Ceddo End Title. Manu Dibango. 1977. Fiesta.

Because it’s easier for us to carry images associated with the history of a particular music with us in our heads than it is the memory of that music itself, I have a picture of the master vibraphonist disrupting what had heretofore been my mind’s picture of twentieth century African music: Fela, stripped to a pair of white athletic shorts, his powerful athlete’s physique dominating the photographic composition, the metallic brilliance of his saxophone the welcoming nodal point for the eye. A 1977 film about Ceddo resistance to Middle Eastern religious dominance, specifically Islamic, in pre-colonial Senegal, Manu Dibango’s end music relates the unsettling transitional mood of historical inevitability. Born in 1933 in  Doula, the economic capital of Cameroon, to parents of mixed ethnicities, Dibango received a European education beginning when he was fifteen; the Wolof word for “outsiders” is Ceddo. In the film, a Senegalese village is converted to Islam by force following the kidnapping of a princess whose father has been murdered by an Imam and his followers. By film’s end, the liberated princess has avenged her father’s murder and led the Ceddo in revolt against their lslamic usurpers. We live in an age divided on one side by a young generation transfixed by the romanticization of resistance to colonial powers and on the other side by an older generation who sees only that romanticization’s blinding glare. Somewhere between the divide, the smoke of history wafts. Ceddo’s exit music begins quietly, Dibango’s tentative, unaccompanied vibes notes sneaking into the consciousness with a minimum of commentary. As the intro proceeds, a rhythmic pattern is established and picked up by bass, drums, and guitar. The music begins speaking, logically, seductively. What begins as the conclusion of a nineteen seventies cinematic experience becomes for a contemporary listener the entry point to Dibango’s imagination, the sensual realization of his finely tuned ear. A new dimension  to Ceddo’s end theme opens when, toward its fade out, hand percussion—probably a conga drum—is brought in, making the connection to human physicality direct, the sensual machine of humanity nudging us, at an accelerated tempo, towards equilibrium. In our current century it’s in this state of cool detachment that recorded personalities from both near and distant pasts work their influence upon the listener’s imagination, hoping for a minute integration with living reality. Contemporary record collectors, one facet of today’s outsider majority population, are often so sympathetic in their listening habits that it’s impossible for them not to affect their immediate social environment under the influence of a vital historical performance. We are an outsider cult in a sustained search for renewable vitality. From the 2005 Luaka Bop compilation CD World Psychedelic Classics, Vol 3: Love’s A Real Thing