258 african appropriations
musicians perform both reflexive and banal kinds of cosmopolitanism.
They are frequent travelers and border crossers. They enjoy “cosmopoli-
tan opportunities in a variety of settings,” which is the rather banal face
of their transnational lifestyle. Their Facebook pages carry many pho-
tos showing them in different locations across the globe. For Mzungu
Kichaa, the iconography of travel seems to be of particular importance.
Many photos capture him in transit: at airports, about to board a plane
or hav ing just arrived. These testimonies of bana l forms of cosmopolitan-
ism, however, should not prevent us from acknowledging the “inclusive
ethical practices” that are at the heart of their individual ventures: their
engagement w it h musica l, l i ng u ist ic a nd c u lt u ra l reg isters convent iona l ly
considered different from their own (“a white boy trying to do some-
thing totally black,” as one of EES’s Namibian colleagues put it). In fact,
Mzungu Kichaa’s frequent travels and EES’s sojourning in Europe are
both a consequence and an indicator of their dedication to African mu-
sic. For economic reasons, they need to leave the continent to continue
with music making. Applying Woodward and Skrbis’s nomenclature too
strictly, though, and calling their performances a “reflexive form of cosmo-
politanism,” would fall short of accounting for the visceral and affective
dimensions of their ventures. This is not to say that they do not reflect
on what they are doing, but their performances touch upon and express
something that lies beyond the cognitive. W hat I find in them is not just
“a positive attitude towards difference” (R ibeiro 2001: 2842) but rather a
desire to blend into the other that goes far beyond staged performances
and strategic maneuvers, and pervades their whole lives. Their crossing
of cultural boundaries is a special case of appropriation in which copying
means becoming a kind of permanent mimesis—but actually, no longer
mimesis, as the copy turns into an original, and the difference between
original and copy may cease to exist.