an emerging discipline, is addressed throughout the course of this chapter. In what follows, I stage a series of dialogical encounters between recent sound studies literature and my ethnographic fieldwork in Africa — primarily South Africa and Cameroon. I respond to three major claims of sound studies, as noted in the introduction: (1) that technology is increasingly isolating listening subjects into individual "bubbles" — for example, in automobiles and through mobile listening devices; (2) that music has become increasingly available and ubiquitous due to technological advances in circulation; and (3) that listening is associated with biopolitical investment and efficiency. The ethnographic vignettes already suggest that these claims are extremely limited. In many parts of Africa, there exists a radically different relationship to sound. Listening carefully for these other relationships goes a long way toward "remapping" sound studies. It also challenges us to rethink the meaning of modernity itself.

SOUND STUDIES: THREE KEY CLAIMS

In this section, I engage the three claims outlined earlier by elaborating their intellectual history with reference to particular authors. While the following discussion is by no means comprehensive, it maps out the broad strokes of some of the primary preoccupations within sound studies.

Contemporary Listening: Mobile and Private

Scholars of auditory culture have established a...