In this recent musical genre, often labeled as a Gabonese-style Afropop, vitesse takes on ambiguous dimensions. It refers, in one sense, to the vigilance, offensiveness and responsiveness required to survive in the urban worlds of banditry depicted by Ntcham artists.
These attitudes and values, characteristic of the ndoss bandits of Libreville culture, were capitalized on by Ntcham artists and became a trademark of the genre, provoking both rejection by some and fascination by others.
The vitesse of Ntcham artists is thus inseparable from money, which is the key value that they depict and pursue, and thus the ultimate goal of this intensification.
In this sense, they establish a break with the slow production processes of previous generations and circumvent traditional media outlets and underlying mechanics of political control. It has also been described in the context of Africa as an ideology linked to the technocapitalism of multinational firms and a developmentalist paradigm that elevates technical progress, inventiveness and entrepreneurship as a way out of poverty Pollio By following the networks of relations and economies built around this art of vitesse, I show how Ntcham is developed as an efficient technology of evasion and illusion, where the race for money accumulation often fails but is converted into social and symbolic capital.
Through this art of vitesse, the youth of Libreville reinvent modes of subjectivation, social recognition and integration into local systems of interdependence. Her second single-authored book, published in by Paris Nanterre University Press, deals with the post-exotic encounters of Senegalese dancers and their students in France and Switzerland. She has also directed four documentary films and currently supervises a SNF team project on music digitalization and power dynamics in Central African cities.
