SLAM Scene in N’Djamena

Chad’s nightlife shows a different reality… does it? Is it in the boîte de nuits where the ethnic groups unite? The music imported from elsewhere, full with DJ’s beats, work as a drug for those who dance. Danse is the ‘medicine of the poor’, as an older man and artist said at a conference about ‘la danse in Africa’. He is right: for the youth dancing (and music) is like a medicine. To forget? Or to get energy, to unite and to be? Is it their quest for identity? And what role do the Jokers that we follow on our journey play in this quest?

Croquemort
The search for the Jokers brought us in contact with Croquemort, a famous SLAM artist in N’Djamena, Chad. He is part of the African SLAM scene. We participated in the SLAM festival he organized in N’Djamena: ‘N’djam s’enflamme en slam’. SLAM is a form of expression, musical poetry, poetry on melody. The words sing and flow into a blossoming rhyme that contains the critiques and emotions that are so much part of everyday life. It is a style that comes close to the ordinary person, it phrases experiences that may be horrific and therefore almost comic. There is no dance but there is rhythm, rhythm of words, that become sentences, that become poems composing a story for those who want to listen.

Medicine student
Croquemort’s success is probably mostly due to his open character and ways of connecting to others. He is not a poor young man, rather a middle class medicine student with a destination as a psychiatrist, who loves to make (protest) music. As a baby he already showed his rebellious character, refusing the mother milk from the start. His mother was very sick when he was born in Pala, Mundang country. He shares this start of his life as it explains his ‘being’. That is how ‘it’ started.

Being disciplined
It was not easy for him to become part of the music scene. First there were his parents to convince: his mother accepted it, but his father was ferociously against, until he understood that the music would not stop Croquemort from being a good doctor. He sent his son to a boarding school, to be disciplined. It conversely deepened his consciousness of inequality and the violent realities of social exclusion.

Free expression
The boarding school episode made him more determined to make music that could change and allow him free expression.  First he made modern urban youth music, freestyle and hip hop, until he discovered SLAM. The raw Chadian SLAM poetry became his passion and brought him into contact with Preston, a producer of music, film and clips, who pushed the creation of an album, a few years ago – album making is the basis of the hierarchy in this scene. Subsidized (partly) by the French Institut de la Francophony au Tchad,  Croquemort became the star of N’Djamena and his music the SLAM of the youth. He joined festivals of SLAM Poetry all over Africa and in France. This year his travels are cancelled, he doesn’t like the slow and bad organization of most of the festivals. He will soon travel to Cameroon but that will be for family reasons. Croquemort has a child-son and a Cameroonian wife.

Useful
His determination to make himself useful for his people and the quarter he lives in, ‘Chagoua’, is strong. As strong as his partly authoritarian character, that is in such contrast to the timid and modest young man he shows as well.

In Chad SLAM is of recent and people are not yet relating to it that much, but there is a future. SLAM allows the youth to express their frustrations. The former minister of Culture assured us that the Chadian government will let them do (…) as long as they do not become too influential. The Chadian governance structure, a rhizome creeping into every corner of society, will not allow them to become that influential; their open attitude will either be co-opted, or silenced violently.