The Ballad at (as?) the Core: Popular African Music Today

The dominant genre of modern African music in 2013-14 was the ballad. Is this symptomatic of anything? Is the African singer, perhaps, at heart a balladeer(ess)? Since it began to step out of its Congolese cradle (where it nestled as rumba) in the mid-1950s, contemporary African music, increasingly a part of the global ‘pop’ culture, continues to be at its most endearing and most resonating in that modus. Since Bob Marley, however, it has been much challenged around Sub-Sahara by the infectiousness of the political-cultural messaging in reggae, the rambunctious imprint in hip-hop, and that catch-as-catch-can wave -- Afro-Fusion.

Still, the lyrical content of African pop music today is mostly about love and loneliness ('aloneness', even) and loss, in distant or forsaken places. Love: which in may sorts of ways, to an expression. The anguished heart which Zahara’s ballad evokes returns us to a period, not quite so long ago, which she probably has a personal recollection of, when parents, spouses and lovers didn’t have mobile phones, and many couldn’t even write. So absences and longings were total, and telegrams (the quickest way to say anything from afar) were dreaded for their habitus-induced capacity to totalize the end of hope. The telegram had become the default bearer of the worst kind of news -- the death of a loved one. 

Has the mobile phone, then, killed longing and lonesomeness? Not quite, for it has restored hope that, as in the traditional village or community life, no social (dis)connect is beyond rerouting and repair in the global village. But it requires a different sort of re-imagining and feeling. Perhaps Zahara should tell us how one should feel about the empty train now. 

Is not all gospel music a protestation of undivided love for The Maker? The “Kwetu” (motherland) which John Bosco, the Congolese, sang so longingly about in ‘broken’ Swahili -- that brokenness being both Sheng’s precursor and contemporary -- across East Africa of the Fifties: Wasn't it about Love?

Here below are 25 of the best African ballads of 2014. Check them out. They are not arranged in any particular order:

1. Bondo - Say You Love Me 
2. D’ija - “Awww” 
3. Jaywon - “Tana Wole”
4. Davido ft. Uhuru x DJ Buckz - “The Sound”{Nigeria+S. Africa}
5. Vanessa Mdee ft. K.O. - “Nobody But Me” {Tanzania + }
6. Skales - "I am for Real" 
7. Orezi and Davido - “Shuperu”
8. Seyi Shay - “Jangilova”
9. Yemi Alade - “Johnny”
10. Tiwa Savage - My Darlin'    
11. Adekunle Gold - Sade 
12. Rayce - For You 
13. Rayce - Tetela  
14. Mr. Flavour ft. Chidinma - “Ololufe”
15. Zahara - Limbisa {South Africa}
16. Tolu ft. Don Jazzy - My Lover 
17. Elani - Nikupende (Lyric Video) {Kenya} 
18. Waje - Coco Baby ft. Diamond Platnumz {Nigeria + Tanzania}
19. Avril - Nikimuona {Kenya}
20. Charass - Coco Butter [Remix] ft. Davido x Phyno 
21. Alicios - Posa ya Bolingo (Lingala Love) {DRC}
22. Harrysong - I'm In Love [Remix] ft. Olamide
23. Bisa Kdei - I Love You {Ghana}
24. DeeVS ft. Bisa Kdei - Yebeko 
25. Elani - Kookoo {Kenya}


NOTE
See also Zahara's Loliwe; and see how she explains the meaning of the song. The literal meaning of the word is “The Train”. Though it came out in 2011, I mention it here for the special poignancy and richness of its allusions. Loliwe is Zahara's metaphor for the deep longing for a father, a loved one, who went away in search of greener pastures. A father who went away and, it seems, isn’t ever coming back -- because trains from the big towns arrive predictably at the local station and disappoint.

A Thought: 13 ~ Body Text

We speak in distinct, culturally mediated languages. Through a given language we speak to others with whom we share a culture, and ipso facto the very same language that we each speak through. Ordinarily, therefore, individuals do not have their own languages which no one else has mediated codes for. Of course, communication with others outside the boundaries of our own language happens, but requires translators, or the mutual learning of each others' language(s) -- or the prolonged evolution of a lingua franca. 

Certain pathologies, or speeches 'under the influence' of some kind of substance (or life-event), may provoke displays of idiosyncratic language -- which are for that reason generally termed incoherent. No one else understands them, though the more empathetic ones among us -- or researchers in the relevant fields -- may try to decipher the incoherence. 

Gibberish falls in this category, though it is certainly the way infants genetically and culturally auto-program their brains to 'proactively' engage in a language -- not of their own choosing -- through proper speech. Speech is voice-bound text. And here it is worth reminding ourselves that we can (if sufficiently keen or "immersed" enough) usually tell a specific individual's voice apart, not from the general voice of the culture in which it is typically lodged, but from most others within the culture.

It follows, I think, that there's nothing like body language inside a culture, only body texts. As a concept, then, 'body language' is a huge misnomer. Admittedly, though, it is already a very sticky meme. As to whether or not the concept of sign language is likewise a misnomer requires, for me, further reflection on, and understanding of, its 'grammar' and geographic/cultural specificities, if any.

Implicit from the arguments just made is that body texts are individual renditions, or alternatives to -- or even mis-transmissions of -- the commonly understood (and practiced) verbal language. In order to be meaningful, gesticulated messages, like verbal messages, must first be (must have been) culturally mediated in the first place, and thus standardized -- while permitting certain, or unanticipated, divergences to live and even thrive. 

In "Say My Name", Upbeat Shilole and Barnaba Confoundingly Veer to the Dark Side of Life

More often than not, one doesn't quite clearly hear the words of a song, even when sung in a language one generally understands. Speakers of certain (perhaps all) languages do have a knack, or even penchant, for cryptic word-craft -- and a patience with all that. I think Swahili is certainly one such. 

And I think that no one engaged in creative writing, and no lover of texts of any kind, should complain when on the receiving end of someone else's artistic burst -- of creativity (and all the crypticism that goes with it) -- or when confronted with textual intricacies of form, content or meaning. I say all this after having drafted the second paragraph below (which remains as initially written) earlier this night (some four hours ago), but before I got a hold of the written lyrics (click on the link below for access) for the very first time. 

I sought the lyrics in the effort to make more concrete sense of my own draft in the light of the light emanating from the singers' written words, and in particular Shilole's; and of the singers' possible intent, in contrast to my own initial reactions (spanning a number of weeks and culminating in the draft), merely to the beauty of the un-examined sounds (vocal and instrumental) and of visual images spinning out of the 3:19-minute video.

So here is what I initially wrote: Say My Name was a stunner when it first appeared. It was a bolt from the blue, with its supremely optimistic beat and high-energy performance delivered by both Shilole and Barnaba. Neither of the artistes was a household name outside Tanzania, as far as I could tell. And here they were, doing it without an iota of bashfulness or self-doubt. The song is hot. Shilole is hotter -- her singing, mostly in Swahili, poesy itself. It's all a firestorm of sorts: enjoyable, uplifting. Above all, "inatuchochea".

The cryptic slant of the song reveals itself now, upon examining the written words at far less than the speed of sound. There is a 'bitterness' you don't quite pick in the singing, but which is self-evident, indeed explicit, in the stationary words. I'm surprised by not having caught it before. 

And yet one can imagine how someone in a "great escape" from existential or psychological danger or long "confinement" (from Igunga in this case) can display, at once, both exhilaration and a sarcasm of -- a thumbing of the nose by -- the finally free. That, I think now, is what the singers were trying to project. I think that Dar Society, steeped in Swahili culture, got it the very first time. No matter.

Here below are snippets of the lyrics which inform what I have just said, and which correct first impressions:

"Igunga mpaka Jo'burg
Kweli nime sota.
Shida nlizopata
Kamwe sitaki kukumbuka."
............................
"Say my name ni Shishi,
Mwanamke mbishi,
Nazijua dhiki
Vikaragosi hamnitishi."
............................
"Najua unaniombea mabayaaaaa
Si ulijua ntayumbaaaaa
Wa kuzuia ni molaaaa"
............................
"Kaka mbona husomeki.
Hush, hubebeki."
............................

NOTE: Sure, Shishi, whose name must be mentioned, is that very Shilole!

READ: Say My Name Lyrics (In Swahili)

A Thought: 12 ~ Music Addiction

We humans can and do get drunk on all sorts of substances and things, which we build a deep affinity to. It all just depends on who and where you are -- and what point in your life your life happens to be at. You can even get addicted to a kind of music. 

Such addiction occurs at various levels (any and all of which may intersect): Global, national, sub-national, communal, group, individual. At higher and higher levels it inserts itself in more and deeply cultural distinctions. And these distinctions may in turn confound or be confounded by the social orders. 

The main point I wanted to make here, though, is that people do get addicted to all kinds of music -- and turned off by all sorts as well. And it is possible for such addiction to shift with time from one genre to another, one end to the other. Wild birds sing too, but each species seems stuck to its own genre -- as to its own feathers. The first is a pity, the second seems glorious (though not for us). We prefer made up or spun threads and, depending on taste, personally coordinated designs and colors -- where mass offerings give us only the basics, or templates to tweak. 

There are people who seem too dour or too serious and too self-absorbed to sing, or ever dance -- which is hard in any case to do alone in public, or before certain publics. We would certainly think they'd lost control of their senses and gone sort of mad, if they were suddenly and dramatically to do so; let alone what they would themselves think. But perhaps we would be wrong. You don't know what tunes and beats light up their hearts and their spirits in private -- and when they're bathing. You know what gladdens yours.

POLITICS, URBAN DESIGN AND MUSIC: To Love or Not to Love Lagos ~ Singer Olamide's Take

In a song published on January 9, 2016 (and which has 1,666,176 YouTube hits right now), Baddo sings a heartfelt love song for his 'hometown', the great city of Lagos. So, what kind of city is this that he so genuinely loves, and invites us all to? 

Lagos is big, big-time. It is vibrant, displaying what some would say is organized chaos [To those who fully understand the concept, incidentally, chaos is not the dirty word it may appear to be]. Inward-looking though it is -- as are Addis, Cairo, Cape Town, Dar-Es-Salaam, Johannesburg and Kinshasa -- it is Africa's epicentre of culture [art, apparel, film, language (pidgin), literature, music and identity] and SM entrepreneurship -- not to mention loud and to-the-hilt living.

And it has a huge reservoir of self-confidence for all that. It has no qualms about doing things its way, but the impression one gets is that the average citizen on the street feels let down by the "authorities". 

Lagos City, observes Tomisin (2016), is currently home to some 20 million Lagosians. That, incidentally, is just under half of Kenya's population, and over half of Uganda's. Its metropolitan areas have a population density of over 20,000 per square mile. Indeed, Tomisin argues, Lagos remains Nigeria's "centre of excellence". But he also shares with us the grim images painted by one artist/designer (Olalekan Jeyifous) of a future Lagos overwhelmed by teetering 'skyscraper' shanties, ever-present rust, decay, structural fragility, ugliness -- and even angst (see more images, depicting/predicting extreme visual pollution, here).

But this pessimistic picture is not reflected in Monty Mumford's 2014 article titled "Booming Lagos, Smart City". He argues there that while Lagos faces 'epic challenges' in infrastructural development (especially transportation), there are reasons to have faith in the future. Specifically, the Eko Atlantic project will be key to the city's "regeneration". But the reality is that the project is designed with the rich at the centre of attention, not the poor. The 12 million additional residents Lagos is expected to absorb in the not-too-distant future are not going to make matters easier by any stretch of the imagination.

In Vision 2015-2030, Orlean Invest is also optimistic that the Eko Atlantic Project is "the future economic hub of Lagos City as well as Nigeria". But this optimism is counter-intuitive to Mumford's other observation that the poorest in Lagos "live in fetid floating slums".

In a 2014 article in the NYT titled "What Makes Lagos a Model City", Prof. Seth Kaplan of Johns Hopkins University observed that "Lagos, which until recently was known as one of the world's most difficult cities to govern, seems to have turned a corner." He added:

"Even though it remains a slum-ridden and largely impoverished metropolis... it  [Lagos] has seen steady improvement in its governance for over a decade [since 1999]. The government has enhanced public transportation, cleaned up streets, upgraded the business environment and bettered the lives of its inhabitants."

And he concluded:

"So Nigeria, of all places, may be pointing the way to a strategy by which fragile states might begin to succeed: Devolve more power to cities from their corrupt and overcentralized national governments".

This positive prognosis was more recently echoed in a 2016 article by Francesca Perry and Chris Michael.

READ: Francesca Perry and Chris Michael "How is Lagos Changing? Share Your Stories".

ALSO READ: Open City Lagos

I think that Baddo Olamide, a native of Lagos State, speaks with song to this generally positive trend; and more specifically to what it has wrought already in concrete ways. He has been witness to all that with his own artiste's eye and as a regular resident of the city.  

So, in his I Love Lagos lyrics, he sings and makes certain categorical declarations and retorts. In the process, he makes point-by-point rebuttal of Jeyifous's sickly vision:

"...Oyingbo ekolowa oyinbo
Oyingbo why you speaking oyinbo

Oyingbo you dey lagos to oyingbo

If i carry you go banana

My guy you go love lagos

You go love lagos"


He mentions other places, people and things, too, he "could carry you go", and you would love Lagos: Elegushi, Police, Ikedja, Badagri, Ikorodi, Epe, VGC. And there's "oh no hustle", he claims, when you ride through his city. So, indeed, your love would only grow after all these experiences that he suggests we should have. 

The sung lyrics are even more lyrical than the written, I find. That's the power of good sound and voice. Perhaps that is because, as I keep telling my students, the ear is more generous than the eye. The singer, resting his case, concludes after all this:

"You cannot deny you no see
You go love Lagos oh"



Here below is the video. It is has very optimistic and upbeat images (of various slices of Lagos) and aurally matching sounds. The chorus is lovely. This is the best music video about an African city that I've heard. It is sung with unquestioning and even protective/ possessive love and passion. The sites(sights) and sounds we see and hear are so infectiously evocative of a living city evolving toward the dreams inside the chronicler's/troubadour's (i.e. Baddo's) head -- and inside all of the dwellers' heads. Yambo says, "Love it all":


Watch Olamide's "I Love Lagos" Video

CLICK: I Love Lagos Lyrics

CSO103 - Introduction to Comparative Sociology, Updated Partial Course Outline and Reading List

UNIVERSITY OF NAIROBI

INTRODUCTION TO COMPARATIVE SOCIOLOGY ~ CSO 103.

[Partial Course Outline and Reading List, Updated in November 2016]

PROF. MAURI YAMBO

INTRODUCTION

CSO 103 is a first year course designed to introduce students to aspects of social structure common to all societies. The idea is to highlight concepts which serve as templates for a comparative or cross-cultural study of selected societies in today’s world.

CLICK HERE To Read More About The COURSE OUTLINE. 

CLICK HERE To Go To The READING LIST

APPENDIX

1. LECTURE NOTES:
1.1. Yambo, Mauri (2012) “Components of Social Control” (Topic 3)
http://mauriyambo.blogspot.co.ke/2012/05/components-of-social-control.html

1.2. Yambo, Mauri (2016) “Topic 4: Social Differentiation, Stratification and Class”
http://mauriyambo.blogspot.co.ke/2016/03/social-differentiation-stratification.html?q=topic+4

2. FINAL EXAMINATION PAPERS IN CSO 103:
2.1. Past Final Examination Papers (Batch 1):  http://mauriyambo.blogspot.co.ke/2013/04/cso103-introduction-to-comparative.html?q=cso+103

Nation and Culture

A nation always has a culture, so none is really lost. The question is: how much of that is purely, authentically, its own; or truly someone else's -- or no one's? Or, to ask a different question: what, really, is a nation, and why isn't it a component, rather than the carrier, of culture? 

We'll forever be caught up in a cultural spiral, I think -- in trending states of consciousness worthy of deep thinking: from local to differentiated to hybrid to global to, perhaps, some sort of new local and new now. Once upon a time we humans had only one culture, which was, so to speak, at once local and global and unprecedented. A given. Nay, universal.


READ: The San of the Kalahari

ALSO READ: Foragers to First Peoples: The Kalahari San Today

Mutations

Mutations are
The culturally-framed,
Problem-induced
Inventions, or
Deviations,
Of the genetic
Universe.

















Note: 'Mutation' is a meme. Culture is a meme-cluster, But the two don't/shouldn't drive the thinker into a conceptual loop/pool.

MUSIC: Nack Am Has the Sounds With Which OritseFemi Opens 2016, For All of Us

I recently made allusion to Nack Am in my comments on Patoranking's Make Am. I see that the video has, at last, appeared. It wasn't a long wait, after all. And what soulful and overcoming tunes, here! A renaissance of a kind to ears that remember, is what I'd like to say just now about Nack Am.

Oristefemi is a Truhero of Africa's aural culture -- an indefatigable sound conquistador.


Watch it!

MUSIC: Patoranking's Song, "Make Am", Has a Distinctive Eastern-Central African Tune

Seriously, I detect an Eastern-Central African 'flava' or turn of melodic phrase(ology), in Patoranking's Make Am (thanks in great part to Ebonyi State Band, which accompanies him with so much passion). If you grew up, or have grown up, in the Great Lakes region (call that Great Lakes and Rivers), more specifically, you would know. And just moments ago (that's early last night already -- I must publish this piece soonest) I happened to be watching a video of Oritsefemi's Nack Am on MTV Base (though a subsequent search has yielded only this audio version online) and I'm saying, "Wait! That, too!" Oritsefemi's unique voice-asset is still coming through -- and he's an outstanding icon of African music today -- but there's ferment in the background which, if things go on like this, won't go away but only grow.

READ: Make Am ranks number 21 in #Africa'sTop40PopSongsOfTheYear2015

I'm beginning to wonder if Nigerian music isn't turning a corner and beginning to somehow "alter" -- that is, to add spice to its huge repertoire of sounds and instrumental 'play' -- in order to maintain its emphatic continental leadership and advantage in these matters. If that's it, so be it. Perhaps this 'altering' is a passing fad, or a 'rooted' tapping of something deep inside Nigeria's complex culture that's only now seeming to outsiders like me to be percolating to the surface. If  a tapping, it'll just go to show that Nigerian artistes can still do lots of permutations with stuff that's deeply inside what's, well, Nigeria's artistic weltanschauung. If a passing fad, then too bad, for that sound is going to be welling up and heard more and more, anyway, as artistes elsewhere on the continent innovate and improvise -- and mine 'suchlike' tunes and tones of possibility -- in order to stay confounding steps ahead of "each other".

We're still on Make Am, but I'd just like to say in passing that one of the most attention-grabbing songs out of Nigeria right now (certainly to me), and which I think is distinctly Nigerian and truly accomplished in its vocal heaves and turns -- the kind we other Africans will hear, perhaps in a supermarket or on radio, and quickly say "That's Nigerian" -- is KJV's Common Sense (forget the awkwardly hilarious 'bedroom' shenanigans which we may blame on the story-line, but which might in turn be blamed entirely on a portion of the lyrics). It's such a memorable song.

Now, about Make Am. There's that wonderful strumming of guitar strings -- which awakens old (older) memories, alright, as it repeats and repeats. The chorus is such a one as, blended with the strumming, one re-collects from a sentimental past. All pasts tend to veer toward the sentimental, anyway, if one didn't have a bad childhood or conflicted youth. And, of course, if one didn't, then all pasts are seemingly wrapped only in things one wants to occasionally remember -- things it doesn't hurt to look back with jaded eyes to -- if only in daydreams. Songs do help all that along.


Click to watch the video


The tune in Make Am is my tune. That's the first thing I really wanted to say, before everything else I've said. Really! Listen, and you'll know. The voice is without a doubt Patoranking's. I think Awilo Longomba, a dominant spirit of all that's good in living African musical culture, would agree with all this, too. But, of course, I don't speak for him; and have never met him in person. One day we will, I hope, have a chat where and why the Greater Congo, his country, stopped where it seemingly did. And where we go from there.

Perhaps I was just using Make Am as an opportunity, and an excuse, to say one or two other things I've been meaning to say, and been hearing as well, about the place of Nigeria in Africa's musical future. And then I detect this: What greater Africa's largely untapped musical wealth means for the future of Nigeria's own, and already vibrant, music!

PS: NOW TAKE A LISTEN TO: Longomba's Karolina

Music, Written Text and the Literate Mind

The literate mind is, I think, more charitable to (the frailties of) the spoken word, than to the written. This is perhaps because, in a great ironic twist, the spoken word has deep roots in the preliterate mind, which we have not quite lost.

The preliterate mind is by definition more aural than textual.

It is far easier to produce great music, than to write great text. And far easier to come upon fine music, than upon fine 'text' -- if you come to think about it.

Music so very often and so easily makes even banal words/lyrics soar into the poetic heavens.

Great literary or scientific text is incapable of dominating the airwaves, as music does. Such a text is not, alas, sexy enough for a 4:12-minute ecosystem.

And yet, for the literate (as for the closed) mind, great music -- in particular, of the popular variety -- when weighed against great scientific or creative literature (or the written word in general), simultaneously appears:

1. Less mainstream as a continual point of reference; and,
2. Even less consequential for important matters of day-to-day life -- a luxury lay society and culture can ill-afford.

But how ill-conceived is all that! How many insights have thus passed us by, and how many opportunities lost? 

Music (Nigeria): "Sisi Jojo" by CJ Mama ft. Dwana

Sisi Jojo, a 'collabo' by CJ Mama and Dwana, is a music video released in 2015. It is a gift of micro-'set-pieces' and tropical sounds all fused into one. 

The visuals are varied but consistent with a nuanced mix of living color and vibrant African (Naija) culture. 

Though I once upon a (recent) time believed that the video degraded the music, I want to emphasize that the whole, as the saying goes, is greater than the parts in Sisi Jojo (as in much of the music that I come upon these days). It's all very moving and totally heart-warming. 

The audio is up-, up-, up-beat. The beat that unifies the audio and the visual ebbs and flows, as the subtle narrative unfolds and reveals itself. 

The whole thing is very danceable; dance, that is, without obligations, and as the spirit moves one to dance.

Upon seeing and hearing this piece, those in the diaspora will, I fear, become severely and inconsolably homesick.
Here, click to play the video -- and, all of you,  mji-enjoy! 

On Dawkins' Notion of Memes as the Emergent Drivers of Human Evolution

In his book, The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins, who was born in Nairobi, Kenya, argues that culture represents a Darwinian struggle among memes. He sees a meme not as a mind-virus but as "a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation,” just as a gene is a unit of biological transmission. That is to say, memes replicate through imitation, and some are more successful at this than others. So Darwin’s concept of genetic (natural) selection is replicated in, and eventually is to be surpassed by, Dawkins’ idea of memetic selection: “Cultural transmission is analogous to genetic transmission...[and] can give rise to a form of evolution” (but see note 1 below, in which Susan Blackmore makes a case for The Third Replicator).

Genes are domiciled in the gene pool, which, broadly speaking, is the biosphere – itself a crucial component of nature (bio-geosphere) as such. Conversely, memes are domiciled in the “meme pool”, which, broadly speaking, is the ideosphere – or culture. I broadly define culture here to include rules, values, symbols of all kinds, artistic endeavours, scientific and other ideas (including human ingenuity and inventiveness), rituals and practices of all sorts, artefacts (as both the basis and outcome of practices), inventions, technology (as a fusion of knowledge, know-how, software, hardware, orgware and practices of all sorts), memories of the past as well as visions of the future, and a widening range of structures and systems developed in the course of social life. There are several 'classical' definitions of culture, such as Geertz's and Taylor's, which mine has benefited from -- and which mine will hopefully be seen to add value to.

Dawkins suggests that the crucial role that genes, being replicators, play in biological evolution will be increasingly matched by the role played by memes in cultural evolution – based on the principle (or law) that “all life evolves by the differential survival of replicating entities.” Eventually, he implies, memes will be more crucial to human survival and indeed evolution than the genes have hitherto been. In other words, the cultural environment, the meme pool in which memes thrive and indeed evolve, rather than the biosphere as such, may eventually be the primary catalyst even of genetic-biological evolution as we have understood it -- and even if such catalysis comes about via the highly technical, meme-driven, tweaking of the physical environment, or of its actual or likely consequences if unmediated, over extended Time.

That is to say, if the “old gene-selected evolution, by making brains, provided the ‘soup’ in which the first meme arose,” then the meme-selected evolution, by making culture – through the dialectical interface of the brain (human thought and conscious practice) and not just the biosphere but the geosphere as well -- is providing the ‘soup’ (the cultural ‘soup’) in which the meme will replace the gene as the dominant, speedier, force in the biological evolutionary process.

One piece of undeniable evidence of meme-induced genetic evolution -- evidence of which each non-black human is a breathing example -- is natural skin colour? Variation in skin colour, the basis of the lay individual's idea of racial difference, began only as a result of human migration and adaptation to climates, "ages" (such as the series of documented ice ages) and regions far from the origin of humankind in Africa (read more here). Human (ex-African) survival in those other 'climes' was due to adaptation, but the point being made by Dawkins and others (such as Laland, Odlin-Smee and Myles) -- and to which I subscribe -- is that adaptation itself was possible only because of the array of memes (that is, ideas and broader clusters of culture-items) which humans brought along with them or devised along the way and through time (for more on my take on human migration with reference to Dr. Alice Roberts' documentary titled "The Incredible Human Journey", click on this link, or this).

Among the most important, and typically overlapping or mutually reinforcing, memes must surely have been: (a) the long-term development and coordinated use of language (following the mutation associated with the language gene) for survival and unprecedented capacities for collective strategy, conquest and advancement, (b) body cover (animal skins and furs to begin with) consciously crafted to help outlast the long wintry seasons (read more here), (c) the shoe meme, (d) weapons (including projectiles) and body armour of all kinds, (e) built shelters and other safe-haven spaces, (f) utensils and tools for a multiplicity of purposes, (g) an evolving chain of ontological, governance and management ideas, (h) the conquest of fire, (i) transportation modes adapted to terrains come upon over time, and (j) changing ideas about diet.

All forms of cross-breeding (of dogs, horses and cattle, for example), are examples of meme-based evolutionary trending. Except, of course, that such trending is possible only if the problematics of sterility, deformity, pathology, retardation, runaway or cancerous growth, and/or other congenital dead-ends are overcome and healthy intergenerational replication assured. Other potential examples of genetic (re)engineering or preservation driven by memes include the lab-enabled production of GM foods or other substances; the building of normative, legal and physical sanctuaries for species endangered by the consequences of our own intended or unintended decisions, or by long-term ecological change; and artificial insemination (as is becoming increasingly necessary for giant pandas).

In articulating his ideas about memes, and about the connection between memes and genes, Dawkins has of course benefited immensely from the thoughts of Aaron Lynch and Douglas Hofstader. In addition, his conversation relating memes to culture or the ideosphere must be seen in the context of his precursors’ own conceptualizations of the ideosphere and the noosphere, for example; and of how these impact the geosphere. Important among these precursors are: Henri Bergson (1859-1941), Vladimir Vernadsky (1863-1945), Edouard Le Roy (1870-1954), and Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955). More recent writers are of course picking up from them.

Certain other questions, related or unrelated to the above conversation, obviously need to be asked about meme-driven evolution. Let me ask a few:

1. Didn’t someone say two or so decades ago that our little toe is doomed to extinction due to the ‘invention’ of shoes; that is, due to the continued dominance of the shoe meme at our feet? If that were doubly true, would it be an example of the sort of culture- or meme-induced biological evolution that is being suggested? And aren’t there similar examples already? [But some people are fighting back against that evolutionary menace, as you will read here]
2. Would life after the conscious extinction of a pathology such as small pox or, hopefully, sickle cell anaemia be a tell-tale form of evolution – whose evolution? What about the eradication of blindness, or the meme-assisted growth of 3^rd to nth generation teeth? [In both cases, Smith (1993) would argue, it is human evolution. The article by Young et al (2005), focusing on differential susceptibility to hypertension, is relevant here -- certainly in a back-handed way]
3. Will not the long-term, technology-intensive, survival over many millennia of human voyagers through otherwise unrelentingly hostile outer space involve a form of meme-impacted evolution that mirrors what we have seen with human migration on earth? Or will the evolutionary ‘switch’ inside the artificial environments (or constructed 'niches') have to involve something more drastic and more sudden – such as a new, spider-like, human skeleton, as has already been predicted? In which case, might the spiders in our midst be marooned (‘reverse’) aliens? [Laland, Odling-Smee and Myles (2010) have given a very strong and direct answer to the question about the influence of meme-inspired niches on genetic change  (see note 3 at the bottom of this article; Lehman (2007) also interrogates the evolutionary effects of "niche construction" in an interesting way, though not quite with the focus of attention called for by this question]
4. Will it be correct, and if so proper, to see the genetic modifications and hybridities likely to result from future scientific work as incremental acts of creation, so long as the results of those acts meet the set criteria for high and long-term memetic-genetic survival and evolution, namely: longevity, fecundity (or speed of replication) and copying-fidelity  (Dawkins, 1989: 17, 194), as well as a conquering devotion to the future (what Lynch calls "motivational advantage"), broad acceptance by the general public (Lynch calls this "cognitive advantage"), and the elimination of all threats (in Lynch's words, "sabotaging the competition") that stand in the way of meeting the set criteria?(see Lynch, 1996; read Paul Marsden's review of Lynch's book, Thought Contagion).

Notes: 1. Here is is an account of Susan Blackmore's variation on the above theme, attributing a new form of evolution to digital information. In an article in The New York Times of August 10, 2010, Susan Blackmore herself "conversed" about the existence of a third replicator -- the teme (the technological meme), a concept which, unlike Dawkins' meme, refers to "digital information stored, copied, varied and selected by machines" -- presumably machines made by humans and not machines (although machines making machines can already be imagined and attempted, by humans)

          2. My article, titled "Toward a Theory of the Memetic Sphere", is relevant to the present conversation, and to the notion of the third replicator (which I did not mention).         

          3. Laland, Odling-Smee and Mlyes (2010) point out as follows: "...niche construction can modify selection,...can allow the persistence of organisms in inhospitable environmental conditions that could otherwise lead to their extinction, and be favoured even when costly because of the benefits that will accrue to distant descendants. However, mathematical models reveal that niche construction due to cultural processes can be even more potent than niche construction due to other (gene-based) non-cultural processes, and they show that cultural niche construction can modify selection on human genes, with resulting effects on evolutionary outcomes. Indeed, human niche construction is informed by a uniquely potent and cumulative cultural knowledge base."
          4.  I first came across John Maynard Smith's book titled The Theory of Evolution, which was published in 1993, only this morning (May 12, 2012), as I browsed in the Jomo Kenyatta Memorial Library at the University of Nairobi. Based on my quick reading, especially of the last chapter, I note that Smith, like Dawkins, had already made a number of the key points that I make above. However, some of the important ones that I make do not seem to explicitly feature in Smith's book; for example, the shoe meme, the memetic basis for human 'racial' groups, the 'language gene' (on page 343 of the book he remarks that don't know "how ancient speech is", but they have since come to know).
    In particular, I should reiterate here what I have been meaning to since May 2, I should underscore here the meme that, I think, is of the greatest importance (second only to language as a whole) to human spread, survival and evolution across the planet's colder surfaces and across time -- a meme far greater than the shoe meme or the housing meme, or even the genetic resistance to infectious diseases which Smith (1993: 330), I note belatedly, so strongly emphasizes -- this is the clothing meme. The invention and progressive refinement of clothing -- a concept I use here as an umbrella term for all forms of warm and dry all-body cover against the elements, in particular extremely cold weathers or climates -- I believe, is at the root of human conquest of the earth; just as it will be of our conquest of other earth-like planets.
    Smith (1993: 343?) remarks that "Evolution tends to adapt the nature of animals to their environments. In history, man has adapted his environment to his nature." However, the clothing meme reveals something significantly more subtle. It does not exemplify the conscious adapting of the natural environment to human nature. Instead, it is (let me say it clumsily) a massively consequential 'sleight of hand' -- a 'magical' sort of simulation or mimicry (of animal nature, say mammoth, wolf, reindeer, polar bear or bison), an illusionist's 'going under the skin'  -- which represents, and whose consequences are, nothing less than the adaptation, at once virtual and contrived/artificial and real, of human nature to the natural environment.
         5.  Additional material inserted on April 20, 22, 27, 28, 2012; May 1, 2, 12, 2012.
                       

Introduction to Tourism: CAT

UNIVERSITY OF NAIROBI
CTO 101: INTRODUCTION TO TOURISM (Evening and Day)
CTM 103: INTRODUCTION TO TOURISM (Utalii)

SEMESTER: October 2010 – February 2011

CAT QUESTIONS [Released: 06/11/2010 ]

ANSWER ONLY ONE QUESTION

1.(a) Supporting your answer with persuasive evidence, and citing
relevant sources, critically discuss the view that tourism is the
world’s largest industry.

(b) Critically discuss the differences between the following pairs of
words, providing relevant examples to show your understanding:
-- Domestic Tourism and National Tourism
-- Inbound Tourism and Outbound Tourism

2. Compare the following factors, showing how they respectively
influence at least five selected aspects of Kenyan society
and/or culture to-day:
(a) Tourism
(b) Mass media.

DEADLINES FOR SUBMISSION:
CTO 101 (Evening) = Saturday 27th November 2010, strictly from 10.30 am – 11.15 a.m.
CTM 103 (Utali) = Thursday 25th November 2010, strictly at 5.30 pm.
CTO 101 (Day) = Thursday 25th November 2010, strictly at 11.00 a.m.

NOTE: 1. I prefer word-processed answers. Expected length of each CAT submission:
5 to 8 typed, double-spaced pages only.
2. Additional marks will be awarded for answers which display originality of thought, as well as critical thinking. Marks will be deducted for Xeroxing published or other works, and for lack of seriousness (i.e. for sketchy, “bullet-riddled” and/regurgitated lecture notes)
3. Your answer should clearly demonstrate, through the citation of relevant texts, that you have engaged in noteworthy library reading for this CAT.

The Three-Legged Stool of Antiquity

Heaven's the abode of Threeness, and of Threeness in Oneness. That is to say, of the Trinity

Geometry and culture mirror this threeness, in which they see, with an inner eye unconstrained by our actual experiences of physical Nature, a liberating logic of ascendant presence.

Hence the triangle as such -- from which arise so many constructs of the mind and habit -- but, above all, the three-legged stool of antiquity, which is in our cultural DNA. The three-dimensional, or triangulated, gaze is the conflation of geometry and perception without which there is neither depth nor wholesomeness, and no accuracy in the gauging of height or distance or circumstance.

It seems to me that Nature -- pure, two-legged and four-legged Nature -- finds threeness, in particular three-legged motion, ugly and unwarranted; ungainly in its inherent inefficiency. Contrary to its nature.

Culture, the true contrarian here, finds three-leggedness per se a necessary, periodic detour from Nature's settled purposes that so overwhelm the human gaze from day to day. A detour and even a destination. It, three-leggedness, is not just a stance (and standpoint) but a source of great stability and reassurance (as in the stool, and in second opinions). In marriage, the first child (together with all the children that may follow) is the family's third leg, the sign that the woman and even wife is become a mother -- even of the nation. So is the walking stick a third leg, for the elderly and the infirm. We encounter the three-leg motif in the cooking stones of the village fire and the hearth.

But, as in the love triangle, threeness is also an affirmation of ever-present chaos, and its potentialities.

As for the inherent expectation of motion where ever there are legs, culture offers a simple solution. It gives threeness wheels, in return for an absence of, or quasi-arthritic, limb motion.