Dislocations and sebene, two related musical concepts investigates how music plays a role in reshaping or narrating African histories in a way that resists colonial narratives and methods. Both ideas challenge established cartographic and historiographical methods by, on the one hand, producing new territories of stories that counter the assertions of colonial maps and, on the other, sidestepping the concept of chronophage or the ‘eating of time’, which is the basis of much western historiography. 

Chimurenga borrows these two ideas from Congolese sound culture, charting their sounds’ presence in improvisatory traditions across the Black world. The sebene is a musical mode popularized by Luambo Franco, where the lead guitar plays rhythmic phrases that continually return with variations. These variations are so slight that they are perceptible only by dancing bodies. In this session, the cyclical and circular sebene are used as a narrative device to express stories that transcend mere storytelling, stories that cannot be told by one person or from one place.

Dislocation, too, represents a mode of circulation that destabilizes the primacy of origin or ‘the original’ in favour of ‘the version’. It is theorized in the streets of Kinshasa and in the stories of Amos Tutuola as ‘splintering’, but in the dancehalls of Kingston it is institutionalized as ‘versioning’. Here, the body exists, or is recognized, only through its dispersed parts. In other words, one is always plural. Dislocation allows the fragmentation or division or mutation of any great body, song or story, across time and space to be tracked; every iteration floats far and away from the mothership but never fully breaks up, carrying creators’ surnames across generations like a badge of (dis)honour.