Since the late 2000s, mobile phones have become an integral part of daily life in Africa, not just in cities but also in rural areas that often lack infrastructure such as all-weather roads or a connection to the electricity grid. As the most widespread digital tool and the main gateway to the internet, the mobile phone is now so embedded in the social life of the continent’s populations that it has become a major topic in anthropology; de Bruijn and Nyamnjoh even suggest the emergence of a distinct ‘African mobile phone culture’ (Reference de Bruijn and Nyamnjoh2009: 13). Initially grounded in fieldwork conducted in Europe and Asia that examined the social transformations produced by specific technological shifts, scholarly discussions have since expanded to encompass a wider range of geographical contexts and to adopt a more nuanced analytical framework attentive to cultural and historical specificity (Horst and Miller Reference Horst and Miller2006; Archambault Reference Archambault2017; Vokes Reference Vokes2018; Horst Reference Horst, Geismar and Knox2021).Footnote 1
Digital communication and storage technologies have reshaped African social worlds in many ways, introducing new objects into people’s daily lives. In this special issue we concentrate on the music file. Whether in audio or video format, these files can be created, manipulated and shared by anyone with a mobile phone. Like other forms of media, music files can exist in multiple places simultaneously, and the relational dynamics they create do not rely on the physical presence of both musical producers and their audience. However, digital files occupy a unique intersection of the material and the immaterial, as explicated by Jonathan Sterne’s ‘format theory’ (Reference Sterne2012). Information is captured, inscribed as binary code and stored on a physical medium. At the same time, the digital aspects of these files can be altered through editing software, sometimes directly on a phone.
From a commercial perspective, the rise of ‘mobile music’ (Gopinath and Stanyek Reference Gopinath and Stanyek2014), driven in the last decade by the advent of digital streaming platforms, social media and messaging apps, has revolutionized African music industries, which have embraced the mobile phone as a key economic and distribution model (Shipley Reference Shipley2017; De Beukelaer and Eisenberg Reference De Beukelaer and Eisenberg2020; Eisenberg Reference Eisenberg and Born2022). While these transformations in commercial dynamics and distribution infrastructures matter, our main interest here is not in music files as commodities. We focus, instead, on audio and visual files of performances, recorded or captured not just by professionals, but also by ordinary people using ordinary devices. The recording of musical events has increasingly been implemented by participants themselves and not only by outsiders to the community, such as non-African scholars or visitors and journalists from national or international media. Many files are produced and shared outside the influence of media industries: excerpts from ritual ceremonies, everyday musical expressions in rural areas, dance competitions and political gatherings are circulated via SD cards, Bluetooth connections, social networks and message applications across the continent and on a transnational scale.
At first glance, these technologies are changing how performers and listeners relate to melodies, dances, vocal textures and instrumental gestures, and, more broadly, how they build relationships around them. But are the systems of sharing, the circulation paths and the modes of listening entirely new? Throughout the twentieth century, the development of increasingly affordable, compact and inexpensive technologies has led to a growing presence in Africa of what has been termed ‘small media’ (Sreberny-Mohammadi and Mohammadi Reference Sreberny-Mohammadi and Mohammadi1994; Castells Reference Castells2009) – in contrast to the ‘mass media’ of television and radio.Footnote 2 Cassettes were widely used for recording music and audio letters in the late decades of the century (Manuel Reference Manuel1993; Barber Reference Barber1997; Newton Reference Newton and Austen1999; Impey Reference Impey2013) due to their ease of production and distribution. Today, the shift from cassettes to mobile phones – with their built-in audio and video recording tools – has further enabled local actors to record, edit and share performances near and far.
This special issue brings together anthropologists, historians and ethnomusicologists to discuss how digital communication devices have continued, reinforced or altered the ways in which African people share sounds and images of performance.Footnote 3 We argue that the production and circulation of musical files often follow historical patterns shaped by direct contact or older sound reproduction technologies. On the other hand, we question the social, political and aesthetic ramifications of these circulation networks in an age of digital sharing.
Here, digital does not always mean online. While global streaming platforms, such as Spotify, are gaining momentum with the diffusion of smartphones and easier access to the internet, the circulation of MP3 and MP4 files is also common with feature phones, which remain a prevalent type of handset in most areas.Footnote 4 Differences between countries are stark, as studies such as the Global Digital Report (Kemp Reference Kemp2024) make clear.Footnote 5 Over the past decades, the African continent has seen a range of ways in which people have adopted and used different types of technology, resulting in numerous local histories of technological circulation. This issue aims to highlight these diverse configurations while addressing key questions about how files, through their circulation, disseminate the social relations, cultural meanings and political stakes embedded in the performances they encode. More specifically, building on Kelly Askew’s perspective on performance, we examine how such files encapsulate ‘the process of [a performance’s] production, its communicative function, the messages it communicates, its reflexivity, its capacity for an enhancement of experience … or a transformation of being and/or consciousness … and the capacity for active power negotiation and contestation’ (Askew Reference Askew2002: 23).
In our analysis of the digitization of performance, we join two major debates about media, temporalities and circulation. The first debate pertains to the concept of ‘remediation’, originally articulated by Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin (Reference Bolter and Grusin1999). This line of enquiry has focused on the temporal dimensions and the imbrications of media (Jedlowski et al. Reference Jedlowski, Oloko, Röschenthaler and Wane2015). As Bolter and Grusin proposed in their influential work Remediation: understanding new media, ‘no medium today, and certainly no single media event, seems to do its cultural work in isolation from other media, any more than it works in isolation from other social and economic forces’ (Reference Bolter and Grusin1999: 15). Our interest in remediation, then, stems from its capacity to foreground how audio and visual recordings are reworked and recontextualized as they move across devices, platforms and social settings. The second debate concerns the spatialities and temporalities drawn by new information and communication technologies (ICTs). Over the past two decades, scholars have examined how digital technologies reshape our understanding of space and time, accelerating the global circulation of information, goods and capital (Abélès Reference Abélès2008; Sharma Reference Sharma2014). This conversation questions whether ICTs reinforce pre-existing social patterns or act as catalysts for transformation. This has become a classic controversy in the social sciences, even though most authors have acknowledged the coexistence of continuities and transformations imprinted by and on digital communication technologies (de Bruijn Reference de Bruijn2019).
The changes in the speed of musical sharing and its potential for spatial diffusion are of interest, not merely to address the opposition between ‘reproductivist’ and ‘transformativist’ viewpoints, but because they allow us to observe the historical continuities and discontinuities in the ways in which musical performances operate as social and political actions. Strategies evident in digital file sharing – whether through social media, digital platforms or communication apps – can be traced back to their analogue predecessors. This not only challenges the rigid ‘digital/analog dichotomy’ (Maley Reference Maley2011) but also highlights how the progression of technology exists on a spectrum dependent on previous technologies, with each era building on and reshaping past practices rather than representing a clean break. As Thorén et al. (Reference Thorén, Edenius, Lundström and Kitzmann2019) contend, the concepts of analogue and digital can be viewed as a continuum rather than a strict dichotomy, allowing for hybrid expressions where digital objects can embody analogue aesthetics and vice versa. In light of these reflections, we suggest that digital technologies, mobile devices and the dissemination of multimedia content as digital files do not fundamentally revolutionize hierarchical and relational systems, nor do they entirely alter the intimate qualities of music. Instead, through the digitization of performance, they shift tensions between reproductive and transformative dynamics into new spaces, where the rules of the game can be renegotiated, allowing actors to access new forms of power and modes of interaction (see Archambault Reference Archambault2017; Nyabola Reference Nyabola2018).
Some of the authors who contributed to this special issue draw on long-time ethnographic fieldwork and have witnessed the arrival of digital technologies and the changes that unfolded; others rely on oral history and archival work. The case studies presented here delve into various African countries and contexts. They look at past conflicts (Raymok Ketema on the Eritrean liberation struggle) and current ones (Katell Morand on the recent war in northern Ethiopia), emphasizing the ways in which digital circulation participates in the construction of collective memory. Attention is also given to electoral communication, the building of political consensus (Giordano Marmone on pastoral northern Kenya), and strategies for controlling circulation (exemplified by the three generations of Nigerien griots discussed by Sandra Bornand). The growing presence of streaming platforms and social media in Africa is discussed in Schalk van der Merwe’s study of transformations of ‘Afrikaans music’ in post-apartheid South Africa.
Performance on file: actors, aesthetics and circulations
In capturing a performance, the shift from an outsider to an insider point of view has many consequences. Choices of perspective, such as the position and framing of the camera and microphone, which can be vastly different from those of a professional videographer or an ethnographer, have direct aesthetic impact. Effects of distortion from copying, compression and conversion, which are often unintended, can at times acquire an aesthetic value in themselves, as explored by Larkin (Reference Larkin2004) and Steingo (Reference Steingo2015). In other circumstances, they can be criticized for distorting a certain form of authenticity better captured with analogue means of recording, as Ketema describes in this issue concerning the Eritrean digitization project of the radio field recordings of the 1980s liberation war: archivists consider that the unique sound quality of the master cassettes, which captured the atmosphere of wartime front-line performances, is lost in the process of digitizing them. More broadly, the articles presented here highlight the multiplicity of actors and media involved in the digitization of performance, and the aesthetic transformations it drives. From snippets of live performances to albums uploaded to streaming platforms, from simple montages shared on social media to professional music videos, all these digital artefacts transform everyday experiences of music and dance (see Shipley Reference Shipley2013 for Ghana; Djebbari Reference Djebbari2019 for Mali and Benin). This fosters a redefinition of musical genres, whether locally defined as ‘traditional’ or ‘modern’ (as discussed by Charry Reference Charry2000). Such processes are explored in this issue by van der Merwe in his discussion of the category of ‘Afrikaans music’ and by Marmone in his analysis of electoral songs in northern Kenya. They also produce new forms of relationships and expectations between performers and their audiences, mediated by files and shaped by how these files are manipulated and the distinct paths they follow.
These relationships and paths are often modelled on earlier modalities of music circulation. Alice Aterianus-Owanga and Rémi Jadinon (Reference Aterianus-Owanga and Jadinon2018), for example, have shown the longstanding routes, actors and objects involved in the transnational circulation of Gabonese bwiti ritual videoclips. Similarly, Alessandra Ciucci (Reference Ciucci2022) examined the formerly analogue and currently digital transnational trajectories of musical repertoires from rural Morocco, which play a key role in shaping the masculinity of Moroccan-born men living in Italy.Footnote 6 Several of the articles included here pragmatically explore these routes of circulation. They show how different modes of dissemination are often used simultaneously, involving online posting across various platforms and social media applications as well as offline circulation in zones where the internet is inaccessible or too expensive for the local population. These offline modes of dissemination can take the form of physical stores, where downloaded files are bought in bulk, as seen in Ethiopia. More commonly throughout the continent, file sharing occurs via Bluetooth connections or through the exchange of SD memory cards among kin members or peers, perpetuating the physical routes involved in the older practice of copying and giving cassette tapes (Impey Reference Impey2013). Paths also include various repetitions and embodiments in new live performances – which are sometimes recorded – as was the case with the circulation of songs about migration through radio and audiocassettes in the 1960s between Mali and France (Mbodj-Pouye Reference Mbodj-Pouye2024). We approach the relationships created with and around files by situating them within local histories of ‘mediatized orality’ (Zumthor Reference Zumthor2008). Developed in the 1980s to explore the impact of radio or television on oral genres, the concept of ‘mediatized orality’ – or ‘secondary orality’ (Ong Reference Ong1982), as it is also known – emphasizes the implications of the reproducibility of performances through the mediation of machines. It also questions what happens to performance in the absence of co-presence between performers and audiences. How are relations formed at a distance? How do listeners connect in their imagination with performers and interpret what they are hearing? What strategies do performers implement and with what consequences?
In her article on the Zarma griots of Niger, Bornand focuses on the perspective of the performers. Starting from an inquiry into amateur montages circulating on social media and the actors involved in their dissemination, she traces three generations of griots confronted with the consequences of their performances being recorded, from early government-forced archival recordings to later radio broadcasts and cassette tapes circulating in markets. Given that their epic tales are highly personalized – changing with each audience and creating states of altered consciousness – and often touch on sensitive topics, griots have developed various aesthetic and political strategies to adapt to widespread distribution beyond their control. For the last griot capable of performing the stories, this included entrusting his personal archive to the custody of Bornand herself. As the connection between griot and audience has now faded, amateurs who search for and post recordings, recognizing the need to compensate for this lack of personal interaction, create simple audiovisual montages that circulate on social media. This prompts Bornand, following John M. Foley (Reference Foley2012), to reflect on the new trajectories of oral traditions in the age of the internet.
Morand focuses on the perspective of listeners. Her study, based on fieldwork conducted in the aftermath of the conflict with the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (2020–22) in northern Ethiopia, examines the connection between the circulation of Amhara sung poetry via mobile phones and the ways in which the war is collectively given meaning. These recordings, whether excerpts captured at weddings, funerals or military gatherings, or heavily edited montages and videos, are largely independent of the local music industry. They are constructed in local discourses as having played a key role in mobilization during the war – as being at the centre of what Zumthor (Reference Zumthor2008) termed an ‘emotional conjecture’. Morand analyses the conversations and recollections that accompany the recordings. She highlights the collective nature of file listening, modelled on the participatory nature of performances, as well as their embedding in trajectories of successive re-vocalizations and recontextualization. Here also, digital inscription is examined within its historical context, emphasizing a ‘regime of circulation’ (Cody Reference Cody2009) with a long history predating the arrival of digital technologies, as evidenced in the tradition of the royal chronicles. This special issue highlights the ambiguity of authorship in the case of oral genres. Ethnomusicologists have indeed long argued that traditional musical genres have a complex relationship with the concept of copyright as understood in the Euro-American context (Seeger Reference Seeger1992; Zemp Reference Zemp1996; Goodman Reference Goodman2002). As Perullo (Reference Perullo and Stone2008) pointed out, musical ownership and control in Africa seldom fall into the two categories of either individual rights or public domain. This means that they are not adequately represented in intellectual property laws, which follow World Trade Organization requirements (Diawara Reference Diawara2024). Although these ownership issues predate the advent of digital recording, they are intensified in the context of widespread dissemination, generating conflicts, tense negotiations and, at times, public debate. In Niger, Bornand explores how differing views on who owns the rights over the griots’ narratives sparked conflict between three interested parties: those who have the skills and the legitimacy to perform them, those who descend from the epic ancestors and to whom the stories are intended, and third-party actors who claim a shared heritage for the broader Nigerien population. The increasing number of actors involved in digitization, their contradictory pushes towards wide versus limited distribution, their various aesthetic strategies and conflicting ownership claims all underscore the social complexities of digital circulation. The articles in this issue examine the forms of proximity and affective dispositions, as well as relations of conflict, power or hierarchy, that develop around the use of digital technologies.
The ‘file-ization’ of society: digitizing relations, politics and conflict
In the chapter ‘Resonance of age systems in southeastern Sudan’ Eisei Kurimoto (Reference Kurimoto, Kurimoto and Simonse1998) reports a curious local story, likely centuries old, recounting how the Pari agro-pastoralists adopted the social organization of their Lopit neighbours by imitating their dances. Kurimoto writes: ‘When a group of Pari men went hunting and came to a Lopit village, they saw Lopit dancing by age-sets.Footnote 7 This was very attractive and beautiful and is why they adopted the system’ (Kurimoto Reference Kurimoto, Kurimoto and Simonse1998: 49). The Pari’s attraction to this specific repertoire of generational songs and dances, and their integration into Pari community music practices, reportedly led to the adoption of the age set system associated with these same songs and dances. While this episode may stem from retrospective interpretations, it highlights the critical role that performance and musical exchange play in the processes of social construction and transformation. Can the sharing of a specific performance pattern enable the dissemination of its associated meanings? Furthermore, can replicating a choreographic-musical repertoire foster the integration of elements of a socio-political organization?
In the early 1980s, Pierre Bourdieu showed that the subjectification of a given social category or ideology is often complemented by a performative activity he termed ‘bodily hexis’. This concept encompasses a series of postures, gestural codes, vocal practices and mental patterns adopted by individuals or groups as they embody these social categories and identities (Bourdieu Reference Bourdieu1991). This issue examines this question from different angles, offering a detailed analysis of how the dissemination and sharing of music facilitate this adherence. In his article, van der Merwe illustrates how both the end of the apartheid regime and the introduction of new communications technologies have participated in the redefinition of what it means to be Afrikaner, and what Afrikaans music represents as a general aesthetic category. Beyond the textual content of songs, this manifests through the choice of melodies, arrangements and timbral characteristics, materializing specific political stances and social aspirations in South Africa. Van der Merwe examines how specific digital strategies in the creation of Afrikaans music, in both audio and video formats, reflect white Afrikaners’ desire to forge a new relationship with the troubling legacy of their ancestors’ complicity in the apartheid regime. In contrast, genres such as Koortjies and gqom act as ‘sonic identifiers’ for the Afrikaans-speaking coloured community, highlighting the lived experiences of its members outside the white-dominated Afrikaans cultural mainstream.
The capacity of music files to embody and disseminate values, regimes of truth and ideological stances thus intersects with core political processes in Africa. Marmone’s article delves into this phenomenon by analysing digital political communication and the rise of new forms of populism in urban and rural settings. Among Samburu pastoralists in northern Kenya, local and national election candidates leverage digital networks and established material practices centred around the sharing of cattle raid songs to disseminate their messages and electoral music. These candidates often have prestigious educational backgrounds, having studied at foreign universities and having held important positions in the public and private sectors in the country’s major cities. However, the electorate in their home regions mainly consists of mobile pastoralists. These voters expect candidates to understand the subtleties of political jargon in local languages and the needs of herders. To secure election, politicians and candidates must therefore fabricate a pastoral identity to emphasize their proximity to their constituencies. To this end, the composition and dissemination of songs using the poetic techniques of traditional music allow them to incorporate pastoral political statuses and postures seeking to build consensus in rural areas while de-emphasizing their belonging to the Kenyan elite.
One major thread that links the digitization of performance across the continent, whether in Kenya, South Africa, Eritrea, Ethiopia or Niger, is a process that we call ‘file-ization’. Cornelia Vismann (Reference Vismann2008) traces the origins of files to the physical threads or wires used in the twelfth century to bind documents and information together. Expanding her argument, we suggest that, as a performance is digitized, files similarly operate as devices that bind together the statutory orders, political ambitions and ideological features embedded within it. This process results, precisely, in their ‘file-ization’ and subsequent dissemination and activation through various sharing pathways.
Through mobile phones, messaging applications and social networks, these files circulate, insinuating themselves into the production processes of historical and social realities by introducing new modes of action and/or reproducing pre-existing systems of power and relations of proximity. Music files, as intangible artefacts, exert performative effects through their digital circulation, influencing individual and collective postures, actions, emotions and cognitive frameworks. One empirical illustration of this dynamic can be found in a digital era parallel to Kurimoto’s account: the widespread dissemination of Samburu music via mobile phones in northern Kenya is contributing to the adoption of Samburu institutional and ceremonial systems among their neighbouring Rendille pastoralists. The uptake of Samburu repertoires, especially among young Rendille, is leading them to increasingly integrate Samburu social identities and rituals (Marmone Reference Marmone2022). From urban to rural areas, the music file’s object-like nature manifests in its ability to encapsulate, transport and actualize social categories, ideologies and powers through the audiovisual reproduction of performances. This is what we mean by ‘file-ization’.
At the same time, the music files are susceptible to different practices of manipulation of their binary codes, ultimately transforming their meanings. Digital files are versatile and can represent various media types – audio, visual, text, or combinations thereof – depending on their encoding and the interpreting software or hardware. A single file may manifest differently across devices or platforms, showcasing the adaptability of digital content. This flexibility enables diverse forms of creative expression and content delivery across multiple contexts. Changing a file’s encoding, content or format can alter its message or meaning. For instance, an audio file can be edited to change its tempo or pitch, completely transforming the original sound or song. Similarly, visual and audiovisual files can be edited to add or remove elements, changing the way they are perceived and, potentially, their performative implications.
Keeping files together: personal and institutional archives
Files do more than circulate endlessly from one device to another in a dynamic of sharing; they are often curated into collections, formed into archives, and preserved for future use. As technology has evolved, so has the field of archival studies and the expansion of what constitutes an archive. Researchers including Jean Allman and Victoria Tashjian (Reference Allman and Tashjian2000), Gabeba Baderoon (Reference Baderoon2014), Marissa Fuentes (Reference Fuentes2016) and Emmanuel Kreike (Reference Kreike2013) have explored how diverse forms of material and immaterial cultural production – such as gender performance, oral histories, literature and environmental records – can serve as archival documents. What, then, happens when files are selected and kept together?
Mobile phones can serve as personal and portable archives, carried in one’s pocket and easily accessible on demand.Footnote 8 With a few simple gestures, files can be viewed or listened to, shown to others during everyday conversation, or kept as collections. As Morand points out in her article, the memory cards of Amhara farmers often resemble layered sediment, with older files dating back several years into Ethiopia’s political upheavals. This gives the history of their production and circulation a biographical flavour; fragments of memorable performances sit alongside popular files acquired from others and new digitized versions of decades-old songs resonating with current troubles. This nourishes individual recollection and shapes collective remembering. The cumulative nature of these personal archives is reminiscent of the practice of building cassette collections, which was especially common among African migrants. As Angela Impey (Reference Impey2013) described, Dinka South Sudanese migrants in the UK built extensive music cassette collections of old and new audio-letter songs sent by relatives, which were played repeatedly, preserving intimate traces of the past. However, memory card archives are inherently ephemeral, constantly changing and frequently reset. Phones may be lost or stolen, files might become corrupted or deleted due to lack of storage space, and hardware often fails or malfunctions.Footnote 9 These archives’ lack of tangibility and the minimal material space they occupy – in contrast to a box of cassettes – largely set them apart from previous forms of personal music collections.
At the same time, many personal music libraries, whether on phones or computer hard drives, are filled with digitized versions of cassettes and other analogue recordings, such as LPs, which undertake renewed social and affective journeys. Claire Clouet (Reference Clouet2019) has given a clear example of this by examining the impact of griot Ganda Fadiga’s voice on the everyday lives of Soninké migrant workers in Paris and the conversations it inspires among them. She demonstrates how the digitization of the old cassettes – now accessible in dedicated folders on mobile phones – has both extended and revitalized their emotional resonance. This interplay between old and new trajectories, as well as between present-day listening and past memories, becomes even more complex when digitized collections are externalized online and made available for streaming. As Bornand illustrates in this issue with the example of third-party collections of Zarma griots’ recordings, online storage and access alter the status of a performance by endowing it with a new form of agency. Similarly, in a recent book on Somali love songs, Christina J. Woolner (Reference Woolner2023: 113–15) describes how large amateur collections have been progressively moved online, along with transcribed lyrics and personal essays. The streaming of simple montages on YouTube channels has now become the most common means of accessing music in Somaliland. This generates new forms of listening habits that are both private (in the current culture of prohibition) and collectively expressed through the many comments under the videos, recounting nostalgic memories.
Scholars of Africa have discussed the way in which technologies are changing how African people are archiving, whether at a personal or an institutional level. In the latter case, digital technologies have the potential to democratize access to archives, while simultaneously acknowledging that these technologies can reinforce existing power structures, particularly in African contexts where access remains uneven (Mbembe Reference Mbembe, Hamilton, Harris, Taylor, Pickover, Reid and Saleh2002). The challenges of managing electronic records in sub-Saharan Africa, focusing on technological, infrastructural and skills-related obstacles faced by records managers, emphasize the need for improved policies and infrastructure to support digital archiving (Kemoni Reference Kemoni2009; Asogwa Reference Asogwa2012; Adu and Ngulube Reference Adu and Ngulube2017). An analysis of the digitization of archives must also consider the historical dynamics influencing the translation of audio and video documents into binary code, including postcolonial power relations, local decolonial perspectives and political strategies for patrimonial preservation and nation building. Whether for entertainment, cultural or historical memory preservation purposes, recording, digitization and storage always involve a series of aesthetic, ideological and political choices. These choices are embodied in the files and their presence in an archive or a government-funded database, becoming carriers of underlying values and decisions. As Fabienne Chamelot et al. write:
[T]he process of digitization therefore consists not simply of making digital copies of paper documents, for it is more than ‘digital photocopying’. Rather, the whole structure of any archive ought to be preserved and conveyed so as to reflect the rationale of the administration that created it. Such information is essential to the historical contextualization of sources and to understand the structures of power and governance … The shift from paper to digital formats does not therefore consist solely of technicalities … [I]t consists in a reflection of the reconfiguration of worldwide power dynamics on the local and the global scales. (Chamelot et al. Reference Chamelot, Hiribarren and Rodet2020: 107–8)
Analysing official archival practices is crucial for exploring the historical continuities and transformations in music circulation as it transitions from analogue to digital media. Following Kelly Askew’s work on colonial and postcolonial nation building in Tanzania (Reference Askew2002), Ketema’s contribution contextualizes this by analysing the digitization and archiving processes of music cassettes from Eritrea’s war of resistance against Ethiopian occupation (1960s to 1990s). This article illustrates how preservation efforts and dissemination via streaming platforms such as YouTube contribute to the emergence of new forms of national identity among younger generations and within the Eritrean diaspora. Ketema explains that the digitization of this collection uses the same classification and communication strategies employed during the armed conflict, illustrating a different facet of the file-ization process: the collection of files becomes, too, a tangible manifestation of projects, ambitions, goals and stories. The digitization of performance turns files into political actors, on which expectations are focused and through which effects are intended to be produced, whether through their sharing or archiving.
The articles in this issue explore the diverse trajectories of digital circulation and storage of performance in Africa. They highlight how these phenomena are transforming modes of entertainment as well as shaping everyday interpersonal relationships and conceptions of the past. By doing this, they reveal digital files as agents of political action, influencing the formation of national and racial identities and contributing to how conflict is interpreted and framed. While the role of digital technologies in transforming African societies or perpetuating existing power structures is a well-established topic in social science, the specific impacts of the digitization of performance on relational systems require more attention. By addressing this gap, this issue sets a new direction for reflecting on the emerging modes of music circulation and consumption in Africa.
Open access
