Dance Your Way Out! - a cherished failure of mine

The introduction of Soumaoro Kanté at 6:45 is one of the best things on YT, bro even has the human bone balafon. 

 

"Mouminatou Camara, once a star dancer in Guinea’s national company Les Ballets Africains, walked to the front of a packed dance studio in Union Square, Manhattan, to begin her class. Before starting the warm-up, she turned to the drummers, stood up straight, and exclaimed with a wry smile, 'Prêt pour la Révolution!' (Ready for the Revolution!)—a political slogan and salutation in socialist Guinea. The remark was lost on American students, but the drummers—most of whom were also Guinean—smiled and responded in kind, 'Pour la Révolution, prêt!'" — Cohen's Infinite Repertoire: On Dance and Urban Possibility in Postsocialist Guinea

"The demystification campaign is finished. The children have made themselves the educators of their mothers and fathers; they have broken in their hands those nefarious playthings and thrown them in the fire. The fetishes have entered the void from which they came." — Game Guilao, as quoted in McGovern’s Unmasking the State: Making Guinea Modern

I could have been chilling with this in the back of my drafts forever but I'm almost finished with Alessandro Iandolo's recent book Arrested Development: The Soviet Union in Ghana, Guinea, and Mali, 1955–1968 (v. good so far) and it's all been forced back to the surface. Also, Eid Mubarak! Bit early but I probably won't be posting again before the date.

Stagecraft | Statecraft

Any Pan-Africanist worth their Lumumba poster (rarer in this fallen age) knows Guinea for two things: their "No" vote in the ‘58 French Community referendum* and Les Ballets Africains. The second part of McGovern's excellent monograph Unmasking the State: Making Guinea Modern is dedicated to the analysis of both through the iconoclastic measures that were part of Sekou Touré’s 'Demystification Program' and the intertwining of various modernization ideologies of colonial, religious, and state-socialist provenance which generated them. Directed against backwardness, the campaign was centered around the elimination of traditional cultural institutions (initiation ceremonies, secret societies, local religious practices, and so forth) while promoting the vision of a Renewed Guinea and the adoption of a more civilized monotheist religion - typically Islam or Protestant Christianity. This was high modernism along Scottian lines, where "the past is an impediment, a history that must be transcended; the present is the platform for launching plans for a better future." In the process, ethnic identities became increasingly exclusive, extending a process that had begun during the jihad state period of Samory Touré (an ancestor of the other Touré, funny enough) and French colonialism. Modernization was the guiding light in decolonization and development theory at the time, shared with “Western” countries and their development approaches throughout the 1950s and 1960s, and the proscribed cultural elements were redeployed in its service. In its attempt to emphasize a reified African tradition as part of the country’s efforts to “recover” its true African roots after independence (RETVRN etc etc), the socialist state in Guinea employed elements of the previously condemned, allegedly backward traditions to create integrated Guinean-African high-culture music and performance bands, serving as Guinea’s international flagships. This is actually where the Ballet Africains begins; teens from the forest regions were brought to Conakry to teach cultural dances banned in their own homes and learn those of other young dancers. 

It's important to remember - McGovern spent the first half of the book talking about ethnogenesis and colonialist myths of oil/water cultural groupings - that even though many Malinke elites (Guinea’s dominant group and the carriers of Sekou Touré’s project) did everything they could to distance themselves from the “animists” in the forest, with their sacrifices and secret societies, they were unable to fully kill the fear that they might have more in common with the forest peoples than they were willing to admit. Historically, the distinctions between these groups emerged only gradually and remained loose for a long time - it was precisely the haunting memory of things shared that made the campaign against forester culture so ferocious. 

Repression is far from everything, though, and the most striking thing about the book is how McGovern succeeds in highlighting time and again a new, hidden layer in what one would expect to be a self-evident opposition - between forest people like the Loma and the Malinke or even between the sides in state iconoclasm. The demystification campaign appeared to be a confrontation between modernizing Marxists and “traditional savages” but Sekou Touré’s Marxism was beset by its own contradictions: it certainly wanted to be modern in a particularly Soviet mold, but it also wanted to share in the alternative modernities offered by Pan-Africanist and Islamist constructions. The Loma, too, struggled with contradictions. In some respects, demystification was an “inside job.” The intergenerational dynamics of the Demystification Program, where forester youth participated in unveiling occult knowledge, disempowering clan elders, and raising themselves up through their alliance with the state, offered young forest people (particularly women and girls) chances to liberate themselves from the grip of existing power structures. In this sense, demystification fitted in with a long series of earlier clashes that defined the colonial period - purification cults // political practice. Likewise, the training of the young to perform the secret dances for Les Ballets Africains adopted and reformulated many aspects of the traditional initiation camps. Even for these ex-forest dancers, Touré’s rule was widely considered the golden age of Guinean art, a time where experimentation was encouraged and even subversive work found ready support from a government eager to prove that it did not need colonial instruction to touch the sublime. Dancers, playwrights, painters, etc. all became "red griots," an appellation that's all the more interesting because it symbolized the break with savannah belt caste-artisan culture in the region's heritage. 

Unrealized Possibility

This tension is something that reappears on both larger and smaller scales: Infinite Repertoire's discussion of the postsocialist ballet companies as both intensely reflective of local power systems and the last urban refuges of Afrosocalist spirit in Guinean society; Schmidt's argument that Guinea’s ‘No’ vote in the French Community referendum reflected not Sékou Touré’s radical politics (he wanted to vote 'Yes' until the very end) but the power of students, teachers, trade unionists, and women within the Guinean RDA** in her book Cold War and Decolonization in Guinea, 1946-1958; Iandolo's account of Soviet-Guinean relations shifting from ambitious and enthusiastic economic partnerships (fun fact: Touré was the first Sub-Saharan African leader to visit the Soviet Union) into disgruntled Soviet attempts to limit their spending and the development of something eerily like neocolonial relations*** still contains running threads of earnest engagement in the dark days after the removal of Khrushchev.  For a while now, I've tried writing a game around this central idea: exploring these contradictions of the liberation era - possibility and constraint, competing visions of modernity, celebrations of heritage and cultural proscriptions, so on - through the lens of the Ballet Africains. My first attempt came around the same time I was working on Ironswarm/Hills to Die On (an Nyiginya Kingdom hack of Ironsworn, still love some of the ideas there + the 1600s Rwanda setting but it's so rough) and even back then I knew it was cursed. It was like bad bad, trad game type material used for these ends is kinda doomed from the start. Couple more tries followed - one was a BitD thing if you can believe it - until I just quit. At first I thought it was an issue of familiarity (much more comfortable with premodernity and Lakelands E. African-Cent. African cultural complexes) but I've worked my way through five books + tons of papers on the topic over the past couple years and I'm no closer to getting it. This is my fucking white whale. There's real power in the dance company-as-West African postcoloniality metaphor…I can FEEL IT creeping around the stage…but I'm increasingly convinced that I lack the skill as a TTRPG person to draw it out. Sucks to admit but it's good to know your limits, particularly when you're trying to do something with other people's histories. Maybe it’s just outside of my gaming experience; I have played very few “storygame”-type RPGs and a successful version of this would probably fit somewhere inside that sphere. I still dream about it, tho, and perhaps I'll find the right mix of inspirations to revive the idea one day.

Relevant Books

• Unmasking the State: Making Guinea Modern by Mike McGovern 
• Cold War and Decolonization in Guinea, 1946-1958 by Elizabeth Schmidt
• Infinite Repertoire: On Dance and Urban Possibility in Postsocialist Guinea by Adrienne Cohen
• Arrested Development: The Soviet Union in Ghana, Guinea, and Mali, 1955–1968 by Alessandro Iandolo
• The Language of Secrecy: Symbols and Metaphors in Poro Ritual by Beryl Bellman

*de Gaulle, upon returning to power, proposed a Fifth Republic constitution that provided for the replacement of the French Union by a French Community. Headed by a powerful president, the Fifth Republic would determine "common foreign, economic, and defense policies and oversee justice, higher education, telecommunications, and transportation within the proposed French Community." Despite the language involved (which people are still suckered by, check out the Wiki page lmao), this was actually a significant rolling-back of colonial autonomy, esp. when compared to some of the patchwork elements in the Union. Among all the French colonies, only 'small brave' Guinea voted ‘No’ to the French Community. It was a dazzling victory for African liberation movements everywhere; Guinea attained immediate independence but the French made sure they suffered for it. Brutal economic/diplomatic punitive measures from France + allies nearly broke the fledgling nation and compelled its leadership to seek assistance from Ghana and the USSR.

**Rassemblement Démocratique Africain, the interterritorial party founded by French African nationalists at the Congress of Bamako in October 1946. 

***Whether the Soviet insistence that plans they came up with cut old dependency links and pushed newly independent countries toward having an "upright" economy is enough to distinguish Soviet engagement from contemporary forms of neocolonialism is beyond me, exercise for the commenter ig.