Music, Patronage, and Oil Capitalism in Equatorial Guinea

Abstract

Amid increasing interest in the impact of capitalism on music (in both the global south and north), some scholars have turned their attention to theorizing noncommodified music and musical labor. These writers convey that these diverse music economies should not be conceptualized as precapitalist, premodern, or subsumed by capitalism; instead, they constitute alternative, hybrid, and heterogeneous socioeconomies that may be central to the lives of whole communities. This chapter adds a neglected focus on how such diverse socioeconomies of music can be characterized by oppressive social relations. It develops this argument through an ethnography of music in Equatorial Guinea, informed by Africanist literature that stresses the longue durée of African social and political formations. Extending Hall’s concept of articulation, the chapter portrays a longstanding patronage-based, noncapitalist music economy that has recently been exacerbated by the Equatoguinean state elite’s involvement in petrocapitalism, with the effect that the asymmetrical relations between musicians and patrons have become more unequal and violent as patrons draw unprecedented economic and political power from the accumulation of oil rents. At stake is the need to analyze the articulation between musical patronage and petrocapitalism while acknowledging the autonomy of patronage. Musical patronage is not a noncommodified music economy inserted within or permitted by capitalism but one that has endured into the contemporary period and that has been deepened by the state’s embrace of oil capitalism. Overall, it is argued, tracing the articulation between the social, the economic, and the political must be a central concern when theorizing music’s diverse socioeconomies.