Jenne: Music as a Political Act in an African Muslim City
Résumé
The time of the maduhu is that of the Muslim city, an ideal city which is brought into being on regular occasions by various operations of re-planning, which affect not only the public and private categories, but also the collective and individual, spatial relations, historicity and temporality, allowing the real city to rediscover a political unity which is often dissolved in its urban practices.
However, aside from the religious event, Jenne is telling the world that it is the town, one of the three Medinas of Mali. And its re-planning takes on a particular significance, that becomes all the greater when we remember that the city is going through a process that is ongoing in Africa, and also worldwide: a process whose watchwords are decentralisation, and an increased importance accorded to local identities. Thus, every time that Jenne sings that it is Medina, it shows itself as part of a dynamic process, a political action, in the face of various external enterprises that seek to fix it forever like a museum, and it strongly asserts its urban status and its contemporaneity.