230 african appropriations
his songs, which they knew by heart, I had the feeling they were also a bit
proud of how far Bongo flava, the genre of Tanzanian pop music Mzungu
Kichaa subscribes to, had traveled that night. In an interview I conducted
ea rl ier t hat day, M zung u K ichaa told me t hat “ in ter ms of ident it y,” he felt
pretty much like a “mixed-race person.” Elsewhere he describes himself as
“the personification of indifference towards racism, stereotypes and the
belief of ‘otherness.’”^1 The enthusiastic response of his mixed audience
that night indicates that his cosmopolitan attitude and the resulting musi-
cal output are met with approval.
Mzungu Kichaa is not the only “crazy white man” currently perform-
ing African popular music in and out of the continent. Equally prolific
are W hite Nigerian, a Nigerian national with Levantine roots whose ta-
gline reads “arrogantly Nigerian,” and the German-Namibian EES, who
performs Nam flava, Namibian pop music with a Kwaito influence from
South Africa. In this chapter, I propose to view the artistic output of the
three musicians within the framework of cosmopolitanism. According to
Ulf Hannerz (1996: 103), cosmopolitanism “is first of all an orientation,
a willingness to engage with the other” that “entails an intellectual and
aesthetic openness toward divergent cultural experiences.” The concept
is rooted in Greek political philosophy; cosmopolitanism was thought of
as paradoxical and reflected “skepticism toward custom and tradition,” as
Kwame Anthony Appiah (2007: xiv) explains. Unlike the ordinary citizen
in Greek civilization, who owed loyalty to the polis, or “city-state,” he be-
longed to, the “cosmopolite” was conceptualized as a “citizen of the world.”
Theories of cosmopolitanism are manifold and have developed along dif-
ferent lines of thinking. Among the six perspectives Steven Vertovec and
Robin Cohen outline in their introduction to Conceiving Cosmopolitanism
(2002), four are more or less relevant for the purposes of this chapter.
In reference to the “crazy white men” whose works and lives I intend to
discuss, it makes sense to conceive of cosmopolitanism as (1) “a kind of
philosophy or world-view,” (2) “a political project for recognizing mul-
tiple identities,” (3) “an attitudinal or dispositional orientation,” and (4) “a
mode of practice or competence.” Subscribing to the last perspective, Ian
Woodward and Zlatko Skrbis (2012) suggest the need for empirical studies
that look out for “the performative, situational and accomplished dimen-
sions of being cosmopolitan.” However, despite advocating a performa-