On musical patronage: popular music, oil capitalism, and state politics in Equatorial Guinea

This doctoral thesis examines the centrality of the state in the constitution of the popular music economy in Equatorial Guinea. It examines transformations and continuities in music production, circulation, and consumption as they have been shaped by the introduction of digital technologies and the Central African micro-state’s growing dependence on the export of fossil fuels. The spectacular oil boom of the last quarter century has consolidated the already-authoritarian rule of Teodoro Obiang Nguema, who stands today as one of the longest-serving heads of state in the world. From within a highly politicised social sphere, popular music emerges as a privileged medium, employed by the petro-elites to accumulate prestige and by musicians to negotiate their relations with the state and to gain access to (unequally distributed) oil revenues. Drawing on 14 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Equatorial Guinea’s major cities, I argue that the local music economy is governed by patronage relations that are embedded in long standing, yet evolving, social and political formations characterised by regional logics of power and wealth accumulation. Rather than disturbing and radically transforming musical patronage, the oil boom and the introduction of digital technologies have opened unimagined spaces of creativity and future possibility but also afforded the exacerbation of these onerous and oppressive relations. While musicians navigate the interstices of the state to find strategies to make do, the music economy is increasingly monopolised by the ruling family. As such, this case stands in contrast to both writing on the Euroamerican music industry and recent scholarship on the seemingly pervasive incorporation of African music economies into (digital) capitalism. Bringing together the anthropology of oil, recent scholarship on the new music industry, and theories of the African state, the thesis resists orthodox Marxist readings of capitalism to offer new understandings of musical labour and exchange.