T R O U P E A R T I S T I Q U E K O O X D A F A N K A

SUPER S O M A L I S O UNDSfrom the Gulf of

MA

IS

ON

D

E

JE

UN

ES

C

IT

É

DU

S

TA

DE

P

AL

AI

S

DU

P

EU

PL

E

R a s s e m b l e m e n t Po p u l a i r e Po u r l e P r o g r è s

RÉ

PU

BL

IQ

UE

D

E

DJ

IB

OU

TI

|

J

AM

HU

UR

IY

AD

DA

J

AB

UU

TI

A R C H I V E S D E R A D I O D I F F U S I O NT É L É V I S I O N D E D J I B O U T I

T R O U P E A R T I S T I Q U E K O O X D A F A N K A

How the Sound of 4 Mars & Djiboutian Music is the Story of the World

By Vik Sohonie

Passing ThroughIn 2017, I had a chance encounter with a senior South African diplomat. Tall, knew how to command a room, with lines in face that could tell many stories, grey hair and thin glasses. One of the original members of the African National Congress. A close confidant of Nelson Mandela. You know the type. His side gig back in the day was a mediator for the conflicts in the Horn of Africa. “Those are old fights,” he tells me with a hint of exhaustion in his eyes. He was curious about Ostinato’s work in Somalia, Somaliland, and Sudan. But he didn’t want to regress into the past too much, moving our chat towards contemporary happenings. China’s planned extensive networks of ports and logistics channels in East Africa was on his mind. When I mentioned Djibouti, he pointed

on a nearby map to the Bab El-Mandeb strait, the Red Sea shipping

lane sandwiched between Yemen and Djibouti that’s one of the world’s most vital trade corridors and busiest waterways, and said, “this is the future.” If you want to move goods and commerce around the world by sea, your maritime route will inevitably need to pass six major chokepoints: the Malacca strait in Southeast Asia, the world’s busiest shipping lane, the Straits of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf, the Suez Canal in Egypt, the Panama Canal, and the Bab El-Mandeb strait which connects the Mediterranean with East Africa and Asia. Nearly 20 percent of world trade passes through Djibouti’s shores, which is why the small country is home to French, German, Japanese, Chinese, and American military bases. US shadow wars in the region are carried out from Camp Lemonier, a base about ten times the size of the international airport.

DJIBOUTI

E R I T R E A

E T H I O P I A

S O M A L I L A N D

Y E M E N

Red Sea

Gulf of Tadjoura

Khôr ‘Angar

Obock

Tadjoura

DjiboutiYoboki

Ali Sabieh

For centuries, even millennia, the part of the world we today call the Republic of Djibouti was a strategic transit point for the trade in high-value goods and ideas moving between the Mediterranean and Asia. When the Roman Empire had to restock its spice cabinet with the finest, most coveted spices from the south of India, the cargo passed through the Bab El-Mandeb strait. Anchors were dropped in the Gulf of Tadjoura, then controlled by a series of city-states that got rich as middlemen in a lucrative trade network at the very center of the ancient world. All sorts of characters passed through here, then and today. They didn’t teach

you that in school, did they?

Opening UpLately, countries looking to dust themselves off and stake a claim for serious power, like China and Turkey, have lavished investment in Djibouti, opening up a once reclusive country. China recently gifted Djibouti a brand new national theater. I got the grand tour. I must admit, it’s a powerful restoration. The old one had long delipidated and the once abundant cultural coffers are now dry. When a lot of folks are knocking on your door, it might be time to keep it open. The government moved its restrictive, expensive visa system online for a nominal fee. Djibouti only has a handful of consulates and embassies in a handful of countries, and if you’re not in any of them, good luck.

Since around 2015, you’re spoilt for choice for which city to have a long layover on your way to Djibouti – Istanbul for the kokoretsi? Maybe Dubai for a bit

of the high life? Addis Ababa for a tall Hakim stout? It’s because of Djibouti’s revived engagement and connectivity with the world that you’re able to listen to this compilation. Times are changing. The world is moving east. Societies and networks that sparkled before 500 years of European conquest are slowly coming alive again. This small country in East Africa is very much a key part of our world’s future. They’ve got grand ambitions to reserve a seat at the tables of power. It’s an incremental but ceaseless process. Some folks think that to understand the future, you have to understand the ancient past. Too often we treat history as extremes – it’s either present day or antiquity. You just have to peak back to the immediate years after Djibouti won independence from France in 1977 to get the sweetest glimpse of what it can offer when given a real chance.

Building A Country From ScratchSo you’re a brand new country. You didn’t even get to choose your own borders or what you should be all about. But here you are, and to add insult to injury, your former colonial master left you with very little to start up and divided your society to maintain power. You’ve now got two major groups – Somalis and Afars – who want equal share of the cake. The New York Times in 1977 called Djibouti a “troubled republic.” The same report said that “The tiny new nation has no army, less than one square mile of arable land and no resources except sand, salt and 20,000 camels.” They still haven’t realized it now, so it was even more doubtful back then, but Djibouti’s main asset was its location and by extension, the culture it had long nurtured. But with little to form a private music industry, and quite frankly an aversion to private anything after being a private

colony of France, Djibouti decided to bring culture under the state’s wing. Music became a public good, provided, supported, and underwritten by the government. Back in the 1970s and ‘80s, “there was a lot of money available for culture,” Abayazid Houmed Ali, the current director general of Le Palais du Peuple (The Palace of the People), a kind of more hands-on extension of the Ministry of Culture, told me. To most, especially in the west, this comes across as little more than state control of expression and the transformation of music as a propaganda tool. Look at it this way: if you’re a new country finding its feet, think about what “propaganda” means. You have a divided society. You need to build some kind of national identity – in 1977, not 1677. You need to rally people and ensure your society doesn’t go the way of so many similar societies reeling from the same legacies of colonialism.

Music, A National AffairMore than only political capital —yes, there’s a song dedicated to President Ismail Omar Guelleh — Djibouti’s leaders saw music as the ideal resource to harvest a sense of pride from scratch. You need to give the people confidence and instill the values you want to build your country on. Look at the track titles on this compilation. Power. Compassion. Motherland. Gratitude. Hello, Peace! These aren’t songs as much as instructions, lessons. (Interestingly, you see similar terms etched onto communal vans in Haiti, another ex-French colony. Tells you what kind of values were needed after the morally depraved institution of colonialism.) It was commonplace across much of Africa of the same era for leaders to adopt policies that poured money into the arts and music, especially in former French colonies, where France’s sensibilities for the arts and its suppression of indigenous art forms lived side by side. Léopold Senghor, Senegal’s first

president, spent nearly a quarter of the government’s budget on culture. Ahmed Sékou Touré of Guinea unveiled his Authenticité program, a comprehensive effort at cultural decolonization that used national orchestras to begin rebuilding a country spiritually. Africa had its spine shattered. You have to restore the people’s confidence. 4 Mars, or Quatre Mars – in English, the 4th of March, the founding date of the Rassemblement Populaire Pour le Progrès (RPP) political party – was the centerpiece of Djibouti’s own Authenticité. There were no private bands. Nobody grooving or jamming in their garage or forming heartthrob quartets out of high school. Musicians were employees of the government. They were public servants. All bands belonged to different political parties. Since 1979, the RPP has been kingmaker in Djibouti’s politics and still rules today. They’re not going anywhere. In 1981, as the largest party in parliament, the RPP

passed a law making it the only legal party. 4 Mars was born a year later at the Maison de Jeunes Cite du Stade Palais du Peuple to serve as the cultural arm of the RPP. That had its benefits. Money and support flowed in. After all, this was not an eight-piece band. They had 40 members. Not so much a band, more like an Olympic delegation, with actors, singers, dancers, musicians, and folklore percussionists. 4 Mars was the most powerful cultural group in the country at a time when world-class musicians seemingly came out of a factory line. There’s a large male and female chorus, which is what you’re hearing in that beautiful, slow call and response communique. They would travel to the rural areas transmitting themes of health, agriculture, and self-reliance, inspiring folks to keep their eye on the prize — a stable, healthy, prosperous society. But this selection mainly consists of the troupe’s work at the national theater. In fact, the national theater could’ve simply been called the 4 Mars theater. It was their personal coliseum, their homefield. Like the political party they played for, their

sheer weight made them almost the only show in town. The love songs, the songs inspired by jazz, the electrified songs — those were exclusively for the 802-seat theater. These songs were all either recorded live on-stage or at the Radiodiffusion-Télévision de Djibouti (RTD), which is the national radio. On the road, the show was rougher. In the theater, professional technicians kept everything finely tuned.

All Roads Lead To DjiboutiThere’s obviously a lot going on instrumentally and melodically in these tunes. The flawless mélange of different cultures I’m about to lay out, each transiting through Djibouti at some point in history, should really make you reconsider where the real center of our world is. The structure of the music comes from Sudan. “We copied Sudan,” Mr. Abayazid told me. They borrowed a few rhythms from Egypt and Yemen. The synth melodies? Turkish-inspired. The off-beat licks that are a signature of reggae? Depending on who you ask, they came from Jamaica’s greatest export or are simply identical to the Somali Dhaanto rhythm. Chicken or egg? The horns? Well that’s master saxophonist Mr. Mohamed Abdi Alto, who featured on our contemporary studio recorded album “The Dancing Devils of Djibouti” by Groupe RTD. 4 Mars is where he started his career. He should truly be mentioned in the same pantheon as all the brass

greats. He grew up listening to a lot of jazz, and most notably mentions the Harlem jazz era as his infatuation. The flutes? They are entirely from the flute traditions of Mongolia and China. The flutes themselves were imported from Mongolia. The vocals? Somali peppered with the singing styles of Bollywood. Has your sense of history been completely shattered yet? Did all roads lead to Rome or Djibouti? Besides music being under the government, another reason Djibouti’s music hasn’t travelled much outside the immediate region is because of the sheer size of 4 Mars. 40 members, remember. That’s a lot of flight seats, hotel rooms, and meals. You need largesse from a true supporter. 4 Mars found that in Libya, where the late Muammar Gaddafi, killed because of yet another illegal western war, bankrolled the whole troupe to perform in Tripoli in 1991, just prior to Djibouti’s civil war. (Gaddafi’s Libya also flew in another Ostinato artist – Abu Obaida Hassan.)

A ShockBetween ’91 and ’94, festering divisions reached breaking point. The RPP was mainly made up of Somalis, and Afars were largely excluded from positions of power. The roots of this war were well laid in the colonial era. It was settled on many battlefields, ending with a new constitution that reintroduced multi-party democracy, but the RPP still kept power. Afars were allowed to serve in more administrative positions and recruited in greater numbers in the army. The new constitution also got rid of political party music groups and turned them into national groups. 4 Mars became the de-facto national band, representing Djibouti around the world. In 1996, they made it to the United States and Canada. Algeria and Libya, again, came calling. But at the end of the civil war, 4 Mars was no longer the majestic melting pot that took sounds from the Caribbean to Asia and everywhere in between to form something truly spectacular, but a powerhouse folkloric troupe entirely driven by percussion.

The best musicians had passed away or moved to Europe and Canada. The folkloric version of 4 Mars recruits only young people, never older than 20, as the performances need stamina and energy. Financial flows that sustained 4 Mars and funded the theater, where its best work was performed and recorded, dried up even before the civil war. Quick economic history lesson. In the 1980s, Africa was racked by a debt crisis, instigated by The Volcker Shock, named after the U.S. Federal Reserve chairman, Paul Volcker. This was basically a way for the US to heal inflation in its own economy by exporting it everywhere else, which usually just means the global South — Africa, Asia, and Latin America. He raised interest rates so high that all the U.S. dollar debt held by the global South skyrocketed, totally wrecking economies, most harshly in Africa. Devastatingly, it stopped the ability of states to fund public goods, everything from healthcare to education to music. The scars of this shock are still nakedly visible across the continent.

The ArchiveWhich is why it’s all the more impressive that Djibouti paid special attention to the upkeep of its national radio archive, which effectively houses the country’s entire musical output since no recordings were released privately. It’s got air-conditioning on 24/7 and everything’s in decent shape given a lack of funds and the general duress of a civil war. A fastidious, wonderful young staff trained in analog technology in China are its keepers. Out of the many archives I’ve peaked into on the continent, it’s jointly the best cared for with the labyrinthine archives of Radio Mogadishu. But here’s the catch. There’s always a catch. The archive master reels and cassettes are numbered and put in order. But every few numbers, there’s one missing. And then another. And another. They told us the archive was subject to a fire, the heat of which can definitely alter fragile film. But also, a theft, where unscrupulous former employees snatched a few of the best reels to mass produce and sell in the market to make a quick franc. Taking no chances, the archive became off limits to most, especially foreigners. Ostinato Records is the

first foreign entity allowed access. This compilation is actually not entirely from the national radio archives. We painstakingly tracked down and recovered the missing recordings as second or third generation cassettes all over the capital, completing the puzzle. The recordings, while intact and cared for, have been through a lot.

To digitize the master reels, we flew in a professionally refurbished 1970s Technics reel-to-reel player. This thing weighs 50 kg / 110 lbs. Djibouti’s head of customs cleared the package through. No way we were getting an absolute unit of an analog system past customs officials without paying an absurd “import duty”. The national radio lacks a maintained, properly functioning reel to reel player. As usual, international organizations and European NGOs made loud promises on equipment donations, but nobody delivered. So we threw in the Technics player, really a masterpiece of engineering that works as good as it did almost 50 years ago, as part of the deal to digitize and license these songs. They’re now able to begin a large-scale, high-quality digitization endeavor of the entire archive.

The FutureActually, the South African diplomat was not exactly correct. Djibouti isn’t the future. It was living in the future when 4 Mars recorded music of this caliber. Djibouti isn’t behind. We’re the ones behind. We still have to catch up with what they were producing 40 years ago. Let 4 Mars take you on a truly perspective-shifting journey through ancient trade routes and the currents of history that gave this small but grand corner of Africa a signature music style, which in every sense reveals a truer story of our world.

Even if Djibouti’s once formidable scene has since passed, between the lavish amount of music in its archives and the national radio band, Groupe RTD a.k.a. The Dancing Devils of Djibouti, this gateway of the world has the perfect soundtrack to accompany the latest chapter of its budding, determined story.

Fully Authorized by Radiodiffusion-Télévision de Djibouti (RTD) & Le Palais du Peuple (The Palace of the People)

Produced & Compiled by Vik SohonieArchive Digitization, Restoration & Remastering by Mark Gergis

Equipment Transport & Project Coordination by Janto DjassiDesign by Pete ‘Piwi’ White

Translations by Hawa, Mulki and Amina Abdulle

Special Thanks to PdP Director General Abayazid Houmed Ali & RTD Director General Mahmoud Souleiman

His Excellency Mr. Aden Mohamed Dileita (Djiboutian Ambassador to Germany)Djiboutian Customs Director Mr. Gouled

Abdulkader Ahmed IdrissAndreas Wetter and the hardworking staff of RTD

Recording Years: 1982 - 1994

© & ℗ Ostinato Records LLC 2020. All rights reserved.