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The Union Trade Company and Its Recordings: An Unintentional Documentation of West African Popular Music, 1931–1957
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 May 2014
Extract
This paper introduces a unique collection of roughly 700 historical recordings of African popular music generated by a Swiss trading company, which today is located at the archives of mission 21 (formerly Basel Missioin) in Basel. The music was recorded and distributed by the Union Trade Company of Basel (UTC) during the 1930s and 1950s in the Gold Coast and Nigeria. The collection represents a rich resource for the study of African history and cultures and caters for the growing interest shown by social historians of Africa in everyday life and accordingly in leisure activities and consumption.
As music and dance undoubtedly play an important role in African social and religious life, they have received much attention and there is a longstanding tradition of ethnomusicological research that has led to a great number of sound collections. The historian interested in the “modern” and “postmodern” or in popular culture, however, tends in many cases to be frustrated by the material contained in these archives. The ethnographic collectors often showed a blind eye to the modernizing forces within the African musical cultures they researched and concentrated on documenting what they perceived as the “original” or “traditional.” Furthermore the collection and documentation of the popular music of the day was rarely on the agenda of national research institutions and archives in postcolonial Africa. In the case of Ghana at least three initiatives have resulted in important collections of music that go beyond a narrow ethnographic documentation. The first, by Prof. Kwabena Nketia at the Centre of African Studies at the University of Ghana, features a mixture of field recordings and a few commercial records. The others focus specifically on the commercial and popular. These are the Gramophone Records Museum in Cape Coast, discussed below by its founder Kwame Sarpong and the Bokoor African Popular Music Archives Foundation (BAPMAF) of John Collins in Accra.
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- Copyright © African Studies Association 2004
References
1 I use the plural when speaking on behalf of the project “Ghana Popular Music 1931-1957,” on which I have been working together with the music journalist Serena Owusua Dankwa (www.unibas.ch/africanmusic) and I use the singular when referring to my authorship of this article. For an overview of recent work in the field see Akyeampong, Emmanuel and Ambler, Charles, “Leisure in African History: An Introduction,” IJAHS 35(2002), 2Google Scholar.
2 See for example Knosp, Gaston, Enquête sur la vie musicale au Congo beige: 1934-1935 (Tervuren, 1968)Google Scholar.
3 Popular music is here understood as contrasting music connected to the practice of religion or court culture. In most cases its performance is connected to a commercial interest.
4 See the compact disc “Music in Ghana. A Selection out of the Archives of African Music at the Institute of African Studies, University of Ghana, Legon” (Compact disc, popular african music pamap 601) (Mainz, 1997).
5 A pioneering project in this field is the pictorial collection of the former Basel Mission. 18,000 mostly photographic pictures are now accessible worldwide via the website www.bmpix.org.
6 Miescher, Giorgio, “Zu den Anfängen der Basler Missions-Handelsgesellschaft in Christiansborg (Ghana)” in Roost-Vischer, Lilo, Mayor, Anne, and Henrichsen, Dag, eds., Brücken und Grenzen: Passages et Frontières (Münster, 1995), 360Google Scholar. The mission also sent a young, commercially experienced man to India with a view to create job opportunities for those converts who had been expelled from caste society. Here too the business expanded rapidly. Wanner, Gustaf Adolf, Die Geschichte der Basler Handelsgesellschaft A.G. 1859-1959 (Basel, 1959), 32–34Google Scholar.
7 In 1884 Otto Schott, the director of the Basel Mission society, resigned from his post in order to express his opposition to this blending of evangelization and trade. Wanner, Geschichte, 83.
8 Vernon, Paul, “A Look at the Engineers who Made History Traveling the World Recording its Music,” Vintage Jazz Mart 94(1994), electronic version (1997) at http://sunsite.kth.se/feastlib/mrf/yinyue/texts/vjm_engineers.htmlGoogle Scholar.
9 Vernon, Paul, “Talking Machines Hit West Africa,” FolkROOTS 122(1993), electronic version (1997) at http://sunsite.kth.se/feastlib/mrf/yinyue/texts/fr122savanna.htmlGoogle Scholar.
10 See Benson, Bobby, “Cherrycoco and Bebiji Topi Yo Sokotijimu,” shellac record Parlophone UTC 3003 (London, 1954)Google Scholar; idem, “La Castagnette and Portable Girl,” shellac record Parlophone UTC 3004 (London, 1954); idem, “Shemiloya No.2 and Darling I Know What You Want,” shellac record Parlophone UTC 3005 (London, 1954).
11 The recording activities, however, might have lasted later than 1957. I found one indication in the UTC correspondence that recording was still going on in 1958, when the UTC general agent in Accra commented on the sales estimates for that year. He reported that in comparison to the year 1957 a big portion of the “recording business” was lost, as the two most important “recording customers” had gone bankrupt. In 1957 the recording activity had comprised one-fifth of the turnover of the machinery department. UTC archives at WELINVEST, General-Agent Accra 1 July 1957-31 March 1959, Letter by General Agent H. Hintze to the Board of Directors at Basel, Accra 4 April 1959.
12 We are thankful to Hans Buser, a former UTC employee, who played a crucial role in convincing the company's managers to transfer the collection to the public Basel Mission archives.
13 This confusing play of numbers results from the fact, that several successful recordings were reissued.
14 It is planned to do research at the British Library Sound Archive, where copies of the UTC catalogs are kept and at the archives of EMI at Hayes. The latter are not public and access is limited.
15 These recording numbers, also called PEG or matrix numbers, are displayed on every published record. Sometimes they are part of the paper label stuck to the disc, but mostly they are embossed in the lead-out area of the shellac disc. See Kwame Sarpong's contribution in this same volume.
16 The record numbers available at Basel might hint to four different series of recordings. There are records with the numbers 2-94, 1001-1033, 3002-3049, 6001-6071. We have not been able to ascertain how the four different series of UTC record numbers come about. There is neither a significant correlation with the year or the place of production (and therefore with the recording engineer), nor with the numbers of the recordings or the style of the music. There are also some few shellac records published under the Odeon label in 1931 with numbers ranging between B43003 and B43133 and in 1936 with numbers ranging between A234002 and A234019. It is interesting to note that it is the B series that dates from an earlier year. This strengthens the point made by Wolfgang Bender below.
17 Actually this opened the path to a second career as a musicologist, composer, and teacher at Achimota College and Legon University. Amu has left a huge number of compositions, many of them with nationalist lyrics. His famous “Yen Ara Asase Ni” composed in the 1920s, has become Ghana's unofficial national anthem and has played an important role in creating a national feeling. See “Akropong Singing Band, Yen Ara Asase Ni,” shellac record Parlophone UTC89 (London, 1931)Google Scholar; Vieta, Kojo T., The Flagbearers of Ghana (Accra, 1999), 438, 443Google Scholar. See Agyemang, Fred, Amu the African: A Study in Vision and Courage (Accra, 1988)Google Scholar.
18 Sackey, Chrys Kwesi, Highlife: Entwicklung und Stilformen ghanaischer Gegenwartsmusik (Münster 1995), 379–83Google Scholar. See also Arlt, Veit, “Der Tanz der Christen: Zu den Anfängen der populären Musik an der Goldküste, ca. 1860-1930,” Jabrbuch für Europäische Überseegeschichte 4(2004), 157, 157n24Google Scholar.
19 Sackey, Highlife, 405, describes how dance band Highlife artists such as Ebow Taylor adapted the Ebibi-Ndwom as a dance music turning its 12/8th into a 4/4th rhythm.
20 Fourteen of the singing bands recorded in 1931 were Muslim bands. See, for example, Band, Mallam Katsina Singing, “Hausa Song,” shellac record Parlophone UTC54 (London, 1931)Google Scholar. For a guitar band see Band, Mpraeso Singing, “Meyere Reton Cocoa,” shellac record Parlophone UTC57 (London, 1931)Google Scholar.
21 See McCaskie, Tom, State and Society in Pre-Colonial Asante (New York, 1995), 216, 286, 411n98Google Scholar.
22 In the Basel Mission tradition everything connected to chieftaincy was „heathen” per se and these two recordings would never have found the consent of an earlier generation of Basel Missionaries. The Ghanaian church leaders up to this day suffer from these early teachings.
23 According to Kwabena Nyama if ever you heard this sound in the olden days you knew that you were about to be executed.
24 Unfortunately these very recordings, six in number, are missing in the collection.
25 See, for example, Bame, Kwabena N., Come to Laugh. African Traditional Theatre in Ghana (New York, 1985)Google Scholar; Barber, Karin, Collins, John and Ricard, Alain, West African Popular Theatre (Bloomington, 1997)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Cole, Catherine M., Ghana's Concert Party Theatre (Bloomington, 2001)Google Scholar.
26 The falsetto voice of course was also used for acoustic reasons, as it carried the sound much further than the ordinary voice and was important before electric amplification came into use.
27 Band, Korkoi Adjekum's, “Mmerantesem Nnti and Gye Me Tataa,” shellac record Parlophone UTC6023 (London, 1954)Google Scholar.
28 Collins, John E., E.T. Mensah: King of Highlife (Accra, 1996)Google Scholar.
29 The guitar bands and their concert party popular theatre developed from the trios mentioned above. It was E.K. Nyame who pioneered the new, bigger format. See Collins, John E., Highlife Time (Accra, 1994), 11Google Scholar.
30 Veit Arlt and Serena Dankwa, “Ghana Popular Music 1931-1957: From Palm Wine Music to Dance Band Highlife,” compact disc Arion ARN64564.
31 In December 2002 we organized a theme week entitled “West African Pop Roots” at Basel that combined music workshops, concerts, lectures, and the symposium at which these papers were presented. We were able to invite Kwabena Nyama and his band, as well as John Collins and Aaron Bebe Sukura from the Local Dimension Band based at the University of Ghana.