African musical practices in Australia are highly diverse and multifaceted. This chapter examines the work of a Senegalese Australian artist across contexts ranging from a new multimedia arts initiative, music festivals, community events and schools. Drawing on evidence from ethnographic research as well as performer and educator experiences, it shows that music provides an important space through which to explore the complexities of diasporic experience in Australia and to engage in self-representation countering dominant negative portrayals of Africans in Australian media and political discourse. Through music, African Australian artists negotiate ideas about cultural specificity and universality, maintaining connections to African cultural practices while forging new connections and forms of creativity in contemporary Australia.

This chapter approaches the history of electric guitar music in sub-Saharan Africa through the perspective of the “new organology,” considering the unique imbrication of materiality and sociality within the cultural work of music. Multiple local and transnational networks impact the work of guitarists, including the movement of musicians, economic systems that circulate instruments, and the circulation of musical knowledge, genre, and instrumental technique. Networks are both embedded in the landscape—such as electrical infrastructure—and lay atop the physical, such as mobile data and social media applications. The author draws upon ethnographic interviews with guitarists from Ghana and Congo to show how these networks of circulation and the materiality of instruments can provide new ways of thinking about guitar music in Africa and the African diaspora.