Popular Politics

Oct. 10, 2016: Highlife Saturday Night

Questions: What kinds of change did independence bring? What kinds of things stayed the same? Why was leisure important? In what ways is leisure political?

Reflection

Nate Plageman’s Highlife Saturday Night shared with readers a music-tinted view into the sociopolitical changes that ensued during the rapid modernization and urbanization experienced by post-independence Ghana. Plageman’s scope centered specifically on the development of Ghana alongside the rise and fall of Saturday Night highlife entertainment culture from 1890 to 1970. His studies blend ethnomusicology with his critical understanding of Ghana’s complex political history and culture, as he sets off to use highlife as the platform by which he bases his observations of what changed post-independence, what stayed the same, why leisure was important in Ghana, and the ways leisure was made to be political.

Highlife, born from three strands: brass band highlife, guitar band highlife, and dance band highlife, can be analyzed as a marker of social change (Plageman 15-16). It finds itself directly intertwined with three integral facets of Ghanaian social change post-independence: gender, generation, and power. As Plageman writes (17), “We also need to confront how the events that took place on Saturday Night could spill over into and shape the other moments of the week.” Plageman shades his readers understanding of highlife with explicit mention of its cultural complexity, it meant different things to different people and could serve as either a vehicle for empowerment of facilitate further entrenchment and control by authority figures. Prior to independence, one’s social status in their community was heavily dictated by their age. Highly respected elders would judge the maturation of members in their community in order to evaluate whether or not one was to be considered an adult, this assessment largely limited an individual’s social mobility and stature (Plageman 10). “…power became an increasingly diffuse resource in Ghana’s urban areas. In the early and middle decades of the nineteenth century, most communities allocated power according to the generational and gendered structures” (Plageman 11). Although the British colonizers disrupted the power of chiefs and elders with the introduction of a market economy, and post-independence rule by Nkrumah and the CPP further dispersed power amongst individual actors as they pushed for Ghana’s urbanization and technological development, the prominence of city life and the institution of highlife played an intrinsic role as a means by which young people could define themselves outside of the judgment of the cultural dictations of their communities. “Oftentimes, disempowered people appropriated tunes that discussed the gendered, generational, and social fabric of Ghanaian towns in way that enabled them, rather than musicians or authorities, to mediate the evolving terrain of urban social relations” (Plageman 19). As young people began flocking to cities post-independence, they found that they could utilize Saturday Night highlife as a way to gain freedom, connections, relationships, and experiences that they felt deemed them proper and capable adults – regardless of the determination of local chiefs and elders. “In the 1950s and early 1960s, young men and women exploited dance band highlife’s new performance setting-the nightclub-and growing links to jazz, calypso, and rock ‘n’ roll to start life, obliterate what they considered to be outdated practices and mediate between their personal liberation and that of the nation at large. In the same period, young bandsmen found that the popular musical stage was a place where they could ear money, meet influential personalities and attract wide recognition as exceptional figures and adult men” (Plageman 229).However, while highlife could serve as a vehicle for change for some individuals, it could also help strengthen and perpetuate the long-established roles of authority figures who capitalized on it. “There were also times when Saturday Nights enabled established authorities to enforces the status quo, revive past arrangements, or even expand their power into new places” (Plageman 229). It was highlife’s flexible nature that made it work in different ways for different people.

When highlife was criminalized, it reinforced social, gendered, and generational traditions and when the CPP came into power it used highlife music to spread manufactured messages about their vision for Ghanaian citizenry (Plageman 229). Overall, leisure was important for Ghana and highlife was a type of leisure that was particularly critical within the scope of Ghanaian history. It was a fun way for Ghanaians to establish themselves during a Saturday Night that also gave them the wherewithal to define the rest of the week by their terms. It brought diverse communities together and inspired musicians and dancers. It is a facet of Ghanaian culture that has been politicized from its inception – particularly because of the power it lent to those who sought to use it to advance their politics. “…musical locales [where highlife was featured] mattered because they dictated who could or could not take part in the performance. Exclusive settings, particularly those managed by middle-class patrons or government authorities, tended to preserve existing lines of differentiation, while their less restrictive counterparts where places where a certain leveling could take place. Yet location also mattered because it helped determine who witnessed, or did not witness, particular musical practices” (Plageman 18). Highlife was hard for authority figures to control because it was both organic and volatile, it could either work for them, but it could also work effective against them – simultaneously. Thus, it was highlife’s connection to politics that inadvertently drove the political acts that at first limited it and any channels that enabled it, and with the strike doled out by Jerry Rawlings institution of an evening curfew in 1979, buried it as a thing of history.

Works Cited