Everything Is Sampled: Digital and Print Mediations in African Arts and Letters 0253065658, 9780253065650

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EVERYTHING IS SAMPLED

EVERYTHING IS SAMPLED Digital and Print Mediations in African Arts and Letters

p A K I N A D E Ṣ Ọ K AN

India na Universit y Pr ess

This book is a publication of Indiana University Press Office of Scholarly Publishing Herman B Wells Library 350 1320 East 10th Street Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA iupress.org © 2023 by Akin Adeṣọkan Portions of chapter 4 were previously published as “‘The Invisible Government of the Powerful’: Joseph Gaï Ramaka’s Cinema of Power” in A Companion to African Cinema, edited by Kenneth W. Harrow and Carmela Garritano, © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48–1992. Manufactured in the United States of America First printing 2023 Cataloging information is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN 978-0-253-06565-0 (hardback) ISBN 978-0-253-06566-7 (paperback) ISBN 978-0-253-06567-4 (ebook)

To Raji Akanji, my first artist, and Afọlabi Akanbi, who can tell. And to Biọdun Jeyifo, with warmth, comradeship and faith.

CON T EN T S Preface  ix Acknowledgments  xv Introduction: The New Terrains of African Arts and Letters  1

Pa rt One: Shifting Margins

1. Modes of Creative Practice  37 2. Spatial Assemblages: Festivals as Curation  81

Pa rt T wo: Across the Digital Divide 3. 4. 5. 6.

The Griot’s Compositions in Time  127 Adaptation or Remake: New Formats for Old Prints  172 Approaching the World as Platform, Literally  215 The Remix: Of New Identities and Technologies of Reuse  260 Epilogue: In Relative Account  303

Appendix  317 Notes  327 Bibliography  343 Index  361

P REFACE

A continuing exper im ent w ith cr eating, studying, consuming, and writing about African arts and letters yields an insight of note—the realization that there is more to a work of art than the sum of it as a discrete object. Everything Is Sampled is a relative account of this experiment. The ideas for this book began to germinate in two distinct ways: following the completion of Postcolonial Artists and Global Aesthetics, my first critical study, and while designing an upper undergraduate Comparative Literature course for the fall semester of 2011. The course, “African Literature and Other Arts,” proceeded on three related premises about the diachronic study of African literary culture. Our first focus was the development of African literary traditions from oral and visual forms that continued to thrive in writing, even as innovative literary conventions began to orient those traditions in other directions. Secondly, we examined the autonomous growth and persistence of nonliterary media as art forms, applying as much historical breadth and depth as is usually present in the study of literature. Finally, we explored the increasing visibility of these other media and their coexistence with the literary arts partly as a result of the crises in book publishing across the continent starting from the mid-1980s. The choice of texts represented a broad range of filmmakers, writers, critics, visual artists, and musicians working in different genres, forms, and locations. Year after year of teaching the course, however, the nagging question about these texts was often that of access—how to get our bookstores or media and archival collections to acquire them in affordable, accessible formats. Still, in studying

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apparently dissimilar texts (Shailja Patel’s Migritude and Fẹla AnikulapoKuti’s “Lady,” for example), we came up with a range of questions beyond looking for thematic information in familiar genres. This book reflects the full range of questions in multiple ways: imagery is constitutive of prosody in Migritude in excess of typical readings of that poetic element, and the rhetoric of “Lady” has its origins in critiques of social manners of Lagos long before the early operas of Hubert Ogunde, highlife music, and the city novels of Cyprian Ekwensi. Notions of textuality and authorship are thus liberatingly unsettled in these contexts; the task of getting an appropriate sense of creative texts that draw on different materials packs a weight heavier than a single disciplinary porter can carry. The second impetus for the book came from the diverse collaborative initiatives in which I became involved just as the course and the book found their ways into the world. Those initiatives included writing and curating for the Chimurenga Chronic in South Africa; a slate of organizational and editorial work for the Fagunwa Study Group in Nigeria and the United States; and various modes of scholarly practice with the New Media and Literary Initiatives in Africa, NeMLiA, a research collective at Indiana University. These involvements encouraged me to develop new skills and sharpen old ones, and each involvement has yielded specific, justly collaborative outputs (Adéè.kó. and Ades.ọkan 2017; Buggenhagen and Grosz-Ngaté 2018; Ades.ọkan 2018; Chimurenga 2019). It is fair to say that in addition to those outputs and the skills more or less ingrained and informing of personal outlook (and I hope this is the case with my colleagues in those initiatives as well), this book comes from that relational approach to production, the reconstructive act of making things exist and matter in the world. The third premise of my undergraduate course was the perception that the crises in literary publishing between the mid-1980s and late 1990s had the unintended consequence of giving visibility to creative outputs in other media. In the course of writing this book, I have come to realize that the narrative of crises might be mistaken. It is true that most African writers at that period experienced specific problems relating to publishing, as Charles Larson documents in The Ordeal of the African Writer, and that in the 1980s, Nigerian cinema underwent what Jonathan Haynes characterizes as “structural adjustments” in a 1995 essay. The crises are not that recent or isolated, I sense, nor have versions of them totally disappeared from these areas of creative output, even with the upswing in publishing,

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criticism, new ideas of textual production, and innovative approaches to studying creativity in African contexts (Adenẹkan 2021; Jackson 2021; Diabate 2020; Bouwer 2019). They have a structural character that has dogged the artistic endeavor among the continent’s creative artists starting long before said artists embraced the arts as a sphere of engagement in the modern form. I argue in Everything Is Sampled that African artists’ attempts to confront the debilitating aspects of this condition come across through modes of creative practice that have habitually taken advantage of prevalent socioeconomic and technological changes. There have not been many opportunities for seeing the attempts in such a steady manner as I present here because academic disciplines often shape the ways scholars think, but because new ideas are now easier to appreciate than before, it makes sense to rise to the challenge. Out of a wide array of such modes of creative practice, I have selected five: adaptation, composition, curation, platform, and remix. In a world of uneven digital penetration, there are many more ways than before to appreciate the processes of aesthetic mediation through which these modes operate—and more compelling ways to add conceptual depth to the discussions about African arts and letters beyond the perspectives of crisis and impasse of the past decades. Humanities scholars are pressured by various institutional forces to prioritize accessible ideas, accessible both in the sense of what is intelligible given the prevalent ruling ideas of global flows and in the sense of information that can be found easily. These demands can neither be simply met nor wished away. Of the many informed ways that one can speak about a subject, I have chosen one that does not proceed as if nothing, complex or simple, has been said about that subject before. Even though Old Testament prophets often spoke with a sense of urgency, they were also clearly aware of what their predecessors said . . . Here is the place to highlight some of the book’s contributions whose import may better orient the reader. In one important sense, Everything Is Sampled develops an interdisciplinary approach to the study of artistic works beyond the standard practice of thematic reading oriented toward the application of empirical concepts. Pairing or clustering texts with diverse formal, generic, or topical provenances allows me to more creatively examine influential categories in postcolonial studies (nationalism, gender, class, race, sexuality, and the like) than has previously been done in the field. Works that are based on history or show specific historical

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episodes to be far from settled accounts have the power to generate new insights when read with more than their autotelic status in mind. The increasing recognition that art forms of different kinds have greater capacity to engage in worlding than previously acknowledged is one reason why academic fields, programs, and departments have embraced change or redirection across the world but especially in North America, the current central axis of corporate global capitalism. Another idea prioritized in this book is the need to sidestep the stillinfluential critical paradigm of assuming a fit between a work of art and the category of culture. Instead of distracting the reader with issues of elite culture and popular culture, this study opts to make a case for the reconstitution of categories of authorship, textuality, form, and style. Without underestimating the specificity of artistic figures, texts, regions, and similar categories as social facts, I think the more challenging task is to address the coappearance of those categories in translocal circuits of dissemination, a compelling reason for abandoning hierarchies of value such as elite and popular or outside and inside (Ades.ọkan 2017). For these reasons, I have deliberately avoided the term “cultural production” in this book. I admit that it is serviceable and inclusive as a descriptor of a wide range of texts, but I am not convinced of its precision in current usage, particularly in relation to its influential genealogy (Bourdieu 1993). Besides, I think that a benign kind of colonial paternalism attaches itself to the tendency among scholars to regard certain works as entertainment, as culture, rather than as art, as if a given work cannot be both. In assuming the voices of historical actors and inhabiting the moment of treated events, the persona in Léopold Senghor’s poem “Shaka” uses the same compositional modalities as the persona in the album track ‘Mọ´ ńléwá’ by the Nigerian musician Odolaye Arẹmu. The social position of both creators informs their respective modes of production and shapes the canonical status of the work. Important as it is, however, a circumstantial fact ought not constitute the primary paradigm for categorizing or analyzing texts that have much more in common in formal, stylistic, discursive, and thematic terms, as Akin Euba’s opera version of Senghor’s poem would show. A few suggestions develop from this critique. Instead of the highly influential but limited understanding of the nature of art based on hierarchies of value such as elite and popular culture, one might advance a composite argument about productions that are periodic in appearance, or turn out as routinely evanescent. They do not just explode, thrive for

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a while, then simply disappear. A complex of sociopolitical volatilities, including the nature of organic things, plays a role in their existence and sustainability. With a long historical perspective, and the right kind of attitude toward technologies of reproduction and dissemination, such productions, from mbari houses, traveling theater, book fairs/film festivals, textualized historical episodes to degenerating print or audiovisual archives are material. They can be reactivated, remixed, and reused as art, as entertainment, as historical documents triggering new imaginaries, and much else. In other words, they can remain what they originally were, or created as, texts with varying provenances, but they can also be brought together in the same space, in a gallery, a database, or between the covers of a composite book such as this one. Secondly, when such productions are viewed as simultaneously art, commerce, and life, it is quite easy to see how they manifest in other spheres of life, beyond art as such. As economic activities, they extend their reach into other domains and are integrated with every aspect of social life. Usually this is the case when artistic productions generate meanings that can be interpreted in political terms, if the historian or critic were that inclined. Even when they do no such things, but mostly highlight less instrumentalized impulses, like pleasure, leisure, desire, play, they nevertheless constitute new forms of knowledge and open up possibilities that might otherwise be hard to imagine. Finally, there is the matter of tastes, of values that, too, are subject to change. In Postcolonial Artists and Global Aesthetics, I made a concerted attempt at using the idea of contingencies of production an indispensable tool for a critical understanding of the nature of postcolonial art, and it is gratifying to know that that effort has served as model for other works (Negash et al. 2014; Smithson forthcoming). In retrospect, I did not have sufficient discursive space to fully analyze the multiple dimensions of the idea, due perhaps to the nature of a first academic book produced within its own set of contingencies! As fate would have it, it is by making a detour to the specificities of translocal African experiences that I have found the space to do more with that idea than before. This is a chastening recognition, especially when taken with the insights of a decade of using constantly shifting modalities to teach a variety of texts to undergraduates. The coappearance of diverse elements of social, creative life within the spatial and temporal scopes of the continent is already an unimpeachable argument for worldliness, for all history as relational, and for our earth as all

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people. It matters little that a time may be short or long, that the space be archipelagic or singular. Everything Is Sampled is an experiment, the first of what may be regarded as a triptych. In these books I use nonfictional prose flexibly to cultivate an intellectual outlook that neither simply opts for one position against the other, nor dismisses both out of hand and then opts for a “third space,” but instead moves dynamically through the interstitial space in which all the relevant positions relate to one another. It is not certain to me where these inquiries might lead; I hope that, like all creative undertakings, they will be worth the integrity of the process.

ACK NOW L EDGMEN T S

In the course of wr iting this book, I received tremendous support and assistance from many friends, colleagues, students, and institutions, and it is my great pleasure to be able to acknowledge their contributions. My colleagues in Department of Comparative Literature and in the Media School at Indiana University have been supportive in various ways, and I offer special gratitude to Michael Martin, Bill Johnston, David Hertz, Herb Marks, Eyal Peretz, Greg Waller, Raiford Guins, Jim Shanahan, Stephanie DeBoer, Joan Hawkins, Paul Losensky, Rosemarie McGerr, Walter Gantz, Radhika Parameswaran, Jacob Emery, Sonia Velazquez, Nobert Herber, Josh Malitsky, Cara Caddoo, Susanne Schwibs, Jim Kelly, Esi Thompson, Elaine Monaghan, and Rachel Plotnick for their collegiality, interest, and generous attention. Stephanie Klausing, JaQuita Joy Roberts, Marilyn Estep, Melinda Bristow-Meadows, Reed Nelson, and Becky Kehrberg capably and warmly assisted with tricky administrative and fiscal issues. The undergraduate students in my African Literature and Other Arts class in fall semester of 2011 were an inspiring and endlessly fascinating group, and over a decade later, I still remember them with fondness: Ashley Adamaitis, Adeọla Ades.ida, Nicole Amodeo, Ruth Christopher, Gina Eastwood, Jatika Expose, Sarah Larson, Shantaya Ley, and Shaqib Habib. The ideas in the book gained a lot from sustained conversations in and out of seminars with Twalha Abbass, Meg Arenberg, Zach Baker, Laura Clapper, Eve Eisenberg, Morgane Flahault, Genevieve “Bunny” Hill-Thomas, Roy Holler, Tolulọpẹ Idowu, Mallika Khanna, Savannah Hall, Steffan

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Horowitz, Julie Le Hégarat, Gabriela Lemos, I-Lin Liu, Essence London, Aolan Mi, Michael Montesano, Meaghan Murphy, Cole Nelson, Ibrahim Odugbemi, Amina Shabani, Cynthia Shin, Nidhi Singh, Sam Smucker, and Melissa Sokolski. With their commitment to issues of social justice and academic freedom, colleagues in the Progressive Faculty and Staff Caucus have made the Bloomington campus a place where solidarity matters. At various stages in my thinking about the book, several colleagues invited me to present on panels, departmental seminars, roundtables, and to give lectures and keynotes. For these invitations, I thank Mọradewun Adejunmọbi (the 2014 Modern Language Association, MLA, conference in Chicago); Simon Gikandi (Princeton University’s African Humanities Program roundtable at the African Literature Association conference in Johannesburg in 2014); Nathan Suhr-Sytsma (Emory University’s Institute of African Studies in October 2014); Ute Fendler (Bayreuth University’s Advanced African Studies lecture series in November 2015); Bhakti Shringarpure (African Studies Association conference in Washington, D.C. in 2016); Monica Popescu (African Literature Association conference in New Haven in 2017); Rhonda Cobham-Sanders (Amherst College’s Digital Literary Africas symposium in October 2017); and Sebastian Lecourt (University of Houston’s Center for Public History series in February 2018). I am grateful to these colleagues and their institutions or platforms and to my various interlocutors at those events: Clifton Crais, Ana Teixeira, Dan Ojwang, Chiji Akọma, Grace Musila, Tsitsi Jaji, Isabel Hofmeyr, Doris Löhr, Ivo Ritzer, Stephanie Bosch-Santana, Susan Andrade, Kenneth Harrow, Gaurav Desai, Patrick Mensah, Ato Quayson, Jeanne-Marie Jackson, Julie Tolliver, James Yékú, Kwabena OpokuAgyemang, Shọla Adenẹkan, and Elijah Koome. They were all kind, patient, and helpful in diverse ways, and I appreciated their relentless questioning even though it might not have seemed so at those moments. Rhonda deserves additional thanks for following up with encouraging words and other forms of assistance long after the amazing symposium at Amherst. Carli Coetzee kindly offered to publish an early version of the Introduction in the Journal of African Cultural Studies, and she was very understanding when I opted to save it for the book. My association with Cape Town-based Chimurenga Chronic, an imaginative platform dedicated to the best ideas, images, and sounds, has greatly expanded my creative horizons and I continue treasure the give-and-take

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with Ntone (“Dread”) Edjabe, Stacy Hardy, Graeme Arendse, and others who come and go to the Market. At Indiana University, where I cofounded the research collective New Media and Literary Initiatives in Africa, NeMLiA, in 2011, I was lucky to belong to the stimulating and imaginative community of brilliant colleagues: Maria Grosz-Ngaté, Marion FrankWilson, Beth Buggenhagen, Marissa Moorman, Vincent Bouchard, Jane Goodman, Michelle Moyd, and Daniel Reed. As directors of the African Studies Program, Sam Obeng and John Hanson facilitated our work with forthrightness. Activities in these groups overlapped, in the course of seven to eight years, and it remains a source of great satisfaction to me to see that each yielded a specific outcome before I completed this book. Biọdun Jeyifo, my former teacher, agreed to serve as respondent when I gave an early draft of the book’s chapter 1 as the keynote at the symposium at Amherst College in 2017. He later read a complete draft of the same chapter and gave it the kind of thoughtful and critical reading for which he is world famous. I thank him most sincerely, even as I assume full responsibility for the shortcomings in that chapter. Adélékè Adéè.kó. and Ọlakunle George, I found out later, were commissioned by my publishers as readers of the manuscript, and they both provided critical but constructive reports that substantially improved the quality of the work. I thank them also for their continuing interest in the work. Mahen Bonetti, the founding director of the New York African Film Festival and a longtime friend, agreed to read the section of chapter 2 dealing with her outfit, providing the sorts of details to which only she had access. She supported the project in other ways as well, and I am deeply grateful to her and her colleagues. For their sustained interest in my work and this project in particular, I am exceedingly grateful to Kunle Ajibade, “Malam” Olufẹmi Taiwo, Dapọ Ọlọrunyọmi, Eileen Julien, Ebenezer Ọbadare, Chika Okeke-Agulu, S.ọla Adeyẹmi, dele jẹgẹdẹ, Ọmọlade Adunbi, Ọlasope Oyelaran, Toyin Akinosho, Odia Ofeimun, Jahman Anikulapo, Titi Ọba, Jacob Olupọna, Tade Ipadeọla, James Ogude, Grant Farred, Natalie Melas, Hortense Spillers, Tim Murray, Manthia Diawara, Salah Hassan, Karen Bouwer, and MaryEllen Higgins. My research assistant, Adefoyekẹ Ajao, makes so much possible with her drive, creativity, ease, and wonderful sense of humor. I can’t thank her enough. I am grateful to Obiora Udechukwu for his constant support, and for the gift of the cover art! Many artists, writers, filmmakers, scholars, and curators readily responded to my questions and requests for interviews, images, recordings,

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and other elements: Souleymane Cissé, Yinka Shonibarẹ, Rowland Abiọdun, Alain Sembene, Tunde Kelani, Abderrahmane Sissako, Olivier Barlet, Cornelius Moore, Filipa César, Abioseh Michael Porter, Muhtar Bakare, A. Igoni Barrett, Jane Plastow, Jo Ramaka, James Gibbs, Shital Pravinchandra, Mọlara Wood, Joshua Hughes, Samba Gadjigo, Iyabọ Oguns.ọla, Ọmọwunmi S.egun, Fẹmi Ọs.ọfisan, Ẹbun Clark, Rọpo Ewenla, Timothy Afọlabi, Ayọ Ọjẹbọde, Derin Ajao, Dami Ajayi, Richard Ali, Ikhide Ikheloa, Kọla Tubọsun, Emeka Ugwu, Bwesigye Bwa Mwesigire, and Shailja Patel. For prompt responses to requests in difficult circumstances, especially during the COVID-19 lockdown, I thank Mireille Djenno, African Studies librarian at Indiana University; archivists Bryan Graney, Ronda Sewald, Amber Bertin, and Dan Hassoun at the Black Film Center & Archive, BFCA; Monique Threatt and Heather Sloane at the IU library’s Media Reserve Services; Laura Hilton-Smith and Layla Hillsden of Leeds University’s Special Collections and Galleries. Ongoing support and comradeship of these friends and colleagues have been a great source of sustenance for me: Maria Hamilton Abegunde, Wale Adebanwi, Wale Adeduro, Muyiwa Adekẹye, Adewale Adenle, Olus.ẹgun Adeniyi, Gbemisọla Adeoti, Tayọ Ades.ina, Waziri Adio, Kim Ady, Tavy Aherne, Fọlarin Ajibade, Mayọwa Ajibade, Jude Akudinobi, Mahmood Alli-Balogun, Awam Amkpa, Chima Anyadike, Tunde Arẹmu, Tunde Babawale, Hakeem Bello, Matthew Brown, Amatoritsero Ede, Bond Emeruwa, Wale Fatade, Carmela Garritano, Ọlabọde Ibironkẹ, Ogaga Ifowodo, Cajetan Iheka, Sean Jacobs, Abiọla Jimọh, Mohamed Kamara, Bashir Kọledọyẹ, Brian Larkin, Dele Layiwọla, Christine Matzke, Audrey McCluskey, Ghirmai Negash, Obi Nwakanma, Maik Nwosu, Kọle Ade Odutọla, Kayọde Ogunbunmi, S.ẹgun Ọjẹwuyi, Sanya Ojikutu, Niran Okewọle, Ike Okonta, Lanre Ọladele, Wọle Ọlaiya, Moji Ọlaniyan, Ladi Ọlọrunyọmi, S.ọla Ọlọrunyọmi, Adebiyi Olusọlape, Chido Onumah, Francis Onwochei, Sanya Osha, Niyi Ọs.undare, Patrick-Jude Oteh, Ose Oyemendan, Oana Panaïte, Rẹmi Raji, Wumi Raji, Morẹnikẹ RansomeKuti, Tọpẹ Adegoke-Salaudeen, Muritala Sule, Pamela Olubunmi Smith, Alexie Tcheuyap, Ọlakunle Tẹjuos.o, Deji Toye, and Joe Uchea. Over the past several years, friends, mentors and colleagues whose ideas, efforts or initiatives played a role in the conception and writing of this book passed on: Tẹjumọla Ọlaniyan, Dapọ Adelugba, Isidore Okpewho, Abiọla Irele, Ọlabiyi Yáì, Harry Garuba, Pius Adesanmi, Frank

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Ukadike, Okwui Enwezor, Bisi Silva, Moustapha Ndour, and Patrick O’Meara. May their work endure. At Indiana University Press, I have been very fortunate to work with a dedicated and professional editorial staff. Dee Mortensen took on this project before she retired and passed it on to IU Press director Gary Dunham who responded to it with great enthusiasm and efficiency. In the capable hands of Anna Francis, Stephen Williams, and Lesley Bolton, this book underwent an effortless birthing process, and these wonderful people have my sincere gratitude. My families in Nigeria and the United States continue to show a keen interest in my writings, and the fun part of WhatsApp is that they are able to share my work with me, and with other people! I appreciate them: Risikatu Ọlagunju, Nurudeen Ades.ọkan, Tajudeen Ades.ọkan, Tawa Ajanaku, Ian Gordon, and Vanessa Quow. In Bloomington, Indiana, my family stimulate, steady, and nurture me: Lucine, Tọlani, and Afọlabi. We collectively inhabited every moment of the writing, and I trust that they will see the book as a gift they helped to make.

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INTRODUCTION The New Terrains of African Arts and Letters

A YouTube video gener ates insight in excess of its ten-minute digital running time. The lighting of the interview with Kenyan director Wanuri Kahiu accentuates the brilliance in her eyes. She is talking about the production of Pumzi, her famous first film, with jolting disclosures regarding the fortuitous conditions that gave the film its storied generic identity. “I didn’t choose science fiction,” Kahiu says with a straight face. “I was writing a story and the story was about a girl in the future, and because the story was about a girl in the future, it became a science-fiction film” (0.10–0.24).1 Speaking further, and with a boldness that leaves the viewer with no doubt about the speaker’s self-assurance, she elaborates on how the story found its generic niche: I didn’t even know it was a science-fiction film. It was only later when I was about to start shooting and I was talking to my producer, and he said, “You know this genre is science fiction.” And he asked me to make a choice because there was some element of fantasy in the original draft of the script. So, he said, “you have to decide whether or not you want to go more science fiction or more fantasy,” so I made a decision at that point to go more science fiction than fantasy. But it was not an active choice that I’m going to make a science-fiction film to deal with the issues. (0.26–0.59)

Further in the interview, Kahiu becomes even more categorical: “But I challenge that question that we’ve just started. I don’t think we’ve just started. I think that science fiction has been a genre in Africa that has been used a lot for a long period of time, way before I was even born. And

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if we think of science fiction as the use of science or something that is fictitiously science or speculative fiction within a story, then we’ve always used it” (1.45–2.13). From these broad statements made with compelling assertiveness, Kahiu brings up two issues pertinent to this introduction and this book, Everything Is Sampled, as a whole. There is, first, the point that “it wasn’t an active choice” on her part “to make a science-fiction film to deal with issues” instead of opting for fantasy. While Pumzi’s status as a work of science fiction, a handy cinematic example of Afrofuturism, is not in doubt, it is worth noting that that identity became contingent on the conditions surrounding its production, rather than imposed from the start. Those conditions include the decisive but opaque fact that to make Pumzi, “Kahiu used the about-to-be-discarded set of the Hollywood sci-fi blockbuster District 9” directed in 2009 by Neill Blomkamp (Bonetti 2013, 5), set in Johannesburg. The productorial act of deciding to go for science fiction, however, involved a deliberate choice, a conscious act of creative practice. Kahiu’s claim in the second quotation that “science fiction has been a genre in Africa that has been used a lot for a long period of time” gives the question of production context shaping film particular resonance with the issues I address in this introduction for the following reasons. Taken with the first statement, this claim draws attention to the ways genres often considered low or popular can be understood as an important part of African artistic history, especially when this history is viewed as evolving over a long period. To say that the genre of science fiction is not new to the continent’s artistic traditions and practices is to do two things. It is, first, to draw attention to a long process of change in conventions, and second, to link the duration of that process to the conditions under which, at a given moment, artists and other professionals make decisions that impact what scholars view as a work’s generic identity. In this book, I argue that those conditions are simultaneously material and institutional—and much else besides. They are a matter of the relations of production in society, and artists play a role in shaping them in the interest of their work. Pumzi is a science-fiction film to the extent that Kahiu and her producer agreed to adapt to a set of conventions that critical arbiters and film buffs have come to expect of the genre. The circumstances of that agreement remain opaque to viewers of the film, however, even with the director’s disclosures, since habits of consumption are imperceptibly shaped by the formal and generic conventions of the modern age. I want to use the two

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related claims in the quoted passages to lay out the themes and issues this book engages. Everything Is Sampled examines key texts, processes, practices, and figures in the shifting modes of production and circulation of African artistic forms with a focus on digital culture as the most currently decisive setting for these changes. The book’s central aim is to make a case for African artistic forms as modes of creative practice, a complex movement of media in which technologies of production and circulation are linked to ethical or political impulses through the agency of artists. Simultaneously analyzing specific works of cinema, literature, music, visual art, and other less discussed forms, as well as the forces and figures shaping these forms (as the opening example shows), I use Everything Is Sampled to address two main questions. In the first instance, given the various changes that the institutions of African arts and letters have undergone in the past four decades, how have the representational impulses in these artistic forms fared in comparison with those at work in pervasive digital culture? Furthermore, how might a long view of these forms across media and in a multiplicity of settings affect our understanding of what counts as art, as text, as criticism, as authorship? The point of these investigations is to show that the changes that have occurred in the production and reception of African artistic forms, at least since the late 1970s, shape those forms through specific modes of creative practice. As artists, directors, authors, musicians, curators, and producers, the creative individuals profiled alongside their works in this book are acutely aware of the media-saturated circumstances in which they work, and they actively make a variety of ethical, rational choices to shape those circumstances. They are no longer, nor have they ever simply been, content to fill a spot in the relay between the conception and distribution of a work. They are also increasingly quick to view, make, and reconfigure texts and their contexts through different modes of creative practice. Five of such modes—curation, adaptation, remix, platform, and composition—serve as starting points for discussing specific works and artists in the book. In part 1, the genealogy of these modes in African arts unfolds in relation to the analysis of three main concepts—diachronicity, translocality, and mediation. With this approach, it becomes possible to expand the scope of the two broad questions posed above and place the work of several generations of artists in historical and aesthetic milieus appropriate to the fortunes of African art and letters. The reader trying to visualize the

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relationship between these three concepts and the modes of creative practice may imagine the concepts as the three mounds that make a grate (a nonelectric technology, to be sure, but unquestionably African and still in use), and each mode the changeable container in which a variety of foods gets cooked on the grate—a frying pan, a clay pot, a stainless-steel kettle, or a grill. The introduction sets out the main topics discussed in the book, focusing on digitality as a current fostering agent for a diachronic reorientation of African artistic practices. The broader conceptual focus of inquiry in the book is on technological change. However, I frequently narrow this focus down to digital culture as the most current and potentially far-reaching instance of this change over comparable recent changes, such as color separation or desktop publishing. Clearly, digital culture, or digitality, as I increasingly use it in this introduction, creates a capacious opportunity for reflecting on print and electronic media as far-from-inviolable spheres of artistic production and engagement. It has changed our understanding of what constitutes art, authorship, text, and criticism, and it continues to expand the scope of these notions. It is able to achieve these results because information is easier to access now than before, and because with that access, which by no means eliminates structural inequality across the world, various kinds of creativity have a greater latitude to manifest themselves. Yet, the reconstitution of ideas of authorship or text that results from this condition does not belong exclusively to digital culture, nor is this prevalent culture the be-all and end-all of media. As time moves, other forms will come into play after different socioeconomic volatilities have stretched the resources of digitality to their epistemic or ontological limits. What digitality has brought to keen awareness, the creative deployment of media in relation to artistic form, is a feature of textuality with impact on prior practices of African writing and artistic or symbolic communication—always availing itself of prevalent technological opportunities. Simply put, and ordinary though it may sound, the arts have a long history in African societies; they have always availed themselves of prevalent technological forms, and digital, new media are a significant prospect at this historical pass because they make the modes of creative practice more manifest than before.2 What differentiates digital culture from earlier technological changes, even those set in motion by the inventions of the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries, is the personal dimension of apprehending those inventions becoming widespread.

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Individuals as creative artists, entrepreneurs, or cursory consumers are able to do things with technology by themselves because the means of making or remaking those things are cheaper, easier to find and handle in relatively shorter time by a greater number of people than before. With particular reference to African societies, a long view of technological changes in the process of creating and recreating texts offers a useful insight. When Orthodox Christian religious texts needed to be made accessible to converts in Axumite Ethiopia, that need resulted in the formalization of Ge’ez, as the literary historian Albert Gérard has shown in “Fifteen Centuries of Creative Writing in Africa,” from his 1990 book The Contexts of African Literature.3 A similar process pertains to Ajami and Kiswahili, both African languages complexly derived from Arabic, in religious and secular contexts. In the field of art history, African and Africanist scholars have labored to establish connections between the verbal arts and various kinds of art objects as complex modes of communication or signification (Abiọdun 2014, 1987; McNaughton 1987). Researchers in communication studies have also developed a sustained interest in media genres that ordinarily escape attention but have been critical to the growth and diversity of African artistic forms (Ọjẹbọde and Owacgiu 2015; Ọpadọtun 1986). Contrary to received wisdom in African historiography, oral narratives were not the primal means of recording and recalling society’s history in precapitalist West Africa. Hieroglyphic, hieratic, and demotic literacies predated orality as the preferred mode of transmitting specialized information. Knowledge of those skills in written communication, according to the Ghanaian author Ayi Kwei Armah in his novel KMT: In the House of Life (2002) and subsequently in the semiautobiography The Eloquence of the Scribes (2006), was lost in the long process of dispersal and migration characterizing the continent’s history long before the Christian era. Armah’s ideas are central to many of this book’s theoretical concerns, as will be obvious in the next chapter, and there is an elaborate discussion of his emblematic novel The Resolutionaries (2013) in chapter 5. The verbal arsenal of the griots, fine tuned to a high level of artistic excellence in the assumed absence of literacy, however, acquired cultural veneration for the first generation of African writers. Some of these writers, including Amadou Hampate Bâ, Birago Diop, and Daniel Fagunwa, wasted no time in making writing the contemporary vehicle for the literary resources embedded in oral genres, doing so within the technological and

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ideological frame of cultural self-apprehension in the colonial context. The discussion in this introduction follows the logic of this claim in a dialectic manner. Before turning to an account of the kinds of cultural representation I have in mind as emblematic features of African textuality and that, I think, Kahiu attempts to describe in her valuable reflections, I address questions about digitality as a fostering agent of a diachronic reorientation of African artistic practices. Through their works, the authors, filmmakers, musicians, artists, and curators profiled and discussed in this book engage in specific modes of creative practice. These modes are tied to long-established ethical or political impulses in modern African arts and letters. Being more affordable, portable, and accessible than prior media systems, digital technology, through the culture it has spawned, makes it feasible, from a critical standpoint, to advance a more comprehensive knowledge of the arts than had been thought possible. In interviews, private or public declarations (letters, press statements, petitions, communiqués), and statements made at conferences, these artists, programmers, and writers actively articulate their sense of how their works are conceived and circulate, usually but not exclusively out of an awareness of the audience. Modes such as adaptation, composition, curation, platform, and remix operate in ways that are separable from the primary act of creating a work, though they sometimes inform the process, depending on the specific nature of that process. Each of them takes creative liberty with artistic or historical material, informed by an ethical understanding of the role of the arts in society. Modern African arts have strong political impulses as second nature, due perhaps to their emergence in specific situations of reversing colonial, racist denigrations of the continent’s cultural values. Scholars have tended to examine these impulses in greater detail in writing a general history of African literature than in discussing other art forms, perhaps because of the relationship between literature and writing (in prose, in criticism) and the presence of the figure of the writer as an activist or teacher, as Chinua Achebe famously opined.4 There are also, however, quite powerful critical interventions by writers and artists focusing on the context of the reception of African arts in general and how those contexts tend to inform the conception of said arts. Chika Okeke-Agulu’s engrossing study Postcolonial Modernism discusses in detail the activist movement of Nigerian art students who consciously developed a practice based on principled opposition to a colonial

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curriculum. These students, retrospectively branded the “Zaria Rebels” (after the Nigerian College of Arts and Science in Zaria where they studied), became the founding figures of modern art in Nigeria.5 For another example, African cinema is a field of artistic production in which a critical crop of practitioners assumed, from the outset, a relationship between how art is made and how it is to be evaluated. Between 1970 and 1982, filmmakers used the occasion of festivals and meetings in different African countries and cities—Algiers, Mogadishu, Niamey, and Tunis—to issue a series of charters and communiqués that proposed cinema as a tool for the positive transformation of the continent’s realities.6 In a 2001 essay titled “Theory, Literature, and Moral Considerations,” Simon Gikandi offers another such intervention pertaining to the writer’s role in holding agents of the state to account. The literary scholar Eileen Julien usefully identifies “the reclaiming of voice and subjectivity and the critique of abusive power” as two animating impulses in African literature (2014, 212). Issues pertaining to a broad range of themes in literary texts, from The Trial of Dedan Kimathi by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and Micere Mugo to Karen KingAribisala’s Kicking Tongues, can thus attract and have been given priority in critical studies. Those two ethical impulses are, I think, possible to identify in works other than literary ones once attention expands to a diachronic perspective of African artistic practices across different media and to those creative and critical interventions that artists themselves make. The reclamation of voice and subjectivity, the first of the two impulses in Julien’s formulation, lends itself to the variety of options adopted by African writers, filmmakers, musicians, curators, and other creative artists. For the purposes of my argument, I identify five of these options and call them “modes of creative practice,” underscoring the claim that creative artists demonstrate astute awareness of the media-saturated circumstances in which they work and actively make a variety of ethical and realistic (or “unrealistic”) choices to shape those circumstances. Opting for five modes comes out of a tactical choice of keeping the book within a manageable scope; it is possible to develop and elaborate on other modes as well.7 Such a possibility, the proliferation of modes through which to explore the relationships between art and its varied contexts, would underscore the validity of the method adopted here. A mode of creative practice manifests itself in the process through which the creation or re-creation of a work of art takes advantage of institutional means of production, based on the ethical understanding that

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time, place, and resource affect the significance that attach to or detract from such a work. The conditions under which modern African arts have emerged and been consolidated are characterized by adversity and contention. To begin with, they have been generated in the ceaseless struggles between the institutional forces of colonial modernity, generally characterized as the power-knowledge complex, the morality of art (the idea of art as the idealistic pursuit of the perfectibility or improvability of nature), the unsettled fortunes of the African state, and the pressures to which the creative self responds. The institutional means of colonial modernity are decisive in the forms that African arts assume, but those forms are better appreciated as discontinuous yet related to earlier institutional means. Such works of art thus bear marks of these struggles, sometimes in excess of their status as art.8 This means that the African dramatist, filmmaker, musician, or writer hardly leaves things to chance in the complex process between the conception and reception of a given work, as such works are not limited to specific places, and social change happens irrespective of the conditions under which a work of art first makes its appearance (George 2017). Implicit in the accepted premise of the reclamation of voice and subjectivity is a variety of interventions that the artist actively puts to service in order to sustain creative self-reproduction in the face of unrelenting political and economic volatilities. Chapters 2 to 6 in the book isolate each mode of creative practice (curation, adaptation, composition, platform, and remix) in discussing the relationships between the larger contextual histories of given works, insofar as such histories are discernible, and the more specific thematic and aesthetic issues of such works. The Emergent Digita l Pr esent A coincidental but as-yet-unaccounted-for transformation of African literary history occurred in the early 2000s through two seemingly unrelated events. The first was the cessation, after forty years, of the African Writers Series (AWS), the literary imprint of the British publishing company Heinemann Educational Publishers, in 2003. The second was the deregulation of the telecommunications industry in Kenya and Nigeria around 2002, which saw personal mobile phones decisively replace analog-style landlines as the preferred mode of telephonic communication.9 There was the additional introduction of what Kenyan expatriate scholar James Ogude sees as “vernacular radio stations in the post-Moi dispensation”

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through frequency modulation (FM) broadcasting in Kenya (2012, 147). A similar development occurred in Nigeria during the previous decade, and it played a catalytic, though often ignored, role in the transformation of the cinematic practice we now refer to as Nollywood. While the state-owned Nigerian Telecommunications Limited (NITEL) established in the 1960s accounted for a total of five hundred thousand subscribers in forty years, three licensed private telephone companies made over two million mobile phone lines available between 1999 and 2002. By the end of 2019, the latest reports indicated that an estimated 83.6 percent of the Kenyan population had access to full digital broadcasting signal, putting the country at the forefront of internet penetration on the continent, perhaps second only to South Africa.10 The case of the discontinuation of Heinemann’s African Writers Series generated some interest among literary scholars in part because of the connection between the series and the legendary status of novelist Achebe as its founding and long-serving editor (1962–1990), and in part because most of the three hundred-odd titles were soon acquired by ProQuest, the online databank for scholarly resources then shopping for content.11 By contrast, the revolution in digital technology in Nigeria and Kenya needed no publicity—it was visible, loud, and colorful and has continued to shape the urban landscape in both countries in irreversible ways. The cessation of the African Writers Series has occasioned two specific changes. The existence of online resources such as ProQuest for African creative works, to begin with, fits in with the modes of production and dissemination currently gaining in importance—blogs, longreads, think pieces, webinars, podcasts, and open-access online journals. This situation makes it possible to teach and conduct research on certain published works without the aid of print, especially in North America, Western Europe, parts of Asia and South America, and also in African countries (if the observations about digital penetration in Kenya and Nigeria are properly harnessed). Even nonacademic readers interested in those classics of modern African literature published through Heinemann can potentially purchase access to the electronic copy of a title, if not for digital download. However, the overwhelming number of students who will want to study African literature at a level for which the titles are suitable may be presumed to reside in African countries, and so some sort of logic of “reversed extraversion” applies—a fact that connects with the other pertinent change brought about by the end of the AWS.12 In fact, the details of

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the ProQuest acquisition are far more troubling than the annunciation of a new portal of distribution might suggest. The British theater scholar Jane Plastow circulated a letter in October 2015 expressing “grave concern at the publishing policies of Pearson in relation to African fictional writing.” The letter attached to the petition alleged that “having taken over the stewardship of the greatest single list of African writing, Pearson [had] no interest in maintaining or developing the fabulous riches of African literature.”13 Without what was thought to be a coherent, steady institutional frame for the production and distribution of African writing, creative writers have had to find a variety of means for circulating and gaining legitimacy, including a combination of autobiographical and celebrity practices (writers embodying or selling “atrocity narratives”), literary prizes, and tactical choices about location and identity. It is fair to say that online, small magazines of different orientations and publishers oriented largely toward internet-based dissemination are among the most vibrant means through which African literature currently thrives. Most of the publications or platforms, like Chimurenga, Kwani?, Pambazuka, Saraba, Wawa Book Review, Bakwa Magazine, Kalahari Review, Warscapes, and Brittle Paper, literary initiatives like Jalada (Kenya), Writivism, and Femrite (Uganda), and book and film festivals within and outside the continent take advantage of Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, blogs, and the websites of conventional and not-so-conventional newspapers to create a variety of options for publication, curation, and dissemination. As I show in chapter 2, Writivism did, through the Center for African Cultural Excellence, take its own initiative to such a level that it functioned for a while as a curatorial platform in collaboration with institutions within and outside the continent. Though primarily focused on literary formations, the Nigeria-based Aké Book Festival has expanded the scope of festival curation to include musical concerts, film screenings, and community-centered engagement with festival guests. Additionally, small publishers across the continent increasingly use the e-book as an indispensable means of publishing literary works. In cinema, an explosion of small but well-publicized festivals has occurred in the last decade across the continent as well as at non-African venues, promoting the work of African directors in unique manners and coming out of sensibilities and cultural innovations tied to digital culture. In various ways, these initiatives, especially in literature, still feed into the traditional patterns of artistic production associated with print. For

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example, Chimurenga publishes the Chronic, a newspaper-format quarterly whose contents are excerpted as hyperlinks on Twitter and blogs, with the entire volume available for purchase in both digital and print formats. These new forms blur the familiar distinctions between conventional print and digital format, opinion making and editorial content, production and consumption, suggesting formats of production that are not limited to print and physical modes of exhibition, and giving writers and other artists new opportunities to pursue their careers. Halfway through the research for this project, I developed a questionnaire for writers publishing on primarily online platforms. The main objectives of the anonymous and voluntary survey were to understand the impact of digital publishing on writers’ sense of craft in professional terms; to gauge what professionalism actually means in the context of the muchstoried democratization of access in digitality; to determine the impact, if any, that the upswing in electronic publishing has had on print formats; and to arrive at a provisional knowledge of the reach of both formats in relation to concepts, such as digital divide and unequal exchange, that have remained pertinent in discussions of African intellectual heritage. Of the several aggregations of responses to the survey, the irrevocable though undeclared adherence to digital culture for purposes of artistic creation is compelling in its recurrence. Respondents also disclose awareness of what some scholars have characterized as “digital feudalism,” the recognition that creative outputs in online platforms often amount to producing content or generating data for big corporations, usually without commensurate remuneration or even guarantee of intellectual property rights. But this awareness does not seem to exercise writers sufficiently to deter committing work to online circulation. Instead, respondents express concern only over such issues as possible disappearance of works from unsustained platforms, the abuse of democratized platforms (through uninformed perspectives, etc.), and the likelihood of increased access making diminishing returns on editorial quality. (See appendix.) Nollywood, the retrospectively named cinema industry that developed in Nigeria from the late 1980s, has always been conceivable within a certain technological orientation. While the industry went global halfway through the 2000s, there was still much mileage ahead, especially in terms of how practitioners might take advantage of digital media. Online streaming platforms like IROKOtv, I-Zogn, and Kanopy came on the scene in due course. But the truly decisive break occurred with the appearance

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of Lionheart, a Netflix original coproduction cowritten and directed by actor Genevieve Nnaji in January 2019. Within a few months, another Netflix release, The Burial of Kojo, by Ghana-born US-based music artist Blitz Bazawule began streaming, with end credits unprecedented in showcasing the reach of crowdfunding for making movies. In the years since Lionheart, hundreds of African film releases of a certain commercial slant have been accorded streaming access on Netflix and similar platforms. This fact indicates that such platforms, Netflix in particular, are a meeting ground of the translocal, though privileged, community of African creatives looking to the medium of cinema for modes of dissemination and consumption regardless of place. Making a case for African artistic forms as modes of creative practice requires that the larger changes described here be understood as connected to the realm of artistic representation. This realm is not isolated from social processes. A tension or dichotomy between middlebrow, highbrow, and popular culture, whether contrived or not, has animated the discussion of African arts and letters for much of the past four decades. What this discussion mostly reflects, I think, are the limits of those categories, especially when one views the production of each category in relation to some development or process in the broader social realm. First, there is the collapse or ongoing reconfiguration of the classes often conceived as the primary instigating force behind each category. Secondly, the crisis of criticism and production of literary works especially, including elite or consciousness-raising theater work, has had the result of extraverting the context of production of both creativity and criticism. One outcome of this crisis is that in the hiatus between the mid-1980s and the mid-2000s, the ideas which prevailed about African literature, outside of the thematics of anticolonialism or neocolonialism making the untidy transition to postcolonial critique, were those of weakly theorized marketable trends, standards, and expectations. The careers, less the works, of Calixthe Beyala and Ben Okri exemplify this trend. However, this trend does not amount to a complete picture of the scene, for other writers, such as Yvonne Vera, Veronique Tadjo, Jamal Mahjoub, and Abdulrazak Gurnah, had steady outputs during much of the 1990s.14 In the third place, the simultaneity of media in the coappearance of print and electronic media in the world of African art encourages a perspective beyond literature as the primary realm of artistic vibrancy. Though easily overlooked, filmmaking in Nigeria provides a good example here.

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Film production has not ceased in the country since 1971, when Francis Ọladele produced Kongi’s Harvest followed by the directorial debuts of Sanya Dosunmu (Dinner with the Devil, 1975) and Ọla Balogun (Àjàní Ògún, 1976). Once the practitioners of the traveling theater idiom with whom Balogun collaborated became convinced of the economic value of this mode of dramatic presentation, a steady stream of films appeared in the 1980s despite the indifference of the country’s cinema organ, the Nigerian Film Corporation, toward this cinematic style in that and much of the following decade.15 In this regard, while almost two decades lapsed before Ngũgĩ published a new novel (between the 1987 publication of Matigaari and the release of The Wizard of the Crow in 2006), the field of African arts experienced the largely autonomous growth of nonliterary but potentially canonical artistic productivity. The increasing visibility of these forms and formats arose partly as a result of the crises in literary publishing, which were accentuated by the new regime of structural adjustments in African economies and the increased relocation of scholars traditionally engaged in literary criticism to universities in North America (and Western Europe, to a lesser extent). Besides video-format Nigerian films, there were “popular fictions”; new genres of recorded music, including music videos; “tourist art”; and other kinds of textual productions in different parts of the continent. These developments, unsystematic as they may seem, reshaped new debates pertaining to genre and the status of the literary. With new interests in unsettling the established ways of talking about what is available in a given field, it is far from surprising that the class-inflected dichotomies between cultures (that is, elite versus popular) would receive their most thorough elaborations in postcolonial studies. “The Age of the Blogger”: Te xt ua lit y a n d Au thor ship R econsi der ed It is largely through this complex process that the idea of a work of art as a text has gained the kind of attention that, in turn, necessitates rethinking. That idea is at the heart of the relationship between literature and other arts, a conception that clearly prioritizes literature. But is literature not just one of the expressive or communicative media of art? How did this prioritization come about, and what does it reveal about the values accorded to works of art? A number of reasons can be advanced. There is,

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first, the disciplinary origin of the African discourse in specific practices of scholasticism informed by literacy. This development in scholasticism, as Abiọla Irele points out in The African Imagination, turned writing into a “modality of expression” in the work of pioneer writers such as Diop and Fagunwa, with ideological if indirect inspiration from figures like Olaudah Equiano and Edward Blyden. Not only did writing serve this expressive purpose, but it additionally pressed into service “a second language introduced as the expressive medium . . . the determining structure of that language [being] brought into play [as] are the literary conventions associated with it” (Irele 2001, 40). A second reason, following from the first, has to do with the relationship between writing and the anticolonial outlook. This relationship is best captured in the visible role of writers as critics of the social order before and especially after political independence, reinforcing the value of the ethical impulse mentioned earlier. In response to comparable historical forces, the writers Assia Djebar, Bessie Head, Nawal el Saadawi, and Jack Mapanje played this role with varying degrees of self-sacrifice. The relationship between writing, as literature, and criticism or scholasticism does not always exert equal force in the preoccupation of a musician or a painter, who has to work in a different medium, practically speaking. A writer who produces criticism J. M. Coetzee (Foe, White Writing) makes a different impression in this context than a filmmaker (say, Sarah Maldoror), without an additional job requiring specialized writing skills. There is, finally, the issue of how literature is disseminated in the classroom. In English departments and adjacent disciplines like history, anthropology, art history, and economics in the United States and parts of the Western Hemisphere, works of literature are amenable to teaching, used either to exemplify certain social practices or to put such practices in context. In this understanding of the value of literature, fiction and cinema tend often to enjoy priority at the expense of poetry and drama and nonliterary arts, because their formal appearance as narratives makes them useful for instructional purposes. Chinua Achebe’s No Longer at Ease is thus a more suitable illustration of a “clash of tradition and modernity” thematic in a general introductory course on African history in a midwestern American university than Wọle S.oyinka’s poem “Telephone Conversation” or Ama Ata Aidoo’s drama, The Dilemma of a Ghost, assuming that the instructor is even aware of these other texts. In African universities, where there is little leverage for literature in other disciplines,

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a similar understanding of the value of literary texts has had the opposite effect of reinforcing analytical practices that treat fiction as historical documents and prioritize what is generally called “close reading.”16 This prioritization of writing—narrative, middlebrow fiction—rides an interesting but overlooked paradox. On the one hand, this pedagogical approach to literature predisposes fiction to commodification on an order of autonomy comparable to a valued art object, aided in no small measure by the close connection between writing—the activity through which criticism often manifests itself—and the expository form of prose. On the other hand, the autonomous status of an art object that is better disposed to commodification, an installation by Kenyan artist Wangechi Mutu, for example, is almost a guarantee that such a work will be treated with a reverence that precludes any useful analytical engagement equal to that of a work of fiction. The hierarchy of values between writing and other forms of artistic representation or communication is historical, and it does not sufficiently reflect the status of different forms in a larger social setting (Jeyifo 2003). That status becomes a viable proposition through a diachronic approach to the history of art across the media and in different parts of the continent when it does not privilege one particular form, time, or place or decontextualize the analysis of any of these categories. The relationship between art forms is characterized by endless, if fitful, mediation, and it is political and economic volatilities as well as disciplinary and pedagogical practices that purposefully or accidentally confer prestige on one form at the expense of another. It is conceptually more productive, I think, to examine the institutional standing of each artistic form in relation to processes of technological or social change, as a way of further underscoring the differing priorities they enjoy in the world as formal modes of representation. Confronting the apparently simple but value-laden assumptions that underwrite the distinction between literature and other arts requires that a strong case be made for the historicity of form, which I do at length in chapter 1. While African literature has had to weather several storms, including the division between the elitist and the popular, the burning representational issues in African cinema pertain to the tensions between criticism and practice. From an early book of cinema criticism, such as Teshome Gabriel’s Third Cinema in the Third World, to a later one, like Alexie Tcheuyap’s Postnational African Cinema, this tension between practice and criticism has endured, with fundamental changes in the emphasis given to the ideo-

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logical orientations of films. Excluding art music and the field of popular genres (musical works in a wide variety of forms named after instruments) circulating translocally across the continent, African music in postcolonial studies amounted largely to Afropop, epitomized by a handful of star performers, until the recent explosion of hip-hop. These works mostly elude analysis except as emanations of what is unsatisfactorily termed “popular culture” or when focus shifts to spectacular figures like Fẹla AnikulapoKuti or the operations of cultural imperialism. This point serves to maximize the scholarly value of such engagements, as seen in Neil Lazarus’s Nationalism and Cultural Practice in the Postcolonial World and Tẹjumọla Ọlaniyan’s Arrest the Music!, both of which have found the disciplinary niche of cultural studies to be indispensable to analysis. Before them, however, Irele had drawn attention to the major methodological oversight in art music scholarship, arguing that the “opposition of high art to the less exalted form has a disabling effect for the healthy development of musical life and expression in the general culture” (2019, 125).17 Despite its long history equal to that of literature and cinema, African visual art that enjoys wide circulation now consists of mostly curatorial objects, close to Afropop in its manner of circulation but reified by practices of connoisseurship and brokerage with questionable relation to collecting. The sustained engagement of African art historians with questions about modernism has decisively oriented the field away from its originating alliance with anthropology and archaeology, and historians’ focus on individual artists as arrowheads of movements and managers of exhibition circuits is generating new perspectives about practice and criticism. A result of this changed context is that curation, a practice owed to contemporary art, has become nearly indispensable to the visibility of artists and their works. This approach also includes traditional and modern arts. Obviously, these art forms do not exhaust the range and depth of African textual production, and each attains preeminence in unresolved tensions with its “others,” those so excluded that a given art form may rise to that level. From unseemly practices of digital feudalism to internal, regional differences as a result of uneven geographical development to issues of taste and value as immanent in art, and to the pressures of the historical world that no one can escape, the various issues that have defined the conception and reception of African art in postcolonial settings are reinforced in digitality, the obstacle that is also a historical opportunity. It

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is as if, in digital culture, the unresolved questions of postcolonial African art appear differently, having changed the terms of earlier relations. Instead of belaboring the issue of whether these are new questions or merely old ones in sublated forms, I think the productive issues to address are the consequential ones pertaining to the reconstitution of authorship and textuality in general. There are two mutually reinforcing ways of understanding this reconstitution. Considering the sheer rhetorical valence of a sung poem hitherto available on compact disc potentially involves a process made easier by new modes of textualization (digitization, transcription) in a situation where the most accessible version of the poem is an audio streamer on YouTube. However, that process of reconstruction, if sufficiently contextualized, also has the potential to offer leads on why that poem was not considered worthy of scholarly analysis in the first place. Did no one notice it? Does the perception that a poem (chanted or homiletic) on an LP is a product of popular culture or “cassette culture” determine its artistic status? Once textualized in written form, the song becomes a poem, based on aesthetic protocols, without losing its status as a song earlier rendered in a percussive ensemble.18 It would be a conceptual error to regard this reconstitution as belonging only to digital culture. It is better apprehended as belonging to the history of African textuality that did not start in 1958 with the publication of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, certainly not with the appearance of the French edition of Djibril Tamsir Niane’s Sundiata the following year. It has always existed in relation to diverse practices of communication, whether figural, sonic, or embodied, even where no vocabularies existed for artists and scholars to come to grips with that relationship. Examples of these modes of communication are abundant. Readily accessible instances exist in textualized forms, in the annunciation of the birth of Sundiata in Dani Kouyate’s Keita: Heritage of the Griot (1995), the steward Joseph’s explanation of the mixed signals of drumming in Wọle S.oyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman (1975), and the long sequence of monitoring and heading off of Nianakoro’s vengeful father in Souleymane Cissé’s Yeelen (1987). The process at work in these media only appears compelling at the current historical pass due to socioeconomic factors of affordability, accessibility, and mobility, the controlled democratization of technology. In her introduction to Africa’s Hidden Histories, one of the most robust conceptualizations of textuality to have grappled with the historical changes discussed at the beginning of this section, the British cultural

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anthropologist Karin Barber provides something of an orientation. She writes of documents in the genre of diaries, letters, petitions, obituary notices, and serial autobiographies as “a zone of activity which has been systematically overlooked in favor of more salient and more official styles of reading and writing by academic and political elites” (2006, 3). Ania Loomba also notes the emergence of “a growing body of work that not only warns us against abstracting [the] literary from other writings, but conversely, reminds us that non-literary texts such as newspaper stories, government records and reports, memoirs, journals, historical tracts or political writings are also open to an analysis of their rhetorical strategies, their narrative devices.” Loomba adds that such texts “are not necessarily ‘objective’ but represent their version of reality for specific readers” (1998, 81). If we extend the scope of these characterizations to include an interest in the aesthetic aspects of such everyday or “tin-trunk” texts, which is an option for a literary scholar, we have additional information about what Kahiu means by saying that African creative artists have always practiced science fiction.19 Barber’s interest in texts as genre has a long history and culminates in the immersive discussion in The Anthropology of Texts, Persons and Publics (2007). Genres are about specialization in kinds, a stage reached when a formal institution (like literary culture) is at a level of relative stability or at least has the potential to be. In African cultural criticism, that stage of stability is conceivable to the extent that scholarship is attentive to the enduring tension between cinematic practice and criticism. The emergence of a work seemingly belonging to a particular genre results in part from the kinds of calculation that Kahiu describes in the YouTube interview discussed at the beginning of this chapter. Viewing generic processes in this way helps to clarify other questions, such as the one this book addresses, about what counts as art. It is important to dwell on this topic because the conferment of artistic value often depends on what is (seen to be) available in a given field or what one knows. The discovery of Greek texts during the Renaissance is fundamental to the conception of the arts through the European Enlightenment and far beyond. It is hardly possible today to understand so-called Western intellectual tradition (and its hegemonic spread throughout the planet) outside of this historic encounter, including the random elements in that encounter (Greenblatt 2012). The modernist delineation of the seven arts has substantially broadened the scope of earlier conceptions that subsisted

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on older arts such as rhetoric, logic, and dialectic, as well as better textualized ones like tragedy, satire, and comedy. However, scholarly erudition in the humanities is hardly thinkable outside of these branches of knowledge even when pedagogical practices no longer accord them the priority they once enjoyed. Generic changes usually begin to attract scholarly attention when the protocols of sustaining accepted categories are tested. This is a standard procedure in humanities scholarship, and it has happened regularly since the far-reaching and still-incomplete reorientation of literary studies engendered by the sociopolitical and economic changes of the past thirty years, as from the professional protocols of the journal Publications of the Modern Language Association, PMLA (2001, 2007, 2013) and the decennial anthologies about Comparative Literature, to cite two common examples. As Michael McKeon once argued with respect to the genre that came to be known as the English novel, these expectations are framed by the historicity of form, the larger social and material conditions that inform scholars’ contemporary views of the practice of criticism (McKeon 2002). The premise of Africa’s Hidden Histories is worth bearing in mind. The various modes and genres of textuality that exist parallel to the more canonical ones grouped under African literature, African cinema, African music, and African art came to be categorized partly as a result of the disciplinary origins of African discourse in specific practices of scholasticism. These practices were informed by literacy, or what Barber terms “elite culture.” Obviously, that volume conceives of literacy as the primary condition for its inquiry into new kinds of textuality, specifically the “tintrunk” variety. However, textuality need not be that limited in scope or kind, and “literacy” can be applied to different kinds of texts. When this approach to texts becomes acceptable and supplemented with an interest in aesthetic issues across genres, media, and historical periods, less conceptual sweat breaking is required to embrace generic openness and come to an awareness of what constitutes art. We can begin with print but look beyond it. In this respect, the writings of novelists like Nigerian Ọladẹjọ Okediji and Kenya-based Richard Crompton provide instructive leads (Fox 2019). According to genre, Okediji’s novels are “detective fiction” or “crime thriller,” as are Crompton’s. Yet, in sheer use of figurative language, Okediji’s works in Yoruba attain a level of literariness that would be the envy of the most dyed-in-the-wool aesthetes and is guaranteed to complicate the

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kind of critical analysis that theoretically-minded writers such as Slavoj Žižek would consider applicable to the airport terminal novels of Patricia Highsmith.20 For Crompton, some level of literacy in urban architecture is more than incidental because the reading experience extends an interest in the real topography of urban Kenya, one with an ideological investment comparable to the pre-1978 writings of Ngũgĩ, especially the stories in Secret Lives. Literacy need not be limited only to print because the ability to read different kinds of codes implies an awareness of conventions and their mutability through individual creativity and critical interpretation. It can be said of an African city like Nairobi or Ibadan (the setting of some of Okediji’s novels) or the Dakar of Djibril Diop Mambety’s Contras’ City (1968) that, quoting Chris Marker about Tokyo in Sans Soleil, “the entire city is a graphic novel.” The conceptual move implicit in this kind of reading is possible through a firm hold on what I conceive of as modes of creative practice. W h at A r e the Modes of Cr e ati v e Pr actice? Demonstrating this kind of reading as a departure from established ways of appreciating diverse artistic forms, and the impact that digitality might have on the reconstitution of ideas of text, authorship, and criticism, requires returning to an argument that appeared near the beginning of this chapter. It is the argument that political and ethical impulses have been integral to modern African art from its inception, and that artists themselves are the primary agents of these impulses. Modes of creative practice manifest themselves other than in, or in addition to, the primary modes that go into the making of a work. A mode of creative practice occurs as the process through which the creation or recreation of a work of art takes advantage of institutional means of production and circulation, based on the ethical understanding that time, place, and material resource affect the significance that attaches to or detracts from such a work. Partly because critics have tended to view these developments as aspects of “biographical criticism” (Gérard 1990), and partly due to the dramatic nature of the expression of these impulses as “grand gestures” by some writers (Ades.ọkan 2003), they have not been examined with the seriousness that suits them. It is important, however, to address these impulses systematically through diverse approaches, one of which is analyzing them as creative practices. They operate in many modes, with artists, directors, authors,

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and producers acutely aware of their media-saturated circumstances and making a variety of ethical choices to shape those circumstances. What is a mode of creative practice in relation to artistic production, though, considering that a work of art is in and of itself creative? Does such a mode change from one text to another, or is the creativity only implicit in the process of bringing a text to life in its original form? For example, is there something in the narrative shape or form of Binyavanga Wainaina’s One Day I Will Write about This Place that predisposes aspects of the writing to recirculation in a blog post? Was the official reception of Ousmane Sembene’s Ceddo in Senegal a result of the director’s handling of historical details as a composite or of the fact that it was a work of cinema rather than of literary fiction? Are the compositional modes in Shailja Patel’s Migritude equally consequential as printed poetry and danced/ spoken performance? What aesthetic aims compel Hugh Masekela’s remix of “Lady,” a track originally composed by Fẹla Anikulapo-Kuti, and how do those aims shape the character of the remix? These questions are necessary in laying out the details of the modes of creative practice. Beyond the creative character of a given work of art, the ways that the work is envisioned to stand in relation to various contexts—economic, political, and institutional—are deliberate acts. There are instances where such perceptions inform even the initial creative process, depending on the specific nature of that process. It is easy to overlook the remarkable artistic courage manifest in the final image in Ousmane Sembene’s first film, Borom Sarret (1963), because of the seemingly offhanded manner of this manifestation. The word DIEHNA, Wolof for “end,” is key to the ideological battles that the director confronted specifically in making this film and generally early in his career, at a time that the forces of production did not avail him of the opportunity to synchronize sound and image.21 The cart driver’s monologue in the film is entirely studio mixed and in French, albeit in Sembene’s own voice. However, the final word is a signal to what later became the director’s main preoccupation, that is, the privileging of Wolof (and relevant African languages) as the linguistic medium of his work, excepting brief compromises with La Noire de . . . and Camp du Thiaroye, to some extent. While the final image is indivisible from the aesthetic character of the film, it is also an act of creative practice as a gesture to the cultural politics that became fundamental to Sembene’s cinematic works. As if in mocking contrast, the final legend in Contras’ City is the standard French “Fin” (end)

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Fig. 0.1. Dienha, Wolof for “The End.” Borom Sarret. 1963.

as kids run after the cart, following the off-camera shout of “Dialogue!” that is perhaps also a playful reference to the studio monologue of Borom Sarret.22 Processes such as composition, adaptation, remix, platform, and curation are some of the modes identified and discussed in this book, and they are mostly qualitatively different from the way a given work first makes its appearance. In complementing the circulation of a work, these modes are significant, and most can be decisive especially because they expand the scope of the work, relying on other media, formats, sites, and audiences to imaginatively reposition it. Additionally, such modes are creative in the sense that they draw on the history, in the present case, of African arts’ affinities with any of a wide array of politics and poetics—anti-imperialism, anti-neocolonialism, socialist realism, feminism, cultural identity, or a combination of these. Through letters, interviews, petitions, press statements, and private or public declarations (at writers’ conferences or film festivals, for example), artists use differences or concordances of opinion between themselves and their varied contexts as specific frames of references that enrich our understanding of how modes of creative practice work. Usually (but not exclusively) out of an awareness of what works for audiences, whether in anticipation or from experience, these artists actively, creatively shape the settings in which their works are conceived

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and circulate. Or they rue the inability to make such an impact. When a writer or a painter grants an interview, gives a lecture, addresses a panel, appends an “artist’s statement” or “author’s note” to a published work, writes a rejoinder to an unflattering review (or is overheard complaining about it), those performances, actions, or activities constitute a specific type of practice. In addition, public or private disclosures are places to look for evidence of how creative acts connect to the ethical basis of African art—the impulse to reclaim voice and subjectivity—in cases where critics have not been disposed enough to read for such evidence. Each of the texts or institutional profiles discussed from chapter 2 through the epilogue—and some of the figures as well—has a relationship to these modes of creative practice that is decisive in how I analyze the given text or figure as a factor in the process. One mode works to frame each of the analytical chapters as case studies, elaborations in excess of the thematic issues in given works. Composition entails the idea of a composite—making up with intent from various elements. In art history, “composite art” means a novel way of creating a unity or wholeness, a form of creative art that can blur previously established paradigms or boundaries and envision new aesthetic and political possibilities. Adaptation involves adapting—revising a work extant in a form to advance new or different artistic visions suitable to the possibilities of a different medium. In its usage here, I intend an additional understanding: the notion of being suited to new conditions, as in the social category of adaptability. From the basic definition of the raised stage used by public speakers to make them visible to spectators, a platform has come to be used in digital culture to mean a web-based space that enables the creation, management, and dissemination of media solutions, products, and services. While authors and creative artists inspired by the lofty aims of cultural self-apprehension might be wary of this blatantly commercial definition, they nonetheless make use of the technology; the internet, like any tool, is an item to be used as and when necessary. Curation is the conceptual practice of the arrangement and display of objects or textual materials in a particular order within a demarcated space, actual or virtual, for the attention of an audience imagined in the manner or shape of that arrangement. Originating in urban musical practices of disc jockeys, a remix emerges from sampling, a process by which a piece of musical media or unit (track) is altered from its original state by addition, removal, and/or rearrangement of parts of the given piece.

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There are areas of overlap between these modes, and I examine those overlaps and distinctions in detail in chapter 1. For a brief example, I have found that remixing a song involves an act of curation, even if the material questions of space and expected reception in a remix are often more implicit than explicit. The formalization of each of these modes also involves trafficking in a distinct realm of experience, modality, or idea, however. Different levels or kinds of expertise—technical, artistic, or social—can be deployed in the service of modes to create new conditions for the dissemination of a work. In this regard, adaptation and remix speak primarily to impulse, to technical hunch, whereas curation is hardly conceivable outside of a conceptual awareness of the history of certain forms and their institutional viability. The media-saturated circumstances in which these specific modes of creative practice exist are becoming more visible and analytically viable under digitality than previously, and they give rise to ideas that accrete as the reconstitution of notions of textuality, criticism, or authorship. In “Freeze Frame: Audio, Aesthetics, Sampling, and Contemporary Multimedia,” an admirably synoptic and informative essay, Ken Jordan and Paul D. Miller (aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid) write of the pioneering years of networked music when composers used available software to explore “wholly original, uncharted musical terrain, one that is unthinkable without networked computers” (2008, 102). Through the manipulation of sounds circulating on- and offline, these composers were able to generate musical experiences in which “the traditional distinction between ‘artist’ and ‘audience’ [begin] to melt away, as the ‘listener’ also becomes a ‘performer’” (102). I will return to this important essay in chapter 1, such is its relevance to the argument of mediation as a broadly conceptual process at work in the kinds of reconstitution that I dwell on in this book. The multiplicity of digital outlets for writers and artists looking to disseminate their works and the accessibility of those outlets through platforms directly linked to personal devices go to the ethical core of modes of creative practice. Yet, while digital culture has had this decisive impact, the reconstitution discussed in this book does not belong exclusively to this new culture. Rather, as I show in detail in chapters 1 and 2 and as the coauthors claim for “our tribal roots” (101), it is a feature of African textuality that has always existed in relation to earlier practices of communication and particularly of artistic or cultural representation because artistic practice usually involves the act of mediation. In complementing

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the circulation of a work, these modes are significant and decisive because they expand the scope of the work. They rely on other media, formats, sites, and audiences to reposition the work in imaginative directions. A Note on Method This case for a diachronic perspective on African textual practices is convincing, I hope, in several ways, beginning with the pairing or clustering of authors, forms, regions, and genres on which the structure of the chapters of the book rests. In its core chapters (2–6), the book focuses on a wide range of texts and practices, such as festivals, sufficiently formalized to be subject to analysis. The texts include Hubert Ogunde’s opera, Moré.niké./ Àyànmó. (1948/1972), Shailja Patel’s Migritude (2010), Ousmane Sembene’s Ceddo (1977), Akinwumi Is.ọla’s Ó Le Kú (1974/1997) and Ẹfúns.etán Aníwúrà (1973/2005), Joseph Gai Ramaka’s So Be It (1997), Ọmọwunmi S.egun’s Ẹniìtàn/Daughter of Destiny (2016), Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Resolutionaries (2013), Binyavanga Wainaina’s blog post ‘I’m Homosexual, Mum’ (2014), Hugh Masekela’s Lady (1985) and Yinka Shonibarẹ’s Lady Na Master (2002), both deriving from a 1973 track by Fẹla AnikulapoKuti, and Spell Reel (2017), a film assemblage by Filipa César and others. According to a protocol of reading, the book exists at the intersection of print and electronic media. I regard such a protocol (informed by cultural studies) to operate on a scale of values embedded in the educational form of colonial modernity, which habitually prioritizes the former and views the latter as relatively recent. Instead, I want to make a strong claim that such perspectives and priorities, when not in thrall to disciplinary blind spots, are often a matter of historical accident. Had the field of humanistic studies been configured as a broad sphere of intellectual endeavor beyond bookish scholasticism, the priorities informing scholarly practices might have been different. Nothing in nature is immutable. By underscoring the role of ethical impulses in African arts, I am proposing that artists, writers, filmmakers, and musicians have been hard at work directing our attention to new visions of these priorities. The arguments that John Guillory makes in his essay “Genesis of the Media Concept” (2010) concerning the concept of media are relevant in this regard, and I take up those arguments in the next chapter. The geographical scope of this book includes West and East Africa, a choice that reflects my interest in artistic or cultural diffusion in African history. But this scope expands in three major, innovative

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ways: through a pairing or clustering of authors, forms, and genres across regions; through a simultaneous interest in the ways that these clusters circulate translocally; and through a comparative mode of analysis that offers a distinct example in methodological terms. In other words, beyond what may appear as its primary area of focus, the book suggests an example for approaching any number of artists, forms, and genres not just in East or West Africa, but in any region of the continent and even in nonAfrican spaces where the conditions described here may apply. The formal differentiation of artistic works according to practices within disciplines tends, I realize, to slow down the comprehension of the perspective I adopt. Think about it. Examining a song through categories such as genre (electronic/jazz) and style (acid jazz) fosters a distinct form of attention. The same is true of experimental prose fiction. These sorts of information have become available through digital interface, where attempts to analyze a text are cognizant of the relationships between computers and electronic composition, and playing or searching online for a musical track is mediated by music-sharing platforms or apps like iTunes, Spotify, Deezer, YouTube, Pandora, and many others. Such acts of knowing and imparting knowledge of music or literature impose on the critic tasks besides which using standard musical notations, for example, are additive but onerous. New information and methodological options do not invalidate tried and tested analytical approaches, of course, but the increased reliance of musical production and consumption on the electronic format, indeed the amplification of percussive energy by electricity, surely calls for supplementary modes of analysis. For another case in point, scholars would study or write about drumming in an academic setting as ethnomusicology or art music according to established divisions (Ong 1977). But how does one come to grips with the nondiegetic sound of what is audible as a Yoruba talking drum in Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust (1991)? Is it enough to simply extract this rhetorical placement of a text as soundtrack? What if this perception of diasporic sounding, a complex figure of embodiment, is already informed by the assertion in John Akomfrah’s The Last Angel of History (1995) that “the first touch of science fiction came when Africans began to play drums to cover distance”?23 Would The Last Angel of History being exhibited in a gallery, say, as part of the famous Short Century show of 2001/2002, expand its disciplinary habitation to art history, a discipline that evolved historically from archaeology? Will the conception of techno music in this

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film as blurring the distinctions between reggae, jazz, funk, and electronic impact how the work of the featured musicians is approached in scholarship? These are the kinds of questions that exercise the pairing or clustering of figures, works, forms, and regions in this book. With the focus on the soundtrack in Ceddo, for example, the reader is encouraged to relate to music in film in ways that go beyond narrative needs. This music is purely sonic and atmospheric, and even its lyrical component does not advance the film’s thematic elements directly. And this in the work of a filmmaker justly famous for his interest in narrative. It is an approach that sets aside the quibbles over the chronological relationship between the production of the two films, and even the unlikelihood of the producers of the latter film missing the textual placement of drumming in the earlier one. It focuses, instead, on the accretion of knowledge around the trope of embodiment, including the contestations, disavowals, and celebrations of this trope in Africana history (Thompson 2011; Bakare-Yusuf 2006). In fact, the orientation in The Last Angel of History toward conceptual issues about technology at a time when digital culture was less pervasive than now validates my preferred methodological outlook. In its basic shape, Everything Is Sampled is a curation. The ideas, aims, objectives, calculations, and negotiations informing the choice, clustering, and exclusion of texts, authors, and genres operate in the relationships between the ethical principles of African art and the various institutional forces at work in the production and circulation of artistic forms. These relationships are often invisible in contemporary cultural criticism except as claims arising from the politics of identity. However, it is important to note that questions pertaining to nation, race, class, sexuality, and gender continue to impact the conception and circulation of works of art in spite of the widespread claim that globalization and the deterritorialized rule of imperialism have blurred the lines between the spaces in which they operate. An imaginative option is to show how digital culture has thrown those questions into relief, as socialized technologies often do. The productive issues to address, I think, pertain to the ongoing reconstitution of notions of authorship and textuality in African artistic forms in general, from the perspective of ethical principles informing modes of creative practice. For these reasons, I have focused broadly on two main regions of the continent—West and East—bending national frames to examine translocal forces (such as the mobility of people and the portability of

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technologies) that shape artistic processes and placing figures, genres, and modes in curatorial sequences with the aim of enacting a specific but nonmonolithic aesthetic discourse in contemporary Africa.24 Scholars typically break down complex processes then isolate or shift to a particular dimension of experience, neglecting inconvenient dimensions. My book makes a case for paying attention to the total context of an experience by questioning the notions that lie beneath discrete choices without fostering a monolithic appraisal of the experience. From the pairings and clusters that we see here, interpretive discussions of concepts that ordinarily fall under the category of gender develop in persuasive ways regarding the historical suppression and creative activation of matrilineal system in chapter 3, the feminist dimensions of political power in chapter 4, and female identity as generative of emotional and intellectual solidarity in chapter 5. A similar point pertains to class in chapters 3 and 4, with texts from different episodes in African history, and to region in chapter 6, where the idea of remix saturates creative affiliations in which Nigerian, Kenyan, Bissauan, or South African nationalities do not necessarily possess comparable analytical powers. Where class, region, or nationality as categories of social relation do not appear in such a conceptual manner in a work of art, the curatorial option of reading for context becomes useful in placing such diverse periods as the British colonial terror in Kenya (Migritude), intraclass politics in eighteenth century Senegambia (Ceddo), and gendered prejudice in nineteenth century Ibadan (Ẹfúns.etán Aníwúrà), among other elements, next to one another. The same claim holds for the status of the song “Lady” and the digital reanimation of other texts in chapter 6. Through this approach, I show a way of addressing the questions that have appeared at different points in this chapter and those that will surface in the subsequent ones. Part 1 comprises chapters 1 and 2. In chapter 1, I mine critical writings by Walter Benjamin, Ayi Kwei Armah, Wọle S.oyinka, Lisa Gitelman, and John Guillory to clear the ground for this study’s three main concepts— diachronicity, translocality, and mediation. The aim is to show how the chosen modes of creative practice have shaped the circulation of works of art and how to better appreciate their analytical force in digitality. I confront theoretical questions about productive ways of thinking about the reconfiguration, within digital culture, of new and canonical textual productions in African arts and letters, and particularly the ways that scholars might hope to undertake such interpretive work without

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underestimating persistent forms of unequal exchange and without presuming a simple antagonistic relationship between old and new modes of production and representation. Titled “Spatial Assemblages,” chapter 2 poses a question: What is the relationship between curation on digital platforms, the principal mode in which a variety of African artistic forms are showcased beyond temporal and geographical limitations, and the notion of festivals as the constitutive element of society’s self-accounting? Oriented toward a synchronic focus on the New York African Film Festival and the Arts Management and Literary Activists Network, two platforms with significant online curatorial presence, this chapter develops a comparative analysis of theater as the decisive example of mediation that thinking relationally between African textual practices and digitality fosters, focusing on two traditions. The first is the modal production style that African art history has long associated with mbari houses of clay sculptures produced through the sixties in southeastern Nigeria, and the second is the career of Hubert Ogunde, the acknowledged doyen of Nigerian theater artists, exemplified in his opera Moré.niké./Àyànmó. (1948/1972). While the idea of sculptural permanence contradicts the spirit of mbari, important acts of mediation have occurred through generational transfer of skills and regimes of visuality with greater disposition to framing and mobility, as the careers of artists Ndidi Dike, Obiora Udechukwu, El Anatsui and Yinka Shonibarẹ testify. These processes manifest in curatorial practices deployed in digital platforms, especially through a reimagining of communities or publics for African arts and letters. For his part, Ogunde developed his theatrical practice through a conception of audience as mobile and traveling theater as the literal pursuit of patrons. As Ogunde’s publics expanded within Nigeria, across West Africa, and even overseas in Canada and England, so did the very forms of his art reveal their constitutive features. The process of developing and maintaining the opera as a repertory item is emblematic of the relationships between ideas that are increasingly indispensable to using digital media to curate productions—cinema, literature, art, music—and the festival mode of generating audiences around those productions in translocal contexts. Part 2 contains analyses of works more discrete in formal terms than, say, Ogunde’s long-range opera. In chapter 3, composition serves as an integral mode of creative practice in works by filmmakers Ousmane Sembene and poet Shailja Patel. Anti-imperialism as a political option among

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African artists has long been a decisive factor for understanding the nature of artistic composition, either through the use of well-known events to create what the literary theorist Biọdun Jeyifo calls “fictional genealogies” of the continent’s involvements with modern historical processes or through a targeted disruption of accepted facts; different aspects of the anti-imperialist temper play a key role in the constitution of alternative narratives. However, anti-imperialism is only one option, generating enormous cultural capital, and a general, diachronic reading of art across media and in different parts of the continent induces equal attention to the simultaneous spheres and practices through which a given technological medium eventuates in an art form. In Ceddo (1977/1980), Sembene uses the figure of Fara Tine, the largely unspeaking griot-musician-messenger accompanying the leader of the ceddo, to advance his conception of a generalized history of African futures, reaching into a continental repository of memories that comes across in the film in diverse ways: the contrasting uses of the griot figure, the transposition of incidents, and the soundtrack by Manu Dibango. Following a similar impulse, Shailja Patel’s Migritude (2010), developed out of a history of displacement, shows visible signs of composition out of performances. Composition is a mode well suited to the political impulse of a work critically articulating current forms of imperialism and struggles against them in a multiplicity of realms. The imaginative network from which Patel’s poetics unspool is transnational, as the poetry, in print and performance, invests in a politics of identity in relation to migration. This politics sets aside the kind of generalized history seen in Ceddo for a more explicit and contextual use of autobiographical details. However, calculated to circulate also through print, the poems can only be read within textual protocols—epigraphs, quotations, timelines, images—that are both different from the contexts of performance and are already imagined to be consequential as part of the creative process. The vastly different contexts in which the two artists created their works do nothing to blunt the political and artistic deployments of composition. Instead, they affirm the perception of African history as a changing case of an old system in new forms and requiring artists to develop matching modes of critique. In chapter 4, adaptation figures as a mode of creative practice that author Akinwumi Is.ọla and writer-director Joseph Gaï Ramaka undertake to bring works extant in print into the medium of film, a mode through which to examine two aspects of the ethical impulse in contemporary

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African arts pertaining to socioeconomic and institutional volatilities. The first is the need to revitalize (and in the process, critique) a culture by retrieving and reformatting texts that were not guaranteed to last, given the combination of class orientation and environmental and economic conditions. In the film versions of his novel Ó Le Kú (1974/1997) and the drama Ẹfúns.etán Aníwúrà (1973/2005), Is.ọla not only takes enormous advantage of a medium perceived to be more economically sustainable but also takes liberty with facts of cultural history by rewriting significant parts of the works. Through a comparative discussion of the various tactics involved in adapting or reformatting the two works, I show Is.ọla as an astute cultural broker who is not content to let his work speak for itself. In a manner similar to his resolve to write creative works in Yoruba and to prioritize drama because of its immediacy in production (both choices reminiscent of Sembene’s historic preference for cinema), this author as a cultural broker adapts easily to the new technology of video production. What seems relatively feasible for Is.ọla, however, becomes a matter of ideological and institutional wrestling for Ramaka, a fine cineaste noted for his adaptations. Focusing on So Be It (1997), an early film by Ramaka adapted from S.oyinka’s The Strong Breed, allows me to examine a thorny issue in contemporary African and postcolonial art: the structural connection between the poetic imagination and the social as the ground on which production, the complex process of making a work exist in the world, takes place. The analytical interest of this chapter also lays in telling a story about the conjoined fates of Nollywood and African cinema that digital media has significantly reshaped, to mixed outcomes. Extending the discussion about the limited marketable value of poetic imagination in an artist of Ramaka’s orientation, chapter 5 highlights platform as a creative practice to address a specific question in the relationship between African literature and the phenomenon of world literature. What is the status of African literature within the ideological entrenchment of the values of contemporary middlebrow fiction? After a close review of new critical currents in world literature by scholars including Emily Apter, Simon Gikandi, Eileen Julien, Pheng Cheah, and Aamir Mufti, the chapter turns to the current fortunes of African literature as an important stream of world literature. Critics frequently prioritize the work of a small number of writers as deserving of attention in the context of world literature. In this chapter, I focus on the visible shadow cast by this discriminatory form of attention. Going beyond the paradigms of contemporary middlebrow

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fiction and their globalization of trendy themes, I turn to African writings that are published to scattered attention as a result of prevailing formal and institutional priorities, focusing on two—novels—Aramide S.egun’s Eniìtàn: Daughter of Destiny (2016) and Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Resolutionaries (2013). These works and others in a variety of forms, genres, and modes are examples of artistic sensibilities that do not primarily depend on the marketable value of a work. However, due to the cultural politics enacted in these works and the process of bringing them into circulation, they are self-conscious participants in digital culture, making available modes of creative practice that have the potential to expand the category of world literature. Chapter 6 considers three kinds of remix that take advantage of digital technology and new conceptions of creative affiliation to generate works of art in peculiar circumstances. Focusing on Binyavanga Wainaina’s 2014 blog post “I’m Homosexual, Mum,” Hugh Masekela’s “Lady” (1994), and the collaborative Spell Reel (2017) by Filipa César and others, I examine the relationship between new identities and technologies. The Kenyan writer’s use of a blog to draw a connection between the genealogy of his much-heralded, generically innovative book One Day I Will Write about This Place (2011) and his homosexual identity represents a technologically savvy enactment of Pan-African politics in which an online platform perceived to be “African” becomes the preferred agent of dissemination. In “Lady,” a remix of an Afrobeat song originally composed by Fẹla, South African musician Masekela adroitly balances the song’s controversial politics with the sonic possibilities of jazz and funk, defamiliarizing Afrobeat’s relaxed aesthetics by making the remix legible within a transnational setting of tolerable Africanness in tune with new notions of creative community, seen in artist Yinka Shonibarẹ’s installation based on the same song. Unlike the two previous cases, what stands for a remix in the hybrid documentary film Spell Reel (2017) is not an autonomous work, but an archive, the decomposing depository of an important liberation movement. In this film, César and her collaborators reconstruct the history of the war of independence in Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde from fragmented, degenerating audiovisual archival images produced by the filmmakers that the liberation movement, the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC) recruited to learn filmmaking as part of the liberation struggle. By juxtaposing the recovered images and audio with commentaries from live screenings across the two countries and

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framing these with reflections on techniques of filmmaking, Spell Reel simultaneously enacts a “genealogical fiction” of the political struggle and restores the fragmented and uncompleted projects to their artistic and political realms. In these diverse works, the recurrent issue pertains to modal practices that preserve essential features of creative communities even as these features change based upon place, time, or material resource. In the epilogue, I imagine the prospects of African artistic cultures without guarantees and make broad gestures of a theoretical kind, discussing possibilities for digital artistic effervescence beyond and within print. Mindful of the nature of art in relation to history as constitutive of representation, I also highlight digitality’s economic orientation as part of a capitalist system driven by the profit motive and property rights—the factor that cannot be divorced from the much-vaunted democratic potentials of the culture.

PART 1

SHIFTING MARGINS p

One

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MODES OF CREATIVE PRACTICE

Introduction: Time, Space, Medium The following questions run like blood through the arteries of this chapter: What theories or modes of reading are available in considering the reconfiguration, within digital culture, of new textual productions in the myriad of forms to which we give the name “art”? If none are readily available, how does one go about bringing them to life? Once assembled, how are such modes of reading to avoid the risks of underestimating persistent forms of unequal exchange between and within different spaces—the hierarchies between artistic forms—and without presuming a simple antagonistic relationship between old and new modes of production and representation? Addressing these questions requires returning to the nuts-and-bolts aspects of the modes of creative practice laid out in the introduction. Returning to a focus on the modes, however, will make sense only after the conceptual ground of the opening questions is cleared through the examination of a set of critical writings. These writings fall into two groups. One group, comprising essays by Paulin Hountondji and Achille Mbembe, comment on the sociohistorical processes that link or disconnect relations of production on the African continent to the world at large. The other group, by writers such as Walter Benjamin, Ayi Kwei Armah, Lisa Gitelman, John Guillory, Eileen Julien, and Wọle S.oyinka, enable me to expand on what is methodologically constrictive (Hountondji) and what is merely suggestive (Mbembe) as I set sight on enacting a particular discourse in contemporary African arts and letters. In the

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process, I connect diachronicity, translocality, and mediation, the three main concepts in the book, to patterns of artistic choice within which the modes of creative practice can be understood. The questions raised above can be synthesized into one theoretical poser: To what extent does the current reconfiguration of textual production help reorient critical analysis, given the ideological purchase of terms such as “digital divide” and “unequal development” and considering that African countries have historically played subordinate roles in the distribution (and to some extent the production) of creative texts? The discourses that fuel terms such as “digital divide” and “cultural imperialism” are part of the elaborate critiques by economists and social scientists associated with dependency theory and a range of antiimperialist positions and premises from the late 1950s onward. Samir Amin’s Unequal Development is the definitive book in these critiques. There are differences in the perspectives advanced by the scholars, especially between those from Latin America (like Andre Gunder Frank) and those with research interest in African economies (such as Samir Amin and Giovanni Arrighi), but they present a common ground as the critique of classical economic models.1 These discourses articulate their difference from classical economics on the basis of colonial relations of extraction, according to which relations between different parts of the world were shaped by the material and symbolic disproportions between the center and the peripheries. Relying on these discourses, Beninese philosopher Paulin Hountondji writes in his 1997 introduction to the multidisciplinary volume Endogenous Knowledge that in specifically African contexts, unequal exchange was driven by “the logic of extraversion” (1, 7–12). He argues that this logic operated on economic, intellectual, and scientific levels; it was so pervasive as to be the axis on which cultural and economic exchanges between the continent and the Western Hemisphere turned. While acknowledging significant differences between the status of social infrastructures in preindependence and independence eras, Hountondji notes that “the multiplication of facilities for intellectual and scientific production in the peripheral countries . . . has so far mainly served to facilitate the export of information” (6). This situation of unequal exchange is reinforced by the phenomenon of “scientific tourism,” by which Hountondji means that knowledge acquired in Africa and the Third World escapes from these places entirely, “ploughed systematically back toward Europe, repatriated,

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capitalized and accumulated at the center of the system” and leading to new fields and specialized subjects (11). In Hountondji’s usage, extraversion presupposes a “The-West-and-Africa” kind of polarity, an analogic concept that is hard to picture within the frame of digitality. Hountondji first used this term, “extraversion,” in “Recapturing,” his chapter in the volume The Surreptitious Speech (Mudimbe 1993) and discloses having borrowed it from scientists working in development (238). Much of his writing from this period engages the topic, and by returning to it in the introduction to his edited volume, he brings to the term a philosophical gravity that resonates with other scholars (Julien 2006). The notion of diffraction that Achille Mbembe advances in his 2006 essay “On Politics as a Form of Expenditure” offers an argument to the contrary. Mbembe borrows the term “diffraction” from physics to describe the condition in which light changes form—breaks apart—when it passes through opaque bodies that deflect rays. For Mbembe, with respect to social processes in different parts of the continent, diffraction is understood on the model of a transnationalization that articulates with metropolises within the continent and globally. Mbembe is invested in multiplicities— as identities, allegiances, authorities, and jurisdictions—and his argument rests on a premise that admits more than a single supervening system in the complex process of diffraction. This model of transnationalization does not and cannot privilege the old colonial metropolises, and it manifests itself through forms of sociality in which political practices are reformulated as practices of war. Arguing that practices of war are central to this perception, Mbembe draws attention to new forms of governmentality resting on “bodies of knowledge or discourse [that] no longer rest on a single ‘archive’ such as the ‘anti-colonial archive’ and its various vulgates . . . [and that] rarely refer, as in former times, to a collective emancipation or to a revolutionary social transformation” (325). The general impulse in the essay is a critical view of cultural states as a structural product of intensified practices of governmentality. Placing those practices within widespread processes of diffraction, however, encourages us to relate the effects of the practices to the benign aspects of contemporary times, such as digitality and the new and varied forms in society with which it shares intellectual origins. These forms include genetic mapping, biotechnology, medicalization, and greater visibility accorded to cultural minorities—people with disabilities and those of different or nonbinary sexual orientations.

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Each of these forms has a complex relationship to the consolidation of cultural states on the continent, and Mbembe’s point is that such a relationship with processes of diffraction makes the premise of colonial relation and its critiques problematic. Simultaneous with the rejection of a singular frame for understanding this transnationalization of African societies is the recognition of processes of doubling, a coexistence of activities that are in contrast. Extreme demonetarization, the appearance of modes of exchange based on subsistence, exists side by side with dollarization, the privileging of foreign currency as a standard of exchange. Similarly, citizenship comes within the purview of doubling “the intramuros polis (place of origin and custom, whose signs one carries along in case of need as one travels to distant places) and the extramuros polis (that which is made possible by dispersion and immersion in the larger world” (Mbembe 2006, 307–308; original emphases). I think that Mbembe’s analysis is still largely descriptive, even if theoretically engaged. It leaves unanswered questions about the extent to which so-called cultural states are necessarily of recent vintage and about how tenably a general case can be made regarding war in a continent with such varied kinds of sovereignty. To be sure, the pace and impact of internal disintegration in a war-ravaged country may differ significantly from the pace and impact in the age of colonialism, when governmentality was vigilantly martial. But a given society is perpetually in the making, even if, in modern African history, certain accents have crystallized and become dominant as cultural nationalism or political radicalism of a revolutionary kind. The global Black nationalist awareness of the 1960s might have provided the intellectual impetus for a work of archaeological history like Walter Rodney’s A History of the Upper Guinea Coast 1545–1800, a muchneglected study. However, the book’s excellence rides principally on the unusual light it trains on the continent’s internal differentiation and the role that that differentiation played in its encounter with Europe and the New World, as well as on its astute exploration of differences along class and ethnic lines.2 If one extrapolation from the Democratic Republic of Congo, with its decades-long war, is that it serves as feeder for various practices of mineral extraction, a similar case can be made for the resourcefulness of the canoe-making industry in the seventeenth century Casamance region, when the trade in slaves boomed. Even before the colonial encounter, Nigerian philosopher Olufẹmi Taiwo argues comprehensively in How Colonialism Preempted Modernity in Africa, ideas and

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practices of African agency in political and religious domains had developed out of an awareness of historical processes in the world. Thus, what we have in Mbembe’s admittedly rich and suggestive essay is a sort of map of emergent cultural states, making his reflections hover between speculation and prophecy, sounding like Frantz Fanon in the pivotal chapters of The Wretched of the Earth. In fact, it is exactly in the part of the essay where Mbembe turns toward new forms of governmentality that his analysis appears to have been anticipated by Fanon.3 There are forms of exchange to which the idea of extraversion will continue to apply, even though a changed state of affairs is more desirable from an ethical point of view. Whatever we mean by “the West” is still more powerful and ideologically dominant from an institutional perspective than contemporary Africa. Perch fish from Lake Victoria are still being shipped as fillets to Europe and North America in exchange for guns and with serious impact on African life, as we learn from Hubert Sauper’s Darwin’s Nightmare. Without minimizing the routinized police killings of especially Black people in the United States, the scale and frequency of xenophobic violence directed primarily at Black Africans in South African cities is hard to imagine in a major Western country. And a US corporation has greater symbolic and actual capital to negotiate the terms of establishing a factory in Kenya than the Guinean government does in determining the terms of mining its reserve of iron ore. One need look no further for evidence than the context of the present writing: discussions of this kind take place more frequently in American or European universities and publications (and are of greater quantity and quality) than in African ones outside of South Africa, never mind that African scholars are now a dominant part of those discussions. In other words, we cannot rule out entirely the pervasive regimes of inequality that extraversion is meant to articulate. It is from the sort of multidisciplinary collaboration that Hountondji advances in Endogenous Knowledge that Mbembe’s skeletal projections acquire substance. When Hountondji writes of the “siphoning of information from the Third World to feed metropolitan universities and research centers” (1997, 5), he draws attention to the pervasive nature of extraction as an integral part of the social economy, metastasized as Mbembe’s transnationalization. This submission, however, underestimates the situation in which African scholars are a major part of what is siphoned, and such an imagining is well within the frame of Mbembe’s description of new (African) cultural states writ global. These two positions are in productive

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tension, and the tension is fundamental to the discontinuities between aspects of African artistic practices that I develop subsequently, using the concept of translocality. While the ideas elaborated by both Hountondji and Mbembe may seem to be in tension, I argue that by approaching the processes through which African artistic forms circulate as modes of creative practice, a more complex picture emerges, one that does not simply cast its lot with either the ambiguous transnationalization of new cultural states or the extractive history trapped in colonial logics. Paying simultaneous attention to the multiple spheres of production and circulation helps in troubling boundaries, whether pertaining to social spheres or to artistic works. The three specific concepts—diachronicity, translocality, and mediation—help to clarify how “the simultaneity of spheres” works in this discussion. Diachronicity, the idea of a perspective informed by a longer, steadier view of historical processes, affords us a way of avoiding the routine tendency in postcolonial studies to stress newness at the expense of the inescapable historicity of form. All media are new relative to their contexts because each exists in language as its primary mode of constitution, and figurative language is always encountered anew. The point of playing up the diachronic view is to underscore the productive nature of historical discontinuity. British social anthropologist Jack Goody, renowned for his interest in concepts of orality and literacy as historical logics of communication, puts this in a clear manner when he writes of communication as representing “a model for a kind of development, from the shift between (purely) oral and written, from the emergence of logographic, syllabic, and alphabetical scripts . . . in this, one new form succeeded another but did not replace it, as largely did the changes in means of production. There was a different sort of change . . . One model of communication builds on another, the new does not make earlier form obsolete but modifies it in a variety of ways” (2003, 33; emphasis added). This statement indicates that the key issue in the relationship between the old and the new, in technology as in ideology, is not the superiority of the new to the old (or vice versa) but rather the inherently limited resources of the one in relation to the other, which are a function of historical, economic, and institutional contingencies. Lisa Gitelman has also written that even “the newest new media today come from somewhere, whether that somewhere gets described broadly as a matter of supervening social necessity, or narrowly in reference to some proverbial drawing board and a round or two of beta testing” (2006, 5).

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Translocality as I use it here is the process through which differences that have characterized the history of the African continent come into play in giving prestige to, or withholding it from, certain kinds of representation or perspective. The African world is translocal; it is not limited to the geographical space of the continent. It is both the historical continent of the Black peoples as well as those different parts of the world where Black populations and their physical and psychic allies are dispersed—as a result of slave trades (Euro-American and Arabian) as well as the diffuse migrations that have defined new communities in the wake of both the abolition of slavery and the emergence of modern African nations. Contemporary scholarship has usually invoked diasporicity and transnationalism to speak about these historical processes. Without ignoring those concepts, I opt for translocality because it encourages the reflexive attitude of naming them as processes internal to the continent as well. Regarding mediation, used here in the sense that the process of artistic composition is inherently mediated, it is significant in that it has, especially through the remediating power of the electronic or technological apparatus, forced a reconsideration of the question of unequal exchange and associated terms in African artistic practice. As will be seen below, I draw primarily on S.oyinka’s writing to elaborate on this idea of mediation, but I have also found Gitelman’s analysis of the inseparability of media and content quite useful (Gitelman 2006, 6–7). I examine these three concepts in detail in the rest of this chapter. The Histor icit y of For m In an essay titled “Eduard Fuchs: Collector and Historian” (1979), the German critic Walter Benjamin makes an arresting connection between the scientific and historical processes that constitute technology around the time of the European Second International (1889–1916). Scholars of Benjamin’s work have correctly noted the importance of this essay in the development of the writer’s thinking on the problems of historical materialism. Chronologically, it was composed between the more frequently discussed “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” and “Theses on the Philosophy of History”; it anticipates “some of the themes and even passages” of the latter in a more discursive and expansive manner, in the words of the publishers of One-Way Street, where the essay first appeared in English (1979, 42). For example, the sentence “There is no document of

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civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism,” perhaps the most resonant sentence in “Theses,” makes its appearance in this earlier essay, though in a slightly different form as a result of translation or revision. Benjamin’s task in “Eduard Fuchs” is to debunk the positivist view of historical processes that dominated the discussion about technology at the turn of the twentieth century in Germany. The dominant features of this view, according to Benjamin, were idealist, focusing on reason, progress, and science, and he argues that the collector Eduard Fuchs was shaped by this view in his choice of what he collected and how he wrote about his collections. The strongly disapproving tone of the essay is reserved for the aspects of Fuchs’s work that fell short of the expectations of Benjamin the historical materialist, and this is because the work—collecting and analysis—was tainted with positivism. “But,” he writes further, technology is obviously not a purely scientific phenomenon. It is also an historical one. As such it forces us to investigate the positivist and undialectical separation between natural science and the humanities . . . In the development of technology [positivism] saw only the progress of science, not the retrogression of society. It overlooked the fact that capitalism has decisively conditioned that development. It also escaped the positivists . . . that the development of technology made it more and more difficult for the proletariat to take possession of it . . . They failed to perceive the destructive side of technology because they were alienated from the destructive side of the dialectic. (1979, 357, 358)

Theoretician, politician, and collector aligned with the German Social Democratic Party in the final years of the nineteenth century. Fuchs might have been a dedicated militant of the Party, but his search for truth in art was of a piece with the positivist outlook for which Benjamin did not have much sympathy. “[Fuchs] steers clear of borderline cases . . . that might reveal the problematic character of such terms. He prefers to stick to the ‘truly great,’ whose prerogative is to give free rein to ‘rapture in the simplest things.’ Transitional period like the Baroque he has little time for” (1979, 366). For Fuchs, the “course of art history is seen as necessary, styles in art as organic, even the most disconcerting art forms as logical” (367). This series of ruling ideas had the closest possible connection with the social-democratic doctrines of the age. The socialist party’s conception of history was influenced by Darwinism, and political deviations, either revisionist or anarchist, were blamed on insufficient knowledge of geology and biology.

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Benjamin’s reassessment and critique of Fuchs’s work as historian and collector took place in a context where “an array of judicial and administrative bureaucracies had arisen, whose members no longer function[ed] as fully responsible moral subjects, their sense of duty [being] nothing but the unconscious expression of this deformity” (377). The overall impulse of the essay is both paranoid and pessimistic. But some of that pessimism was justified, in retrospect, particularly with respect to such claims that “the energies that technology develops beyond their threshold are destructive. They serve primarily to foster the technology of warfare, and of the means used to prepare public opinion for war” (358). The war came in 1939, not long after the essay was composed, and Benjamin did not survive it. There are several values to the essay, but the one I want to stress in terms of its relevance to the present discussion is how the kind of diachronic view of technology that Benjamin adopts lays a basis for a stronger appreciation of the status of artistic practice that Everything Is Sampled addresses. Diachronic studies are a controversial topic in literary history principally because of the fallacy of historical continuity (Robertson 1974). However, as will become clear when I turn to S.oyinka’s theoretical but insufficiently studied essay “Theater in African Traditional Cultures” (1988), such quibbles over the nature of historical continuity are valid only if one approaches a literary history or an artistic form in isolation from other social processes. To put this case about diachronicity in the terms of a study equally poised between media studies and comparative literary studies, the approach to media enjoined by John Guillory in “Genesis of the Media Concept” (2010), an essay cited in the introduction, offers additional context. Guillory’s approach is diachronic, as the title of the essay implies. In charting this genealogy in Western literary tradition, Guillory points to the concentration in Aristotle’s Poetics on mimesis, the idea of creation in tragic poetry as the imitation of life, which remained the standard for representation in nearly all literary fields. (Until, that is, the maverick Bertolt Brecht came along with his concept of epic theater to excite writers of a certain inclination, and until poststructuralism offered critics a way of reading beyond the principles of semiology.) With the appearance of print in the early modern period, the idea of remediation as we now know it “[made] medium visible,” even though “the transposition of writing into print did not elicit at first a theoretical recognition of media as much as a reflection on the latency of print in the technology of writing itself” (324;

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original emphasis). Guillory argues further, however, that the social contexts in which the new technology of writing made its impact encouraged enthusiasts to view it as a more powerful means of communication in comparison to rhetoric. Like grammar, dialectic, geometry, and arithmetic, rhetoric as a genre of discourse was among the seven liberal arts as characterized by the European institutions of literacy in the early modern period. In this respect, it was a sensible though naturally fractious move to posit print as the medium for forms of expression that were previously codified in mimetic terms on the premise set down by Aristotle—literature. As shown earlier, the diachronic perspective in this study takes off in part from Abiọla Irele’s argument that a generation of modern African writers such as Birago Diop and Daniel Fagunwa used writing in African and European languages as a modality of expression. But I go farther back, following also the footprints of the writer Ayi Kwei Armah, whose discussion of the social milieus of the griot, the traditional historian/storyteller mediated in the narratives of Diop and Fagunwa, adds a theoretical depth to Irele’s analysis. In Eloquence of the Scribes, his 2006 account of the sources and resources of African literary history, Armah draws on the work of historians and writers such Amadou Hampate Bâ, Djibril Tamsir Niane, and Cheik Anta Diop, all well known to scholars of African literature, to make a case for a diachronic view of African arts and letters. From Hampate Bâ in particular, Armah extracts a useful example of the training of the griot (dieli or djeli in Bamana) as a socialized educational system, in which the first forty-two years of a professional historian’s life were dedicated to formal instruction, practice, and the acquisition of authorial/authoritative voice: Hampate Bâ took pains to explain that the preparation of verbal artists for this significant social role [as the blood circulating in the body politic] was not left to chance; it required a long process of carefully structured technical training timed to coincide with selected rites of biographical passage. For the purpose, the life cycle of an individual candidate was considered to fall into successive periods each seven years long. The first three sets of seven year-periods, roughly speaking, infancy, childhood and adolescence, were reserved for formal instruction. In the next 21 years, the young griot was encouraged to acquire practical experience and to deepen the learning already acquired, while still being considered unqualified to speak in an authoritative voice. After 42 years, the griot became a councilor and an instructor, while continuing the educational process. (2006, 147)

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With this awareness of careful training in what might be comparable to rhetoric, dialectic, and grammar (in Guillory’s usage), Armah then makes a stunning declaration linking the artistic role of the historians to the unstable sociopolitical situations for which training had prepared them: “The training of keepers of collective memory required the development of high-level mnemonic skills. Tricks of memory, refined until they attained an altogether artistic sharpness, turned recitation of historical and pseudo-historical narratives created for purposes of legitimation into works of narrative, dramatic, and poetic art” (148). Armah’s larger interest in this passage is to underscore the social role of the griot (or dieli) as a manipulable or manipulative mouthpiece of political authority, but that opportunistic use is entirely dependent on the aesthetic gift of this figure. Works such as Sundiata, The Epic of Mwido, Chaka, and The Tales of Amadou Koumba have become the building blocks of modern African literature; they began life as historical accounts that acquired poetic or narrative significance by the sheer rhetorical gifts of their tellers. The force of Armah’s formulation dovetails with two apparently unrelated but quite illuminating examples that, I think, will be useful in explaining the relationship between artistic form and broader sociopolitical dynamics. The first is in the domain of religious ideology, and the other pertains to technology. The first example, the advent of Islam in West Africa (the primary thematic focus of Sembene’s film Ceddo, discussed in chap. 3), occurred in different phases, beginning with what historian Diop calls the “peaceful penetration” model (1987, 163). The “peaceful penetration” approach was a tactical ploy, however, and the jihadist impulse of conversion by violence was to make its appearance as soon as the “marabouts” felt sufficiently strong in numbers. As the history of the region proves, this impulse has appeared periodically since the eleventh century. The worldwide, stateless character of global terrorism appears to magnify the importance of the Al Qaeda in the Maghreb (AQIM) in the twenty-first century. However, the jihadist impulse persisted in the nineteenth century through the military-religious campaigns of Uthman dan Fodio, which differ in scale from the twenty-first century manifestations. In prior centuries, the impulse certainly played a crucial role in the reconfiguration of identity across West Africa, including those identities lurking beneath the surface of the educational system that shaped the griot in Hampate Bâ’s account. It also left a mark on the geographical spread of various ideas, practices,

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and traditions with far-reaching implications for aesthetic developments. Dealing with the terrorist onslaught in West Africa in the twenty-first century thus requires not only the political engineering of state agents like the AFRICOM (through the US State Department/Pentagon) and the French government with its political and economic investments in the CFA zone, but also cultural-aesthetic mobilization—as in Ceddo and Abderrahmane Sissako’s Timbuktu, both of which rely on complex interpretations of African cultural practices and an awareness of shifting geopolitical calculations across the world (the revolution in Iran in 1979, the coup in Mali in 2012).4 The other example pertains to technology. Digital media’s supersession of the video mart style of distribution may seem unprecedented, but there is a precedent in the system of both the transistor radio and the mobile cinema, as some scholars have shown (Larkin 2008; Moorman 2019). As we shall see in the discussion of Spell Reel in chapter 6, the circuit of exhibition that became integral to the film’s identity as a remix originated in the era of liberation struggle in Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde, and the status of the transistor radio among West African populations in urban and rural areas represented an additional grid of dissemination. Certainly, there are differences of scale between the scope of digital penetration and the reach of the mobile or portable object in the analog mode, but the overlap of both in the historical life of the contemporary user (wherever it occurs) is a unique experience that the advent of a new circuit or mode of dissemination does not simply efface. On the scale on which the impact of digitality has manifested itself, change in these settings means several things. First, it means that African consumers or users who rely on social media, streaming platforms like Netflix, and selected affordable satellite channels to gain access to cinema are unlikely to be fully aware of the wealth of African screen media produced starting in the middle of the twentieth century unless they take an additional professional interest as critics or curators. A majority of these works that collectively make up African cinema as an artistic tradition exist mostly in limitedly circulating videotapes, and only a few highly successful works make it to the quasi-digital format of what is marketed as DVDs. As I have taught these films, most of which were released internationally under the imprint of California Newsreel, over the past two decades, I have become quite aware of the specificity of their formats in contrast to standard DVDs.5 Second, some of these works are available for streaming in various online apps such as YouTube and Vimeo, platforms

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which foster screening experiences that do not always require context or consistent attention, since YouTube algorithms sometime break an entire film down to discrete videos. There is something of a deflating irony in this situation because even in the early 1990s, African filmmakers were opposed to the minimalization of their films and the chance of piracy when California Newsreel began formatting the films into video. “I really prefer wide screen, because if I see my films on video, I feel sick,” Sembene told Francois Pfaff in 1992 in response to a question about video formatting. “I would not like my films to be distributed on video. I don’t like the video. I don’t say that I will never use it; I only say that I prefer cinemascope. I still hope that people are going to visit the movie theaters, but it is very difficult.”6 (2008, 160–161) This means that until the 1990s, most African films could only be seen in theaters, which were few and hardly functioning in most places, or at film festivals, the majority of which existed in European and North American settings. The more accessible formats for distribution geared toward circumventing monopolistic or exclusionary practices are the proliferating online channels, platforms, and outlets for Nollywood films and other television serials in African countries. With these platforms comes a disincentive to comparative perspective, as much of the history of Nollywood has tended to stress its singularity rather than comparative reading with better-institutionalized African cinema. With music, for instance, the more platforms or apps there are, the greater the ease with which the need to listen to a particular song is put above the need to know its history; access becomes mediated through a given app.7 This statement is made without prejudice to the fact that platforms such as YouTube and Vimeo provide important access to screen media not easily distributed under the prevailing institutional conditions of postcolonial art, but which may become available through the objective factor of a relationship between an artist and a scholar.8 For example, I might not have become aware of Spell Reel, the film that Filipa César and her collaborators remixed from the archives of the Bissauan liberation movement (discussed in chap. 6), at the time I did or gained access to the film on time if I had not been involved in projects about the archives of decolonization. On the other hand, the manipulability of online resources through decoding, downloads, and other mechanisms of the File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is often used to exemplify the blurring of the boundaries between producers and consumers. In a situation where knowledge of a practice like African cinema is limited, the degree to which such a transformation

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of audience into producer is possible is a matter for debate. Images that are decontextualized can be reframed and deployed to various aesthetic ends through curation and may thus be playful or earnest in ways that draw attention to their original contexts. One example is the reimagining of images from Djibril Mambéty’s Touki-Bouki (1973) by the African American musicians Beyoncé and Jay-Z in Everything Is Love, their 2018 joint album. In her book Always Already New, to which I referred earlier in this section, Lisa Gitelman undertakes a discussion of the relationship between media and representation that provides a useful entry point to understanding the issue here. Representation, or, as she puts it, “commodifiable— representation,” is integral to media’s sense of status and based largely on social usage (2006, 4). When she extends this discussion to media less invested in representation, such as the telegraph, she views transmission as decisive even though such tasks also imply a certain amount of codified meaning-making. Similarly, her analysis of the relationship between production and consumption of new media offers insight into how media came to manifest as products. As media-related categories, production and consumption were not initially distinct and only became viable with women’s increased role in defining the mutual logic of media and public life (15). The historical span of Gitelman’s analysis covers the era of recorded sound in the period between the final quarter of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth and the contemporary period of the World Wide Web. It is a conceptually strong comparative frame that raises questions about the notion of newness in descriptions of media. She could not, however, have thought of media in the wider sense I am looking at African arts and letters as diachronically embedded modes of communication. This is nothing to do with any intrinsic flaw in her method, which is capacious enough for a history of modern media in the United States. Rather, it has to do with the provenance of my argument that keeps the broad scope of African arts and letters in focus in order to underscore the nature of artworks as essentially mediated and bring to the conversation forms of media that are not usually viewed in textual terms. Tr a nsloca lit y: A Descr iption Dramatist and Nobel laureate Wọle S.oyinka is not famous for his academic writing because he opted not to commit his time and effort to that

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vocation. Yet his most theoretical piece of writing, in my view, is the essay I referred to earlier, “Theater in Traditional African Cultures: Survival Patterns.” Compared to “The Fourth Stage,” which is better known, this essay is more capacious and serviceable, which explains its purpose in this chapter. S.oyinka uses the essay both to make a case about theater as a constitutively spatial artistic form with provenance beyond a nationally segmented geographical space and to develop an innovative argument about “the fundamental unity of various art forms” (1988, 203).9 As fate would have it, the essay came out of research that the playwright undertook with a Rockefeller grant in the early 1960s, and literary scholar Bernth Lindfors has provided a revealing reading of the archive of the application process through which S.oyinka received that grant (Lindfors 2008). The theoretical perspective that S.oyinka develops in “Theater in Traditional African Cultures” is useful to my discussion of the two other concepts at play in the simultaneity of spheres, but only when the essay’s argument is placed in the context of its composition.10 On close examination, the argument is a strong case for mediation, the third concept on which I focus in this section, but the essay’s composition presents a productive analysis of what I mean by the term “translocality.” In an undated conversation, one of several he had with the ethnologist Ulli Beier, S.oyinka says: “I was impressed by the movements across the borders of many of these [traveling theater] companies. I would arrive Abidjan and find Ogunde performing. I would arrive in Ghana and meet a group from Abidjan” (Ọmọdele 2012, 153). S.oyinka offers this statement in response to a question about a festival of theater he attempted to organize in Ibadan in 1965 as a way of creating productive interactions between traveling theater artists and university-based theater professionals such as himself. But the response draws attention to larger issues about the nature of socio-spatial dynamics in West Africa, the basis for a conceptual understanding of relationships between location and artistic vibrancy. I use translocality to clarify the complex processes through which differences within the continent give prestige to, or withhold it from, certain kinds of representation or perspective. Frequently employed in critical geography, translocality describes “socio-spatial dynamics and processes of simultaneity and identity formation that [although they may occur within specific boundaries] transcend [those] boundaries—including, but also extending beyond nation-states” (Greiner and Sakdapolrak 2013). To different extents, concepts such as transnationalism, postnationalism,

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and diasporicity have been useful in addressing the large-scale reconfiguration of spaces and social relations of the late-modern era in the wake of the changes in sociopolitical realms in the second half of the twentieth century.11 These concepts still serve those purposes, but translocality adds further reflexivity to the processes they describe. For example, transnationalism often implies a geographic conception extending beyond a given continent. With reference to the African continent, translocality implies a conception of relations within the continent and beyond; it indicates that the movement or imaginary that transnationalism and diasporicity attempt to describe are applicable to the continent on a scale, scope, and span comparable to current usage. Not only were those processes ongoing on the African continent over a long period, but the accelerated pace of cultural change in the past half-century has also put the somewhat settled idea of diasporicity as being essentially offshore to the test. With translocality understood as the worldliness of sociocultural specificities, there emerges a broader possibility for addressing developments in a multidirectional frame, broader that is, than an approach that presumes a singular point of departure or carries on as if a concept exists in relation to nothing concrete. For my purposes, translocality describes the dizzying reality of both the specificity of places—the African continent as well as its various diasporas, historical and recent, internal and external—and the concrete fact of global flows according to which the boundaries and borders that separate places have almost disappeared (or show fitful signs of doing so). Digital culture, I think, reinforces the sense of translocality that has been a fact of African societies for a very long time: the fact of a pluralist space where different ideas, practices, perspectives, and personalities can be simultaneously present in contrapuntal relations with ramifications beyond space and time though reference to a singular idea. The African world is not only not limited to the continental space; even that continental space is internally relational, down to it smallest fragment of settlement or ethnicity. Paulin Hountondji captures this fact in his arresting assertion in African Philosophy: Myth and Reality that “pluralism in the essence did not stem from the intrusion of Western civilization into our continent . . . it is an internal pluralism born of perpetual confrontations and occasional conflicts between Africans themselves” (1996, 165). Across West Africa, it is hard to imagine a geographical instance in which a cultural group does not cut across a national, which is to say international, border. As a matter of fact, the tendency to view transborder

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groups (say, the Senufo between Ivory Coast and Burkina Faso) in ethnic terms is perhaps less helpful than seeing them in national terms—the idea that a city-state constitutes, as a process of worlding, the capital of what might be viewed as a nation in the modern sense. The multinational spread of Mande empire is both a historical and economic fact, and it always has an aesthetic component. The same is true of Greater Senegambia (Barry 1998), of the scope of the polities between southwestern Nigeria and central Togo (Polanyi 1966, 25), and of various other formations in the borders between Nigeria and Cameroon, north and south. West African populations not only did not suspend the broad range of socioeconomic and political interactions that were in place before the partition of the continent in the nineteenth century set up national borders, but they also intensified those interactions according to the demands of agricultural and commercial activities of the colonial period. The movements or migrations were horizontal, vertical, and went in all directions. The picture presented in this ensuing complex cultural formation would be superficial if focused only on one period or one kind of activity. The Yoruba populations in Ghana and Ivory Coast might have been increased by the labor demands in the railways, gold mines, and cocoa plantations; they also interacted with the Hauka, Bobo, and Mossi coming in from the “interiors” in today’s Burkina Faso and Niger (Rouch 1954, 1955) and were already deeply marked by the movements that took place with the dissemination of Islamic religious ideas as far back as the eleventh century, going by Diop’s argument referred to earlier in this chapter. The movements across the borders overland went on at the same time as a parallel but complementary movement along the coastline through the maritime networks of business and international travel, bearing contents and ideas that were not bounded by the strictly national provenance of the European and American companies involved. The nature of commerce was such that these networks provided a fertile ground for ideas and movements that went a long way in informing the kinds of aesthetic changes possible under the prevailing political and technological climates. For example, the impact of the circulation of Garveyite pamphlets on interwar nationalist awakenings across the continent depended on access provided by the integration of commercial activities along the coast and overland. One might imagine the coappearance of commerce and culture in this way: it occurs at the market, a center of exchanges of various kinds, where a band of performers (musicians or masquerades) entertains crowds that

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happen to be present regardless of the business at hand, and the act of advertising one’s wares amounts to a dramatic ploy. The explicitly political objectives and methods of Garveyite pamphlets, effective equally as rumors and as seditious matters, played a role in the emergence of politically conscious publics in places like Lagos, Freetown, Abidjan, Accra, and even further inland. In strictly artistic terms, the urban space as the playground of multiple spheres makes the inseparable coexistence of different arts a fact of life; a given artistic practice functions simultaneously as business and life, while also being shaped by its relationship to other forms, both competitive and collaborative. Concert Party culture grew in Ghana from the 1920s and drew inspiration from the African American minstrelsy performance mode, as Catherine Cole has usefully shown (2001). The musical instruments which gave this quasi-theatrical idiom its distinctive cosmopolitan identity also shaped the character of highlife music as it grew and proliferated across West Africa in the decades immediately following the end of the Second World War. Further east, the performance styles of Concert Party theater contributed to aesthetic choices available to the first truly professional theater group in Nigeria, the Hubert Ogunde Concert Party, founded in Lagos in 1944. The risk of proposing the simple view that one form influences another is attenuated by the recognition that there is hardly ever a single source for the emergence of an artistic form, as shown in S.oyinka’s analysis (to which I turn in a few moments). It is hardly possible to appreciate Ogunde’s work in theater without a reference to the nationalist political fervor of the postwar years in Nigeria and the complex process of cultural brokerage it encouraged. This is an argument that I develop at length in chapter 2. This process of commercial and cultural traversing of geographically bounded polities is clearly not limited to West Africa, or for that matter to the twentieth century with its rich resources. The eastern African corridor, by way of the Indian Ocean, provided a comparable template of relationships in terms of commerce and trade, and these relationships were decisive in the diachronic emergence of Kiswahili and Kinyarwanda as regional lingua francas. Furthermore, this set of relationships can be combined with other kinds of transactions, including those that do not depend solely on oceanic travel but also on overland mobilities.12 Long traditions of communication across the central African landscape played a role in facilitating what Jan Vansina describes as “kingdoms of the savannah”

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(1966), residues of which can be glimpsed in the cultural configurations between the two Congos, Central African Republic, and Cameroon, and between Kenya, Uganda, and Sudan with the Horn as an adjacency.13 It is also the case that these movements are connected to processes unfolding outside the continent at a given time and through practices ranging from trade and politics to warfare and migration. They are part of the phenomena that Mbembe characterizes as diffraction, as we saw earlier. That characterization also feeds into more fashionable and arresting developments, like Afropolitanism, which have purchase in the context of transnationalization as opposed to cultural nationalism or PanAfricanism, presumed to be old, unitary, and continent bound. Access to technical, fiscal, and emotional resources by virtue of location casts this presumption in personal terms, and racial and class differences and their effects are parlayed on the grounds of identity to gain companionship in the imaginaries of others.14 There is something quite instructive in this alignment of location and identity for the current fortunes of African literature as an important stream of world literature, through the prioritization of certain themes in contemporary middlebrow fiction, as we shall see in chapter 5. But the alignment gains salience only in relation to a perceived lack or an ostensible distortion of human values in a given African location. Though works of considerable artistic accomplishment individually, recent novels—mostly novels—by writers of African descent that are successful on the global scene are also received within the context of marketable narratives about location, cultural minoritization, and identity, serving as foils for the historical abjection of Black life. The subject matter of a novel is sometimes as important as the biographical details of the author—and she does not have to be the author of a notable novel; it is enough that her personality or backstory is as fascinating or endearing (and thus as marketable) as the plot of a novel, to which it becomes a supplement. Thus, novels about child soldiers, radicalized or abused children, and girls subject to genital mutilation encourage a reflection on humanitarianism as an affirmation of external agency and enable a trenchant liberal outrage, which nevertheless ignore the roles that liberalism in the economic or cultural realm play in sustaining the practices being criticized (Ades.ọkan 2012). The opposition between the two spheres—as if there were always only two—is exaggerated mainly for the rhetorical reason of sustaining the privileges thus gained. In fact, Afropolitanism

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and Afrofuturism are aspects of a larger discourse about African openness to the world, indeed of the continent as a historical site and agent of worldliness, and translocality addresses the processes of capturing the various dimensions of that discourse in relation to space and time. The standard rhetorical response to African cultural essentialism by certain tendencies among diasporic Blacks is to say that not having the weight of history, long traditions, powerful gods, and majestic lineages frees people to be imaginative and define themselves based on nonessentialist principles. This position has been updated in the debate around Afropolitanism (Ede 2016; Gikandi 2011; Selasi 2005).15 However, as the Kenyan scholar Grace Musila notes, “Afropolitanism signals a particular location in the world, significantly marked by a toned down Africanness” (2016, 112). The idea of translocality in this book operates on at least two levels. One is that perspectives about the individual freedom to imagine selfhood and assume new identities are not strange to African societies themselves—they make up the internal pluralism of Hountondji’s assertion in the quotation cited earlier. The nationalist impulses that concealed these perspectives might have been justified as historical self-accounting of the kind that Biọdun Jeyifo (1993) argues as effects of “determinations of remembering.” Besides, so-called essentialist claims were contested by Africans at every step of the long-unfolding history of the continent’s experiences and were far from being uniformly shared. The earliest and most implacable critics of Négritude were African intellectuals, from S.oyinka to Marcien Towa to Stanislav Adotevi. Furthermore, both the “affirmative” and “contingent” claims (Ọlaniyan 2011) were necessary parts of a self-constituting historical process. The other level on which to appraise this idea of translocality is that of the historical, aesthetic, and institutional factors that brought about the concept of the contemporary in art history. This dimension is best seen in the curatorial practices that Nigeria-born curator Okwui Enwezor and his collaborators advanced in the field of art history starting in the early 1990s. As I argue in detail in chapter 2, the journal NKA, founded in 1994, provided the institutional frame for these curatorial practices through its critical proposition about the world of African art history, modern and contemporary, and the need to depopulate the center of its assumptions (Enwezor 1994). The publication of the volume Reading the Contemporary, which Enwezor coedited with Olu Oguibe, laid out a broad theoretical ground for the position, placing the contemporary on view as an urgent

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category for historical understanding of African artistic practices. Reading the Contemporary did this by aligning the category of the contemporary with what was generally understood as diasporicity, and the contemporary and diasporicity constituted the ground from which the curatorial practice critically cut through notions of binary discourse, such as the opposition of inside to outside and authentic to tourist in the analysis of productions in visual art. This discourse and practice principally took place in North America and western Europe, locations which influenced the choice of artists to feature in exhibitions and the manner in which critics wrote about them and their works. In his essays and exhibits from this period, Enwezor displayed a preference for a cluster of artists such as Bili Bidjocka, Olu Oguibe, Ouattara, and Ike Udé. This preference was most explicitly demonstrated in “Between Worlds: Postmodernism and African Artists in the Western Metropolis” (1999). In “Between Worlds,” Enwezor mapped this terrain, the contentious situation of “African artists, working in the interstices of postcoloniality in the Western metropolitan arena” (245). The situation was contentious because, according to him, the institutional viability of such African artistic practices was caught between “two very self-interested parties . . . the neoconservatives, with their antique, crusade-flavored paleo-Christian fanaticism . . . [and] the self-serving liberal critical establishment, still clinging to outmoded models of Marxist liberal triumphalism” (246). Whereas postmodernism promised to undo this constrictive value system, Enwezor argued, it too operated within neat, epistemologically conclusive paradigms and was thus too welded to “the authoritarian grip of a Western historicism hell-bent on shaping its definition.” Enwezor proceeded to appraise the works of these African artists—Bidjocka, Udé, Oguibe, and Ouattara—showing how they undermined those paradigms while at the same time clearing a space for artistic meaning. Such meanings were feasible in the in-between world where African identities as an open process of negotiation with the present, with sense of material, and with institutional protocols come to light. Characterizing Enwezor’s assessment in that essay in the past tense is a tacit acknowledgment that the object of his critique is historical in the sense that those conditions were in the process of alteration, a process to which Enwezor as much as the artists he discussed contributed. In addition, as I show in chapter 6 while discussing the work of the artist Yinka Shonibarẹ, Enwezor’s slate of artists expanded with those changes

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and included works in different media. From the unprecedented scalar styles of Bodys Isek Kingelez and Shonibarẹ to Frédéric Bruly Bouabré’s personal grammar of alphabets to Oguibe’s more conventional approach to conceptualism, these artists evinced a contemporaneity that, in every register, differs from both traditional and modern styles. Though artists in those other categories also worked in a broad range of media, artists singled out as contemporary had a conception of art making that was quite new in scale and use of material. Above all, their outlooks were contemporary in the sense of producing individual subjectivities of the kind that could be seen even in the outlooks of so-called traditional artists, had the method of early art history been that well-tuned. There was always an unmistakably reflexive attitude to the analyses, however, and that attitude was a function of what I think of as a translocal apprehension of the African terrain of the artists. In ways that now are either dim or incomprehensible (ironically, some of Enwezor’s writings from that period now seem dated), the successful efforts of bringing those diverse artists together—and the scope soon expanded to include cinema, photography, and performance—marked the appearance of curation as a mode of creative practice with respect to African arts, whether traditional, modern, or contemporary. The writings read as dated because they were fashioned as weapons in a battle for position, and such weapons have served their purpose. They can now become blunted and set aside, to be sharpened again and reused if necessary. Disciplinary fields set limits on what scholars and practitioners in a particular orbit are able to do, and by an inverse logic, they make only some forms of knowledge accessible or visible. But as S.oyinka argues in the essay, “Theater in Traditional African Cultures,” the arts (and human activities, for that matter) do not behave in this way. The concept of translocality presents a more thoughtful and dynamic approach to some of the divisions that have shaped the ways we think and write about work produced in various locations. One of these divisions, the one between inside and outside (the continent being the primary ground of reference for the division), ordinarily suggests that the force that commercial considerations exert on production with, say, an artist in Kenya becomes complicated with an artist who works in England. This perspective requires more nuance. The narrow scope of circulation—if not the actual potential in the audience as market—is less strictly a function of economic or political volatility than of the possibility of producing work that is enhanced by contradictory

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awareness of new opportunities, such as Africa-themed festivals and artfriendly curricula at schools or colleges. Thus, while a work like Kenyan director Anne Mungai’s Saikati (1992) may not be guaranteed mass circulation due to the format of analog technology that shaped its initial production, a different director can remix or curate that work using digital means and build specific issues around it. In an important sense, this is what Is.ọla does with the two films adapted from his work that I discuss in chapter 4. While adaptation is the operative mode in that discussion, the ways of apprehending this possibility enacted through his interventions constitute the mode of creative practice with respect to this author and producer. In another case, curation might be the decisive mode. This approach concerns the means through which a film such as Saikati might find a new setting for being known, appreciated, viewed, and written about. Validating the choice of curating it requires some knowledge of the film, the accretion of discourses about its production and circulation, and an imaginative conception of these ideas in relation to the new setting.16 The boundaries that supposedly separate national entities like Nigeria and Benin Republic or the locations of two Kenyan artists in London and Nairobi are matters of historical and empirical fact that do not efface the creative traversal of those strict borders in art. Before and after European diplomatic mapping segmented West African polities within national borders, populations in that region carried on with movements that responded to needs both within and without the borders. And while a London-based artist or filmmaker may have only tenuous legal connections with her Kenyan homeland, the exigencies of production in- or outside that home bring choices on an imaginative use of available ideas, forms, and practices. In concluding his essay, S.oyinka writes: “While for purposes of demarcation we may speak of Nigerian, Ghanaian or perhaps Togolese drama, it must constantly be borne in mind that, like the economic intercourse of the people themselves, the various developments . . . in drama and the arts do not obey the laws of political boundaries though they might respond to the events within them” (1988, 203). This assertion is the culmination of an argument about the impact of primarily but not exclusively horizontal mobilities across West Africa on the constitution of aesthetics in a variety of artistic forms. The argument itself serves to reinforce the thesis that developments in the arts are analogous to those in the economic or social

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sphere, and that borders (what S.oyinka terms “demarcations”), whether national or disciplinary, are as much acknowledged as traduced for creative purposes. These kinds of trafficking between national spaces are also and already a fertile ground for aesthetic mediations, each art form being constituted by the dynamics of the movements. The putative identity of that form can be understood through particular attention to how political and economic volatilities purposefully or accidentally confer prestige on one form at the expense of another. Mobilities and movements, manifestations of translocality captured in time, constitute the context of S.oyinka’s essay. Through their relationship to aesthetic forms and practices, the concept of mediation manifests itself. Or bits of Mediation Often overlooked among S.oyinka’s writings due perhaps to its scholarly tone in an intellectual climate that expects little such rigor of writers’ prose works, “Theater in Traditional African Cultures” offers S.oyinka an opportunity to comprehensively reflect on the complex ideological transformations through which traditional funerary rites and religious and secular festivals became theatrical forms in West Africa. It is a nuanced history of theater in the region in the colonial period, an account of “cultural resistance and survival” (1988, 190). The essay’s central claim is that culture is often the first form of social expression to come under assault in a situation of domination such as colonialism or religious conversion, but that it is also a site of resistance to the domination. This is an argument that Amílcar Cabral made in another context (1973). S.oyinka views drama as the form that best exemplifies this condition. Drama, he writes, “is created and executed within a specific physical environment. It naturally interacts with that environment, is influenced by it, influences that environment in turn and acts together with the environment in the larger and far more complex history of society. The history of dramatic pattern or its evolution is therefore very much the history of other art forms of society. And when we consider art forms from the point of view of survival strategies, the dynamics of cultural interaction with society become even more aesthetically challenging and fulfilling” (1988, 190; emphasis added). A dual process of attenuation and resurgence guides cultural practice in the theatrical forms that S.oyinka examines, and developments in the

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mid-nineteenth century in what became Nigeria provide a useful example. Just as the Islamic onslaught against the semireligious performance genre of funerary rites by the court masquerades (egúngún) succeeded following the disintegration of the Ọyọ empire that had guaranteed the genre’s vibrancy, the attack received an additional boost from the hostility of the new Christians. These Christians “did not content themselves with banning just the dramatic performance [but] also placed their veto on the indigenous musical instruments . . . the very backbone of traditional theater” (191). Yet it was not long before the Church again became the site of cultural resurgence through the secular use of Biblical themes, the earliest modern guise in which traditional theater (now transformed into traveling troupes) was to reemerge. Similar changes occurred elsewhere on the continent. S.oyinka finds an example in the practice of formatting Christian hymns according to the patterns of traditional musical forms from the old Buganda Kingdom, oftentimes in the service of religious promotion. These were clearly situations of religious restriction, and they bear striking semblances to the economic volatilities frequently at play in what I called “the simultaneity of spheres” at the beginning of this chapter. S.oyinka goes further to describe the manner in which this “survival” of art accounted for itself under the hostile, watchful eyes of “the missionarycolonizers” and the subsequent “culture denigrators” (192). That process, fundamental to the act of artistic composition, is part of what I term “mediation” in this chapter. Theater is an ideal example of it, a fact that makes S.oyinka’s analysis quite appropriate. A school of thought in African art criticism has long associated this production style with determinate aesthetic practices like the mbari houses with figures in clay produced in the sixties in southeastern Nigeria, as Hebert M. Cole and Chike Aniakor demonstrate in their work about those mostly female artists. The evanescence of the theatrical form in as embodied a mode as dance, as I argue in detail in chapter 2, is better grasped in relation to those houses—their construction for ritual purposes tied to the demands of organic life among agrarian populations. In the form of cultural expression embodied in mbari, the transition, or generational transfer of skills, to visual arts is also a process of extracting the art, the finished product, from the long process of mbari ritual.17 The mediality of technological forms as historical or current apparatuses that make certain transactions possible in the realm of artistic practice additionally constitutes mediation.

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Using the Afikpo (Igbo) masquerades of southeastern Nigeria as a case study, S.oyinka argues further that theater is a decisive category incorporating “diversified forms” and “consciously differing qualitative enactments” (192). Two components of the Afikpo masquerade—the oje ogwu and the okumkpa—are also qualitatively different, one balletic, the other mimetic. Though parts of a larger festival, with okumkpa representing the climax of the oje ogwu dance moves, the enactments are less about ritual and more oriented toward performance requiring the appreciation of the audience. But the audience’s interest is purely aesthetic. “Whatever symbolism may be contained in the actual movement of the oje ogwu,” S.oyinka writes, “is of no significance in the actual judgment. What the audience looks for and judges are the finer point of leaps, turns, control and the general spatial domination” (193). By contrast, the okumkpa is a performance of satirical mimesis, the main action being a rendition of events known to audience and performers alike, including genteel (and gendered) critiques of social habits—such as the antics of a self-absorbed maiden who turns down every suitor. The serial sketches in the performance are dramatizations for which competition is keen—the process of wooing the suitor is itself a contest of various kinetic, gestural, and verbal displays. S.oyinka’s point is that elements of theater are present in these two strands of masquerade performance even though the visual aspects exist for primarily aesthetic purposes, and that the festivals in which they make their appearance are repositories of multimedia. The masqueraders dance; they act through mime. Their physical forms as performers are an integration of sculpture, dance, and drama. In the spectacles are also drummers, chanters, ringleaders, and an aesthetically invested spectatorship. With this point, the basis of the disclosure by art historian Rowland Abiọdun that he “co-taught Aesthetics in Drama with Wọle S.oyinka” becomes clear (Abiọdun 2014, xvi). Glancing through the acknowledgments section and coming upon that phrase revealed a lot to me; it suggests that Abiọdun’s erudite and robust argument in Yoruba Art and Language is a missed piece in what becomes, in consequence, less of a puzzle. In elaborating the role of verbal forms (oríkì, às.ẹ, ọfò.) in the manifestation of the abstract quality of orí (individuation) in an artistic composition such as sculpture, Abiọdun establishes the dynamic relationship between discrete codes, forms, and material in the constitution of communication.18 Following his analysis, S.oyinka makes two submissions that clarify my present argument about the nature of mediation. First, he argues that in

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studying an art form, “it is clearly more appealing to look into extant material for what may be deduced as primitive or early forms of the particular art, noting along the way what factors have contributed to their survival in the specific forms” (194). Second, he makes a statement about method that will continue to astonish cultural critics for years to come. He states that “instead of considering festivals from one point of view only—that of providing, in a primitive form, the ingredients of drama—we may even begin examining the opposite point of view: that contemporary drama, as we experience it today, is a contraction of drama, necessitated by the productive order of society in other directions” (195). There are implications for these statements beyond the given case study, and S.oyinka goes even further, drawing comparable examples from Burkina Faso, southern Africa, Senegal, as well as modern dramatic styles in both the elite academies of the Victorian era and the so-called NovaScotian vaudevilles that inspired the Concert Party genres of late-colonial periods. Although ideological blind spots in the religious and political domains remain, the long march of artistic mediation in African cultural history likewise persists, fostering the emergence of various traditions in markedly discontinuous ways. When S.oyinka writes that “by 1912, the secularization of theatrical entertainment in southern Nigeria was sufficiently advanced for the colonial government to gazette a ‘Theatrical and Public Performance Regulations Ordinance,’ which required that performance groups obtain a license before going before the public” (192), we see a foreshadowing of what transpired in the renaming of the Nigerian Censors’ Board in the age of Nollywood films. S.oyinka later demonstrated creative instances of this act of multimediality, most memorably in the character of Ẹlẹs.in Ọba, the protagonist of Death and the King’s Horseman, “a man of enormous vitality, [who] speaks, dances, and sings with that infectious enjoyment of life which accompanies all his actions” (2003, 5), and his elaborate performance as the singer of the tale of the Not-I Bird. Such are the processes of mediation whose details will not be apparent in a given dramatic piece or in critical analyses of it as performance or printed text. Yet the overall artistic quality of the dramatic performance is inconceivable, as a mediatory act, without these processes that, in S.oyinka’s examples, include the integration of sculpture and dance in egúngún performance, the condensation of multimedia in an annual festival, and the secularization of Biblical themes in mid-twentieth century traveling theaters’ repertories. The work of Hubert Ogunde represented

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a culmination of this process at the time of S.oyinka’s “fieldwork,” as the discussion in chapter 2 shows. In addition to this powerful idea of a dynamic inherent to the act of artistic composition, mediation speaks to the historical character of the technological apparatus through which a variety of artistic practices is made possible in the composite sense of representation. In this respect, I find what Lisa Gitelman says about media to be particularly relevant, in addition to her method on which I commented earlier. Defining media as “socially realized structures of communication,” Gitelman holds those structures to “include both technological forms and their associated protocols, and where communication is a cultural practice, a ritualized collocation of different people on the same mental map, sharing or engaged with popular ontologies of representation” (2006, 7). Gitelman approaches media as historical subjects, corroborating the materialist views expressed by both Jack Goody and Walter Benjamin discussed earlier and creating a basis for relating the historicity of technology to processes that scholars have termed as remediation. An oftencited discussion of these processes is by David Bolter and John Grusin, for whom remediation exists primarily in new media as a combination of hypermediacy (an immediate reminder that an experience is being mediated, such as a computer with a number of windows open to different sites or a PC interface) and immediacy (an attempt to make a completely unmediated media experience, as seen in virtual reality sets or Apple’s interface in 1999).19 This claim takes me back to “Freeze Frame: Audio, Aesthetics, Sampling, and Contemporary Multimedia,” the essay coauthored by Ken Jordan and Paul D. Miller that I discussed briefly in the introduction, which needs further discussion here. For these authors, music is of primary interest, and the issue of access in this media form is simply a matter of converting “sound into digital streams, so it can flow anywhere across the computer network, to be manipulated by a continually growing array of software” (2008, 100). However, what they say about music pertains to other kinds of expression needing specific media to exist in multiple contexts, particularly in digitality. The blurring or intermediation that characterizes digital culture in the realm of textual reproducibility comes from a basic premise in computing, which holds that all information can be translated from its original form into a binary code. This discussion of networked music-making stresses the connection between sound and network

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computing in such minuscule but consequential ways as the trilling sound that issues when a modem connects, “a hyperaccelerated Morse code, a billion dots and dashes too fast for the human ear to discern” (98–99). As it happens, the 2003 documentary Afro@Digital by filmmaker and writer Balufu Bakupa-Kanyinda (DRC) sets its sight on similar questions in addition to those concerning the status of African countries, especially the economically marginalized sections of those countries, in an age of computerized exchange of ideas, information, and objects.20 Through such computing mechanisms as File Transfer Protocols (FTP), Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), and Internet Protocol (IP), digital technology fosters a culture of mediation that existed in various forms and structures in prior modes of communication or expression. For example, FTP is a network protocol used for the transfer of computer files from a server to a client on a network, and the technical aspects of this protocol include modes that enable different kinds of transfer, from file structure for streaming, record structure of fixed or variable length, and page structure dividing files into pages of data. The relationship between the technological apparatus (computer) and the media content (sound file) operates on the basis of software being used for manipulation—databases for storage and networks for interactivity between databases, software, and artists/users. These elements constitute FTP, the central mechanism that allows for the circulation of content online through network computing or what are generally termed information and computer technologies, or ICTs. This discussion of multimedia networking aligns with S.oyinka’s elaboration of theatrical performances in festival as repositories of different media in the sense that both Jordan and Miller view online musical performance and collaboration enabled by network computing as retaining aspects of predigital compositional cultures. The markers of difference between the two compositional practices, as the authors abundantly show, include the state of technological development in terms of software sophistication, the size of the bandwidth available to a network, and the legal issues surrounding copyright and access. This is the media-saturated environment. Musical text created in this environment bears the marks of history (technological development and limited access), and appreciating it as process or product is richer when informed by the idea of historical materialism that Benjamin proffers in his of critique of positivism. What works for music also applies to electronic literature, as the literary historian Katherine Hayles has shown in

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multiple ways (2002, 2008). Furthermore, the simultaneity of spheres in African environments described at the beginning of this chapter implies that this process goes on in a multiplicity of realms. Earlier in the chapter I observed that a tension sits between the two perspectives on extraction (Hountondji) and diffraction (Mbembe). Not only are those two perspectives in tension, but the parentheses drawn around each are constricting and potentially misleading. I think that Hountondji’s focus on the colonial encounter and the continuing pattern of extractive relationship in its aftermath is limited by the context of the volume’s production: in fewer words, neocolonialism redux. Mbembe, on the contrary, minimizes the structural inequality that persists and decisively shifts emphasis from colonialism to transnationalism, a situation in which it is not easy to hold imperial Europe to account as the originator of colonial pillage. None of the themes that this book analyzes—cultural revitalization, anti-imperialism, cultural integrity, new conceptions of community—are new, free from contingency in the historical consciousness of Africans, or isolated from questions of identity (class, race, culture, nation, gender, disability, sexuality) and their continuing iterations. The theoretical voices speaking through this book, such as S.oyinka, Armah, and Julien, say that the social relations that produced the cultural artifacts on which modern African letters and arts have been built were informed by a conception of history as cyclical, an interplay of realms of existence in which the past, present, and future are in dialogue. From this perspective, there are already creative and critical possibilities beyond the grounds of Hountondji and Mbembe’s arguments. On the grounds of diachronicity, neither extraction nor diffraction is recent and one does not totally displace the other. One could be more prevalent than the other at a given time, but that perception itself must be informed by an attention to processes between locations not reducible to a national boundary, let alone a region or continent. If the succinct point of S.oyinka’s argument is that a literary history or artistic form should not be studied in isolation from other social processes, the same could be said of critical concepts developed by historians or philosophers—they should not be formulated as though isolated from literary history or form, since such formulations are parts of textual production in those historical or philosophical fields. When analysis proceeds from such a combination of contradictory processes, extraversion simultaneously with diffraction, several things

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happen. Seeing present disparities in the economic or political realm in a historical frame becomes feasible from an analytical point of view. Furthermore, internal differentiations between and within locales, classes, practices, and traditions appear in their dizzying, unsynthesizable complexity; staunch sovereignties coexist with nonstate formations, such as the “narco-state” of Guinea-Bissau next to Senegal or Kenya and its northeastern neighbor, the “pirate-state” of Somalia. In the dynamic logics and sensations generated from these formations, we might perceive the emergence of a network of cultural states that do not resemble either the modular nation form of the age of empire or the supposedly precapitalist African form it was meant to replace. Toward the end of the introduction, I showed the impact of the historicity of form on African textual practices by focusing on the roles that social, ideological, and material forces play in constituting art. The phrase “simultaneity of spheres” that I use to describe this process draws attention to how this historicity of form plays out in those textual practices. Starting from the premise that diverse forms and media—music, television, literature, cinema, painting, photography, and radio—coexist inseparably in a social setting, the character of each of these forms can be seen in the complex of spheres that constitutes the context of their production. A work of art manifests itself through accustomed conventions, but it is at the same time a commercial means of earning a living, however unsteady in situations of economic or political volatility, and a way of being in society, in the realm of a cultural or professional identity. It is a product of spheres that do not stand alone and do not stand still. This simultaneity or coappearance of spheres is inseparable from the product. When such a work, such a product, is generated in a condition of political or economic volatility, its potential as entertainment and information becomes interchangeable, a fact that does not diminish its aesthetic quality, which, in any case, is a function of its place in the complex. The distinctions between and within print culture and mass media may operate on a scale of values embedded in the educational system through which modern African arts have become consolidated. Within these distinctions, print (or the literary) receives priority while works in electronic/ digital media are viewed as relatively recent and less suited to the kinds of privileged formal analysis accorded literary works. These perspectives arose from historical accidents, coming out of scholarly practices held in thrall to disciplinary blind spots. That is what disciplines do—vigilantly

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determine the boundaries of an entity in order to respect its integrity. Yet disciplines and their objects exist in history, and it is possible to shed light on this fact without vulgarly violating that integrity. In fact, going by John Guillory’s observations regarding the relationship between literature and the technical media in contemporary culture, this scale of values is not limited to African artistic practices.21 Coming to a particular work (Pumzi) or art form (theater) through a specific analytical approach does not mean that one takes these distinctions or categories as immutable. I will now show in detail that the process of conceiving a worked object or an art form and putting it in the world already admits such flexibility or malleability of context through the phenomena I call modes of creative practice. M a nifesting Modes of Cr eative Pr actice In a 1969 interview with critic Guy Hennebelle, director Ousmane Sembene discussed his decision to take up filmmaking after having established a name for himself as a writer of fiction. “I realized,” he said, “that with a book, especially in Africa where illiteracy is known to prevail, I could only touch a limited number of people. I became aware that film, on the contrary, was likely to reach broad masses” (Hennebelle 2008, 7). By 1962 when he headed to Moscow to study techniques of filmmaking at the Gorki Institute, Sembene had already published three well-acclaimed books of fiction: the novels The Black Docker and God’s Bits of Wood and the story collection Tribal Scars. The decision to study filmmaking was one of several acts of creative self-apprehension that the artist enacted in the early years of his career. There was also the resolve to use Wolof, the major language in Senegal, as a viable medium of writing starting with the establishment of Kaddu, a newspaper he developed with “a group of people who sought to promote the national languages without preferring one over the others” (Gadjigo et al. 1993, 93). Members of this group included Pular, Serer, and Wolof speakers, and viewers of Xala (1974) may remember the character hawking the periodical in the film. Furthermore, beginning with Mandabi (1968), his third film, and continuing through the end of his career, Camp de Thiaroye (1988) is the only film by Sembene that does not have an African-language title. Although initiated by activists in Senegal, these choices about language should be seen in the larger context of African artist-intellectuals taking positions in response to instances of cultural domination, whether perceived or

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manifesting as institutional practices. The much-storied decision by Kenyan author Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o to abandon English for Gikuyu as the language of his writings was a similarly principled but controversial ideological choice. That decision shared much with Ghanaian writer Ayi Kwei Armah’s resolve to work exclusively with African publishers “as opposed to a neocolonial coffle owned by Europeans using a coffle strawboss in the front office and slyly misnamed ‘African’” (Armah 2010, 169). Armah’s experience with one such European publisher is something of a saga. He documented the experience at length; it has had consequences for his attitude toward creative control of his work, unquestionably shaping the outlook of that work starting from the mid-1990s. A good deal of chapter 5 elaborates on this episode in relation to one of his later novels.22 Around the same time, as we shall see in chapter 4, Nigerian writer Akinwumi Is.ọla chose to concentrate on writing plays after the phenomenal success of his play Ẹfúns.etán Aníwúrà , shown at a stadium in Ibadan and attended by fourteen thousand people in one day in 1982. As these authors weighed in on diverse issues of cultural politics, a related development manifested itself in the use of letter-writing by South African writer Bessie Head. Forced into exile by the apartheid regime and living in a Botswana village, Head was embattled (dealing with a nervous breakdown) and productive but unable to find the kind of social or financial stability that her personal condition required. Very little about these circumstances is visible on the surface of the novels and stories she published during this period, although the intensity of A Question of Power signifies a great deal. Her letters to other writers, however, provided an outlet and have constituted an additional opening for scholars to reflect on the complex relationships between a creative artist and her contexts. In Head’s case, these included the devious ways of a destructive system like apartheid, the cruelties and wonders of village life, the tensions surrounding a broken marriage, and the delicate business of looking to fellow writers for emotional support. Kenyan writer Nanjala Nyabola has viewed the letters in which Head revealed these personal issues and discusses them in an essay published online.23 These letters are held at the Khama III museum in Botswana, meaning that they would have been unknown to the public outside of the carefully contextualized accounts given in Gillian Stead Eilersen’s biography of the writer. The existence of the letters and the light they throw on the writer’s struggles provide an insight into how platform and curation can deepen

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Fig. 1.1. Ismaila Sarr (left) as Nianankoro’s “uncle,” with his pylon bearers, an appearance restored in the film in homage to the actor. Yeelen. 1987.

and expand the social life of creative works.24 It is conceivable that anyone with sufficient curatorial and archival skills could turn those letters into another book, perhaps entitled “Writing from the Heart: The Letters of Bessie Head,” but the status of the letters as occasional, context-rich forays into spaces of personal communication goes beyond what may be revealed in exegetical reading of literary works (such as Simon Gikandi’s insightful undertaking with regard to A Question of Power in his essay discussed in chap. 5). In another instance that should be productive for analysis, the Malian writer-director Souleymane Cissé, in his masterpiece Yeelen (1987), leaves a whole sequence unintegrated with the general plot out of homage to the material culture that gave rise to the film. It is the sequence where a figure hitherto not part of the narrative appears as protagonist Nianankoro’s uncle, with two assistants carrying a pylon ahead of him in the same way Soma, the vengeful father, has appeared up to this point in the film. A critic has commented on this moment (Barlet 2000, 222), but the reason offered by the filmmaker adds a unique insight. In emailed communication, Cissé writes: I had indeed done [a quarter] of the film with Ismael Sarr and in the middle of the [filming], he had a heart attack. This deeply affected me. And I didn’t know what to do with the film. [A third] of the film was [already in the box], so I began to rewrite the script in order to give some meaning to his

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Fig. 1.2. Soma, Nianakoro’s father, with his pylon bearers. Yeleen. 1987. presence in the film. It was then, in the new script, I assigned him another role, which was no longer the hero (of the film) but [the hero’s] uncle and this fit perfectly with his presence in the film.25

The protagonist thus ends up with two uncles in the film, even if the actor Sarr’s appearance leaves unanswered the question of his relation to the protagonist, who undertakes a journey with his wife in the Dogon region to see an uncle who looks identical to the vengeful father. Sarr was important to the filming process because he was Cissé’s link with the Komo elders whose rituals form the aesthetic and philosophical basis of the narrative, and he appeared in Cissé’s other films (Baara and Finye), often opposite the actor Moussa Keita, as in this sequence. While this sequence sticks out to an attentive viewer, I doubt that it detracts from the overall sophistication of Yeelen, a canonical work of African cinema. It becomes noticeable partly as a result of the director’s reflections on the contingencies of production. Clearly, interviews, letters, interviews, and private or public communications are specific frames of reference that provide useful analytical insights if read astutely and within the relevant contexts. These individuals are enacting a creative practice suited to form and circumstance. While such enactment indicates that writers and filmmakers are no longer content to simply occupy a space in the complex relay between the conception and reception of a given work, I think it is also

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the case that they have never really been content. It is just that criticism had tended to focus on a standard (admittedly important) explication of texts without a comparable attention to how such texts can be read within a multiplicity of shifting contexts. The relationship between digitality and the five modes of creative practice in this book takes the following form. Suppose that a dramatic work first broadcast on radio became so popular that it was recorded in the long-playing format of vinyl or cassette. Suppose, further, that through that repeatable format, a poetic verse stood out to a consumer in aesthetic, discursive, or formal richness, but that the supersession of those prior formats made the performed dramatic text, and in particular that singular poetic item, inaccessible anymore. The consumer is held in thrall to fragmentary recollections, and in time the text comes to acquire the character of lore, a proverb, a moral or amoral fragment desperately struggling for context, liable to be ascribed the hallowed status of cultural integrity and essential difference. No stretch of the imagination is required to show that this process of loss and recovery was a factor in the fate of communicable ideas in most societies prior to the advent of technologies of mass production, first in print and subsequently in other media. It is the reverse of the situation that shaped the training of the djeli, the traditional historian, as Armah describes it earlier in this chapter. With the possibility of digitization, the text would come alive as a sound file, and the consumer would be better able to reassemble the fragments for aesthetic pleasure or, if needed, for the variety of modes in which said text could be deployed for creative purposes. The discussion of composition in chapter 3 draws on this relationship between fragment and the process of textualization. As modes of creative practice, adaptation, composition, curation, platform, and remix operate on a plane of qualitative difference from the manner in which a work first appears. The modes of operation are uneven, underscoring the need for the qualification that I promised to deliver here. Adaptation in cinema and literature stands as a complex factor in relations of unequal exchange and uneven development. It is easier to conceive of Nigerian playwright Fẹmi Ọs.ọfisan adapting works by Ukrainian-born writer Nikolai Gogol or French dramatist Jean Anouilh than the other way around. There is the matter of precedence here as well, but it is so obvious as to conceal the more compelling question of unequal exchange. As a practice, remix originated and is best developed in music, where a range of professionals such as producers, DJs, engineers, performers, and sound

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mixers use it to explore the limits of what is technically and artistically possible, generating new music in the process. The technical possibilities have multiplied with the advent of the internet, and my deployment and analysis of this mode of creative practice comes from insight enabled by those new opportunities. In an important sense, what is entailed in composition (as I develop and exemplify it here) differs little from what theater artists typically refer to as improvisation. The challenges of making do, of using means that are at hand as the need arises or out of productorial constraints, may be more easily concealed in formal terms in the complex process that I describe for the making of Ceddo and Migritude in chapter 3. But that is largely because the process is streamlined against the technical factors appropriate to the given work. Mégotage (filmmaking as a hardscrabble activity analogous to collecting cigarette butts)26 was fundamental to making films in the African context that Sembene inhabited, but a finished work, such as Ceddo, does not bear those marks as improvisation—not, at any rate, in the visibly artisanal manner in which that act is often expected to manifest itself.27 The difference between composition and curation, on the contrary, is that the first is crucial to the making of a work in the conventional sense. A work is essentially made of fragments, ineffable intimations, imaginings, old and new ideas, concepts, and practices that a creative artist brings together in order to make a coherent, stand-alone object or work. This assembly applies as much to an artistic process as it does to any act of reconstruction. Curation relies to a great extent on the existence of the work as finished, or at least an idea of its independent existence in that state. In case this formulation sounds schematic, the reader may grasp composition as summative while curation is exploratory. Neither mode, nor even remix and its potential to extend creative possibilities, closes the door on analysis. There is also a sense, however, in which curation can attain a level of completeness similar to composition and be distinguishable in formal terms from remix. This is the case with Wainaina’s book One Day I Will Write about This Place, discussed in chapter 6. Through writing, editing, and reediting, the book brings together several discordant ideas and stories crafted for different contexts in a seemly form. The blog piece that insofar as this book is concerned works as a remix attains that status to the extent that it develops a new identity based partly on elements drawn from the prior work. A curation gathers items with different orientations into a new composite form; a remix takes its shape from the entirety of

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the prior work, an uncertain balance between composition and curation, to highlight one or a few of the elements in that corpus. The relationship between these modes is even more integral when a work of remix becomes a feature in a curated show. The mixture of temporal, spatial, paratextual, and immaterial sequences in that work assumes a conceptual identity originating in relation to the form from which the remix developed. This process is obvious in Spell Reel, where a collective undertakes to assemble footage and newsreel from the audiovisual archive in Guinea-Bissau. The resulting film can be displayed as part of a curated show, and while the process of assembling the film involved a curatorial practice, the film itself operates as a remix of the archive on which it is based. Were the film in existence in 2001 when Okwui Enwezor put up The Short Century, it would have been a candidate for inclusion and added context to Mark Nash’s essay in the section on cinema and decolonization.28 None of these modes determines absolutely the character of the given text or context in which it occurs; the significance of a mode lies in how it dominates the creative orientation of a work and in the role that mediation plays in that orientation. In Ceddo, the relationship between the composite nature of the soundtrack and the composite identity of the ceddo offers an insight into editing as a technique of filing fragments of historical events creatively imagined. But it does not affect characterization in the film, which, in spite of Sembene’s preference for collective rather than individualized experiences of history, still attaches distinctiveness to some characters. Regarding platform, the digital publishing option clearly places S.egun’s Ẹniìtàn: Daughter of Destiny in specific situations with respect to circulation. However, the option is consequential for analysis in this book to the extent that it makes the novel available at all, and a pattern of storytelling could still materialize outside of the digital context of the narrative’s production. These qualifications are necessary because in spite of its nearly indispensable status in current history, digitality does not exhaust the possibilities of mediation. The various acts of position-taking enumerated at the beginning of this section have at their core an unquestionable investment in the artistic and epistemological validity of African experiences, personal or collective. That investment speaks to a political outlook closely resembling the ideas of decolonization that the post-1945 generation of African and African-diaspora political and cultural leaders touted to great success, even if largely on the level of “description,” as Frantz Fanon once presciently

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noted (Melas 2001, 140). In music, an adjacent area of cultural activism, the construction of “Africa” in the work of Fẹla Anikulapo-Kuti represents another case in point. Switching to Nigerian Pidgin as the linguistic medium of his music, Fẹla embraced a particular idea of African reality to which the language seemed perfectly tailored. In such songs as “Original Sufferhead” (“Na so so water for Africa”), “Shuffering and Shmiling” (“We Africans, all over the world”), and “I. T. T.” (“Dem go get one African man . . .”), the musician collapses the spatial and temporal boundaries between African countries and communicates with everyone through the “musical construction right opposite you.” (Anikulapo-Kuti 1979, 06.16– 06.18) This communication takes place on the well-threshed ground of Pan-Africanism, to be sure. It is a discourse that began percolating to various degrees across the continent even before the colonial enclosure was completed. This discourse was reinforced when European colonial powers and their allies entrenched racial hierarchy to justify past and new forms of exclusion, exploitation, and physical cruelty, particularly in the United States and the so-called conquered states from eastern to southern Africa.29 However, beyond the often-tenuous, sometimes-unstable premise of that political solidarity, Fẹla imagines a process of circulation relying on the music’s cultural force, a sounding of global Blackness that persists even where the political force of the old community of Pan-Africanism is no longer assured or may not have firmly set roots. To a large extent, the global power of Afrobeat derives from the success of this communicative act as much as from its commitment to critiques of the repressive acts of the Nigerian state, whether personally suffered by the musician or collectively borne by a majority of the population. What makes these different examples even more striking as conditions for modes of creative practice is that they do not operate on the basis of unanimity. Armah (2006, 121) is on record as being critical of Ngũgĩ’s stand on the language question, as are S.oyinka (Gibbs 2001, 111; Harding 1987, 22) and Sembene, although the filmmaker does not always mention names. In fact, it did not take Sembene very long to adopt a rather pragmatic position on the language question.30 Nor, as with the perspectives on extraction and diffraction critiqued earlier, did the force of any of these choices peter out with the older generation, as a few more recent cases demonstrate. In addition to the decision regarding where to publish the “missing chapter” of Wainaina’s book that I discuss in chapter 6, we have the case of Boubacar Boris Diop, who published a novel, Doomi Golo, in

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Wolof, and Sarah Ladipọ Manyika, who opted to publish Like a Mule Bringing Ice-Cream to the Sun, her second novel, with an African publisher (Thierry 2018). It is clear from each of these admittedly complex cases that a deliberate but far-from-indulgent practice of anti-imperialism (or a stand for something else rather than simply against imperialism) forcefully marks the field of African arts and letters as an ethical domain. The choices by Sembene, Ngũgĩ, Manyika, or Armah represent a cultural impulse that African or Africa-identified artists evince as they position their works and practices in response to perceived depredations of old and new forms of cultural domination—“neo,” “anti,” “post,” or one posing as the other. Mbembe’s claims for diffraction may rest on a suggestive map of cultural change not reducible to the colonial archives and their binary schema. The fact remains, however, of the empire or emperor donning new clothes and requiring sentient subjects or citizens to develop matching modes of perception as a manifestation of cultural or political struggle. Sembene’s turn to film as a medium with greater accessibility than literature in a situation of widespread illiteracy and Fẹla’s adoption of Nigerian Pidgin as the default language of Afrobeat music are at once political and aesthetic choices. The perception that a genre is limited because of its technological status in relation to one’s investment in a given social space reflects a political outlook. Yet the importance of these controversial choices lies in how they unfold as forms of ethics within a general climate of decolonization that has continued, past the twentieth century, and in the process fosters modes of creative practice that have somehow eluded analysis. The ethnographic method of research (in history, anthropology, folklore, ethnomusicology, etc.) that saw African, African American, and Africanist scholars recording local epics, panegyrics, odes, elegies, and other oral forms and transcribing them as texts resulted directly from the academic acceptance of oral account as a legitimate source of history. It came out of a cultural sensibility very much in line with the ones informing the decisions of the intellectual artists: to preserve the memory of the people in the manner of the djeli and make the people aware of their historical or cultural heritage. Ngũgĩ and Sembene went further only in the thematic thrust of the work thus produced. Neither figure merely deployed a mode of creative practice or switched to a new medium but also, and equally important, presented a particular kind of representation (Ngahiika Ndeenda or Ceddo) and infused it with an ideological force that took its inspiration from the anti-imperial critique common to modern African letters.

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There are also cases, however, where what is contentious political or artistic history provides an unexpected opportunity for creative crossfertilization. Such is the relationship between the film Wend Kunni (1982) by Burkinabe director Gaston Kaboré and his Tunisian counterpart Férid Boughedir’s Halfaounie (1990). In a wide-ranging interview with French journalist and critic Olivier Barlet in 2008, Boughedir made a series of disclosures that shine light on important moments in the history of African cinema. After praising Sembene’s La Noire de . . . as a work of remarkable dignity and political conviction, Boughedir said that “the film that influenced me directly when I was working on Halfaouine was Gaston Kaboré’s Wend Kuuni . . . When Kaboré films Wend Kuuni, holding up the close-up shot of the boy longer than is normally accepted in the rules of classic montage, something magic[al] happens at that precise moment. It was a lesson for me. He had the necessary perception to cut the shot later, and those few ‘extra’ seconds generated an emotion I had never seen before” (4–5). Boughedir’s encounter with Wend Kuuni occurred at a film festival, the one setting of circulation that allowed for the cross-fertilization of ideas for artists working against multiple obstacles in production. Indeed, without Boughedir making these statements, even the most careful student or scholar of African films could not have made the connection, important as it is. These modes of creative practice operate in excess of the autotelic status of the work of art, however that is defined. Musicians, writers, and filmmakers are no longer, nor have they ever really been, content to fill a spot in the relay between the conception and distribution of a work. They place such a work in an ethical world, making such a world indispensable to an appreciation of the work. Under digitality, they are also quick to view and reconfigure texts as active instruments in making a variety of ethical choices to shape those circumstances changed by the much-attested features of new technologies—their relative ease of access, mobility, and affordability. In a somewhat similar context, the cultural theorist Jacques Ranciere, writing about the post-World War II art scene in France, describes this mode of practice as art enacting politics, suggesting that such active engagement is intrinsic to both a particular text and the practices into which it is inserted in the complex process of its dissemination. Near the beginning of the introduction, I argued that the reconstitution of ideas of authorship and textuality and an expanded understanding

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of art result from the kinds of engagement I have described as modes of creative practice. It remains to show how this actually works. Considering the impact of the simultaneity of spheres on artistic production, what we know as authorship comes loaded with complications. On the one hand, if a social media platform like Twitter is seen to operate as a kind of digital feudalism where tweeps create data for the corporation that provides the platform, the assumption is that the process of agglomeration of data deprives creators of ownership—as authors—of what they tweet. But we have the case of African authors—including the poets Uche Nduka, Ondjaki, and Leonora Miano—who self-consciously use the format of tweets to compose poems that might be, over time, redirected to their own personal database and appear in the traditional format of poetry volumes. In this process, digital media become an avenue for writers to reimagine notions of authorship, the supposedly transient character of a tweet becoming subordinated to the authorial charge of the writer who views the platform as another opportunity to create a poem or an essay. On the other hand, creative artists with class-related and other social volatilities are able to generate new ideas of textuality through choices imposed by their productive situations. Multimodal composition (print, taped live performance, writing) inscribes survival into the DNA of poetic works of recorded music. In addition, the technology of mechanical reproduction ensures that such works can exert new force beyond the threshold of “lore” that once limited the scope of circulation for literature and theater within class orientation. This new reach may apply more to those artists who have to deal with economic or religious inhibitions than to those, like S.oyinka and Sembene, who display heightened awareness of the ideologically driven battles with artistic censorship and even welcome such battles to further the ethical aims of the culture. Between them, these two processes of reconfiguration can expand our ideas of what constitutes art, especially within the changing contexts of the institutions producing and disseminating worked objects, material, virtual or embodied. Should it be necessary to determine any order of priority in the workings of these processes, it would not be productive to think simply in terms of the superiority of print to electronic format, since remediation typically occurs in both cases. The discussion in chapter 2 presents the two processes of reconstitution in greater detail. In the view of Pan-Africanist scholars and writers such as Cheik Anta Diop, Théophile Obenga, and Armah, the fragmentation of African artistic

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cultures mirrors the fragmentation of the continent’s history. Linking historical narratives to the process of consolidating multiple identities, Armah writes: The truth is that Africa does have its own narratives, in a dazzling array of forms. The multiplicity is a result of the fragmentation of African society over time and space. This has produced a situation in which each broken-off piece of African society has in time acquired a quasi-independent narrative of its own existence. Cheik Anta Diop calls these histories, these fragmented narratives, specific histories . . . What we have in short supply, so far, are the broader types of narrative that Cheik Anta Diop classifies as general narratives . . . a higher level of narrative in which characteristics common to a wide range of lower-level narratives are brought together to synthesize a new whole. (2006, 135–136)

Armah thus imagines, most cogently in his novel KMT: In the House of Life (2002), a multimillennial history of Africa as “one continuous stream” and has Lindela, his translator-protagonist, imagine a situation in which “through conscious training, to project our best hopes across geography and history . . . and across thousands of years” (212). According to this premise, the predominance of orality as the preferred communicative mode and venerated approach to reconstructing history in the colonial era also introduced a situation in which facts were gathered piecemeal, or deliberately withheld, for example between the griot wa Kamissoko and Youssouf Tata Cissé in L’Epopée Mandingue (Cissé et wa Kamissoko 1991), to such an extent that these styles of communication subsequently attained a stability of their own. As a result, fragmentation and incorporation have, in time, come to be proffered as intrinsic to genres like oríkì and yere don (Barber 1991; Diawara 2003). A modal practice such as composition becomes generative because it recasts the terms of fragmentation, valiantly suturing the open wounds of history with the license that creativity affords. Sembene’s approach to history in Ceddo (chap. 3) shows this convincingly. Defragmentation, a theoretical idea, grows out of this generative relationship of diachronicity, translocality, and mediation, bringing composition and the scattered nature of proverb and lore to appearance on the same plane. This appearance has the status of “celluloid grains converted into pixels, pixels into fireflies,” to borrow from the film Spell Reel, discussed as a remix in chapter 6. The process of placing the fragments of the degenerating archive in Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde within screened

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and filmed sequences includes poetic, self-deprecating, and critical reflections on the discontinuous relationship between past and present, which applies to the other items in that chapter as well. As we shall see in chapter 3, the idea of defragmentation succeeds in Ceddo to the extent that Sembene uses it to develop a multifaceted critique of imperialism as an essentially class-structured phenomenon. However, it remains subject to criticism in two principal senses—one ideological, the other aesthetic. The ideological issue is best summed up in the passage where Walter Rodney discusses class differentiation in African societies in his History of the Upper Guinea Coast. Focusing on contacts between the hierarchized formal systems to the north and the littoral states, Rodney writes that “in terms of the ancient influence from the interior, new intrusion usually meant change at the level of leadership, that is to say the Mande and Fula were partially able to replace the ruling class of the littoral. But even more important, in its contacts with the Europeans, the African society of the Upper Guinea Coast did not present itself as an undifferentiated entity. The patterns of trade often transcended tribal divisions, but never the distinction between fidalgo and plebeian” (1970, 38). It is worth noting that this region existed in close but problematic proximity to the period and place where the ceddo as a sociopolitical formation developed. As we shall see, Sembene’s creative deployment of this formation leaves room for the critical appreciation of its unflattering profile when read with historian Boubacar Barry’s account of the period. As for the aesthetic, the results are mixed: Sembene’s creative use of history runs aground on the dusty terrains of religious politics in contemporary Senegal, demonstrated in the banning of Ceddo by the government of President Léopold Senghor. Finally, the expressions of poetic language—or figurative language in general—are never free of fragments, a point to which I return in the epilogue to underscore the limits of defragmentation. Rather than locking things down (or up) with the key of a final account, a view of these relationships that starts from the present—but not in isolation—is in better accordance with the impulse in this book.

TWO

p

SPATIAL ASSEMBLAGES Festivals as Curation

Introduction: New ness R e-enter s the Wor ld The cream of African literature gather in a cavernous hall at Bard College in Annandale-upon-Hudson, upstate New York. The occasion is the highlight of a three-day series of events celebrating of the seventieth birthday of the iconic Chinua Achebe, a legendary name in the literary tradition. Other legendary figures are there in person. There is an unrelieved solemnity to the proceedings, though, and once the moment is right, someone stands up to comment on the mood. Ibrahim Gambari, Nigeria’s permanent representative to the United Nations, uses the question and answer segment of the Writers and Scholars roundtable to observe the paradox of celebrating the birthday of the preeminent African novelist, whose writings ripple with the spectacular energy of festivals—drumming, masquerades, and dances—in an atmosphere of such gravity. “If we were to be having this celebration in an African country,” the diplomat comments in a manner typical of his profession, “I assure you that we would be seeing a lot by the way of the spirit of true festival.” Gambari’s observation has stayed with me since that autumnal day in 2000, and I have frequently considered it indicative of the tension between the actual production of art forms or secular ceremonies in African cities and their display in expatriation. Responding to the propulsive force of that memory, this chapter considers a question. What is the relationship between curating on digital platforms, the principal mode of showcasing a variety of African artistic

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forms beyond temporal and geographical limitations, and the festivals from which theater developed historically in West Africa? If theater is a decisive example of the mediation that thinking relationally between African textual practices and digitality fosters, as I argued in the last chapter, then I press the case further here, focusing on three kinds of curatorial practice that have evolved in a complex manner from the entity we typically regard as theater. The first is the modal production style that African art history has long associated with the mbari houses of clay sculptures produced in southeastern Nigeria through the sixties. In focusing on a mode of production that used architecture, sculpture, painting, and other expressive forms to curate society’s expectations around a festival, I seek to establish a connection between the ritual aspects of an agrarian economy and the fragmented, evanescent modes of generating textual material around African artistic forms, either as operatic performances or through curation on digital media. The operatic work in the career of Hubert Ogunde, acknowledged doyen of Nigerian theater artists, exemplifies the second kind of curatorial practice. Through a discussion of the historical and production circumstances out of which Moré.niké./Àyànmó. (1948/1972), one of Ogunde’s more frequently performed operas, emerged and thrived, I extend the idea of curation as informed by commercial expectations unique to the urban settings of midcentury West Africa to the third kind of practice: the New York African Film Festival and the Uganda-originated Arts Management and Literary Activists Network, dedicated to literary matters.1 These two Africa-identified platforms have significant online curatorial presence from which the commercial dimension in Ogunde’s theater is largely absent. In reviewing these new examples of festival, I observe that while the idea of sculptural permanence contradicts the spirit of mbari, important acts of mediation have occurred through developments with greater disposition to framing, mobility, and conception of audience than before. These acts of mediation manifest in curatorial practices deployed in digital platforms, especially through their reimagining of communities (or publics) of African arts and letters in film, music, and book festivals. For his part, Ogunde developed his commercial theatrical practice through a conception of audience as mobile and traveling theater as the literal pursuit of patrons. As Ogunde’s publics expanded, the forms of his art revealed their constitutive features. The process of creating and maintaining the opera as a repertory item over a period of more than three

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decades is emblematic of a contemporary development: the relationship between ideas that are increasingly indispensable in using digital media to curate productions—cinema, literature, visual art, music—and the festival mode of generating audiences around those productions in translocal contexts. As much as any of the modes of creative practice developed in this book, curation seeks to make its impact through practical ideas about location, available human and material resources, and the vicissitudes of audience expectation. I readily acknowledge that the connection between these practices is unusual. The women who worked to cover mbari houses in sculptures and paintings clearly did not set out to curate anything, at least not in the faddish way we now approach the practice of formally arranging seemly items for aesthetic sensation. Proceeding in a chronological manner, I think, creates the best opportunity to clarify this connection, particularly in relation to the time-space-medium complex laid out in the previous chapter. Starting from the agrarian practice of marking the cycles of life with mbari art, I move to the modern, more integral condensation of this festival mode in the art of the theater, using Ogunde as the prime example, then to the even more contemporary idea and practice of film and book festivals. The connection is structural, if discontinuous, and in order to speak productively to the different settings of these modes, a quick return to Wọle S.oyinka’s argument in the essay “Theater in Traditional African Cultures” seems necessary. Of relevance here is the part of the essay where the writer focuses on the complex ideological transformations through which traditional funerary rites and festivals became theatrical forms in the colonial period in West Africa. It is necessary to emphasize discontinuity, an idea that is strategically useful in a context where what needs to be connected is often missed. If S.oyinka’s focus in the first part of the essay is on strategies of survival the arts develop under a myriad of religious, political, and economic restrictions, he turns toward the end to a more summative claim. He argues that “artistic forms return to life again and again after their seeming demise . . . [a] process which emphasizes the fundamental unity of various artforms and the social environment that gives expression to them . . . and certain creative ideas [as] the very offspring of historical convulsions” (1988, 203; emphasis added). The circumstances under which digital media have continued to reshape the form and content of African arts and letters are obviously different from a presumed unity of the kind S.oyinka

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addresses in this formulation. Yet there is a correlation of purpose in the idea that digital media play to a notional African community—broadly imagined—against the pressures of expatriation and ever desirous of “the spirit of true festival” of which the Nigerian diplomat of our opening example speaks. In a sense, the preference for short reads, blogs, listicles, threads, video clips, and similar habits of production or consumption fostered by digital media, especially internet platforms, reproduces (or at least symptomizes) the modal production styles associated with the economic or cultural arrangement that underwrote the ritual architecture behind mbari art and life. The anecdotal, evanescent, fragmented, cyclically renewable modes of generating textual materials around African artistic forms through digital curation exemplifies historical relations of production. In the context of the crisis in African state economies from the 1970s to the late 1990s (some might argue that there is no end in sight as yet), critics and policymakers were quick to view the near-total disappearance of certain works of art, especially in cinema and marginal, ephemeral formats, in terms of cultural catastrophe. I share this sense of catastrophe to some extent. My proposition, however, is that we take a fuller measure of this perspective by seeing it in process, linking that process to the modal production styles associated with mbari. When people who are removed from a particular sociocultural context, either as a result of physical relocation or of defamiliarized aesthetic upbringing, encounter an image or an idea associated with that context, they may respond in a number of ways. These range from an affirmative identification with the given image to a visceral rejection of it to the more complex emotion of having a questioning dialogue with that encounter. Rather than prioritize any of these responses, it is more productive for aesthetic communication to acknowledge the creative choice of enabling the encounter because participants in that encounter may not know what was missing from their consciousness until the experience kindles imaginaries they had not known they inhabited. In situations like this, creative choices like titling works in a particular language go farther than the obvious purpose of making a cultural claim.2 The theatrical practice of Hubert Ogunde, a foremost figure in modern Nigerian arts, evolved in the general context of urban change in West Africa in the middle of the twentieth century, which called for a commercial—that is to say, professional—development of a dynamic performance style. This style entails an elaborate performance sequence, the

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opening glee, from a series of songs, dances, mimes, and other expressive materials in the Concert Party format that elicit the active recognition and participation of the audience. This practice manifests itself as a curation, the arrangement of seemly materials in a particular order within an actual, demarcated space for the attention of an audience imagined in the manner or shape of that arrangement. Extending the premise of this argument brings into focus the explosion of diverse, well-publicized film festivals within the last two decades, both across the continent and outside of it. These festivals, dedicated to books, films, poetry, and music, promote the work of African creators in unique ways and come out of sensibilities and cultural innovations barely imagined before the advent of the internet. Popular, sophisticated, and professionally run, these include the New York African Film Festival (NYAFF); the African International Film Festival (London); iREP Film Festival and Lights, Camera, Africa! (both in Lagos); the African Diaspora Film Festival (New York); the Sithengi Film Festival and the Durban Film Festival (both in South Africa); the Zanzibar Film Festival; PanAfrican Film Festival (Los Angeles); and Nollywood in London. They are closely linked to new processes of imagining audiences, publics, patrons, and communities. Of these, the NYAFF, established in 1990, is the oldest and receives separate and extensive discussion in this chapter.3 Examining the ubiquity of these film and book festivals through online curation implies that they coincide with the advent of digital media. It is important to note, however, the prior existence of the Ifè. Book Fair; the Londonbased International Book Fair of Radical Black and Third World Books; the Zimbabwe International Book Fair; Journées cinématographiques de Carthage (JCC); and Festival panafricain du cinéma et de la television de Ouagadougou (FESPACO), the last two being film festivals in Tunisia and Burkina Faso and still going strong. The last-named festival, FESPACO, provided inspiration for NYAFF. The same goes for book festivals, though as we will soon see, a slightly different kind of rationale informs the conception of literary events. Nonetheless, they proliferate across the countries, from the Lagos Book and Art Festival; the Aké Book Festival at Abẹokuta; the Bamako-based Rentrée littéraire du Mali; the Hargeysa Book Fair (Somaliland); the Abantu Book Festival (South Africa); and several others. These new outfits are named “book festivals” more often than “book fairs.” This naming suggests, perhaps, a different conception of the public

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for which these festivals are meant, and it clearly echoes the African cultural matrix of communal celebration of important occasions. The relationship between the organizers of these festivals and African-identified publishers appears more cordial than the business orientation that shaped earlier instances of book fairs, where book deals, foreign or translation rights, and adoption for school curricula often determined the details of programming.4 New books, new authors, and panels around topics of current relevance appear to constitute the focus of activities at these new festivals. While their sources of funding are diverse—local and international organizations, private and public enterprises—their “professional” interests appear shaped by new conceptions of communities or publics for which their events are intended.5 Hardly any of the festivals operate without an awareness of digital media as avenues for generating interest and publicity for their programs. Interested members of local communities and attendees certainly maintain active curiosity about the events, but for the larger audience of creatives, tweets, Facebook and Instagram posts, podcasts, blogs, vlogs, and storified narratives remain the most accessible ways of keeping abreast of events. Obviously, these modes of dissemination of real-time activities generate the kind of emotional investment usually lacking in reports in a newspaper or a trade journal, written days or weeks after the conclusion of a book fair or a film festival. These are new imaginings of African experiences of artistic practice as relates to notions of audience, processes of production and circulation, and the creation and ascription of value. Currently, the imaginings are concretized through social media-based dissemination, since digital platforms generate modes of awareness that could not have been contemplated at a time when the concept of the internet was nonexistent. All the same, it is important to place this conception of community in a larger setting than current apprehensions based on new media imagining can illuminate. Such an approach is also in accord with this book’s interest in charting the genealogy of multiple levels of relation and space in which the production of African and global Black identities takes place. For curating in both cinema and visual arts, the relationship between place, however imagined, and space of actual exhibition matters a great deal and has not escaped theoretical elaboration informed by practice. One of the most sophisticated positions on the informing ground of this curatorial practice is found in the writings about diaspora of the late

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Caribbean theorist Stuart Hall. In such essays as “Cultural Identity and Cinematic Representation” (1989), “Negotiating Caribbean Identities” (1995), and “Old and New Identities, Old and New Ethnicities” (1997), Hall lays out the idea of the diaspora in such an expansive but focused way as to constitute the framework for a wide range of cultural and artistic practices in translocal settings. Translocality, as we have seen, adds further dynamism to the conception of processes and practices that diasporicity describes. Those processes and practices occurred in the space of the African continent over a long period of time, although they were not perceived as such. Furthermore, the accelerated pace of cultural change of the past half-century, the “short century” of the African modern, as the title of an exemplary art show has it, has tested the somewhat settled, one-track idea of diasporicity. This conception of change in relation to diasporicity is crucial to Hall’s career, and he sums it up in Familiar Stranger, the memoir published three years after his death in 2014: “The modern idea of diaspora seeks to reproduce in thought the contemporary dynamic by which cultural formations coexist and interconnect, drawing one from another, which is one of the consequences when peoples with very varied histories, cultures, languages, religions, resources, access to power, and wealth are obliged by migration to occupy the same space as those different from themselves and, sometimes, to make a common life together” (2017, 143–144). Hall’s interest in diasporicity took shape in his active involvement in the political and cultural lives of Britain in those postwar years. Those interests, however, also evolved in a dynamic, reflexive engagement with the history of Jamaica and the Caribbean in general. They came from study, both in his professional immersion in the work of Henry James and his less formalized education in the work of James Baldwin and jazz music (2017, 127, 129). Bringing this simultaneous attention to processes unfolding in Britain and the Caribbean, as well as to those in less tangible spaces of aesthetic sensing, gives further purchase to my preferred term, translocality, in comparison with diasporicity or transnationalism. This specification is relevant to the present argument about festival curation for one important reason. Around the same time as Mahen Bonetti (who we will meet in the third section of this chapter) began formalizing the NYAFF, curator and critic Okwui Enwezor was living in New York City. Enwezor had begun working his way toward an idea of contemporary African art that saw him collaboratively establish first the journal

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NKA, then art shows and a whole set of conceptual interventions that have changed the field of art history and practice in the whole world. An early statement of this curatorial principle in art history is found in “Redrawing the Boundaries: Towards a New African Art Discourse,” the editorial of the premiere issue of NKA, where Enwezor argues for redrawing boundaries and reconstituting contemporary African art (1994). This principle informed the various shows that Enwezor curated either singly or in collaboration in the first phase of his career—between the founding of NKA in 1994 and 2002, when he served as the artistic director of Dokumenta 11. Additionally, the theoretical premise was elaborated in the volume Reading the Contemporary he coedited with Olu Oguibe (1999). That volume marked the inaugural moment of a particular kind of curatorial practice that used the idea of the contemporary and diasporicity to criticize the notions of a binary discourse (outside versus inside, popular versus high culture) as well as the designation “non-Western art.” Both notions had been crucial to the major exhibit of the previous decade, Magiciens de la Terre, curated by Jean-Hubert Martin and held at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. That mega-exhibit took place in 1989, and the discursive ground had already begun to shift. By then, a sizeable body of scholarly works by African and non-African artists had made an unanswerable case against the idea of Europe as the center of the world on the basis of culture.6 In an important sense, the idea of the contemporary as a fitting register for appreciating translocated African artists was also a practical departure from the approach favored by an established journal like African Arts, renowned for its investment in traditional art. In addition to Hall, this idea of the contemporary received inspiration from the work of scholars like Valentin Mudimbe, Kwame Appiah, and Gayatri Spivak, as well as the modernist impulses in African writers such as S.oyinka, Christopher Okigbo, Arthur Nortje, and Dambudzo Marechera. The significance of Reading the Contemporary is visible in its list of contributors, the general framing of a discourse of African art as an ongoing critique of ideas of authenticity—European as well as African—though some aspects of that critique would become nuanced in later shows and publications. The conceptualism of Enwezor’s practice comes from the diasporic, expatriated context of its unfolding. Attempts to pose questions in this context about representation in relation to the continent often manifest themselves in intellectual, generalized, or inclusive terms. Such questions

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address larger issues and take the entirety of the continent in their scope. This approach also explains the tendency in most of Enwezor’s curated shows toward the discursive or analytical, exemplified in critical essays serving as frames for the placing of the artworks. Starting from early shows like Mirror’s Edge (1996) and In/Sight (1996) to the Johannesburg Biennale and large-scale shows like The Short Century (2001), Dokumenta 11 (2002), Snap Judgments (2006), Archive Fever (2008), and Venice (2015), among others, an irreducible conceptuality figures in the shows, whether singly or collaboratively curated. Preferred artworks often tend to be conceptual ones, playing up, with controlled abstraction, issues of identity such as racial, class, and geographical differences. These postcolonial notions had been making inroads into cultural institutions across the world since the end of World War II. They were reinforced in the 1990s by the coalescence of multiculturalism and the postmodernist privileging of difference following the series of political changes ranging from the deterioration of Soviet communism in the USSR and Eastern Europe to the end of the apartheid regime in South Africa. In clearing a space of enunciation for his and his collaborators’ work in the post-1989 art world, Enwezor showed less engagement with African settings, even when he curated shows on the continent and increased the tally of Africa-based artists in shows outside the continent. I do not think it was an accident that the nexus of art shows and expatriation provided the conceptual ground for the curatorial practice from which the new film and book festivals borrow their modes of operation. If a studied jettisoning of African settings marked Enwezor’s practice early on, that only underscored its awareness of external context as the immediate sphere of its influence and reinforced the attenuation of the “spirit of festival” that Gambari, the diplomat in the opening example, enjoined. Yet, by emphasizing “festival” in the conception of their activities, the curators of film and book shows clearly evoke memories of the old festivals, which mbari once proved to exemplify. Mba r i Is Life In physical terms, mbari is the ritual-inspired architecture that mostly women workers in Owerri Igbo in southeastern Nigeria constructed over the course of two years in response to communal needs. The process would begin with the divination that Ala, the deity of earth worshippers,

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requires attention for the renewal of the community’s social and psychological resources. For the next several months, the priest and chosen individuals would set about the elaborate task of preparing for this festival, the high point of which was the construction of the mbari house. The completed structure would usually be unveiled on a certain night, the climax of a variety of ceremonies and peak of an annual festival that began with the divination. The structure, when completed, would contain new clay sculptures, painted walls, elaborate murals, and other items pertaining to the festival. But as Herbert Cole, who has written extensively about this religious architecture (sometimes with his Nigerian collaborator Chike Aniakor), demonstrates, the final product, while significant, does not say everything about the process. This becomes obvious to the viewer of Nigeria: Culture in Transition, the 1963 documentary narrated by S.oyinka himself, which opens in two striking ways: “Not the product,” the solitary narrator standing in a clearing says, “not the final artifact, but the act of creation.” Next appears the striking image of an mbari house, to which the narrator points as an indication of the creative principle of cyclical, renewable life that the documentary seeks to present in relation to art forms. “Process as discussed here,” Cole writes, “is the complex of interactions among people, their physical world, their artifacts, the products of their thoughts—i.e. their speech, song, dance, ritual, and so forth. Nor is this all human activity, for that is life, and clearly, there are distinctions between art and life” (1969, 34–35). Mbari is art—the end product, the beautiful architecture and its sculptures unveiled to the community on the appointed day—but it is also life. In addition to building the mbari over the course of two to three years, “the construction process included a series of interrelated or overlapping art forms such as dance, songs, chants, drumming, body painting, processional marching and set rituals” (35). The connection between the process of enacting this ritualized festival over a period of two years and the one of transforming festival into theater should be apparent from these observations. Perhaps in order to reinforce the specific conditions of appreciating as art what was motivated by a “complex of interactions among people,” Cole characterizes each stage separately, focusing on the prevalent activity at a given stage. The relationship between product and process in understanding this practice becomes even more compelling in light of S.oyinka’s analysis of how festival origins such as those present in mbari shaped theatrical practice in the colonial period. In Mbari: Art and Life Among the Owerri Igbo, the book published

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after the appearance of the series of articles, Cole makes the insightful argument that the Nigerian civil war was a factor in the overall decline of mbari tradition besides “the construction, about 1965, of a cement and concrete house . . . [as] the builder sought to freeze mbari and render it permanent—in direct contradiction to the tradition itself ” (1982, 4). From the point of view of social conditions authorizing mbari as a festival of life, such use of material might indicate a contradiction. But even so, important acts of mediation have occurred through generational transfer of skills and the emergence of new regimes of visuality with greater disposition to framing and mobility. Even as modern mbari structures constructed out of cement made their appearance, the establishment of the Mbari Artists and Writers’ Club in Ibadan in 1961 by writers of different backgrounds was directly influenced by the Igbo styles. In his historically rich account of the club’s founding at Ibadan, art historian Chika Okeke-Agulu makes this connection with contemporary art very explicit and consequential for curatorial practices outside of Nigeria (2015, 149–152). Proof of the influence of mbari on contemporary art was in the club’s rhetorical naming by Chinua Achebe, but equally decisive was the impact on the principles informing the work of modernist artists such as Demas Nwoko and Uche Okeke, whose paintings were featured in the inaugural exhibit at the center in the same year. Slightly later but closely connected to the modern tradition of Nigerian art, the works of uli artists Obiora Udechukwu (whose painting graces the cover of this book), Ndidi Dike, El Anatsui, and others represent significant examples of mediation. Their use of other media expanded on the principles of mbari even as conditions for the ritual-inspired structures and festival have changed irrevocably. One feature of mbari as simultaneously art and life is its enactment of both as a public event: the festival. This feature of mbari, I think, is what expatriate Ghanaian architect David Adjaye attempts to capture in the notion of “publicness,” as he states in an interview during the inaugural exhibition of Urban Africa, his continent-wide project on African capitals. Asked by the interviewer, Rita Palma, what ideas he brings to the practice of architecture from his identity as an African, Adjaye says: “I think that I have a very different discourse about the notion of habitation and the notion of publicness. I think that, even without me realizing it, during my research I’ve become very conscious of my own practices, I realize that I always have a desire to express a certain kind of publicness . . . an overt

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publicness, even when it’s not there, and I think that’s a very African sensibility, this idea of the open, public . . . to see. Not to hide, to see!”7 Though somewhat inchoate on theoretical grounds, Adjaye’s statements about publicness resonate with the conception of space in traditional festivals, of which ritualized processes such as mbari form a part. The statements are also conceivably the informing impulses in the observation that the diplomat Gambari made during Achebe’s birthday events recounted at the beginning of this chapter. In case the reader senses in this feature of mbari a manifestation of the process that I conceptualize as “the simultaneity of spheres” in chapter 1, I say that it is, indeed, that. Different kinds of expertise obviously go into making this community-wide festival, and different kinds of art are manifested in an mbari house itself. It is hardly tenable to reflect on this process in an informed manner without abandoning the academic tendency to prioritize a specific expertise or discipline, either in architecture or art history. Thus, it is not an accident that S.oyinka’s attempt to argue for a connection between festival and drama draws on one of Cole’s essays: A festival is a relatively rare climactic event in the life of any community. It is bounded by a definite beginning and end, and is unified thereby, as well as being set apart from the . . . daily life. Its structure is built on a core or armature of ritual. The festival brings about a suspension of ordinary time, a transformation of ordinary space, a formalizer of ordinary behavior. It is as if the community becomes a stage set and its people actors with a battery of seldom-seen props and costumes. Meals become feasts, and greetings, normally simple, become ceremonies. Although dependent on life-sustaining rituals, the festival is an elaborated and stylized phenomenon which far surpasses ritual necessity. It often becomes the social, ritual, and political apotheosis of community life in a year. At festival time, one level of reality—the common and everyday—gives way to another, a more intense, symbolic and expressive level of reality. (S.oyinka 1988, 195)

Contemporary theater, thus, is an extraction or contraction of drama in the festival idiom, determined, as S.oyinka argues in that arresting statement, “by the productive order of society in other directions” (195). The point is that the basis of artistic composition in mbari and similar festivals was historical, answering to specific social, economic, and technological needs, akin to the growth of Concert Party theater in late-colonial West Africa. If those ways of making art revealed a tendency toward evanescence and mutability, this was a function of the modes available to the

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professionals who, as the case of Ogunde will show, were also remarkably attuned to arresting those conditions and made attempts to diversify their modes of production and circulation. Digitality offers a more opportune way of negotiating those limitations through the modes of reproduction or retextualization it fosters. For artists and cultural workers in this context of socioeconomic volatilities, there is a predisposition toward surviving through thick-and-thin, and this explains the use of multimodal circulation (print, taped live performance, photoplay, LPs) in the career of Ogunde. In addition, the changes in technologies of mechanical reproduction ensure that such outputs, like recorded music, can thrive beyond levels that once limited the scope of critical attention for literature and theater created in such socially volatile circumstances. In addition to the earlier case about theatrical form as an exemplar of mediation, it is possible to highlight aspects of theater built to advance the objectives identified in the five modes of creative practice. Primarily oriented toward performance, theatrical productions do not manifest as texts as easily as the way literary ones do. Unless a play is part of a repertoire or is recorded on film or video, the production script is the most immediate way of ascertaining its existence, even when it has been published as a book. It would be a published play but without evidence otherwise that it had been performed. Thus, theater tends to an evanescence or ephemerality that can easily manifest itself as a hierarchy of values in relation to other forms. But this perspective is complicated if we choose to closely relate theatrical practice to the idea of festivals as periodic attempts to renew a society’s productive forces, and which, although they may be transient, are also sufficient as performances. Cole’s term “mbari-as-life” is most useful in establishing connections between the different kinds of practice under discussion in this sense. Theater is an exemplar of mediation in its unique arrangement of different elements into a whole in performance. That whole encompasses extrinsic factors like directing, stage management, and production design, and intrinsic ones like speech, movement, music, and spectacle, and is changeable from one performance to another as long as a given production—opera, theater, dance—exists in a repertoire. In his analysis of the transmission of elements of festival into a dramatic act, S. oyinka puts across the idea that this arrangement takes into consideration factors intrinsic to the concept of production, even when such factors do not appear to matter to the aesthetic whole as

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a product. Cole writes further: “Particularly at the rites of unveiling, ‘mbari as process’ gives way to ‘mbari as monument,’ as an ordered environment which is beautiful aesthetically and thus efficacious ritual” (1969, 50). One might add that the aesthetic whole is in the eye of the beholder—the preference for discriminating judgment over the significance of symbolism in the oje ogwu dance movement that S. oyinka observed. As we shall see momentarily, Ogunde’s aim in a performance is to give the audience “excellent fun,” an aspiration uncannily reminiscent of S. oyinka’s own notion of providing “excellent theater for the audience” (Pieterse and Duerden 1972, 173). One analytical issue to keep in mind in this idea of theater oriented as festival or ritual renewal of society’s productive forces is the emergence of the mass media, which is itself an element in the system of mass production, a feature of the classic mass society of the late nineteenth and early to mid-twentieth century. This new era of social organization changed the relation between art and its context, as Walter Benjamin discusses in his much-cited reflections on the nature of mechanical reproduction. But that is only one instance of change, as Benjamin notes and elaborates in “Eduard Fuchs, Collector,” the essay I discussed in the previous chapter. Another instance is the coexistence of the mass-reproduced product and the relatively unbounded annual festival, which is better appreciated in regions such as West and East Africa, where other factors necessitate the continuation of festivals in certain forms, at least up to a certain point. The idea of festival as the basis of mbari clearly anticipates the characteristic of “the newer art” as theorist Fredric Jameson describes it: But now we can see a little better what they really are: they are not objects, because they are in fact events. The installation and its kindred productions are made, not for posterity, nor even for the permanent collection, but rather for the now and for a temporality that may be rather different from the old modernist kind. This is why it has become appropriate to speak of it not as a work or a style, nor even as the expression of something deeper, but rather as a strategy (or a recipe)—a strategy for producing an event, a recipe for events. (2015, 111; original emphases)8

Jameson’s characterization of events here shows a belated awareness of exactly the point S.oyinka made years ago, that contemporary drama as art is a contraction of drama in the context of festival. In relation to the changing contexts of midcentury West Africa, that act of contraction was already on view in the operas of Ogunde and his counterparts even as the

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art of mbari continued in various forms. Minimally scripted and produced in the context of fitful record keeping, many of Ogunde’s plays are hardly available in the retrievable form of print. Being spectacles with many moving parts, those plays would have been harder to contemplate as objects without the option of diverse media available to the dance company.9 The films that some of them became were never mass-produced, principally for reasons of technological format that limited their distribution. The songs of the operas, on the other hand, were recorded and mass-produced on LPs. Depending on the coalescence of technological and copyright issues, they may be the only reliable way of retrieving many of the scripted works. Digitality as the current, general apparatus of mediation supplies the final item in the series in the sense that it enables the curation of productions within the frame of the festival mode and generates audiences around those productions in translocal contexts. The larger argument here is the possibility of viewing theater and its constitutive elements like directing, stage management, and casting, as well as the intrinsic ones of expression, as spheres of creative practice to which the notion of a body of work in print need not apply. Reviewing Wiveca Sotto’s The Rounded Rite, a 1987 study of S.oyinka’s adaptation of Euripides’s The Bacchae, theater director Dapọ Adelugba draws attention to Nigerian productions of the play of which Sotto was not aware. These were directed by Carole Dawes and Saidat Ọdọfin, both in 1985, in Zaria and Ibadan respectively. Sotto’s analysis would clearly have been enriched if she saw these productions, but, failing that, being aware of them through production notes or records would at least have added more nuance to discussions of the productions in England. Similarly, Adelugba’s views on the comparative production history of Le Exil d’Albouri, the play by the Senegalese writer Cheik Aliou Ndao (in Dakar and Ilé-Ifè.), which he discusses in the preface to his translation of Bakary Traoré’s African Theater and Its Social Functions, confirm an idea of theatrical production as a sphere of engagement that cannot be evaluated only or even primarily on the basis of what is available in print. This path leads to an interesting paradox. In late March 1987, the production of S.oyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman at the Lincoln Center in New York closed within a week of its opening night. It was stridently panned by critics, the opinions of one being so consequential that the frustrated playwright wondered if a single journalist should have such power to determine the fate of a creative work

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(S.oyinka 1988). The paradox is that the play is something of a crowning glory of S.oyinka’s career as a dramatist. It was specifically highlighted in the October 1986 Nobel Prize announcement, the global honor in the glow of which the author still radiated much goodwill as the play opened in March. This paradox is complicated by the fact that the paid-for, commercial theater within which a figure like Ogunde operated is susceptible to the evanescence that is a feature of festivals, while the subsidized one of S.oyinka (and Fẹmi Ọs.ọfisan and any number of university-based practitioners) largely survived because of its mode of articulation through the figure of the dramatist-director, and mostly through print. Novelist and dramatist Akinwumi Is.ọla’s recourse to film through collaboration with Tunde Kelani (the focus of chap. 4) was motivated as much by the need to revitalize Yoruba culture as by that of retrieving and reformatting texts not guaranteed to last, given class orientation, environmental, and economic conditions. Is.ọla’s standing as a writer guaranteed, to some extent, that his oeuvre lives on in print, even if specific works go out of print. For professional artists working in electronic or nonliterary media, the situation could be more dire. The film Ọ`run Móoru (Stuffy as Dying, 1982), by the comedian Moses Ọlaiya Adejumọ (famously known as Baba Sala all over the world), provides an exemplary story in this respect, specifically of piracy as the simultaneous destroyer and enabler of Nollywood. Perhaps Adejumọ’s best-known cinematic work, Ọ`run Móoru is also the leastknown because of the way in which it was pirated. The story of the film’s piracy is closely connected to how Nollywood managed to emerge out of the strictures of the analog mode from a technological and economic perspective in the late 1980s. Ironically, however, of all the Yoruba-language films that constituted the “golden age of Nigerian cinema” (1977–1989), Ọ`run Móoru was probably the only one freely available for sometime on YouTube—obviously from the pirated version of the film. I am making three related points here. First, that the historical transformation of theater from festivals and rituals has fostered multimedia styles of production and circulation conducive to changing technologies and relations of production. It reinforces theater as an exemplar of mediation that can guarantee the survival of supposedly old media. Second, theater as an ephemeral form of artistic production is sufficient on its own terms, even if the formal procedure is contingent on the productive forces of society that happen to be prevalent. It is one form in which different expressive elements (dance, speech, music, print, sculpture, spectacle, stage

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management, design, etc.) come together to make an artistic whole. Third, with such understanding of the role of different media in the constitution of textuality, the academic prioritization of print, and setting up of a hierarchy on which ride the divisions between elite and popular forms, runs contrary to the integrity of forms constituted in such promiscuous manners. When retrievability for purposes of future use (in curation) becomes an aim in preserving such work, digital media represents a complementary means of accessing and reconfiguring artistic compositions that struggle under the pressures of new historical changes in multiple locations. A closer look at the transformation of Ogunde’s performance practice will give concreteness to my argument. Hubert Ogunde: “The Audience A r e Pa rt of th e Show ” Ogunde’s work is compelling in two specific ways. Of all the dramatistproducers in traveling theater and comparable idioms like Concert Party, his practice evolved most dynamically in response to the variety of contexts—technological, social, political—shaping the performing arts in West Africa from the 1940s onward. A decade before the advent of television broadcasting in Nigeria in 1959, Ogunde had already cultivated country- and region-wide audiences through live performances, phonographic recordings, and publications.10 The dramatist’s selfdescription as a “professional entertainer”11 is consequential, therefore, and goes beyond the oppositional politics of the colonial period, as we shall soon see. Secondly, the nature of his productions—operas, plays, dances, music albums—gives the term “mediation” a major resonance. This resonance pertains to both the process of composition that each output goes through and to the overall dynamism that allows each fragment or whole to find multiple outlets through different media over the course of Ogunde’s career. With respect to the dramatist’s professional exactions, an opera titled Moré.niké./Àyánmó., through its unusual genealogy, points to the kind of creative choices that nowadays fall under the category of curation.12 First produced in 1948 when it bore the title Yours Forever, this opera appears here as the version that Clark recorded in Ibadan in 1972. While the work reflects the character of Ogunde’s troupe following its deproscription by the military government of Western Nigeria in 1966, significant evidence

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exists that such an approach to producing an opera was intrinsic to the troupe’s operations even in its earlier nationalist phase. Ogunde was one of the most decisive figures in generating cultural awareness on a popularly accessible level in late-colonial Nigeria. Whether through the African Music Research Party or the Ogunde Concert Party, the musician-actor-producer developed a vibrant, incorporative art driven by a formative idea of cultural nationalism. Although he began his career with productions that emphasized biblical and religious themes, the register was affected by the changes that occurred in the years immediately following the Second World War. We need look no further for proof of this claim than the nationalist newspapers of the time—the West African Pilot, Daily Comet, and Daily Service—providing much of the primary source for Clark’s study of the theater group. The daily newspapers were a mode of public opinionating during Nigeria’s independence struggle, and the nationalism of early Ogunde complemented that of the newspapers both in striving for political independence in Nigeria and in making a case for the integrity of African cultural practices that we now regard as self-evident but was not fully assured at the time.13 Hubert Adedeji Ogunde was born in 1916 in Ò.s. Ò. s. à, a small town near Ijẹbu-Ode in then-western Nigeria, where he had occasional encounters with traditional traveling masked performers called Alarinjo, or itinerant dancers. He had a brief association with one of these groups before leaving to start elementary education in Lagos. After returning to the Ijẹbu area in the late 1930s to work as a teacher, Ogunde joined the Nigeria Police Force (March 1941), training in the east before receiving his first posting to Ibadan as a third-class constable. He was to remain in the force for a total of four years, resigning in March 1945, only after he had formed his performing company. Lagos became his base, and from there he traveled across Nigeria and West Africa, with occasional international tours. In 1986, he became the first artistic director of Nigeria’s National Theater. In A Man of the Theater, a 1983 documentary coproduced by the British Broadcasting Corporation and the Nigerian Television Authority and directed by Richard Taylor, Ogunde discloses that he started the company with nine pounds, the amount he saved from eight years of working— including four in the police. Between 1944 and 1950, Ogunde’s productions were mostly operas, a performance constructed from a medley of songs, dances, and music. Emphasis was on singing, and there was hardly any dialogue in the parts

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that developed into a storyline (Clark 1979, 110). In works such as Africa and God, The Garden of Eden, and Israel in Egypt, produced during this phase, he and his troupe made conscious use of Yoruba music, folklore, incantations, and proverbs, in line with the aims of the African Music Research Party as Ogunde set them out at the establishment of the group in 1945. Yet this was also a period of intense nationalist activities, and the African Music Research Party frequently fell victim to the colonial government’s astringent rules on exhibition of theatrical production. Apparently, the ordinances that S.oyinka referred to in his essay discussed in chapter 1 were still in force. Whether through the routine police action of “caution” or outright ban, three of Ogunde’s operas—Worse Than Crime, Tiger’s Empire, and Strike and Hunger—drew official censure within the first two years of the company’s existence. In their evaluations of the folkloric resources that Ogunde and other exponents of early folk opera drew from to produce their works, Ẹbun Clark and Oyin Ogunba stress a significant point. Ogunba argues (and Clark agrees) that the use of those resources such as “traditional sayings very much over-adorn the play and make [the sayings] sound too much like poetic exercises and too little like an interplay of dialogue which is the proper province of theater.”14 This well-appointed criticism is valid to the extent that both critics viewed theater in the increasingly dominant format that contemporary critical opinion preferred and to which the practitioners of folk opera clearly subscribed. However, the form of folk opera was still evolving, and the availability of different media oriented the productions in specific ways. As they took shape from performance to performance and in different venues, those productions underscored the dynamism of this theatrical style in the urban setting of its development and confirmed S.oyinka’s assertion about the relationships between festival and drama. To Ogunde, who directed the most commercialized troupe at the time, the basis for these changes was even more practical. It marked the shift in his orientation from scripted theater, what S.oyinka calls the “Nova Scotian tradition” (1988, 202), to the improvisational style, and coincided with three new developments. These were the increased visibility of Ghanaian Concert Party idiom in Lagos, the unexpected but contradictory competition from the Bobby & Cassandra Modern Theater Party, and competition from the troupes of Kọla Ogunmọla and Duro Ladipọ. Within a few years of the formation of his group, Ogunde was touring all over Nigeria and all the way to Ghana (the Gold Coast), where he came

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in close contact with the Ghanaian Concert Party. His first tour of that country occurred in 1948; he had taken the company outside Nigeria to then-Dahomey two years earlier. Although he found the Concert Party style in Ghana to be different from his Nigerian variety, he wrote and produced an opera, Swing the Jazz, set in Accra. The aesthetic traffic went both ways, with Ghanaian musicians like E. T. Mensah going to Lagos to perform in the 1950s and selling records there. The commercial activity of the traveling theater and the Concert Party was a literal pursuit of patrons, very much like the classic economic logic of supply and demand. Clark writes that “Ogunde . . . could not perform [Swing the Jazz] in any of the local languages. Swing the Jazz therefore was performed in English, thereby beginning another important phase in his theater” (Clark 1979, 124). Even in Lagos, barely four years after he established his theater company, Ogunde already faced stiff competition from a new kind of theater. The Bobby & Cassandra Modern Theater Party concentrated on “American musical variety shows,” and the couple were advertised as “AngloAmerican Trained Artists” (Clark 1979, 48–49). Ogunde incorporated several companies (Dance Company, Recording Company) during the first two phases of his career (1944–1966). This was a matter of professional dynamism. Coupled with the fact that Bobby as Bobby Benson is historically better known as the father of highlife music in Nigeria, this dynamism indicates that there was more at play in the consolidation of the musical or operatic/theatrical groups than an interest in a particular form—theater, music, dance, or “acts.” What mattered in this setting was the professional status of the players as entertainers and that their encounters happened in an urban setting where the needs of patrons fostered competing demands. Within this structural link between urbanity and media, a similar though less competitive relationship might be seen between the Concert Party idiom and Nigerian literature, especially with specific works of Amos Tutuọla (My Life in the Bush of Ghosts) and Cyprian Ekwensi (People of the City, Jagua Nana). In terms of entertainment, the trajectory of Ogunde’s West African trips coincided with the secular, itinerant egúngún (masked) performers traveling as far west as Koforidua in Ghana. The same pattern had informed labor migrations earlier in the century, as Anthony Hopkins shows in another context (Hopkins 1966, 148). As Ogunde’s audiences changed (and as his publics expanded) within Nigeria, across West Africa, and even overseas in Canada and England,

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so did the very form of his art. He changed the format of his operas from scripted theater (with lines being sung) to an improvised format in which they were spoken as dialogue. Clark argues that this change “‘weakened’ the art of his theater but increased his popularity” (121). While Yoruba continued to be the primary linguistic medium for the songs and dialogues, the actual productions, whether as plays or operas, increasingly incorporated styles from other Nigerian or West African societies. Of the three major factors noted above, the last one—competition from two folk opera groups— forced Ogunde to simultaneously emphasize authenticity and novelty. He began to display authenticity in terms of his themes and novelty with regard to compositional or percussive choices. All of this led him to incorporate the format of improvisation through spoken lines, at which point the troupe began to shed much of its stylistic attachment to the Concert Party mode, especially of the Ghanaian variety discussed in detail in Catherine Cole’s book (2001). Clark dates this change in emphasis from music to speech to the production of The Black Forest in 1950. Yet the primacy of spoken lines had taken on a different importance by the political crisis of the mid-1960s, eventuating in the banning of Ogunde’s troupe by the embattled government of western Nigeria in 1965. As S.oyinka again notes, “Ogunde’s highest development of the chanted dramatic monologue can be fixed at the period of the political ban on his Yoruba Ronu” (1988, 203). Moré.niké./Àyànmó. was recorded by Clark during a performance at Obis. ẹsan Hall in Ibadan on May 29, 1972. According to Clark, the performance was a revival of Yours Forever, an opera first performed in 1948 but now titled Moré.niké.. Clark, who was present at this performance, describes the occasion in some detail: “The curtain opens to a dance sequence which lasts for about seven to ten minutes, after which Ogunde enters to a resounding cheer from the audience, and like a true star basks in their adoration” (103). The applause subsiding, the lead actor addresses the audience not in Yoruba, but in English, a practice carried over from the Concert Party days: “Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you very, very much. Thank you very, very much. Welcome to the show, welcome to Moré.niké., alias Yours Forever. The play, Moré.niké., was written and staged first in 1948. I know (pointing to a member of the audience) you were not born then. Well, you’ve been seeing it off and on, and tonight it’s back again. Those were the days of the operas, singing and singing. And now you are going to do plenty of singing” (103; emphases added).

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After 1966, Ogunde moved away from the operatic format where lines were sung, and his reference to “the days of the operas” served as a means of bringing his audience to speed about the return to those old days. Thus, the performance was a revival, the curation of a repertory piece for the principal reason of entertainment. Clark views the opening section of the opera as essentially the opening glee, the introductory dance-and-song sequence that announces a performance to the audience. But she adds that it “takes about half an hour to perform [and] can indeed be called a miniature concert program with its own independent structure” (110). Ordinarily, a performance of this duration has tremendous valence as text, especially if it combines different media—dances, songs, mimes—each with their own textual densities and referents. From Clark’s rendering of the “Àwè.ró” song (105–106), it is clear that Ogunde composed the song for performance in a call-and-response format between himself and the audience. Clark intends these observations as a means of analyzing the form and content of the opening glee (105), but in the process, she reveals a connection between the composition of this song and the schema of different songs in the opera, such as “Yours Forever,” “Moré.niké.,” “Àyànmó.,” and “Onímó.tò.” The songs are texts on their own, and the third one may have formed the basic scenario for Àyànmó.(1988), the fourth of Ogunde’s films. The different songs have no thematic connection. Their coappearance in the opening glee, however, points to a targeted act of curation based on a number of changing factors. What are these factors? They include the needs of the audience, which are simultaneously to be entertained and instructed, the role of the dancers doubling as singers and backup, and the conception of the sequence itself as a discrete item of entertainment, one in which the audience is closely involved. A detailed discussion of the songs will show the significance of these factors in the choice and sequence of the items to prioritize. The first number, “Àyànmó.,” is sung entirely between Ogunde and the chorus, an accustomed practice, as ethnologist Ulli Beier claims, of the early phase of Concert Party theater.15 Beier writes: “Every opera in fact opens with a special song-and-dance number called the Opening Glee in which the audience is told about the story they are about to see” (1954, 33). The lack of thematic cohesion between this song and the purported story of Moré.niké., and even between any of the songs, is an indication of their status as formulaic placements for the purpose identified by Beier and purely for reasons of entertainment. Who would not want to hear a

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delightful song accompanying the graceful movement of a band of dancers? The song “Àyànmó.” goes further, however, even if Ogunde in that show does not follow the formula to the letter. The opening number is about destiny, and beyond that thematic thrust is the song’s quality in that performance as an invocation of good fortune, which the audience has come to expect. Following Ogunde’s lead, the backup joins the collective address through a chorus: Good luck My choice is good It is what I knelt to choose Lord, help make my life a success Help open the path of success for me . . . (from Clark’s transcription)16

In the context of a performance, the audience welcomes this song as if addressed to members individually, a form of benediction in which everyone is encouraged to participate as a way of catching the positive vibes in the prayer. Clark later adds that the song was “written as a memorial to one of his wives, Adeshẹwa Ogunde, who died in a motor accident in 1970” (105), and the footnote at the end of the song’s text indicates that this recorded version was different from the one printed earlier by the author (n17, 142). The song that follows, “Àwè.ró,” directly courts the participation of the audience. Led as usual by Ogunde, the song’s introductory segments end on a hanging note, and the audience’s response literally takes it from the lead vocalist’s mouth. At no time in the singing is the Ogunde chorus involved, although it takes the place of the audience in the version recorded on an LP. “Àwè.ró” is about the stereotypical Lagos woman who is so focused on money and other material things of the city that she ignores her husband and children, an early version of the type to be found in such diverse genres as the city novels of Cyprian Ekwensi and highlife music. A later variant of this social type is the target of Fẹla’s song “Lady,” discussed in chapter 6. In the song, vocalist Ogunde takes on the character of the neglected husband, and the audience complements his pose, rather than standing in the antiphonal position that the call-and-response structure of the singing might invite. Coming right after “Àyànmó.,” which, as Clark argues, is dedicated to a recently deceased wife, this song does not drive thematic cohesion in the performance. However, both songs share two things. There is, first, the impact of the performance as an exhortation addressed to oneself, like a benediction.

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Àwè.ró’s negligence is not so much to be regretted as to be used as a source of uplift: Ogunde: Àwè.ró went away, not knowing it shall be well with me Audience: Ha! It shall be well with me Ogunde: To the knowledge of the young ones Audience: It shall be well with me.17

In the second place, as songs in the Yoruba language, with its integral musical qualities, the renditions carry a tonal semblance in the two titles (Àwè.ró, Àyànmó.), and this is of great aesthetic pleasure that both the troupe and the audience are fully aware of but may take for granted as part of the musical experience. The performance of “Onímó.tò,” the third song, occurs entirely between Ogunde and the chorus. There is no audience participation, judging from Clark’s transcription. Unlike “Àwè.ró,” which starts as a narrative, this song begins on a homiletic note, which causes Clark to characterize it as having “a moral bias” (106). It is a song about drivers, or motorists in general, and it has a thematic resonance with S.oyinka’s The Road (1965). Ogunde as the lead vocalist sings (or chants) at length before introducing a brief chorus and taking up the thread again. As the song coasts to its climax, it acquires the tone of a prayer similar to the two previous numbers. The only difference is that this prayer is not directed at the self—not at Ogunde, nor at the chorus, nor at the audience—but at drivers as a whole and their passengers. It is a supplication, and as the chorus peters out with the song, Ogunde introduces yet another narrative. Or, more accurately, he expands the prayerful exchange with the chorus into a new praise. This praise is in honor of Ògún, the patron deity of warriors, ironworkers, and other creative artists using material. It is sung in an entirely chanting mode, and although it has brief sequences in the chorus, it is a performance executed by the lead vocalist. It is a transposition of ìjálá, the traditional chant of hunters. With this final (sung) number in the opening glee, we come to a case in which the context of a performed song is immanent to the text. Narratively separate from “Onímó.tò,” the section on Ògún’s praise would appear disjointed from the standpoint of thematic unity. The point, however, is that the prayerful address to automobile operators is only guaranteed of propitiation on the mercy of Ògún, their patron deity. The movement is thus related on the grounds of a composition principle that informs the genre of the opening glee. For Ogunde and other practitioners in the folk opera idiom, the opening glee is both an intro and a

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homage. The introduction draws in and acknowledges the presence of the audience, and the homage addresses the forces that make a performance possible and are expected to ensure its success. It is helpful to emphasizes that the process through which Ogunde worked on this opera is curation. Both the act of developing the opera Moré.niké./Àyànmó. and the elaborate mechanism of rendering the specific performance into textual presence (through Clark’s agency) entailed practical choices about circulation, vagaries of audience expectation, and negotiations of exemplary narratives. Clark’s transcription of the songs in this opera is in English, indicating an act of translation informed by the professional needs of producing a study in the language. But the songs surmount those barriers because they were also recorded as LP albums, through which they made their way into public consciousness, deepened by their repeated use as repertoire items. That is one pointer to the curatorial directions of the work. Another pointer is the isolation of one item, the song “Àyànmó.,” from the operatic assemblage as the synopsis for what eventually became Ogunde’s fourth and final film, released in 1988. The process through which a song, an episodic item in a series of musical pieces prelude to a performance, became a full-fledged work of cinematic narrative was anything but fortuitous. It was an elaborately curated undertaking involving a variety of factors, of which the company’s sense of its audience was key.18 That audience was not monolithic in time or space. Apart from the span of time between 1948 and 1972, there was the geographic scope of the company’s travels across Nigeria and as far along West Africa as northern Ivory Coast. The commercial import of this theatrical idiom should not be minimized, nor should it be understood as a crass act of playing to the gallery of a paying public. In the perception of those dynamic audiences, viability of an artistic product in commercial terms is implicit in that work: if it is good, it will be well accepted, and it going over well is proof of its artistic merit. Although such commercial considerations would obviously be missing from the ritualized festival associated with mbari, there is a correlation between the aesthetic value of a festival and its efficacy as ritual. To quote Cole on this point, it is during the “rites of unveiling [that] ‘mbari as process’ gives way to ‘mbari as monument,’ as an ordered environment which is beautiful aesthetically and thus efficacious ritually” (1969, 50). The question of audience in relation to Ogunde’s work is pertinent in another respect. For using a song from the Orò cult of civic control in the

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opera Africa and God (1944), he “was fined by members of the cult [and] . . . had to perform certain rituals to appease their anger, and to avoid future reprisals he began to modify some of the traditional chants and incantations” (Clark 1980, n35, 143). In retrospect, and with the benefit of information regarding Moré.niké./Àyànmó., shifting patterns of patronage had an impact on the curation of that opera, which was conceived as a performance for the church (where Ogunde had begun his career). For a work coinciding with the artist’s cultural revival phase, however, the production (Africa and God) was caught in a paradox: a form of cultural nationalism portraying African culture as quiescent before the twin forces of Christianity and colonialism. Indeed, the primary audience might not be worthy of courtesy, as the 1964 play Yoruba Ronu (Yoruba, Think!) demonstrated. The newly founded but controversial Ẹgbé. Ọmọ Ọló.fin, a cultural organization, had commissioned a performance for its inauguration ceremony in February 1964. Although supposedly a cultural organization uninterested in the political crisis of the day, Ẹgbé. Ọmọ Ọló.fin was clearly seeking to wrestle control of the symbolic capital of Yoruba society from the Ẹgbé. Ọmọ Oduduwa, the highly prestigious cultural organization that had preceded the founding of the Action Group (the party whose leader, Ọbafẹmi Awolọwọ, was jailed for treasonable felony the previous year). All the leaders of the Nigerian National Democratic Party, NNDP, including the premier, Chief Samuel Ladoke Akintọla, attended the February 28 premiere performance of the play, which turned out to be a thinly transposed allegory on the present crisis. Chief Akintọla reportedly walked out during the show, and Ogunde’s troupe was declared an “unlawful society” the following month. The songs in that performance, however, became very popular despite and because of the ban, and the opposition, the United Progressive Grand Alliance, used them as rousing songs during the political disturbances that followed the 1964/65 elections.19 Ogunde thus had the singular honor of being censored by the traditional, the colonial, and the postcolonial authorities in the first twenty years of his career. Running a commercial theater company and playing primarily to a feepaying public shapes the art and the artist in different ways than if the artist were to have an additional source of self-sustenance. That was the case with S.oyinka’s second troupe, the semiprofessional Orísun Theater, at a time he had secured regular employment on the faculty of the University of Ibadan’s School of Drama. The paradox is that the paid-for, commercial

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theater (Ogunde) has tended to an evanescence characteristic of festivals, while the largely subsidized theater (S.oyinka, Ndao, Were Were Liking) has endured. This is not just because of its mode of presentation through the figure of the dramatist/writer/director/producer—it is due also to its perpetuation through the medium of print. As the Spir it Moves: Festiva ls at Hom e , i n th e Wor ld Turning to film and book festivals, the third and final example of curation, I find the arguments that Lindiwe Dovey makes in her 2015 book Curating Africa in the Age of Film Festivals as a useful point of departure. Herself a festival organizer (through the Africa in Motion festival in London), Dovey defines festival films as “films that have not had, or are unlikely to have, access to a mainstream market” (15). At the start of her analysis, she uses a striking term, “African diaspora language,” which she credits to Egyptian filmmaker Jihan el-Tahri (7). Dovey’s use of the term has a critical undertone, conveying el-Tahri’s disapproval of the cultural politics guiding the choice of works considered audible in the diasporic setting of their circulation. However, the term is strikingly relevant considering that the translocal circulation of African artistic works is less elitist (or perhaps less exclusively so) than the one ostensibly favored on the film festival circuit that Dovey discusses.20 In addition, her discussion attempts a close connection between film festivals and digital culture, as when she notes that “festivalization has occurred in concert with the phenomenon of digitalization” (14). Given the focus here on the New York African Film Festival (NYAFF), the critical undertone in this characterization has to be placed in context. Mahen Bonetti, the founder and director of the festival, was herself a diasporized African living in New York City, feeling at home there and unquestionably conscious of the need to see African images in the world. Here she elaborates on the series of events, encounters, and impetuses that led to the founding of one of the best sustained and most prestigious festivals dedicated to African films, especially outside the continent: I enjoyed the company of those who would come to be known as innovators, who redefined the cultural and artistic landscape of New York and beyond. However, I also had the advantage of being attuned to the culturally vibrant and artistically funky Caribbean and African youths who were setting

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fantastic trends while also acting as a supportive community of refuge for people such as myself who longed for bits of home. In addition to the Anglophone African immigrants who had already found their way to New York, there were a growing number of Francophone immigrants who were also busy weaving themselves into the fabric of the city. It is among these two widely diverse groups that I began to meet tailors, vendors, and drivers who were also incredibly talented drummers, visual artists, dancers, and writers. . . However, my desire to bring these African voices (and in many ways my own voice) into the fold was the impetus for me to start a dance party, featuring contemporary popular African music, in 1986. (Bonetti 2013, 1–2)

This was New York City in the age of Ronald Reagan and Bush Sr., when issues about the HIV-AIDS epidemic began to seep into the consciousness of Americans, although still largely misrecognized and pathologized in the ideological outlook of the ruling party. According to Bonetti, narratives about the African continent were folded into perspectives about the epidemic to reinforce the idea of social diversity as otherness and AIDS as the common pathology of the cultural margin. She continues: “By 1989, the party had morphed into a full-blown salon featuring African drummers, performance artists, and visual artists such as Ike Udé. As my project grew, I was able to cement my personal philosophy about introducing people to Africa and its culture” (2). The African Film Festival, Inc. (AFF) was incorporated in 1990, and in 1993 “it held its inaugural festival of contemporary and classic African films in collaboration with the Film Society of Lincoln Center at the Walter Reade Theater” in Manhattan (2013, 2). AFF presented the first New York African Film Festival under the banner theme Modern Days, Ancient Nights: Thirty Years of African Filmmaking. The festival included three panel discussions: one on the films of Ousmane Sembene; one on the dialogue between African and African American filmmakers; and a more general panel on contemporary African cinema. “We exhibited paintings and sculptures from ten countries at the Frieda and Roy Furman Gallery at the Walter Reade Theater,” Bonetti reflects further, “which set a precedent for pairing fine arts with film, a tradition that we continue to carry out to this day” (2–3). The connection may not have occurred to Bonetti, but a precursor to the efforts and activisms in New York City as she describes them was the Caribbean Artists Movement, CAM, that developed in London between 1966 and 1972. From discussions and conversations between writers

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Kamau Brathwaite, John La Rose, and Andrew Salkey, the CAM grew organically into a sustained movement that sought and found ways of promoting and disseminating the work of Caribbean writers and artists in the face of active indifference from mainstream media and outlets of publicity.21 In her history of the movement, Walmsley stresses the collaborative, even communal nature of its growth, considering that each writer circulated in various interlocking communities. The community-based dimension of this movement, with its connections to the carnival, may have taken on a different configuration in the context of New York, with the new cultural climate of the early 1990s. Listening to the story that Bonetti tells, one can hear a number of things, most of them implicit. First, there is a connection between the idea of the film festival as a public presentation and the founder’s selfunderstanding as an African out of home. There is a strong desire to reject dominant ideas and images of the continent as a place of abjection (droughts, dictatorships, diseases, etc.), and that rejection takes the form of “promoting more realistic depictions of African culture and people,” as she says in another context (Jacobs 2007, 56). Second, there is the perception that this self-understanding manifests itself in relation to coexistence in an urban space of cultural diversity—New York City—with individuals from similar or different backgrounds. Social interactions take place on a terrain of creating mutually intelligible narratives mediated by available resources, including financial support, institutions of dissemination, and the recognition of a community willing to be addressed. Third, we have evidence that much time—three years—lapsed between the incorporation of the festival and the convening of the first event. The intellectual and social labor expended in this period of gestation is not easy to quantify, but anyone who has tried to start a not-for-profit initiative is well aware of the necessity of that period for the fate of the initiative in the short or long run. Fourth and finally, the imaginative choice of “pairing fine arts with film” underscores the institutional setting within which cultural forms not assured of independent flowering are viewed. They are best placed in conversation with one another, with suitable regard for their aesthetic provenance, itself informed by a conceptual awareness of the basis for that coappearance. This is what curation entails. On the level of practice, curating African art, literature, cinema, or music is a conceptual undertaking. It fits in with both the understanding of diasporicity as conceptually apprehensible, in Hall’s definition from

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chapter 1, and with the Euro-American derived history of film festivals, as Dovey chronicles in her study. This means that such curation develops from specific thoughts, hunches, or desires informed by the curator’s sense of the prevalent cultural politics of her milieu, for example in Hubert Bals’s “eccentricities” as founder of International Film Festival of Rotterdam (Dovey 2015, 44). Perceptions or misgivings about exclusions, misrepresentations, or needs for new voices or perspectives even in her primary reference point are sufficient to encourage a curator to stake out a new model, giving shape to those initial hunches. These are then abstracted to address the arrangement of the set of works, artists, or writers chosen. In this regard, any idea about African life, in or outside the continent, can be conceptualized in an expansible way, and any artist, writer, filmmaker, or musician can find her or his niche. If done right, such a conceptualization makes it possible, for example, to curate a show or a festival about neglected or nonmainstream Nollywood films. An interesting model of this approach to curating is on view in the work of filmmaker and film historian Manthia Diawara (of whom, more later in this chapter). In his writings, documentary films, and other kinds of interventions, Diawara clearly aims at an inclusive, relational, and open practice that integrates diverse locations and forms. His 2010 book, African Film: New Forms of Aesthetic and Politics, is in this respect a curation, one that uses the forms of festival, lecture circuit, and hybrid exhibitseminar to articulate a variety of ideas and artistic practices through dialogues or conversations. In fact, in what is perhaps an important point in his career, Diawara’s 2017 film An Opera of the World (commissioned for Dokumenta), we see both a cinematic manifestation of this modal practice through relational editing, and the opera itself as a metacommentary on what an Ogunde opera might sound like if curated as a conceptual retrospective.22 What would give such a curated opera a rarefied, abstracted quality, which is probably what Dovey means by “elitist,” is not so much the intrinsic quality of that opera (or show about Nollywood) as the conceptual orientation of its appearance as part of a curated show. This orientation arises out of the subjective schema through which the curator places that topic in relation to others or to items with adjacent subject matters. Outside the continent, AFF was a relatively new festival in the early 1990s. It developed in the wake of older festivals dedicated to African cinema, such as the Three Continents Festival in Nantes, the Festival International du Film d’Amiens, the Milan Festival of African Cinema,

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and Vues d’Afrique (Montreal, Quebec). All of these had a loose, sisterly relationship with FESPACO, the premiere festival of African cinema in Ouagadougou in existence since 1969. The formal inauguration of NYAFF in 1993 occurred in the wake of the thirteenth edition of FESPACO, and both were historical for marking a milestone: the thirtieth anniversary of the birth of African cinema with the release of Borom Sarret (1963), Sembene’s first film. As we have seen, although the African Film Festival, AFF, was formally incorporated in 1990, the organization only succeeded in hosting the first festival three years later. As a matter of fact, Bonetti first contacted the programmers of the Film Society of Lincoln Center in 1989 and kept up enthusiasm about her project through close liaison with this better-entrenched organ. The first signal of the dream becoming a reality came in the middle of 1992 with major support in terms of grants from the Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation. In the interim, the organizers worked out the character of the festival as part of the African Program of the Film Society. It would be a strictly African festival, different from “African Diaspora,” and African was be understood as “sub-Saharan.”23 The first edition of the New York African Film Festival opened on April 2, 1993, with Guelwaar, Sembene’s newly released, scathing parable of economic dependency, as the headliner. The program was titled “Modern Days, Ancient Nights: Thirty Years of African Filmmaking.” Richard Peña, the program director of the Lincoln Center’s Film Society, whose testimony has been useful in retelling this story, gives an impressionistic account of the first outing. There were lines for ticket buyers stretching past the entrance to the music school down the road, and notable attendees testified to the historic nature of the events. Guelwaar received a standing ovation; Sembene was in attendance, and several of his friends (William Greaves, Toni Morrison, Gordon Parks, Jonathan Demme) came out and gave him a grand welcome. “Nothing we had done at the Walter Reade up to that point,” Peña continues, “had done more to put the theater (then about 18 months old) on the cultural map of New Yorkers than that first African show” (Peña 2003, iv). Another set of screenings also took place at the Brooklyn Museum and lasted through the third week of May 1993. It is significant that this first festival occurred in the aftermath of the 1993 edition of FESPACO, itself a watershed moment in the history of African cinema. Besides rolling out a program that set its sight on the thirtieth anniversary of African filmmaking, FESPACO also made the Af-

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rican diaspora an important part of its events, scheduling notable African American or foreign-based directors or their films in the main events. In perhaps the most consequential report of the year’s FESPACO published in Public Culture in the following year, Diawara argues that “not since Dakar 1966 (Festival Africains des Arts Nègres), and Lagos 1977 (FESTAC), has there been a similar convergence of Africans and blacks from the diaspora on the African continent” with figures like Alice Walker, John Singleton, Tracy Chapman, Spike Lee, and Clyde Taylor either communing with Sembene and Ahmadou Kourouma or sending their works for screening (1994, 391). Diawara’s report is important in other respects, but it does a lot to maintain a consistency of perspective in relation to the festival in New York, especially in terms of what many people saw as the shortcomings of the festival in Ouagadougou. Bonetti is mentioned alongside cultural programmers with Women Make Movies, the Los Angeles Pan-African Film Festival, and California Newsreel as notable members of this august gathering, and the second part of the article is devoted to the event at the Lincoln Center, the inaugural festival of African cinema in New York City. The essay’s focus on the festival in the wake of FESPACO attempts two things. It views the emergence of this new festival as a point of entry for African films into an arena of wider distribution and circulation. Given the central location of New York as the site of many cultural events, the city holds out a promise to directors looking to expand their audience beyond the continent or the old colonial relation with France, then-principal supporter of African filmmaking. Diawara notes that for “international cinema, the Lincoln Center has been a sure passageway to commercial theaters; a testing ground for cinephiles and distributors with their eyes open for foreign films that would go over well with American spectators.” Likewise, to African cinema, this new organ of exhibition “provides the first opportunity to cut through the politics of intermediaries, and to address Americans directly with the best African films” (392). The other sense in which Diawara’s report of the festival in New York is notable is as a contrast to the perceived shortcomings of FESPACO, seen as more beholden to the antics of the French government and its diplomatic and economic policies in West Africa (if not in the entire continent). He focuses on the screening of A Certain Morning, Fanta Regina Nacro’s short film that reflexively questions the notion of cinema and has become a reference for the conceptual understanding of filmmaking among a later generation of African artists. This film was “overlooked at the Pan-African

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Film Festival in Burkina Faso,” and Diawara notes that apart from the outlook of the jury “composed mostly of cultural policy elites with little appreciation for the work of art” (393), it is also a reflexive work by a female director that addresses a male-dominated filmmaking practice. Together, these structural issues contributed to moving African cinema as a field of artistic practice in a direction for which the cultural changes of the 1990s became unexpectedly opportune. In just over a decade of existence, NYAFF established a physical library of African cinema of close to five hundred titles, an impressive private collection of items in DVD and VHS formats among the world’s leading repositories of works in that field (Jacobs 2007). In the course of its operations, the NYAFF has become a fixture on the cultural calendar of New York City. Through its curatorial reach, the festival has established prestige in a vast network of directors, distributors, critics, festival organizers, and international funding agencies to the extent that Bonetti can say, as she does in the 2007 interview, that “soliciting films [for the annual festival] is usually a secondary option for us” (Jacobs, 57). In addition, the organization has published two volumes of “Dialogues with Directors,” a series that documents the views of African directors featured at the festivals curated on the basis of available guests or interlocutors. The festival’s model is also a precursor to the gig economy, the idea of making a livelihood on the basis of impermanent, though tractable, networks that are fundamental to mobility and digital technology. The seemingly offhand (though clearly committed and persistent) manner in which Bonetti developed the structure was possible in the urban setting of New York City, with its accustomed prioritization of personal recognition and the optimal usage of networks. The NYAFF’s contacts extend beyond the city, but the structural connection between the festival’s origins and its sustained predilection to innovation is grounded in the ecosystem of cosmopolitanism for which New York is known. This open, renewable view of community relations has some affinity to the communal curation of sociality in mbari and traditional festivals and has been intensified in the economic logic of late-modern capitalism. Digitally mediated festivals and networks around literary activism have borrowed more than a page from the book of this curatorial practice. In an email sent to me in 2010, Nigerian writer A. Igoni Barrett discloses that he got the idea for BookJam, the monthly readings he coordinated at the Silverbird Galleria in Lagos, after noticing the “slow sales” of his

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Sh i fti ng M a rgi ns Fig. 2.1. Angelique Kidjo and Safi Faye at the sixth New York African Film Festival, April 2000. Credit: Photo Courtesy © African Film Festival. Inc.

self-published collection of stories, From the Cave of Rotten Teeth. Barrett hoped that BookJam “would attract crowds of readers to the store regularly, and that when browsing through the shelves of books my book might catch a few eyes.”24 This sentiment, I find, is common in stories about how Africa-identified literary festivals have developed and been consolidated in the era of digital media. The development gained widespread acceptance as greater success among writers led to more opportunities for creating awareness about literature and writing. In the year 2015, decisive in the evolution of African literary culture as a digitally mediated practice of curation in relation to other arts, several notable African writers became equally known as founders of initiatives related to writing. Lọla Shonẹyin, author of the engrossing novel The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives (2010), started the Aké Book Festival in Abẹokuta in November 2013 and followed

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a few years later with the publishing outfit Ouidah Books, supplemented with a bookstore. The Kenyan writer Binyavanga Wainaina, whose book One Day I Will Write about This Place (2011) is discussed at length in chapter 6, founded Nairobi-based literary magazine Kwani? shortly after his story “Discovering Home” won the Caine Prize. Another Kenyan writer, Muthoni Garland, whose work was shortlisted for the same prize in a different year, established Storymoja, rolling publishing and annual literary festival into one identity. At the time he began BookJam, Barrett also maintained a blog where the stories in From the Cave of Rotten Teeth first made their appearance, and some of those stories were later republished in Love Is Power, Or Something Like That (2013), his first agent-managed book. BookJam ran out of steam after a few years. While it lasted, however, it did a good job of complementing other literature-related activities in Lagos, including the Lagos Book and Art Festival (LABAF), and providing an opportunity for Lagos-based creatives to meet and listen to literary figures such as Wainaina and Tsitsi Dangarembga. The excitement created around BookJam was not limited to Lagos—or Nigeria, for that matter. Informed by the desire to see the work of African writers featured in conversations that could gain wide attention, what Barrett intuited was so obviously commonly shared as to become a value. In its turn, the value informed a repeatable practice, such that the practice of organizing literary festivals for writers within the context of an ensemble of curatorial options is now a formidable institutional culture.25 A good example of this emergent culture, so consequential as to seem representative, is the network of activities spearheaded by the Center for African Cultural Excellence, formally based in Uganda. Founded in 2012, the center (or CACE, pronounced “Cha-Che”) is a program of the Arts Managers and Literary Activists, AMLA Network, a group of activists who became associated through networking. The brainchild of three young writers and cultural enthusiasts—Gaamangwe Joy Mogami, Bwesigye Bwa Mwesigire, and Tadiwanashe Madenga—AMLA was conceived as a Pan-African platform to bring together founders and members of literary and cultural initiatives to create “space for intracontinental collaboration, support new platforms and ideas for the promotion of African literature, and find ways to make academic research useful for literary and cultural production and vice-versa.”26 This approach is informed by the desire to build “a self-reliant and sustainable literary and cultural sphere based on the African continent.” As an organization of

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activists, AMLA began organizing an annual workshop for aspiring literary curators held in Kampala in 2016 and subsequently in 2017. In 2018, it initiated an online mentoring program that swiftly expanded to include four-month fellowship awards to writers with the support of a UK-based funding organization called the Miles Morland Fund for Writers. In the same year, the group held a workshop for early-career academics working in the fields of African literary and cultural studies, which was envisaged to dovetail with a special issue of the academic journal Eastern African Literary and Cultural Studies, published in 2019. This network grew out of a set of initiatives that began on a smaller scale early in the 2010s. The originating center, CACE, a not-for-profit organization, had other founders: Bwesigye Bwa Mwesigire, Naseemah Mohamed, and Kyomuhendo Ateenyi. Mwesigire, the coconvener most visible—and often audible—online, writes to me: “We started online . . . Ateenyi and I were friends offline, and we met Naseemah [at] a conference, so CACE itself started offline. But Writivism started online. To be specific, on Facebook. In [many] ways Writivism operates mostly on social media except the print publishing and festival activities. AMLA is still mostly offline through the annual workshop but we are moving towards having it more centralized as an online network.”27 The relationship between the three organs is clearly defined: CACE curates both the AMLA and Writivism but gives each a different structure and focus. On the one hand, Writivism exists to promote unpublished writers living on the continent, having originated from Munyori Literary Journal—the imprint that publishes works by those mostly young writers. AMLA, on the other hand, creates a supportive network for curators of literary and cultural events. In this sense, CACE established Writivism as an outlet for aspiring writers, and it, in turn, gave birth to AMLA. The two are separate but related. In and out of Uganda, AMLA as a network collaborates with Cameroonoriginated Bakwa Magazine and Africa in Dialogue, both online publications, to form its Steering Committee, with the Universities of Bristol and Exeter and the scholarly journal EALCS as partners. These alliances and relationships demonstrate that AMLA operates through networks and that both individuals and institutions are involved in specific work related to the promotion of literary practice. Through publishing, mentoring (workshops, meetings), prize giving, and other institutional expressions, they expand the scope of curation for writing and related literary undertakings. Festivals, conferences, and online exchanges are among the most

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frequent means of carrying out these literary activities, but there are also moments of focused curation that integrate all three. The best example of this is the launching of the anthology titled Odokonyero in Kampala in May 2018. The print volume is Writivism’s anthology of short stories by emerging Ugandan writers, the same community that inspired the publication of Munyori, the literary journal, around 2011. After five years of promoting ideas through arts and culture, the Center for African Cultural Excellence judged that the moment was ripe to reflect on its history as well as the literary history of Uganda. The coeditors, Madhu Krishnan, Bwesigye Bwa Mwesigire and George Ocan, write that “the anthology also comes out of a desire: to showcase the kinds of stories young people across Uganda are interested in telling and offer opportunities for imagining other lives and other minds” (Krishnan et al., blurb, 2018). The anthology brings together the voices of young emerging Ugandan writers between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five, most of whom had been through workshops and mentorships that formed part of CACE’s engagement. Thematically focused on violence, the anthology features stories that explore the legacies of armed conflict, others that “focus on intergenerational and family conflict, [some that] look at conflicts between the genders, and stories which look at conflict within the self.” The release of this anthology may appear to signal Writivism’s embrace of print as a means of curating an important aspect of its operations. However, the more complex the group’s work becomes, the more entrenched its reliance on digital media has appeared. For one, Facebook remains the primary source of information for all Writivism activities. The platform’s suitability to using different media—long posts, photos, videos, and other media—trumps the access provided on Twitter, for example, which can display the same materials but in a highly limited and controlled manner. It is on the group’s “Events” tab on Facebook that visitors can get a sense of both the past and upcoming events, and the “Posts” as well as “Community” supplement this information in a carefully curated way. While still in operation, the Writivism Festival, the Center’s headline event, brought a unique and focused attention to AMLA’s annual activities.28 Held over a weekend in the middle of August every year between 2015 and 2018, at a venue in Kampala, the festival included a number of events that streamlined the program’s various involvements. Highlights included the annual Koffi-Addo Creative Nonfiction Prize, the Fiction

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Masterclass, the Mentorship, and a keynote address given by a leading African writer, old or young. In 2018, for example, the keynote lecturer was Mwesigire himself, and he gave a maverick speech that is worth drawing on here because it doubles as an insider’s perspective on the impulses behind this remarkable surge of organizational energy among young African creatives. Titled “Who Keeps the Housekeeper’s House?,” the long speech is characteristic Mwesigire: fearless, sardonic, circuitous (the speaker’s own word), endlessly allusive, but plainspoken. The lecture is also priceless as a reliable, first-hand account of the origins of AMLA and reflects Mwesigire’s attentiveness in acknowledging the work of other writers who selflessly supported CACE’s activities.29 The main argument of the speech is that the literary activism propelling CACE constitutes an alternative to the kind of gatekeeping performed by the entity that Mwesigire tags the “White Publishing Industrial Complex.” But he is also quick to highlight the unequal nature of the exchange between African literary activists and Western publishers, despite the visibility of much of new African writing coming in large part from association with corporatized publishing: “My argument is that literary activists are not building a second Europe,” he says, after quoting a pithy statement by Fanon about humanity’s wish to be other than an imitation of Europe. “We are not necessarily replicating, or even imitating the Western Publishing Industrial Complex. . . . We require a different language to talk about literary activism. The language that we are accustomed to, which has developed around gates, enclosures, and doors doesn’t work. I don’t mean to say that in the African setting we don’t have gates. I am simply emphasizing the point that [Grace] Musila makes that . . . [s]ome of the Africanist scholarship around contemporary African literature definitely comes loaded with the metaphors and frameworks created particularly to fit the Western Publishing Industrial Complex” (2021, 13). The need for a creative alternative to corporatized literary culture leads Mwesigire to an overly long account of the series of actions, circumstances, and opportunities that led to the establishment of CACE. At one of its earliest workshops, held with collaborators in the UK, what became AMLA was first called AMLEW, that is, Arts Management and Literary Entrepreneurship Workshop. The “entrepreneurship” was thereafter dropped for “activist.” Entrepreneurship is ominously resonant of the corporate idea of “professionalism,” but the work of literary activists is “to make not only the dreams of creative writers possible but to ensure that our colleagues who are working to create environments that make imagination possible are healthy” (21).

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Clearly, the overlapping slate of events and the disposable or recyclable manner in which the authorizing organs emerge and mutate through tactical usage engender a comparison to the structural basis of practices for which mbari once provided an outlet. They may differ in terms of material details and ideological styles, and the consumption patterns of an agrarian economy may come across as involuted because of association with the regenerative values of local religion. But the main objective, that of responding to the perceived needs of one’s community through an elaborately planned and executed set of activities, is strikingly similar in both cases. For example, Mwesigire speaks of AMLA Network being “like jazz, comfortable with uncertainty. We drop a notch and pick a notch. What we are doing is about improvisation, without being in free fall” (21). Furthermore, CACE’s imagining of its publics plays a role in the way it develops aspects of its operation and reinforces the ideals of publicness that Adjaye presents as a theorization of his architectural practice, as I discussed earlier. Finally, the fact that like those of the New York African Film Festival, CACE’s activities are decidedly not-for-profit speaks to the orientation of mbari-like festivals as outlets for communal psychic regeneration—and a strike against the excessively impersonal nature of a transactional relationship. A major difference between mbari and these curated festivals, especially AMLA, is the question of funding. The agrarian system was self-sufficient, and the exhaustion of its force was factor of nature, and it is legitimate to wonder if AMLA’s brand of literary activism has been held in thrall to available funding options. One feature of AMLA that is unique for a platform curating literature is its Twitter feed, the African Literary Activism Daily. This feed culls news features that deal with every aspect of literary culture from newspapers and other publications across the continent and beyond. This social media-centered initiative serves as a clearinghouse for “founders of literary festivals, prizes, podcasts, magazines, spoken-word events, publishers, booksellers and other platforms for the promotion of African literature.”30 It is also important in one easily overlooked respect. Given the translocal settings in which much of this dissemination takes place, such an initiative replaces the more conventional approach to providing information about literature, book publishing in particular. Exigencies of funding and other logistics put Writivism in hiatus even before the COVID-19 global pandemic began to circumscribe the scope of organizational structures of various kinds in early March 2020. AMLA’s Daily remained active throughout this period and beyond, doing its job of periodically sending

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out different news items related to literature and the arts. While the literary or arts pages of dailies in London, Berlin, New York, or Paris continue to regularly publish reviews of new books to the scattered attention of what one may call the Black metropolises, the Daily strives for something less routine but more inclusive. Any information of significance about African literary culture is a potential candidate for attention here, and with proper curation, it may serve as basis for a full-fledged literary review. It is worth highlighting two conceptual issues about the contours of translocal curation of Africa-identified festivals related to films and books. The first of these issues has to do with a significant difference between the Ogunde tradition on the one hand, and mbari and contemporary digital curations of artistic forms on the other. This is the conception of theater as a commercial undertaking. What changed between these two approaches—the commercial mode developed by Ogunde and the not-for-profit mode continuing with contemporary curations? In the case of the Ogunde tradition, the relations of production in an agrarian economic setup differ from the professional outlook of a public entertainer afforded specific technological and social opportunities associated with urbanization in midcentury West Africa. This professional outlook retains some of the features of the festival, for example, its deployment of elements of media, integrating art with life. But it makes alterations oriented toward commercial theater and mindful of the social conditions of its publics. What Ogunde retains is, principally, the dramatic form in the traditional events, a contraction of the drama that was usually only an integral item in the series that constituted the years-long mbari festival. His approach toward creating an opera or a play provides a modal example for the kind of curation we notice in the translocated festivals, especially the film festival, as when Bonetti executed the first NYAFF in 1993. The need to play to a paying audience in different places required of Ogunde a sensitivity to context, and his chosen modal form, while bringing different elements together to create an opera, was conceived essentially in terms of entertainment. In the second case, the film and book festivals taking place across African and Euro-American cities confront a complex interplay of professional but noncommercial expectations. They may be nonprofit, or not-for-profit, but are not run as charities and require professionalized support networks such as grant writing and auditing to be self-reproducing, despite the AMLA Network’s misgivings.

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In addition, they stand to refine scholarly conception of their roles in relation to accustomed categorization of African arts and letters. From the curatorial practices of NYAFF, we can see the tiresome division or sequestration of Nollywood from “African cinema” becoming redundant. The festival lines up diverse works, genres, and tendencies and showcases them to audiences just as diverse, brought together by the common desire to view works of African directors in a sophisticatedly curated series. Is it perhaps ironic, though, that this situation highlights a few shortcomings of a festival like FESPACO, where the official position remains to sustain the separateness of Nollywood and “African cinema”?31 Besides, aspects of the Francophone-centered attitude of the festival have tended, in recent times, to put the continuing relevance of the festival to question. One issue in this respect is the bureaucratization of the FESPACO, its calcified sense of the festival as routine biennial event with little activity in-between. The mbari type of festivals and the contemporary ones such as the NYAFF differ from this formal style in the way they prioritize year-round programming. They organize events in multiple localized, small-scale venues, keeping the festival spirit in public consciousness in the off-season. This is reminiscent of mbari, whose workers took time to carry on with daily life while enacting, in seemingly desultory ways, activities that deepened the intensity of the major ritual. Besides its summer events at the Brooklyn Museum, the AFF also cocurates programming for children. Of these, the KIDflix Film Fest in Brooklyn centers on African American concerns and ensures an intensification of the communal values associated with festivals. This approach to programming may not strike the engaged observer with the kind of ebullient spectacle that Ibrahim Gambari, the diplomat in the incident with which I began this chapter, felt was missing from Achebe’s birthday. But doesn’t it count for more than before and show an African presence in unexpected ways? The other conceptual issue about curation in this world of cultural flow serves to link this chapter to the next, in particular the idea of community through which Kenyan poet and activist Shailja Patel puts composition to work in her performance poetry. AMLA Network’s standing as a Uganda-originated initiative exists side by side with its position as a networked curation of African literature. Indeed, in being simultaneously site-specific and a springboard for activities further afield, the network draws attention to translocal forces shaping African artistic cultures—if only we train ourselves to recognize those forces. As I show in detail in

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chapter 6, although Wainaina was Kenyan, according to his account in One Day I Will Write about This Place, his mother was Ugandan. This fact would be overlooked or considered minor if we were to think about nationality in simple geographical or legal terms. However, with the picture of translocal movements across Central and Eastern Africa seen in the previous chapter, we can imagine that familial affiliations of this kind are common in different parts of the continent and connect with global Black identities in important ways. The same is true of younger writers, who freely identify with both their native countries and those to which they moved while young. The scope of the movement that brought Lindsay Barrett, father of Igoni, to Nigeria from Jamaica may be broader in spatial terms, but the principle of the relationship between nationalities here is not so different from the case of Wainaina. This principle is relevant both because it is overlooked as a consequential example of Africana cultural identity over time and because it is increasingly a material factor in the constitution of artistic practice. The artistic encounter between Manu Dibango and Sembene in the making of Ceddo, discussed in the next chapter, brings another instance of this principle into view. That the encounter between the two artists took place in Abidjan could itself be circumstantial; the relevant point is that it took place in the setting of what may be termed “the sound of . . . blackness.”32 An understanding of these encounters across geographies and nationalities applies to a sense of African literary/artistic community in translocal settings and informing the curatorial choices of the last two formations discussed in this chapter. Bonetti’s understanding of this community is brilliantly stated in her statement: “I am an African, who is also a New Yorker, and my love for films is really about my love for beauty in motion—I love to see my fellow Africans on the screen, and I love to see the landscapes from our old and our new homes” (2007, 55–56). This desire manifests itself both in the practical, involved creative acts that inform the film and book festivals and in the nature of the works that are featured in the curations. For example, in some of the stories in Love Is Power, and more explicitly in his novel Blackass, Barrett uses “media” (telephony, texting, and Twitter) in such innovative ways that the claim that the internet is indispensable to their constitution is not far-fetched. As it is with Barrett and Wainaina, so it is with Patel. She is a citizen of Kenya who is also a product of a specific history of migration—the laborpropelled migrations across the Indian Ocean to eastern and southern

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Africa in the nineteenth century. Her very public poetry thematizes imperialism (“[a]n accounting of Empire enacted on the bodies of women” 2010, 96), and this thematic interest marks the protocols of composition through which the performed poetry evolves as a book. Additionally, however, the ideas of translocalized communities centering on African arts and letters extend from the curatorial practices I have elaborated here to the composition methods to which I am about to turn. Patel’s work is pivotal as it stands in adjacency to those with which the festivals are concerned, both in its conception of community that fosters a series of choices about presentation not free of paradox and on the same level of composition as Sembene. What animates that space of adjacency is an ethical impulse to project an African presence in unexpected ways and places in the ever-expanding geography of Black metropolises.

PART 2

ACROSS THE DIGITAL DIVIDE p

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THE GRIOT’S COMPOSITIONS IN TIME

Introduction: Poetics of A nti-Imper ia lism The impulse to project African presence in unexpected but justifiable ways is sometimes propelled by explicit ideological critique. Such an impulse may not be as subtle as one shaped by curatorial demands, whether in the commercial context of Ogunde’s operas or the festival programming of translocalized communities. This is the case with the performance poetry that Shailja Patel, the Kenyan poet and activist, composed into a book titled Migritude, published in 2010. In an earlier manifestation of this impulse, the acclaimed Senegalese filmmaker Ousmane Sembene pulled his film Ceddo (1977/1981) together through a series of acts of composition calculated to reimagine African history in its resistance to imperialism in primarily religious guises. In this chapter, composition becomes the mode of creative practice through which such insertions of the collective personhood occur, with anti-imperialism as the ideological handle. Anti-imperialism as a political stance among African artists of the postcolonial era has proved useful in understanding the nature of artistic composition. The usage has occurred through the deployment of historical perspectives to create what the Marxist critic and cultural theorist Biọdun Jeyifo, in his essay “Determinations of Remembering: Postcolonial Fictional Genealogies of Colonialism in Africa,” calls “fictional genealogies” of the continent’s experiences of colonialism (1993, 109). A targeted disruption and contestation of accepted facts is another way that the anti-imperial

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impulse has played a key role in presenting alternative narratives. These efforts go beyond the colonial episode, and the significance of the ethic propelling such acts is to be sought in the comparative model of analysis postcolonialism fosters. Taking responsibility for examining the histories of their societies, artists are better placed to subject the past, including the past that colonialism wished to distort or deny, to as much scrutiny as they do the immediate past of colonialism and its aftermath. The more imaginative among these artists, writers, and musicians do not view history as made up of discrete blocks of time. They share the awareness that though it generates enormous cultural capital, anti-imperialism is but only one critical option. Its expressions are multifaceted and can be discontinuous. A general, diachronic view of art across the media and in different parts of the continent thus offers a useful means of grasping the translocal forms of this multiplicity of perspectives. The selective use of historical or constructed details on which composition depends is a result, according to Jeyifo, of “the complexly determined cultural process that always attends reconstructions of the past” in the service of “ideological discourses of decolonization and the construction of positive, disalienated identities” (103, 113). Jeyifo makes the crucial claim that postcolonial fictional genealogies that paint a negative picture of the elite beneficiaries of the early phase of colonialism have become dominant in literary criticism over fictional genealogies of the “minor paradigm” that offer a more complex view of colonialism through positive, collaborating protagonists. He then raises and provisionally addresses the question of why “the neocolonial legatees of the colonial system . . . have not succeeded in generating their own legitimizing genealogical fictions” (115). I find his answer—that that elite lacks the scale of cultural capital of the European powers in their imperial phase—satisfactory but want to turn the argument about the complexities of depicting the past in a different direction by highlighting the multifaceted nature of imperialism that the composite character of the texts I am about to discuss makes clear.1 We heard quite a bit about Senegalese director Sembene in the preceding chapters, but this is the place to look at him and his work in greater detail. In his film Ceddo (1977/1981), Sembene advances a conception of the history of African encounters with imperially ambitious external forces, and he does this by reaching into a continental repository of memories that comes across in the film in diverse ways. There

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are contrasting uses of the figure of the griot, a retrospective transposition of incidents, and explicit, reflexive use of musical compositions and soundtracks created collaboratively with Manu Dibango, the Afro-Jazz exponent from Cameroon. Emerging out of a history of displacement, Patel’s Migritude (2010) shows visible signs of composition out of performances, a mode suited to the political impulse of a work critically articulating current forms of imperialism in a multiplicity of realms. The imaginative network from which Patel’s poetics unspool is transnational—the poetry, in print and performance, invests in a politics of identity in relation to migration.2 This approach sets aside the kind of generalized history seen in Ceddo for a more explicit and contextual use of autobiographical details. However, calculated to circulate also through print, the poems can only be read within textual protocols— epigraphs, quotations, timelines, images—quite different from performance. The representational demands that such an approach to composition makes on Migritude also reveal several paradoxes in the text, one of which is the simultaneous critique and embrace of saris, the traditional dresses of Indian women that are both orientalizing and treasured. The vastly different contexts in which the two artists created their works do little to blunt the political and artistic deployments of composition. Instead, they affirm the anti-imperial perception of African history as a mutable case of complex, powerful system that necessitates artists to develop matching modes of critique. The specter of imperialism haunts the home front as well. If, in the final account, Ceddo strikes the ambiguous posture of being both a radical text and a mediation of unbiased historical experiences, then such a stance suggests the multifaceted character of imperialism and its critiques. Being only one option to which the compositional impulse responds, anti-imperialism is neither necessarily of colonial-modernity vintage, nor is it likely to become dated just because the conditions under which artists produce work change through new global flows. From the thematic and aesthetic propulsions in Migritude, Patel offers an incremental vision that is suggestively proposed in the final moments of Ceddo. Poetic language is a delicate tool, and the diverse situations in which the volume is composed and disseminated does not make the imposition of the thematic of anti-imperialism easy on analysis. Those situations, as we shall see, are also the drivers of formal daring that can be read in ideological terms.

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Sh a le, Sh a il, Sh a ilja When she was a little girl in Kenya, Shailja Patel observed her mother collect saris, the customary attire for Indian women, with the intention of presenting the set to the daughter upon marriage. Mother proposed, but Shailja disposed of the future intended for her. Tired of hoping that her daughter would marry, Mrs. Patel finally gave the trousseau of saris to her the way one surrenders a symbolic present to its intended recipient regardless of original intention. In turn, the daughter grew tired of watching the saris gather dust. “So I came up with the idea of using them in my work,” Patel tells researcher Vanita Reddy shortly after the San Francisco premiere of Migritude in 2006: “At first, I thought about a gallery exhibition, where they would be displayed alongside the poems that explored their history and meaning. Then I met my director Kim Cook, who suggested that we use them in a one-woman show I wanted to do, which would tell untold stories of colonialism and imperialism, through the lens of the South Asian Diaspora” (2010, 142). The idea that Patel initially wanted to mount the saris like artworks in an exhibit, with poetry thrown into the mix, establishes the imagined show’s conceptual link to the curatorial practice through which Africaidentified creatives conceived of festivals in transnational settings, as discussed in the previous chapter. As in the making of Pumzi, gleaned from the anecdote shared by Wanuri Kahiu in the introduction, these negotiations are crucial to the form a work in progress finally takes, and there is no knowing for certain what other considerations played a role in nudging Patel and Cook in the direction of settling for the quasi-theatrical performance. Yet it matters that both options—the curation and the poetry performance—were available. The text of Migritude bears the marks of willful composition. Short as it is, the book is packed full of forms, ideas, and sensations, and it is made to do many things. It is “an accounting of Empire enacted on the bodies of women” (96). A catalytic poem, “Born to a Law,” tells the story of how Migritude began “as a quest to use my trousseau in my work. A vision for a masthead of verbs to fly my saris from” (93). The text in print is “a 90-minute theater show complete with set, choreography, dance, soundscape as visuals . . . born from exchange [with director Cook],” a work of spoken word performance poetry that, having “traveled the world, from Nairobi and San Francisco to Vienna to

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Zanzibar, finally reached this incarnation as . . . book” (2010, 2). In print format, the assemblage of prose texts and poems comes with a foreword, a prelude, a timeline, epigraphs, images, drawings, photographs, designs, interviews, and more. Even as poetry, Patel’s lines sing resonantly of diverse Bakhtinian speech genres, such as letters, excerpts, quotations, and newspaper reports. One poem simultaneously inserts newspaper reports and operates within the dialogic form to represent the family dynamics between mother and daughter. In another instance (“The Making I”), the process of composition might be understood in the way the poet has selfconsciously described it, while the same process is marked off from what the poem says as a poem. With media as the expressive grounds on which its ideology stands, Migritude in Patel’s hand, sets three kinds of composition to play. Or work. There is, first, a dynamic relationship between dance and poetry in which the rhetoric of spoken word jostles with the demands of poiesis. The basis of the present discussion is the volume in print, but there is clear evidence that the verses were composed for performance and impacted by that mode of communication. However—and this is the second identifiable kind of composition in this work—diverse metaphors animate the poetic undertaking as the author-performer constructs an uneasy equivalence between imperialism and modern Indian, Kenyan, and transnational histories, making the relationship between her family history and several autobiographical notations the starting point of self-exploration. Third, the poetry itself, in print form, is an assemblage, with a composite, mostly integrated use of different forms, genres, and protocols. Each of these approaches to composition is internally coherent on the level of style, but there are significant overlaps between them in formal terms. Considering the scope of the poetry in performance, few of the elements in the assemblage, for an example, would have a real impact in the show—even with an informed use of the kind of visual projections that are conventionally traced to Bertolt Brecht, although Patel describes her premiere show as a multimedia performance of poetry with “soundscapes as visuals.” Further, paradox trails the undertaking on several levels. In a fundamental sense, there is something of a paradox in the fact that Sanskrit, providing the root for the flowering tree of the English lexicon, serves to highlight the historical dispossession of India through British colonialism (“How Ambi,” 75). We have, in addition, the enigma of the poet performing in saris despite having not wanted to wear them. The paradox gets

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more interesting: the history of the fabric is inseparable from the modern history of imperialism, and the presence of black-and-white images and motifs in a book so evocative of color contradicts the poet’s intentions, perhaps for her having dared to treat maternal sentiments with disdain! This series of paradoxes throws the challenge of representing history into sobering relief and confirms the role that ideology plays in the creative apprehension of the multifaceted character of imperialism. If ideology sounds heavy-handed in characterizing Patel’s poetic task in this text, an unmistakably political consciousness is clearly in operation in the way that the third mode of composition—the book as an assemblage—manifests itself. That consciousness runs through the poems and the idea of a dance performance. Prosody in the book, in the sense of versified or fractal sublimation of intensive language, is similarly compelling. The different sections of the book draw attention to issues of composition in formal terms, as narratives jostle with versifications and commentaries exist alongside unintegrated images, quotations, and notations. The most elaborate appearance of this self-consciousness is found in the poem “What Came Out of the Suitcase,” a synthesized account of the “observations harvested from sari viewing by eight friends and director Kim Cook, blended with my own associations and responses” (65). This report of the personal, political, and collective experiences of the cloth summarizes the creative act of composition in the poems, in performance and print. The formal relationship between dance and poetry wherein the stylistics of slam and spoken word struggles with the demands of poetry is hard to streamline into poetic metaphors because the two media respond differently to that figure of speech. Besides, the subtleties of modern Indian/Kenyan or global postcolonial history that the author communicates through a poetic examination of imperialism are such that the composite use of forms and genres is materially graspable in the printed book. Thus, unlike the procedure in Ceddo, where analysis takes the form of showing the relationships between the elements of composition in a distinctive manner, the articulation of the elements in Migritude works through a synthesis of those elements and the poetry’s central metaphor of the sari. Proceeding this way puts the sari poems at the center of analysis and draws the performed poems in closer association with their printed versions. Elements that may resist representation on the page, such as motion and color, evidently find that outlet through the medium of performance. Finally, the entire ninety-minute

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performance unfolds through a series of clothing changes, the trying on and discarding of different kinds of sari. “It all began with a battered suitcase filled with untold stories and unseen beauty,” Patel writes in the final sentence of her Author’s Note, an unmarked text before the prelude to the “Migritude” sequence of poems.3 Sari is a metaphor for notions of Indian femininity that the author attacks as sexist and racist in the poem “Swore I’d Never Wear Clothes I Couldn’t Run or Fight In.” Essentialist and stereotypical views about the sari— femininity, Indianness, colorfulness—make the critique of imperialism in the two poems both necessary and fraught. The fabric’s production is shot through with ideals of corporate zeal, its consumption indicative of fragile habits (or aspirations) of primitive accumulation in the postcolonial world. Yet as an element of a material culture, the sari is a force of pleasurable socialization, and not even Patel’s fiercely feminist distancing from that habitus can neutralize its aesthetic charge. In the trousseau are seventeen kinds of saris. The poem “What Came Out of the Suitcase” is made up of stanzas in like number, each stanza describing one kind, with details of color, texture, value, usage—and authorial extrapolations. The poeticized narratives are detailed, with such close attention to a fabric’s specificities that the reader feels as if in the presence of a connoisseur, the sort of informed judgment that all but empties the fabric of the oppressive history of its production and circulation. Regarding the Orange Georgette, the poet observes: In the US, this sari looks psychedelic because of its color combination—purple and orange. But it reminds me of how bold and playful my mother is. The flowers, which look almost like fourleaf clovers, are loops of cord attached onto the sari, representing hours of hard embroidery . . . (p. 66)

These few lines are striking because the identity of the fabric is inseparable from the perception offered by the author, firmly anchored in an American context. In this respect, such a specific reference would come across as odd in a performance staged in San Francisco if not for the ingrained self-consciousness at work in the composition. A metaphor for notions of Indian femininity, sari operates on several levels in the work. The basis of the poetic undertaking, the trousseau is filled with “untold stories” and “unseen beauty,” a means of bonding between mother and daughter, a passing of the baton of life in the sphere of

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family memory. The innocuous gesture of bonding conceals or normalizes another secret, that is, the accretions of habituated prejudice about Indian femininity that are the target of attack in “Swore I’d Never Wear Clothes I Couldn’t Run or Fight In.” Indeed, the complicated relationship between mother and daughter with respect to unexamined prejudice begins in this poem, an unmediated exchange between mother and daughter: Looking pretty, my mother said, is the least you can do. Looking pretty is the least you can do, Shailja, to make up for not being a boy. You are not safe as a girl, my mother said. If you had a brother to protect you, you could go out at night. If you had a brother to protect you, we would let you (IV-V, p. 20–21)

To which the addressee responds: But how could I run if a man attacked me and I was wearing a sari? How would I fight? As a child, I knew of women strangled in their saris. Women doused in paraffin and burned in their saris. Saris made you vulnerable. A walking target. Saris made you weak (VI-VII, p. 21)

That no exchange actually occurred is clear from the formal manner of address; the mother’s injunction took place in the past and is here reported. The editorial decision to put the injunctions in italics gives the mother’s voice a distinctive, appealing quality that feels natural in context. It is also endearing in part because it appears to have done its work in parental confidentiality. However, it does not make room for the daughter’s agency. Since there is not a brother to protect her, how is she, dressed in a sari, to defend herself in the event of an attack? The frame for reflecting on the mother’s injunctions extends beyond the sneak attack in an alley by prepubescent boys. Patel opens the poem with a disjunctive placement of a quotation from the Mahabharata, followed by documentary observations about the precarious lives of women in Iraq in the aftermath of the US invasion of the country in 2003. The daily disappearance of women and girls, a “phenomenon unknown under Saddam Hussein” (20), is proof that women become preys in war. They also go war, and to work—as virtual war—in their saris, but this knowledge is concealed from the young girl. On the contrary, injunctions about saris and feminine propriety

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proliferate, becoming reminiscent of “Girl,” the famous lapidary short story by Jamaica Kincaid: You have to be careful in a sari. You’re exposing (whisper) the body. Don’t let the pallav slip under the breast. That’s obscene. Don’t let the petticoat show the panties . . . (1983, XII, 1–3, p. 21–22)

The poem ends with the persona’s affirmation of its titular resolve. What we see here is a two-pronged attack on colonial notions of Indianness and femininity, foreshadowing the more elaborate evisceration of the sari myth in “What Came Out of the Suitcase,” the longer poem. The spirit of Patel’s belated retort to her mother is one of ambivalent respect, markedly clear in the formatting of the two voices in the poem as well as in the persona’s questioning tone. The mother has her say at a time when the daughter cannot offer an adequate response, either as a result of limited discursive knowledge or out of the pressures of parental censure. When the time is ripe, the daughter has her way, answering with an attitude that places the sari-clad notions of femininity in question and letting the trove of exotic attires gather dust. Over and above the resolve against the path of femininity, the disconnect between mother and daughter plays a role in the latter’s consigning the trousseau to the status of an ambiguous heirloom. Yet the elapsed time brings increased understanding, and the daughter is able to critically analyze her mother’s prejudices with emotional and intellectual distance. Examining the contents of the trousseau gives Patel an opportunity for an anti-imperialist critique as well as an object lesson in how not to be a woman according to maternal sentiments. As we shall see, however, this ideological task comes freighted with what appears to be a performance of connoisseurship, if not outright nostalgia. Of the (plain) Red Georgette, perhaps the sari at the top of the pile, Patel writes that it [m]atches the suitcase. Everything is red through the diaphanous screen. In India, at Diwali, upper-middle-class people give bright synthetic saris to servants because they wash easily . . . (I, 1–3, p. 65)

So obviously lacking in social value, this sari is a product of a “Surat Mills” apparently in India and considered “American Georgette.” A smaller stamp at the border shows that it was “Made in China.” For her part, Patel adds the parenthetical tag “Mau Mau” to the sari’s name. The implicit, hermetic glossing of this unimportant item is all there is to

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its identity; there are no indications of its relationship to Mau Mau, the armed anticolonial movement in Kenya. It is possible to read into these multiple signs a tension between class, culture, and commerce. The segmentations within Indian culture in terms of the rich and the poor mirror the commercial forces at work not just in the manufacture of a textile that is milled in India, made in China, and named for the United States. Those forces are also present in the textile’s circulation. As the colonial overlord in India and Kenya, Britain is a central factor in this history of circulation, though its name is missing from the various stamps. The parenthetical addition of Mau Mau as Red Georgette’s alias serves a purpose, after all. It suggests an equivalence between the fabric’s class-stratified perception in India and the colonially engendered racism that views the Kenyan resistance movement as simultaneously poor and uncultured. In the book’s timeline, Patel constructs a narrative signpost about this history, putting the imperial traffics between Europe, India, and Africa on the same page as the changes unfolding within the continent. Due to the complexity of these historical processes, however, much of the coevality suggested in the coappearance of Africa, Europe, and India remains implicit (Desai 2013). The fourth and sixth stanzas are equally about the Georgette—of different colors and designs—and underscore this cultural disequilibrium. The “Bright Green Georgette with Black and Gold-Embroidered Flowers” feels “sixties,” evocative of . . . Bollywood scenes—wet saris, saris caught on trees, saris fluttering in the breeze . . . (IV, 3–5, p. 66)

while, in the US context, the “Orange Georgette with White/Purple Embroidered Flowers” looks “psychedelic because of its color combination.” Patel’s mother loves the embroidery in this Georgette and keeps samples of it. Nonetheless, the poet informs that the embroidery is a result of labor performed by . . . Five million Tamil women all over the world [who], in slum hovels and in mansions, begin the day by making kollum patterns on their thresholds for the protection and blessing of their family (VI, 10–13, p. 66–67)

As it is with Georgette so it is with silk. The “Pale Green and Pink Heavy Silk with Fringed Pallav” has the colors of the “light-dappled sea at sunrise,” inspiring in the author as a child an imaginary epic novel about a family dedicated to making a sari they cannot afford to wear. This is the

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ninth kind of sari. Its colors are soft and muted, coming from hand-dyed vegetables rather than industrial chemicals, the labor of weavers socially categorized as untouchables. Similar sentiments color the production of the next kind of sari, the “Magenta Silk Chiffon with Black Print.” Colors are powerful goddesses. I associate this sari with Draupadi, strong and beautiful. The silver border is formal. The magenta, rich yet airy, is called “rani” in Gujarati. My parents call it “ falsa,” which is a fruit from Pakistan that tastes a little like pomegranate and dyes your mouth pink . . . (X, 1–5, p. 67–68)

This chiffon is the lightest of all the saris in the suitcase, we are told, and it has very strong erotic charges—playful, seductive, exoticizing. When she wears it, Patel feels like “a walking flirtation, inviting exotification,” her bearing speaking the kind of responsibility that she might have wished, through years of indifference, to shirk. At the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, Indian tourists can be seen wearing this kind of sari, with sneakers and jackets to go with it for environmental context. The emotions and rationales in this set of silk/chiffon saris complement those associated with the Georgette. The suggestion of divine power and sexual potency in the wearer presents the fabric as the visual front for colonial notions, which we are sufficiently prepared to treat with suspicion. The accretion of cultural habits through distance in time and space seems, however, to keep those notions in operation through two interrelated issues. One concerns the sociological questions surrounding migration, the thrice-removed apprehension of Indian culture from India through Kenya to activist and alternative-culture San Francisco. There are also the aesthetic issues of the poet marshalling linguistic and performance idioms to project a material culture with the integral gestures of a connoisseur. The Sh a dow Book under the Spotlight In the first case, migration provides the frame for reflection on the saris and for the volume in general. One of the paradoxes I highlighted earlier concerns the relationship between Sanskrit as the root language for several words in English and the historical fact of the latter language returning to dominate and reshape Indian culture through colonialism. “How Ambi Became Paisley,” the first poem in the collection, is also a prelude to the themes explored in the book. Its one-word final line gives Migritude its title. A version of it, related in nearly nothing but the title, opens “The

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Shadow Book,” the volume’s second section. Through this poem, Patel fleshes out the page-hopping historical sketches set out in the timeline, showing the complicated careers of words borne as names and brands. “Mosuleen,” a type of woven fabric, is named after its city of origin. Mosul, in Iraq. ...................................................... Two Indian cities rose to glory and fame on the waves of mosuleen: Masulipatnam in South India and Dhaka in Bengal (VI, 2, 6–8, p. 5)

Once an object of commercial contention from Babylonian, Egyptian, and Roman times, ambi formed patterns woven into mosuleen and became, through the British imperial system, an item of a different kind of battle on the London textile market. From financial speculation to expeditionary attacks on Dhakan weavers in which the fingers of supposedly tardy weavers were cut off, the new imperialists controlled the value of mosuleen to the point of developing a town, Paisley (in Scotland), around the weaving industry it spawned. Of the many historical parallels that can be drawn with these developments, two have an uncanny resonance. In then-Belgian Congo, King Leopold I instituted a quota-failure policy which mandated the amputation of workers’ limbs on the rubber plantations (Hochschild 1998). There is, secondly, the connection between commercial, maritime, and agricultural (plantation) industries and the growth of American cities like Charleston in South Carolina and English cities like Manchester and Liverpool (Said 1993; Phillips 2000). It was in this industry, in Scotland, that Weavers . . . learned how to churn out imitation ambi, on imitation Kashmiri shawls, and got to keep their index fingers and thumbs (XV, 4–6, p. 6–7)

These workers managed to escape the fate of those in Dhaka perhaps as a result of labor unionism, and perhaps because industrialists were wary of committing large-scale corporal violence under the limelight of local corporation. In the next stanza, Patel writes: Until Kashmiri became cashmere. Mosuleen became muslin. Ambi became paisley (XVI, p. 7)

The connection between the two stanzas exists in the passage of time from the atrocious labor practices in colonial India to the marginally

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improved ones in England. In the meantime, the historical Kashmiri—the region that is the subject of a drawn-out dispute between India, Pakistan, and China—is reduced to the precious textile material with Anglicized naming (cashmere), and the Iraqi town experiences a similar fate in relation to muslin. And ambi, “form of a mango . . . a shape like a peacock feather” (4), is transformed into paisley, the pattern of an ornamental design seen on a number of fabrics, including a sari. It is through a similar process of change that the word “shail[a]ja,” used to describe the paintings of the goddess Astarte in mountain caves, stands between the Sanskrit word “shail” (mountain stone) and “shale,” the English word to which it gives root. This blood-soaked history, a record of the march of imperialism, is also a history of migration. For Patel, it moves between India and East Africa (specifically Kenya), between Kenya and the UK, and then the United States, with San Francisco being the pivotal locale for activist and artistic purposes. She carefully builds familial and personal histories of migration, and the book’s shuttle between performance and print, into the larger narrative. The same pattern is sewn into relationship between “Migritude” and “The Shadow Book.” Each poem in the two sections is repeated, and as we have seen with “How Ambi Became Paisley,” the similitude is limited to the title. The idea of the “shadow book” is, in this respect, to re-present the poems in the voice of the performer. This device details the real-time effects of the performance, including reflections on the dynamic shifts between the involved dancing with saris and the selfconscious act of commentary on what went on in the show. The poems narrating or dramatizing the Patel family history work those domestic details into the movements of contemporary Kenyan history, such that the national fortunes in the socioeconomic realm reflect the family’s precarious financial situation. This is the case with the poems “Shilling Love” (I & II) and “The Sky Has Not Changed Color.” In the two versions of “Shilling Love,” the humiliation felt in the declining value of the Kenyan currency due to conditionalities imposed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), as the timeline shows, is reflected in the parents’ efforts at saving for the daughters’ education (I) and their later attempt in trying to enter the United States (II). The Patel sisters’ educational sojourn in England provides for the poet an opportunity to reflect on the ongoing relationship between empire as the movement of capital and migration as the movement of labor. Through the mother’s

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voice in the dispersed letters sent to the daughter, we get a glimpse of this family trajectory and gain access to autobiographical details: the father is a mechanic, and the situation in Kenya is reflected in the larger historical movements, such as the reckoning over the British suppression of the Mau Mau. Integrated and consistently reflexive, this blend of personal, familial, national, and transcontinental histories sometimes strains narrative similitude. For example, Patel writes about personal anxieties as a student in England in the poem “Over and Under,” studying hard and worrying that she would not succeed: I didn’t. I failed my final exams. I lost my job and work permits. I burned all my boats. I went to America (XII, p. 40)

A reader attuned to the precarious situation of migrants has to wonder, How? Given the perspectives in this book about migration, how does she find it so easy to just go “to America”? Only later, in the timeline, does an intimation of this possibility come up: in 1982, the poet’s “family was sponsored for immigration to the US by an aunt who live[d] there” in the aftermath of an abortive coup in Kenya (131). This point needs not detract from the import of aggregating diverse histories, however, because a similar kind of ellipsis is present in “The Sky Has Not Changed Color” (44–48). This is a poem that gives voice to the testimonies of victims of rape by British soldiers in the wake of the suppression of the Mau Mau. The numbing, traumatic episode is so much part of the country’s psyche and landscape as to be telescoped in the touristic imagery of the Maasai, the routine index of exotic Kenya second to the safari “in Western fantasies” (45). The poem begins with this sardonic idealization of the Maasai, establishing a link between the popular notion and the banal evil of colonial terror. However, what is most telling about the testimonies offered in the poem is that out of more than six hundred fifty rape allegations between 1965 and 2001, we hear from only three people—Survivors 3, 58, and 651. The violation each suffered is rendered in a graphic way, and the trauma is so generalized that just a brief sampling suffices. The point is clear: rape was routine as a weapon of terror, but the experience of each victim was unique, and the perpetrators observed no discrimination between genders. For Patel, then, the import of this historic case of mass victimization is of a piece with the psychological dislocation that attends the experience of marginal people. Kenyan scholar Dan Ojwang has written of

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Migritude as “an imaginative counter-history of migration and commodities in the age of imperialism and capitalism” (2013, 124). He has noted, in addition, that the poet’s knowledge of Kenyan history as framed in the book is complicated by her relation to the country, in expatriation, as well as by her middle-class education in the native country, in spite of which she managed to “consciously forge solidarity” with the underprivileged. Workers, women, and political captives are, like migrants, victims of empire in various guises, and this premise, that the specificities of context and historical detail need not obfuscate this ideological perspective, gives the book its unique form. And so, we come to the aesthetic questions, the linguistic and performance idioms that Patel brings together to treat the sari as more than the detritus of a mother’s lapsed hope of matrimonial sufficiency. The interview between Patel and Vanita Reddy that I referred to at the beginning of this chapter is entitled “Come for the Saris, Stay for the Politics” (141–147). Even without the interviewer’s acknowledgment of the sartorial attractions suggested in that advertorial, the idea of the sari as the visual (and exotic) representation of Indian femininity already contains a paradox. Patel put up shows in San Francisco and Berkeley (in 2006), performing in saris in spite of not having wanted to wear them. She confirms this dilemma to Reddy as her “vexed relationship to saris” (142), the principled view that sees through the orientalist and racist/sexist stereotypes about women thus dressed. “What Came Out of the Suitcase” is a critique, but the poet has the duty, through the performance, to mediate the audience’s understanding of the critique with the posture of a savant, a connoisseur. If in the written poem, the “Bright Green Georgette with Black and Gold-Embroidered Flowers” feels “sixties,” and Bollywood uses it to sell its ideas of Indian women to the world, it did something specific during Patel’s show in Nairobi, during a 2007 World Social Forum meeting. “I toss the bright green georgette in the air—one of my favorite moments in the show,” Patel comments in the second, narrative version of the poem “Born to a Law” (95). She follows this with sensuous gestures—tracing the silver zari patterns on the chocolate silk, inhaling the sandalwood scent—that are in excess of the thematic issues that the performance is set up to illuminate. Some of the descriptions that constitute the prosodic heart of the seventeen saris already suggest this kind of sensual intimacy with material. The thirteenth sari, the “Sand Colored Heavy Silk,” is Patel’s favorite, perhaps because it is the closest to her skin color, although

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most of her friends do not like it. This is the chocolatey one with the silver patterns that she lovingly touches during the show and brings to her nose for the dramatic effect of inhaling its scent of sandalwood. The next one, the “Magenta Chiffon with Heavy Gold Embroidery,” is a creature of even purer aesthetic associations: transcendent power of love. American georgette, made in India The embroidery, a celestial gold, evokes Oshun, who represents love, wealth, and creativity . . . (XIV, 2–4, p. 69)

Encountering the name “Oshun” in the poem, I wondered if the reference was to the Yoruba goddess of fertility, worshiped every year in Òs.ogbo, or if Patel had an Indian figure in mind.4 The description continues that “fuchsia flowers are also used in love spells for Oshun” and extends the possibility that magenta is “the color of my mother’s broken heart: the weight and magnificence—the splendor—of her sacrifices” (69). Although fuchsia can grow in Nigeria, the notion that its petals are used in love potions seems to exist in the realm of aesthetics a fanciful idea that minimizes the gendered risks of being dressed in that sari. How much of this general aesthetic outlook Patel wishes to be responsible for is an open question. The verses making up “What Came Out of the Suitcase” are the sum of observations gathered “from sari viewing by eight friends and director Kim Cook,” with the poet’s own responses in the mix. Insofar as the collaborative character of the performance in print is sublimated to the logic of authorship, the overriding perspective remains that of the speaking “I,” and matters of taste are not to be understood in terms of unanimity. On the evidence of the occasional conflicting perspectives about a particular sari—the “Sand Colored Heavy Silk” is Patel’s favorite, but her associates don’t like it—one can safely infer that a complex act of negotiation is fundamental to the process of composing Migritude, both as poetry and as show. It is tempting to see in this recourse to accessible, though hardly unanimous, aesthetic standards a surrender by the poet to the manners of bourgeois feminism. The light, airy, consistently poised opinions about colors, textures, and sensual associations are the sort of attitude one would encounter at certain soirées, energized by drinks and vegan finger foods. But such a view would be needlessly uncharitable because there is too much vigilance in the work for Patel to easily succumb to judging. Representation as the nature of things is the real culprit. To deploy Theodor Adorno’s classic axiom about the right attitude toward tradition, one has

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to know imperialism in order to hate it properly (Adorno 2005). The idea of spending “hours experimenting with different wrapping styles for the performance” (80) is a good case in point. Acts that the better-informed adult Patel has come to regard with suspicion have to be learned again in service of a performance enacted for the pleasures of an audience. It is just as telling that she claims as one of her artistic aims the need “to keep expanding the definitions of beauty . . . to be potent, sensual, alive, in performance—warrior, goddess, child, athlete—with no conflict or tension between all these different selves” (81–82). Without embracing the idea of being detained by politics while imagining the sheer beauty of saris, the viewer (and the performer) can hardly know the risks integral to both dress and politics as grounds for representation. Rather than absolve the process of tension, however, I think it is more productive to acknowledge that tensions and conflicts are indispensable in this realm of representation, especially for a work brought to life in the uneven terrains of poetry and performance. There is ample evidence of this in the work. The poem “The Making” (II, 122–127) without the “Migrant Song” subtitle is poised in conversation with the first (32–38). The first is propositional while the second is imperative, although there are variations on these modes of address. An active, evocative tone, the kind usually reserved for slam, animates the second version, whereas the first is essentially a written poem. The first stanza of “The Making” (II) indicates that Patel performs first, then commits poems to paper. In the poems in the second section (those under “The Making”), the verses read as more self-conscious about performance. The impression also registers of the poet-performer as an artist at the opening of an art exhibit, as she leads the viewer along the wall, speaking of how each painting was conceived, what the symbolisms mean. This is perhaps a residual effect of the initial plan to exhibit the saris in a gallery before Cook’s theatrically tuned sensibility persuaded the poet. Whereas the chronological arrangement of the poems suggests that the writing precedes the performing, the poems in the second and third sections are explicit about the stage-to-page sequencing. There is a direct account of the print-to-performance sequencing in the line “How do I know when a piece of writing wants to leap from print into performance?” (77). If theater is the modal form of mediation on the evidence of the reflections in the previous chapter expansive enough to guarantee the survival

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of supposedly old media in new contexts, then what Patel attempts in this work has additional significance as a specific mode of creative practice. Migr a nt w ith Attitude In “Speaking of Saris,” his foreword to the volume, the scholar and activist Vijay Prashad observes that Migritude shares a philosophical orientation with Négritude, the literary-aesthetic term coined by Aimé Césaire and shared with other Black students (Léopold Senghor, Leon-Gortras Damas) in prewar France. Migritude, writes Prashad, “draws from this heritage [of Négritude] to suggest that there is a ‘compass of suffering’ shared by migrants of color into the heartlands of power” (2010, iv). The reference is obvious enough, and the gesture is more than rhetorical, as discussion has shown. However, there is another dimension to this relationship in poetic terms, and it is to composition as the mode of creative practice in this work that we should look. Despite the political sentiments of her poetry, best captured in an identification with contemporary Kenyan and transnational issues, Patel’s poetics betray very little of the sensibility out of which they supposedly came. In the work of African poets, notably Senghor and Niyi Ọs.undare, the Nigerian poet, the association between poetry and African performance or musical styles is so close as to be organic. With these two figures in particular, poems are composed to be performed to the accompaniment of certain instruments. Reading Senghor, for example, the scholar Tsitsi Jaji has focused on the diasporic dimensions through which the poet incorporates jazz music in his poetic composition (Jaji 2014). Patel’s more appropriate affinity is with poetry slams, however, and she makes this connection in an interview. Responding to a question from Sonya Taylor about the wide range of genres and forms marking her poetry, Patel says: “As an artist I move toward the forms that move me. I’ve been a poet from childhood. When I migrated to the United States and discovered slam, it blew me away, so I immersed myself in it. When I began to write pieces that were too long and complex to slam, theater was the natural space to move into. Now I’ve come full circle to writing again, making workbooks, poems, political essays that migrate freely across continents and languages, independent of my physical body.”5 What is not obvious in this response is slam’s multiple lineages in Africana poetry. In one respect, one can trace the relationship to the work

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of dub poets (Linton Kwesi Johnson, Mutabaruka, Jean “Binta” Breeze, and Benjamin Zephaniah), a clear Caribbean lineage. Even here, the affinity that Migritude shares is muted or transformed into a performance that becomes a genre of its own, “work that is larger than Slam.”6 A more seemly point of comparison can be sought in the genre of digitally mediated poetry, such as that of the Indian-Canadian poet Rupi Kaur, in titles like Milk and Honey (2014) and The Sun and Her Flower (2019), as well as How to Cure a Ghost, in which the Bangladeshi-identified poet Fariha Róisín collaborates with Monica Ramos through images to produce work that draws on the minimalism of Twitter text. The basis for comparison is properly speaking attitudinal, as all these poets reflect a transnational imaginary and invest in a politics of identity in relation to migration. Patel’s politics are more explicit and informed by autobiography insofar as thematics are concerned. Far from a shortcoming of the work, I think that this self-conscious absence of the music-inspired Africana poetic tradition in Migritude is an indication of the changing terms of artistic production. It is a measure of the ease with which context shapes compositional procedure to the point of defamiliarizing a given work’s artistic lineage. As a work with simultaneous or parallel lives in print, Migritude is best compared with Under African Skies, by Nigerian poet Odia Ofeimun.7 The comparison is even more relevant in the active, evocative tone of slam poetry that animates the second version of “The Making” in a case of intradialogic movement of versions of the same poem. Important distinctions in relation to cinematic montage in Sembene’s Ceddo do not invalidate the self-conscious attentions to context, indeed to the need to shape context, as fundamental to the choices that African artists make in and out of particular modes of creative practice. In fact, if these comparisons do anything, they abundantly reinforce those attentions and make them indispensable to a productive appreciation of the work. If we agree that imperialism is neither recent nor outdated due to global flows, then artistic representations of its impact on society are liable to change with context. Through the thematic and aesthetic propulsions in Migritude, Patel offers an incremental vision of African history as a mutable case of the emperor wearing new clothes and requiring changes in the modes of critique. Poetic language is a delicate, paradoxical tool, and the diverse situations in which Patel’s poems are composed and disseminated puts a wholesale application of the thematics of anti-imperialism to the test.

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The Gr iot in Time Ceddo had its African premiere in Mobutu Sese Seko’s Zaire, of all places, in 1977. Sembene spent two weeks from October 30 to November 14 in Kinshasa, the capital then called Kin-la-Belle. In straightforward narrative terms, Ceddo tells the story of the kidnapping of Princess Dior Yacine, daughter of King Demba War, by the armed segment of the population, the ceddo, to protest forced religious conversion by the Muslim cleric Imam, an ally of the king. Warrior after warrior is armed and sent to rescue the princess. Each returns as a corpse until, following the news of the king’s suspicious death from snake bite, the Imam seizes power and orders a swift jihad that vanquishes the armed ceddo and results in the mass conversion of the populace. To fully consolidate his powers, the Imam prepares to take the rescued princess as wife, but when she appears, Dior Yacine turns the tables. Among the films of the Senegalese master, Ceddo occupies the unique position of being treated with the veneration proper to an unfairly censored classic that, at the outset, bears difficult witness to a twice-embattled past. It was not enough that the ceddo, known for resisting forced conversion to Islam were, in fact, ultimately defeated. History rubs salt in the wound when the offspring of the victors, in the figure of powerful Islamic brotherhoods, became so indispensable to contemporary Senegalese politics as to induce the president, Léopold Senghor, a Catholic man of letters, to use the facetious pretext of linguistic formalism to keep the film under seal until he left power. The film is best approached as a composite of historical facts relating to the spread of Islam in West Africa, especially around the Senegambia region, from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries. The composition comes stylized with Sembene’s anti-imperialist humanism that pits historical reality against contemporary examples of distortion of African history by nativists and imperialists alike. “These events,” says Sembene to journalist Ulrich Gregor in a 1978 interview, “occurred in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and are still occurring” (Busch and Annas 2008, 107). In a synopsis developed as part of the press kit and published in the same year, Ceddo is described as a film that brings “together bits and pieces of facts and authentic events that took place in a period spanning centuries to the present day” (quoted in Pfaff 1984, 166). Introducing her conversation with Sembene, which

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later appeared in Demain l’Afrique, Josie Fanon describes the compositional mode in Ceddo as “shortening several historic eras to one single anecdote” (2008, 112). It is also enriched with a unique editing style and a musical score directed by the Cameroonian Afro-Jazz composer Manu Dibango, both of which are equally composite. The critic Brendan Berrian has produced an informative analysis of the music, as we shall soon see. The assertive use of composite historical facts, as Sembene argues in an interview, offers an alternative view of history that is both remedial and creative, informed by an anti-imperial impulse seen in the work of a number of African artists.8 There is a corresponding approach to composition in the film, and the naming of the ceddo attests to this approach most incontrovertibly. In Halpulaar, according to historian Mamadou Diouf, the word ceddo means “outsider” or “reject,” and in Wolof it means “warrior” or “pagan” (Diouf 2010, 14). There is also the expression Ceddo Baadoolo that refers to lowly groups of unconverted. In strictly historical terms, historian Boubacar Barry writes that “ceddo regimes emerged during the eighteenth century in most of the Senegambian states. They came to symbolize the reign of violence in political relationships between and within states. Organized, massive manhunts created objective conditions for this violence. Violence became self-perpetuating in an infernal spiral of civil strife and inter-state wars that wasted the country and brought profits to European markets along the Senegambia coast” (1998, 81). According to this formulation, the ceddo were leaders of African-led regimes with formidable military resources. They opposed the incursions of Islam or, at best, rejected attempts to be placed under any religious or political authority. Indeed, there was evidence that the more forceful of these regimes did co-opt Muslims into their governing systems (Barry 1998, 82). For the film, however, Sembene presents the ceddo as a composite of the warlike resisters and unconverted—the unconquered forces of popular resistance. In this sense, he deploys the figure as a concept and poetic device to characterize the spirit of rebellion against imperialist imposition, whether religious or economic, without ignoring the contradictions of the concept. Like most of Sembene’s midcareer films, Ceddo had its share of official censorship—it is perhaps the most notoriously sanctioned. Emitaï (1971) and Camp de Thiaroye (1988) were banned in France, according to Gadjigo (2004, 39), while Xala (1974) was censored in Senegal ostensibly because of the way it handles the bust of Marianne, a symbol of French

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culture, in the scene where the new members of the Chambers of Commerce remove the vestiges of the colonial system. The government of Senegal prevented Ceddo’s release over a disagreement about the spelling of the title. This, Gadjigo writes, was part of “an effort to silence an imagination and a voice that create turmoil in the calm sea of official historiography” (39).9 Diouf calls the film “a digressive space that opposes, disorganizes and reorganizes the nationalist discourse” (2010, 14) and a critique of nationalist discourse that, in addition to its chronological uncertainty, drew the ire of “politicians and professional historians” (14).10 The refusal of Senghor’s government to countenance the title (stipulating “cedo” rather than “ceddo”) ensured that the film was not seen in the country until the coming to power of Abdou Diouf in 1981. Both Diouf (the historian, that is) and the novelist Ayi Kwei Armah agree on the linguistic quibbling as a pretext for something else—the politics of religion and history in Senegal. A close friend of Sembene, Armah is more critical than Diouf of the role of the government in the controversy. Reviewing the film in West Africa in 1984, Armah writes that “because of the seeming pettiness of the ‘War of the Two D’s’ that led to the ban some have speculated that it was a mere excuse used by Senghor, a Roman Catholic politician in an overwhelmingly Muslim country, to keep the film out of Senegal and thus avoid religious controversy. For the fact is that Sembene’s Ceddo is an iconoclastic film, frankly intelligent and devastatingly anti-religious . . . and religious connections happen to constitute the most powerful political factor in Senegal’s domestic public life” (1984, 2031). In 1979, Sembene himself told Fanon that “the film is not really forbidden. It was subjected to the commission of cinematic control that made two recommendations: first, I had to declare that the film was not about current events; second, I had to change the spelling of the title, which meant replacing the two letters ‘d’s of Ceddo by one, following the issue of presidential decree . . . I protested because I consider that the highest authority, my government, is not empowered to give me counsel” (113). Sembene’s experience with the prerelease reception of the film is emblematic of how a mode of creative practice works as a choice the individual artist makes in the context of the work’s circulation. Notice that there is a link, a structural link perhaps, between the anti-imperial impulse in filming history in a particular way and the antiestablishment rejection of the sanction surrounding the final product. The artist in this respect is

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held in suspicion by political, clerical, and scholarly authorities—the Senegalese state and the professional historians—because of the iconoclastic subsumption of historical fact to the demands of the creative process. A similar thing happened to dramatist Hubert Ogunde who, as we saw in detail in the previous chapter, was serially censured by the relevant authorities: the custodians of traditional systems fined him for his use of religious music; he had his shows cancelled by the colonial government because of the anticolonial charge of his plays; and his songs as well as his company came under a ban by the postindependent government of western Nigeria because of the company’s criticism of the regime’s policies. Composition is the creative practice through which Sembene approaches history in this film, and it extends to the editorial decisions that shape the film and most of his work from this phase in his career. Sembene’s longtime collaborator, the Beninese-Senegalese director, writer, and film historian Paulin Soumanou Vieyra, was present on the set of Ceddo and produced L’Envers du Décor (Behind the Scenes, 1981), a twentyseven-minute film in the “making of ” genre. The documentary offers rare insights into the practical technical factors, editorial and otherwise, that this particular artist wrestled with on location and in the studio. These factors are consequential to the look of the film and constitute my sense of how Sembene develops its composite style in narrative and editing. Combining “true facts from different centuries,” in Diouf ’s words (2010, 14), Sembene uses composition to offer a perspective on African history that, in principle, rejects imperialism and its contemporary manifestation as neocolonialism, whether in the realm of religion or of political economy. This principle is also on view in Patel’s imaginative transformation of personal and transnational experiences of imperialism through performances that can be repeated and revised, irrespective of time and place. Rather than a simple distortion of historical facts, Jeyifo in his essay quoted at the beginning of this chapter argues that an artistic composition exemplifies “the complexly determined cultural process that always attends the reconstruction of the past” (1993, 103). This statement reiterates the point of Sembene’s view about art as a means of recreating history. Two aspects of Sembene’s work need to be explored further for the light they throw on him in as an African artist. There is the perspective of Sembene as a creative historian, most powerfully demonstrated in Emitaï and Ceddo, especially in the latter. He distills a history of several centuries into one charged composite narrative in a way that simultaneously

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legitimizes the creative imagination as more than alternative history and distinguishes the artist from the historian. This connects to his status as a Tourean intellectual, named after the founding president of Guinea, Sékou Touré, who was Sembene’s personal friend. Like Touré, Sembene’s political outlook came in part from a colonial experience mediated through unionism in the aftermath of World War II. In light of both men’s limited familiarity with formal French education, that experience often found an outlet in an attitude of distrust toward intellectuals, an attitude with serious, tragic consequences in the history of Guinea. In a postscreening discussion at Amherst College in 1992, Sembene tells the audience: I am going to tell you an anecdote . . . It is possible to like or dislike Sékou Touré, but we took the same path in life and he was a friend. I was in Conakry, and in Guinea a conference was being held . . . Since I did not live very far from Sékou Touré, he said, “We are going to play a trick on your friend.” Because he referred to Senghor as my friend. And so we went to Labe, which was very far, and all the heads of state were there. Sékou Touré, who did not stand on ceremony, took me by the hand and said, “Let’s introduce people to each other.” Che Guevara was behind me and he introduced him . . . finally to Senghor, which gave Senghor quite a start. (Gadjigo et al. 1993, 66)11

This idea of an intellectual who is deeply distrustful of intellectualism is a recurrent feature in all Sembene’s films. It is constitutive of his dialectic camera, the refusal of easy compromises, and the routine defeat of the pompous old order. It may seem heavy-handed and is frankly redolent of playing to the gallery, especially in his late films, but it is also consistent and brutally realistic. The principle of composition at work in Ceddo takes three specific forms. It operates through Sembene’s contrasting depictions of the figure of the griot and his selective use of historical detail to construct a composite narrative; it comes across in the effects achieved through musical score, editing, and soundtrack; and it manifests as the retrospective transpositions of incidents through fantastic projections, primarily from the perspectives of the Catholic priest and Princess Dior Yacine. The third instance of composition may seem like an elaboration of the first, as both constitute the opening through which the story unfolds narratively. However, so much rests on the impact it creates for the film’s larger goals and the contextual hindsight of its reception in contemporary Senegal that I think it is important to sustain the distinction. For instance, to understand

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the significance of the first principle of composition, an appreciation of the staff, the samp, as a symbolic object of mediation, is crucial. Sembene’s creative use of historical facts in the film, the real reason for the negative official reaction it drew, flows from the deep well of his conception of the griot’s role as custodian of society’s memory. There are two griot figures in the film—Jaraaf and Fara Tine. Jaraaf, the court historian, appears with the royal retinue and attempts to change sides when the balance of power shifts. Fara Tine, on the contrary, stays with the ceddo throughout. Considering that the dramatic conflict arises from the opposed views of the two groups regarding the Islamic onslaught, much rests on this bifurcation of the griot. Depicting Fara Tine as ideologically opposed to Jaraaf may have confirmed the widespread critiques of the much-idealized figure of the griot in Africana intellectual tradition, with Sembene being one of the most vocal critics. What does Jaraaf stand for, and what does that stand mean? As the king, Demba War,12 and his court file in, they are heralded by Jaraaf. If the viewer had not been confronted by the news of the princess’ kidnapping, he might wonder a little about the significance of the issue over which the members of the royal train bicker. Tioub Biram, the prince, wishes to take the throne after his father. The king’s nephew, Madior Fatim Fall, contests the claim, and it is obvious that the latter stands on the assured grounds of tradition since the society is governed according to matrilineal rules. Jaraaf mediates between both and, as he sees things, both happen to be right. This is the first sign of his compromised status because it is impossible for both claims to be legitimate. However, worse signs of a new ethos soon follow. Jaraaf makes the categorical statement, “We are Moslems [and] Islam forbids matriarchy,” in response to Madior’s eloquent declaration. Madior’s claim is thus at risk, but the king’s silence has the greatest neutralizing effect. Jaraaf is the griot as an agent of the state. He conducts the dignitaries, including the Catholic priest and the slave trader, to their seats. He also speaks for Demba War about the dire fate awaiting the ceddo, threatening Fara Diogomay, the spokesperson for the ceddo still in town. Having kidnapped Dior Yacine, the king’s daughter, the ceddo send the samp, the symbolic sculpture, to the king, and Diogomay is requested to speak to its contents: “We want this iniquity to stop. Our crops belong to us. You must put an end to the plunderings. As king, you must decree that no one will be

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persecuted, no one will be enslaved. The obligation to be Moslem is abolished. No faith is worth a man’s life. May oppression cease one day” (16.15–17.07). This court sequence is enlivened with lots of formal, discursive speeches and dazzling claims of kingly or royal privileges, even as the institution of monarchy faces certain extinction. There is much about appearance, too. In a display of the splendor of power, Saxewar the warrior, arriving boastfully to humble the ceddo, gives a swift, nonchalant swat that knocks off balance the slave girl who has brought him water. No one present attaches any significance to this casual treatment of human life; indeed, Jaraaf entreats the soldier to use the girl’s neck to sharpen his sword. Sembene claims that he imagines the ceddo as a collective making a history collectively and so does not give priority to individuals. In fact, speaking to the duo of Sada Niang and Samba Gadjigo during the 1993 edition of FESPACO, Sembene states that “there is [often] no main character in my films. They are group stories. At a given time, at a given hour, each character plays a little role, and the sum of these roles make up the physiognomy of the group” (176). Yet, in Ceddo, there are distinctions between the elites, the nobilities, and the generality of the populace. The scene is set up with these distinctions in mind, with the dignitaries ranged on one side, Fara Diogomay and other ceddo in the middle (the cinematic foreground), and the rest of the people massed together in the background. Denied his rightful inheritance, Madior breaks ranks with the family and spends the rest of his time in the film on a fruitless search for an ally. Implacable but right on tradition, he covers all ground in rallying support to his cause. He neither confronts nor joins the ceddo, but he affects to share their sentiment through his new costume, discarding the flowing aristocratic white robes for the simple attire dyed in earth colors. He briefly appears to dabble in a new faith when he approaches the Catholic priest, who takes his presence as sign of the future flowering of his religion and goes into a fantasy of a Black church, about which more will be said later. Among the aristocracy, Madior stands out for his figurative language. (“The wind that knocks down a baobab only bends the millet stalk,” “a goat devoured by the hyena leaves no skin for tanning,” “you’re a palm tree that gives no cover to its roots.”) He appears to have some character; he is clearly inexorable, but that character is, in addition, a metaphor for a tradition in its final gasps. Madior’s claim of matrilineal inheritance may be valid according to tradition, but history points to a different sequence or, at least, a shift

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in the ground of contention. In Senegambia and the Atlantic Slave Trade, Senegalese historian Boubacar Barry argues that the institutionalization of the matrilineal system under the legendary Kajoor ruler Lat Sukaabe Faal (1695–1720) was “a reaction to the patrilineal system of succession advocated by Islam” (1998, 83). In fact, Madior’s insistence on taking Dior Yacine as wife is an attempt to perpetuate matrilineal rule, which itself has the principal function of ensuring the purity of royal blood. When Thioub stakes a claim to the throne and receives Jaraaf ’s approving nod, it is the appeal to Islamic identity that validates that claim. Sembene opts to show Jaraaf and Dembar War as representative of Africans who made a common cause with Islam, but the historical status of matrilineality is not in doubt, and it will be invested with a radical force toward the end of the film. This subjugation of the matrilineal system has parallels in other African polities, such as the rise of Ọyọ over the Ifẹ kingdom (in southwestern Nigeria), where a military class displaced earth-mother worshipers. This episode occurred at an earlier period than the eighteenth century described in Barry’s account, and owed little to the Muslim incursion, whether of the jihadist or “peaceful penetration” mode. By the time Demba War rises to speak, his once-crowded court under the state umbrella is empty. This moment is very brief, but it is powerfully arresting as visual evidence of the creeping evacuation of royal power. It is not to be confused with another, several scenes later, in which that evacuation is complete. During this second meeting, called to find a solution to the ceddo revolt following the killing of Saxewar, the council comprises of Demba War, his four nobles including Jaraaf, and the Imam’s group. Although the leaders of the ceddo are officially part of the council, they are not invited and, on the Imam’s orders, are forcibly removed when they appear. This prompts Madior, again, to warn his uncle of the potential loss of his power. In addition, he challenges the Imam’s authority, overriding the noble’s quiescent advice to the king. Of course, by now, it is a lost battle: Demba War makes a feeble attempt to question the Imam’s cavalier manner of addressing him by name instead of title, and the latter responds that Allah is the only king he recognizes. As the Imam departs, he informs the king that Babacar, his right-hand man, will lead the prayers. The scene shows the king, Madior, and the Imam’s right-hand man who, though seated, shifts closer to the king. Though the move itself is ambiguous, the scene clearly underlines the subjugation of monarchical power. It is also the last time we hear from or see Dembar War.

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Fig. 3.1. Placed higher in this scene, but the king has lost his authority to the Imam’s deputy (in white cap). Ceddo. 1977.

The four nobles—Jaraaf, Beeg Neeg, Teigne, and Laaman—display all the opportunism and short-sightedness of their class. Apprehensive about the ceddo, whom they fear will oppress them, they make a proposition: “We must welcome Islam, while maintaining our customs and work[ing] to safeguard a few advantages” (1.09.02–1.09.11). These four men are removed and replaced by the Imam’s loyalists as soon as the jihad is won. Cynical as it sounds, however, their argument becomes the basis for sociopolitical stability in the region, and in Senegal in particular, in the long run. Despite Sembene’s disclaimer to Josie Fanon, the film shows extensive interest in the contemporary situation as a point of departure for reflections. Film scholar Phillip Rosen characterizes the approach to historical narrative thus suggested as “retrospective utopianism” (1993, 160) because it directly addresses the tension between the fitfully hopeful ending of the film, in which the Imam as the figure of religious imposition is eliminated, and the reality of present-day Senegal, in which Islam remains a powerful factor in many spheres of society. Talking to film scholar Sada Niang in Toronto in 1992, Sembene himself paints a complex picture of relationships (between the state, the Muslim community, and the traditional authority) in contemporary Senegal: “There is a colonial administration inherited from the colonial era, but this

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administration cannot survive without the ‘imams’; furthermore, beside the religious chief, you will always find a traditional chief guarding the tradition. These are clear distinctions, even if the representatives of the three levels are all Muslims” (Gadjigo et al. 1993, 96). If Jaraaf performs a mediatory though obfuscating role in the court of Demba War, Fara Tine, the other griot, differs in significant ways. He speaks very little, but it is from his point of view that the action surrounding the hostage Dior Yacine unfolds. He is the mindful witness and the quiet, consenting translator between princess and ceddo combatant. Each of them addresses him as the bearer of a message in the formal manner we see earlier in the king’s court, since the royals are obviously too important to speak directly to their auditors. Fara Tine does not actually relay the messages, but his very presence in the middle makes him the great mediator—the medium, in fact. He is the medium as the communicator, a messenger who, by his mindful silence, enables an exchange between the two doubly alienated parties—in the traditional hierarchies of caste and as a result of ceddo affront. (A stunning similarity exists between this pose of mediation and that of the oracle consulted on behalf of Ajani, the young undergraduate planning to take a wife, in Akinwumi Is.ọla’s work discussed in the next chapter.) He may be with the ceddo, but Fara Tine is impartial in his witnessing. When someone from Demba War’s party appears on an attacking mission, he alerts the ceddo combatant. Once the adversary is defeated, he holds his xalam aloft, but horizontally, a positioning that says a lot about his role both ideologically, as evidence of emergent class orientations in West Africa, and technologically, as an indicator of mediation. The two impulses have to be read carefully. To better understand Fara Tine’s role in this film, it is useful to refer to an example provided by Armah in another context. Discussing historical records as a source of literary explorations in The Eloquence of the Scribes, Armah writes: “Where, following long-established custom, griots, historians, poets, singers and traditionalists followed their sovereigns into . . . confrontations, traces of the work of these verbal artists survived and can now be counted as part of our literary and historical record” (2006, 116). Armah locates a vivid instance of this practice in one of the wars of resistance to French colonial imposition in the wake of the Berlin Conference’s partition of the continent (not incidentally, the instance is taken from Barry’s book), in the case of the defeat of Bokar Biro in the Futa region of Guinea (117). But he also notes that it is a long-established practice. The relevant point here as it pertains to Sembene’s deployment of the griot figure is that that use

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has affinity in other militarized West African societies of the time, before and after the European imposition of colonial borders across the region. In African literary studies, the kind of recitation ascribed to Bokar Biro’s griot comes under the genre of the epic, the most famous example being Sundiata, the epic of old Mali. If one were to locate a comparable example of this verbal art in another West African context, the Yoruba oríkì would serve well. As a text generated in memory of several military campaigns, the following fragment from the oríkì of Bas.ọrun Ogunmọla (1865–1867), a Yoruba (Ibadan) general-cum-prime minister, is representative: Ó jó gángan rè ‘Wàwun Ó f ’àdàmọ` jagun Ìjàyè.13

The fragment does two things simultaneously: it indicates that the military commanders went to war with musicians to serve as inspiration (affirming Armah’s insight), and that the musicians were also obliged to faithfully record the soldiers’ victories and defeats. The long poetic chant “Mọ΄ńléwá,” recorded as an album by Nigerian musician Odolaye Arẹmu, provides an additional example of this practice. The historical Mọ΄ńléwá was a notable general and possibly a contemporary of Àfọ`njá, the ààrẹ ò.nàkakan` fò (or generalissimo) of the Yoruba confederate army circa 1820.14 The first four minutes of Arẹmu’s song are halfway between recitative and narrative, and the notably musical tale unfolds without percussion. The cultural grounding through which Sembene compositely develops Fara Tine’s role in the film is on display in Arẹmu’s song. The contemporary musician embodies the spirit of the griot (or Yoruba akígbe/arọ΄kin) by putting out a long-playing record for sale in mid-twentieth century Nigeria and singing of events over a century old as if he is a living witness. There is a similar conceit in Senghor’s long poem “Shaka,” in which the Zulu general is shown having a dialogue with a white man, and Senghor’s poetic persona becomes the mediator of that dialogue. The adaptation of the poem into the opera “Chaka” by the Nigerian composer Akin Euba changes the character of the griot figure somewhat. But this is mostly a result of the conventions of an opera as a form, and with the right conditions, those changes will not stand in the way of a productive comparison.15 The process of aesthetic mediation that each artist puts to work in these cases further underscores the pertinence of S.oyinka’s essay discussed in chapter 1. The essay, we know, is notable for its theoretical investment in discontinuity, as S.oyinka considers the complex transformations through

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which traditional rites and festivals took on new theatrical forms in the colonial period in West Africa. This comparison with S.oyinka’s argument is important because what film theorists call “continuity editing” and Rosen discusses extensively as “analytic editing” (more will be said about his argument later) is held to advance formally coherent or progressive narrative. Sembene’s nonstandard musical composition and retrospective use of historical facts add complexity to the assumed chronology of his narrative. An analogy may be established in this creative use of discontinuity in Ceddo with the unpremeditated discovery of Pan-African solidarity between Africans and West Indian soldiers at the conclusion of The Healers by Armah. Neil Lazarus’s reading of this passage (1999, 196) sits comfortably with Dibango’s statement in his interview with Berrian about a kind of discontinuous Pan-African solidarity. The force of Fara Tine’s mediatory role receives further boost in the film through another sign that shows Sembene’s empathy toward subjugated sensibilities. This sign is the samp, an object that serves as a symbol of contest. It is a medium which is spoken of as having contents; it is a text which has been imbued with a message. At the top of this staff is a carved female figure, an important sign in light of the final action of the film. The Muslims scorn this medium of communication, but the nominally traditional folks still subscribe to the discourse it imparts. When carried vertically it signifies war, and when held horizontally it means that an important soldier has died in combat. It thus complements the positioning of Fara Tine’s xalam, as indicated earlier. For nearly five minutes after Thioub Biram, the king’s son, is killed, only the repetitive chant of “Allah!” fills the film’s soundscape amidst the fitting out of Saxewar for another assault on the ceddo. When the recovered body of a fallen soldier is brought back, the body dangles horizontally across the horse’s back, its supine position imitating that of the samp. This image has a force as potent as the chant of “Allah” following a defeat because the ceddo are the Muslims’ paramount adversary. Beyond the samp, however, the film does not develop an endogenous discourse to match the capacity of the Koran and the Bible as cogent grounds for rational and sensorial experiences. During the long, invisible preparation for jihad, the Muslims’ base, day and night, is lively with people either learning the Koran or reciting Arabic verses. The fantastic sequence of the Catholic priest projecting Madior as a vanguard of the faith is explicitly developed through the chorale of St. Joseph de Cluny in Dakar, chanted by Julien Jaga, as seen in the end credits. In Vieyra’s

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documentary Behind the Scenes, a short sequence shows some of the crew members, including Carrie Sembene (the director’s wife and occasional translator), in a mass. This mass is an actual event, most likely recorded on site and coincident with the filming. Once the subjugation of Demba War’s court is assured, the Imam still bids his time. Meanwhile, the unity of the ceddo disintegrates as individuals are hard-pressed to make personal deals or give in to the new systems of domination. Notably, the ceddo are the ones who try for a truce, perhaps because they are concerned about the divisions within society. Yet they are also not opposed to trading humans for arms and ammunitions. Some resolve to convert; others, like the Seneen clan, choose to go into exile, while the rest opt for selling slaves in exchange for weapons. Possibly out of political optimism, Sembene, appearing in a cameo and soon to be renamed Ibrahima, is shown deliberating with the ceddo. He is the one voicing a note of caution: “Sacrificing one’s children to save one’s life is a rude test for a father.” Inter lude: “The Ca mer a in a n Open Sk y ” Of the different writings on the film, Phillip Rosen’s essay “Making a Nation in Sembene’s Ceddo” (1993) stands out as a searching, analytically strong discussion in cinematic and historical terms. While participating in the interest in the imaginative contours of nation-making in the wake of Benedict Anderson’s classic thesis, Rosen’s essay takes the film on its own terms, seeing a link between the constructedness of its editing style and the narrative approach that, for the argument in this chapter, rests solidly on composition. Rosen focuses on the relationship between the film’s visual style and the directness of its editing, and writes: “Along with the exterior location shooting and choices of short scales and camera positions, [the horizontal organization of movement] helps emphasize both the flatness of the ground and the spaciousness of mise-en-scène” (148–149). Arguing further that, for Sembene, “history is to be comprehended as the interplay of collective groups and forces” (149), Rosen undertakes an extended analysis of editing choices in the film. He argues that these choices deviate “from standard Western analytic découpage but, from a different perspective, [. . . manifest] Sembene’s solution to the problem of clearly articulating spaces while maintaining the collectivization of

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discourses associated by the film with African tradition” (155). From this perspective, the composition of the first major court scene allows Sembene to stretch the 180-degree rule of reverse shot, pushing the logical points of that rule (for example, the presence of the two European characters) outside the enclosure of the highly verbalized world of formal, courtly discourse. Some exchanges are deliberately theatricalized while others, such as the contestations over royal succession that Jaraaf intermediates, are triangulated between the two princes and the griot. Another example occurs when characters speak directly to the camera even though they are addressing a figure within the enclosure. Thus, the classical 180-degree rule becomes irrelevant, Rosen writes, “as the film cuts to all sides of the triangle, generally centering frontally whichever of the three is speaking, to theatricalize the scene further” (156). This discussion of analytic editing informed by standard cinematic strategies of narrative and characterization seems, to me, to reinforce the composite editing that Sembene uses in the film. The composite editing is a mixture, and perhaps a dialogue, of two technical kinds of decision-making: the classic analytical form fostered by the need to tell a mimetically comprehensible story, common in Sembene’s work, and the tactical kind of editing imposed by the constraints of mégotage, as heard in Sembene’s disclosures about editing in Vieyra’s documentary. In one important sense, as a work of composition, the drama of Ceddo is a series of discordant events spread over several centuries condensed into one incident—ignited by the news of the kidnapping of Princess Dior Yacine—and enacted under the sun in a multiplicity of overlapping positions. The first four minutes of the film unfold as mime, scored with music. A girl is seen bathing. Women are going to the farm or the market. It is the humdrum life of daily routine and transaction (including the trade in slaves) of the kind seen in the opening sequence of most of the director’s work. Until the news of the kidnapping breaks. Shot during the dry season and making an excellent use of the spaciousness of the Sahel without sliding for a moment into the ethnographic mode often criticized by scholars of African cinema (Ukadike 1994; Diawara 1994), Ceddo creates an echo for works such as Yeelen (1987) with the sepia tone of its photography. The idea of filming in one place and time—the dry season, in an expanse of land with minimal set design—works beautifully to accentuate the historical dimensions of the film. Forever a realist, Sembene has put this choice down to the need to save money since changing

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designs, costumes, and seasons, requires cost. The second technical issue about editing, a function of the demands of mégotage, is perhaps the most vexing issue in Vieyra’s documentary, and the filmmaker confronts it with a forthrightness that underscores the necessity of a pragmatic approach to editing. With an exchange between Sembene and his editor, Florence Eymon, fading into the background, Vieyra asks, “What is editing, according to you?” “It’s more than creation,” Sembene responds, it’s all about suffering. It’s like giving birth, actually. All we have done until now, has been something we’ve imagined; we’ve prepared and improvised, but editing cannot be improvised. The very logic of pictures makes the story consistent. What you don’t have, it’s like a potluck supper; you only find what you bring. That’s why you only work under pressure. If you add a shot, it brings something, but if you remove a shot, it destroys what you have planned for the movie. I think that it’s the only moment when film creation becomes something concrete. Editing is not only about pictures; it’s about showing pictures with the sounds. A five- or four-second event can be forgotten. But a sound can bring back a picture in the viewer’s consciousness and a link can be made with the story you’re seeing. I think editing is the most difficult thing. (5.07–6.15)

After a brief comment and a question directed at Georges Caristan, the film’s cinematographer, Vieyra returns to Sembene, who says, How many miles are there between Paris and Dakar? So we don’t know what has been done, we don’t see the dailies. So we deal with what we have here. The difficulties are great and numerous. One shot has to be done again, but we can’t do it again. We wanted to have a sundown between the trees, but we don’t have it. We could have filmed a look, if the actor had been around. We could have filmed the sequence again. These are the difficulties we face. This also includes working with people who are not in the same cultural area. (7.49–8.29)

This elaborate exchange about editing, or generally about technical issues in filming, reinforces the experience of African filmmakers at a time when they could only work with the celluloid-formatted camera that created a hit-or-miss situation in compositional terms. Tunde Kelani shares a similar story about digital media’s retrospective revolution, as we shall see in the next chapter. In relation to the present discussion, the dialogue between Vieyra and the crew of Ceddo sets a compelling premise for appreciating the second manifestation of composition in the film, the effects

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achieved through the unconventional combination musical score and the soundtrack, and editing’s mediatory role in it. For a historically and thematically specific narrative, Ceddo is significant for including a soundtrack which suggests a musical composition not adhering to any historical moment. The music blends African American gospel, jazz, and Wolof musical traditions into a sonic assemblage in keeping with the aesthetic principles of the film. As a complement to the collaboration on editing that Sembene explains to Vieyra, there is a record of the partnership pertaining to music and soundtrack in the film. In an innovative and informative essay titled “Manu Dibango and Ceddo’s Transatlantic Soundscape,” the scholar Brenda Berrian (2004) explicitly discusses this collaboration between Sembene and Manu Dibango, the celebrated Cameroonian musician and composer who was based in Abidjan at the time. According to Berrian, Sembene had just listened to Dibango’s newly released Baobab Sunset, a title evocative of the sensual world of Ceddo, and was convinced that this was the right musician for his work in progress. Never mind the irony that the album was based on an evening with President Senghor. The relationship was marked as much by understanding as by disagreement and artistic tension. “The Sembene-Dibango partnership was hardly a smooth one,” Berrian observes. “Although Dibango was enthusiastic about the Ceddo film script, he and Sembene often disagreed on the rhythms and instrumentation . . . Sometimes, as soon as [Dibango] had finished composing cues for 22 or 44 seconds, Sembene would ask him to cut them to either 20 or 40 seconds” (2004, 143). Sembene was apparently also frustrated with the partnership. When interviewer Ulrich Gregor enthuses over the music, he responds: “Actually, it’s not music. Manu Dibango recorded it in three days and nights especially for the film. With bottles . . . it’s not music connected with dance . . . it’s much more noises, rhythms, repeated. A harmony had to be established between sounds and rhythms. It wasn’t supposed to be music in any sense resembling African, European, or American music” (2008, 110). Both reached a compromise only when Sembene brought an old recording of Senegalese music on which Dibango based the film’s music plan while imposing his own vision on the “soundscape”—Berrian’s preferred term. Known for his own histrionic tendencies, the Afro-Jazz exponent recalls that composing “the music was one of the difficult jobs in my career but it caused me to know more about myself and what I was capable of doing” (143–144).

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Oddly, this information comes through only in Berrian’s interview with Dibango, who omits the entire episode in his extensive reflections on his bittersweet experience in Abidjan in Three Kilos of Coffee (1994, 95–104). The album Baobab Sunset is also missing from the discography section of the autobiography, but the version on YouTube, titled Baobab Sun7 (Sunsept), has a 1995 release date. The uncertain mix of nondiegetic xylophone and keyboard sounds in the opening scene of a young woman bathing (repeated when Princess Dior Yacine goes bathing soon after the jihad scene) can be heard distinctly under the standard Afro-Jazz instrumentals in the 1995 version. Call it noise or music, the composition suits the film well, and I agree with Berrian’s claim that the different elements of “filmic representation” are inseparable insofar as the soundscape is concerned. Its generic openness matches the indefinite time and space in which the story takes place, and the different elements that constitute the film in visual, aural, and sonic terms are as composite as the repetitive noises and rhythms that emerge harmoniously in the diegesis. Under the cover of darkness, with the garments of the Imam’s followers and the pages of the Koran as the only white objects on the screen, the four nobles appear to confide in the Imam, the diegetic sounds of Koranic recitation accompanying their mimed actions. It turns out that they have only come to confirm to him what his followers have shared: the ceddo are planning to attack. This scene of confidential information is a cinematic contraction of the historical sequencing of the capitulation of Black kings, according to Cheik Anta Diop’s “peaceful penetration” thesis in Precolonial Black Africa (1987, 162–165). The Imam has no time left, so he directs his followers to mount a jihad, while handing out his injunctions: “Fight against them. It is a jihad. Be firm but tolerant with those who submit to us. As for those who hold out, trade them for weapons. If you’re killed, you will have accomplished an act of faith, and you will go to Paradise” (1.22.04–1.22.21). Among the first direct actions initiating the jihad sequence is the Imam bringing the samp, the traditional symbol of mutually comprehensible communication, and throwing it onto a pyre, with the sound of Koranic recitation getting louder. For the next three minutes, all is fire, burning, and stampede. The soundscape comes alive, and the rising wail of the gospel music takes the place of the Koranic chant. Fighters go to get guns; a horde descends on the ramshackle church and kills off the Catholic priest in an unremarked sign of the brutality of empire. The fact that the

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slaver and the priest are two white men who often sit together at public events does not guarantee racial or class solidarity. As multiple fires rage and livestock thrash about, Arthur Simms’s haunting “I’ll Make It Home Someday,” rises steadily, soaring above the spectacle. The physical landscape is a despoliation of lives and livestock, and it is not long before the vultures descend on the scene of carnage. The cinematic scope of this aftermath is not very wide, being of such intensity that the sound of destruction and sonorous music is all there is to hear. In sensorial terms, the soundtrack packs a punch and recalls what transpires in the two-minute mime sequence preceding the declaration of jihad. It is an epic sweep of many historical moments, and some of these have been carefully documented in relevant accounts of West African history in the writings of Barry, Diop, and others, as the historical ceddo were not subdued in one single battle. In this decisive confrontation, the jihad takes up the entire frame. The time for dialogue has long passed with the ejection of the ceddo representatives from the king’s council on the orders of the Imam. There is no battle in the real sense; there is a wholly visible scene of destruction. The seven-odd minute sequence of jihad is of such cinematic and political charge that, in sheer look, the classic montage overwhelms the hit-or-miss effects of the mégotage. Sembene delivers a superbly constructed set piece to complement Diop’s assessment of the historic battle between Ahmadu Sheiku and Lat Dior (Kajoor). “The Tuculors . . . fought while singing hymns that had a profound effect on the soldiers and their enemies,” Diop writes. “The Tuculors were fanaticized, the Cayorians terrified. The secular pseudo-nationalism of the latter, their mundane tieddo [ceddo] spirit, very quickly fell before the unshakeable faith of the Tuculors who, of course, were convinced that they would go directly to Paradise” (Diop 1987, 170). The jihad results in a refugee situation, the internal displacement of peoples that has historically been a feature of African lives in times of crisis. The discussions around a defensive plan of action among the ceddo prior to the attack were primed for this eventuality and are indicative of the extent of the Islamic penetration of African society in psychological terms. On the morrow of the Islamic triumph, Jaraaf, the official griot, attempts to change sides and assume the role of mouthpiece for the new order. But the Imam unceremoniously puts him and the rest of the nowvanquished traditional nobles in their place. The defeat of the ceddo occurs simultaneously with the ceremony of Islamic conversion, although

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in real time, the Imam’s seizure of power occurs before the fight in which the ceddo leader is defeated. Notably, Fara Tine, the unspeaking griotmessenger accompanying the leader of the ceddo, is not seen or heard from again once that leader is killed. But his job is done. The Muslims emerging victorious, the Imam hands out the new decrees: “Fetishism and idolatry are forbidden, and their worship is forbidden. You must no longer cherish them. Debauch [sic] and drinking are forbidden. I forbid you to make reproductions of human beings in any form, be it metal or wood. Do not wear human faces on your garments. I want no more of that. You must pray five times a day. Your children, boys and girls, must learn the Quran” (1.36.01–1.36.51). This formal declaration of theocratic rule occurs within the scope of another set piece: the long, exquisitely filmed ceremony of conversion in the wake of triumph. The renaming and shaving of the heads of the ceddo— without regard to age, gender, or social position—is a condensation of a traumatic episode, the psychically enervating experience of being forced to give up one’s identity. The sight of Fara Diogomay, the implacable ceddo spokesperson from the earlier court scenes, regarding the detritus of his shaved hair and headwear in his palms, provides a weighty image of this trauma. The recurrent sound of the cries of an infant whenever the ceddo are gathered is another instance of this trauma, occurring as sound rather than as an image, with a jarring effect at one with Simms’s gospel song soundtrack, the aural coding of jihadi destruction. The scene takes place under an open sky in what feels like late morning to early afternoon. Unlike the previous sequence, dominated by the gospel track, the diegetic sound in this sequence is the sound of blade being sharpened on bare palms, its constant, grating swish becoming indistinguishable from the rattle percussion in Dibango’s more elaborate audio mix. A mass of people gathers before the Imam and his court, and for the first time, we see a formal separation of the population on the basis of gender. Adults with bald pates are blessed with rosary placed on their bent heads and named like infants. Formal and traumatic as it is, this scene of conversion occurs earlier on a smaller scale, when the entire family of a leading member of the ceddo voluntarily submits to conversion, just before the series of discreet exchanges of information that leads the Imam to raise an alarm about a ceddo attack. Each time a person gets a Muslim name, the special syncopated sound created by Dibango punctuates the incident, as if cheering the renaming. It is melodious, soothing, but it is not the kind of music to which one can dance.

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Fig. 3.2. Fara Diogomay’s shaved hair. Ceddo. 1977.

The same sound returns, elaborated with the gospel score in a more jarring way, when the slaves are branded. This time, it serves the distinct though discontinuous purpose of suturing historical memory. Rosen discusses this musical insertion in relation to the artistic vision of the film as part of the larger tactic of “a certain fluidity of historical temporality [joining] the collective positionality of the film to an active historiographic one” (1993, 161). Just as the Catholic priest’s fantasies of a dominantly Christian society (about which we shall hear more below) present a version of history that did not come to pass, the gospel song “mediates between indigenous African music and Dibango’s jazz” (161), creating a flashforward awareness of a history to emerge from the current action in the film—the production of mass enslavement. The song’s thematic and perceptual code is projected forward into the world and culture of the Black diaspora, a culture that the African American descendants of the enslaved will create in the form of jazz and gospel music, and without which the film, such as it is, is incomplete. A film with tremendous investment in history and narrative, Ceddo devotes a substantial amount of diegetic time in these sequences to mimes, chants, recitations, whispers, and spectacles, all structured with the panoply of music and soundtrack. This attention to minimally verbalized

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communication indicates Sembene’s interest in a composite idea of editing. The options relating to editing in these elaborate, minimally dialogic scenes of subjection are suited to the idea of composition to the extent that the unique, repetitive soundtrack fosters narrative coherence at the most unexpected turns. They also link the story’s culmination in the rise of “the new king” (as Jaraaf calls the Imam) to the third and final manifestation of composition in the film. The retrospective transpositions of incidents through fantastic projections from the perspectives of both the Catholic priest and Princess Dior Yacine reorient the story to a dialectical positioning that is a signature of Sembene’s cinema. Even before the film’s central conflict concentrates on Demba War’s court, daily life is shown to revolve around the trade in slaves for weapons and other goods. At the nearby church with hardly a congregant, an attendant waters newly planted flowers. Meanwhile, the plants grow steadily into trees. The appearance of an aggrieved Madior at the church, however, transforms the perspective from which the scene is experienced. Regarding the man before him, the priest goes into a dreamlike vision, showing the inside dome of a cathedral with Christian imagery of all-Black angelic figures. The vision expands further. With his akwete-themed apparel, Madior administers the communion, and each of the dignitaries—Demba War, Fara Diogomay, Dior Yacine, and the Imam—takes communion with him. Given the fantasy of conversion that the priest entertains upon seeing Madior at his site, the tree-planting earlier in the film serves perhaps as a metaphor for the act of proselytization and the assumption that the Christian faith holds the future. In his reading of this sequence, Rosen argues that the film presents “a version of the priest’s ‘dream’ that exceeds his knowledge and therefore psychological motivations in his interiority” and that the reality effects of the documentary style imply “a kind of historically shocking false flashforward, directed at a spectator who knows that modern Senegal is overwhelmingly Muslim” (160; original emphasis). The priest’s fantasy of a wholly Christian Senegalese society might not have been fulfilled, as Rosen argues, but there remains in its place something more complex and truer of the country’s reality than that projected future. This is the fact of ecumenism, the material state of things in which citizens of Senegal live together, not without friction, but without abandoning their religious convictions. This fact is clearly dramatized in films that came in the wake of Ceddo. There is the conflict at the center of Guelwaar involving the mistaken

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burial of a Catholic in a Muslim cemetery and, on a less dramatic tscale, the didactic moment in Faat Kine when a Muslim looking to observe his prayers is handed a prayer mat by Kine’s fueling-station assistant wearing a necklace with a cross as pendant, and the Muslim cries Allahu Akbar! There are equally suggestive signs, even in Ceddo. In the mass that Madior presides over (in the priest’s fantasy), the staff he holds is topped with the same figure in the samp, and Sembene offers a revealing comment about his perception of Christianity’s place in the continent at large.16 The presence of Catholicism in the film remains a striking anachronism, at least insofar as it operates alongside Islam, obviously the more powerful and decisive force in the changes wrought on the kingdom. But that is true only from the point of view of standard history. As another instance of composition, Sembene unsettles official chronology not so much by moving Christianity out of its historical sequence, since the French first camped in St. Louis in 1659, nearly four decades before the rise of Sunkabe Fall in 1695 (Barry 1998). Rather, this supposed anachronism serves the interest of a composite history through which people currently live. In the material question of power in contemporary Senegal, Christianity occupies an important position, delicately balanced against Islam. It makes sense that Madior aligns himself with Christianity, although his desperate search for power, depicted in this fantasy, is a mere political calculation. The social dimension of the fantasy is borne out in the mass held in the sun, a matter of religion as lived, imposed experience. The soundtrack in the sequence is a mix of the original score and the chorale of St. Joseph de Cluny in Dakar, vocalized by Julien Jaga. The emphasis on fantasy is different with Princess Dior Yacine. It is not a fantasy of power, naked or subtle. A human rather than abstract character, perhaps second only to Madior in self-possession, the princess’ command of psychological depth exceeds that of the priest in the sense that we know what she thinks of her condition. If, as S.oyinka famously argues, Sembene’s characters are created out of abstractions, Dior Yacine strolls across the face of Ceddo as a flesh-and-blood human being unlike the character Bakayoko in God’s Bits of Wood, who is the basis of S.oyinka’s claim (S.oyinka 1976, 117). The leader of the ceddo has no name. This is a choice on Sembene’s part to characterize this figure as an archetype rather than a personality, the better to underscore the sentiments (pseudopopulism/ secularism) of the movement. Not so with Princess Dior Yacine. All majesty and royal indignation, the princess does not hide her sense of outrage

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at the ceddo’s audacity in kidnapping her. In the scene where she and the ceddo leader engage in a ritualized exchange about why she is being held, using Fara Tine as the mediator, she unmistakably puts the lowly ceddo in his place. When Saxewar boasts to her of having killed the ceddo combatant, she is unperturbed but swears that she will walk over the man’s corpse to mitigate the insulting act of kidnap. However, the moment the news of her father’s suspicious death reaches her, Dior Yacine clamps up and does not say another word for the rest of the film. Instead, she channels her desires and fears through silence and, significantly, through the fantastic projections. Bare-breasted and lounging on a hammock, she regards a hanging gourd, which she takes down, then approaches the combatant. Fara Tine looks on. Offering her captor a drink of water on her knees is a complex gesture of gendered submission (her bared breasts have beguiling erotic implications as well) and filial solidarity. It is a ruse, however, as she lowers herself at his feet and tries to seize his gun. He is quick to anticipate the move, stopping her and forcing the three of them to maintain the tension in silence. The scene later replays itself, and its signification breaks into two. First, we see it as a fantastic projection, when she offers the water as a gesture of welcome now on her feet and fully dressed. She could as well pass for the ceddo combatant’s wife, welcoming her victorious soldier home. But it is at this moment, in cinematic real time, that the ceddo leader is eventually killed in combat, and the diegetic sound of gunshot brings the princess’ fantasy to a shocking, jolting end. Partly as a result of her growing admiration for the ceddo’s strict adherence to principles and social rituals, partly due to her dissatisfaction with the disintegration of her family, the princess grows as a character. Her royal status may remain intact, but she has been thrown by circumstances among the lower castes, and she is thinking through her options. The second part of Dior Yacine’s planned action against the ceddo combatant, the seizing of the gun, foreshadows the film’s closing act, when she grabs a gun from one of the Imam’s bodyguards and shoots the man who has usurped her father’s throne. The actions of the sentient members of the crowd show that solidarity has developed between her and the ceddo. To preempt possible reprisal from the Imam’s followers, some seize guns from the guards while others block nozzles with their mouths. All of this happens quickly, as is the case with Dior Yacine’s action. Despite its duration in narrative time, slowed down through slow motion and ending in

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Sembene’s signature freeze-frame, her arrival and shooting of the Imam is best understood as a swift, radical move. It is an affirmative revolutionary act to which Sembene shifts the emphasis that has been placed on the film’s diverse sequences of fantastic projections. It is also a double compression of time, the finalizing of months, perhaps years, of preparation for change of which her kidnapping and the unfolding events up till that moment can be read as signals. The several attempts she makes to revolt against the ceddo capturing her—in act, gesture, and rhetoric—do as much to put her on the side of the revolt as to present her as another opportune agent of resistance. Whether she does this as revenge for the usurpation of her family’s powers or for the foul play of her father’s questionable death from snakebite does not much matter. Sembene’s perception of this character’s role in the general frame of the film is instructive. In his contribution during the aforementioned writers’ panel at Amherst College, the filmmaker offers the following anecdote, with a specific reference to S.oyinka’s comments on first seeing the film: “When I made Ceddo, my friend S.oyinka saw the film in the United States. He was asked what he thought of it and he said he would have forbidden it to be shown . . . There was also the Salman Rushdie affair. In Nigeria S.oyinka came out in favor of Rushdie, in the name of liberty. The imams of Nigeria told him not to speak out and not to show solidarity with Rushdie. When I saw him, I told him: ‘If you don’t kill the imam and if your wife doesn’t kill him, it’s the imam that will kill you’” (1993, 61). On another level, Dior Yacine’s act represents an affirmation of the matrilineal system or, at any rate, the significance of female courage in radical intervention where men have failed. The act accords with the preference of Madior, who survives in the film (or, at any rate, is not shown as having been killed), but it is also a common theme in Sembene’s work, culminating in the indomitable protagonists of Faat Kine and Moolaadé, his two final films. The film’s radical though stalemated ending indicates Sembene’s overall goal of investing the ceddo with a positive ideological force in excess of their actual historical status. The ceddo, according to Barry, symbolize “the reign of violence in political relationships between and within states . . . [and were responsible for] organized, massive manhunts that created objective conditions for this violence” including the large-scale deportations of the Atlantic slave trade (1998, 81). They operated in a militarized, internally differentiated world of classes and castes. The film’s

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deployment of the concept in a composite form elides this complexity to a great extent. Even while showing that the ceddo participate in trading slaves for weapons, the film’s final sequence unfolds in a manner that elicits understanding, if not outright sympathy, toward this bastion of resistance. This is where I find Sembene’s approach to composition to advance an anti-imperialist goal in the film. Ceddo situates Fara Tine as a silent, indispensable memory of the resistance who nevertheless refuses to present a celebratory image of the ceddo’s military prowess, which Africanist historiography shows to be the forte of the griot. This is a subtle and powerfully immanent critique, a most aesthetically judicious way of assessing the griot’s practice. For example, discussing the scale of the poetic invocation of a famous ceddo general, Samba Gelaajo Jeegi (1725–1731), Barry observes that the epic “is recalled with no awareness of its context . . . [one] dominated by the violence of the slave trade, which was the real reason behind the emergence of this type of warlord, steeped in the ceddo ethos” (90). The shift in the montage from the militarist, masculine world of the ceddo warriors to the radical act of the princess reinforces this optimistic critique, but the shift also ensures that the historical co-option of Muslims by ceddo regimes is elided. Therefore, the character of the ceddo in the film is a composite: collective, dissentious, violent yet respectful of customary procedure. At the same time, these characteristics are liable to be unstable in the prevalent order of the day. Having explicitly demonstrated the triumph of Islam, however, and given plenty of airtime to diverse emblems of the religion, the director feels assured to play up the image of African resistance as a gesture to the future. He is clearly not a misty-eyed defender of tradition, but we know from his lifework that resistance through culture is a fond item in his Marxist or materialist arsenal. This chapter began with a reflection on Jeyifo’s analysis of the nature and features of the fictional genealogies of African colonial history. In addition to affirming Jeyifo’s submission that African postcolonial elites have not succeeded in legitimizing their history of collaboration in fictional works, I think that texts such as Ceddo and Migritude show the multifaceted nature of imperialism, in effect supplementing the perspectives obtainable in the “minor paradigm” of African fictions that Jeyifo discusses. That they are not works of fiction may have something to do with this posture, but that is only a partial explanation. Fara Tine’s paradoxical position— spatially of the ceddo’s party but temporally a medium of unbiased

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historical experience—is a felt cultural outlook demonstrated through comparisons with other West African examples of customary practices in militarized societies, such as southwestern Nigeria in the nineteenth century. The point is that such intra-African manifestations of practices best understood as critical praise also suggest the multifaceted character of imperialism and of the relationship between the artist and the state as a political formation. Composition is the central creative mode through which these critiques are achieved, although the achievement occurs within the specificity of form. In the film, the link is between composition and editing, a link made manifest through Sembene’s elaborate discussion about editing earlier in Vieyra’s L’Envers du Décor. Speaking further in the interview, Sembene says that “I rely on [my editor] for a certain technical logic. As for sensitivity and emotions, we try to understand and she helps me . . . It’s more subtle, but it’s a collaboration between the editor who isn’t familiar with the culture and the African director” (11.11–11.43). It is necessary to relate this point more closely to what Patel says about putting the Migritude poems up in performance, and the technical differences between cinematic editing (montage) and editing in print may not be easily smoothed over. However, these important distinctions do not invalidate self-conscious attentions to context, indeed to the need to shape context, as fundamental to the choices that African artists make in and out of particular creative moods. In fact, if these comparisons do anything, they abundantly reinforce those attentions and make them indispensable to productive appreciation of the work in light of such manifest efforts of composition. When constructed through the sorts of composition that Sembene and Patel undertake, historical memory leaves room for new questions and, with the availability of formats other than print for storytelling, provides an occasion for addressing such questions. Historical memory being the ideological grounds on which the Senegalese master threshes his antiimperial ideas in Ceddo, the case can be made that Akinwumi Is.ọla, standing on a ground adjacent to Patel’s in relation to the festival curators, gets on this track as well. In adapting his work—novel and drama—to cinema, the Nigerian writer and scholar refreshes history in the process of revitalizing a cultural ecosystem he considers to be under foreign assault. Adaptation affords him the opportunity to reimagine or rewrite the past. His attitude toward Ibadan history is not as overtly critical as in Sembene’s film, but the chance he gets at a rewrite yields results that are consequential for historical interpretation.

FOUR

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ADAPTATION OR REMAKE New Formats for Old Prints

Introduction: Forces of R eproduction The second entry for the year 1997 in the Biographical Outline section, actually a chronology, of Nigerian writer and scholar Akinwumi Is. ọla, in an edited volume dedicated to his career, lists him as “direct[ing] the recording of the adaptation of his novel, Ó Le Kú, for Mainframe Video Film Productions” (2008, 475). The use of the verb “direct” in that entry is neither accidental nor accurate. Acclaimed director Tunde Kelani (popularly called TK), not Is. ọla, was the director of the film adaptation of the novel, but the writer obviously viewed his oversight role in the production in such terms that it amounted to orienting the process in specific cultural directions. A novelist, poet, and playwright writing primarily in Yoruba, Is. ọla was a longstanding advocate for multimedia, specifically for making works of art available in any format to which an artist might have access. This hands-on, interventionist advocacy was an ingrained creative practice in his intellectual life, and in this chapter, adaptation becomes the mode through which this practice manifests itself. In the diverse processes through which Is. ọla and the Senegalese writer-director Joseph Gaï Ramaka brought works extant in print into the medium of motion picture, adaptation plays a central role as a mode of creative practice. From this perspective, two impulses in contemporary African arts pertaining to the shaping impact of socioeconomic and institutional volatilities come fully into light. The first of these impulses is the need to revitalize a culture by retrieving and reformatting texts that

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were not guaranteed to last, given the combination of class orientation, environment, and socioeconomic volatilities. The second is the ideological and institutional wrestling between the poetic imagination and the social as the ground on which production, the complex process of making a work exist in the world, takes place. This latter issue is a thorny one in contemporary African and postcolonial art, and it is in full display in the production choices of Ramaka’s career. In Is. ọla’s case, an investment in cultural preservation both motivates and is driven by the choice, early in his career, to write in Yoruba, his mother tongue. This puts him in the same camp as other writer-intellectuals profiled in the previous chapters, such as Sembene, Head, Fẹla, and Armah, each making a specific creative choice in the nexus of production and dissemination. These individuals, for a variety of reasons, are not content to just write, compose, publish, and move on to the next book or album, but are invested in taking creative actions that contribute to the reception of those works. In her book A Theory of Adaptation, Linda Hutcheon considers three perspectives on adaptation as a mode of creation (2006, 7–8). Of these, the second definition that sees adaptation as “a process of creation” seems to speak most suitably to what Is. ọla undertakes in the film versions of Ó Le Kú and Ẹfúns.etán Aníwúrà. That is, he favors the preservation of stories that are worth knowing but will not necessarily speak to a new audience without creative “reanimation” (8). It is interesting that Hutcheon refers in her analysis to Mbye Cham’s discussion of adaptations in African cinema “as a way of preserving a rich heritage in an aural and visual mode,” with particular reference to the rhetorical characterization of Sembene as “a modern-day griot . . . using film to retell traditional stories” (8, 174). Both perspectives fit into the larger frame of creative practice, although, in the narrow sense of Hutcheon’s discussion, adaptation is too exorbitant a term to describe Sembene’s work.1 In this chapter and with respect to both Is. ọla and Ramaka, adaptation operates on two levels. It is the commonplace creative practice of bringing a work into another context, whether cultural or technological. The cultural variety (like Nigerian playwright Fẹmi Ọs.ọfisan adapting Ukranianborn Nikolai Gogol’s The Government Inspector as Who’s Afraid of S.olarin?) receives a great deal of attention in Hutcheon’s discussion. While some of this variety is at play in the following discussion, Is. ọla and Ramaka are equally invested in the other, technological kind of adaptation. Adaptation is a disposition to adjusting to new social circumstances, not a minor

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issue in the wide-ranging changes that various forms of technology have wrought on the production of postcolonial art in material and epistemic terms and of which digital culture stands as a current manifestation. In an important respect, this understanding of the mode of creative practice has implications for the discussion of platform in the next chapter as well. Our authors are creators in one sense and social actors in another sense, and while the two roles are intertwined, they are distinguishable on the basis of the specificities of writing and filmmaking as materially impacted acts of creation. In Ó Le Kú and Ẹfúns.etán Aníwúrà, two films adapted respectively from his novel and play published in the early 1970s, Is. ọla seeks to do something specific along this interventionist line. In particular, he sees and adopts new technologies as a means of revitalizing a society’s cultural resources by retrieving and reformatting texts not guaranteed to last, given a combination of socioeconomic and political conditions. In the two texts, Is. ọla not only takes advantage of a medium perceived to be more sustainable in the new media environment, but also takes liberty with the facts of cultural history by rewriting significant parts of the works. The new format of video or digital cinematography opens up vistas that once seemed impossible, even in the analog format of reverse film stock, which did not guarantee the possibility of reviewing dailies while the crew are on location. The limits that such strictures imposed on creativity became more astonishing with the benefit of hindsight gleaned from improved technology, as none other than Kelani was to discover after taking possession of his first digital cameras. He recalls in an interview years later: What is important to understand is that when I was shooting in celluloid, we did not have access to the means of production, in the sense that everything had to be imported. First, the technology had to be imported. Then, we’d do the shooting, then export the films for processing. The people who owned the technology, they could see the rushes on tape every morning, and see what they did the day before. In my own case, I would encounter the film only after the whole thing had been done. It was a hit-or-miss situation, and I had to do everything to stay close, as much as possible, to what we wanted, doing so largely on hunches. But now, I can shoot 35mm quality on digital media and see it almost immediately, and do all these previews the same day.2

What seems relatively feasible for Is. ọla becomes a matter of ideological and institutional wrestling for Ramaka, a fine cineaste noted for his

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adaptations. To focus on Ramaka’s early film So Be It (1997), an adaptation of S.oyinka’s The Strong Breed, is to show the many dimensions of a thorny issue in contemporary African and postcolonial art: the structural connection between the poetic, nonrealist imagination and the social as the ground on which production, the process of making a work exist in the world, takes place. The opportunity offered to Ramaka for producing an adaptation of The Strong Breed came out of practices of programming in cinema that prioritize thematic issues, in the present case on the theme of romantic love. Yet, given the aesthetic outlook of this director’s oeuvre, which is overall more poetic than mimetic, it was an opportunity squeezed out of complex negotiations. Production, the idea of making a work exist and matter in the social space, tends to displace high-minded aesthetic presumptions, and the diegesis of the film So Be It bears the marks of those negotiations. This short film is not Ramaka’s best-known work— that honor goes to Karmen Gei (2001)—but it provides the foundation for the longer work in institutional and aesthetic terms. The historical interest of this chapter also lays in telling a story about the conjoined fates of Nollywood and African cinema that digital technology has significantly reshaped, to mixed outcomes. The novel Ó Le Kú (1974) was Is. ọla’s first work of fiction to be published. Generically it is a work of campus romance, and it is rich in details characteristic of that genre and of the outlook of the author as a first-time novelist. A young undergraduate in the final years of his study, Ajani also faces challenges of that transitional period when a young male seeks a life partner. He has been going out with As.akẹ for a while when the novel begins, but not long after, another girl, Lọla, appears in his life to complicate his decision. Three-quarters of the way into the story, Ajani develops a romantic relationship with yet another female friend, S.ade, the one with whom he eventually ties the nuptial knot. The narrative pivots on these axes of relationship, involving different families and personalities, with ramifications beyond the campus of the University of Ibadan and beyond the standard expectations for a work of genre fiction. The question that this generic status of Ó Le Kú raises for an adaptation in the late 1990s is primarily about the cultural orientation in Is. ọla’s work as a writer. On the one hand, the novel and its ambience are notably about the fashions of undergraduate life, where sensuality takes priority due to the emotional and social aspects of that milieu. On the other hand, Is. ọla is temperamentally a traditionalist, and in time his interest in the integrity of African

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cultural practices came to acquire an equal, if not greater, priority in comparison with the aesthetic issues that are attributable to a literary genre. The emergence of video as a viable format for audiovisual production in Nigeria in the late 1980s fostered the mediation of these sentiments at the same period when the crisis in publishing dealt severe blows to works in print format. Is. ọla and Kelani had an unusual but providential collaboration starting with the film Kòs.eégbé (1995) and continuing through The Campus Queen (2004). Though they collaborated on Ẹfúns.etán Aníwúrà (2005), it was purely by contract. The actor Iyabọ Oguns.ọla, one of the widows of the dramatist Ishọla Oguns.ọla (“Dr. I-Sho Pepper”) who had the drama as a repertory item for nearly two decades, told me in an interview in August 2019 that Is. ọla contacted her about a new production of the play. She, in turn, approached Akintunde Ayẹni, proprietor of the herbal medicine company YEM-KEM, for sponsorship. Is.ọla’s account of how his relationship with Kelani developed is informative as a happy encounter between two people with similar aesthetic and cultural aims. In a video tribute that Kelani’s production company, Mainframe, released following Is. ọla’s death in April 2018, the writer discloses: “I think it was around 1995 or so that TK came to me to ask if he could use any of my stories to shoot into videofilms. That was the time I was thinking of what to do to further my original aim of conserving and safeguarding culture. I started by writing plays in Yoruba to preserve the language, and also concentrated on writing plays that could be performed on stage, that could reach the audience faster, than just writing poems or novels” (0.13–1.52).3 The films on which Is.ọla collaborated with Kelani are notable for this programmatic interest in culture as something to retrieve and keep alive (Ades.ọkan 2011). The sequences on letter writing (Agogo Èèwọ`), lectures on names and defense of African history (Ó Le Kú; The Campus Queen), and critiques of denigration of African cultural practices (Thunderbolt, etc.) are all pedagogical attempts to affirm this notion of culture, and there is more to say about them in due course. Ca mpus Love Although his formal appointment was in the African Languages department at the Ọbafẹmi Awolọwọ University at Ilé-Ifè., Is. ọla worked simultaneously and extensively in television starting in 1982. This was the year

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when one of his plays, Ayé Yẹ Wó.n Tán, was adapted for television as a thirteen-week serial and screened by the Nigerian Television Authority, NTA, in Ibadan. By this time, the drama Ẹfúns.etán Aníwúrà had become one of the most popular stage plays in Yoruba theater circles as part of the repertoire of the Oguns.ọla (traveling) Theater Company and was subsequently made into a film of the same title, directed by Bankọle Bello (1983). The production of the play in April 1982 was a command performance for the third anniversary of the establishment of Radio O-Y-O, the Ibadanbased broadcasting corporation of Ọyọ State.4 Originally scheduled for the Trenchard Hall at the University of Ibadan with a capacity for a thousand seats, the organizers shifted the performance to the Liberty Stadium at Oke-Ado when ticket sales convinced them that they had underestimated the significance of the play. An audience of over fourteen thousand attended the performance, writes the critic Biọdun Jeyifo, “in a festive, holiday mood” (1984, 108). Is. ọla’s account of the incident is more graphic, in part because what happened became decisive for his career choices. In an interview given to the poet Niyi Ọs.undare and videotaped during the 2001 African Literature Association conference in Richmond, Virginia, he provides instructive context for the unusual staging of the production: The initial plan [by management of the Broadcasting Corporation of Ọyọ State, BCOS] was to stage the play at the Trenchard Hall, University of Ibadan. Unfortunately, they found out on the performance day, after the governor had arrived, that the venue was too small to accommodate the people who had bought tickets for the play . . . Therefore they cancelled the performance that day. Few days later, the management of BCOS decided to stage the performance at the premises of the corporation itself [and] too many people turned up again, so much that the governor could not enter the second time . . . Therefore, they decided that the only place that could be used was the Liberty Stadium, and fourteen thousand people watched the play that day . . . From that time, I decided to write more plays than novels because a play could be performed almost immediately after being written. It has an immediate effect because it could reach the people at the same time. And it is for the same reason that I am now going into video film production. (2008, 455–456)5

The performance was also broadcast live on the radio. Within a few years, the same theater company also took on Kòs.eégbé (published the following year, with Ayé Yẹ Wó.n Tán) as its series in the Yoruba photoplay magazine Ató.ka. In the early 1990s, with his collaboration with NTA

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coming to an end, Is. ọla had plans for another series with the poet Adebayọ Faleti, which never got off the ground. These different involvements reveal a strong intellectual preference for deploying a variety of platforms to make work originally in print widely available, and Kelani’s appearance as a director of note provided an outlet for projects that Is.ọla had been constrained to leave on the drawing board. The change brought about by digital technology appeared, from this outlook, as just one more route to get to the market. A quicker one, guaranteed to avoid the slow-traffic delay normal in book publication and to reach a targeted clientele more effectively. This is adaptability, a widely shared social outlook within the Nigerian artistic community in the late 1980s, as the country’s cinema industry made the difficult but, in hindsight, inevitable transition to a video-based format of production. This transformation has a longer history than the changes set in motion by the economic dislocations of that period. In terms of the composition of literary works—fiction and drama—with different media in mind, the inclusion of graphics and illustrations in the novel Ó Le Kú can be seen as having admitted multiple audiences. Illustrations deepen the visual impact of the work and, in several circumstances, can leave an imaginative impression as powerfully affecting as the cold print.6 Furthermore, the novel Ó Le Kú was one of several Yoruba-language texts broadcast on the Radio O-Y-O in Ibadan in a twice-weekly “audiobook” program known as àyọkà. This was most likely the format in which unlettered folks encountered the story before it was adapted into film. To Is. ọla, therefore, the big-screen option only expanded the scope of this multimedia culture, and he was just one of several figures who embraced Kelani following the successful appearance of the director’s first video film, Ti Olúwa Nilè., in 1993. These cultural figures supported Kelani’s work, both for the intrinsic value of that work and for advancing their own. Writers and actors such as Faleti, Larinde Akinlè. yẹ, Wọle Amè. lè. , and Wale Ogunyẹmi either appeared in Kelani’s work (all were in the cast of Ó Le Kú) or wrote screenplays for some of his earliest films. Nearly all of them played a role in Nigerian theater and television, and Kelani worked with some of them in the 1980s, particularly on the film Ìwà, based on a play by Faleti. Even without making explicit statements in every case, all of them were, like Is. ọla, invested in the project of cultural revitalization that defines the playwright’s attitude to new technology. As this transitional period swung into steady gear, the general motivation

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was the need to put cheaper and more readily available video technology at the service of a filmmaking tradition that had hitherto depended on the celluloid, electromagnetic format of reverse film stock. That aim was achieved almost immediately because there had not been any real break in film production from the point of view of consumers and, in certain respects, producers.7 The changed context of production, however, immediately provided the pretext for different representational choices, including the reconstitution of traditional notions of authorship, as was the case with Is. ọla. Retiring as a professor of African literature and language, Is. ọla discovered that his books—fiction, poetry, drama, essay—were not only out of print but also no longer considered fashionable in one of the more vibrant literary cultures on the continent. Kelani, an astute reader of the cultural scene, was busy shopping for scripts sophisticated enough to improve the quality of filmmaking. This providential encounter would decisively shape the course of contemporary Nigerian cinema. Here is Is. ọla explaining his rationale in 2006, expanding the scope of the statement he made to Ọs.undare a few years before: “Since many generations have missed acquiring [certain] humane qualities in their culture, we have to find a way of teaching the adults and the children together on the same platform. And the best way to do that is to present these qualities through a medium that they would enjoy, like watching the video film or listening to songs” (Akinyẹmi 2008, 444; emphasis added). Not only were Kelani’s proclivities as an auteur confirmed by this collaboration, making him easily the most sought-after Nigerian director at the time, Is. ọla’s work also received an impetus from cinema being perceived as a mode of new (cultural) literacy. Except for Ti Olúwa Nilè. , his first video-formatted film, and the short films contracted for international television programming, all of Kelani’s works in the 1990s were adaptations from literary works. More than half of them were authored by Is. ọla, either as straightforward adaptations or as original screenplays. It is easy to think of this example as relating specifically to the technological template of cinema and its possibilities in enhancing a new oral culture. However, I think that it has implications for representation far beyond form in several ways. In the first place, it bears relation to the ideological choices open to Sembene when he opted to learn filmmaking in the early 1960s because he perceived the limitations of a book written in French in a situation of severe illiteracy, as seen in chapters 1 and 3. Or, for that matter,

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to Ngũgĩ when he cofounded the Kamĩrĩĩthũ theater project in the late 1970s in Kenya to broaden the scope and appeal of his work among the peasants.8 Is. ọla is thus an exemplar of the African author as initiator of creative practices tied to an ethical impulse. Indeed, he was very much attuned to the significant topics in the field of African literature, as exemplified in his 1992 essay dealing with the language question.9 In this case, the ethical impulse favors revitalizing “a literary ecosystem” (1992, 18) by retrieving and reformatting texts that are not guaranteed to endure in a situation where a variety of sociopolitical and economic volatilities have conspired to redefine cultural priorities. The second implication of the adaptation is that the pace of the film Ó Le Kú is novelistic, perhaps a sign of Is. ọla’s aesthetic preference, although a general interest in formal realism is characteristic of Kelani’s films preceding their collaboration. The structure of the film largely follows that of the novel in terms of the unfolding of the plot and order of importance attached to characters and events. In significant ways, this narrative pattern reinforces the primacy of print in the relay between the two media, perhaps a result of Is.ọla writing the screenplay. This aesthetic preference is also borne out in the use of period costume and the stylized delivery of the Yoruba language by the actors, starting from Is. ọla himself, appearing as a professor discussing the etymology of names.10 Thirdly, and ironically, this didactic sequence is not in the first and subsequent editions of the novel. Indeed, the professor who addresses students in this fashion in the relevant sections of novel is a teacher of French. His address to the class is limited to general information about the structure of class business for the school term. The following passage from the novel can illustrate the argument I am making here: “Ò.gá àgbà wọlé. Ajani kò tilè. gbó. ohun tó ńsọ mó.. Ọmọ yìí ló ńwò. Bí ò.gá ti ńsò.rò. lọ Ajani kọjú sí ẹni tó wà lé.gbè.é. rè., ó ní, ‘S.ùgbó.n àwọn ọmọ tó dáa kò.ò.kan wà ló.gbà yìí o’” (21–22).11 Narratively, the professor’s appearance and address to the class only provide the novel’s omniscient viewpoint an opportunity to focus on Ajani’s current romantic interest. It has little analytical content. In the film, however, not one but two professors appear before the class, and both appearances are notable for being short, didactic lectures, complemented by writings on the chalkboard.12 In a section of the novel where another lecturer appears, the narration is limited to a comment on preparations for exams, supplemented with general intertexual remarks about the satirical force of an unnamed novel by Mongo Beti, the Cameroonian writer. (Is. ọla

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wrote his BA thesis on Beti’s fiction.) Finally, both the pedagogical and stylized uses of Yoruba in the screenplay appear exorbitant in contrast to the extensive use of linguistic code-switching in the novel. Certainly, code-switching is a legitimate rhetorical device in a work conceived in the genre of campus romance, and Is. ọla as a young, first-time novelist deserves his slack for impressionistic writing. In the first two pages of the novel, no fewer than five English words occur, in dialogues as well as in narrative passages, all dutifully italicized.13 These and similar protocols are probably early signs of Is. ọla’s cultural sensitivity. Writing a novel in Yoruba in a milieu where the forces of education in English were strong, and having obtained a first degree in French, called for a particular kind of sensitivity to language. It would be a matter of finding confidence in one’s cultural tradition, even if responding to the professional demands of career required other gestures to that superintending educational milieu.14 In the novel, however, code-switching is also an indicator of social stratification, or class difference, as Owonibi argues. But the diegeses of Ó Le Kú are spectacularly and densely constructed, a function of both the ideological cues informing Is. ọla’s adaptational options and the specific means that the medium of cinema affords. Is. ọla and Kelani, his director, use a variety of media insertions within the main frame of adaptation to bring about this cinematically dense structure. The term “remediation” is what media scholars use to describe the process of placing specific media such as the radio, television, video, and so on to create new content, in the present case, a work of cinema (Moorman 2019; Gitelman 2006; Bolter and Grusin 1999). In the film, these media are mainly devices best suggested in the prior text (the novel), but which become realizable with the format of audiovisual communication, even if the explicit media that are part of the novelistic structure are now abridged or cast aside. They are production choices but, more specifically, in the form of media, suggesting an order of artifice quite different, at least in appearance, from those sequences structured as exercises in pedagogy. They are material because they show up as deliberate acts, part of an elaborate mode of creative practice, as if the producers were making the film, remaking the novel in visual terms, hands-on and manually, with the kind of media tool kit suddenly available. There are five such remediated insertions in the film. These include the appearance of the juju musician, Sir Shina Peters, as the performer during the “Ẹrẹbẹ Night” party; the images accompanying the recorded recitation of Ajani’s love poem to As.akẹ;

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the dance-drama performance which Ajani uses as a treat for As.akẹ; the television broadcast through which As.akẹ learns of Ajani’s marriage; and Ajani’s brother’s consultation with an Ifá priest. In the novel, the performing musician is the Afrobeat master Fẹla Anikulapo-Kuti, popular among Nigerian youths in the early 1970s (on the cusp of his oppositional music phase), at home with the kind of social music for which Peters was more suitable in the mid-1990s. The four remaining insertions deserve further exploration. As Ajani goes over old photos with his friend Ijaọla, commenting on the various girls he befriended, they come across one of As.akẹ, his current girlfriend. At that moment, the romantic protagonist breaks into wistful poetry and turns on a cassette player to play a poem previously recorded on tape. The present of the poem’s recitation in Ajani’s voice is intercut with a series of silent images, as if on tape as well, of him and As.akẹ serenading each other, giving solidity to the airy sound of a voice whose owner is no longer attentive to his friend sitting right next to him. In the novel, the love poem is similarly prerecorded, another indication of the author’s sensitivity to media usage in that context where the importance of print as a mode of communication was less precarious than would be the case in the latter half of the 1980s. The montage of silent images now adds life to the replay of the taped poem, but none of the scenes of romantic dalliance attempt to dramatize the lovers’ first encounter narrated in the poem. The remediation here manifests itself cinematically and lends to the film a stylized quality that had begun to mark Kelani’s work at this point in his career. The scene ends on a fade-out. In one of the most astute moves in Ó Le Kú aimed at deepening the adaptation as a work of cultural revitalization, Ajani attends a theatrical performance at Obis.ẹsan Hall with As.akẹ. The show, a dance-drama, tells the story of a young maiden, a princess, who falls in love with a stranger, to the king’s disapproval. By the time the story comes to a happy ending for the couple in the drama, its allegorical direction has become clear to the young couple in the audience, even as As.akẹ mildly takes exception to her boyfriend’s pointed comments about her own father. What makes this sequence so unique in the series of production choices in the film is that it takes place in Obis.ẹsan Hall, the legendary performance venue of record for the Ibadan elite in the 1970s and 1980s. It was the venue of Ogunde’s Moré. niké. /Àyànmó., the opera discussed in chapter 2. But, like most live theater halls, it had fallen on hard times by the time Nollywood came alive

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in the early 1990s. While the establishing shot of the outside wall displays the name in palette, using that venue for the mise en abyme has more than nostalgia value. Besides the allegorical force of the dance-drama, the blend of mime, drumming, choreography, and singing adds a striking aesthetic depth to the film as the carefully composed sequence breaks into the routine triangulation between Ajani’s dormitory and his lovers’ abodes. This shift is all the more intriguing because of what holds the same space in the novel. In the chapter with the most instances of code-switching, Ajani invites As.akẹ to a screening of The Sound of Music at Scala Cinema, a popular venue for filmgoers in the city and one in keeping with the characters’ fascination with being “cool.” As they plan their schedule, Ajani comments on the ticket price: “Kò lè pò. jù náà. Èmi ti wòó lé.è.mejì l’Ékò ní Roxy l’Apapa, s.ùgbó.n mo tún fé.é. wò ó lé.è.kan sí i. Bó bá jé. ti sinimá yẹn, ńkò fi s.eré rárá o” (39). (It can’t be that expensive. I have seen the film twice in Lagos, at Roxy Cinema in Apapa, but I want to see it one more time. When it comes to that film, I don’t take it lightly.) The story of the von Trapp family ends happily, as does the dance-drama, and As.akẹ wishes that she and Ajani could have a similar wedding. In the novel, they comment on the film more extensively after returning to Ajani’s dorm. The use of dance-drama in this adaptation, in contrast to a canonical film, a musical, in the novel, shows what was once fashionable among young people seeming passé nearly three decades later. It is the act of filmgoing that interests Ajani. The preference is now for the mature space of live theater, the authentic, stylized dramatization of a story with an echo. (There is an account of a stage play in the novel, but Lọla is Ajani’s companion to this show, which takes place in an unidentified theater and is modeled on a Roman comedy of errors.) A similar move occurs at the climactic point of the film, with Ajani tying the proverbial nuptial knot with S.ade, an entirely new woman in his life. As.akẹ is indoors with her family, watching the evening news, when the item about Ajani’s wedding that day appears on the television. While the narrative aim of breaking the news to her is achieved, the insertion of the telecast as a media form fits into the pattern of previous instances of remediation, complete with the old analog technology of studio broadcasting and the poet Faleti as the newscaster. This is a sharp break from the novel, in which As.akẹ is shown as knowing of the wedding plans in advance and reserving her resentment for her overbearing father. But the immediacy of television broadcast is telling and effective. The father is also indoors, and so As.akẹ easily directs

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her anger at him physically, thus activating the kind of drama suitable for cinematic perception. No less compelling as a case of remediation, the sequence about the consultation with an Ifá priest presents the film with the pretext to simultaneously dignify a cultural practice under ideological assault and complicate the novel’s use of a method owed to one of that practice’s contemporary rivals—the Pentecostal church. Unable to decide on either of the first two women, Ajani seeks the counsel of his older brother, who approaches a babaláwo (a priest of Ifá) for guidance. By pure relay, the oracle’s message—the two women are suitable, but As.akẹ will bear more children than Lọla—is passed on from the priest through the brother to Ajani. The clear diegetic sound of the relay is arresting, guileless, and frank, and adds poignancy to the film’s secular aura. This is a stunning moment of mediation, reminiscent of the griot Fara Tine in Ceddo as discussed in chapter 3, although in practical terms the relay involves neither the use of a technical tool nor the concept’s classic meaning as a balance of opposites. The oracle, the priest, and the brother each serves as a medium and transmits the message without embellishment. This is important because in the novel, the brother consults with an “aláduˇ rà” (a Pentecostal pastor), and Ajani makes his misgivings about such pastors known. Substituting an Ifá priest is thus an ideological choice in keeping with the film’s general outlook. By going beyond simply activating the agency of Ifá divination in a humanistic way, the film opposes this humanism to the crude cynicism of the Pentecostal pastor, Joshua, an unctuous charlatan medium who colludes with As.akẹ’s father to lie to her about the prospects of a union with Ajani, weakening her longnurtured affection for him. Given this prevalence of remediation, it is easy to think that these changes in Ó Le Kú are necessitated by the technical and formal differences between film and literature, which adaptation naturalizes. However, it is noteworthy in this complex process that though occurring through cinema, writing as a modality of expression is reinforced by, rather than subordinated to, cinematic narration. Every instance of remediation in the film thus extends the potential of the novel, and it is more interesting to think of the film as a kind of rewrite.15 A different comparison with an earlier case of adaptation in Nigerian cinema is equally relevant. Although later disavowed by the playwright (who also authored the screenplay), the film version of S.oyinka’s Kongi’s Harvest (directed by African American actor-director Ossie Davis) serves as a rewrite of the play in

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significant ways. The film’s ending with the assumption of power by Dr. Gbenga seems to offer a brilliant insight into the critique of power consistent with S.oyinka’s overall creative vision, which is present in different works over the span of fifteen years (from The Lion and the Jewel in 1959 through Madmen and Specialists in 1971 to Jero’s Metamorphosis in 1973), but which the play Kongi’s Harvest would not seem to have sufficiently captured. In the sequences of the film where the megalomaniacal tendencies of Ọba Danlọla and Kongi are juxtaposed, one grasps more firmly the fact that those character traits are just extreme versions of the comic aspects of Baroka and Lakunle. According to Eldred Jones’s insightful reading, Baroka’s is a “hard-headed conservatism” while Lakunle displays “muddle-headed sloganeering” (1973, 24), meaning that neither provides a useful option in progressive terms. The short, brusque, and shakily edited broadcast by Dr. Gbenga, the new head of state, following Kongi’s assassination in the film is shot with a film of a different color, but the broadcast is a simple repetition of the dead dictator’s dogmatic declaration earlier in the film: The will of the state is supreme. Destiny has entrusted in our hands The will of the state.

Kongi is dead, but the business of state goes on as usual. Ẹfúns.etá n A níw úr à R edux: History as R e m edi ation Ó Le Kú as a rewrite is possible only under certain conditions, and technology is a major enabling factor. As Is.ọla sees it, putting these works in the new format of film is a “way of teaching the adults and the children together on the same platform” (2008, 444) through tools that are more congenial to that precarious demography (the young) than reading in a language struggling for its life as a means of everyday usage. This leads to the other major manifestation of Is.ọla’s handling of creative practice in this film—the emphasis on education as a tool of self-advancement. An emphasis on education seems natural to a work invested in issues of cultural revitalization. In the novel, where the central element of youthful fascination with trendiness and novelty impels a lax, though complex, attitude toward Nigerian culture, the campus setting never lets the focus slack on the quest for education. As a matter of fact, this setting adds

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urgency to the quest as As.akẹ, the only one among the young characters who is not an undergraduate, often feels inadequate in the company of others. The film takes this emphasis to a different level and reflects the changing meaning of education in relation to the latter context, the declining interest in Yoruba cultural traditions among the young that Is.ọla bemoans in the statement quoted earlier. The second, brief didactic lecture by a professor (the one played by Is.ọla himself) focuses on the students’ poor performance in a homework assignment about the etymology of Yoruba names. Like the first sequence about defending the integrity of African history against colonialist distortions, this pedagogical sequence is part of a larger design in Is.ọla’s work with Kelani, and instances of this design occur in other films as well, notably Thunderbolt: Mágùn (2001) and Agogo Èèwọ` (2002).16 There is also the personal dimension. As.akẹ’s father opposes her relationship with Ajani in part because, with only a high-school certificate, she stands in intellectual disadvantage compared to her boyfriend, a final-year student at the university. The father comes across as a strict disciplinarian, ready with tongue-lashing or worse whenever As.akẹ makes a mistake related to her romantic affair, like missing a night at home. But he also uses such occasions to stress the importance of education, a parent’s wish that his child embrace an opportunity that he was not lucky enough to have. In the novel, this case appears only on a few occasions, and mainly to reinforce the father’s sense of duty toward his brother, who is As.akẹ’s biological father, now residing in Ghana. This obsession with education becomes so central to the family’s domestic affairs that these details of paternity count for nothing in the film, and As.akẹ’s father pursues his resolve in the integral matter of education as upbringing. What holds for this nuclear family serves as a metaphor for the society at large. The father’s insistence on his daughter gaining admission into a tertiary educational institution and the author’s interest in addressing a precarious demography are enlarged as the formal setting for several films based on Is.ọla’s work: The University of Ibadan provides the location for Ó Le Kú, the Ọbafẹmi Awolọwọ University for Kòs.eégbé, and the University of Lagos for The Campus Queen. These two themes in Is.ọla’s cultural politics—the reconstitution of authorship and textuality based on new media and education as the larger goal—serve as a basis for examining the process of adaptation at work in Ẹfúns.etán Aníwúrà. When an adaptation contracts details in an earlier

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text, the reasons are often related to form—the new form or medium has a different technical configuration, and the logic of that template enjoins a sense of realism about what can be included or excluded in the process of adaptation. We have seen instances of such omissions in the discussion of Ó Le Kú. The changes in Ẹfúns.etán Aníwúrà are of a different order. Based on the play of the same title that Is.ọla published in 1973, the film produced in 2005 rides on a similar wave of enthusiasm for restoring work with classical value in the culture. Easily the best-known of Is.ọla’s plays, its revival through the medium of cinema occurred within the same context as two cultural events. The first was the major sponsorship of stage adaptations of the work of Daniel Fagunwa by CHAMS, a Nigeria-based computer hardware company, a project in which Is.ọla worked with the playwright Fẹmi Ọs.ọfisan to adapt a Yoruba version of the English-language play by Ọs.ọfisan based on the novel Ìrékè Oníbùdó. The other case was the filming of Ògbórí-Ẹlé. mọ`s.ọ΄, a historical play based on the founding legend of Ogbomọs.ọ town, part of the repertoire of the Lere Paimọ Theater Company in the 1970s and 1980s. Just as Is.ọla judged that the capacity of Yoruba culture to reproduce itself was failing, entrepreneurs (such as CHAMS’s Ademọla Aladekọmọ and YEM-KEM’s Ayẹni) who yearned for those classics undertook to have them adapted using newly available media. Certainly, these companies also used the sponsorships to promote their products—computer equipment and herbal medicine. The changes in the film Ẹfúns.etán Aníwúrà involve significant departures from the original play published in 1973, and they strike me as being motivated by the ideological underpinnings of the rewrite. Primary among these considerations is that Is.ọla uses the new format of digital filmmaking to humanize the story of Ẹfuns.etan already etched in popular consciousness, which has turned the name into a synonym for cruelty and unbridled female ambition. The broad outline of this story is by now well known. Ẹfuns.etan, the second Iyalode (leader of the womenfolk) of Ibadan who held office from 1867–1874, was in conflict with the male chiefs of the city, principally Latoosa, the ààrẹ ọ`nà kakan` fò (or generalissimo) of the Yoruba army headquartered in Ibadan, over the financing of wars in which the generals were involved at the time. Rich and resourceful, she was a formidable personality and, in the manner of the time, was given to the hubris of the powerful. This manifested itself in the treatment of her slaves.17 This play, which inspired the versions that Oguns.ọla’s troupe dramatized on stage, on radio, in photoplay, and on film, was conceived in the

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mold of “good and evil,” an accustomed dramatic template for Yorubalanguage productions in the traveling theater idiom. It draws upon the standard theme of unforgivable villains of Yoruba history such as in Faleti’s Ìtàn Ìbànújé. ti Bas.ọrun Gáà (The Tragic Life of Bas.ọrun Gaa), which has also been made into film. The same play ran in the repertory of another traveling theater company and constituted a lesson in how not to conduct oneself in public office. The original text of Is.ọla’s play includes a didactic epilogue, “Ò.rò. Àsọkágbá,” which dwells on the retributions that are sure to follow villainous behavior. The 2005 adaptation departs from this template in major ways: the use of digital filming to accentuate the personal trauma impelling Ẹfuns.etan’s cruelty; the customary inhabitation of the drama’s classic template by a new generation of actors with ties to Nollywood; and an opportunity for imagining Ibadan society through a new conception of Yoruba nationhood. It is noteworthy that the 2005 digital film has a subhead, “The Real Story Behind Iyalode Ibadan.” The Ẹfuns.etan encountered in this film has the fierceness of the customary figure, starting with the fact that the same actress in the play, Iyabọ Oguns.ọla, plays the part. But there is a story behind the legendary cruelty, and Is.ọla tells it in a unique way. As soon as the nondiegetic music paying tribute to the founder of the Oguns.ọla traveling theater company (the late “Dr. I-Sho Pepper”) ends, Is.ọla himself, in the role of Etiyẹri (the rhetorician/singer of tales), appears in a documentary sequence, commenting on the changing character of Ibadan, this bastion of Yoruba military power in the nineteenth century. He is interrupted by a woman, Iyaniwẹ (played by Margaret Adejọbi of the Oyin Adejọbi traveling theater company), and both engage in a banter about how this character took shape. The exchange devolves into a serial commentary on the powerful rulers of the city (Bas.ọrun Oluyọle, Bas.ọrun Ogunmọla, Balogun Ibikunle, and Aarẹ Latoosa), the culmination to what Peel has characterized as the “age of confusion” (2000, 47–87), the century-long civil wars that took all southwestern Nigeria (and eastern Benin Republic) in their orbit. The wars also led to the emergence of powerful women, especially Ẹfuns.etan, and the scene of banter dissolves into the tracking shot of a group of women, with Ẹfuns.etan at their head, approaching the city. It is a compellingly imaged spectacle of a group of women trailed by male and female carriers, all slaves. The dialogue picks up the thread of Latoosa’s warmongering, a drain on her resources, but Ẹfuns.etan’s immediate concerns are domestic and

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familial. One of her slaves has just been delivered of twins, and Ẹfuns.etan and her followers are welcomed home with this news. She asks to see the new mother, greeting her with warm affection. Next, she moves indoors to meet her own expectant daughter, Toyọsi, whose delivery time is close at hand. Ẹfuns.etan dotes over Toyọsi, giving specific instructions about the kind of food to be prepared to salve her cravings. A brief sequence interrupts this domestic narrative when Latoosa gathers all the chiefs in his palace and talks angrily about a conspiracy against him. (Ẹfuns.etan is the only female in the group, and her attempt to speak is rebuffed.) Other than this, much of the action in the early parts of the film focuses on her family. Unfortunately, the second childbirth within the household does not go as well as the first. Toyọsi dies despite all the fuss her mother and other female handlers make over her. What follows this incident is a long sequence without dialogue. Overlaid with a diegetic sound—a dirge— this sequence narrows all emotion down to the aural charge of mourning by Ẹfuns.etan, who progressively descends into a state of nervous or mental breakdown to the point of hating the very sound of baby cries. The end credits include the identification of Kelani as the film’s digital director. In an interview some years after the film’s release and in a manner reminiscent of Sembene’s frustrations with celluloid, Kelani comments on the aesthetic opportunity that digital filmmaking provides in Nollywood.18 This statement reveals an important fact about possibilities that have aided the cultural activism that Is.ọla undertakes in his work. How could a director suggest mental breakdown on stage for the audience that traveling theater had cultivated without it coming across as a crude representation of derangement? The use of a silent screen with Toyọsi’s image dancing above Ẹfuns.etan’s mourning mindscape is a thing of wonder, and digital imaging provides a suitable way of capturing that emotion. In the film, Ẹfuns.etan is no longer the brutish, willfully villainous character who acts with impunity, killing slaves at will—just because she can. Now she has a reason to be mean. It is the trauma of the death of her daughter, her only child, during childbirth, and it takes a slave, the starcrossed lover soon to become a plotter against Ẹfuns.etan, to voice this change. Gone is the pretext of relating her legendary cruelty to her own childlessness, as the play has it. Secondly, her quarrels with the male chiefs and Latoosa, the Aarẹ, in particular, do not rise from her superintending the manslaughter of the ward of an important chief. In the film, the material fact is Latoosa’s overreach, declaring wars on neighboring cities and

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putting a strain on Ẹfuns.etan’s finances as an unofficial exchequer. When she carries her cruelty further by executing a pregnant slave, the chiefs find an excuse to move against her. In the simplest terms, Ẹfuns.etan has her reasons for being so unforgiving and bloodthirsty. The chiefs, on the other hand, are magnanimous enough to warn the public against the looting of her property, which is now declared to belong to her family. This is changed in the film in very visible ways. After Ẹfuns.etan commits suicide and is shown to have been vanquished, Latoosa emerges to announce the news, and he makes two proclamations. He declares that all the slaves are hereby freed, but that Ẹfuns.etan’s property be preserved for her family. The decision to free the slaves, as seen in Latoosa’s speech at Ẹfuns.etan’s house, is in the original play (58), but the “leave her property alone” part is not. Even in the earliest written version of the historical episode in Ìwé Ìtàn Ibadan, Is.ọla’s inspiration for the writing, the final aim of the attack is to loot her property, the standard practice against a vanquished stalwart. There are many other changes of this kind, and they create an opening to discuss the second element in the adaptation regarding the inhabitation of the drama’s classic template by a generation of actors whose ties to Nollywood are stronger than to traveling theater. The primary cast for the film is constituted by the members of the Oguns.ọla troupe. Only the actors Iyabọ Oguns.ọla and Samson Eluwọle retain their original roles as Ẹfuns.etan and Latoosa respectively. With Ishọla Oguns.ọla, the troupe leader, deceased, the willful character Itawuyi (the male slave) that he used to play now goes to Saheed Balogun, a much sought-after Nollywood actor and producer. The role of Adetutu, the slave who becomes pregnant from Itawuyi in the aftermath of the death of Ẹfuns.etan’s daughter, now goes to Nollywood actor Toyọsi Adesanya, while Yetunde Oguns.ọla, who occupied that role in previous iterations takes the character of Awẹro, and the old Awẹro (Moji Oguns.ọla) takes the role of Àjìlé, Ẹfuns.etan’s confidante. The complex process through which Is.ọla’s play has passed to get into the hands of these old and new actors—some of whom may not have read the published text—is worthy of consideration on an analytical level. In this process, which is also an elaborate adaptation, the printed text as play (itself informed by wellknown but controversial accounts of the heroine’s life as a historical figure) loses its place of importance, and the repertory play in turn acquires a proverbial, curatorial quality. The play simultaneously circulates as radio

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slot, photoplay serial, and in other formats—including the historic command performance at the Liberty Stadium. The actors’ handling of their roles, whether naturalized in the case of Ẹfuns.etan, Àjílé, and Latoosa, or stylized in the case of many others, comes principally from the folkloric process of circulation.19 The entertaining sequences of comic relief in the film that include dance and music were not in any of the previous versions, but are now meant to showcase specific skills that have no relation to anything in the plot. The dirge sung by Adetutu and resonantly rendered by Adesanya is an addition by the late Oguns.ọla in the repertory version of the play. It is not in the drama text, but on stage and in the two film versions, it underscores Adetutu’s self-pity, an extension of the helplessness of the slaves in the story. The character of Alágogo/Onís.é. (the messenger) in the play is given the culturally deep name “Ayingun” (Herald) in the film, perhaps also in keeping with the martial history of the city at the time. In both the drama text and the theater repertory production, Ẹfuns.etan is captured after the combat of spells with Latoosa and humiliated by being turned into a slave in his palace, until she summons enough of her old strength to commit suicide.20 In the film, however, she is never captured, walking away from the combat into her bedroom, only to be discovered dead and laid out on her bed, with only Latoosa witnessing this sight. This last change reinforces the redesigning of the story to humanize the powerful woman: she dies as an act of will, as legendary and mythical figures often did, and not through the agency of the socialized act of suicide. These deliberate rewritings of historical facts for creative purposes accord with the moves in Sembene’s work discussed in chapter 3, though the primary objectives are not the same. Sembene’s choice reflects the attitude of the nonruling strata of society toward history, the classic lionand-hunter critique of historiography of which Chinua Achebe was fond. Is.ọla, on the contrary, appears more invested in restoring to a muchmaligned historical figure virtues that may have been distorted in the skewed battles between powerful men and an exceptional female personality. This perspective makes Is.ọla something of a latter-day feminist, but there are equally compelling and historically rich revisions by literary scholars, such as Adélékè Adéè.kó. and the late Folukẹ Ogunlẹyẹ. Both scholars focus on Ẹfuns.etan’s political agency in ways that Is.ọla strives for, only for that agency to be undermined by the playwright-commentator’s simultaneous glorification of Ibadan’s military prowess.21 Mrs. Oguns.ọla disclosed further in our interview that these rewrites were an attempt to

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Fig. 4.1. Mrs. Iyabọ Oguns. ọla during the interview. Ibadan, August 12, 2019. Photo by Akin Ades. ọkan.

restore what the troupe used to stress about the drama to the film, especially with respect to Ẹfuns.etan’s character. These changes are consequential in part because of the imprint left on the original play by the production work of the Oguns.ọla theater troupe. The leader of that troupe, “Dr. I-Sho Pepper,” did not always play the leading part in its productions. In Ẹfúns.etán Aníwúrà, his character (Itawuyi) orients the drama in the direction of a discourse to which the contending forces—the male military chiefs and the wealthy, powerful woman—are largely oblivious. This is the world of slaves, members of society whose views hold no sway in generating discourse. In the published play, Itawuyi and Adetutu converse in such an intimate way that the entire scene 4 is alive and rich in romantic desire, leading to the woman saying “Èmi náà gbà pé kàkà ká wà láyé ní àìlèsúnmó. olùfé. ẹni, tí a bá kú, ó tún yá. Bí ìfé. gidi bá wọlé, gbogbo ìbè.rù á sá jáde ni” (1970, 22).22 One can compare this to Ó Le Kú to see in the author’s work a specific interest in the notion of romantic love as fitting for artistic exploration, besides the general investment in historical or cultural revitalization. The quartet of Adetutu-Awẹro-Itawuyi-Ọs.untunde might be a latent cell for revolt within the slave quarters, and we get this idea from the

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extensive focus on them in scenes 4 and 5. There are revealing insights into their thoughts, fears, desires, and hopes. The historical dimension of the story needs the creative force of the writer’s imagination to make these insights manifest themselves. The slaves are humanized, and it is possible that this interest in the human aspects of historical figures is what Is.ọla extends to Ẹfuns.etan as well, eventuating in the changes that characterize the film version of the story. The turn toward historical depth in the film also makes it possible to critically analyze the motives of the chiefs and the powerful women in contrast to the helpless, the enslaved, the unrepresented. These extrapolations are convincing insofar as the position of Is.ọla as an African author with all his creative hunches about him is compelling. The impulse toward a formulaic opposition of good and evil in Yoruba traveling theater is present in the original play, as we have seen. But it is more helpful to view the manifestation of this impulse in the play as pointing in a direction that the author would perfect, or deepen, as he matured in his craft. Is.ọla completed these two texts before, by his own admission, he realized the power of literature in society (2008, 454). The maturation of creative powers can be a continuing process, drawing on a variety of moments, explicit and subtle. One significance of the details that Is.ọla provides in the quotation cited earlier is the impact that the unprecedented size of the audience at the 1982 performance in the stadium had on his sense of the writer’s responsibility. This choice accords better with Sembene’s option for cinema as the expressive medium more accessible to unlettered audiences than print. Furthermore, the presence of elders at Ẹfuns.etan’s house has a number of rationales pertaining to production design. Among these are the need to accommodate a great variety of actors to deepen the deliberative aspect of the tension between her and the chiefs and within her household, humanizing her even more. During my interview with her in 2019, Mrs. Oguns. ọla remarked on the support from leaders of old theater troupes, such as Faleti and Jimọh Aliu (another troupe leader in the 1980s), in ensuring the success of the film production. These are opportunities that filmmaking in Nigeria brings to Nollywood, with the benefit of long years of practice dating back to the era of traveling theater. They are the same opportunities that are not sufficiently available in the curatorial system through which a director such as Ramaka, with different aesthetic preferences, operates.

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The In visible H a nd of the M a r k et Ramaka’s So Be It (1997), an adaptation of Wọle S.oyinka’s early play The Strong Breed, came out of television programming of Africa cinema of a kind barely countenanced in early Nollywood. With this perspective, and based on the last point about the comparatively long history of filmmaking in Nigeria, it is possible to see the relationships between Nollywood and African cinema that digital media has significantly reshaped, to mixed outcomes. The choices that Ramaka makes in the film So Be It thus present an opportunity to examine a thorny issue in contemporary African and postcolonial art: the structural connection between the poetic imagination and the creation of cultural prestige, through the figure of the artist. What is the economic status of difficult or obscure subject matters to the institutions which confer value on art? How does an artist with a style that could be called surrealist, another way of saying poetic or nonnarrative, pursue a career in a context in which having an audience and producing work with commercial viability count as measures of professional excellence? These are questions that apply to a particular type of literary works by African authors (the focus of the discussion in the next chapter). In cinema, however, they acquire a momentous significance: the social poses challenges to the poetic imagination because the social is the ground of the collusion of authoritarianism and neoliberal globalization, and censorship is their mutual, reactionary instrument in relation to art. But it is also the ground on which production takes place. Without the social, those institutional forms that artists, scholars, and audiences alike have come to take for granted, even the most difficult, inaccessible work of art would be grateful to escape the fate of works which have never been made, produced—because no one knows about them. On closer inspection, this institutional challenge appears in Ramaka’s work in the guise of censorship as the effect of a process for which no one can be held accountable—unlike the more notorious idea of censorship as authoritarian control by the sovereign. The process that led to the production of So Be It was one of commissioned programming which prioritized thematic issues. As an artist, Ramaka displays a creative outlook that is more poetic than mimetic, and to write to the stipulated theme of romantic love was necessarily a matter of negotiations. If production is the idea of making a work exist in the social space, an aesthetic temperament such as Ramaka’s faces an enormous battle, involving complex negotiations. The diegesis of his film bears the marks of those negotia-

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tions. So Be It was one of four short films on the theme of love produced for Arte, the French television programming company, collectively titled Africa Dreaming (1997). The others are Abderrahmane Sissako’s Sabriya (Mauritania/Tunisia), Pedro Pimenta’s The Gaze of the Stars (Mozambique), and Richard Pakleppa’s Sophie’s Homecoming (Namibia). According to promotional information about the project described on the DVD case, Jeremy Nathan, an executive producer for Arte, conceived of television programming designed “to give Africans a rare opportunity to speak directly to each other in their own words and images” (1997). There was already a series in place, and this project was aimed at generating collaboration between broadcasters, television producers, writers, and film directors across the continent. Nathan “asked for script proposals for 26-minute dramatic shorts on the broad theme of ‘love in Africa’ . . . [and the channel chose] four of the six films which were selected and produced.”23 Ramaka has also disclosed that he was hired to work as a production consultant on the project (personal communication/interview, 23 September 2016). Production choices that seemed relatively easy for Is.ọla through collaboration with Kelani and the proprietor of YEM-KEM herbal medicines became a matter of ideological and institutional wrestling for Ramaka, who worked with a programming concept tied to international television. For all that, Ramaka’s adaptation (“re-imagining,” as he prefers to call it) strikes me as the statement of a very profound artistic principle. It is not his best-known work (that honor goes to Karmen Gei), but it is the most decisive from my understanding of his career, the film that made it possible for him to produce the universally acclaimed one. Institutionally, the short film serves as a launching pad for the feature film. Aesthetically, the artistic liberties which Ramaka takes with So Be It become indispensable to his reimagining of George Bizet’s opera (based on Prosper Mérimée’s Carmen). In this thirty-minute film are present most of the distinguishing features of Ramaka’s work: a philosophical concern with the social rendered in poetic terms; the relationship between sexuality and power; a preference for the spectacular and the anti-illusionistic; the relationship between otherness and violence, both psychic and physical. In an interview with film historian Michael Martin, Ramaka characterizes the mental disposition from which he works as a “‘surrealist’ understanding of the world” (Martin 2008, 25). But what does it mean to have a surrealist understanding of the world when, again, as Ramaka claims in the interview, this sense predates the canonized idea of surrealism as a modern European literary movement? Eileen Julien once described

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this filmmaker as a poet with a camera, and I think that the quality Julien attempts to capture through this description is not rare in African filmmaking.24 Indeed, Ramaka as writer and director is comparable in certain aspects of his poetics to his compatriot Djibril Diop Mambéty, who once described himself as the history of a dream.25 African cinema is still a relatively young field, quickly expanding into subfields, so we make useful contributions to knowledge when we distinguish directors like Ramaka and Mambéty from Ousmane Sembene and Gaston Kaboré on the basis of the general philosophical orientations of their art. In the first set of directors, there is a well-established preference for conceiving of experience as primarily a function of individual consciousness, whereas in the second set there is a comparatively higher investment in the dramatization of such an experience as a part of broader sociopolitical phenomena. Secondly, there is a higher degree of mimetic representation in Kaboré’s work than in Ramaka’s. For example, the figure of the mute child in Wend Kuuni (1982) serves explicitly narrative purposes whereas this figure is primarily symbolic in So Be It even though Ramaka took that conception from S.oyinka’s play. This kind of distinction is useful, but it also conceals one important fact. The social, that is, the embodied relations of power and exchange in the different dimensions of lived experience, is not a discrete, preconstituted domain, as Ato Quayson has argued in Calibrations (2003), nor is it exhaustive of experience as such. There are dimensions of experience that are not reducible to sociohistorical rationalizations, so when Ramaka defines his aesthetic philosophy in terms of surrealism and qualifies this definition by distinguishing its history from a European provenance, a productive way of coming to terms with such self-conception is to take the logic of a dream as its point of departure. What is called “poetic” in the filmmaker’s work, I think, is not a refuge in the irrational from an overdose of reality, but a self-conscious labor on behalf of complex pleasures that, as Bertolt Brecht famously says, are “more intricate, richer in communication, more contradictory and more productive of results” (1992, 181). But this presents another question. How is it that an artist with such a profoundly aesthetic apprehension of experience is also one for whom sociopolitical engagement is a moral imperative? More persistently than Mambéty, Ramaka proceeds from the point of view of a citizen, an individual artist with a sense of responsibility toward the civis, the given social space. And it is not enough of a solution to think of Ramaka the

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filmmaker as separate from Ramaka the citizen: in the first place, the idea of citizenship is inconceivable outside of a locality, so Citizen Ramaka is not the same person in Dakar and New Orleans, although this would be a little complicated if he were to naturalize as an American; secondly, this individual citizen would not be of much analytical interest were he not also, and primarily, a filmmaker. There is really no solution here; this is the kind of problem to confront in Ramaka’s work, the problem which defies solution but draws attention to art as the basis for thinking through it. The idea of censorship pertinent to this discussion is the less common but quite consequential one of what the prevailing relations of production prohibit. The culprit behind this form of censorship is sometimes identified as “the invisible hand of the market.” Under a neoliberal economic system, this kind of censorship manifests itself in political terms as well, although through the phenomenon usually described as corporatism. In Firing Back, one of his last works to be published, the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu implies a synthesis of the censorious culprits as “the invisible government of the powerful” (2003, 14), pointing to Benito Mussolini’s characterization of fascism as corporatism, an earlier instance of the collusion between sovereign and market. For Bourdieu, who was not interested in artistic censorship as such, the problem with determining what is permissible action has to be located in “the novel forms that domination assumes” (20). Where there is a mobilization and concentration of cultural capital, Bourdieu argues, there is less need for the spectacular demonstration of power. Bourdieu’s term “invisible government of the powerful” is useful for many conceptual reasons, primary among which is its character as a synthesis. However, it is possible to slightly amend the term by substituting “governance” for “government” because the impersonal, administrative ring of the former accords more with the “naturalness” of neoliberal ideas of free market. The prevalence of conceptmetaphors like stakeholders, service delivery, and good governance in contemporary, everyday usage points to the unfelt effect of a corporatist worldview. Besides, more than “government,” “governance” rings true of such concepts as “governmentality” and “biopolitics,” all of which make the link between power and domination or control relevant in the discussion of Ramaka’s work. Nonetheless, it is important not to lose sight of the vulgar displays of power in the authority of the sovereign who, in an African context, is indeed an autocrat, an Abdoulaye Wade or a Paul Biya, but who is con-

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strained by the political demands of global corporatization to pretend to be a democrat. There is a terrifically funny moment in And What If Latif Were Right?, Ramaka’s documentary film about the authoritarian ways of Wade, when the Senegalese president, sitting on an imposing throne, says to a political adversary: “But for the fact that I am a democrat, I would send you to jail for saying that!” Such a display of power in relation to a work of art does not have to manifest itself as or translate into a ban on a film or a book. It is significant enough that there is a structural connection between a given political atmosphere and the production of a particular work, for example the immediate repressive aftermath of the Nigerian civil war and S.oyinka’s production of Madmen and Specialists during a period of self-imposed exile, or the military attacks on Lebanon in 1982 and the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish, residing in Beirut at the time. This is the problem I am trying to pinpoint: the social as the ground of the collusion of authoritarianism and neoliberal globalization, and censorship as their mutual, reactionary instrument in relation to art. In literature, as shown in the next chapter, this problem manifests itself in the complex relationship between the category of contemporary middlebrow fiction and untranslatability as the conceptual naming of the controlled circulation of works deemed to have limited marketable, commercial value. The argument that Ramaka has displayed greater civic-mindedness in his work than, say, Mambéty, means mostly that we have more evidence from him of works that respond to baldly political emergencies, such as And What If Latif Was Right? and Plan Jaxaay! But it is important to resist the temptation to distinguish these works from others like So Be It, Karmen Gei, and It’s My Man (2009) solely on generic grounds, in part because of what I say below about So Be It. In the play A Thousand and One Voiced Fragments, which has not been widely performed and may yet emerge as a film script, Ramaka has brought these aspects of his work together in a very compelling manner, dramatizing illusions of power without losing sight of the compositional principles of anti-illusionist theater. The censorious collusion between authoritarianism and neoliberalism works in indiscriminate ways, and Ramaka’s films provide us with evidence of this. How the form of power that is characterized by censorship operates in Ramaka’s work deserves a careful attention. A major controversy surrounded the reception of Karmen Gei in Senegal. The outrage expressed by the clerical authorities in the country over the use of Mourid sacred music during the funeral for the prison warden Angélique, a lesbian who com-

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mits suicide following a heartbreaking separation from Karmen, is most likely a pretext for the unexpressed reactionary view of unconventional sexuality. It is clear from So Be It that a concern with sexual tension represents a resolve to confront authority on the sources of its legitimacy. It is productive to speak about censorship in the filmmaker’s work in this sense—the idea of taking on subjects critical of authority and authoritarianism, perhaps in politically direct ways as in And What If Latif Was Right?, perhaps in poetically concentrated ways as in So Be It, as to attract suspicious attention of the culturally dominant. What remains little explored but important is the role of sexuality and ritual as the forms in which political domination is calibrated. This is slightly different from the amoral “aesthetics of vulgarity” that we associate with a specific literature, exemplified in the works of Jean-Pierre Bekolo (Les Saignantes), Sony Labou Tansi (La Vie et demie) or even in early writings of Achille Mbembe. I think that the focus on the body and bodily functions through grotesque and excessively parodic imageries in these works tends to undermine the deeper aspects of the relationship between sexuality, ritual, and power. If this literature is to speak meaningfully to the problem, it will also need to see the relationship in the sense of James Baldwin’s “unspeakably dark, guilty, erotic past” (1998, 267) because the taboos associated with sex and ritual have political implications and purposes. Besides, the interest in comical aspects of the nexus of power and sexuality is overdramatized and even its more critical aspects hardly go beyond the cathartic effects of the critique, thus leaving the tyrannical resources generated in the nexus intact. It would be more productive, I think, to deepen this focus by paying attention to the relationship between ritual sacrifice and the maintenance of order in precapitalist societies as a sign of homoerotic power, along with the standard practice of using women, the young, and strangers as victims. A detailed look at So Be It will clarify what I have in mind. A cinematic reimagining of The Strong Breed, S.oyinka’s play about the practice of communal carrier and the demands of personal sacrifice, So Be It unfolds within a startingly concentrated frame. Michael, a medical doctor, has come to live in the small village where the story takes place out of a commitment to serving the needy and love for Sunma, his girlfriend and a native of the village. The action revolves around the event of selecting a victim to carry away the sins of the village in the style of ritual scapegoating, and Michael’s futile efforts, against Sunma’s warnings, to save the

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helpless victim, Ifada, a mute boy he has befriended. In addition to the three characters, a sick girl appears to ask of the doctor, but not to be healed by him. In The Strong Breed, the plot is stretched over two periods—the present of Eman, the protagonist, attempting to stop the cult elders from using Ifada as the scapegoat, and the past, rendered in flashback, of Eman as a young boy failing to complete his tutelage because he disagrees with his tutor’s amorous advances toward his (Eman’s) young friend, Omae. In the film, the flashback sections of the play that have the feel of cinema disappear completely, although there is a brief sequence near the beginning where a young man departs hurriedly and a woman following him pauses to cast a gestured spell of irrevocable departure. In place of these, the film presents emotional tensions between Michael, Sunma, and those triangulated between them and the two children—Ifada and the sick girl— loitering around the house. These tensions are expressed through interrupted sexual acts. In scenes remarkably poised between the cinematic and the theatrical, Ramaka frames the drama of incommunicable anxieties manifested in Michael’s silent moments of reading and Sunma’s own of literal hairsplitting through indoor, low-light sequences. While Sunma finds Michael’s refusal to heed her warnings and leave frustrating, she also suggestively thrusts her pelvis at him in a series of taunting moves not meant as sexual advances. The sexual acts are, practically, attempts by Michael to physically dissuade her from these taunts. The attention given to sexual acts in the film is one of the major innovations Ramaka brings to the plot of S.oyinka’s play, where such acts are suggested largely through Eman’s suspicion of his tutor’s advances toward the young Omae. Indeed, in the play, Eman’s departure from his town and its ritual expectations signifies a break with tradition as an ethical reinforcement of the principled defense of his girlfriend’s honor, which is also a rejection of the tutor’s irresponsible conduct. The same principle earlier has Eman retorting to the elders in his new station that “a village which cannot produce its own carriers contains no men” (S.oyinka 1973, 129). The prominence given to sexual acts in So Be It is thus significant for a variety of reasons. First, the emotional intensity is a symptom of other things—the taboo of the scapegoat that the opening ritual by the elders and the closing ritual of seizing Ifada seek to enact, the otherness of Michael as foreigner and physician professionally trained to oppose the logic of secretive rituals. Secondly, as the highly charged lovemaking between the lovers is repeatedly begun and interrupted, Sunma barks in frustration: “Get your crazy little pal to rub up against us,” giving voice to

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the homoerotic fantasy attached to the mute Ifada as one who competes with her for Michael’s attention. And, in fact, Ifada is sustained emotionally by attentions from Michael. At one point, the boy shows the pleased contentment of a pet while being stroked by the doctor. Thirdly, the most sustained of the attempts at intercourse is witnessed by the sick girl and thus interrupted, deepening Sunma’s dread of ill omen either in relation to Ifada’s presence or the advancing horde from the village. The lovemaking is not for only physical gratification, but also serves to create intimacy between them and thereby provide a refuge from the hostile environment. Finally, the revulsion Sunma feels toward Ifada comes from the primordial fear that potential mothers might have for disabled children. It is a well-known taboo in some West African societies that pregnant women are prohibited or discouraged from walking in the noonday sun, the time of the day when evil spirits are believed to be abroad, looking for a vulnerable body to inhabit. In the play, Sunma explicitly connects her revulsion toward Ifada to the fact that she is a woman, and “these things matter. I don’t want a mis-shape near me” (117). The film being based on The Strong Breed only serves to give wings to Ramaka’s imaginative flight, showing his assured command of the ethical grounds of the dramatic conflict. The originality of So Be It manifests itself in the idea of using cinematic techniques to turn the merely suggestive or poeticized in The Strong Breed to an ineffable spectacle. The charged emotional states occupied by Michael and Sunma are foreshadowed in the hermetic ritual in the opening scene, witnessed by only Ifada, who flees the scene, literally followed by the diegetic sound of a pig grunting, most likely a sacrificial animal. This grunting denotes a lack of articulation, a condition that attaches itself to the scene through association with the mute Ifada. The lack of articulation and the impossibility of full communication are, for Sunma and Michael, displaced onto the repetitive and desperate attempts at lovemaking. It is logical thus that the mute boy is seen as the potential victim, even if he runs or is driven away from the scene, and that his fate is connected to that of the couple—Michael the foreign doctor, and Sunma the native daughter revolted by the conduct of her own people. Indeed, Ifada’s muteness makes it possible for him to be present (he is tolerated because of the assumption that he cannot tell of what he has seen) but also seals his fate at the end. Taken with the image of the sick girl looking silently on copulating adults, this incident—Ifada’s witnessing of the brief, bloody ritual—dramatizes Ramaka’s imaginative response to the earlier work, in which none of these moments is present.

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The opening ritual is accompanied by a chant in Wolof: This friend of mine cures whatever illness he comes across What I do not know, Is the one he does not know about or does not come across. But I know he cures whatever illness he falls on.26

The same chant returns in the final sequence, when the crowd arrives to seize the sacrificial animal, Ifada. The very image of a crowd arriving in the night with torch lights vividly recalls the scene of the expulsion of the stranger Mercenary in Sembene’s Mooladé and in a few scenes in Mambéty’s Hyenas. Michael, who so identifies with Ifada as to become his protector, tries but fails to prevent his capture, and the final image in the film, the horrific face of an infantile Michael staring at the girl and reciting a nursery chant, appears to make this identification concrete. He is unable to save Ifada, but he now takes the child’s place through the recitation of the formulaic chant, this voicing itself making up for Ifada’s irreparable muteness. An important achievement of this film is therefore its careful linking of the traumatic experience of unsuccessful sacrifice to Michael’s alienation from the village. In one of the short, fragmentary sequences at the beginning of the film, right after the opening ritual witnessed by Ifada, we see a figure hauling a bag on his shoulder and walking angrily away—toward the camera—against the background of the diegetic sound of a pig’s grunting. He is followed by a woman, Sally, whom he entreats to walk faster, and who pauses, making an ominous gesture of breaking with the place she is leaving behind by running her hand over her head. This sequence is not really integrated with the plot, and the couple does not make a subsequent appearance. It is part of the film’s residual connection to The Strong Breed, where stage directions detail the presence of a couple passing by Eman’s house to catch the lorry leaving the village. The sequence about the departing figures symbolizes Eman’s psychic break with his own community, which is dramatized in the play in a flashback. In So Be It, it is supplemented through another sequence of a scattered crowd moving through the open grassland in a move indicating angry leave-taking. While these sequences contribute more to the poetic, fragmented look of the film than to its narrative depth, they validate the tension between Sunma and Michael. The opening dialogue between the three elders actually prepares the grounds for these developments: “Will he get out alive?” says the old man. “And her,” one of the women adds. “I warned her. What does he know about us?”

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Fig. 4.2. The frame of opaque emotions. So Be It. 1997.

Details of why Michael and Sunma return to this village are as fragmentary as the challenges of departing are urgent. The strong bond between them, the basis for the film’s thematic investment in romantic love, is tested by this challenge, the recognition by Sunma that Michael’s commitment—to his profession, to the village, to Ifada—is straining their relationship. They are the kinds of details to analyze, and one opportunity for this interpretive task is the quite opaque exchange between Michael and the little girl. The girl, who is sick, persistently voices the belief that an effigy, the item she plans to display at the impending rites, will carry her sickness away, even in the presence of a medical doctor. The girl’s certainty is reinforced by her steady gaze conveying quite opaque emotions. It says a lot about the villagers’ needs and expectations and brings greater clarity to the opening dialogue as well as to Sunma’s trenchant statement that Michael is viewed as an interloper. To her, the relationship is sustainable only if they leave. To him, full self-accounting is inseparable from the deep care for the unlucky and vulnerable Ifada. The sentiments are incompatible, and this is where to look for the film’s gestures to a fatal condition. The custodians of the ritual in S.oyinka’s play are the Ògbóni, the judicial body connected to earth worship in traditional Yoruba society and whose powers have often fascinated scholars. As Peter Morton-Williams (1960) writes in “The Yoruba Ogboni Cult in Ọyọ,” his illuminating essay

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on the Ògbóni, the religious duties of this body are ultimately connected to the exercise of control, the maintenance of order, in the social realm: “The senior grade of Ògbóni will collectively know all that pertains to the oris.a cults. They will also have been active participants in them and many will have gone deeply into their esoterica. The ritual of the oris.a ceases to captivate the most thoughtful of them and to be reduced to a technique for gaining magical power from the oris.a; through their experience, age, and closeness to death they have transcended the ordinary oris.a‘truth’— the conceptions expressed through the cults—leaving only Earth as the absolute certainty in their future” (373). Ramaka’s framing of sexuality in this ritual discourse is profound because although membership in the Ògbóni is gendered, the importance of the elderly female as mother is also the reason for making a woman central to the conclave. This woman, a mother of the palace according to MortonWilliams, is a representative of the king; this inclusion recognizes the power of women as mothers and as wives, possessors of the XX chromosomes and thus, in this cultural context, of the erotically charged powers of life and death.27 In So Be It, two women take part in the opening ritual, and when the torch-bearing crowd arrives to seize Ifada at Michael’s door, there is a woman at its head, chanting to the boy’s face as the crowd finally seizes him. The filmmaker’s larger poetic overtone, certainly in this film, is found in the nonmimetic ways it confronts this dramatic conflict between the administration of a sovereign but closed system and an intellectual alienation from the idea of hermetic ritual. It is because of this connection between sovereign or authoritarian control and the ideological openness simultaneously enjoined and withheld by neoliberalism that Michel Foucault’s reflections from The Birth of Biopolitics become relevant. Foucault’s central aim in using biopolitics, to explore “what concrete content could be given to the analysis of power—it being understood . . . that power can in no way be considered either as a principle in itself, or as having explanatory value which functions from the outset” (2003, 186) actually dates back to the first volume of The History of Sexuality (1990) and receives far more detailed treatment in Society Must Be Defended! (2003). But it is in The Birth of Biopolitics (2003) that he connects the concept more directly to neoliberal economics, especially through the writings of Jeremy Bentham, an eighteenth-century English economist and historian of laissez-faire capitalism. In particular, Bentham’s formulation of sponte acta derives

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from a view of economic activities spontaneously developed by members of a community without governmental intervention and distinct from agenda and nonagenda, economic activities of a government according to whether they maximize pleasure or minimize pain. Reading Bentham, Foucault argues that the even more provisional term, governmentality, “the way in which one conducts the conduct of men, is no more than a proposed analytical grid for these relations of power” (186), and that the most meaningful term, “biopolitics,” represents “the attempt, starting from the eighteenth century, to rationalize the problems posed to governmental practice by phenomena characteristic of a set of living beings forming a population: health, hygiene, birthrate, life expectancy, race” (317). Far from suggesting that the neoliberal system views a work of incredible erotic charge such as So Be It unfavorably, or that the political and clerical authorities in Senegal are in cahoots with the agents of the World Bank to sanitize the country’s cinema industry, I am making a different argument. Ramaka’s artistic preference for complex subject matter and his poetic, highly aestheticized approach to filmmaking complicate the desire for producing work with the kind of commercial viability in which neoliberalism is ultimately invested. It is also relevant to this question of commercial viability to note that years before he made So Be It, Ramaka established “Les Ateliers de L’Arche,” an independent production and distribution company, located in France. His dedication to professional sustainability thus appears to be both long-standing and pragmatic. The World Bank may not be in cahoots with the political establishment in Senegal to clean up the filmmaking industry, but Kodak will promptly set up shop in Dakar if there is money to be made, though preferably on a smallscale, cost-saving basis. Furthermore, the neglect of culturally esoteric topics—like the connection in So Be It and Ògbóni society between erotic powers and political rituals—under the prevalent economic conditions is systematic. It pertains to other art forms (contemporary middlebrow fiction, as seen in the next chapter), and it amounts to a form of censorship for which it is not easy to hold anyone accountable. This explains why the term “governance,” rather than “government” in Bourdieu’s “invisible government of the powerful,” is quite eloquent about where to locate actual control. The objective, impersonal attitude toward activity through which to safely and profitably do business runs into a conflict when an ungovernable artistic temperament makes its appearance,

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and censorship is the administrative way of removing, suppressing, in short, controlling such a conflict. It seems to me that the elaborate, diffracted process of executing this form of control is part of what Foucault calls “biopolitics,” and that it acquires a potent force in contexts where it involves bodily control in erotic terms. The critique of authoritarian power in So Be It, though still suggestive, has added significance in the context of neoliberal globalization because, even at that early stage in his career, Ramaka was working within a production context in which the contingencies of funding and commissioning were consequential enough to shape, if not absolutely determine, what a film is or turns out to be—what films get made. So Be It is film commissioned for television, a form of media production oriented toward the institutional protocols of film scripts as grant writing, competitive submission, and jury selection. Prior to the emergence of Nollywood and outside of the Egyptian and South African industries (and excepting the corpus of directors like Sembene and Souleymane Cissé to some extent), this is how much of what has come to be known as African cinema was produced. Commentaries on this complex, exogenous production context for a cultural form aimed at self-representation are just as complex and diverse, but one of the most insightful comes from an insider—Rod Stoneman’s reflections as Commissioning Editor for UK’s Channel Four. First published in 1993, incidentally on the thirtieth anniversary of the release of Sembene’s Borom Sarret, Stoneman’s reflections articulated the issues surrounding the politics of funding for film and television in African cinema at a time when the large part of funding and technical resources originated outside the continent. Stoneman names “ultra-auteurism” the condition of many African filmmakers, “directors who are also, at one and the same time, the producers of their own films.” He then makes a case for a “body of professional, entrepreneurial, cultural producers . . . to articulate potential funding sources and, it can be argued, to strengthen individual production processes” (1996, 176). To underscore this dire situation, Stoneman quotes Ramaka (though without providing context), who sees the writer/director/producer complex as unacceptably obstructive of professional sanity: “They have always gone on the long, solitary and labored quest for international aid, accepting all its criteria and demands, making one film every four to ten years ” (176). From this picture, a tension between “the directorial id” and “productorial superego” arises, and the result is best imagined in the questions that Stoneman

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subsequently poses: “Is there an unconscious predilection for certain types of products, a selective prioritization of certain types of films? What kind of African films are more difficult, or even impossible for European television? Do specific interventions change particular films? No commutation test exists when asking how these relations may affect the organic development of African cinema—it is not possible to know those films which have never been made!” (177). Current developments in digital technology, bold imaginaries of global Blackness, and new channels of distribution and curation of the kind and range examined in chapter 2, it is true, have complicated or even changed some of the premise from which Stoneman’s argument is launched. The Nigerian breakthrough film Living in Bondage was conceivably in preproduction (note the euphemism) as Stoneman’s essay was being written in the early 1990s, and the case of a director/producer like Kunle Afọlayan has shown that it is possible to be both and still make a film every two to three years—even three films in a year, as his 2017 output demonstrated.28 Within Nigeria and in much of West Africa, different kinds of Nollywood films are broadcast around the clock on the Africa Magic channel of MNET, the same South African satellite broadcasting company that contracted Afọlayan’s three films of 2017, while the Chinese-owned company Starfilms and the online streaming portals of iROKOtv are among several outfits that have taken to producing original Nollywood content. And Netflix has since set everything adrift or, better still, provided a different kind of orientation for African filmmaking. Even if, by some quirks of nature, the Netflix model were to be revoked, history has already been made, and the rest is archive. All the same, some of Stoneman’s points bear returning to because of a beguiling paradox. Recent developments in the production and distribution of African cinema have also increasingly resulted in the marginalization of the filmmaking which ought to serve as an aesthetic alternative or complement to either Nollywood’s “extraverted productions” or other strong national industries in Egypt or South Africa.29 Salutary developments pertaining to internet distribution such as streaming platforms and pop-up marketing outlets have not eliminated the dire circumstances under which African or noncommercial directors operate, and which continue to put their works in a special category, particularly when compared to those of their contemporaries in the United States, the UK, France, or Germany. To be sure, certain operational modes of neoliberalism, in the

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ubiquitous form of globalization, play a role in determining the fortunes of a film as a final product, if it succeeds in making the transition from a script. Even international film festivals such as the Sundance and the Independent Film Channel (IFC), designed to rescue filmmaking from the so-called Hollywood model, cannot totally escape this logic, and when an African director appears at any of these festivals, he or she is rarely scheduled in a major event, far from the prestigious “A-list,” as the industrial pecking order reasserts itself anew. As the writer Bérénice Reynaud puts it in her famous report on the 2005 Sundance Festival, “film professionals, when they come to Sundance, want to be a part of the ‘discovery’ of the ‘new Tarantino’—not marvel at the bold cinematic language of an auteur from Burkina Faso, whose commercial prospects are close to nil” (Reynaud 2005). In this regard, the production and aesthetic situations from which Ramaka made So Be It ought to be discussed in more specific ways. That any director would be selective in his choice of material for a thirty-minute film is sensible enough. As a matter of fact, Ramaka also disclosed during the interview I mentioned earlier that his screenplay based on The Strong Breed was much longer than the filmed script. Had this full script of So Be It (reflecting tensions between Eman and his tutor, between him and his father, and his confrontation with the cult elders) been developed and produced, we could conceivably have a work to compare in thematic terms with Yeelen, which thematizes generational/familial conflict over the control of esoteric knowledge. Getting into the head of the creator of an artwork is not always a sufficient guarantor of informed ref lection on said work, but it can be useful to speculate on what may not be reflected on the surface of a film—if that film manages to get made at all. Only four out of six scripts made it to production in a project which sought to explore the theme of love. What happened to the remaining two, fallen on the hard ground of production exigencies? There is the additional question of the specific directorial choices through which the successful script was processed once it received the approval of the commissioning team for the Arte project. This is relevant because So Be It is one of two films in the project based on published works, the other being Pimenta’s The Gaze of the Stars, inspired by a story by the Mozambican writer Mia Couto. Both the appeal and the discomfort of S.oyinka’s dramatic assumptions become grist for the mill of Ramaka’s directorial options, but the thematic pressures of making the film address issues of love result in a work that shifts the focus of action and diegesis from the primary issues

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of sacrifice and self-accountability. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with this—the field of signification is a field of infinite possibilities. In the same interview, Ramaka discloses that he did not agree with some of S.oyinka’s choices in creating a self-sacrificing character like Eman, nor did he intend to suggest a homoerotic bond between Michael and Ifada—but he was fully aware of the erotic power of female roles in secretive rituals, and even as a mode of public censure.30 One issue is worth stressing, however. Between reducing Ramaka’s script to a thirty-minute drama and downplaying the originating ideas in The Strong Breed, important analytical questions arise that further underscore the tensions between the social and the poetic imagination. On a certain level, it is conceivable that the treatment of the romantic desire truncated in So Be It makes a return in It’s My Man, a film which is admittedly different in generic terms and comes out of a more independent production process than in the earlier film.31 I think it is more helpful to view Ramaka’s oeuvre in this incremental or supplementary manner: that which does not have the opportunity for full manifestation within the parameters of a sponsored or commissioned work makes a return in another where the production strictures are relaxed. The dramatic intensity of S.oyinka’s play is differently calibrated in film, a medium which prioritizes meaning-making through the narrative demands of a theme-based curating or selection. It may sound unseemly, but Arte’s ostensibly bold idea of television programming designed “to give Africans a rare opportunity to speak directly to each other in their own words and images” is hard to conceive outside of the pressures of neoliberalism. S.oyinka did not have to confront this reality, being at the time a research fellow courtesy of a Rockefeller grant and with the benefit of young, enthusiastic actors. Ramaka is afforded the privilege of limited enunciation because the challenges the social poses to the poetic imagination manifest themselves through the invisible governance of the powerful, in this case through the deleterious effects of the free market. They are the challenges that a director of Ramaka’s artistic orientation faces in dealing with the contending forces of authoritarianism and neoliberal globalization. In aesthetic terms, Ramaka’s work ranks very high among scholars and critics—and with audiences, on the evidence of Karmen Gei—and his poetic approach does not necessarily eventuate in obscure or inaccessible work. On the strength of Karmen Gei he attained something close to canonical status in the annals of African filmmaking. To the best of

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my knowledge, the film is one of the few works in African cinema about which an entire monograph has been written.32 While this fact in itself represents a potential, the implications of such status for Ramaka’s earlier and later works are considerable. His more recent films, especially the short films Plan Jaxaay!, Madame Plastig, and Un arbre qui crie!, have been privately produced and not formally distributed. All three are about specific social and environmental problems—urban flooding, the ubiquity of plastic in an African city, and deforestation—across West Africa, not just in Senegal. Ramaka’s relentless pursuit of marginal, localized, but consequential subjects is complemented by his poetic approach. He is a true aesthete who puts art first, but does so from the standpoint of a citizen. If the problem of censorship as I have discussed it thus far is consequential in Ramaka’s career, the challenge is to probe further into the role that the forces of authoritarianism and neoliberalism have played in this situation and how the director’s aesthetic options, if properly harnessed, could constitute a real alternative in African filmmaking. This is the issue to which I now turn. “A Scr eenplay Is Not a Gua r a n te e” Of these two forces, the devil and the deep blue sea of postcolonial art, neoliberalism is the more implacable, implying consequences for artistic confrontation with authoritarianism. Given his predilections, Ramaka is the kind of director to make a film for which the System (read imperialism, neoliberalism) has no use, as the proponents of Third Cinema once wrote to characterize revolutionary filmmaking. The incorporative and absorptive nature of the commodity form has certainly shown how much this assumption underestimates capitalist culture. There are hardly any films which the System may find useless to the point of being surprised by their potential for subversive politics, and capitalism is sustained by the constant, restless search for spaces in which to do business safely and profitably. The singular example of Gilo Pontecorvo’s classic The Battle of Algiers is a case in point. This film dramatized the history of the Algerian War of the 1950s but, fifty years later, became a useful weapon for the US Department of Defense, a sort of how-to film in the war against terror. To understand the process leading to this transformation of a revolutionary classic in cinema history into a tool of high-wire warfare, I think it is useful to pay attention to how and why Pontecorvo made this film.

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According to Carlo Celli in Gillo Pontecorvo: From Resistance to Terrorism, the director was already well established within the international context of cinema as an industry, from Italian neorealism to contractual Hollywood. The treatment for a film that Pontecorvo wrote before The Battle of Algiers actually imagined either Paul Newman or Warren Beatty as the lead (2005, 50). Celli writes further that the “PontecorvoSolinas treatment is apparently imbedded with an admiration for the cool, macho professionalism of the French paratroopers . . . but the film was never made, in part because producers at the time were wary of the Organization de l’Armée Secrète (OAS), a terrorist group active in maintaining French rule in Algeria through intimidation and terrorism” (50). Although the film was never made, the contacts that Pontecorvo made while traveling in Algeria played a role in the film that he did make. The relevant point in this example is that the director was a player in a production context in which the sense of filmmaking as a commercial undertaking was decisive. The subject matter of Ramaka’s three short films—Plan Jaxaay!, Madame Plastig, and Un arbre qui crie!—is localized and difficult, and may seem too middling to merit the kind of attention usually given major works. But if we consider these films alongside the aforementioned And What If Latif Was Right?, a different interpretation suggests itself, one which approaches the films as a series of much-needed activist interventions in the social sphere, a significant body of work about sociopolitical issues in Senegal with reverberations across the West African region, thus reinforcing Ramaka’s self-characterization as a “citoyen engagé” (Martin 2008). The main issue in Plan Jaxaay! is less the flooding than the neglect of the Jaxaay neighborhood—which might even be a calculated neglect aimed at preparing the grounds for prime property by office holders and their business allies.33 Concerns over the environmental risks that the pervasive presence of plastic poses may come across as elitist from the perspective of the long line of laboring women carrying water on their heads in the opening scene of Sembene’s Faat Kine, the haunting voice of the Senegalese diva Yande Codou Sène hovering above. Yet it is exactly the kind of morality informing the film’s critique that is missing in so many cinematic attempts at acknowledging the ingenuity of ordinary people— in a world where the ordinary people unsustainably, unreflectingly (and perhaps inescapably?) reproduce the conditions for their own continued exploitation.

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It is also the case that these examples of activist subject matter are not entirely resistant to corporate or large-scale funding. The challenge is to determine the scale of their importance as ideas or social issues that can find company in the imaginaries of others—which is always a complex blend of many things, including material conditions. The historical basis for the opportunistic re-canonization of The Battle of Algiers ought to be discussed in a broader context. The position of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer on the culture industry as reinforcing conservative ideology is well known (Horkheimer and Adorno 1993). Less known is the view of Andrei Tarkovsky on the relationship between a filmmaker’s poetic imagination and popular audience. In The Genius, the Man, the Legend, a film which follows Tarkovsky around as he works on films, the Russian director makes the compelling argument about poetic imagination in cinema and its relationship to popular, commercial success. According to Tarkovsky, poet-filmmakers such as Satyajit Ray, Ingmar Bergman, Luis Buñuel, and Akira Kurosawa “have difficulty getting their works out, not because they want to be obscure, but because they want to listen secretly, to give expression to what is deep inside those we call the audience” (Tarkovsky 1988). It seems to me that the challenges the social poses for the poetic imagination in the work of Ramaka are to be met at the intersection of these three approaches. It is a problem that defies a simple solution because for Ramaka, there are two additional institutional issues: the contexts of filmmaking in contemporary West Africa and diasporicity as a fact. Several years ago, Cameroonian filmmaker Jean-Marie Teno wondered wryly if the success of Nollywood might intimidate scholars to abandon African cinema, which he believed to have more to offer on African experiences than the ostensibly commercialized Nigerian form.34 Recent scholarship on African cinema shows an interest in subthemes and subfields, and we have the paradoxical situation of a cinematic practice that, having attained a level of institutional viability on the evidence of scholarship, is also at risk of stasis in terms of production and dissemination (Brown 2021; Green-Simms 2022; Harrow and Garritano 2019; Tsika 2022). A film such as Sissako’s Timbuktu attracts an Academy Award nomination, as Nigerian director Afọlayan releases one well-distributed film after another, whereas Cissé’s entire oeuvre remains largely unknown except to specialists of African cinema. Such limited knowledge is not so much a function of the nature of those films as of the contexts in which they are

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produced, and in cases where they are accessible (say, on YouTube), there is less disposition to look for them because the shadow of those contexts still looms over their circulation. These are important issues in the development and growth of African cinema, and for a filmmaker like Ramaka, they are material. If the primary motive for Is.ọla to extend to the film medium is the same impulse of cultural preservation that informed his focus on writing plays, and only in Yoruba, how does that affect the critical perception of works whose production, let alone survival, is not guaranteed in a supposedly different context, such as Ramaka operates in? In this regard, the declaration “A screenplay is not a guarantee,” made by Sissako in an interview with Kwame Appiah (2003) and used as subheading for this section, remains resonant and instructive. Indeed, how different are these contexts as instances where African creative artists are putting their work out as contributions to a common heritage of the world? Biọdun Jeyifo has criticized the idea of preservation within Yoruba performance idioms, especially among the professionals in the traveling theater idiom, as “cultural conformism” (1984, 115). This describes the sense that the troupes’ survival as part of the popular practice in a society in transition depends on their ability to respond to the expectations of their audiences in the idealized memory of the “traditional moral codes, and preindustrial, precapitalist animist-pantheistic sensibilities of pristine Yoruba culture” (115). The idea of preservation in Is.ọla’s work examined thus far would appear to be more sophisticated than this view of cultural heritage. To begin with, there is compelling evidence that Is.ọla views culture, whatever it may be, as a dynamic aspect of society, and he appears to be alert to the negative uses to which said culture can be put. But only in appearance—in his fastidious interest in correct usage of the language, in unapologetic defense of African cultural practices against the onslaught of modern ways, the author as a culture hero is invested in preserving what he deems the better aspects of the culture. In this respect, his attitude is in line with Jeyifo’s understanding of the troupes’ perception that cultural practices need to be preserved in an age “when the forces and products of modernization seem so threatening and externally-derived” (116). In principle, there is nothing wrong with undertaking a deliberate, constructive act of revitalization because a tradition is sustained by its visibility and reproducibility. Even the negative act of critique is valid to the extent that it has a target, an object, to make the focus of its own

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undoing of grand narratives or whatever it deems crucial to the existence of that tradition. In addition, this idea of culture having blind spots could be one of the reasons for the film version of Ẹfúns.etán Aníwúrà, although as we have seen, Is.ọla does not go far enough along this route. When this argument is extended to Ramaka, the claim that the two figures operate in differing contexts is valid only in the sense of uneven national traditions (Nigerian performance culture versus Senegalese cinema industry). We might even argue that what Is.ọla perceives as precarious in the YorubaNigerian cultural ecosystem against the onslaught, to him, of forces of cultural imperialism is writ large for the poetic imagination against the hostility of the market that looks kindly upon only what it deems commercially viable. This is one of the reasons why Is.ọla’s adaptations, as rewrites, are caught in a paradox. He works with an imaginary of a world now dim to many: the period of political optimism across the global South—“the third world,” the decolonizing world—that rose against the long practice of imperialism and came into its own in the series of cultural and especially political events from the latter part of the twentieth century. This context puts him in the same boat as figures such as Sembene and Ngũgĩ. All the same, he comes to adaptation in a significantly altered economic and technological milieu, one held in thrall to neoliberal logic in blatantly unceasing and uneven ways. Extended to Ramaka, the paradox lies in censorious power in the political (Ẹfuns.etan’s appearance as the sole female figure among powerful male chiefs recalls a political arrangement identified with the Ògbóni, as we have seen) and creative realms. A poet-filmmaker is audible or visible in the world as a filmmaker to the extent that she is able to produce and reproduce herself, and the social is the ground for this possibility. On the evidence of their work, the two intellectual figures managed to adapt to the changing circumstances of production, as much in the realm of creative retooling of previous texts as in the realm of making the best of those circumstances. The second sense of adaptation hardly ever receives the proper treatment, but it is no less consequential in the larger goals of an artistic endeavor, whether declared or assumed. The writers Ayi Kwei Armah and Aramide S.egun, whose novels are the focus of the next chapter, have shown how this sense of adaptation as adaptability can be done for literary works.

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APPROACHING THE WORLD AS PLATFORM, LITERALLY

Introduction: Wor ldly A fr ica n Liter atur e The second sense of adaptation highlighted in the last chapter offers a path to the discussion in this one, the case of writers adapting to changing technological contexts, like digital technology, to circumvent the diverse censorious antics of the cultural dominant. That second sense of adaptation is an inventive, integral way of deepening the ethical impulse in African arts and letters. Joseph Ramaka uses it as a route to make manifest the kinds of creative impulse perceived to have limited marketable, commercial value from the perspective of the dominant accents in the production and reception of postcolonial art. For his part, Akinwumi Is.ọla approaches the notion as a means of revitalizing a society’s cultural resources, retrieving and reformatting texts not guaranteed to last under prevalent socioeconomic and political conditions. The two figures do this implicitly, integrating the accustomed idea of adaptation (of one form to another) with their artistic aims. In this respect, authors Ayi Kwei Armah and Aramide S.egun, in their novels The Resolutionaries and Ẹniìtàn: Daughter of Destiny, develop ideas of cultural integrity emanating from serious and uncompromising analysis of contemporary realities on the African continent. For both authors, adapting, and adapting to, new technological possibilities in publishing makes platform the creative mode driving this ethical impulse, especially in relation to issues of translatability, comparatism, and hierarchies of values.1 The stories told in these novels, and the ideas arising from them, are not necessarily difficult or even unusual. However, the

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dominant publishing practices perceive African literary history in such specific (some might say myopic) ways as an aspect of world literature that, like Ramaka’s poetically attuned or thematically localized films, those stories could easily suffer the fate of films that are never made. “There are no boundaries in literature,” the writer and critic Adewale Maja-Pearce writes near the beginning of A Mask Dancing, his study of Nigerian novels of the 1980s, “only shifting centers of excellence. We all look forward to the day when Nigeria becomes just such a center” (1992, 4). In the past two decades and a half, not just Nigeria but the entire African continent has become a constellation of centers of literary excellence, even going beyond the geographical orbit. Few regions of the world can boast comparable slates of new writers with global visibility as does the continent, currently and translocally. Perhaps moved by this attention, recent commentaries and scholarly discussions of African literature by critics, teachers, and readers have tended to prioritize contemporary middlebrow fiction, the work of an extremely small number of old and young (mostly expatriated) writers, as deserving of attention.2 In this prioritization, poetry, writings in African languages, or works of fiction exploring unusual topics in unconventional narrative styles do not receive sufficient attention, if any. With the exception of the late Chinua Achebe and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, whose names are secure, and Tsitsi Dangarembga to some extent, it would seem from this picture that African writers are uniformly emerging, new, and that they produce only works of fiction with uniformly conventional topical concerns or styles. If it is not a coming-of-age story, then it is a story of familial upheaval or personal redemption with an immigrant or diasporic outlook thrown into the mix. This situation has also made pertinent questions relating to the status of knowledge of African literature within the ideological entrenchment of the values of literature in the world. In a sense, some of this development is a function of the status of everything in the age of new media, when personalities, ideas, texts, or practices that are available in certain accessible formats tend to attract greater attention than those that are not. Some of it, also, comes from the perception of cultural consanguinity between the emergent crop of writers and a new generation of scholars. Yet another aspect is the unacknowledged role of the politics of recognition, to borrow a term from philosopher Charles Taylor: in the United States, a job candidate with an Ivy League degree with scholarly interest in the work of Yaa Gyasi is likelier to receive due consideration than one degreed from

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a state university with interest in Tierno Monenembo, even if the latter were to be doing more original work with potential to transform the field. The development is partly also a result of the pressures of a professionalized lifestyle in academia, in which expertise, measurable outcomes, and changing institutional dynamics in the humanities play a role in what knowledge is considered worthwhile. For this fourth factor, focusing on the work of a handful of books with “hot” themes provides easier access to navigable terrains of scholarship than those perceived to exist in a different phase. Yet, one does not have to harbor a bias against the fascination with the new to be guarded about this trend. African literature did not begin in the year 2004, when Facebook was founded, or in the year 1958, when Achebe’s Things Fall Apart was published, even if the latter date now appears long ago in the life of African letters. Nor is African literature the sum of novels that thematize trendy topics, however progressive or compelling those may be from the perspective of the cultural flows that define the present dominant world order. Nor are such novels, even when they are marketed as “telling our stories” (in the admirable editorial signature of a oncepromising literary magazine), exhaustive of the aesthetic possibilities through which the history of this literary culture might be understood. In fact, adopting such an approach as the primary yardstick for thinking relationally between African literature and the highly visible and institutionalized phenomenon called world literature betrays a subtle conceptual problem. It reinforces African literature’s standing in an unselfconsciously disadvantaged position as a version, or an inversion, of a dominant modular form, and thus does not represent a strong enough challenge to world literature as a category whose institutional fortunes are far from settled. The point, however, is not so much that such an approach be abandoned as that it be more closely scrutinized. Relatively new arguments that scholars such as Emily Apter (2013), Simon Gikandi (2016), Pheng Cheah (2016), Eileen Julien (2006; 2015), and Aamir Mufti (2016) have advanced about world literature demonstrate that there is much more to the status of literature in the world than the globalization of trendy thematics. There is a great tension between the animating forces of these thematics and the forces dominant today—forces before which it is difficult to feel at ease. Putting the two novels here in conversation with the concerns of critical world literature, as expressed in the writings of those scholars, opens wider the window of renewed attention to African literature.

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“To Sh a r e the Vision—Attr actively” Two related points are worth stressing with respect to Ẹniìtàn: Daughter of Destiny and The Resolutionaries as writings published to scattered attention as a result of prevailing formal and institutional priorities in African literature. Firstly, the two novels exemplify a notable departure from the fascination with bourgeois or middle-class worldviews in much of contemporary middlebrow fiction. The decision by the authors to publish in outlets other than mainstream (Western or African) ones, secondly, affords them the opportunity of addressing ideas of cultural integrity that grow out of serious and uncompromising analyses of contemporary realities on the African continent in a manner that contemporary middlebrow fiction typically does not. There is certainly very extensive and intensive engagement with lived realities in contemporary middlebrow fiction, as a current trend in the works of female African authors of fiction shows. It is the case, however, that the thematic interest in these works plays off expectations about the abjection of Black life, and the way they are treated on the level of form reinforces those expectations. Platform as a mode of creative practice plays a role in the chosen two novels’ capacity for advancing a different perspective because the latitude provided by such nonmainstream publishing outlets aligns with the political or ideological force of the narratives. They do not merely reject the trendy thematics (identity, difference, heterogeneity, etc.) that define that literary formation. They go further by offering narratives in which middle-class values are either marginalized and shown to be destructive (Ẹniìtàn: Daughter of Destiny) or, as in The Resolutionaries, are subject to such a thorough critique that nothing valuable is left of them. The critique undertaken in the novels occurs on the level of characterization and, in Armah’s hands, in the protocols of narrative. Given the extensive, endogenous focus on specific ideas of cultural integrity in both novels and several others of their kind, it is hardly surprising that no publisher with an eye on the bottom line or cued into the prevalent thematics of contemporary middlebrow fiction would poke them with a long rake. Hardly can any forms of representation escape the interests of a corporate system if such a form is perceived as profitable, even in other senses than simply commercial, as is the case with Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers discussed in chapter 4. However, these two novels have paradoxically escaped that attention from corporate publishing. Many

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more creative works suffer worse fates simply because their authors do not opt for the kind of platform that Armah and S.egun have put into use. For all that, there are hardly any reviews of these novels or much awareness of their existence in spheres where African literature is discussed, such spheres being dominated by issues that resonate with the protocols of contemporary middlebrow fiction. It is not incidental that the novels are critical of institutional priorities in the realm of publishing, translation, and literary convention. Their critical posture indeed takes the form of approaching a convention—say, narrative—as a situation that can be transformed by example. To varying degrees, the novels are aware of, but are not unduly troubled by, the discursive context for the dissemination of African literature, especially the formation I have termed contemporary middlebrow fiction. Given the novels’ complex attitudes toward the discursive context of African literature, they may throw the shortcomings of this formation into relief. For Armah, the focus on ideas of cultural integrity is shown through an elaborate, uncompromising presentation of an African worldview. We have an inclusive, forward-looking society that, though caught in the machinations of Euro-American corporate interest and exploitation, is still devoted to relieving itself of its colonial and neocolonial baggage. Armah brings to literature the attention that others like Cheik Anta Diop, Chancellor Williams, and Théophile Obenga have given to history, linguistics, and philosophy, tracing the roots of African civilization to ancient Egypt, or Kemet, according to their preference. This subject matter is far from chic; it is difficult enough in ontological terms. But Armah also approaches it in a formally demanding manner, displaying an array of unfamiliar choices in the realms of narrative, characterization, plot, and setting. For her part, S.egun confronts a similarly complex topic through the life-affirming gesture of giving new names to old ideas and suggesting new patterns of thought to inform contemporary social choices. She is deliberate in rejecting certain narrative approaches that many works of fiction in her cultural environment are fond of. Her scope is less grand than Armah’s, but she matches him in terms of seriousness of purpose and delivers a more coherent result than the Ghanaian writer in some important respects. The two authors’ astute use of platform (through publishing) as a mode of creative practice plays a significant role in their abilities to explore and convincingly present these supposedly unfamiliar issues.

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In many ways, Armah’s novel compels attention to the central question in this chapter. One might go so far as to claim that the two novels are complementary arguments unaware of each other’s existence only to the extent that the critical establishment neglects to foster such awareness. The Resolutionaries is perhaps the most currently explicit fictional elaboration of the themes that have preoccupied Armah throughout his writing life. Published in 2013 and narrated by a woman, this novel is brimful with insight about African society’s strive for positive values in the face of unrelenting assault from exploitative forces within and without. Importantly, it develops the idea of African cultural integrity through digital and technological platforms, on visible display in the writing and in ways that reinforce the author’s long-standing commitment to African creative and economic independence. Critics have treated Armah’s work with serious attention and have assigned unique importance to it right from the start, although some of this attention was mistaken in major respects. Critics and writers as different as Wọle S.oyinka, Neil Lazarus, Robert Fraser, Charles Larson, and Chinua Achebe wrote on Armah’s early work, and the author replied in kind but unkindly to the two last-named critics.3 According to influential inaugural thematics in the study of African literature, Armah’s early novels (at least the first two, The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born and Fragments), which thematize the independence-era sociopolitical situation as a betrayal of nationalist optimism, appear to reflect the concerns of what Jeyifo calls the legitimation phase of postcolonial literature, discussed in part 1 and in chapter 3. One can also point out that Kwame Appiah’s focus in “Is the Post- in Postcolonial the Post- in Postmodernism?” on African novels critical of nationalist politics was surprisingly silent on those two novels. It is as if the writer began writing in a mode that lent itself easily to certain interpretive protocols in African literary studies but changed course at a particular period and thereafter followed a different trajectory. With this understanding, Achebe’s dismissive statement that Armah had “gotten himself completely confused” (Nwachukwu-Agbada 1997, 135) is not only odd and hostile, but also betrays an unwillingness to treat the writing seriously. The view of African history presented in Two Thousand Seasons—the novel singled out by Achebe to make that statement—might be catalytic in this supposed intellectual reorientation because it marks the first time in Armah’s oeuvre that a fictional narrative was framed as a critique (and reconstruction) of continental history. Robert Fraser, on

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Fig. 5.1. Ayi Kwei Armah at Drexel University, Philadelphia. (17 April 2003). Credit: Photo Courtesy ©2003 Abioseh Michael Porter.

the other hand, has affirmatively analyzed Armah’s narrative approach in the novel as projecting a specific understanding of time in relation to historical experience (1980, 11). A careful attention to the authorial choices in this writer’s work, including those demonstrated in his recently available publications, presents a complicated though clearer picture. In this perspective, not even the first novel is totally exempted from the political impulse that seems to define the later works. Armah’s writings have been shaped by his awareness of millennia-long creative practices that connect the literary and linguistic heritage of ancient Egypt (Kemet) through hieroglyphics with the oral and written forms of the epic across the African continent in modern

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times.4 This heritage is envisioned as resource base for African writers of the present, contemporary era, as for those yet to come, and the writer has steadily taken advantage of the creative, psychological, and social insights it provides. There is, to be sure, a definite shift in the character of the novels and other books released in the period following the establishment of Per Ankh, the imprint that Armah and other colleagues in a publishing collective founded in Popenguine, Senegal, in the early 1990s. For one, in concept and theme, the novels from the mid-1990s address issues of African epistemic integrity more explicitly than before. With the novels Osiris Rising (1995) and KMT: In the House of Life (2002); the semiautobiographical The Eloquence of the Scribes (2006); Remembering the Dismembered Continent (2010), which collects much of his expository writings from the 1970s up to the year of its publication; the somewhat polemical The Way of Companions (2018); and the translation of Théophile Obenga’s African Philosophy: The Pharaonic Period (2004), The Resolutionaries (2013) advances Armah’s conception of the centrality of the heritage of ancient African civilization in the Nile valley to his own work. In addition to the imprint, the collective also established Per Sesh, a workshop-style initiative designed to help its members plan and execute all aspects of a book, from conception to publication and distribution. Finally, bypassing conventional distribution networks or outlets, it built a website, bbkwan.com, where books under the imprint can be ordered directly. The narrative in Osiris Rising is modeled on the Isis-Osiris cycle taken from ancient Egypt—the central characters are given names drawn from ancient (Ast, Asar, Seth) and modern (Cinque) episodes in African history, and the chapters bear Kemetic names in Latin scripts.5 Indeed, in some core chapters (chapters 13 through 17) of The Eloquence of the Scribes (191–248), Armah uses this historical background of Egyptology to set up a systematic description of the relationship between themes and identity as grounds for a literary history. What looks like a shift is therefore a reorientation of priorities informed by two related factors. The author was never in doubt that his personal experience as a writer followed a historical pattern of European exploitation of African resources. In cofounding a publishing outfit of his own, he breaks free of that exploitative system in formal and institutional terms. The fact that Armah has taken full artistic, financial, and legal control of his creative output is consistent with his long-standing argument about the provenance of African identity in the

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past, the present, and the future. In African Novel of Ideas, Jeanne-Marie Jackson writes of “Armah’s characteristic orientation toward the past at the expense of any viable investment in the future” (2021, 61–62), noting that the novel Osiris Rising is a thematic and formal instance of this “larger recuperative project on Armah’s part” (n10, 193). It is true that Armah is invested in the past, but not in a nostalgic, misty-eyed manner, and certainly not at the expense of the future. His conception of time, shared with S.oyinka (and fundamental to the play Death and the King’s Horseman), follows a continuum in which separating the past from the present and the future is a methodological error.6 The writings are notably didactic, continental in scope, totally accommodating of global Black identities, and unambiguously preoccupied with the focused construction of a positive African worldview, an inclusive, forward-looking society relieved of its colonial and neocolonial baggage. The novels are unique in another important sense. They are told from the point of view of women, either omnisciently or in the first-person perspective. In terms of plot, theme, pacing, characterization, dialogue, and other formal features, they draw inspiration from a deep knowledge of African intellectual resources, beginning with the scribal practices of old Egypt. They are a unique contribution to the literary heritage of the world, and it would be interesting to know if there are comparable initiatives in any other region of global postcoloniality. The Resolutionaries is a summative fictional attempt at an integration of these formal and institutional initiatives. Unusual for a work of fiction, the novel features “A Conversation with the Reader,” a four-page text and excellent example of the mode of creative practice, in which the author uses his platform to explain how he conceived of the book and its final form. The novel is also an elaboration of many themes from his previous nonfiction, and it probably has its origin in “Halfway to Nirvana,” a short story that Armah published in West Africa in 1984. The imaginative work on display in these writings appearing in the aftermath of the founding of Per Ankh/Per Sesh is stated as the explicit thesis of the lecture by Seyni Maty Joobe, a minor though indispensable character in the novel, as we shall see in a moment. It is slightly reformulated in the long passage at the beginning of the title essay in Remembering the Dismembered Continent (9–10).7 Armah has clearly developed an innovative style in fiction and expository prose. This style is not without its shortcomings, but it anticipates many of the criticisms that current

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scholars of world literature have levied against the classification, from the restrictive, half-examined Eurocentrism of the comparative literature model (Gikandi, Julien, Mufti) to the equation of globalizing thematics with translatable worldliness (Apter, Cheah). Told in the first-person voice of Nefert, an introspective single parent who makes a living as a professional translator and interpreter working the circuit of governmental and NGO conferences across the continent, The Resolutionaries confronts African rulers’ resolve “not to challenge European domination over Africa, but to work more efficiently at its maintenance” (1). As a translator, Nefert sees herself and her small but active circle of friends as continuing with “the role Africans with language skills have played since the first European slave-raiders cut a deal with the first African slave-seller . . . [helping] African collaborators reassure owners of the global economy that their system will not change, that year after year, we shall reapply the formulae designed to maintain Africa as a resource bin for Europe and America” (1–2). She is interiorized and emotionally disturbed, and at the root, the reason is not too different from what we shall see with the protagonist of S.egun’s novel. It is more accurate to describe Nefert as narrator than as protagonist, because although we see most things through her lens, what counts as the idea of the protagonist is better worked out as the preference of the collective to which she belongs.8 There is a clipped reference to her obsession “about the absence of a male companion in my life” (85) and a passing mention of her having “spent three mind-numbing years working in the language section of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs” (90). Forty-five years old and with a master’s degree, Nefert is all depression, and her sensing of the conflict such as there is in this novel is personal. It is the conflict she experiences within herself about this professional task and her deep conviction of the need to break out of it. She experiences this conflict on a psychological level, as depression, marking the tone and pace of the novel from the first page. In a brilliant calibration of this theme, Armah plots the novel according to Nefert’s bimonthly, year-long conference schedule, organizing each chapter around an explication of the theme of each conference to which she travels with close friends Sali, Jehwty, and Benga to peddle her skills as a translator-interpreter. Each of the conference themes—election, antiterrorist border security, education, energy and natural resources, publishing—is carefully constructed as a pressing problem on the African continent, and there is never a shortage of perspective on what African

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leaders think of these problems and what the forward-looking characters think needs to be done. The leaders (or their intellectual enablers, such as we are shown in the novel) are content to roll out one resolution after another at the end of a conference funded by GloBank every year; the thoughtful among the interpreters are resolved to change the situation by proposing and working on practical alternatives. The title clearly has double meaning: the resolution to work for a change in the mindset that treats ineffectual conference resolutions as normal practice. There is something of a classic conflict in realist fiction in the novel in the efforts by the shady Shaka Foreman (father of Nefert’s son) to control TransInter, the translators’ group, through a streamlining plan. This plan starts as early as the first chapter (20) and appears every now and then, receiving something of a resolution in the final chapter (463), when Foreman loses the electoral bid to become the association’s executive secretary to Nefert. But Armah does not play up this opposition of perspectives as a central conflict, which may have something to tell us about his lack of interest in formal realism (in contrast to S.egun’s novel) and even more about the two novels’ critical stance toward the ideologies of contemporary middlebrow fiction. Instead, he unfolds a canvas centered on a positive, constructive depiction and reinvention of African realities. This sidelining of conventional formal realism mars the narrative for a reader looking to enjoy a straightforward story, and some of its broader ramifications (the status of expository prose, the relationships between archetypes and characters) are beyond the scope of this chapter. The bulk of the story takes place in Lebw, an unidentified West African city where Nefert lives. Several names—Lebw, Niwet, Nwnw, Jehwty, Resy—are drawn from the language of Kemet, but Armah infuses the narrative with elements principally from contemporary Senegalese and Ghanaian cultures. Lebw appears to be Dakar, Gan is Accra, Nwnw somewhat resembles Lagos (or Port Harcourt), Arusi is Dar es Salaam or Nairobi, and Mwisho is Cape Town. Of all the cities the conferenciers visit, Mwisho is the most fully recognizable. Nefert is bogged down by another problem, a practical one. She is the mother of four-year-old Resy, from her affair with Shaka Foreman, a former fellow dreamer who has finally “grown up” and made peace with the cutthroat world of careers as an African middleman—not much different from the colonial social station that furnishes his last name. Nefert is overwhelmed by her internal conflict, and caring for Resy without

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domestic support further drags her down. Her close friend, Salimata (Sali) Ka, practically forces her to seek help by hiring a housemaid, Rama, and inducing Nefert’s mother, Yaye Lyssa, to come and live with them in Lebw. This problem thus solved, she gains greater confidence with the kind attention coming from fellow interpreter Jehwty Lumumba, a model of high principles and exemplary generosity who, as she muses, “attracts me with a pull I cannot begin to describe” (93). Slowly, love and lifework come together as a joint pursuit with like-minded friends—the signature potential for cooperative existence in Armah’s fictional world. There is no shortage of absurdity in the real world nonetheless. Nefert’s witnessing of the organization and implementation of each conference is an unvarying account, in real time, of the expenditure of African human and material resources for the enrichment of Europe and America. During a conference on elections, she listens and watches in pitying frustration as African public servants gather to be instructed by detached Western bureaucrats on the values of violence-free elections. The communiqué at the end of the deliberations is standard fare of begging-bowl dependency, African officials resolving to “request that the European Union, the United Nations and the USA establish a support fund for powersharing governments created in the wake of disputed elections” (69). At another conference, African states are shown to be a consortium of militarized camps for the purposes of selling American equipment to be used in antiterrorism surveillance and control. At the same time, a resolute search for an alternative vision gathers momentum as Nefert’s small circle of friends imagines turning the intrinsic weakness of this condition into a force for change. The conference on the theme of “Culture, Literature and Publishing” has a special resonance, both for the focus of this chapter and for the overall strength of Armah’s investments in the institutional dimensions of African intellectual work. The format of this conference, held in Arusi, accessible by air from Joburg, follows the standard practice observed in the previous instances, which, with Nefert’s humorlessness, tends to make the narrative tedious. But there is a comically satirical twist. The scope of the conference has been sharply reduced, participants learn during the opening ceremony, because the extra “work required to coordinate the conference from London had meant a division of the total Japanese remittance between the supervisory agency in Europe and the conference secretariat on the ground, in Africa” (360). Armah is sophisticated enough as a novelist to let the reader realize that this arrangement is indicative of the level of seriousness

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attached to the promotion of African literature by philanthropic outsiders. Out of her listening port, Nefert reports: “Someone asked why Japanese funds meant for African literature had to be managed in London. The coordinator said Asians knew African literature only as an extension of European literature, because the African writers they read used European languages, and also preferred European and American publishers. This news was greeted with a deep silence” (360–361). Nonetheless, the conference gets underway and begins with a panel of four writers, two women and two men, each a professor: Esi Tawia Nkrumah, Oshikoya Eshu-Price, Msemaji wa Taifa, and Ade Ramsford. Although the biographical details of each of these characters roughly echo that of a well-known, specific African writer or scholar, Armah’s portrayals are caricatures. Ramsford, who was jailed during a brutal war in his country and later awarded an international “genius prize,” briskly leaves the conference “to catch a flight to Austin, Texas” (367). Eshu-Price was “a star on her campus, one of the most famous in Africa [and her] firstclass degree was a sensation” (362–363). Msemaji wa Taifa’s teaching and writing “brought him into accelerating conflict with the government of his country [with] statements about the need for a revolution to decolonize the state” (364). Knut Haakon, a mystic student of world literature, expresses his passion for an unnamed African writer who had the reputation of “a reclusive, twisted, racist, essentialist loner” (371–372) and was cheated of his royalties before eventually dying of either AIDS or hunger. Each of the panelists shows a commendable public-spiritedness; each has had a rough deal in the hands of the rulers of his or her country, but they have all escaped to the United States to teach “world literature, the exotic cousin to world music” (364; emphasis added). Anyone with more than a passing knowledge of African literature should have an idea of which writer, male or female, is the target of the caricatures in these profiles. As he notes in “Conversation with the Reader,” Armah abandoned satire as the generic template as work progressed on the novel. Still, it appears that he finds the stylistic predilection for caricature irresistible, as seen in those profiles. The abridged program, however, does not affect the centerpiece event at the conference, “a 50th anniversary revisit of Englebert Chingalugha Abacha’s novel The Center Cannot Hold” (368), complete with testimonies from publishers’ reps from London and the local branch. Indeed, the nearreligious reverence for this anniversary includes another ironic twist: it is

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within that perplexing and humiliating context of a parasitical conference culture that perhaps the most radical platform for making an alternative case in African literary history makes its appearance. This is the speech by a little-known but prolific scholar called Seyni Maty Joobe. She is a physically impressive and arresting woman, and her posture is combatively objective. Nefert describes her: “She was strikingly tall, slender in an elegant way, and she carried her sixty or so years with grace. Her hair was natural. A single strand of grey mixing with the black suggested that she was comfortable with advancing age . . . I was baffled at the idea that such a photogenic, well-spoken person could be camera-shy” (371). There are two aspects to Joobe’s speech. She is ruthlessly critical of the traditions of narrative associated with the dominant strands of African literature. These traditions, she argues, come from conceptions of narrative as a “Platonic lie,” an order of organizing reality “powerful beyond belief even though it be totally lacking in truth” (374).9 Focusing on The Center Cannot Hold, the work whose fiftieth anniversary the conference is partly celebrating, as “the apotheosis of an established missionary literary form” (375), Joobe elaborates on the process through which missionary propaganda was transformed into literary material for catechist instructions. As African agents replaced white missionaries in the work of propagating Christian gospels, that Platonic lie was reshaped and fitted out as literature. The author Abacha, according to Joobe, was “a final year university student short on genius but long on ambition, eager to try his hand at fiction after failure at earlier disciplines . . . [who] unable to invent a story of his own [thus] latched on to the familiar narrative, stirred bits and pieces of his English literary studies into it, gave the whole a hypocoristic vocabulary suitable for a story about primitive society” (375). The other aspect of the speech is Joobe’s thesis, proposed as a critique of the antithetical Platonic lie, “that there is a real African literary tradition, but that before it can express itself in new writing, the educational system inherited from European colonialism, in particular its literary projection, will have to be carefully analyzed and understood, so that if Africans decide to break free of the European stranglehold on African literary history, the continent’s real artistic culture can be seen and studied without European blinkers” (376). This statement takes us back to the earlier point about Armah’s conception of his work within the matrix of African intellectual history stretching back to ancient African civilization in the Nile valley. The connection

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is clear from the title of Joobe’s book, The Kemet Hypothesis, and she dwells on the history of this intellectual culture at length, giving Nefert a rare feeling of emotional and intellectual exhilaration. Taken beyond literary history to serve as an informing idea of social organization, a sort of inversion manifests itself in Armah’s conception: contemporary Africa as a collection of nation-states is an unjust system designed by Europe and America to exploit African natural and intellectual resources for the benefit of their own societies, while a handful of selfish, short-sighted “African agents” get personal cuts, and millions of primary producers wallow in poverty (315, 321). This system persists in part because, through the violent tools of colonial education imposed in the aftermath of the Scramble and relentlessly perpetuated through complex forms of unequal exchange afterwards, Africans have been disconnected from their millennia-long history. Egypt is excised from Africa on the level of episteme. The programmatic way to redress this condition, indeed change it, is written all over the novel. However, the most explicit statement is a declaration by Jehwty, Nefert’s emerging partner. As some of the translators and interpreters meet privately at the end of the first conference on elections, he proposes, in his usual gentle manner, that “if we met regularly and focused on a purpose, our association could contribute to the way our society gets shaped. That’s assuming we want to participate in it not only as interpreters and translators, but as thinking Africans” (72). Again, there are variations of this statement elsewhere in the novel (179, 181, 335), with emphasis given to the specific context in which each restatement occurs. The connection between the two positions, Joobe’s and Jehwty’s, and publishing platform as the creative mode of expanding access to literary works exists in a discussion that takes place between the two declarations (335–338). Preparing for the conference on literature and culture, Nefert reviews materials dealing with the history of African literature since the era of political independence. She is stunned to discover that no African writer had been able to “settle down into a serious, productive life as a professional writer” on the basis of income from foreign publishers, even though “a few had had their books sold in millions of copies” (335). Ruing this scandalous state of things, she calls Jehwty for his opinion, and he lets her in on the details of the difficult situations under which African writers operate. The explanations he proffers are a robust account of the intricate system of trade book sales, of the kind rarely heard from African authors, in part because few ever need to worry about those

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details, being either too busy looking for publishers or too careful not to seem difficult once the lucky break has come. In turn, Jehwty’s analysis prompts the question of why no African authors break out of those situations and develop an equitable system. The conversation devolves on the existence of one cooperative alternative, a publishing initiative that looks a lot like the Popenguine-based outfit which Armah has used to reissue three of his four earlier novels and, in large part, thrive as an African writer. “Human factor” and a variety of institutional limitations come up as obstacles in the way of this fictional ideal. While those are not likely to be eliminated any soon, the possibilities that “electronic publishing and e-commerce” offer for a distribution model to circumvent dependency on European publishers represent a feasible route. This is the route S.egun and Armah have embraced. It is the reason that their works have not suffered the fate of many African novels that do not exist, to the extent that such works have not been published. More pertinently, it is the reason they are able to envision such radical futures for African societies beyond the concerns of contemporary middlebrow fiction. A further development from this approach offers an insight into the politics of circulation and translation in the context of globalized literary studies. By examining these two impulses carefully, we come to a better sense of how the shadow of certain features of critical world literature—translatability, comparatism, and hierarchies of values—loom large over the fortunes of African literary history. The questions that later examples of world literature scholarship (Cheah 2016; Gikandi 2016; Mufti 2016; Julien 2015; Apter 2013) raise are about literary reflections on the world as a lived and living entity. Varieties of social inequality, cultural difference, and economic or political exploitation are the shifting grounds on which human beings make lives, encounter one another, or fail to do these things. Beyond the spatial or geographical representations of those experiences, which exercised an earlier crop of commentaries on world literature, new questions have arisen about the very nature of the world that literature engages. In What Is a World: On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature, Pheng Cheah focuses on literature’s ability to project “the world as a dynamic process with a normative, practical dimension” (2016, 192). The prevalent analytical approaches to the concept and practice of world literature have relied on the world-system analysis (Moretti 2000), global circulation (Damrosch 2003), and the idea of world literary space (Casanova 2004). Cheah posts

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a strong criticism of these still-influential kinds of reading when he writes that “the fundamental shortcoming of equating the world with a global market is that it assumes that globalization creates a world. This leads to a restricted understanding of the relation between literature and capitalist globalization that places literature in a reactive position. Instead of imagining what literature can contribute to an understanding of the world and its possible role in remaking the world in contemporary globalization, theories of world literature have focused on the implications of the global circulation for the study of literature” (5). In contrast to this approach, Cheah develops “a normative theory of world literature, [giving] an account of world literature that does not merely describe and analyze how literary works circulate around the world or are produced with a global market in mind but that seeks to understand the normative force that literature can exert in the world: the ethicopolitical horizon it opens up for the existing world” (5). This, he argues further, is a proposition for “a more rigorous way of understanding world literature’s normativity as a modality of cosmopolitanism that responds to the need to remake the world as a place that is open to the emergence of peoples that globalization deprives of world” (5, 19). Undertaking this normative theory of world literature requires that Cheah give priority to philosophical reflections in the spiritualist-materialist mode developed by Hegel and Marx as well the phenomenological ones of Martin Heidegger, Hannah Arendt, and Jacques Derrida. It is a strong approach, and it allows him to examine a range of works of postcolonial narrative fiction based on how they articulate with world literature and its participation in worlding processes (213). By making postcoloniality the starting point of these processes in literature, Cheah pushes the boundaries of critical reflection on common impulses (being human, desiring freedom, projecting futures) more forcefully than discrete engagements with the concept of world literature have. Using time and temporalization as processes through which literature engages in worlding, Cheah prioritizes narrative fiction—perhaps in excess, from the standpoint of Joobe’s critique of the “Platonic lie” discussed earlier. Without prejudice to the evaluations of graduate students that the scholar reports in the introduction (15), his chosen works of fiction may be broadly representative and more astute on aesthetic grounds than much contemporary middlebrow fiction. All the same, they conceal important questions about circulation and access, precisely the questions to which

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earlier theories of world literature have drawn attention. To put it differently, Cheah is able to discuss those novels because they exist through specific circuits of visibility or availability. There are other ways of getting back to these questions while staying with the critiques of those theories, and Simon Gikandi, Eileen Julien, Emily Apter, and Aamir Mufti point to these ways. Taking Cheah’s premise seriously, Gikandi asks, “How is literature to be read both immanently and relationally especially when, to enter the world or to claim the capacity to world, it must also abandon the places and referents that enable it?” (2016, 1200). Gikandi’s preference is for literature in the world rather than world literature or comparative literature, so he is particularly concerned with matters relating to method, that is, the potentials that literary studies offer in engaging with literature circulating in this way. He observes that “world literature opens its doors to the primary texts of the whole world, but it does not want to derive its method from that world.” Comparative literature, likewise, “is comfortable with the West-East comparisons that posit a totalized Europe in an analogical relationship to an East Asian field in which the cultures of China, Japan and Korea seem to share the same roots and thus promise both difference and similitude” (1203). For this reason, Gikandi pays extra attention to literary exchange as a mode of comparison, for example “between the cultures of the global South, especially those that have not been mediated through the European center” (1203, emphases added.) In the final section of “Another Way in the World,” Gikandi undertakes an exemplary reading by looking at the points of intersection between Bessie Head’s A Question of Power and Munshi Premchand’s A Gift of Cow (Godaan, 1936). It is an unusual kind of analysis—unusual, that is, in the dominant situation that the concept of world literature has fostered. Even though Gikandi does not make the point explicitly, the exchange is conceivable on the basis of three models of relationality that the concept of world literature sidesteps. These are the Tricontinental or Third World internationalism, the rubric of Commonwealth literature, and the less literarily systematized organ of the United Nations. The edition of A Gift of Cow referenced in Head’s novel was a UNESCO publication. This approach parses the question of unequal exchange between these two novels and between the sites of Third World / Tricontinental “southern” exchange. Godaan (A Gift of Cow) is a Hindi novel received in translation, and English is still the common ground of that encounter. It is an

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innovative method to the extent that what A Question of Power loses in the lopsided exchange it gains in its predisposition to the protocols of comparative reading that Gikandi opts for. Furthermore, the idea of an exchange “not . . . mediated through the European center” operates as a mode of creative practice under discussion here, of platform making possible specific but new kinds of intervention. In “The Critical Present: Where Is African Literature?,” an essay that traces new terrains of African literature as a form of “cultural production,” Julien (2015) expands on these possibilities by emphasizing the always-already syncretic status of African material (historical and otherwise) on which literary works by African authors draw. Location and new modes of subjectivity become the fostering agents of new perspectives beyond the male-dominated paradigm through which literary history came to be constituted. Taken with her earlier, now cult classic essay (2006) about the extroversion of African novels, Julien’s argument in this essay shows the pertinence of context as indispensable to reading. The argument provides options for tracking literary works in multiple locations and, added to Gikandi’s, generates discussion of African literature as a pivotal axis of literature in the world. This discussion, I think, will warrant supplementing the perspectives of these two scholars of African literature with that of Aamir Mufti. Forget English! Orientalism and World Literature, Mufti’s book, came out in 2016, so Gikandi could not engage it the way he did Cheah’s, although both share a similar political outlook on the subject, and some of Mufti’s points may have been anticipated in a strong essay that Gikandi published in 2001.10 Aiming to “provid[e] a critical historiography . . . of the concept [of world literature] itself and . . . of its applications and consequences with respect to one region of the world and its languages and literatures” (30), Mufti exposes the connections between Orientalism and the enabling conditions of world literature in new and succinct ways (20–22). To Cheah’s mixture of spiritualist-materialist and phenomenological analyses, Mufti adds a historical-materialist approach combined with a strong case for linguistic alternatives. He shows the classic European practice of otherness that coupled the Orient and Africa to contain a genealogy of asymmetries that discussions of world literature often elide. Orientalism is “the cultural logic of bourgeois modernity in its outward orientation” and provides the basis for the elision of “inequality and difference” in the writings of scholars such as Moretti and Casanova (2016, 30, 33–34). Mufti argues that the appearance of world literature engaged by

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this early scholarship was linked to the disappearance of old internationalism that tried to bypass bourgeois exchange in the wake of decolonization. “Far from being mutually exclusive ideological formations,” he writes further, “Anglicist and Orientalist ideas and practices coexisted productively in the cultural and educational institutions inaugurated by colonial power” (90). This critique of world literature’s overvaluation of English relies on an idea of historical amnesia in that all the major theories “give an account of world literature as a concept, practice, or structure of the (Euro-America) bourgeois world, without any reference to . . . concrete historical alternatives and contestations throughout much of the twentieth century” (94). Another aspect of Mufti’s argument finds company in the critique elaborated by Emily Apter in her book Against World Literature, one of the earliest efforts in this latter turn in world literature scholarship. Both scholars find faults with the tendencies in world literature to presume cultural equivalence among literary histories. Apter opts for “literary comparatism that recognizes the importance of non-translation, mistranslation, incomparability and untranslatability” and that stands against the “tendencies in world literature toward reflexive endorsement of cultural equivalence and substitutability” (2013, 4, 10). Both translation studies and world literature, Apter contends, are “too pluralistic, too ecumenical” in their pedagogical interests and are thus “unable to rework literary history through planetary cartographies and temporalities despite their recourse to world-systems theory” (8). She makes a case for an array of topics that “imply a politics of literature critical of global literary management within corporate education” (16) as a way of examining the notion of world literature that, through translation, assumes equivalence between languages and literatures. Though she relies heavily on the Vocabulaire, a French “dictionary of the untranslatable” drawn from European philosophical concepts (edited by Barbara Cassin), Apter develops a healthily plural approach to what she terms, as a consequence, “oneworldiness,” and she analyzes a series of keywords whose linguistic complexity shows untranslatability to be an overlooked phenomenon in criticisms about world literature. There are important points of intersection between these approaches on their own terms, besides what they all suggest as useful, critical points of departure for the discussion in this chapter. For instance, Apter’s argument should ordinarily resonate with Cheah’s interest in worlding processes based on their conception of new temporalities for studying literature, but the author of What Is a World? draws no attention to such an affinity.

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Due to the summative nature of his essay that serves as introduction to a special issue of the Publications of the Modern Language Association of America (PMLA), Gikandi presents a more even-handed analysis, and his status as a scholar of African literature offers additional openings to thinking relationally about world literature in the present context. His argument is prescient in another respect. In 2016, as Gikandi’s essay made its appearance, Armah’s publishing cooperative Per Ankh was in press with an interesting example of the mode of exchange Gikandi enjoins, one centered on African languages, though not to the exclusion of European ones. This text is Sanhat (2017), a multilingual, collaborative book that manifests Armah’s commitment to an African epistemic presence over the years and is imagined in his novel as well. The story of the eponymous Sanhat, an official of Kemet, was written at the time of King Sehotepibre who ruled in Egypt around 1800 BC; the small but heavy book has a genealogy just as storied. The hieroglyphic study group Shemsw Bak issued it in an innovative way: the Latinized version of the hieroglyphic text was translated into French and English, and from these three versions emerged translations into several African languages, including Akan, Bambara, Kikongo, Kiswahili, Lingala, Pular, Wolof, and Zulu. On a basic level, two African languages—Ro es Kemet/Old Egyptian (hieroglyphics) and Akan—may have had an exchange in translation not mediated by French or English. The innovation here is that there could be new editions of the book with new translations, incrementally expanding the size of the book without significantly changing its nature. In addition, even if one such future translation, say Hausa, were based on the text in English, it would bypass the institutional authority that the language has fostered through dominant strains of world literature, generating new models of comparison for African literature. In this regard, the conception of this book and the translations that it has generated lay to rest Apter’s observation that the Vocabulaire would “ideally . . . have had a companion volume covering Asian, African, Indian, and Middle Eastern languages, [but that it] succeeds within its terms as a latter-day version of humanist translation studii” (32).11 “Liter a ry Gatek eeping”: On Contempor a ry Middlebrow Fiction The critiques of cultural equivalence and substitutability from both Apter and Mufti offer another point of departure for my argument. “Literary

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gatekeeping” is a term frequently used to characterize the limits imposed on the ability of certain kinds of writing to circulate in the world. The import of this characterization might be closer to often-overlooked untranslatability, having to do with what editors and publishers endorse or refuse to. Through the politics of publishing in which English, according to Mufti’s critique, is regarded as the literary gold standard, works considered culturally middling, topically unfashionable, formally or ideologically demanding, or held in thrall to location and access are guaranteed to remain untranslated and untranslatable. The untranslatable in this respect goes beyond the phenomenon of the linguistically complex terms and notions on which Apter focuses (117ff). It extends to the detritus of cultural superiority underwriting Eurochronology, and according to which only sociologically transparent experiences or sensibilities are considered amenable to translation or travel. In the same vein, how would anyone know what terms in Xhosa are untranslatable, let alone in relation to what linguistic standards, if a Xhosa text or manuscript was never published, which is to say, produced? Like the films that never get made, in the manner discussed in chapter 4, the works that fail to meet the essentially cultural criteria set by publishers are not marketable and so do not exist, never mind what linguistically complex terms might be lurking in their enunciations. The current standing of African literature in the world, as argued at the beginning of this chapter, places this question squarely in the frame of the formation I have been calling contemporary middlebrow fiction. It also leads us to a discussion of the chapter’s other novel, Ẹniìtàn: Daughter of Destiny. Contemporary middlebrow fiction is a highly complex, internally differentiated, institutionally uneven formation, and like creative systems generated in a variety of unequal and fitful interplays of material and epistemic forces, it is not easy to pin down as a type.12 Yet, systematize one must, both to situate this formation in relation to others that are left out and because the notion and practice of world literature feed from it. As a literary formation, contemporary middlebrow fiction is extraverted, yearns to feel at home in the world, and is fully invested in the intractable aspects of the abjection of Black and postcolonial life. In its simultaneous inflation of the extractive patterns of African economy and feeding off of the idea of transnationalism, the formation shows contradictory impulses in the positions of Hountondji and Mbembe (as seen in chap. 1) to be less so. In other words, my assertion in that chapter that there is more to the

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two positions than mere tension finds further validation in the representational force of this literary formation, according to the tendencies described here. I place the formation in a broader context by underscoring the diverse ways in which writers who are wary of its institutional grip have sought to break away from it. Ẹniìtàn is close to contemporary middlebrow fiction in the way it handles the protocols of formal realism, and on this stylistic point, it is at a remove from The Resolutionaries. It tells an emotionally engrossing story with everyday characters and has a resolution that restores a sense of domestic equilibrium to the nuclear family. However, in terms of its subject matter—how it evolves in the narrative as well as in its mode of appearance as a publication—it is totally in company with Armah’s novel. This second factor, the novel’s mode of appearance, is consequential on balance, insofar as the argument of this chapter is concerned. Looking at the novel in terms of that argument calls for two distinct analytical approaches. The first concerns the novel’s interest in engaging the complexity of subject matter, thematizing issues like reincarnation, mental illness, and the restorative powers of the natural world. It combines this complexity with the life-affirming gesture of giving new names to old ideas, elaborating on patterns of thought that can inform contemporary social choices. Furthermore, the novel demonstrates a deliberate rejection of certain narrative models that uncritically center bourgeois values. It does this a number of ways, including the ironic deployment of Kìńs.èkó as its primary setting. In the second analytical approach, however, it is a novel that takes the representation of surface realism more seriously than Armah’s novel (Harris 1990). The depiction of the protagonist explores the realms of spirituality that most works of contemporary middlebrow fiction usually treat casually, when not infusing those realms with melodramatic topicality. Such works generally prefer to play up, through plot and characterization, emotional dimensions that appeal to sensibilities at home with the abjection of Black and postcolonial lives. Ẹniìtàn: The Daughter of Destiny stays with The Resolutionaries in addressing ideas of cultural integrity that grow out of serious and focused analyses of contemporary realities on the African continent. In narrative development and characterization, however, it moves closer to the contemporary middlebrow fiction genre than does Armah’s novel. Concentrating on two main topics in the novel—positioning of characters and thematization of politics—yields a rich account of its investment in surface realism.

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In the first place, how does the novel handle complex topics, that is, in the sense in which such thematic issues are given priority in this chapter? The work of Nigerian writer Aramide S.egun, Ẹniìtàn: Daughter of Destiny stands in a curious relationship to the formation that I have characterized as contemporary middlebrow fiction.13 Narrated against the background of the sociopolitical history of contemporary Nigeria, the novel is an engrossing tale about two strong-willed and incompatible sisters, a family drama starring very flawed personalities. The older of the sisters, Abikẹ, totally absorbed in the chiliastic worldview of Pentecostal Christianity, regards the younger, the eponymous Ẹniitan, as mentally unstable because she does not conform to her expectations about normal life. Abikẹ, married to Tunde, a man with political ambitions, is also a mother of twins and has very clear and strong ideas about how to keep her family together. Having previously dropped out of university, Ẹniitan thoroughly upsets her well-meaning sister (and self-arrogating mother) further when she turns against Abikẹ’s plans to mark the younger sister’s birthday with a ceremony in church. The novel opens with this dramatic event. With a single-mindedness that enervates the older sibling, Ẹniitan refuses the family’s entreaties to brighten their day and go to church with them. Tunde’s harsh reaction as well as the general hostility in the house drive Ẹniitan to attempt suicide, and as the much-put-upon couple suddenly face a crisis in their marriage, they are less attentive to the declining health of one of the twin brothers, Kẹhinde. Given Abikẹ’s emotional investment in Pentecostalism, she is, like her husband Tunde, ill-equipped to understand the mystery behind Ẹniitan’s personality—the fact that she is an incarnation of a grandmother who, during her lifetime, was feared and considered a witch. There is a great irony in this misunderstanding between sisters who, in actual fact, love each other. Abikẹ chooses white dresses for her sister’s celebration whereas, according to Ẹniitan’s intuitions, the Pentecostal cherishment of white clothes is an appropriation of the sartorial practices of endogenous spirituality. (In Nigeria, the earliest Pentecostal churches were known as white garment churches.) While it may seem like irony that the existence of familial love does not guarantee understanding, it is perhaps more accurate to put this tension down to the novel’s clever juxtaposition of two kinds of spirituality—the nature-inspired one to which Ẹniitan is drawn and Abikẹ’s own faith in Pentecostal Christianity. The balance sits delicately between these two poles. Faith-based healing intersects with

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options for modern psychological or psychiatric care; the preference for herbal or homeopathic treatment reinforces the perspective about Ẹniitan as an incarnation of her grandmother. There is much of Pentecostal rationality (or irrationality, if you will) and a good amount of political brigandage, but there is also a sharp interest in the spiritual aspects of daily life. We understand Ẹniitan’s nature and personal disposition through the novel’s deployment of the spiritual idea of afterlife later in the story (208), but there is early evidence in the discussion of her birth, with respect to the legends surrounding her grandmother, popularly known as Ìyá: “Her daughter-in-law died on the anniversary of Ìyá’s death while giving birth to Ẹniitan. These unusual circumstances fueled new rumors that Ìyá—in the afterlife—had sacrificed her daughter-in-law in order to return to conclude unfinished business” (10). In Ẹniitan’s dreams and visions, there are residues of what might be termed magical realism (202–203) as she tries, out of psychic energies she is hardly aware of, to test the stories about the connections between her and the deceased grandmother. She is far from certain and needs the elderly Iya Adunni to help her understand. (The deceased grandmother, Ìyá, and the still-alive Iya Adunni were cousins and very close.) The difference between S.egun’s use of magical realism and the standard idea of this literary device lies in the novel’s interest in the personal spiritual realm as opposed to the forces of Christian/Pentecostal faith-based projections. The prose rises to the occasion of these forces, whether of nature or of religion. But this is only one part of the disequilibrium. The long meeting between the couple and Mama Yard, Tunde’s mother (87–96), supplies the other part of this tension as a microcosm of the novel’s core. It also fulfills, in a limited way, the functions of the family meeting, a customary practice in which the novel does not invest too much narrative time. Even in the part of the story about herbal care, the two worlds appear sealed from each other. The recourse to Christian prayer is complex, as is the recourse to psychiatry that Tunde frequently and negatively alludes to as a curative option for Ẹniitan. The point, though, is that in Nigeria, the psychiatric option would have been taken over by Christian fervor, as doctors trained in orthodox medicine are liable to hold prayer sessions at the start of a day’s work. Adunni, the physician, comes across as a possible mediating force, but perhaps the novel’s point is to sustain this lack of empathy toward nonorthodox medical protocols. An otherwise practical and sane character like Adunni continues to mistrust her mother’s attitude toward herbal

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cures and sends her medications from Lagos. Unlike Abikẹ, however, she does not speak ill of the mother’s ways or represent an insurmountable ideological opposition. After the doctor’s valiant efforts to save Kẹhinde from cancer fail and the chastened parents come to their senses, Tunde hands to a returning Ẹniitan an envelope containing documents and a photograph, which the dead twin had requested be given to his aunt. The reader notices a brilliant exfoliation of language into narrative and incidental space: “As she held the photograph closely, she broke into a big smile that lit up her face. This was because as soon as she looked at the picture, she experienced a transient pain in her head and went into a trance. Her vision became flooded with images of her grandmother’s estate—its rustic beauty blossoming with the cultivation of new ideas. The estate was now an open community attracting young minds keen to re-discover the ancient knowledge of herbal cures” (300). Iya Adunni’s store of herbs is gradually transformed into a Research Center for the Study of Alternative Medicine as a real-time manifestation of Ẹniitan’s experience of slow recovery. It is as if the spent forces of the departed older women—Ìyá the grandmother and Iya Adunni—are returning to enliven hers. S.egun handles this transformation of damaged and distorted lives with a striking sense of balance and responsibility. She advances here a central objective of the novel, the life-affirming gesture of giving new names to old ideas, through an expansion into new patterns of thought with consequences for contemporary life. In her own words, S.egun seeks to address “religious diversity and the lack of inclusivity which has led to intolerance, disrespect and misunderstanding of other worldviews, especially with regard to traditional and cultural practices in the Nigerian society” (interview 2020).14 Ethnic diversity is a salutary, if sometimes fractious, indication of the country’s inclusiveness and is generally acknowledged as one of Nigeria’s unique features as a modern African nation. When it comes to religious diversity, however, the same kind of tolerance is hard to find. The novel depicts this lack of tolerance in the way the relationship between religion and traditional practice, which does not trouble a character like Iya Adunni, is often used to malign those who do not subscribe to imported religious beliefs and practices. Abikẹ’s Pentecostal fervor is exhausted, but Ẹniitan’s love for her is not diminished. Nor is the renewal of the “ancient knowledge of herbal cures” presented with undue romanticism shorn of context. A few pages earlier, the omniscient narrator observes the two older women as “a formidable

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pair who abhorred the denigration of local values and did everything to preserve their native traditions in an age given to foreign values” (295). Ẹniitan’s discovery of the relationship between the two older women takes the form of physical and emotion suffering of the kind that, speaking objectively, one will characterize as personal sacrifice. If not for our author’s sensitive handling of Ẹniitan’s character, her behavior might be viewed as mental illness or bedevilment, as Abikẹ and her husband see it. The questions then arise: Is the notion of mental illness suitable in describing the protagonist? Considering the total, unquestioning acceptance with which her grandaunt, Iya Adunni, relates to her, how does the option for tolerance differ from the point of view of the socially stigmatized? By expanding Ẹniitan’s community to include providential helpers like Pa Joshua, Ajọkẹ, and Thomas, the novel reframes the idea of mental illness as an object of prejudice, or more pragmatically, a result of insufficient self-questioning. The madness is less what others think of her than her inability to see that she can opt to be around only people who view her with compassion. This novelistic deployment of difficult mental, spiritual, and religious topics has a particular resonance with respect to the focus of this chapter, and it is best stated as a balance of priorities and critiques. In giving priority to ideas of cultural integrity emanating from serious engagement with contemporary realities on the African continent, the novel lays out critiques of ideological and formal practices it considers detrimental to the full expression of cultural integrity. This is demonstrated in the connection between the representation of unusual topics and other aspects of the work, that is, the path it opens to a critique of contemporary middlebrow fiction. This path takes two forms. The first, halfway between irony and sarcasm, is the novel’s setting. Kìńs.èkó (It’s Not Lagos) is a careful but effective strike against the alienations and cruelties generally thought to characterize Nigeria’s famous megacity. The location is not geographically specific, perhaps out of a wish to avoid a concrete association with Lagos, which is frequently mentioned as the place where some of the characters, such as Adunni, reside. The naming points to an opposition to state capture as Ìyá, the grandmother, and others “took it upon themselves to buy up most of the land” to forestall any attempts by the government to grab prime land (17). There is an additional pointer to the symbolic core of the novel in Iya Adunni’s refusal to surrender to pressure from those who are hostile to her ways. S.egun offers

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a reason for this choice: “I felt it was important to locate this fictional town near Lagos in order to give my reader a geographical/cultural reference point,” she says. “It was also a ploy to get the reader to focus . . . attention on the story rather than on the location. I felt strongly about this because there is a tendency among literary enthusiasts to gloss over a story and concentrate on the setting especially when the story is set in an urban environment like Lagos.” In other words, in contrast to the standard practice of describing a work of fiction as a “Lagos novel,” S.egun “would rather not have [her] novel tagged in such a fatuous manner” (interview). In a subsequent discussion, she connects this stance toward Lagos to the novel’s ideological interest in prioritizing a traditional worldview (Iya Adunni, Ẹniitan) by contrasting her own middle-class upbringing within the confines of the University of Lagos to her encounter with a “new world” of experience in Ibadan.15 The second form that this relationship between the novel’s priorities and critiques takes is more intrinsically developed. S.egun spends considerable time on every one of the characters—all strong, sharply drawn, and remarkably memorable. There is the housemaid Taibatu and her endlessly comic trysts with Iwin, the “area-boy”; ID (short for Idowu), Tunde’s political associate with a distinct speech mannerism; Mama Yard, Abikẹ’s mother-in-law; Thomas, whose providential encounter with Ẹniitan brings prospects of emotional reawakening; and Adunni, a doctor and daughter of Iya Adunni, cousin of the feared grandmother. In order to reinforce this approach to characterization, the novel deploys a variety of narrative perspectives. S.egun builds a credible narrative out of the tissue of contemporary Nigerian life, adroitly placing obsession with religious fundamentalism on the same level of moral reckoning as political opportunism. The work is set against the background of the spiritual and political conundrums of a country where an apparently easygoing man named Goodluck became president in extraordinary circumstances, his wife is called Patience, and following his defeat in a democratic election, a Pentecostal pastor became the new vice president.16 Within this formal structure, S.egun develops a thematic focus on politics in a transhistorical manner as a feature of character—that of Tunde, Abikẹ’s husband. The depiction of politics as a thematic issue comes across in the relationship between Tunde and ID as the symptom of a general malaise that Tunde’s ambition represents. It does not manifest itself as a plot device as it does in works like Purple Hibiscus and Stay with Me, two Nigerian novels set

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in similar social circumstances. S.egun shows Tunde’s ambition to be a catalyst for his middle-class aspirations. However, it grows and declines in inverse proportion to the turmoil in his home. Starting with his alliance with ID, an unscrupulous and corrupt fellow that S.egun shades with cartoonish disdain, Tunde gradually gets drawn into the politics of “godfatherism,” the patrimonial system whereby a powerful politician attains the authority of deciding who runs for what office. He is interested only in running for the office of a local council chairman, and his need for such backing is indicative of the extent to which corruption has eaten into politics at the grassroots. As Tunde is sucked into the unethical world of politicians, his misgivings increase when he eventually meets one of the party elders at the burial of Gbadebọ, the deceased chairman of the council, whose vacant position Tunde is gunning for (179–180). His first sighting of the godfather figure, Chief Owónikókó, is full of omens. His friend ID points the man out to him in the church, and although their meeting is brief and brisk with a handshake, Tunde already has a fair idea of the chief’s infamy: “From his recollection of the newspaper articles that he had read . . . , Chief Owónikókó was described as a thug, vindictive and ruthless in his dealings with internal opposition in the party. Besides, Tunde had had a very nasty sensation when he shook the man’s hands. It was as if something slimy had stuck to his palm, which rubbed off onto palms that came into contact with it” (180). When Chief Owónikókó fails to keep his appointment, Tunde’s disillusionment is complete. Heedless ambition has made him neglect his family. The turning point is his major fight with Abikẹ over his negligence, and he finally decides to drop out of the race and out of politics. This treatment clearly deflates Tunde’s ego and sends a clear message about the author’s critical stance toward the kind of politics in play in her milieu. But does it also reflect an insufficient interest in such a consequential social formation? Could S.egun have gone further to develop this stance into the opposite of the kind of politics Tunde and his associates represent? There is evidence of such a position earlier in the novel. During one of the first meetings between Tunde and ID, we learn that he and Gbadebọ, chairperson of the local council, had been very close, “so close that those who did not know their kith and kin had thought that they were related” (29). Unlike Tunde, who was academically brilliant, Gbadebọ was an average student, but had an aptitude for persistence. With such dedication he managed to get into medical school and qualified as a doctor while Tunde careened from one unproductive enterprise to another. Tunde was

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struggling to start a new business venture when he met ID and settled into the warming pool of party politics; Gbadebọ, now a doctor, returned to Kìńs.èkó to work in the primary health care center as a matter of community service. His eventual decision to run for public office was an extension of this commitment. S.egun writes: “[Gbadebọ] was the people’s natural choice when the search for a candidate began and it was of little consequence that he did not have any money of his own. His supporters, many of whom had benefited from his medical care at one time or the other, financed his entire campaign” (30). This portrayal of Gbadebọ is an example of the novel’s ethical concerns in its contrast to Tunde’s trajectory as a wannabe politician. While Gbadebọ might not have emerged organically from the community, his fortunes quickly became inseparable from those of the people whom he chose to serve. Even if Chief Owónikókó had not disappointed Tunde and had instead cultivated and rewarded him as expected, he would still have remained morally wanting in comparison to the now-late Gbadebọ. In fact, it is less the godfather’s unreliability than the pressure at home and ID’s criminality that turn Tunde off politics. An old family member, Pa Chukwuma, tries to dissuade him from getting involved with individuals like Owónikókó, but like every political hustler, Tunde does not heed the warning. In other words, Tunde knows what he is getting into, and it is fair to say that he yields to ID’s importunities out of an unresolved complex in relation to Gbadebọ. This is a personal flaw. The novel’s depiction of politics reinforces the character trait particular to an ambitious member of a socially rudderless middle class. While this is going on, S.egun scrupulously attends to the desires and yearnings of Tunde’s children, the twins Taiwo and Kẹhinde. They get a pet tortoise that they name Nikẹ and devote precious time to, clearly to “forget the barrage of words their mother and father had fired at each other” (99). The pet is housed in the garden behind the house, and the farther away from the house they go, the closer they get to nature—the terrain of rodents, reptiles, chameleons. This excursion is medicative for ailing Kẹhinde, and it strengthens the emotional connection he, more than any other person in the family, develops with Ẹniitan. Through this connection, S.egun separates both characters from the turmoil in the nuclear family and moves them rhetorically toward Iya Adunni. That it is her daughter Adunni’s medical expertise, rather than Iya Adunni’s herbal medicine, that attempts to treat the little boy’s cancer certainly follows the

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novel’s investment in a critical stance toward the equally incurable though less fatal disease of Pentecostal irrationality and political opportunism. It is deliberate narrative choices of this kind that introduce Ẹniìtàn to the conversation about the role of platform as a mode of creative practice in redirecting certain impulses in African literature. The outcome is a work ethically close to The Resolutionaries but formally in poised distance from it. Where the novel goes further than Armah’s is in its creation of a powerful play of mutual recognition between Ẹniitan and Iya Adunni, the new flowing into the old in grateful acknowledgment and acceptance. The two most self-possessed female characters are also the most agreeable on ethical grounds. The Resolutionaries promises a similar kind of identification between Nefert and Joobe, the cultural historian and Egyptologist who delivers the keynote at the literature conference in Arusi. There is evidence that the identification exists on a deep level, giving the novel a rare moment of true emotional satisfaction for the narrator, second perhaps only to the one where she and Jehwty first make love. Listening to and translating Joobe, Nefert comments that “the style of this scholar’s presentation made the work of interpretation intriguingly pleasant. Her statements were so logical, so coherent, so beautifully organized that I could follow her thinking like a surfer riding a series of gentle, rolling waves” (376). Having previously been gifted The Kemet Hypothesis, her book of essays, and The Center Cannot Hold, the novel that the cultural historian makes the focus of her critical analysis, it is natural that Nefert would feel elated upon the encounter with her. Unaccountably, however, Armah establishes no actual, physical bond between the two women afterwards, and this enigmatic scholar’s work is not placed in any kind of conscious dialogue with Nefert’s working group. Joobe comes across as forbidding and standoffish, it is true, but it would have been interesting to get to know her. Companionship or collaboration is fundamental to the work enjoined in her speech, and the small group of activist-translators would seem ideal for that. But she is an individual, one whose original ideas are not engaged during that meeting or subsequently. Having gifted her book to Nefert prior to the conference, Jehwty probably has a soft spot for Joobe. An attentive, sympathetic reader might entertain a degree of complementarity between her work and what the incipient collective is advocating. Moments after the lecture, Nefert notes that “the speaker’s words . . . were familiar . . . like continuing a conversation with Benga, Jehwty and, I hoped, Sali” (380).

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But the promise of a physical encounter is never fulfilled; no direct forward-looking dialogue ever takes place between the two women. Nefert’s encounter with Barbara, an idealistic doctoral student, is another case of missed encounter. Nefert reaches out to Barbara, the student, after she, Barbara, has been humiliated by a French man, a professor, and the student acknowledges this gesture when she chats with Nefert after a meeting of the language collective. That opening also does not lead to further discussion, although Barbara is welcomed to attend the collective’s meeting, and Amandina, one of the younger translators, gets drawn into the core group at the end, the only convert. There is hardly a satisfactory way to put an author on the spot for making or not making certain choices within the logic of the world of the story, and there are many questions about Armah’s choices in this novel.17 Given earlier arguments about this author’s attitude toward a specific form of narrative realism (the “Platonic lie”), however, a few points can be advanced about the choice regarding the lack of demonstrated solidarity between Nefert and Joobe. The missed opportunity of an encounter with Joobe opens possibilities of critique in the sense that the reader becomes aware of unfilled spaces of action in the near future, perhaps of complementary pursuits of similar goals without guarantees of successful collaboration. Similarly, while the withheld promise of successful collaboration might seem odd in a novel this invested in change, it is also an indication of Armah’s grasp of reality. There are false starts, unfulfilled hopes, unvarnished views of the “human factor,” and unsatisfactory resolutions. In his study of Armah’s pre-Per Ankh novels, Fraser argues that what seems like the absence of progressive time in those novels is a stylistic choice rooted in the author’s sense of the movement of history: “Perhaps because of his vivid historical sense, Armah’s style seems closely attuned to a particular way of registering the passage of time. Time moves not in the rigorous chronological progression from one instant or period to the next invoked by the academic historian, but in a remorseless, almost cyclical pattern” (1980, 10–11). This perspective is useful in coming to terms with many of the choices that Armah makes in The Resolutionaries, particularly those that present points of contrast with Ẹniìtàn. S.egun’s novel ends on a chastening note, neither falsely hopeful nor totally catastrophic. It is far from a happy ending, in part because Ẹniitan’s return to the family occurs at the same time that Kẹhinde dies. The family attains a sort of equilibrium but finds true happiness to be elusive. Ẹniitan realizes that her desire to bring

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respectability to Iya Adunni’s maligned herbal practice requires her completing her abandoned university studies and embracing her sister and “a future free of prejudices” (300). It is the restoration to the family of exactly the equilibrium that has not existed between the sisters’ spiritual outlooks. Armah, however, views resolution in paradoxical terms: to be at home in the world, to adjust appropriately to the state of the world as it is—the ideology of the dominant aesthetic of contemporary middlebrow fiction—or to propose a vision according to which adjustment is not an option? This question remains poised between the resolution to work for a change of the mindset that treats ineffectual conference resolutions as normal practice and the normalization of the conference resolution as a way of life. The paradox would seem defeatist if not for the consistency of vision that has informed Armah’s work throughout the decades, which would be hard to track in the current situation of literary gatekeeping—if not for the option offered by platform as a mode in which such a creative vision can find its footing. The Sh a dow a nd the Limelight For all his capacious vision of an ideal African society rid of the exploitative antics of the imperialist system, Armah is far from a grumpy old man dismissive of the power of new, material aspects of life, especially including technology. His abiding interest in the past, reaching all the way back to ancient Egypt, does not mean a lack of interest in things as they are now and as they ought to be. It underscores the importance of those social forces likely to hinder or help the vision so beautifully conceived and shared, and in this respect, he relies extensively on new technology as a constitutive force of literary or artistic experimentation. Armah is at the forefront with the youthful, trendy platforms, portals, and devices, and he takes full advantage of these in the novel. The passing reference to “e-commerce” in the discussion between Nefert and Jehwty about the business side of book publishing is just a tip of an inescapable iceberg. There are copious references to technology and digital media throughout The Resolutionaries. In the novel, characters are busy making internet calls, sharing files online, or saving time by moving discussions to email. As a matter of narrative detail, this is a novel imagined to exist fully in the world of digital culture. The author himself may be temperamentally averse to the publicity and desire for instant gratification of this culture,

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but he intends to draw on the intellectual resources available therein. This is an outlook we encounter in S.egun’s decision to bring her story to light. A long novel, Ẹniìtàn came out in early 2016 through an online digital imprint called CreateSpace. As Nigerian in topic as any of the current well-received novels from that country, it is nonetheless the sort of novel for which not even the small literary imprints across Nigeria and the continent would have much use. In the same interview referred to earlier, S.egun reveals that she resorted to this Amazon-linked print-to-order outfit as a practical option: “I published Ẹniìtàn via CreateSpace (now Amazon Kindle Publishing) because it was the only viable option for me. Publishing creative works in Nigeria is a no-no. Publishers are never honest about how much has been sold and what royalties are due to the author. I tried to find agents abroad but most of them are more interested in authors whose faces or personalities can sell books than in the actual content of a book” (interview). Without being constrictively deterministic (she did try for an agent outside Nigeria), one can sense a telling match of intent and method in this choice. The dominant publishing practices that energize contemporary middlebrow fiction are discriminatory in their priorities, although it is often difficult to tell how those priorities are calibrated.18 Perhaps there is an intended irony in this publishing choice for a novel with characters invested in “the [preservation of] native traditions in an age given to foreign values” (295). Intended or not, the irony is welcome because S.egun’s priorities are complemented by the driving force behind the narrative, the assigning of specific personal attributes to Ẹniitan as a mediatory presence in the crumbling world of her sister’s immediate family, and the narrative’s culmination in a life-affirming gesture of giving new names to old ideas. This is significant. The narrative choices that the author makes are conceivable in a rarely imagined yet ever-present space—the political space of enunciation from which all manners of speech, including unfamiliar, untranslatable ones, are possible. This point requires further elaboration, particularly in relation to a corresponding awareness in Armah’s work, one that raises the profile of the narrative with respect to issues of platform. While S.egun’s engagement with digital culture exists largely on the level of using an online platform to publish her novel, Armah does something quite decisive by showcasing The Resolutionaries’s sensitivity to technology. At a point in the story, Benga turns his smartphone on in order to show images, including maps, to Nefert and Sali. They are in an airport, returning

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home after a conference. After scrolling briefly, he gets to a map that, as he says, “represents the political geography of ancient Egypt at the time just before the unification” (398). Moving down the screen, Benga stops on each color-coded spot indicating a state on the map, then zooms in on the name. The collection of forty-odd names may present a visually arresting rainbow on the screen, but he thinks of the jumble as emblematic of disunity, and his companions agree with his reading that the multiplicity uncannily reflects “the present state of Africa” (399). Benga characteristically prefers to see the potential of order in the chaos. This moment is a microcosm of the larger argument in the novel, pertaining to the existence of old knowledge of creative work in African society and the need to not only discover it but to reenergize it for an envisioned future of egalitarian living. It is also important for a discussion focused on platform because the ability to bring obscure, muchneglected information to light is the rationale for the use of that mode of creative practice in the present context. Any self-conscious neutering of the boundary between digitality and such kinds of knowledge is crucial to the larger point the novel is making. The Resolutionaries is an unapologetically contemporary novel for this reason, but without subscribing to the ethics of contemporary middlebrow fiction. The policy issue at a given conference in the novel is about an aspect of life as it is experienced on the continent in the present, and the integral placement and use of various forms of technology are constitutive of that experience. On this point, the novel stands toe-to-toe with works like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah (2013), which is written partly from the point of view of a US-based blogger, and A. Igoni Barrett’s Blackass (2016), in which Twitter and the Google search engine become indispensable narrative apparatuses. These novels are celebrated for this turn to media, especially social media, as spaces for exploring ideas of African being in the world. The worldviews that they (especially Americanah) project are more agreeable within the frame of contemporary middlebrow fiction than those in Ẹniìtàn, and this contrast is sharp enough to underscore the auspicious appearance of the two novels in focus in this chapter. Increasingly hard to typologize in their sheer proliferation, the works which evince the characteristics of contemporary middlebrow fiction are also difficult to study productively. Reflecting further on the ideas foregrounded in Ẹniìtàn might clarify my argument. Modern African arts and letters were generated in a complex historical process that gave purchase to

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the idea of culture as the expressive term for ways of life considered valid and worthy of respect. Not all practices of consolidation were informed by well-examined evidence, and the representation of cultural practices often existed on the surface, even if psychically usable. But the evidence of presence was often credible, especially because it emerged in opposition to a general premise of racial prejudice and the ever-renewable ideology of the abjection of Black life and because, as Cabral memorably argued, culture was often the terrain where nationalist battles were most likely to be successfully pitched. The value that the novel places on native traditions must be understood in this respect. It is the affirmation of endogenous spiritual lives in the face of strong, self-absorbed, and extroverted practices in religious and political realms. How much space exists, though, in a literary culture that is closely wedded to the neoliberal literary marketplace for a novel like this? Printto-order publishing is a form of digital publishing, so in a sense, the viability of Ẹniìtàn as a published novel is a function of this digital culture. It emerges out of publishing opportunities that did not exist for Nigerian authors and readers over a decade ago. Yet, how many Nigerian writers and critics who live virtually by tweets and Facebook posts would be aware of this work, or harder still, be interested enough to look for it and make it part of the conversation they are so eager to have? It is an oddly sanguine situation. The more alluring aspects of this digital literary culture have to do with “famzing,” with ease, with appearance, with trending, and so on. The same culture, however, has enabled the appearance of this thoughtful novel by an author who is extremely sophisticated, fully aware of the movements of contemporary middlebrow fiction, but averse to the kind of self-display it often demands of writers. From what we know about it thus far, The Resolutionaries is clearly not an easy read. The gentle exploration of pleasurable subjects like erotics, the senses, scenery, and controlled humor that readers of Armah’s fiction have come to expect does not come easily or satisfactorily in the present novel. African literature has many functions in the world—including those that one may view as nonfunction, like pleasure.19 Ways of being in the world valued by the trendy thematics of contemporary middlebrow fiction—Afropolitanism, cultural heterogeneity, etc.—are neither exhaustive of what African literature is, nor are they absent in the translocal context of an African-focused idea, as Eileen Julien has argued in the essay “The Critical Present: Where Is ‘African Literature’?” discussed

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earlier. There must be space for inconvenient truths, unrealistic visions, and modes of being such as one encounters on the pages of an Armah novel because there are sensibilities—African and non-African—that respond to the impulse such modes exhibit. They speak to African experiences, even if realism is not the adopted formal means of their exploration. Platform as a mode of creative practice validates the existence of such a space. As different writers (Carlos Fuentes, Caryl Phillips) have made a case for it, a platform is the polyforum in action: a public space where everyone can have a say but no one can, or should, have an exclusive right to speak. Armah has put the novel out as a robust, demanding kind of speech in that public space. A refusal or unwillingness to confront a work like this, in spite of its formal and other demands, is a form of historical prejudice masking itself as an aesthetic attitude. On closer examination, it is clear that beginning with Two Thousand Seasons, Armah’s novels are notably negligent of the features of canonical African literature, such as the thematization of politics and the recurrent attention to contemporary moral and political malaise. If anything, there are conceptual attempts in these works to anticipate the problems that feed those themes, the kind of approach toward writing that Patrice Nganang (2007) calls “preemptive.” One possible consequence of this approach to African literature pertains to the issue of translation and translatability, as it opens another path to assessing the marketable values attached to literary works in the circuits of publishing and scholarly attention. As an institution invested in worlding human experiences, African literature exists in language in a manner similar to that of a few modern literary traditions, mostly in the Southern Hemisphere (Ibironkẹ 2018).20 That existence is of a multiplicity of endogenous languages struggling for expression and visibility in the shadow of a multiplicity of economically or religiously imposed practices. Each category of segmentation or classification, whether intrinsic in formal and generic terms or extrinsic in terms of regional, national, or generational differences, often exists within another set of institutional paradigms of dissemination: publishing and commentary. The contents of this complex of factors shift all the time, but institutions as systems are known to be slow to change. Up to this point in the life of African literary arts, the roles that translation may play in the worlding process to quicken such a change remain underspecified. I shall return to this argument in the epilogue by highlighting the process of worlding in the

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work of Daniel Fagunwa, but a brief highlight is useful here. Even though they are written in Yoruba, Fagunwa’s novels are explicitly addressed in prefaces to the “world,” the author having implicitly taken his primary audience to constitute a world and presumed translation as an enabler of that process of worlding. What publishing and commentary make of the issue of translation is one thing, and what the two novels in this chapter, especially The Resolutionaries, demonstrate about it is another, and both deserve to be examined in detail (Kermode 2011). Translation would be a natural candidate for separate treatment as a mode of creative practice if not for the tactical choice of managing the scope of this book, so it is appropriate to turn to this mode here as a bridge between adaptation and platform and as a further gesture to the acts of cultural translation at work in remix in the next chapter. The main characters in The Resolutionaries proposes to lead themselves, and by extension, other “thinking Africans” (72), out of the parasitic dependency on the vicious circle of conference resolutions, beginning with the creation of a common African language. For Joobe, the cultural historian, being aware of the rich heritage of African literary traditions is the starting point for the historic break, but the novel’s proposition about a common language is ambitious in an equally exacting way. In one sense, it is radically different from the controversial proposition about the language question in African literature, and that difference, as we shall see, seems to edge the topic in literary culture closer to certain aspects of contemporary middlebrow fiction. A paradigmatic example of this turn is the event of “The Upright Revolution: Or Why Humans Walk Upright,” a short story by none other than Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. Written in Gikuyu, the story was first published in the March 2016 issue of Jalada, a Kenya-based literary magazine, as headliner of its inaugural translation issue. An English translation by the author appeared alongside the first version, and by the last count (August 2022), there have been at least one hundred translations, nearly all based on the English version.21 Without a doubt, Ngũgĩ’s status as one of the most vocal advocates for writing in African languages played a role in the magazine’s choice, as did the fact that that advocacy has, over time and in addition to other personal circumstances, generated to the author a visibility as cultural capital that is not readily available to many writers. (Apart from Akinwumi Is.ọla, as shown in chapter 4,the Senegalese writer Boris Boubacar Diop is also a strong proponent of writing in African languages, and he has written and published a novel, Doomi Golo, in Wolof.) Besides, .

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we are in the presence of a work of fiction, a short story, told as a fable, a combination of formal and generic identities that predisposes the text to an easy life in the world of contemporary middlebrow fiction. Interestingly, a similar process is at work in the Shemsw Bak-curated novella Sanhat, discussed earlier, as an African text whose circulation does not depend on an exchange mediated in a European location or language. That book may not have had the visibility of Ngũgĩ’s story for the reasons just mentioned, but the same kind of credibility is potentially available to it because, in both cases, translation and platform exist in a close relationship, of a kind that earlier discussions about the language question did not address. In this specific sense, translation opens a path to non-English African works of literature in Afrikaans, Portuguese, French, Kiswahili, and Arabic as well. But such an opening might be imagined in a more plural form than strictly textual-based understanding of translation, becoming the condition in which “cultural translation” manifests itself, especially between and within different modes and locations of creativity on the continent. There have been plenty such dialogues in various creative modes, and Is.ọla’s Yoruba-language novel Ó Le Kú, telescoping several formal issues in Mongo Beti’s fiction in the previous chapter, is immediately available.22 Indices of translation as a condition for worlding, these creative explorations appear scattered or desultory in part because the contents of publishing and commentary, the constituent elements of forms of attention, have shifted in the African literary culture of the past three decades to an emphasis on the thematics of contemporary middlebrow fiction. The reasons for the shifts are well-known from the juxtaposition of the arguments put forward by Paulin Hountondji and Achille Mbembe in chapter 1. However, when, as shown in that discussion, the attentions in the two cases are extended to those focused on processes of worlding internal to the continent, to those occurring over a long period, and to those going on in other disciplines and artistic forms, a richer account becomes possible. Such an account dwells on creative approaches, both artistic and theoretical, that prioritize ideas of cultural integrity in relation to the continent without ignoring the fact that contemporary middlebrow fiction is effectively at play in the visibility, which is to say the marketability and translatability, of both Ngũgĩ and Adichie, two writers at both ends of the formation’s spectrum. Several features of just such an account appear in the positions that the two novels discussed here take on what makes translatability a strong substitute for marketability.

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“Languages grow by absorbing elements from each other,” says the character Benga, who is a nonbiological sort of uncle to Jehwty, Nefert’s partner. “We can create and develop our common African language by incorporating elements from all that exist, every language we’ve spoken, making the most intelligent choices” (313). This would be a language that all Africans can speak, without the undue prioritization of European and Arabic languages whose purveyors the characters view as destructive and exploitative forces in the continent’s long history. Variations or fragments of this statement are found in other parts of the novel (217, 380, 388, 471). In one of the instances that reinforce the missed encounter between Joobe and Nefert (as a representative of the collective), the cultural historian’s lecture ends on a note that affirms this premise about a common language nearly seventy pages later: “We can create that language out of the many shreds of our common consciousness, just as out of the forty-two ethnic tongues of Kemet, one language grew to serve a united people. What our ancestors were able to do, we can in our turn achieve” (380). In a reading based on realism, the recurrence feels repetitive and tedious. On the contrary, Armah’s purpose is cleverly built into his composition style, which imagines ideas first in parts and builds them into a whole in a sustained shuttle, matching the movement to a rhythm. It further confirms Fraser’s assertion about the author’s handling of historical time discussed earlier. Taken with the rhythm of life in the narrator’s domestic setting, that design shows a relationship between narrative, phrasing, and speech. In The Eloquence of the Scribes, Armah reveals that there is a connection in hieroglyphic texts between direct, uncomplicated telling and the cadence of a speaker’s breathing: “If phrasing follows a rule, it is that the lines be respectful of the natural rhythms and cadences of speech” (2006, 245). Through this language that Benga (like Joobe) projects, it would be possible for Africans to speak directly to one another and work for a transformative society that would end their untenable condition. There is no assumption that this project would eliminate or compromise the existence of African languages, including recently organic ones like Pidgin and Sheng, nor is there any desire to speculate on the status of dominant European languages in the wake of its success. On the contrary, the envisioned new planes of existence are those of relational orbits of African lives grounded on the continent but also envisioned to extend beyond it. This is a key point. Armah’s interest is in an epistemic centering of African needs

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as he sees them. The projected language serves principally to orient the characters toward awareness of these needs, away from their routine lives of translating and interpreting from one European language to another solely for the selfish benefits of the African bureaucratic elite. The link between this perspective and translatability as marketability lies in the case of a writer whose experience mirrors that of Armah and S.egun. Included in Armah’s 2010 collection of essays is a review of a French-language novel that most scholars of African literature may not be aware of. Titled “The Excision of Desire,” the review focuses on Ramata, a novel by Abbase Ndioume, a Guinean writer.23 The novel deals with female clitoral excision, but draws, according to Armah’s reading, on practices both ennobling (the cultural pedigree of the Senegambian coast and hinterland) and oppressive (the patriarchal system seeking to control women’s access to sexual fulfillment). Armah clarifies the novel’s plot, characterization, and other narrative elements, but what makes the review relevant to the present discussion is the way it concludes: “Readers coming across this remarkable book might wonder why such an exciting writer has had only one other book. . . The reason is that Abbase Ndioume is one more African author struggling to live in a society far too derailed to organize a viable publishing industry of its own. . . . So he has made his living working full time as a hospital nurse” (217–218). To a large extent, this situation applies as much to Ndioume, sixtyfive at the time of the review’s publication in 2010 and with two novels available only in French, as it does to Armah and, especially, S.egun. The Nigerian writer’s first novel, The Third Dimple, was published in 1992, after the year it won the 1991 Association of Nigerian Authors’ prize for fiction. A professional librarian, S.egun works full time in that field and commits much time to training, workshop, and consultancy. She went for over two decades before publishing another novel, an experience that is not strange to African writers of a certain artistic inclination, irrespective of the language in which they write. She was active in the literary field in-between, first as the assistant general secretary of the Association of Nigerian Authors, and later as a cofounder of Writa, a women’s writing collective established in Lagos in 1994. Before relocating to Lagos, she headed the University of Ibadan’s chapter of Amnesty International and has continued to play other activist roles. In ways that may not be visible from the surface of an engrossing novel such as Ẹniìtàn, the sensitive depiction of traditional medical practices in the novel is a conscious act of

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class solidarity. During the festival appearance in November 2020, S.egun disclosed that growing up on the campus of the University of Lagos, she was cut off from many aspects of traditional life. “It was only when we moved to Ibadan,” she said, “that I became aware of what we generally call ‘tradition’ and the ways of life of the people who are usually dismissed as illiterate and uncivilized.” The upside of not having to write to the arbitration of contemporary middlebrow fiction is that she, like others of that inclination, feels free to prioritize in her works those ideas of cultural integrity centered on African lives without sacrificing aesthetic awareness or other pleasures that come with textual representation. As Armah notes with respect to Ndioume, however, writers do not have to be limited to either pandering to expectations about what sells in the narrow scope of middlebrow taste or waiting for years between books. There is also the tenable option of creating the conditions for writers and other creative artists to “free up a year or two of frugal writing time . . . sufficient to [lead] into a sensible cultural future” (217). Imagining this other option, the creation of “a sensible cultural future,” is of a piece with the projection of a common African language on an epistemic level, and it dovetails with the issue of translation or marketability (as commercial viability) in the following ways. Armah’s project of a common African language takes the language question in African literature further than debatable because it goes beyond the legitimacy of each extant African language for literary purposes, understanding that such legitimacy will operationally require a level of intra-African translation. Not only will a Xhosa novel be only conceivably translatable to Amharic according to this painstaking requirement, a writer identified with a language that has not attained the status of print culture will also have to engineer that viability for her language and then proceed to institutionalize and use it.24 If translation’s purchase is fraught in such a circumstance, additional aid becomes necessary. That additional aid is what platform provides, with respect to literature. According to the astringent, though unstated, rules of contemporary middlebrow fiction, neither Ẹniìtàn nor The Resolutionaries comes close to attaining the level of marketability that is usually the pretext for translatability. That both novels now exist in a form to attract the present kind of attention is a function of the technological change that has thrown digital spaces open to uses that once served African writers as self-publishing. It is also because their authors are creative enough to adapt to this change.

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In The Resolutionaries, the translator does not exist separately from the interpreter. The coupling is necessary for the professional work of intermediation in the conference circuit, and, in an important sense, it affirms the double meaning of the title: the resolution to work for change in the face of normalized practice of ineffectual conference resolutions. Most of the characters are proficient in several languages, and the group that develops around Nefert and Jehwty comes from their rank, even if more than half of the rank eventually fall back on old habits, leaving just five people to carry on. By making some of these translator-interpreters the novel’s collective protagonist, Armah hits on a narrative device that brings issues constantly into focus, evaluating them without letting anyone, including the leading characters, off, the way the genre of reportage might be inclined to do. From the very first page, when Nefert thinks of translatorinterpreters as aiding “African collaborators reassure owners of the global economy that their system will not change” (1–2), it is clear that Armah intends this paradoxical figure to be viewed with cautious skepticism, if not outright distrust. Self-criticism is implicit in this characterization as well. Armah is himself a professional translator and, as a writer, also an interpreter of a particular kind, on the evidence of his commentary on Ndioume’s Ramata, a French-language African novel. He is the translator of important works of contemporary African intellectual traditions, such as Endogenous Knowledge, edited by Paulin Hountondji, and Boubacar Barry’s The Senegambia and Atlantic Slave Trade (discussed in chap. 1 and 3, respectively). If one views his entire intellectual project within this frame, the picture becomes more complex, and the integral figure of the translator-interpreter as a framing device for the novel reinforces platform as a mode of creative practice. The entirety of Joobe’s two-part speech (371–380) is this platform writ small, with the bonus of metacommentary on an exemplary novel, The Center Cannot Hold, and a critique of modern African literary history. For Armah, and potentially for other African writers operating outside the orbit of the publishing culture that drives literary formations like contemporary middlebrow fiction, platform is not limited to a self-publishing initiative such as Per Ankh. Complementing that imprint is the writing workshop design, Per Sesh, or the house of scribes, to which the Shemsw Bak (the cooperative behind the novella Sanhat and the poem On Love Sublime) is affiliated. In one of the final chapters of The Eloquence of the Scribes, Armah describes the workings of this workshop system in detail,

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breaking down the components of a book, providing guidelines to how they can be synthesized into a whole, and outlining the logistics of producing and distributing the finished product. There is even a sizable bibliography of fifteen books, a reading list of representative texts about the literary traditions of Africa, Asia, and Europe that a putative participant in the writing workshop would be expected to know.25 Working out the contours of a literary practice oriented away from the ideologies of the “Platonic lie” along these lines indicates that the issue is no longer about the legitimacy or viability of other formations. Notice, for example, that setting these two examples side-by-side closes the gap between Joobe’s thesis (a critique of the “Platonic lie”) and Jehwty’s analysis of the business side of publishing. The issue is about their sustainability, and the creation of outlets of dissemination—publication, distribution, commentary—is platform in practice. The various online magazines, blogs, festivals, pop-ups, podcasts, and app-powered distributions dedicated to African artistic culture are the more visible examples of this practice. As the case of the curation of Ngũgĩ’s short story shows, the unprecedented success of the translation project is in direct proportion to the online mediation of the initial publication. Equally, the fact that the text is accessible is generative of attention, not to mention the attractions of the Ngũgĩ “brand” and the peer pressure among young translators wanting to throw their linguistic hats into the ring. Such attention need not be permanently set to overdrive on the basis of brand recognition, an all-too-common shortcoming of social media driven platform usage. During the November 2020 book festival mentioned earlier, S.egun was asked about the reception of her novel four years after its appearance. She lamented the limited publicity that the work had received and the absence of literary soirees and reading clubs that could have taken advantage of a new publication. It is particularly telling that but for the providential existence of such a gathering, she might have waited longer before finding a way to publish her second novel. “I discovered CreateSpace,” she says, “when I attended a literary program organized by the US Embassy in Lagos. Someone gave a talk on it. Amazon Kindle Publishing is not like the traditional publisher who undertakes to promote the author and market his/her book. With Kindle digital publishing, the author has to do the promotion and marketing, which is a pain because I would rather spend that time writing. Authors . . . who are not dynamic in marketing their books do not make as many sales.”

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The playing field gets broader and more level. A multiplicity of platforms creates a socialized space for other skills that could be useful in reconfiguring African literary spaces in ways that Armah’s characters only imagine but that the author has put into service. It is also the case that younger, more technology-savvy creatives become indispensable to this reconfiguration. The challenge is for these two stances to come to a mutual recognition: that Africa-identified natives of the digital world be aware of how, in textual and institutional ways, Per Ankh/Per Sesh already provides a viable model of platform of a very rich scope and depth, and that the publishing/workshop outfit does not underestimate the reach and creative power of those socialized to make up their minds by clicking links or typing into search engines. The skepticism with which Armah characterizes the translator-interpreter in The Resolutionaries therefore requires further discussion. Although the skills brought to use at those conferences are narrowly conceived, there is the understanding of interpretation as commentary as important as translation. Armah does not explore this idea of interpretation, but publishing is only an aspect of forms of attention through which dissemination occurs. Another aspect, commentary, brings to mind the kind of neglect that S.egun has in mind and disproportionately affects works published in the shadow of dominant cultural formations. When attention is extended equally to publishing and commentary, readers are better able to engage the work of writers such as Armah, S.egun, and a thousand others pining in silent neglect, and appreciate shortcomings that are intrinsic to formal choices as well as those that result from the contingencies of production.

SIX

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THE REMIX Of New Identities and Technologies of Reuse

Introduction: Moda l Pr actices Like platform, remix as a mode of creative practice takes advantage of digital technology and new conceptions of creative affiliation in generating works of art in peculiar circumstances. With primary focus on Binyavanga Wainaina’s 2014 blog post, “I’m Homosexual, Mum,” Hugh Masekela’s “Lady” (1985), and Filipa César and her collaborators’ Spell Reel (2017), I will here analyze the diverse relationships between new identities and the ways that technology advances creative artists’ perception of opportunities for reuse. Kenyan writer Wainaina’s use of a blog to connect his much-heralded, generically innovative book One Day I Will Write about This Place (2011) and his homosexual identity represents a technologically savvy practice of Pan-African politics, in which an online platform perceived to be African becomes the preferred agent of dissemination. In the process, he debunks the claim that homosexuality is un-African, expanding the scope of this identity and displacing a putative Western agency as the mouthpiece of cultural minorities across the world. In “Lady,” his remix of an Afrobeat song originally composed by Fẹla Anikulapo-Kuti, South African musician Masekela adroitly balances the song’s controversial politics with the sonic possibilities of jazz and funk, defamiliarizing the Afrobeat tempo by making the remix legible within a transnational setting of palatable Africanness. This approach to remix is in tune with new notions of creative community seen in artist Yinka Shonibarẹ’s highly accented installation

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Lady Na Master (2002), based on the same song. In the hybrid film Spell Reel (2017), César and her collaborators in Guinea-Bissau and Germany reconstruct the history of the war of independence in Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde from fragmented, degenerating archival images. These images were produced by the filmmakers that the liberation movement, the African Party for the Independence of Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde (PAIGC), recruited to learn filmmaking as militants of the struggle. By juxtaposing the recovered images and audio with commentaries from live screenings across the country and in Germany and framing these with reflections on the techniques of making a film based on an archive, Spell Reel simultaneously brings the political struggle to the awareness of new audiences and restores the fragmented and uncompleted projects to their artistic and political aspirations. The recurrent issue in these diverse works pertains to modal practices that preserve essential features of creative affiliation even as perceptions of these features change based on place, time, or material conditions. As a mode of creative practice, remix originated and is best developed in electronic music, where a range of professionals including DJs, sound mixers, producers, and so on expanded the scope of what is technically and artistically possible. In the most complex manifestations of this musical practice, artists conceive and use remix in a variety of ways, giving it appellations that suggest its applicability to different contexts and values: “sampling,” “mashup,” or “cover.”1 However, technical opportunities have multiplied with the advent of the internet, and what I do with remix in this chapter comes from an awareness of those new opportunities. The recognition that texts and works produced under specific political or technological situations can be reimagined and placed in new contexts is the basis of the analysis of the three works under discussion here. What are the new identities at work in these remixes, and how does this mode of creative practice help in showing their significance? The works, such as they are, are very different. However, remix manifests itself in the newness of the contexts through which each work extends the aesthetic and sociopolitical possibilities of prior works. It is helpful to understand the new contexts through the complex, structural links between digital technology and conceptions of affiliation that may be opposed to, or at least differ from, how those prior works set out as creative explorations. It is clearly the case that the earlier works (a music album, a book, and party-funded newsreels) were so uneven in formal terms and came out

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of such different institutional histories as to have unwittingly created the conditions for the remixes. In that case, the process of sampling exposes the limits or excesses of forms and institutions of textuality, which is not necessarily to claim that those limits and excesses constitute aesthetic or ethical flaws that new creations have escaped or will escape. The version of the song “Lady” in Masekela’s corpus sidesteps the excessive masculinity of Fẹla’s original, though that controversial topic is only a part of the song’s multilayered discourse. Nor is it immediately clear if Masekela’s stance is simply a result of his perception of what many see as sexism in the earlier song. It is a tighter, shorter, funkier song than Fẹla’s admittedly fast-paced Afrobeat track. Yet it also offers a more playful, relaxed angle from which to hear the mixed message of controversial riposte to female social affectations. Perhaps because music has historically best developed the practice of remix as a technique, the attempts at remix that Masekela makes in his version magnify the ideological blind spots of Fẹla’s own. Thus, when sensitivity to gender issues becomes a legitimate factor in the implicit critique of the remix, elevating the ambiguous refrain (“Lady Na Master”) to the level of a declarative as Shonibarẹ does in his installation further deflates the cultural and artistic assumptions in the original track. Appreciating Shonibarẹ’s conceptual installation and Masekela’s new song as products of new models of creative affiliation, indeed of new contexts, requires that we pay attention to institutional forces as having a decisive impact on the remix process, a claim that cannot be made without qualification in the case of the earlier work. These new models sit uneasily between copyright constraints, protocols of gallery exhibition, and authorial sense of material. They are consequential because they are new in the sense explained above. Uncoupled from Fẹla’s context of a supposed critical attack on the effects of women’s liberation, the remixes take positions in terrains where the earlier song sounds anachronistic insofar as masculinist self-regard is now perceived to be disagreeable or uncool. For Wainaina, the new identity is his homosexuality. It is new both in contrast to heterosexuality, especially in the modern African world, as well as in its appearance outside of what the reader learns about him from the memoir One Day I Will Write about This Place. He presents this identity in the blog post as a detail deliberately withheld from the memoir, ostensibly to avoid shocking his parents, particularly his mother. Appearing in early January 2014, however, the announcement can also be considered a response to anti-LGBTQIA+ identities in African countries, which a

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new legislation in Nigeria exemplified at the time. As a blog post, “I’m Homosexual, Mum” gives Wainaina an opportunity to create a political impact against the background of changing global attitudes toward queer and nonbinary identifications. The blog post works as a remix because it relates to the memoir on the level of substance, being conceived as a “missing chapter” of the book— what the author left unsaid in the expansive chronicling and self-exploration of what began as a creative nonfiction titled “Discovering Home.” Extending this conception to the style of the post, Wainaina brings the arc of writing back to its origin as an online publication. The book thus serves as a medium through which the diverse stories cohere, and the post on Africa Is a Country is the mode of its remix as new content in new contexts. One outcome is the reinforcement of the stylistic and formal integrity of the pieces, since a topic like homosexuality now has a more attentive audience than it used to. As a blog post, a short read, it has potentially a better chance of receiving attention as a political and emotional issue in the explicitly publicized grounds of digital dissemination, given additional traction by current affairs in an African country. Furthermore, it arrives in the digital space in the company of a YouTube video in which Wainaina provides his tactical reasons for using that format and platform.2 The relationship between Spell Reel and its authorizing text is much more complex. There is the tangible, bounded film Spell Reel, the remix in excess of its original. That original hardly exists in a bounded form because it is the entirety of the cinematographic archive of the PAIGC, and only about 40 percent of the archive has survived. It is neither possible to know the extent of the archive, due to the material conditions of its degeneration and partial destruction in the coup of 2002, nor is all of it likely to count toward the technical act of giving its contents a new lease on life. For there is also the larger project, the process of remix, one to which the collective gives the name “luta ca caba ainda” (the struggle is not yet over). “It is also the title of an unfinished film in the collection,” César discloses, “thus cursing the accomplishment of the film, of the struggle, and eventually of this project, too” (2016, 66). In an important sense, the collective’s epistemic break with the original rationale for the archive, problematic and tenuous as it seems, is also suggestive of the kind of discontinuous relationship that remix signifies. The process of making this film involves curation, since César and the collective practically undertook the curing of a damaged archive. But

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there are pertinent grounds for characterizing the film as a remix. It has a critically productive relationship to the fragments that it brings together from the archive, which we see in the manner that the filmmaker/s use those fragments to construct a story. That story is incomplete because much of the constitutive elements are missing and because the incompleteness affirms the utopian, reversible, but also perfectible nature of the revolution in Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde.3 In mixing color-filmed sequences with black-and-white footage, among other techniques, the collective confers on Spell Reel a new identity that, in the manner of most remixes, draws attention to the constraints and excesses of the prior text. Spell Reel samples the archive of Bissauan filmmakers in part because the archive needs to be rescued from degeneration, and in part because the entirety of recorded footage cannot be put into one film (and is, in fact, no longer even available as such). The film’s new identity involves the technological mode of digital filmmaking and the newness of its audiences in two specific senses. The audiences to whom the remixed film is screened are scattered across the two countries and Europe. In Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde, they are made up of a generation to whom the images were previously unknown as a result of the nature of state archives, the sociopolitical situation in the mainland country, and the technological limitations of the electromagnetic film format. What we have in Spell Reel is what remix in film would look like if it were to creatively use the principles that music attaches to the mode. Repetition is a key element in remix, its primary function being to match the rhythm of a particular sequence with the overall effect of the sonic or sensorial experience. Best developed in music, where practitioners also call it “cover,” “mashup,” or “sampling,” remix also operates on the principle of discontinuity. Remix originated partly from the willful arrest of the motion of rpm vinyl shellac by disc jockeys, leading to the creation of distinct musical practices and genres that tell ineradicable stories of global Black presence in the artistic realm. To varying degrees, rap, hip-hop, soca, merengue, soukous, calypso, Afrobeat, and afrobeats all result from experiments with the technology of sounds. Such experiments happen all the time in different settings and even before DJs wised up to the turntable experiment. In Lagos in the 1940s, young musicians created Big Brass music, also known as “palm wine sound,” using similar practices of sampling materials as Ghanaian highlife. In an interview in Lagos from 2001, Fatai Rolling Dollar, the highlife maestro, says: “In those days, palm wine music

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was strongly influenced by the Ghanaian musicians that used to come to Lagos . . . Then E. T. Mensah used to sing songs in his language. We would go and buy their records and then change the lyrics into Yoruba language because the songs all have the same rhythm and in fact this is how highlife with the Brass Band started here in Nigeria” (2001, 39). The premise of remix is the circulation of sensible material, ranging from sound and text to image and, in the film, a mixture of all three. That is to say that material effects of a specific provenance are recognizable or perceptible, and those who share or imagine creative affinities with that provenance go to them to create new material. They are notions that can be pulled out of context and given a new life or meaning based on the needs of those who make new works out of such assemblage of things, ideas, or practices. The musical relationship between Fẹla and Masekela comes out of a terrain that creates the kinds of opportunities on which remixes feed. Stories abound of the lively and sustained spirit of camaraderie among African musicians, owing perhaps to the collaborative nature of musical bands. Going on tours, holding curated or sponsored concerts, and jamming together when occasion demands, these artists are more attuned to the styles and personalities of their colleagues. The spirit is obvious from stories the musicians tell. In his memoir, Three Kilos of Coffee, Manu Dibango recalls flying from anywhere to hang out with Fẹla in Lagos, which had “an ultramodern recording studio,” or to record with Nigerian and Ghanaian musicians in Calabar (1994, 102). Hugh Masekela, in turn, puts a dramatic spin on being commandeered to be a guest of Tabu Ley Rochereau in Kinshasa, then on Fẹla’s laconic letter of invitation to Lagos (2004, 252). For Miriam Makeba, it is a matter of leading a band in Dakar or Conakry as a guest singer or doing a duet with Zé Carlos in Bissau because she knows the bandleader or star musician.4 The impulse to remix comes partly of this spirit, one that does not minimize the importance of individual talent. Technical skill in mastering an instrument and competence in songwriting, arrangement, composition, and singing fosters personal confidence. Masekela’s remix of “Lady” is a product of this spirit of camaraderie and comes out of past collaboration with Fẹla. With the advent of the internet, remix has assumed a new level of importance tied to the technical possibilities available to media and forms other than music. In the introduction and chapter 1, we heard from Ken Jordan and Paul D. Miller, coauthors of the essay “Freeze Frame: Audio,

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Aesthetics, Sampling, and Contemporary Multimedia,” which discusses the ways internet culture has changed the character and value of music in production as well as consumption. Their claim is strong in several ways, hence its relevance in the present focus on remix as an imaginative use of texts including but not limited to musical ones. They see sampling in terms of online musical performance and collaboration that network computing makes possible, but that nevertheless retains aspects of predigital compositional culture. “Online, everything is a sample,” the coauthors state. “Every audio element becomes a potential fragment for manipulation and recontextualization,” and “the only limitation comes from the bottleneck that bandwidth places on file exchanges. The quicker the speed, the richer the environment” (103). The practice itself, however, does not always involve collaboration or even familiarity with the author of the remixed work. These “nonfamiliar collaborations” are even more common, as artists work with meager resources, the limits imposed by distance, while navigating the tricky terrain of intellectual property laws. Jordan and Miller write further: “Referred to as ‘remixes,’ ‘mashups,’ or ‘bootlegs,’ digital files of a wide range of recorded material are being cut up and manipulated into singular creations” (101). While noting the contentious issues of copyright infringement that this process of creation entails, including ethical ones about an “artist’s unique affiliation with his or her own unique creation,” the authors argue that this process introduces a shared folk culture “where creative expression is the property of the community at large and can be shared for everyone’s benefit” (101). Wa ina ina: “Everything Is Sa mpled” Of significance in the style of remix in Wainaina’s presentation of his gay identity, a topic he does not dwell on much in the book, is its deployment in the creation of a public voice purposefully for a digital community. This is to say that the mode of creative practice does not exist without an ethical anchor. Throughout One Day I Will Write about This Place, the author makes different formal choices to introduce novel themes and, as a result, emerges with a voice he successfully puts to a variety of services. We know this from the sundry sources where the texts constituting the memoir had previously appeared, but more crucially from the framing of a blog post, “I’m a Homosexual, Mum.” Appearing on the Africa Is a Country website,

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where it is described as a chapter “missing” from the book, the post treads the slippery ground where a private, controversial topic about sexuality takes on the character of a public discussion. In mid-January 2014, in the midst of the Nigerian government’s promulgation of a law criminalizing gay activities in a new way, Wainaina surprised and delighted many by publishing this missing chapter to break the news to his mother, using the kind of intimate tone suitable for the topic and context, one that resonates stylistically with the rest of the book published two years before. One only needs compare the image of the mother Wainaina creates and sustains throughout the book to the one coming across in the blog post to accept that both writings have the same genealogy, coming from the same vast material of his life. The clever sound of a voice that oscillates in tone between private and public articulation is integral to Wainaina’s style as a writer, and the calibration of the blog post as a writing with two versions affirms this quality. When “Discovering Home,” his award-winning piece of creative nonfiction, clinched the Caine Prize in 2002, it threw several received wisdoms of African literature into question. In the first place, it had been published in an online magazine, previously called netzine, at a time when there were not many such outlets. As far as quality control was concerned, such a platform did not have much credibility, and the judges were at a loss for just what box to put the entry in (Gibbs 2006). As a sampling of the book’s personal voice focusing on a topic that places its author in the position of a public figure, the blog post is the primary focus of discussion in this section of the chapter. In narrative terms, the book, One Day I Will Write about This Place (2011), begins when the author is seven years old and ends with the referendum culminating in a new Kenyan constitution in 2010. Stylistically it is powered by a personal voice that allows the author to address matters of taste in a language that points to the liberty he takes with the genre of creative nonfiction. The reader may not easily remember the details of a particular passage or scene, but the writing leaves an effect—that of having been made to share in a sensuous experience. The words build up to an impression, a “word world” (8). Throughout the book, Wainaina caresses the word kimay without much glossing. In the penultimate paragraph of the book, however, he offers a characteristically poetic gloss that places the term in the realm of imagined identity. “Kimay,” he writes, “is people talking without words, exact languages, the guitar sounds of all of Kenya speaking Kenya’s languages” (2011, 253). The blog post, “I’m

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Homosexual, Mum,” begins and ends in July 2000. Although it was written in 2013 and published a year later, it fills gaps the author intentionally created through the fugitive handling of the material that makes up the memoir. The genealogy of the book and the blog post, the “missing chapter,” is best sought in a welter of factors that inform the author’s reconstruction (and thus awareness) of his identity, of which being gay is just a part. Those factors are social in the conventional sense, supplied by geography and history. They are significant insofar as the author deploys them creatively, demonstrating socioeconomic and geographical data as meaningful for stylistic purposes. Wainaina wished to submit an entry for a literary prize awarded to short stories. He had not published a fictional story. But there was an essay, a reflection on a Christmas family reunion in Uganda in 1995, titled “Discovering Home,” first published in the Times in South Africa. This piece, or essay, was “quickly re-edited” (2011, 188) for a netzine edited by an American named Rod Amis and published before the deadline. There was a bit of drama about the Prize’s eligibility rule concerning entries that had not appeared in print—a telling rule, given the status of print at this point in the life of African literary history. Wainaina and his US editor-publisher did not expect much from the competition, so the award was a delightful outcome. The incident, like much else in our author’s life since the age of seven, became material to the creative liberty out of which emerged the memoir and, subsequently, the blog post. This creative liberty with material, also operative on the level of the language, defines the book. It takes its bearing partly on the constitutive elements in Wainaina’s biography, an astonishing story of cultural and geographical openness from the northeast to central Africa, including the eastern seaboard and potentially both banks of River Congo. In this subregion where ethnicities, languages, and nationalities are distinct yet overlapping, the translocal overland and maritime mobilities described in chapter 1 appear as parts of a long, living history. Different patterns of familial relationship put a concrete stamp on notions that scholars in various fields have described in partial ways, that is, according to the perceived requirements of those fields (Desai 2013; Mamdani 2001; Vansina 1966). It is the landscape that opens up the mobility of Congo music—a sonic leitmotif in Wainaina’s writing—as well as the historical diffusion of Kiswahili, Kinyarwanda, and Sheng in Kenya. Congo music is one of the manifestations of translocal identity in the book, aligning closely with

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the spread of Kiswahili and Kinyarwanda, though Wainaina is not often explicit about this alignment. Part of a broad assortment of elements of overland seaward movements in the region through Lamu, the music is perhaps more noticeable than the others due to its quality as a thing heard. The sonic power of a cultural form commands mass appeal and explains the preference for music in an urban setting. Sheng offers another such appeal, steeped as it is in the urban context of creative expression. Wainaina’s grandmother was born in the Congo. His mother, who was multilingual like his father, was a national of Uganda, a Bufumbira by ethnicity. A “mixed-up people” (21) is how Wainaina describes his family, in that the accident of marriage across ethnicities and countries collided with the Gikuyu cultural practice of naming children after their grandparents on both sides, depending on the additional accidents of order of birth or gender. Binyavanga, a Ugandan name that implies mixing things up, becomes Gikuyu, borne by a Kenyan national. When the family gathers for Christmas in 1995 in Kisoro, the Ugandan town where his maternal grandparents live, Wainaina observes, “In two days we feel like a family,” in a pivotal chapter of his book. “In French, Swahili, English, Gikuyu, Kinyarwanda, Kiganda, and Ndebele, we sing one song, a multitude of passports in our luggage” (163). This was the occasion that provided the impetus and material for the writing of “Discovering Home,” which won the author the Caine Prize in 2002. The final sentence of that chapter gives the book its title. Beginning from the author’s childhood years, the memoir dutifully details the childish pranks he undertakes with his siblings, Ciru (Wanjiru) and Jim, in their neighborhood with the Mwelas and across town where the mother’s hair-dressing salon is located. They play soccer desultorily because Binyavanga prefers to daydream as the ball sails toward him, and they take on American accents and manners with the purpose of deflating the Mwelas’s affectations. But even at this stage, the sensible world that the book evokes is so vivid, the sentences so well wrought, that it cannot pretend to be a simple factual account. Formally, there are ample suggestions that one could be reading a work of fiction with a dramatic plot still in the realm of fancy. Here is the child Binyavanga describing his sensations while playing soccer with his siblings: “I am ready. I am sharp, and springy. I am waiting for the ball. Jimmy runs to intercept [Ciru]; they tangle and pant. A few moments ago the sun was one single white beam. Now it has fallen into the

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trees. All over the garden there are a thousand tiny suns, poking through gaps, all of them spherical, all of them shooting thousands of beams. The beams fall onto branches and leaves and splinter into thousands of smaller perfect suns” (4). Strikingly, the final sentence of this paragraph is revised a few paragraphs later, on the same page, in what could be understood as a sign of this particular child’s predilections as a sensitive observer of his world. Notice that I have used the phrase “could be” twice to capture a reader’s impressions about the book. This is deliberate, and I suspect that Wainaina intends for the reader to approach the book in this kind of exploratory, lyrically wondrous way. Even issues and personalities with immediate political weight are construed as part of what a child senses as he plays or loiters: sausages frying in oil sound like Idi Amin’s laughter (10); the word “Kenya” stretches into Kenyatta, father of the nation, whose Mercedes Benz is stuck in mud and who shouts “harambee” so people would come and pull it out, although we are not told if he got a response (13). This early in the book, one already notices the way it marks a generic discontinuity in African literature, especially when read against such classics of childhood narrative as S.oyinka’s Ake, Mabel S.egun’s My Father’s Daughter, and Camara Laye’s L’Enfant Noir. The sort of coming-of-age that happens in these books does not seem important to Wainaina. In fact, one gets the sense that he does not want to grow up, which is not to discount the profound manner in which the book displays the author’s acute social and psychological awareness. Textua l Or ientation The book doubles this generic discontinuity with previous African narratives of childhood with a different kind of discontinuity—between Wainaina and Ngũgĩ, the famous Kenyan author and activist. Ngũgĩ embodies the progressive culture of Kenya in so many ways, and in a sense a good part of his work can also be considered as providing a map for its postcolonial politics. However, the self-ironizing way Wainaina frames Kenyan identity in this book is startling and yet very credible. He writes, after broadly shading in the preindustrial social formations around the Rift Valley: “And brewing inside this space, from fifty or so ethnic histories and angles, is Kenya—a thing still unclear, picking here, marrying across, choosing there; stealing here, and there—disemboweling that which came before, remaking it. Sometimes moving. Sometimes not” (132).

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Here is a noteworthy perspective because it is valid for most countries on the continent and perhaps other postcolonial and colonizing countries as well. It develops an understanding of identity as a translocal phenomenon and does not pretend to a completeness (or see a lack of it as an indication of failed nationalist hopes). The attitude here toward the settled idea of national identity that animated much of postindependence cultural critique is ironic, but without undermining the exactions of authors like Ngũgĩ who took such critique to be sacred duty. In the final section of the book, as we shall see, this discontinuity rests on firm grounds in Wainaina’s discussion of benga music, a form very much in the style of Sheng, the language of urban Kenya, its ineffable resources both explicitly (‘Anglo-Kenyan’) and linguistically (kimay) suggestive. These different ideas by Wainaina all point to a community of creative affiliations that would rather take nationality for granted than knock it out of place, and the author’s keen awareness of this community provides the main oxygen of the blog post. Concerning the structural connections between the memoir and the “missing chapter,” perhaps the place to look is the section between when Wainaina starts writing seriously (165) and when he first gets published (174–176). In the years of his return to South Africa, roughly between 1996 and 1998, having dropped out of the University of Transkei, the recollections are punctuated by moments of silence. In the next chapter, a few pages later, a phone call comes announcing his mother’s death (180). Wainaina categorically explains his closeness to his mother; she is the buffer between him and his demanding father, and she “defends him, more than she should.” He has her “dreaminess, her absentmindedness [and her] stubbornness” (180), and her tendency to overlook his flaws is perhaps an acknowledgment of her own unexplored creative side. He feels the genuine warmth of her personality in moments of loneliness. In terms of style and procedure, the “missing chapter” fits easily into the subsequent spaces of silence in the book, even as a sort of gesture of mourning, a striving for momentary closure after a painful loss. Even the notion of a chapter that went missing is very much in character because Wainaina is the sort of person who would lose things. Looking for links of a structural type in Wainaina’s writing only takes the attentive reader so far. The calibration of the telling contained in “I’m Homosexual, Mum” has a distinctiveness to it, a function both of the personal nature of the topic and the public setting of its disclosure. He has

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only one voice and modulates it to match the tone with topic and context. Wainaina indicates this distinctiveness by presenting two versions of his attempt at coming out to his mother. The fact, of course, is that he does not ever tell her about it, but empirical fact has a dubious status in the worlds the writings navigate. There is the fanciful version of how he makes the disclosure to his mother, and there is “the right version of events.” The fanciful version aligns more with the dreamy, extravagant side of the writer, the precious son whose side the mother usually takes to defend him from his demanding father. In this version, Wainaina places himself next to his dying mother, in a deep and touching intimacy, “putting my head on her shoulder, that last afternoon before she died” (2014). They are in the intensive care unit of Kenyatta Hospital, and he is grateful to have arrived in time to be with her. The moment is tense with uncertainty, the air heavy with the weight of the confidence the son desires, timorously, to share. Everything is tentative, halting, laconic in its programmed inarticulateness. When he has spent sufficient time playing with the mother’s half-lifeless hand, Wainaina pulls “air hard and balled it down into my navel, and let it out slow and firm, clean and without bumps out of my mouth, loud and clear over a shoulder,” into her ear: “I am a homosexual, mum.” The writing and the attempted disclosure both feel like a rehearsal and Wainaina engages in an uncharacteristic mixture of tenses. He projects what he wishes to communicate: “She was lying on her hospital bed. Kenyatta. Intensive Care. Critical Care. There. Because this time I will not be away in South Africa, fucking things up in that chaotic way of mine. I will arrive on time, and be there when she dies” (2014; emphases added). This is wrought-iron writing, yet vibrant with the suppleness of clay. The communication, such as there is, exists as a heart-to-heart message, in part because an exchange is impossible when the receiver is incapable of giving feedback. She is dying. When this vegetative state becomes the space for sharing a confidence “nobody, ever in my life has heard,” the aural quality of the message intensifies. The writing is affective; Wainaina may as well have been talking to a shadow or her mother’s favorite dress laid out in a human shape on the bed.5 This version aligns closely with the fugitive spirit of the memoir: the expatriate student, likelier to be hiding from his landlord than studying, put upon to return to Kenya and drawn into a temporary job as an

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agricultural extension worker. The experience gives him an opportunity to explore the country with the eye of an outsider. It is a world of endless wonders, not so much unknown as taken for granted, the kind of perspective from which the book’s overall shape emerges. The period around which Wainaina skirts here culminates in the family reunion in Uganda, which proves pivotal to his writing career. He returns to South Africa but drops out eventually and takes to working odd jobs while writing, before coming back to Kenya following his mother’s death. There is also the right version of the event, which finds the beloved son absent as the mother draws her last breath. He is not at the hospital; he is still South Africa because his immigration status is precarious, and he may not be let back in should he travel to Kenya. In point of fact, three days before Wainaina receives the heartbreaking news, his father has been adamant he not leave Johannesburg and carelessly travel without his papers. He receives the news through a phone call from his uncle, the professor who, after asking if he is sitting down, simply says, “Ken, she is gone.” This is not how the death is announced in the book. Though similarly ponderous and conveyed with a sense of tragedy, there is much more hesitation from the uncle, the elliptical recording of it being suited also to telephone conversation. Wainaina builds into this version of the events a reflection on his father, a more exacting person than the mother. At the time of the writing, Wainaina père, too, is deceased, passing eleven years to the day of his wife’s death. This is significant because it was also the year the book came out, and the event must therefore be a major milestone in the orientation of the blog post. We know of his mother’s death in the book, and in a sense, it foreshadows the author’s later concerns about his own health. Mrs. Wainaina died of complications from diabetes, an illness that, running in the family, will similarly affect the son as his knees begin to give him problems. Wainaina’s description of the father’s death is more brutal. He had a “massive stroke” and was gone in spite of being kept on life support at the hospital for three days. It is this second death that forms the basis of the writer-son’s purpose of directly divulging the secret of his sexuality, as if he is telling us, “Now that my parents are gone, I can let it all out.” In a lyrical passage, he writes: I am five years old. He stood there, in overalls, awkward, his chest a railway track of sweaty bumps, and little hard beads of hair. Everything about him is smooth-slow. Bits of brown on a cracked tooth, that endless long smile. A good thing for

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me the slow way he moves, because I am transparent to people’s patterns, and can trip so easily and fall into snarls and fear with jerky people. A long easy smile, he lifts me in the air and swings. He smells of diesel, and the world of all other people’s movements has disappeared. I am away from everybody for the first time in my life, and it is glorious, and then it is a tunnel of fear. There are no creaks in him, like a tractor he will climb any hill, steadily. If he walks away, now, with me, I will go with him forever. I know if he puts me down my legs will not move again. I am so ashamed, I stop myself from clinging. I jump away from him and avoid him forever. For twentysomething years, I even hug men awkwardly. (2014)

By this point in the writing, Wainaina has divulged more. He has used the word “homosexual” again (that is, beyond the title) and added “gay.” He had been conscious of the identity denoted in the first word since he was five, but he cannot use the second word to identify himself until he is thirty-nine. At twenty-nine in July 2000, at his mother’s death, he utters the word “homosexual” for the first time in the breath of the deathbed conversation he cannot have with her. This is not the imaginary conversation in the first version but the honest sharing of a confidence that took place without the fanciful contrivance of a deathbed confession. This conversation is on par with his spirited call to Aunty Grace as a way of getting through to his father (“to cry inside Baba”), who, naturally, is “crying and thundering and lightning in his 505 car around Nairobi,” too disconsolate himself to console anyone. In an important sense, this version of the events around the mother’s death underscores Wainaina’s inability to make the intimate confession that he records in the first version. It is factual, dry, yet cathartic, and it sets for the author the mood for the emotionally liberating task of outing himself in the most effective way possible. With a playful yet fastidious management of time lapses between 2000 and 2014, Wainaina affirms the credibility of his story as a matter of self-understanding, writing: “It will take me five years after my mother’s death to find a man who will give me a massage and some brief, paid-for love. In Earl’s Court, London. And I will be freed, and tell my best friend, who will surprise me by understanding, without understanding. I will tell him what I did, but not tell him I am gay. I cannot say the word gay until I am thirty-nine, four years after that brief massage encounter. Today, it is 18 January 2013, and I am forty-three” (2014). Wainaina keeps an eye on the existence of two versions of his divulging his secret to his mother without making the reader lose sight of the fact

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that both are part of the same piece. In any case, he merely imagines coming out to his mother, and thus does to the whole world. Indeed, there are two encounters in the piece through which the author becomes aware of his sexuality. The first, at age five, is conveyed in the charged recall quoted earlier; the second is “aged maybe seven . . . with another slow golfer at Nakuru Golf Club.” Analyzing these encounters, or more accurately, the sensations that Wainaina can recall from them, gives credence to his statement that the “feeling is not sexual [but] certain.” It also places his heterosexual encounters over the years—with three different women—in a context appropriate to the undertaking, which is about identity and less the spectacular notion of sexuality. This is writing as a calibration of style appropriate to the subject. The halting tone of the first part extends to the second in its deliberate play with time lapses, and what we have are two versions of an imaginary conversation smoothly constructed into a singular narrative. It is the same way the memoir takes shape, and despite its flexible compositional style, One Day I Will Write about This Place has a definite shape. It begins with Wainaina growing up and follows with his high school phase. Then, he moves to South Africa for higher education, returning to Kenya in an unpremeditated way to work in agricultural extension. The final section, the last third, finds him traveling in Nigeria, Ghana, Togo, and finding work as a teacher in the United States, from where he returns to Kenya for the 2007 presidential elections, observed initially from Lamu.6 The blog piece has a relationship to the book in its approach to the truth, a way of relating experience through an apprehensive style that does not betray its subject. It comes, in this material sense, from the book. The missing piece in the puzzle is back in place, the shortest chapter, no doubt—but that is also totally credible, considering its subject. The earliest, perhaps most pertinent encounter with homosexuality in the book occurs when Wainaina is a boarder at Njoro High School, and he discloses that “our head boy is a homosexual” (61). Soon, George Sigalla, the head boy, asks him to come to his study for some cocoa. There is a great deal of discomfort, sweatiness, and awkwardness on both sides, and Wainaina brings concreteness to the moment: “He leaned in and sat next to me on the bed. He started to reach up my thigh. I froze. The hand moved higher. I gulped down the coffee and stood to leave. He caught me at the door. ‘Don’t tell anybody. If you tell anybody . . . !’” (63). Later, there is a teasing moment with Suzannah, a girl Wainaina meets while he is on the

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road as an agricultural extension officer. Nothing physical or drawn-out, but it is suggestive as an encounter between strangers. There are impersonal observations about news of the South African singer Brenda Fassie being a lesbian, and about all-girl parties in Umtata. Other than these, there is very little discussion of sexual interest throughout the book. This indicates that the resonance with the blog piece is not merely stylistic. One unquestionable quality of the book is its frankness; the ease with which the author tackles private issues is unusual (he talks about his depression, his diabetes, saying that it runs in the family). This is what makes Wainaina’s coming out in the “missing chapter” so logical, and the internet the natural place for such self-exposure. The chapter connects with the book and the scattered global community for which this issue of identity is part of an ongoing transformation of the world, a transnational imaginary invested with social justice stretching down, in the modern period, from the abolitionist and the feminist movements. The author emerges with a very public voice, one heard in different parts of the book but most eloquently in the section following his Caine Prize event. The discontinuities in the book in relation to a canonical writer like Ngũgĩ then break down or, more accurately, are reconstituted, as Wainaina assumes the mantle of the African writer-intellectual, which figures like Assia Djebar, Nawal el Saadawi, and Chinua Achebe were famous for being in the last quarter of the twentieth century. That the assumption of this role happens as an act of writing should not be minimized. Both Facebook and Twitter, and subsequently YouTube, become one seamless bazaar as this chapter appears, and Wainaina takes the public role coming with the attention in stride. The commentary focuses on the emotional and political dimensions of gay identity, but the chapter’s online trajectory says much about the directions, the material facts, and the intellectual and creative possibilities of African arts in a technologically transformed world. In a YouTube video recorded shortly after the “missing chapter” appeared, Wainaina provides additional context for the form and platform he chose to publish it. Dealing with the tendency in the media to sensationalize a topic such as homosexuality is a first step, but there is the more charged question of how a perception feeds into settled notions of cultural or socioeconomic difference, particularly when those notions pertain to the continent.7 Thus he offers a direct reason for the choice of platform: So it was very important to me that first, that these things—I didn’t want this story published in the New Yorker or in some magazine abroad or

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anything. I wanted to put it out for people to share. I wanted to generate a conversation among Africans. I wanted to put up a documentary the day before—just talk around the issues in a certain way. So it’s a kind of, like, a little bit less our issue than—you know, I sometimes get the sense that it’s this thing of, my god, you Africans are very homophobic. I’m going to go and report it to the West. That sort of thing. I didn’t want that much of that. And I think that, you know, it did provoke—it did provoke a healthy conversation and a lot—a huge, huge amount of love and support. (“Why Kenya’s Best-Known,” 2014)

That the social media platforms where the post circulates extend beyond a location bears no repeating. However, the community of support that receives the announcement and eagerly reads, circulates, and discusses the text is already present in a microcosm in Wainaina’s delineation of Kenya’s online populations crowding the chat rooms in the latter part of the memoir. It is the community which Kwani?, the literary journal Wainaina founded with the Caine Prize money, legitimizes and draws its support from, and it is mindful of non-Kenyans to the extent that the country conveyed to us in the memoir is both in that geographically delimited space and beyond it. It is not for nothing that Wainaina ties the fate and legitimacy of “Anglo-Kenya” to the political landscape in the wake of the election of President Mwai Kibaki (2002–2007). Kibaki’s presidential tenure was a period of decisive transformation in the consciousness of Kenyans, and Wainaina’s delineation of it in linguistic terms is rich in a writer’s sense of irony. The music identified as benga captures the spirit of this change, but the point is that it belongs in a wider context, and the decision to highlight the musical style is of a piece with the impulse in the book. In “Popular Music and the Negotiation of Contemporary Kenyan Identity,” their richly developed discussion of the Nairobi City Ensemble, Joyce Nyairo and James Ogude offer a useful guide into the complex field of remix as a kind of relay between language and musical forms. The Ensemble’s KaBoum Boum has a clearly defined format, songs being arranged along thematic lines with an interlude that is both a space marker and an index of reflection. The grounds on which this exchange and the extended production of substance and pleasure is threshed is linguistic, however, and Sheng is that language. A “hybrid of Swahili, English and ‘bastardizations’ of a host of ethnic vernaculars” (2003, fn 1, 398), this language has a capacity for standing as a national language with due respect to the accommodating notion of “new Englishes.” Given its syntax and lexical

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structure, Sheng is remarkably suitable for rap (393). The musician Poxi remixes the classic “Lunchtime” (1972) from the Kiswahili into Sheng, redefining the percussion-based rhythm as rap. As a creation of complex voluntary relations in an urban setting, Sheng represents an unexpected outcome of processes that go on in society all the time, right under the nose of tastemakers and trendsetters invested in definite ideas of what counts as culture. It is a product of what the authors describe as “the site of the anxieties of urban youth, reflecting a generation that refuses to be ascribed to narrow ethnic spaces, a generation that has legitimized notions of urban culture and urban identity where, barely thirty years ago, these were unacceptable concepts. By its fusion, Sheng is about a search for location, for place, for home; at once borrowing ethnic identities even as they are fused with cosmopolitan discourses” (396). This is a long way from the conception of Kiswahili as an early and important African literary language (according to Gérard’s account noted in the Introduction of this book), as well as in Ngũgĩ’s ideas of linguistic antiimperialism, in which Gikuyu serves as a basis for national self-awareness. What needs to be recognized in this process of transformation is that Sheng’s indebtedness to that origin of which Swahili is representative, even if undeclared, lives on in the homage that Poxi pays to the old version of “Lunchtime.” The implication will reward elaboration. While Ngũgĩ, like Fẹla, might invest an “original identity” claim in the form of political practice—sometimes extended to the domain of language—users of Sheng are open to an equally organic, though more recent mode of enunciation, one that comes out of historically foreshortened memory and opens itself up to speakers irrespective of ethnic identity. It is the language of the urban, and like languages of its kind, compels speakers to embrace the identity that it is calling into existence. Hea r d across Bor der s: M asek ela Ja ms Fẹl a In his book The Sound of Culture (2015), the scholar Louis Chude-Sokei presents a stimulating discussion of the nexus of technology as a historical form and the effect of race, specifically Blackness. He argues that “black music—from jazz to reggae, hip-hop to electronic dance music—has always been the primary space of direct black interaction with technology and informatics” (5). These interactions take place in major Black cities such as Martinique, Detroit, and Kingston. The practice of sampling that

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shaped musical cultures in many African countries throughout the eighties and nineties occurred at once in the shadow and under the glare of copyright laws and unequal economic exchange. The technical force of the practice leaned on cultural disposition toward eclectic selections to easily outclass those laws. Through piracy, those practices provided one of the incentives for the explosion of new audiovisual media in Nigeria, later named Nollywood. Posting mixed results, piracy is but a small step away from “the culture of internet crime” that, without irony, Chude-Sokei claims to be West Africans’ (“particularly Nigerians”) contribution to the nexus of technology and race (2015, 6). In addition, recorded music in West Africa operates historically in a commercial context grounded in singing, targeted to mass, largely localized markets, and structured around modes, genres, and themes with potential for functional exemplarity, in addition to being suitable for dancing. This attention to commerce has tended to overshadow the experimental aspects of sound culture, the opposite of what Chude-Sokei refers to as “sound system” (Jamaica), where “song or lyric is secondary to a larger cultural complex” (7). But there is documented evidence of techno-bricolage around music in West Africa nonetheless, such as can be seen in the example, discussed earlier in this chapter, of young Nigerians reformatting highlife music from Ghana in the 1940s. Similar experiments occurred much later in the work of innovative instrumentalist-composer and masked musician Lagbaja and a whole range of movements in different forms and formats, leading to the explosion of hip-hop music in Lagos starting from the late 1990s. Though it comes out of a better streamlined or documented musical practice, Masekela’s remix of Fẹla participates in this culture to the extent that it manifests the same elements of technical hunch and takes creative advantage of material noticed in these other experiments.8 Masekela recorded “Lady” in 1985 as a tribute to Fẹla, who had been jailed on a trumped-up charge of currency trafficking by the military regime in Nigeria. According to a music writer, the song was part of an awareness drive and was produced with an eye on raising money in support of the Afrobeat master (De Stefano 2020).9 It is the opening track of Masekela’s 1985 album Waiting for the Rain, which included the track “The Joker of Life,” featuring Guillermo Arantes and John Lucien. In Still Grazing, his autobiography cowritten with D. Michael Cheers (2004), Masekela characterizes Fẹla’s pre-Afrobeat music of the Koola Lobitos band as “a

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hybrid of Nigerian folk and urban dance music with a touch of jazz . . . strongly influenced by ‘highlife,’ the popular Ghanaian dance groove, with which he mixed a diaspora’s worth of influences, including big-band swing arrangements, folk chants, a touch of calypso, ska phraseology and South African township mbhaqanga” (242). Looking to work with musicians on the continent and form his own band, Masekela in 1972 went first to Guinea, hanging out with Miriam Makeba (from whom he was previously divorced) and Kwame Ture, her husband, and settled in Conakry as his base. From there, he traveled to Liberia and finally to then-Zaire, where he and the Guinean guitarist Sekou Kouyaté played in Franco’s band before being “imprisoned” on the orders of Tabu Ley Rochereau. It was upon his return to Guinea that he found a letter from Fẹla waiting for him: Dear Hugh, Just come to Lagos as my guest and we will take care of it from there. Whenever you are ready you can sit in regularly with my band, and you will meet other musicians from whom you can pick people for your proposed band. I will meet you at the airport when you come. Sincerely, Fẹla (252)

Masekela’s description of his first encounter with Lagos suggests a mixture of an outsider’s experience of a confounding urban reality and an exuberant musician’s hyperbolic take on synesthesia. Nothing that he had heard from his friend, the poet Quincy Troupe, who had encouraged him to work with Fẹla, prepared him for what he saw. Riding into town from the airport in Fẹla’s company, Masekela observes: “Everybody was screaming, arguing, or yelling at one another. Millions of restless souls, reeling from the heat, irritable from the discomfort of their conditions, pissed off at government negligence but somehow still laughing from their souls between shows of violent temper: social schizophrenia at its most intense permeated the atmosphere” (261). Playing with Fẹla’s Africa 70 band in Lagos in 1973, Masekela recalls, was a huge boost to his spirit: Then [Fẹla] would call me to the front to solo. Slowly the rhythm guitar would join Fẹla’s keyboard behind me with the bass and tenor guitar relentlessly repeating the same licks they had commenced with, holding down the groove like a mighty herd of cool elephants, along with the percussions. As I continued with my solo, the saxes, then the trumpets, would gently join the accompaniment, taking me to a climax in the song where the female vocalists were riffing in the upper register and I felt like I was sitting on a fat cloud of music with my eyes tightly shut. (266)

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Of this collaboration nothing immediately came, but subsequently, it was through Fẹla that Masekela got his first African recording, with the Accrabased group Hedzoleh Soundz in August-September 1973. The rehearsals took place in Accra, but the actual recording happened in Lagos. “Because we had gelled so well as a unit in Ghana, our recording sessions were smooth. Stewart [Levine] engineered the recording, and after three days we had completed the project. We spent our nights at Fẹla’s Afrikan Shrine, where I had a chance to sit in with his incredible band once again” (269). Between the two encounters, he also witnessed the photo session for Fẹla’s new album, which contained “Lady” and “Shakara.”10 This narrative indicates two things. First, that Masekela had an immediate and uncomplicated affection for Fẹla’s music and worked closely with his band to practice and record. Secondly, the relationship was longstanding, because although “Lady” was first released in 1972, Masekela’s remix version did not appear until over a decade later. The song starts with the intro “This one’s for Fẹla!” and the earlier grooves include the undertoned “Like-a-dis-like-a-dat” above which Masekela’s own rapping cuts soar. What follows is the horn session, modeled on a very fast version of Fẹla’s original tune, and the singing begins only 1.15 minutes into the track. If you call my woman African woman no go gree She go saaaaay e she go say I be Lady o If you call my woman African woman no go gree She go saaaaay e she go say I be Lady o I wan tell you about lady She go say I be Lady o I wan tell you about lady She go say I be Lady o I wan tell you about lady She go say I be Lady o I wan tell you about lady She go say I be Lady o She wan sit down for table

The reprise “I never tell you finish” occurs several times, spaced out in the song, and the track ends with the live-audience applause. The remix has the rhythmic pattern of the original, and it is decidedly a tribute. But it is a distinct creation in three main ways that are difficult to miss and underscore the technical aspects of remix as a creative practice. First, the

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tempo is faster in this version, and the guitar chord progression contracts to two, rather than Fẹla’s standard two-semi chord. Funk is not a style Fẹla used often, although his early Afrobeat songs took a lot from the elements that scored James Brown’s fast-tempo guitars. Second, the percussion is expansive, even at that extremely fast tempo, and there is the significant addition of a minor talking drum (omele), an instrument that was never part of the Nigerian maestro’s ensemble. This insertion of a solo instrument figures prominently in the track, taking up nearly a minute and dominating the soundscape in a familiar funky style. Generically electronic and jazz, Masekela’s composition features a jazz component that is stylistically between acid and funk, relying heavily on percussion and live performance. When the track enters the last minute, Masekela introduces the “I never tell you finish” riff, with clubby interjections like “Xcuse me.” Finally, he omits the line in the song that rubs most progressive lovers of Fẹla’s music the wrong way. He does not sing the line “She go do anything he say,” but jumps from “She go cook for am” to “Lady na master.” The version of the song played live at WOMAD Charlton Park, South Africa (2012), was nearly twice the length of the original album recording. It includes a two-minute-long sequence of pure riffing and scatting, the crowd-pleasing kind of stunt into which Masekela throws chants like “siole-leh” and “Fẹla-no-go-die-oh”/“Na so Fẹla-say”/“Na so e-go-be-oh.” It is only after this sequence that the undertoned “Like-a-dis-like-a-dat” comes in, followed by “This one’s for Fẹla,” the intro in the 1985 remix. Halfway through, the song is broken up with a solo session on the different instruments; the talking drum omele has its day on stage, played by the conga drummer. The popularity of the refrains “She go say I be Lady oh” and “Lady na master” makes it possible for the instrumentalists to double as backup, a role that was lacking in the live version. Adding extras like “get away from here, silly man!” brings the spirit of the song closer to something like “Shakara,” another track in Fẹla’s original album. Fẹla’s version of the song is part of a well-known critique of affectations of urbaneness (by men and women) in Nigerian music, comparable to highlife tunes like Adeolu Akinsanya’s “Acada” and Orlando Owoh’s “Kangaroo” and even earlier, in Ogunde’s operas as evident from the discussion in chapter 2. The target in Akinsanya’s song is closer to the beento figure in African literature (The Dilemma of a Ghost, The Interpreters) and the object of derision in Fẹla’s “Colo Mentality” and “Gentleman.”

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Musicologist and Fẹla biographer Michael Veal, who briefly played saxophone in the musician’s Africa 80 band, writes: “As a humorous song belonging to a body of materials [that are derisive, abusive, or critical], ‘Lady’ was not received exclusively as serious social commentary. Rather, it was taken as a jibe at the more extreme departures from traditional gender identities and cultural practices” (2000, 110). In a remix, something new appears, and an old thing disappears or is displaced. It is easy to overlook the fact that the original version by Fẹla derives much of its power, paradoxically, from the all-female chorus, responding with “She go say I be Lady o” to Fẹla’s call. In an ironic twist, Masekela’s backup is all instrumental and all male, and whatever might have been heard as female contribution—as knowledge and labor—is reduced to technological mediation through synthesizers and Masekela’s own showmanship. The change simply confirms the sentiment that what a “pedagogue-artist” (Ọlaniyan 2004) such as Fẹla intends, even emphasizes, through repetition, is not guaranteed to be what the work says, how it is heard. “Lady Na Master,” as a refrain, speaks behind the musician’s back, in excess of its utterer’s intention, so to say. A listener, even a sympathetic but translocated one like Shonibarẹ, hears differently. Lady Na Master! In Shonibarẹ’s case, the avoidance by Masekela of the controversial, malechauvinistic line generates a different, totally new discourse. The installation is titled Lady Na Master, an uncanny disruption of what Fẹla might have intended as loaded sarcasm. The work appears to quote the sarcastic declarative out of context, but it is noteworthy that that line is repeated in the original composition. And if repetition is an indication of emphasis and rhetorical investment, then Shonibarẹ generates a new discourse whose veracity relies on the magnificence of his headless figures as embodiments of matronly power. In an essay titled “Fẹla, Women, Wives” (2003), the scholar LaRay Denzer takes a sanguine view of the musician’s relationship to his women, starting with the guiding inspiration of his activist mother, Funmilayọ Ransome-Kuti. She also gives extensive attention to Fẹla’s first wife, Rẹmi Taylor, and to Sandra Smith, the African American political activist whose providential relationship with the then-bourgeois hustling musician in the United States positively changed the art and politics of Afrobeat.

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Denzer’s interest is in the contributions that women make to the vibrancy of Fẹla’s career. “His collective of women (which included his wives from the 1978–1986 period and assorted girlfriends), which he called his ‘queens,’” she writes, “provided the talent and professional organization for much stagecraft and production—as singers, dancers, disc jockeys, and managers” (112). It is striking that Denzer comments approvingly on Fẹla’s “honesty” about sex and sexuality (131) while refraining from any explicit critique of those relationships in exploitative terms. Rather, when she turns to the twice-told story of his “collective marriage” to twenty-seven women in one day, the creative spark for Shonibarẹ’s installation, Denzer reportorially describes the event and rationalizes the decision on the basis of its practical value for the business side of things. Appearing in the same volume as Denzer’s essay, Nkiru Nzegwu’s “School Days in Lagos” (2003) takes the opposite view. Her focus is on the song “Lady,” which raved in Lagos when she was a high school student, and which she views as meaningful to her generation of teenagers for ideological reasons. Reading Kristin Mann (1985) on Victorian ideals of marriage in Lagos, Nzegwu states that “late twentieth-century middle and upper-class African men like Fẹla miss the fact that their ideal of an African woman . . . is not an indigenous model or ideal. It is a late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century construction derived from, and indebted to, the Western nuclear family structure, which was by no means a traditional African family model” (140). In this view, the song “Lady” presents a view of women that “seems intuitively true about African women yet is fundamentally Western” (141). Whether critical of women or dismissive of them, however, the song unwittingly reinforces the self-image that these youthful, Lagosian connoisseurs of Afrobeat, students at the all-female Queens College, try to project. “To us (the ‘acada girls’),” Nzegwu claims, “it seems that [Fẹla] was notifying people of what to expect from this generation of educated girls and women. If people perceived us to be assertive and independentminded and to be feared, then all the better, as that would gain us the necessary space and the respect we deserve” (142).11 This is the spirit in which Yinka Shonibarẹ approaches the issue with his installation, Lady Na Master. Shonibarẹ’s installation was one of thirty-four works that constituted the core of Fẹla: From West Africa to West Broadway, the 2003 exhibit focused on the musician’s lifework curated by Trevor Schoonmaker and

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mounted at the New Museum in New York. In Lady Na Master (2002– 2003), the artist presents twenty-seven headless female figures in the installation mode that has become his style. The figures are displayed on a table, fitted in fabric with wood armature. The title, as we have seen, is a quotation of the refrain from the song, but the work itself is a commentary on a different aspect of the musician’s life, the famous wedding to twentyseven women undertaken in a ceremony in Lagos on February 20, 1978. Shonibarẹ is fully aware of the complexity of the signs surrounding the song, and his approach suggests an awareness of those signs, reinforcing the status of his own work as a remix. To show the conceptual orientation informing this awareness requires placing his practice in two contexts. The first is the broadly historical one that puts contemporary art in a frame of intelligibility as a metropolitan practice. The second is specific to the artist himself, one that may accord easily with prior notions of art only when viewed in relation to the processes at work in the mbari houses discussed in chapter 2. Both contexts are curatorial, as argued in chapter 1, judging from the commentaries and curatorial practices of critics such as Okwui Enwezor, whose reflections on artists in the Euro-American metropolises would reframe the practices in mbari through new kinds of mobility. As Enwezor’s focus on these changes deepened, he noticeably and frequently added more names to his list of exhibited artists (including non-African figures such as Iranian filmmaker Shirin Neshat), prominent among whom were Ghada Amer, Ọladele Bamgboye, Zarina Bimji, and, of course, Yinka Shonibarẹ. Over the past three decades, Shonibarẹ has developed a visibly conceptual style that is unique in contemporary art. He creates large-scale installations, mixing performance, photographic image, décor, and settled but questionable ideas of cultural identity all conceived for an exhibition space, whether a gallery or a museum. In their introduction to the catalog of Unpacking Europe (2001), Salah Hassan and Iftikhar Dadi summarize this style and Shonibarẹ’s work as a whole as conveying “a strong sense of aesthetic coupled with a sharp wit. They cast light on the colonial lifestyle, while also poking fun at African fetishists who use so-called ‘African’ fabric which though believed to be of African origin is actually imported from Europe, Indonesia or other parts of the Far East” (18).12 Writing in the same catalog but specifically about Shonibarẹ, the critic Nancy Hynes, in “Addressing the Wandering Mind” (2001), notes that for the artist, the fabric is a “metaphor of the entangled relationship between Africa

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and Europe, and how the two continents have invented each other, in ways often overlooked or deeply buried” (396). According to Hynes, when Shonibarẹ began using the “African” print (real or wax) in the early 1990s, he did so to replace canvas, painting on both the side and the surface of the mounted cloth, and achieving results that were “very deadpan, slick and minimal” (397). As he created objects and installation tableaus using those print cloths, his initial forays were directed at the Victorian era, the period marking the systematic elaboration and consolidation of ideas of the non-Western as the “primitive other” in political, discursive, and institutional forms. For Shonibarẹ, however, that era of imperial domination also brought enormous economic advantage to Europe through colonial dispossession and exploitation. He “plays with scale,” observes Hynes, reducing “giants” to tabletop figurines or placing racially exotic figures in unseemly spots to underscore his critique of notions of otherness. The kind of cloth that Shonibarẹ uses in his work has proved to be an adaptable material. It is easily cut up, sewn or taped to diverse surfaces, and, being varied in color and design, modeled or remodeled into new forms. On display, his style has become recognizable, but it has never failed to engender curiosity. With the perfection of scale in varieties of ankara, Shonibarẹ’s installations appear as headless, visually kinetic figures, whose placement within an exhibition space becomes integral to their aesthetic impact. This is the case with Lady Na Master. In an elaborate “Artist’s Statement,” Shonibarẹ places his work in context: Lady Na Master is a tribute to the love appreciation and inspiration that Fẹla Kuti received from his many lady admirers. Translated into plain English from Nigerian pidgin English, it simply means that the lady is the master. The title comes from Fẹla’s song, “Lady.” The piece is a celebration of the excess and the pleasures that Fẹla received from female attention. In the song “Lady” Fẹla celebrates the assertiveness of women. It has to be said that to the contemporary ears the song may sound condescending, but in the context of a patriarchal Nigeria, the song was a triumph, a profeminist anthem. At a ceremony in 1978, wearing only his typical stage gear—the hotpants—Fẹla married twenty-seven women. “Women, I have been very lucky with women. Girls admire me when I am on the stage. Naturally I am happy about it and it is only natural that I should return admiration for admiration,” Fẹla said in an interview in Drum (December 1963), a story written on a young Fẹla when he had one wife and two children.

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Even though he divorced all these women, he maintained a throng of admirers until he passed away in 1997 at the age of fifty-eight from HIV/ AIDS. Saint or sinner, sexist or romantic? It was his energy, his attitude—a liberal, and anarchist fare—that compounded itself in his truest expression, sex, and political distaste. Fẹla’s music was his muse, it expressed everything about him.

On its own, this perspective gathers different moments, ideas, and situations under one complex but seemly notion—Fẹla’s relationship with women. From an interview he gave a few years after his first monogamous marriage to the public display of polygamy fourteen years later, Fẹla’s view of women, Shonibarẹ suggests, has undergone specific changes. However, those changes have not transformed the intrinsic value of the relationship beyond a conceptual grasp. The installation, like the song it quotes, is elaborate. On display, it takes up a great deal of the gallery space at the New Museum. Each of the headless figures stands for one of the twenty-seven wives, decked in massive, stylized, costume-like gowns. The placing of the figures confirms the role of scale in the artist’s sense of his material. Apart from being headless, each stands apart, individuated but kinetically staged, dressed as massive “mamas” in that unique style of the artist. Both in the expansive spread of the installation and the way the figures are fitted out, what Shonibarẹ presents is in excess of its referent. Placed next to the image of the actual wedding ceremony, the piece does not appear to have much in common with the famous event. There is an air of joyousness, fitting for a wedding, in the appearance of some of the wives dressed in ankle-length handwoven clothes with bead accessories, posing for a group photograph with their husband and his band members. Shonibarẹ is clearly aware of this fundamental difference, having made the ceremony the basis of his own work. But that awareness operates as a conceptual processing of items that have appeared at different times and with different, sometimes conflicting suggestions of their pertinence. In other words, as elements in the making of an artwork, neither the sentiment expressed in the interview, nor the song, nor the ceremony exists in isolation, even if each can be set in its historical place. This is what makes Lady Na Master a resonant remix. By quoting the refrain and elevating it to the status of a discourse, Shonibarẹ’s installation draws attention to more than the song, explicit as it is, has to say. This remix throws a further light on Masekela’s song. Both are primarily creative

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Fig. 6.1. Lady Na Master, 2002. Dimensions: 180 × 335 × 195 cm. Medium: 27 dolls, Dutch wax printed cotton textile, table. © Yinka Shonibarẹ CBE. Credit: Image Courtesy Stephen Friedman Gallery, London.

quotations rather than critical, rigorously questioning reflections on the work. However, where Masekela minimizes the controversial aspects of Fẹla’s composition, as we have seen, Shonibarẹ expands the focus of the song by adding new creative contexts and contents. Relating the technical and material circumstances shaping these attitudes to the song to commentaries by feminist scholars adds a new perspective. There are probably copyright and technical limitations on Masekela’s version, in addition to those pertaining to the changing views of gender relations in the translocal contexts of the song’s circulation. This comparative placement of the song’s audience receives attention in Denzer’s and Nzegwu’s analyses. In the final paragraph of her essay, Nzegwu writes that in a certain sense “Fẹla was right when he characterized assertive women as ‘Lady na master’” (147). It is this sense that informs Shonibarẹ’s approach to the song. In concrete terms, through these diverse interventions—critical, complementary, or paradoxical—what is generally received as Fẹla’s chauvinistic view of women (of which the song often stands as easy proof) becomes

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at length less significant than the rhetorical sum of its parts. The refrain becomes a big portion of those parts. Additionally, the two remixes and the critical commentaries by female scholars are not totally free of their own occlusions. “Luta Ca Ca ba A inda: The Struggl e Is Not Ov er Y et” In 1967, the African Party for the Independence of Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde (PAIGC) sent twenty-five students from Conakry to Cuba to learn filmmaking at the Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos (ICAIC) in Havana. The aim was to make them participants in the larger liberation struggle that Amílcar Cabral, the muchadmired thinker, revolutionary and leader of the party, and his comrades in Guinea-Bissau and farther afield had sent in motion as an anticolonial armed struggle against Portugal.13 Other students specialized in aviation, medicine, and engineering, and a few years later, in 1971, another group followed, mainly to study medicine. Cabral makes a clarifying reference to this decision in his essay “The Weapon of Theory,” first delivered, as it happens, as a plenary speech during the Tricontinental Conference of January 1966 in Havana. He says: “Retracing the once sad and tragic path of our forefathers (notably from Guinea and Angola), who were shipped to Cuba as slaves, we would come now as free men, as willing workers, and as Cuban patriots, to fulfill a productive role in this new, just, and multiracial society, to help defend with our own blood the conquest of the Cuban people” (1979, 120–121).14 As a discrete work of cinema, Spell Reel came out of the audiovisual material that filmmakers produced in the course of that liberation struggle, a struggle not imagined as having an end. It was assembled and released in 2017 by Filipa César and a collective that includes Bissauan filmmakers Sana na N’Hada, Flora Gomes, Suleiman Biai, French director-producer Anita Fernandez, and a few other collaborators in Bissau and Berlin. It is remixed from the archive of film and audio material in Bissau. As César discloses in “A Grin without Marker,” a short text accompanying the final film, she became aware of that archive in 2012 during her first meeting with Fernandez at a film festival, where Fernandez and N’Hada showed newly digitized materials from the archive that was then close to total degeneration. A product of the liberation struggle in the twin countries

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(Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde), the National Institute for Cinema and Audiovisual, INCA, had succumbed to a variety of political and environmental volatilities, and the digitization that César encountered through Fernandez was a partial rescue effort. (There is another accompanying material, a 432-page digital assemblage of images and texts that can be viewed as a curatorial object adjacent to the documentary motion picture.) “We had been shooting for five to six years before the Film Institute was founded, when we decided to give it direction,” N’Hada says at some point in the film. “So we created the Program of Rural Promotion by Audiovisual Media, which meant that, with cinema, we could make people from there understand people from here. We would contribute to imagining a national space, together with Creole” (48.08–48.53). The surviving material was far short of the total newsreel film shot in the period between the trainees’ return and in the years following the country’s proclamation of independence in 1974. At the time of its formal completion as the bounded work discussed here, Spell Reel had been shown over a period of four weeks (November to December 2014) in Bissauan towns such as Buba, Morés, Farím, Cacheu, Bafatá, Béli, and Lugajol, where President Luís Cabral proclaimed independence in 1974, weakening Portugal’s colonial grip on its African possessions. Before the screening gets underway in Bafatá, Biai, a member of the collective and filmmaker in his own right, asks the audience to imagine that “the totality of the archive [is] about 100 hours, and what is left is only 40 hours” (25.49–25.57). The remainder was digitized through the collaboration of the National Institute for Cinema and Audiovisual and the Institute Arsenal in Berlin in 2017 and serves as the basis for the remix discussed here. To undertake a discussion of this work in a manner appropriate to its technical grasp of remix, four kinds of relationship between the archival footage (the 40 percent of the remaining film archive) and the assembled film seem pertinent. There are sequences of only visual unfolding of events with minimal to no audial interference or interjection. The images move, of course, but these are reels shown on the screen for the purposes of marking or identifying specific moments, accompanied by filmed sequences in which the same images are displayed on a computer screen or a video monitor. Second, there are those sequences where what matters is the audio. These are few—after all, we are looking at a film in which what is seen is fundamental—but they are significant because they concentrate attention to the extent to which the images accompanying them are only complementary.

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Third are the sequences where all elements as sound, image, and text converge to reinforce one another and produce a complex cinematic, that is, sensorial experience. That sensorial experience is nonetheless incomplete without reference to what necessitates the appearance of the particular sequence at a given moment in the film, and this fact underscores the partiality of the archive. Finally, there are sequences where sound and image are filmed as mixed, the series of insertions of live-audience interactions during the mobile screening events. There is much more to these filmed moments than is apparent on the screen, in part because they bring up the question of the “irrelevance” of the archive to which César devotes considerable time in “A Grin without Marker.” The formal relationship between these techniques can be seen at a particular moment in the film. The natural, real-time soundtrack of the screening, especially the noise of the children, gets superimposed on the soundless moving image of children marching, and then slides into the sound of a boat rowing through a mangrove swamp. A long quiet sequence follows, during which the in-text graphics present a situated discourse of the nature of the Bissauan mangrove, the world’s densest, and its protective values for guerrillas and endangered species alike. This sequence continues until N’Hada’s voice breaks the silence of the screen, talking about the efforts by Mário de Andrade, the Brazilian poet and cofounder of Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola, MPLA (with Cabral and Agostinho Neto), in bringing the filmmakers’ work to international attention.15 In both the organization of this series of sequences and the partial images they display, an idea develops: a chronology of the archive is not only unfeasible, but is also not ideal because the struggle it documents is not over yet. For the first few minutes of the film, we see an upside-down black-andwhite image of trees and human figures walking on their heads. Probably a result of an error in threading the reel, this errant image is justified by a fragmented in-text graphic, one of the several used to frame the images throughout: the kapok tree sees the freedom fighter upside down.

There are sounds of gunshots in the distance, but even with the fragments of text as guide, there are no easy connections between the

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Fig. 6.2. Juxtaposed images in real time. Spell Reel, HD and 16 mm transferred to video, 2017, 96’, a collective film, assemblage and essay by Filipa César, with Anita Fernandez, Flora Gomes, Sana na N’Hada et al.

sequences and way the reels unspool. Soon, however, and after a colored, audio only sequence to which I shall return, is a visual only sequence, also in black-and-white. Initially in a fast-forward speed, the picture gradually slows down to standard speed, showing first the full frames, then hands, then back to the medium shots of tellers at a bank. In one particular sequence, the screened footage showing a teller handling cash appears on the left, while the real-time filmed image of the projectionist’s hand (on the right) fits the reel into the projector as the image unspools on the screen of a laptop placed in the middle. In this sequence we know the latter film, Spell Reel, in literal light of the black-and-white images, although both sets of images, now in one sustained long take, still do not provide sufficient context, whether narrative or descriptive. Two in-text graphics of a series of dates listed backward from 2014 to 1789 and a poetic reflection on the act of taking over a bank finally situate the images as the record of the nationalization of the National Overseas Bank in Guinea-Bissau in February 1975. The country seized its freedom in 1974 but did not divest itself of the colonial currency until the following year. In a similarly remixed footage, Luís Cabral, the president at independence, is shown walking on a bridge. Soundless at first, this image attains a different intensity with another shot from a moving vehicle on the same bridge, in which N’Hada and César are seen in conversation. From this

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conversation emerges that this is Saltinho Bridge, leading from Bissau to Cacine and constructed during the colonial period. What makes the sequence relevant to the analysis here is that even with this audio, the image does not clarify much. The little information that N’Hada, our guide, has about the bridge exists in a book by French journalist René Pélissier, and it includes the possibly anecdotal information about the death of 90 percent of the laborers brought to work on it. President Cabral, we are told, makes the trip in response to the request from the local deputy that he not visit by airplane. The footage of Cabral walking alone on the bridge has no sound, but we can see that the waters in the background are tempestuous, as they are in the view across from the vehicle carrying N’Hada and César. The silence accentuates the loneliness of the president whose movements linger long after the audio has ceased, playing to the audience gathered in an open-air screening. This act of reuse becomes more revealing when focus shifts to the second significant moment of remix, the audio only sequence referred to earlier. Appearing while the opening reels of the desolate battlefield of upside-down trees are still running is the intriguing audio of a female guerrilla talking about different weapons: “Most of the people present know nothing about the images shown here. If a HK (Heckler & Koch) comes out, we know it. Mortar, if we hear it, we know. G3—they know. Mauser—they know it. Cannon . . . Missile . . . Any weapon brought out here—they know it all” (02.17–03.44). The silences, the long pauses between the audio tape being played and the reportage or translation (and transmission) by a member of the collective indicates belatedness in sequencing as a conscious act of remix. The sequence is captured later in the film with video (38.09–38.34), and the brevity of this sequence compared to the initial one of transmission underscores the significance of the remix. We now know that the speaker, a former militant, does not speak Creole, and that the actual speech is more articulate and immediate, being a contribution to an after-screening discussion. This knowledge is possible in part as a result of the visual component in the first sequence. That sequence shows the patient attention of the translator, who is also a transmitter, and who has to pause sometimes for upwards of twenty seconds for the next static to come through. The transmission takes more than three minutes whereas the actual speech lasts just twenty-five seconds. But what is the use of this three-minute speech, beyond the feel of nostalgia? In one sense, it follows the old guerrillas’ understanding of the

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relationship between cameras and guns as weapons, a relationship that informed the conception of Third Cinema as a philosophical approach to filmmaking (Nichols 1976). There are two ways to better understand the rationale behind this particular moment of remix. On the one hand, an in-text graphic quotes N’Hada as saying that “what made sense as an object of our propaganda in a particular context can become a sturdy ‘friend’—difficult to appease—in quite another,” and that with time the “image gives itself a new life, a new destiny, with or without us” (21.35–21.41; 21.56–22.00). It is unquestionable that the lapses in time between audio and the appearance of texts (as graphic or subtitle) underscore the nature of analogic timing when an audiovisual material goes through digital conversion. An entire field of cognition opens up through this perspective, affirming the collectives’ disassembling of chronology in relation to the archive and validating the relational conception of time, space, and medium set out in chapter 1. On the other hand, another in-text graphic appearing alongside the opening upside-down image (now set aright) notes that the guerrilla filmmakers had to escort the archive through decades of political upheaval. The viewer thus feels free to imagine the guarded reels as the metaphorical decomposing body of a valiant leader felled in war, which must be kept safe and brought home through the treacherous waves and ambushes along the way. The filmmakers’ discipline was warfare as struggle, like that of the teachers about whom we shall hear momentarily, filmmaking and teaching being understood conceptually as aspects of a battle over ideas, images, and educational paradigms. Much has been made over the years about the exhaustion of the Third Cinema paradigm, which is due for rethinking (Guneratne and Dissayanake 2003). Exhausted or not, the precepts of Third Cinema hold the camera to be a weapon, and as we shall see, Flora Gomes, one of the trainees sent to Cuba, brings up an elaborate discussion of the dialogue of the mortars and cameras on the battlefield. Next to that image of a soundless battlefield is another in-text graphic explaining the military perception of a quiet jungle as a signifier of danger. Guerrillas believed Portuguese soldiers to be lying in wait in such situations, like crocodiles lurking under quiet mangrove waters, ready to pounce. Though they may seem contradictory, the two perspectives are already implicit in Cabral’s injunctions about the nature of the “minor program” (the armed struggle) and the “major program,” the building of a new society after independence (César et al. 2017, 57).

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Tellingly, the first and perhaps the only full-audio sequence accompanying the footage in the film shows Cabral making a speech. This is the third kind of remix used in the film, the combined appearance of sound, image, and text. A voice rises gradually from the tactile detritus of grainy films, making a public address: Comrades, I tell you honestly. I am very glad we are gathering this year in the jungle, all here in Boé. Comrade teachers, maybe some of you think you are not contributing to the liberation of our land. But those of you who think so still don’t understand our struggle, nor about our life, nor our party. It is not only with gunfire that one frees a land. It is not only military or political work that frees a land. The greatest battle we must engage in is against ignorance. Only when men and women understand this can they lose their fear. Fear of the river too full and running too quickly, fear of thunder, fear of lightning, fear of thunderbolt, fear of the kapok tree, fear of the dark path, fear of the Cobiana bushland, fear of the Quinera bushland, fear of clairvoyants, fear of sorcerers, fear of healers, fear of spies, or the police, fear of any political leaders, fear of armed men, fear of forces that lie ahead. Only with a clear understanding is a man able to lose these fears. As you know, our people have lived too long in fear. The biggest release we can do in our land is to free our people from fear. To liberate our people from fear, we must liberate them from ignorance. This is fundamental, comrades. That is why the teacher’s work is the frontline of our struggle, the vanguard. It is work that may not be visible every day, but that will have great consequences for the future of our country. (41.19–43.47)

Sequenced from O Regresso do Amílcar Cabral (The Return of Amílcar Cabral), the 1976 documentary that N’Hada coproduced following the repatriation of the revolutionary leader’s body from Guinea, this 1967 speech lasts just over two minutes. (His collaborators include José Bolama Cobumba, Josefina Crato, and Flora Gomes [2017, 219].) Cabral delivers it ex tempore as he sits at a table flanked by comrades (including a little boy doodling with his fingers on the table), addressing teachers but including people of different ages and backgrounds. It begins, in the manner of most of the sequences in the film, with a brief in-text graphic signaling date and identity of the speaker. However, the information pertaining to his face and the setting of the speech is withheld for upwards of a minute, as moving images refracted from that event are projected on the screen in a real-time screening in a Bissauan neighborhood in November 2014. This device may have been intended to reinforce the statements made by the audience members at those screenings, who have obviously just listened

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Fig. 6.3. Amílcar Cabral (in glasses) addresses the people in Boé (1967). Spell Reel, HD and 16 mm transferred to video, 2017, 96’, a collective film, assemblage and essay by Filipa César, with Anita Fernandez, Flora Gomes, Sana na N’Hada et al.

to the speech and are enjoining Guinean politicians to follow the example of the great leader whose words are ever resonant as an injunction to the historical destiny of the people themselves. Some of the actual audience at Cabral’s address look tired; a few can be seen dozing under the sun, and it is likely that this gathering has been going on for some time. But it is also striking that Cabral is speaking to the people in Creole, the language still being forged as the lingua franca of the country and that, by the cessation of the war of liberation seven years later, was on its way to becoming the common language of a people long accustomed to speaking thirty different languages. Also, Cabral speaks to them directly, rhetorically situating each listener as part of the vanguard, the people collectively imagined and addressed as present charged with the responsibility of carrying the message forward, because, of course, not all Guineans are present at the meeting. There is a compelling analogy between the content and the interpretive hinterland of this speech and the act of remix it is used to enact. In giving priority to Creole, the revolution is making manifest its promise of popular participation, which is to engineer a unique and a national

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unit—a new people, as Fidelists and Guevarists would say. The screening in which this sequence appears takes place in Boé, one of the first regions liberated. During the following discussion, a series of audience interventions draws attention to the pertinence of the fourth act of remix, the color filming of the coappearance of audio and image. Kadja, another former guerrilla, remarks that forty years after independence (1974–2014), she and her comrades had never seen the footage of the group going to lay wreathes at the grave of a female militant. It sounds like the repetition of the testimony of the first female guerrilla itemizing different kinds of military weapons. This testimony’s force, however, lies in the context of the mobile screening, an approach to circulation that the message in Cabral’s speech envisaged but that did not happen until much later. The French director Chris Marker came to Guinea-Bissau in 1979, with Sarah Maldoror, after being recruited by Mário de Andrade to help assess the professional viability of the young filmmakers. The trainees returned from Cuba after a few years and set about the work of documenting the war of liberation as militant filmmakers. The mobile screening in the film, in the course of which the female militant’s testimony occurs, was an attempt to repeat what N’Hada and Marker had undertaken in that period. They took films to the countryside for mass-screening following the founding of the Program of Rural Promotion by Audiovisual Media, itself a decision taken years after the documentation had begun. In “A Grin without Marker,” the film’s companion text referred to earlier, César tells the story of her initial encounter with Marker in 2009. A subsequent meeting with Anita Fernandez occurred, as we have seen, and this led César back to N’Hada. From Sans Soleil, Marker’s famous film, we know that GuineaBissau and Japan are two discursive sites, so it is not surprising, as N’Hada says in the same sequence, that he was the one who shot the scenes of the festival featured in Sans Soleil. A number of issues are pertinent to this relationship between the revolutionary conception of cinema and the practice of mobile screening. In broad terms, we see a pattern between filmmaking and warfare, as Gomes’s description of the connection makes clear. Commenting on a scene of soldiers firing cannons, filmed by him, the director says that “the difference between this and the actual theater of war is that you’re not holding a gun, you’re holding a camera. And if the enemy has to choose between shooting who has a gun and who has a camera, I’m almost certain that he would shoot the one with the camera. In fiction film, the difference

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is that I was the one who set the scene. I direct people . . . But I always carried these images with me while shooting Mortu Nega” (36.45–37.32). The perspective further underscores guerrilla filmmaking as welded to revolutionary militancy, an imagining that finds expression in the testimonies of the two female militants. From this point of view, a distinction can be made between militants, whether as actual fighters or as filmmakers, and civilians who never joined up but commented on the screening. A second pertinent issue follows, and that is the status of the audiovisual archive as a document of the war. According to César’s elaborate discussion of the making of the film, the act of remix is the work of a broad collective of artists. These include “the Guinean filmmakers and the crowd that built an alliance from the first cataloging of the materials in Bissau, through the digitization in Berlin, up to the participation in multiple screenings and discussions in dozens of locations in the past four years” (“A Grin,” 66). “We wanted to exercise a ritual of profanation of the archive power,” she continues, “stop using the word ‘archive,’ to substitute it for collection, materials or assemblage, words of destitute power and collectivism” (66). César dwells at length on the statement by the Portuguese institute for cinematography that the Bissauan “archive is irrelevant.” There were diplomatic tensions involved in the institute’s dismissive attitude, but these are not specified or discussed in any detail. One could speculate that beyond the prevalent political relations between Guinea-Bissau and Portugal, the former colonial power might not be too invested in the images of the affront to its authority, especially since those images and the history that they have generated do not flatter Portugal. True to this perspective, the film does not attempt to tell a chronological or even narratively coherent story. And this is less the result of a maverick editorial decision than of the simple impossibility of such coherent narrative. To begin with, there are no carefully preserved materials to base such a story on. Further, the liberation struggle that the archive or collection aims to document did not proceed in such a tidy manner, and clearly, it is not over yet. These disavowals of the digitization project do raise questions, not because they are mistaken but because they are insufficient. Considering the filmmakers’ resolve to retrieve the films from the rot of sociopolitical neglect and the enthusiastic interventions on behalf of Guinean history by the crowd at the mobile screenings, there is a lot more at stake in the images,

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Fig. 6.4. The decaying edges of a reel. L-R: Aristides Pereira, Julius Nyerere, Luís Cabral. Spell Reel, HD and 16 mm transferred to video, 2017, 96’, a collective film, assemblage and essay by Filipa César, with Anita Fernandez, Flora Gomes, Sana na N’Hada et al.

and they operate in excess of the collaborators’ intentions and disavowals. In addition, there is no forgetting Cabral, the universally acknowledged visionary thinker and force behind the revolution’s success, of whom several commentators have written with definitive approval (Chabal, Castelheiro, Dhadha). This is certainly the sentiment that informed the militant filmmakers’ decision to make The Return of Amílcar Cabral. Another pertinent issue arises from the fact that the archive, such as it is, is partial. In the scene where Fernandez appears, the filmmakers devote extensive attention to the story of a film projected but not completed. It is a film about women from all walks of Bissauan life undertaking a variety of highly important and quotidian tasks. However, like the decaying images from The Return of Amílcar Cabral and of a performance by Miriam Makeba in a duet with Zé Carlos during an independence anniversary, the footage shot during preproduction is as fragmentary as the scenario. César displays an astute reading of these contexts by characterizing such incompleteness as “cursing the accomplishment of the film, of the struggle, and eventually of this project too” (66). Hence Luta ca caba ainda, the subtitle of the remixed film, drawn from the title of the projected film about women. In one of the film’s final sequences, over N’Hada’s commentary about the abandonment of Portuguese statues following the war, we see a wasteland of missile heads, and the camera lingers on this dumpsite for

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more than two minutes (1.29.53–1.32.11). This sequence of total silence is a mirror of the wastage and abandonment of the archive, as overseers of the Film Institute reportedly threw film reels into the street. Material conditions such as poorly kept 16mm reels, the war of 1998, and the military coup of 2002 in Guinea-Bissau have an impact on the process of digitization that César describes throughout the text. These conditions cannot be minimized because they make clear the inability of this country to ensure the preservation of its heritage, which has occurred sometimes as deliberate acts of sabotage. Secondly, against the best effort of the Portuguese officials, the archive can be seen to complement documents pertaining to the war of liberation itself, the communiqués, position papers, and bulletins on which authors and journalists like Basil Davidson, Patrick Chabal, and José Castelheiro relied to tell the story of Cabral’s remarkable success as a revolutionary leader. Whatever one may think of Cabral’s political or personal morality (Chabal 2003, 7–9; Davidson 1981, 140–141), his political and military skills are not in doubt, and he led a revolutionary project with abundant evidence of transparency on the basis of which even critiques of his style, if that, could be advanced. Producing this film as a remix is an affirmation of that exemplary idealism as a matter of historical reckoning imagined to exist in the future. The future to which Cabral, speaking at Boé in 1967, addresses his message may not have arrived as promised, as the decay of the archive testifies. But that message escapes the decay and truncation of the archive. Instead, in coming across with such clarity and urgency, this message goes to the heart of aspirations in contemporary Guinea-Bissau as members of the audience, seeing and hearing Cabral from that distant past, some for the first time perhaps, extol his great qualities as exemplary values for the people. This communication is possible because of the film’s dissemination through mobile screening, another element in the revolution’s conception of the role of cinema. Aissatu Seide, the female broadcaster who connects the crowd and the filmmakers, knows that radio is the most important means of communication in Guinea-Bissau, where you barely have internet and where in the countryside electricity is still produced by generators. The filmmakers received their training in Cuba as part of the PAIGC’s political initiative to develop technical skills considered useful in the liberation struggle. However, upon their return to Guinea-Bissau, their acquired skills became deployable in additional professional contexts. This perception of professionalism comes out of a socialist understanding

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of production, the understanding that human skills and knowledges are consequential when they are socialized. It is comparable to the training of other professionals, such as medical doctors, teachers, soldiers, and civil servants. For filmmakers, it is consequential that their works circulate and coexist with those of peers from other forms and practices of cinema, national or not. Given what Cabral says in the passage from “The Weapon of Theory,” other skillsets are equally envisioned to be socialized and made available to other socialist countries—in the spirit of internationalism. In Spell Reel, we have a film that develops a critically productive relationship to the fragments it brings together from the archive, as perceptible in the manner that the collective uses those fragments to poetically enact an ongoing story of a struggle yet to end. The comparative discussion of remix in this chapter rests on the relationship between new identities and technologies of reuse. In formal terms, the texts examined here come from different experiences of media, ranging from commercial music, conceptual art, and niche-inspired creative nonfiction to nationalist newsreel documentation. The contexts could hardly be more dispersed. However, if there is anything guaranteed to efface that dispersal of contexts of original production, it is their coappearance as digital texts variously formatted on YouTube (to isolate one platform), hyperlinked to other discursive hinterlands.16 This coappearance is engineered by recurrent modal practices that preserve essential features of creative affiliation. Those practices are imagined in worldly, relational patterns, even as perceptions of these features change based on new elements of place, time, or technological conditions. The creative use of material through remix may have begun in the sphere of recorded music, but with the expanding formats and communities that artists find at hand, it saturates creative affiliations addressed in each case. These are situations in which Nigerian, Kenyan, Bissauan, or South African nationalities may not necessarily possess analytical powers. For example, the discourses of the song “Lady” operate on a level of creative affiliation that does not prioritize the fact that both Fẹla and Shonibarẹ are Nigerians. César approaches the Spell Reel collaboration as a complex act of restitution as the child of a Portuguese soldier who fought in the colonial war. That identity is supplemented by her professional interest and might have wanted for creative grounding if not for a random encounter with Anita Fernandez, who knew Chris Marker, who once worked with Bissauan filmmakers . . .

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The terms of affiliation, then, shift, far from fixed, in the relationship between the works, and the material condition of remix is the enabling locus of that relationship. In each case, the prior text gets displaced as the remix, taking advantage of these new conceptions of affiliation, manifests a different language, often in contrast to or in excess of the presumed meaning of the originating work. What gives legitimacy to the remix is the creative act itself, the panoply of creative uses that Kodwo Eshun envisions for Afrofuturism as the “manufacture, mutation and migration of concepts and approaches within the fields of the theoretical and the fictional, the digital and the sonic” (2003, 301). The seeds of that act, or acts, are not lacking in the given authorizing text, twice or thrice displaced. Wainaina’s missing chapter enjoys a special privilege in that the author of the nonfiction book One Day I Will Write about This Place is also the author of the blog post. However, nothing, outside of some copyright restrictions, stops anyone wishing to remix any part of the book, in print or other format, so long as the sense of material is judged appropriate. Even copyright rules are potentially subject to change within certain conceptions of creative use or reuse. What remain, or remain relevant, in relative account, are the kinds of questions that Michel Foucault, in “What Is an Author?,” suggests as more consequential than the long-established ones of author function.

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EPILOGUE In Relative Account

For sever a l hour s in June 2011, Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google (and his team), met with Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks, then living under house arrest in Norfolk, England. In his account of the meeting, published three years later in Newsweek magazine, Assange wrote that the “stated reason for the visit was a book. Schmidt was penning a treatise with Jared Cohen, the director of Google Ideas.” The controversial WikiLeaks release of intelligence and diplomatic cables occurred shortly thereafter, and considering the signals he received from high places, Assange realized that “Eric Schmidt might not have been an emissary of Google alone. Whether officially or not, he had been keeping some company that placed him very close to Washington, D. C. . . . Schmidt fits exactly where he is: the point where the centrist, liberal and imperialist tendencies meet in American political life” (Assange 2014). My aim in drawing on this rather obscure incident might be obvious. Or not. Surely, connections exist aplenty between material productions such as art and letters and the historical world of political and economic calculations. The general aim in this book has been to make a case for the historicity of form by confronting the apparently simple but value-laden assumptions that underwrite the constitution of African arts and letters. In this epilogue, I make broad, theoretically open, relative gestures to the contexts of the various objects of analysis in the book, exploring possibilities for artistic effervescence, beyond and within print—and beyond digitality—highlighting digitality’s economic orientation as part of a capitalist system sustained by unequal development. This is a crucial factor

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that cannot be divorced from the much-vaunted democratic potentials of the culture. The assumptions, actually institutional practices, informing African arts and letters are products of historical accident, usually hardened as scholarly practices held in thrall to disciplinary blind spots. Disciplines vigilantly determine the boundaries of an entity in order to respect its integrity. Yet disciplines and their objects exist in history, and history never stands alone or still. Looking at how different modes of creative practice shape or reshape the production and dissemination of artistic texts brings us closer, I think, to an appreciation of the nature of text and of authorship. At a time when the resources for engaging these productive acts exist mostly in specific media ecosystems, such an appreciation requires an awareness of diverse contexts—historical, spatial, and material. The internet is an interface run by megacorporations of the sort that confounded the politics of merger in the age of financialization. In fact, these megacorporations operate in a different kind of economic and political agglomeration. This is the format of an alliance that seamlessly mediates economics, culture, politics, and society, and engenders a sociocultural outlook in which the logos of Facebook, Twitter, Google, Pinterest, Reddit, and WhatsApp are lined up as a series of texts that are also images, imprinted on human retinas over three trillion times a year. Less than two years after the meeting with Assange in Norfolk, Schmidt was in Nigeria. Among the places he visited were the Lagos headquarters of Mainframe Productions, where filmmaker Tunde Kelani and his employees spent “a week preparing to receive certainly one of the most important visitors to us in our own Oshodi” (email communication, February 2013). The initial 140-character limit of Twitter was an economic, technologically imposed format based on the limit of the SMS text code. In this regard, it is comparable to the initial six-minute length of the magazine in the pre-Bell & Howell camera, which forced a particular kind of aesthetic on the early documentaries of Jean Rouch, one of the most privileged recorders of African stories in his generation. The texture or aesthetic feel of the celluloid differs between the 16-mm film, made of acetone, and the 35-mm film, made of polyester. Outside of unexpressed resentment probably influenced by France’s cultural-diplomatic maneuverings, much of the aesthetic judgment that bedeviled and continues to inform the reception of Nollywood films in an institutional context like FESPACO results from this kind of material specificity. The point, however, is that these are

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purely circumstantial results of technological limitations and marketdriven options, and they are liable to change according to trends in the economic field, which is not thereby an autonomous field. The relation between image and sound in Rouch’s work is informed by the notion of exchange, itself a variation on the theme of colonial relation before the fact (or recognition) of dialogism. Even within Rouch’s colonial framework, a form of exchange based on humility, respect, and an overall ethic of mutuality was possible, though not easily recognized or sufficiently admitted. Of course, such an ethic did not fully undermine inequality (of access, legibility of certain aesthetic priorities), as the 1965 historic exchange between Sembene and Rouch proved (Cervoni 2001).1 Critics such as S.oyinka, Armah, and Benjamin offer perspectives about historical discontinuity that, I think, are useful in coming to terms with the creative possibilities available under digitality, depending on the form or genre to which one is temperamentally or circumstantially disposed. As Benjamin and Raymond Williams, among others, have shown, there are strong objections to the positivist tendency to view technology in isolation. The prevailing importance of new media, we need reminding, is coupled with other developments that affect everyone in our common world: free trade goes hand-in-hand with increased hunger for migration; advances in technology continue in the area of genetic science as cloning, artificial intelligence, robotics, and virtual and augmented realities; the commodification of exhaustible natural resources and of human agency (postmodernism’s “waning of affect”) follows the bureaucratization of electoral politics. The “others” of African literature are its nonliterary and extraliterary siblings, its contemporary rivals in both telescopic forms of artistic media and untextualized ones like soccer, pool betting, and political rallies, and also the very conditions of the production of each, the obstacle and the enablement. African countries have historically played subordinate roles in the dissemination (if not the production) of certain kinds of creative texts, although the situation has changed somewhat in recent times (Adejunmọbi 2017b; Bakare-Yusuf et al. 2016; appendix). Scattered artistic initiatives benefit from the controlled democratization of digital technology, as seen in the proliferation of small magazines, in print but increasingly online, across the translocal space of the Africana world. Yet alongside this explosion of creative endeavors the old problem of unequal exchange reappears in new forms: the emergence of new Africaidentified writers and the availability of their output run into crises in

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higher education within and outside the continent. Imaginative online magazines are hampered by limited access and potential for archiving as a result of widespread low broadband penetration and practices of digital feudalism everywhere. Tech hubs, startups, computer hardware, and apps are created for translocal needs but without enough electricity to power them. The list of problems is long. Equally long, however, is the history of a complex artistic culture that does not presume an antagonistic relationship between old and new modes of production and communication. Examining the connections between the contexts and forms of art and the role of media, especially new media, in the reconstitution of authorship, as I have done in this study, calls for a reflexive attitude toward a number of issues. A reader might wonder, why these forms? One objective of the study is to expand the paths that previous scholars and writers have opened by generating a consistent but constantly discontinuous historical perspective about African arts and letters. The fact that African arts have gone through different phases in the context of fitful institutional memory makes it risky to speak about this tradition. Theoretical, scholarly paradigms are never settled, and there has hardly been a time when one could spot a steady standpoint from which to take a measure of what constitutes these paradigms, even in order to open those to debate. Given the unsettled nature of these traditions, scholars have tended to proceed as if beginning from scratch, and that that beginning is either recent or constituted only as productions accessible through, or as, current media. Without discrediting such scholarly options (there is always a place to start), one can still make a case for a more robust, historically rich account of African arts and letters. A second question may be asked: Why is this approach necessary? Why not focus on the work, which is aesthetically and even epistemologically sufficient? A number of responses can be put forward. First, the idea of the sufficiency of the work as basis for critical analysis and interpretation coincides with a historical pass, between the Renaissance and the late nineteenth century, when the notion of art came to represent an approach to knowledge drawn on philology and exegesis. It might have been a dominant approach, but it was never the only option—later, Marxist or broadly materialist approaches fostered a sociology of literature that Pierre Macherey, Frank Lentricchia, Edward Said, and more recently, Neil Lazarus and his colleagues in the Warwick Collective came to exemplify. Second, recent approaches owed to the work of French historical sociologist Pierre Bourdieu have demonstrated the value of exploring the

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context or “field of cultural production,” and good examples of these approaches include Pascale Casanova’s The World Republic of Letters (2004) and James English’s The Economy of Prestige (2005). The historical sociology approach has become even more necessary due to factors such as circulation, translation, and the politics of knowledge and location that can now be understood as constitutive of what art is, what literature is, and if the notion of language in literature is necessarily the same as in cinema, visual art, or music. By focusing on the diverse ways that media constitute form, the shape that is constantly in motion, through which art, text, and criticism can be understood in a long duration, a better sense emerges of art, particularly in history. In Everything Is Sampled, I have worked with a diachronic map that unfolds in relation to two other concepts—translocality and mediation. The most beneficial way to look at this map is by embracing the idea that like all societies, African societies are internally relational. The patterns of movement of peoples across Northeast to West Africa and East to central and southern Africa in the common era are a useful prism for understanding the history of the arts in these regions. The three concepts play a central role in sustaining that internal relation between history (and its elements or “fields,” according to Bourdieu) and the arts, and between one form of art (oral telling) and another (writing). This is a situated way of explaining the historicity of form, and here are two processes through which the three concepts manifest themselves in the present summative context. In the first place, what Abiọla Irele does with the idea of writing as a modality of expression in the works of figures like Fagunwa, Mofolo, Diop, and Niane (highlighted in the introduction) rests on the perception that modern literacy is a new technology, and writing is its active agent. According to this perspective, expression in folktales, songs, proverbs, and other oral genres is transformed through literary conventions into poems, dramas or narratives. Diop’s The Tales of Amadou Koumba are a good example of this. Secondly, there is the idea of folk or popular styles, coming from such diverse areas as “tin trunk” texts and popular literacy, richly elaborated by Barber and Stephanie Newell (2002) as well as the Concert Party and folk opera modes and their relationship to musical genres, specifically highlife in Catherine Cole’s study (2001). That Ghanaian highlife had an influence on the Nigerian variety is hardly debated these days, and the story shared by Fatai Rolling Dollar in the last chapter offers further confirmation.

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Within this frame it is possible to demonstrate the relationships between the three concepts as functioning through the historicity of form. In the first example, institutions of literacy—print, literary convention, and educational programs and their curricula—shape the acts of mediation that transform oral genres into works of literature. Critics often neglect the fact that those oral genres were, or are, creative and open to various kinds of reading. The modal change occurring extensively in the twentieth century, however, also bore the imprint of the ethical core of African arts, the impulse toward reclamation of voice and subjectivity, as a broadly accepted principle. This is characterized in the plea of the protagonist of Fagunwa’s first novel to the scribe “to take down my story . . . that it may [not] die unexpectedly with me,” and it receives a more formal expression in the ethics of modern African authorship in which Fagunwa himself participates (Fagunwa 1982, 8). The basis of movements across capitals along the West African coast within which the exchanges in the second example occurred is urban, the social setting where distinctions based on class, ethnicity, religion, and language are not guaranteed to remain stable. Urbanization is far from a twentieth-century phenomenon in West Africa, however, and taken with translocality, the long view of that social phenomenon yields a specific idea: the horizontal, multidirectional nature of the movements across the region, creating the clientele for artistic and sundry traffic, can yield fresh insights by unsettling long-accepted ideas of national, ethnic, linguistic, or religious identity. Highlife musicians were welcome in Lagos as Nigerian musicians and other performers plied their trades in Accra and beyond. If urbanization provides a setting for creative practice in the manner Rolling Dollar describes, such acts of remix take place out of a sociocultural predisposition to material use within the scope of technological change. This understanding of remix as reuse brings the mode closer to the conceptual orientation of mbari, in which material life is viewed as disposable, renewable, and subject to refinement.2 To that should be added the musicians’ strong awareness of context, in this case calculated to appeal to the Lagosian consumer of the remixed highlife tune. The tendency toward “copying,” a colloquial description of copyright infringement, comes of the lax assumption that to use a previously authored song is to pay homage to the author, and that such a song is public property anyway. When reuse is contested outside of legal contexts, the characterization is “stealing or borrowing or adapting,” as Bisade Ologunde offers in the interview with Glendora Review (1995, 18).

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In relation to the communal context of mbari and the understanding of organic or cyclical life that undergirds the making and use of material held in common, such differentiated approaches to ownership have important ramifications that still need to be historicized or theorized as issues in (intellectual) property laws.3 A separate though related issue about such communal understanding of production is its regenerative value as that pertains to archives. Clearly, as we saw in chapter 6, the perception of such value played a role in the decision to revisit the degenerating archive of the Program of Rural Promotion by Audiovisual Media in Guinea Bissau, with the collaborative film, Spell Reel, as an artistic outcome. Between England and the West Indies, the Caribbean Artists Movement, the International Book Fair of Radical Black and Third World Books, and other undertakings created in London by John La Rose and his various collaborators all ran their courses, as time happens. Nearly every piece of those undertakings has survived and is now accessible in the archive of the George Padmore Institute. Indeed, it was mainly La Rose’s retirement in 1991 that necessitated the discontinuation of the International Book Fair, a decision quickly followed by the incorporation of the GPI. We have thus come full-circle: the season is turning, and it is time for harvest. Another dimension to this relationship between material degeneration and the regenerative values that may arise from it is worth mentioning. S.oyinka captures this dimension in a response to an interviewer’s question about the impulse behind “Cremation of a Wormy Caryatid,” the final poem in his volume, Mandela’s Earth and Other Poems: “Yes,” he says to the interviewer, Jane Wilkinson, “there is this work of art, and it is quite possible for little termites to eat into it and destroy it. But those termites cannot, simply cannot, because of the continuum, the philosophy of continuity that is built into both concept and execution, they simply cannot destroy the creative essence that produced the work of art” (original emphases, Wilkinson 2001, 162).4 Furthermore, while class orientation may have set a limit to the scope of the musician-entrepreneurs in Lagos in working out the politics of this creative use (in comparison to the explicitly ideological manner of Birago Diop), the impulse toward the reclamation of voice remains operative in both instances as a general principle of the historicity of form in African arts. Finally, the question of how explicit Diop was in apprehending his ideological relation to colonial institutions in Senegal is hardly settled, as seen in Paulin Vieyra’s documentary Birago Diop: Poet and Storyteller

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(1982). It can, at least, be posed in terms of policies in Francophone countries in contrast to the Nigerian context of Fagunwa, whose narratives in Yoruba are the generic equivalent of Wolof tales but the linguistic equivalent of Diop’s stories in French. With the reconstitution that digitality makes possible, it becomes easier to place a fragment, as a random victim of political, technological, or environmental volatilities, in context. A phrase that a consumer had long presumed to be from a popular saying reappears as part of a text by a nameable author, of dateable origin, and even if it were to attain legitimacy as public property, such appraisal would have a history. An aesthetic appreciation of the drumming in Fẹla’s “Yẹ`yé. Dey Smell” (1971) is richer, I think, with the knowledge that, as the bandleader says at the end of the song, “the first drummer was Tony Allen, and the second drummer was Ginger Baker.” A diachronic perspective developed in relation to translocality and mediation means that digitality, a historical phenomenon, need not be unduly credited with enabling this potential. After all, prior media took their turns within a given historical pass. In their famous essay on Third Cinema, Argentine filmmakers Fernando Solanas and Octavio Gettino compare the “national cinema” of Argentina to “the mechanistic takeover of a cinema conceived as a show to be exhibited in large theaters with a standard duration, hermetic structures that are born and die on the screen” (Solanas and Gettino 1976, 51). Taking a closer look at this statement provokes reflections about the relationships between technological malfunction and improvisation. In the best of circumstances, such as streaming clips from a Netflix-platformed African film (Maty Diop’s Atlantiques) for class instruction on a computer with stable network, the platform may disappoint by reporting an error code.5 In such a time-sensitive situation, the problem may be resolved in a quick manner (like getting a student with a Netflix account to log in and share screen—they are all too happy to help!). Hardly a foolproof solution, and the fact that such incidents occur routinely points to the limitations of a positivist view of technology, requiring a predisposition to improvisation as a reflexive attitude of the scholar grounded in the real world of unequal exchange. There were forms of media before digital technology attained its domination, and other forms will come into existence and take things further after the epistemic and ontological resources of this culture will have been stretched thin, if not exhausted. It is quite possible to imagine the texts

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profiled in this book owing their survival or technological reproducibility to the opportune coexistence of production and circulation fostered in digital culture without neglecting the fact that several of them were products of prior experiments with technology. The relevant features of digital technology—portability, accessibility, affordability—have certainly left more than an impression on aesthetic appreciation of worked objects, material or otherwise. A track ripped from a compact disc occupies more space as a sound file than one downloaded from an online app. The same goes for a scanned book in contrast to an electronic book with digital rights encoded. The manually digitized ones may also differ in quality (of sound or image), with consequences for value, symbolic capital, and other questions pertaining to the politics of knowledge in production and circulation.6 A third point is that the linguistic provenance of a representation of the world need not circumscribe interpretations, textual and otherwise, of that representation. Translation provides a way of expanding the scope of such consciousness. Visionary Fagunwa recognizes this implicitly when, though writing in Yoruba, he addresses his fiction to the world, confident in the power of literature to open up a world and translation to expand the scope of that world—a process of carrying out what Pheng Cheah characterizes as the worlding functions of literature. Cheah posits postcolonial literature as fulfilling such worlding functions, but the formal choices in the work of novelists that do not fit that designation provide additional examples. The “worlds” of the novels of Joaquim Machado de Assis (Quincas Borba), William Faulkner (Yoknapatawpha), and Gabriel García Márquez (Macondo) are formally rounded in such explicit ways that Faulkner’s representative setting becomes an example upon which Márquez draws. In theoretical terms, this approach to worlding through translation is still insufficiently explored. In one respect, it has very little to say about works whose perceived limitation is less that they are formally demanding than they exist in the shadow of the politics of translatability, a critical practice for which marketability is often a substitute. The work of Nigerian poet Odia Ofeimun, which I noted briefly in chapter 3, offers a case in point.7 In another regard, worlding through translation can also be understood as a manifestation of Irele’s classic formulation of writing as a modality of expression as it pertains to the exactions of figures such as Birago Diop, Djibril Niane, and (for Armah) Thomas Mofolo. Within the ambit of production, this approach shows in

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the idea of the rewrite that Is.ọla mobilizes to bring his published texts to the audiovisual platform and in the different kinds of remix seen in chapter 6. To return for a moment to the literary example, the process through which Márquez transforms Faulkner’s representative world into an exemplary one goes beyond textual-based understanding of translation to embrace the more plural idea of cultural translation. Thus, the approach to worlding can begin from literary texts but does not have to be limited to them, as the comparisons in chapter 3 between the song “Mọ΄ńléwá” (by Odolaye Arẹmu), the poem “Shaka” (by Léopold Senghor), and the opera “Chaka” (by Akin Euba) show. When new media of reproduction appear, so does a predisposition toward repair and reuse, especially in contexts where new tools are ill afforded. In the face of changes in technology that are part of capitalism’s accustomed coding of expiration, tools are not built to last for long. Digita l Pa r a dox In its critical engagement, Everything Is Sampled sits athwart two perspectives. The first is a long view of historical and artistic process in the African world, and the second takes a synchronic view centered on the incredible resources of digital culture, the worldly, translocal belonging in which all information is presumed present and accessible in a computer search engine. With this diachronic perspective, reflecting on African history will go beyond the so-called colonial encounter and its aftermath, and themes such as anti-imperialism that have powered central ethical impulses in African arts and letters will be shown having a multifaceted history (as in chap. 3) worthy of equally multifaceted critiques. The accessibility of the second perspective, in terms of being both available and legible, has a compelling force in our contemporary experience. In the years of working on this book, I have observed a decrease in communications by email and an increase in those via WhatsApp, particularly from associates and relatives based on the continent and the southern Hemisphere of the Americas. There are complicated questions here that may be related to changes in personal and institutional controls of the means of communication, and they are rich in contradictions. One challenge is how these two stances, the diachronic and the synchronic, could come to a mutual recognition, without undue reconciliation: that Africaidentified and global-southern natives of the digital world be aware of

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how, in textual and institutional ways, diachronicity provides a viable theoretical model of a very rich scope and depth, and that those intent on the steady view do not underestimate the reach and creative power of those socialized to make up their minds by clicking on links or typing into search engines. A fine example of this mutual recognition is displayed in the attitude of Orlando Julius, the Nigeria-born composer and saxophonist, who, in the documentary Stadium Hotel (2012), says of the digital afterlife of his music: “So, today now, I mean, I go on YouTube myself to see a lot of my oldies. They put [them] on YouTube, and I’m very happy….” (0.26.48–0.27.00). More to the point, however, is that in any given epoch, there are never just the “old” and “new” generations. Every epoch is intergenerational, inclusive of active social agents sometimes spanning four generations. Today, an eighty-eight-year-old writer is in dialogue with a twenty-three-year-old festival curator deploying new skills, even though both may not be fully conscious of the forces mediating that dialogue. In this intergenerational relay, the means of experiencing a narrative or dramatic story move in nonsequential manner between oral telling, exhibition at a film festival, theatrical performance, the printed book, broadcast on television or radio, the formats of VHS cassette and DVD, and online streaming through mobile phone-powered apps. According to the preferred understanding of the relations between time, space, and medium in this study, the various modes of creative practice employed by artists, poets, and writers are informed by an ethical impulse that foregrounds the historical validity of African and global Black experiences. The less ironic of these figures, such as Ayi Kwei Armah, Akinwumi Is.ọla, and Shailja Patel, appear to prioritize a sense of epistemic continuity as safeguard to historical amnesia. A diachronic perspective brings visibility to these artistic orientations. To acknowledge and even give priority to a diachronic perspective, however, is not to lose sight of the fallacy of historical continuity at large or of the complex nature of the processes of artistic composition. The aesthetic dimension of holding defragmentation to light calls for a more exacting, dynamic perspective. In a genre like oríkì, fragmentation arises in part from the stylistics of chanting—rhetorical procedures requiring changes in tone, pace, and other complex, often unpremeditated modes of enunciation. This is due in part to the genre’s primary function as vocative, and to address a subject is less to describe or narrate but more to bring out the essential qualities of that subject. Two examples will clarify what I am getting at here. In the

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first, we have following text from the book I Could Speak until Tomorrow by anthropologist Karin Barber: Ayinde alágbàdo-ègbo lóko Babaà-mi-agbìngbàdo-é. wà lọtọ` Ayinde alágbàdo-ìs.aájú Baba Olútọ΄mọrí, tíí gba ni lọ΄wọ΄ ebi.8

Barber, following scholar Ọlatunde Ọlatunji, explains the subtle linguistic acts of nominalization and contraction that occur in ordinary speech and adds that “in oríkì they are used much more frequently and are attached to much longer and more complex phrases in inventive ways” (1991, 71). The quoted lines “maize that ripens before other people’s . . . is what saves one from hunger” may or may not be a favorite saying of the person being addressed, but they appear as part of his attributes and are inserted in the whole as fragments coming from that nebulous explanatory hinterland. The construction of this oríkì, in whole, in part, and particularly in its tonal matching of lexical contrasts, is an act of language in which an artist has left a mark, and the status of the fragments is indispensable to its integrity. The second example concerns the incorporative character of oríkì as a genre. This feature is present in a variety of ways, and the following fragment from the oríkì of S.ango, the fifteenth-century king of Ọyọ, incarnated as the deity of thunder in Yoruba history (and dramatized in Duro Ladipọ’s 1965 opera Ọba Koso) will suffice: Olójú-orógbó, ẹlé. ẹ`ké. -obì, Ó f ’igbá méjì tọ´ gbẹ`gìrì wò . . .9

The questions that these lines trigger have to do with the relationship between the historical S.ango and the appearance of kolanut (introduced into West Africa in the modern era) and gb`ẹ gìrì, a type of popular soup made from cooked beans whose domestication is less dateable. For the author/s of the oríkì, however, the attributes of the deity being evoked are transhistorical (even though S.ango remains a deified subject of history) and in the process of incorporating those new items of socialization (and of ritual propitiation), the artistic function enjoys a priority over historical sequencing. These examples show how figurative language operates as an expressive act. The validity of poetic or artistic language rests in its being

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figurative apart from providing information and historical data. Literary conventions may affect the modality of one such expression (in a written poem, for example), but those conventions are open to change when an author, responding to a range of factors in a given context, brings personal stylistic predilections to bear on the process of making that expression. These features are not limited to the oral genre of oríkì, as comparable observations about the compression of time in relation to moving image would show. The freeze-frame following the shooting of the Imam by Dior Yacine in Ceddo condenses emotions and sentiments that have struggled for expression for much of the film’s duration. The act itself is a radical eruption of time, a culmination of years, perhaps decades, of attempts at class realignment. It is also potentially a disruption of a process in formation. In another example, the time lapse between the audio and the appearance of text as graphics or subtitles in Spell Reel points to the nature of digitality in contrast to analog. In most digital films, the clock might continue running even after the subtitle or in-text has appeared and can be time-stamped because the speaker has not finished speaking. My sense is that the diachronic perspective ought to be attentive to this sort of discontinuity in time as well as in space because it opens up a whole new field of cognition.10 Considering how Armah, by way of Hampate Bâ, has described the training of the djieli (griots) and the contexts of their practice, as seen in chapter 1, we can begin to relate to this cultural figure with less veneration or idealization and adjust to what should be obvious: African societies, like other human societies, existed and continue to exist as dynamic spaces with a variety of inequities, class differentiations, conflicts, and antagonisms. Fragmentation in artistic composition may differ in analytical terms from fragmentation in historical process, but the relationship between a fragment and a whole is a factor that cannot be minimized in understanding the status of atoms, which constitutes both. A perspective developed from familiarity with these positions (Armah, Bâ, Diop) will include observations that history does not stand still or alone. It exists as acts, through reconstructions. It exists in relation to other forms and sites of social expression, to changing values, and so its status is relational particularly in how I have described translocality in this book. Clearly, these pathfinding figures knew (and know) this. The fine details are liable to disappear or be mis-selected in the relentless struggle for meaning and sentience that is the process of historical reconstruction, as Jeyifo

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has argued, when not held hostage to the socioeconomic volatilities that have typically besieged the production of African arts and letters. It is possible to make this argument, to hold this view, without discounting the necessity of a cultural or political unity of the African continent. The history that takes place in one location—say, within Kenya as a nationally bounded space—has implications beyond that country, given its constitutive presence in East Africa and toward central and southern Africa, in temporal and spatial terms. This is all the more pertinent because for figures like Armah, Patel, and Is.ọla, the point is less to set sight on the future or on the past as to be invested in the present. In this regard, even if contemporary Kinyarwanda (ethnic) or Kenyan (national) culture is no more than a fragment from the whole history of the African continent, it remains in process and has validity of singularity in relation to other forms, sites, and times, and its absence from the whole diminishes the integrity of that whole. Not all of that culture’s aspects, even as secondary wholeness, even in the realm of artistic representation, could be reduced to a direct commentary on history, that all-encompassing entity from which humans cannot escape. A representation could also be just about art, about artifice, about random choice, about sheer play or pleasure since, in relative account, such a representation comes out of language working on material and on which a given artist leaves her mark as a sign of virtuosity. Or, a striving for one.

A P P ENDI X

During research for this book, I developed an anonymous and voluntary survey for writers publishing on primarily online platforms. The objectives of the questionnaire included understanding the impact of digital publishing on writers’ sense of craft in professional terms; the status of professionalism in the context of the much-storied democratization of access in digitality; the impact that the upswing in electronic publishing had on print formats; and a provisional understanding of the reach of both formats. This appendix is an aggregation of the responses received. how long have you been publishing online? Respondent #1: I’ve had a blog since the early 2000s, first on Blogger and then on Wordpress, before the explosion of social media. So, blogs were my first platform and I’ve been using blogs to get my thoughts out there for about twelve years now. Then there were the e-zines like African Writing where my very first poems were published in 2008, as well as African Writer and others. Around 2012, social media was in full force and we embraced it, along with Blackberry and the thenrudimentary cloud computing platforms. Our first books, around 2013, were also available in Kindle and Amazon print-on-demand solution editions. Respondent #2: Roughly eight years. Respondent #3: Since 2007 (ten years). Respondent #4: I have been publishing online for between two to three years. Respondent #5: Twenty years + Respondent #6: For about ten years now.

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what informed this decision and what was your publishing experience prior to taking the decision? Respondent #1: I came of age with the rise of digital environments so it was not much of a shift. The possibilities came to me at about the time I started taking writing seriously, around 2006, through membership of a couple of YahooGroups then frequented by the exile-generation of Nigerian writers, also called the Third Generation. The idea of instant access to content created a world away was fascinating. When we started publishing, there was the cost associated with both building contacts and a distribution network in the West, which we knew had a huge Nigerian diaspora who were potential buyers of our books. So, publishing on Amazon POD and Kindle made sense. Respondent #2: In the newsroom, where I first worked, one of the directors advised us to start blogs—if we hadn’t already. I set up about two but didn’t start using them until 2010/2011, ironically after leaving the same organization. Basically, it seemed like a good idea for warehousing my writings in case my computer crashed. My publishing experience before going digital has been the same generally. 234NEXT newspaper (where I was employed full-time) was strong on both the online and print fronts (physically, there were limitations in terms of circulation), and most of the other publications I wrote for as a freelancer now operate the same way (although it took many of them a longer time to get the swing of online publishing). Respondent #3: In 2007, I had a clutter of short pieces (poems, sketches, and short stories); it made sense to publish them online. Prior to this, I had zero experience in publishing, save for the occasional poem in the newspaper. Respondent #4: My decision to start publishing online was informed by a realization that there exists an increasingly young public who, in order to engage and exchange ideas, have embraced the Internet. Thus far, it has been very rewarding as I had no experience with publishing prior to making the decision. Respondent #5: It was more convenient; it allowed me to reach a wide audience. I’d had little or no publishing experience before then. Respondent #6: I realized, shortly after I left the university, that a new opportunity existed on the Internet to get one’s words across to a global audience without the filter of establishment publishing houses, so I followed it. It was a new environment, so it wasn’t a smooth entrance. But in a couple of years, I got a hang of it and got more comfortable. describe your experience vis-à-vis print publishing. Respondent #1: As a writer, print publishing is easier and one can get one’s views across quicker. It’s not like in the old days where literary output and arguments had to wait for the next edition of Transition or Okike. So, I have a poem or an essay; I shop around for one of the many outlets—African Arguments, Enkare

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Review, Brittle Paper etc.—and balance their interest in publishing new content regularly with my desired target readership. The downside is of course the multiplicity of e-zines and e-journals and whatnot with a corresponding lessening of quality. Just about any group of chaps can share a beer and set up an e-zine the next day and everybody has, of course, been “published” even if the writing isn’t worth a bad coin. That’s the downside. As a publisher, digital publishing brings its own challenge of having to spend huge sums and time catching the very short attention spans of the age enough to get them to go order this or that book. Liberating to put a book on the Amazon cloud at a few clicks of the mouse, but getting people to go and buy is another [bother] all on its own. Comparable to the trouble one faces with print publishing especially in a country like Nigeria. In Nigeria, the paper is imported by cartels, the ink as well, basically every publishing consumable. So, publishing costs ensure that both the cost per book and the cover price are beyond what’s optimal for the average buyer. A nonexistent distribution system, an expensive marketing system and a lack of quality criticism all add to the issues. So, digital publishing vis-à-vis print publishing really is a devil and a deep blue sea situation. As a publisher, you offer both, and both formats have their own peculiar issues. Respondent #2: In my experience, print publishing has largely encouraged lengthier pieces and, not to repeat the previous reply, I would say online publishing ensures a wider reach. However the same effect is now possible with the option to download digital editions of print copies and the possibility of ordering print copies online. Respondent #3: Digital publishing has both pros and cons. It is quicker to access than print for publishing. It removes the encumbrances and logistics that print suffers i.e. press, postage, etc. The more prestigious the digital outfit however, the more difficult to get published. The experience with less prestigious digital outfits is that editorial process is either absent or deficient. Overall, it is a decent and pragmatic alternative to print. Respondent #4: In relative terms, considering that digital publishing led me to print publishing, I’d say that while publishing online is no substitute for print publishing it complements the latter by granting easy access to a public that would otherwise have remained remote. Respondent #5: Online publishing for me as a writer allowed me to be just myself. I’ve always resisted gatekeeping. I didn’t have to worry about Western editors forcing me to make my prose “universal” or mainstream. It was easy for me to tailor my writing to my niche audience. Respondent #6: My primary medium is a blog, which is something like a personal magazine/public diary, which doesn’t usually lend itself well to the print medium. The blog was started as a way to publicly and privately document a travel and teaching experience. There was no other print medium that could have given me

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that much space and liberty of subject. But it was also not traditional, in that I couldn’t get paid for it and I didn’t have an editor looking over my shoulder, which could have been a good thing at different times. So it has its pluses and minuses. what are the publications where your writings have appeared? Respondent #1: African Writing. Saraba Magazine. Jalada Africa. African Arguments. Brittle Paper. Mantle Thought. Johannesburg Review of Books. A number of others. Respondent #2: 234NEXT, the Sun (Nigeria), Chimurenga, the Guardian (Nigeria), the Hollywood Reporter, Daily Times, Awotele (nos. 3 and 7), Glänta Issue 4, Africiné, The Equator (newsletter of the Biennale Jogja 2011–2022), This Day, Daily Independent, African Studies Review. Respondent #3: Africanwriter.com, African-writing.com, Kalahari Review, NigeriansTalk.org, Saraba Magazine, Sentinel Magazine, Badilishapoetry.com, Brittlepaper.com, Bakwa Magazine, Itch Magazine, Ann Arbor Review, OlisaTV, Aké Review, Mantle, Chimurenga. Respondent #4: Wawa Book Review; Chimurenga Chronic; Music in Africa; Olisa TV and Happenings. Respondent #5: Eclectica, Guernica, Enkare, Jalada, Saraba, MTLS, BrittlePaper, Next Newspaper, Sahara Reporters, Fogged Clarity, Premium Times, Facebook, Twitter, etc. as well as my blog. Respondent #6: Print publication? Farafina Magazine, Aké Review, The Moth, Sentinel Quarterly, The Guardian, etc. were these solicited? competitively submitted? Respondent #1: A mix of both, really. Respondent #2: All were solicited (except for those published by 234NEXT as its employee). Respondent #3: About 90 percent were competitively submitted. Respondent #4: They were solicited. Respondent #5: Both. Respondent #6: Yes. can you provide a range in terms of response time and indicate whether this was uniform across your outlets? Respondent #1: Response time is usually within a week. The finer details of editing can take a couple of more weeks. Usually the pieces are up between a week or two after a final draft is sent in.

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Respondent #2: Response time in terms of publishing? If yes, this varies. Respondent #3: Two weeks to three months. Respondent #4: The range in response time would usually vary across outlets and can be roughly put between two weeks and three months. Respondent #5: It took about three to four weeks to hear from Eclectica and Guernica. Shorter for the rest. Respondent #6: For self-publishing, anything from one day to one month, depending on when the writing is complete. For print publishing out of the blogger’s hands, anything from two weeks to two months. what specific technical skills (editing, peer review) would you judge as having impacted your submissions? Respondent #1: Editing is an important skill, and one we need more of on the continent. This is where we locate the poor quality of a number of the e-outlets which I spoke about have proliferated over the last decade. Mostly, I have published essays and poems, so not so much peer review as whatever criteria the editorial boards have used. So, subjective. I’ve had rejections and disinterest from several platforms of course. Peer review would be limited to scholars who have done work on my writing. A Nigerian academic used my novel for his doctoral dissertation and there was a piece in Ariel after that. A couple of other instances which one finds out only much later, or never at all. Respondent #2: Definitely both, especially if part of the target audience has largely different experiences and backgrounds. Usually, editors write back with questions and comments, if necessary, a number of which also grant me further insight into and introspection about the topic at hand. Few friends are willing to review my work because I edit theirs, and they instantly assume mine is good to go. However, there is a small circle that gladly takes on this task: helping with grammar, sentence construction, content etc. I believe everyone needs an editor, so it’s usually interesting to see the many ways a contribution can be improved upon by the first round of comments before it officially goes public. There have been the rare occasions though, where I have felt the editor’s rewrites were more a disservice to my article’s flow or coherence than an improvement. Respondent #3: Editing (structural and copyediting). Peer review, and postpublication promotion. Respondent #4: I’d like to think that my submissions have benefited greatly from editing.

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Respondent #5: Editing. Respondent #6: My work goes through personal editing and peer review (by friends who are usually professional writers/editors) before I submit them. what role does remuneration play in your choice of outlet or topic? Respondent #1: Not a whole lot, really. There are outlets to which I have contributed journalism and there, of course, renumeration is important. However, the most important criteria for me is impact, potential readership. I’ve on instance accepted token renumeration even for journalism if publishing in those outlets guarantees more eyeballs to my writing. Like Edward Said reminds us, choosing a platform where the right change can do the most good is an important decision. Respondent #2: Depending on the scale of the contribution, remuneration plays hardly any role. The reputation and audience of the outlet are the first things I consider. In certain cases where a contribution requires a lot more time and effort though, payment is necessary. Respondent #3: Until 2014, remuneration was almost absent. But currently remuneration both in cash and kind are germane. By kind, I refer to qualities like being published in a prestigious journal with rigorous editorial inputs. Respondent #4: Remuneration as incentive, when it does come for work done, is important but hardly plays a big role in my choice of outlet or topic. Respondent #5: Little or none. Respondent #6: When I was young and restless, with little responsibility, the only objective stimulant for submitting works was exposure and publication. But as an adult with a family to feed, remuneration has started to play a crucial role in the selection of outlets I submit my work to. what artistic/copyright control do you exercise over your published work? do you request contracts? Respondent #1: For most digital outlets, what exists is first publication rights, usually limited to between thirty to ninety days after publication after which it reverts to the creator. Formal contracts are rare with digital outlets but these are usually stated in the terms. With print publishing, there is always a contract, particularly if it’s work that’s being paid for. Also, with paid-for journalism, it would be unethical to republish the same piece elsewhere. So, control is based on the arrangements, works on a case by case basis. Respondent #2: I have only once received a contract (the publishers have a standard contract issued to contributors, in which case the latter retains moral rights). Usually, both parties state the terms clearly and reach some form of

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general agreement in the emails we exchange. On few occasions, I have republished these contributions on my blog, but only after a specified period of time. Respondent #3: I favor journals where copyright reverts to me after 90 days. No, I don’t often request contracts. Respondent #4: No, not in a strict sense, I do not request contracts. However, over my published work, I request artistic control to the extent that a publisher’s agenda doesn’t obscure the overall thrust of my intended message. Respondent #5: No. I am pretty indifferent to artistic/copyright control. I don’t request contracts. Respondent #6: It depends on the work or on the outlet. For my work published on my personal blog, I have a creative commons license allowing people to republish any of them with or without written permission, as long as credit/ attribution is provided. When I submit work to outlets today, I usually write to ask what rights I continue to have on the work, especially if it wasn’t paid for. I usually prefer to have the rights to reuse them at my own time. consider general reflections on the merits and shortcomings of online publishing, with respect to your personal artistic visions/ objectives (if any). Respondent #1: Key merit is the instant access. Demerit would be the reality that everyone has a voice, everyone can own a platform, even if they don’t deserve to speak, really. We have a situation where everyone is yelling at everyone at the same time and the sort of structured argument and discourse in the old days of strictly print publishing is impossible with this social media digital world. Poststructuralism running amok. But these are the realities of the times, and we must face them, use the merits, create contingencies against the demerits as can be helped. My artistic vision is to write whatever I live the best I can, my own truth. My objective, complimentary, is to give as many people the opportunity to engage or not as possible. Respondent #2: It’s an advantage to have control over the content that you publish and not be restricted by deadlines or ideological bent. However, if you’re publishing on public platforms such as Blogger, Tumblr, Wordpress, or Medium, you are, in a sense, somewhat dependent on their existence. We might fool ourselves that nothing on the Internet can disappear but in instances where such portals decide to censor content or shut down their services altogether, such an outcome can be imagined. Respondent #3: Just like print publishing has its various subtleties, so also does online publishing. The prestige of the journal in which I publish in, their house style, and publishing contract matters. I will say in my development as a writer,

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I have moved beyond some kind of publications to more serious ones, once the novelty of publishing has been removed. As much as online publication has the merit of being instantaneous, it is still subservient to the Internet, power, and other logistics print has been extricated from. Respondent #4: I think that, in deciding to publish with a particular outlet online, as much as possible I ought to pay attention to the modus operandi of said outlets where my work gets published in order to avoid potential conflict. I also think constructive feedback, which tends to be in short supply, should be encouraged. Respondent #5: Online publishing has been great for writing, eliminating the middleman and offering the writer full-blown control and artistic license over his or her work. It has offered high quality content, mostly free or cheap to readers all over the world. There are issues with the quality of editing and there has to be a way to pay writers for their online work. For me, it has allowed me to be fully me. I am able to speak directly to my customized audience, and in terms of the politics of the written word, my content is unfiltered, indigenous, and to me, authentic. It is almost like a return to the oral tradition of my ancestors. I love it. Respondent #6: Notwithstanding what I think, online publishing has come to stay. But it is important to separate what is personal online publishing from edited or curated publishing. An example of the former will be a personal blog, while the latter would be something like BrittlePaper.com or AfricanWriter.com or Saraba Magazine which are also online publishing outlets but with an editorial team that vets what comes in and goes out. Generally, for the latter, there is no difference from local print publishing except for their distribution access and the possibility of being able to quickly fix an error (which you can’t do when work is already public with print). Other than that, both (can) have a solid editorial team to ensure that the quality of work is standard across board. But for personal/self-publishing online, as with self-publishing in print, there is the risk of overexposure and substandard output. Vetting that depends solely on the writer is usually not as qualitative as one that goes through a number of editing eyes. Moreover, most people don’t respect what isn’t published on someone else’s platform. If all the work that Soyinka has ever published came from his own printing press, not only would it be filled with editing errors, it would also not get as much visibility nor would it be taken as seriously as would those published by established media houses. The advantages for self-publishing online, however, are numerous. In my case, it has given me the confidence to write regularly and a space to put my thoughts

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directly out into the world. Writing can be a business as well as a vocation. Blogging allows the latter much more than the former (though a couple of people have made money through private blogging, just not enough). People who write a lot but aren’t interested in “publishing” all of their thoughts in a printed and for-purchase format have the online medium to thank for a chance to regularly engage an audience on their own terms. But it can always go hand-in-hand with traditional print publishing, as Teju Cole successfully demonstrated, transitioning from Twitter to being an internationally acclaimed author of books.

NO T E S

Introduction 1.  “Africa and Science Fiction: Meeting with Kahiu.” Interview by Oulimata Gueye. December 2013. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWMtgD9O6PU. 2.  In crafting this sentence, I imagined a version written in longhand or on a typewriter and wondered at the practical and psychological editorial costs of revising it for clarity without the benefit of the “Undo” function in Microsoft Word! 3.  Alain Ricard also develops this idea further in The Languages and Literatures of Africa (2004). 4.  Achebe discusses this idea most formally in the essay “The Novelist as Teacher” (1975), but much of his nonfiction prose is actually an elaboration of the idea. For further discussion of this idea in postcolonial fiction, see Ades.ọkan (2012a). 5.  See Okeke-Agulu (2015), especially chapter 3. 6.  For a comprehensive review of these statements, see Diawara (1992), especially 35–50. The writings of the director, producer, and film historian Paulin Soumanou Vieyra constitute the best example of this critical practice in African cinema. The acquisition of Vieyra’s papers and other materials by Indiana University’s Black Film Center and Archive in 2021 and digitization (including translation) of those writings are expected to bring a more thorough understanding to this practice. 7.  Translation is another mode that I consider at length in this book, as can be seen in the discussion in chapter 5, where I focus on it as a problematic, missed encounter between the marketability (which in some cases means the translatability) of contemporary middlebrow fiction and diverse theories of world literature. Improvisation, editing, and similar technical procedures are equally viable, and I examine these in some detail wherever appropriate. 8.  There are countless examples of this predicament in the history of African arts and letters, but the introduction to the interview between scholar Fírinne Ní Chréacháin and director Ousmane Sembene (Chréacháin 1992) and the second paragraph of Ayi Kwei

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Armah’s critique of Marxist methods in African political culture (Armah 1984b) provide sufficiently synoptic views. 9.  On pairing Nigeria and Kenya as countries where digital media in particular has had an impact on literary production, see Adenẹkan (2021). I return to this work later in the book. 10.  For a detailed analysis of these figures, see Communications Authority of Kenya (CA) annual report of 2018–2019. 11.  Reports of ProQuest’s possible acquisition generated some controversy around cultural patrimony among African writers, critics, and cultural enthusiasts. Such sentiments were legitimate but were also potentially problematic because, even long before Heinemann decided to discontinue the list, Heinemann had been sold to the general trade and educational book publisher Reed Elsevier, which was itself a subsidiary of Random House, and no one knew for certain the actual owners of the copyrights of the novels, plays, and poems in the Series. For several years starting in the early 2000s, ProQuest regularly took out ad space in periodicals like the London Review of Books and Times Literary Supplement requesting information on the copyright owners of certain AWS titles. 12.  I borrowed the concept of “extraversion,” which I first used in this context and revised as “reversed extraversion” in “New African Writing and the Question of Audience” (Ades.ọkan 2012a), from philosopher Paulin Hountondji. He used it first in an essay titled “Recapturing” (1993), then developed it in his introduction to the volume Endogenous Knowledge (1997), discussed in chapter 1. Likewise, the scholar Eileen Julien in a nowclassic essay (2006) employed the term “extroverted” to characterize those African novels that are read differently in non-African contexts irrespective of the critical opinions of African literary circles. I have opted for “extraversion” rather than “extroversion” to avoid the psychological issues attached to the term as a human trait. 13.  This letter was circulated among scholars of African literature and theater studies, asking for signatories to be sent to Professor Plastow. Upon inquiry about whether the petition produced any results, Plastow emailed me: “The publishers got back to me quite positively about our letter. Unfortunately, I was then travelling a lot for research so my follow-up then died out” (email communication 31 October 2019). 14.  Ambroise Kom has given an excellent discussion of this critical pass preceding the outputs of the latter half of the 1990s in “A Literature Without a Voice” (1994). 15.  For a useful perspective of the situation before Nollywood became dominant, see Haynes (1995). For a discussion of the scene prior to the early 1990s, see Ades. ọkan (2012b). 16.  Examples of this trend include James Ogude’s Narrating the Nation (1999). I reflect on these tendencies as the effects of disciplinary and institutional pressures, not necessarily to impute any judgment to them. They are only different from the preoccupations of expatriated African scholars to the extent that their concerns are perceived to respond readily to local contexts, which those of expatriated scholars are presumed not to do! 17.  In case this publication date appears to reorder the text’s chronological relation to the work of Lazarus and Ọlaniyan, it is important to point out that Irele’s essay first appeared as “Is African Music Possible?” in 1993 (Transition 61) where the quotation reads “this opposition can be, ultimately, a disabling one for the healthy development of musical life and expression in the general culture” (70). 18.  For a discussion of the recorded music of Yoruba poets, see Ades. ọkan (2017). From another point on the spectrum of artistic composition there is the practice among modern African poets, from Léopold Senghor to Niyi Ọs.undare, of joining performances of their poems to “the accompaniment” of specific musical instruments. I discuss this practice in chapter 3.

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19.  For an exciting reading of Fagunwa’s fiction in relation to tropes of supernaturalism and fantasy in J. K. Rowling’s Harry Porter novels and Pentecostal-themed Nigerian films, see Adejunmọbi (2017a). 20.  See Žižek (1991). 21.  See Vieyra (1987). 22.  Mambety’s playfulness is well taken, as always. However, his call for dialogue, if that, can be read as staying at the level of the dialogic, whereas even with the wagoner’s monologue, Sembene’s camera already privileges the dialectic with all the contradictions implied. 23.  See also Kodwo Eshun (2003). 24.  For an imaginative conception of African nationalism transcending geographical boundaries prior to the consolidation of European nation-state mapping in West Africa, historian Emmanuel Ayandele has argued that “far more than the post-World War I African educated elite, their predecessors [in the nineteenth century] were cosmopolitan and West African, in their outlook; they were veritable West Africans . . . narrow ethnic or tribal affinities and loyalty to narrow territorial frontiers were much less weighty than allegiance to Africa in general and West Africa in particular” (1970, 12). This perspective validates the idea of translocality discussed in chapter 1.

1. Modes of Cr eative Pr actice 1.  A good example of this common purpose is the 1982 book Crisis? What Crisis? (in French) that all four (plus Immanuel Wallerstein) jointly authored. The US edition cited here is titled Dynamics of Global Crisis. Arrighi offers a light-hearted take on these differences when he says in an interview with David Harvey, “But whether there were possibilities for political developments beyond this [southern African liberation movements] is something that John [Saul] and I still quarrel about to this day, good-humoredly, whenever we meet” (2009, 65). 2.  See Rodney (1970, 38). I discuss the passage later in this chapter as a cautionary move in relation to the idea of defragmentation that arises from composition as a mode of creative practice. 3.  In this regard, Mbembe’s argument echoes Fanon’s discussion of how independenceera rulers turned violence into a metaphor for nation building (94–95). Although Mbembe has published several books (Critique of Black Reason, Necropolitics, and Out of the Dark Night) since this essay came out, his central claims have not changed. For example, he mostly reinforces the premise of transnationalization and “Africa-in-circulation” in Out of the Dark (2019, 5). See especially the Introduction and chapter 6 of that book. 4.  See Murphy (2000, 237) for a discussion of the issues surrounding the failed attempts to screen Ceddo in Iran. 5.  As discs, California Newsreel films initially formatted as VHSs only display “Play Program” on screen, unlike standard DVDs that include chapters and special features. 6.  In a comparable discussion that shows filmmakers adjusting to changing production contexts, Vieyra’s essay, “Le film et le problème des langues en Afrique,” in Le cinéma africain: Des origines à 1973 (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1975), 251–268 and a subsequent interview with film critic Pierre Haffner take up issues about synchronization of audio and image on film, especially through either subtitling or dubbing. This essay has been translated into English by Mélissa Gélinas in an article that brings together the translation and the

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interview between Vieyra and Haffner. In contrast to Sembene’s bellicose attitude toward video, Vieyra’s position, in 1978, shows a more pragmatic but visionary consideration of the relationship between sound and image, and anticipates many of the technical ideas that have since become standard in film production. See Gélinas 2019, especially p. 129 for ideas about making films with multiple audio tracks. 7.  To put this in clear terms, typing the words “Dizzy’s Boogie,” the title of a 1945 track by Charlie Parker, in the Google search brings up results showing the track in Deezer, Spotify, iTunes, and Pandora, and extra work is required to filter the results and get to the details of the song’s composition. 8.  For an informed and insightful discussion of the exclusionary politics of online distribution of cinema, see Lobato (2012). 9.  Given the unique qualities of the essay, I highlight the aspects that are relevant to a translocal conception of space here and return to the discussion of artistic unity in the subsection on mediation. 10.  See especially the chapters, titled “The Rockefeller Ride” and “The First Fieldtrip” (95–126), for Lindfors’s account of the contexts of the grant, for which the essay appears to be the final report. 11.  Arjun Appadurai’s five “scapes” in Modernity at Large are a useful description of these changes. 12.  We have evidence of the travel of Garveyite pamphlets from several unusual sources—C. L. R. James’s At the Rendezvous of Victory (1984), Joyce Cary’s The Case for African Freedom (1963), and Monique Bedasse’s Jah Kingdom (2017, 53–54). 13.  The translocal process at work in this part of the continent is comparable to the one in West Africa, especially as such a process catalyzes artistic mediation and exchange. In a 2012 essay I referred to in the introduction and will discuss in detail in chapter 6, the Kenya scholar James Ogude focuses on the impact of Congolese music on the experimentation in Kenya in the post-Moi era. Similarly, the debate around the “migration model” summarized by Mahmood Mamdani in When Citizens Become Killers (2001, 49–50) and the distinction between Kinyarwanda speakers and citizens of Rwanda are equally comparable to that between Yoruba speakers in Nigeria and the Republic of Benin. 14.  For a good example of this imaginary, we can point to the protagonist of Tẹju Cole’s Open City (2011), who is of Nigerian/German parentage but resides in New York City. 15.  In addition to these views, a special section of Journal of African Cultural Studies (28:1, March 2016) is devoted to the topic, with seven mostly critical contributions and an introduction by the editor. Ede’s article was published in that section. 16.  A very informative interview by Mbye Cham provides one such discussion of the complex process of producing the film. A film festival instructively provides the occasion for the scholar’s encounter with the film and thus the basis of the interview. See Cham (1994). 17.  Thus the discouragement of permanence—for which using cement to build mbari houses in the 1960s has been criticized (Cole 1982, 4)—is perhaps misplaced. The changing contexts of observing this elaborate ritual require that the workers be flexible about their social conditions and adapt new methods to suit those conditions. 18.  See especially chapter 1 of Yoruba Art and Language. 19.  Gitelman is critical of Bolter and Grusin for trimming “out any mention of human agents” in how media operate (9). 20.  Part of the documentary’s appeal is the conceptual force and the foresight with which it approaches the questions of digitality and stretches the discursive concerns

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beyond filmmaking. The expertise is likewise broad, ranging from computer technicians, engineers, administrators, and those who rely on mobile technology (for example) in daily business transactions. 21.  Guillory has offered a useful example with respect to this attitude: “As a discourse of writing and of print, works of literature are also indisputably media. Yet literature seems to be less conspicuously marked by medial identity than other media, such as film, and that fact has tacitly supported the disciplinary division between literary and media studies (and by extension between cultural studies and communication studies). The repression of the medial identity of literature and other ‘fine arts’ is rightly being questioned today. The aim of this questioning should be to give a better account of the relation between literature and later technical media without granting to literature the privilege of cultural seniority or to later media the palm of victorious successor” (2010, n3, 322). I return to an extensive discussion of Guillory’s essay. 22.  For a detailed account of Armah’s experience with Western publishers, especially Heinemann, see “Negatives—The Colonial Publisher as Predator” in his 2006 memoirs, The Eloquence of the Scribes. For a view of the relationship from the point of view of Heinemann, see Hill, In Pursuit of Publishing (131–132). In the preface to the 2008 edition of The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, published by Per Ankh, the cooperative publishing company Armah cofounded in Senegal, there is an additional documentation of his dealings with Houghton Mifflin, the novel’s original publisher. See Armah 2008 (31–39). 23.  Nanjala Nyabola, “Bessie Head: A Life of Letters.” https://popula.com/2018/07/17 /bessie-head-a-life-of-letters/ 24.  “She had no amusements other than writing; there were no jazz bars, no dance parties, no speaking engagements, and no libraries or salons to kill time. And so, letter writing was Head’s primary connection, a lifeline and a means of surviving the lack of what other artists could take for granted. She survived. She found a way to love. And she sent us letters.” (Nyabola 2018). 25.  Souleymane Cissé, email communication, 30 April 2019. 26.  I have not succeeded in locating Sembene’s direct use of this powerful term, mégotage, but Paulin Vieyra mentions it in a positive description of Arab cinema as “moving away from miserly bureaucratic attitudes [mégotage]” in the interview with Pierre Haffner cited earlier. See Gélinas (2019, 135). 27.  The brief drama following the unbidden appearance of griot Zégue Bamba behind the microphone during the trial of the World Bank in Bamako (2006) comes to mind as a good example of this traffic between composition and improvisation. Director Abderrahmane Sissako explained to me in conversation that the scene was not in the script, but that he could not resist the moment and decided to let the man do his thing (according to a proverb uttered by Bamba right then!). Sissako later used editing to space out the scene so that Bamba appears twice in the film. (Interview: Abderrahmane Sissako). 28.  See Enwezor (2001). For Nash’s essay, see 339–346. 29.  These rhetorical claims about Africa can be seen in the naming of the anticolonial nationalist party in South Africa as the African National Congress, in the evocation of “Africa” in the nationalist writings (autobiographies and pamphlets) of Nnamdi Azikiwe (Renascent Africa) and Adegoke Adelabu (Africa in Ebullition), as well as in the category of “Black Africa” by writers such as Cheik Anta Diop, Wọle S.oyinka, and Nwachukwu F.Ukadike. 30.  Although Sembene published the scenario of Ceddo in Wolof, he had mixed feelings about the enterprise: “I had made the decision after L’Harmattan was published.

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But how realistic was it? Nobody forces me to write Wolof, Pular, Bambara, or French. Since I have the choice of writing in French and Wolof, why not adopt both these codes? I changed my mind because limiting myself to Wolof would have resulted in huge debts for no purpose.” Pressed further to comment on the choice by Ngūgī (present during the interview), Sembene added: “I agree with [Ngūgī’s] position but I do not think that the revolutionary act should be a limitation. If I wrote in Wolof, it would all be to my credit, but who would read me?” (Gadjigo et al. 1993, 94–95).

2. Spatia l Assemblages 1.  Before this book was completed, I discovered that AMLA Network and its several projects had gone into a hiatus. I am not fully informed about the reasons for the cessation, but I have opted to keep the discussion of the initiative in the spirit of the argument: the recognition of the social value or relevance of periodic initiatives made to serve a purpose can, in the manner of an mbari house, be pulled down once that purpose is served or when the conditions (including financial ones) sustaining it are no longer tenable. 2.  Nigerian director Tunde Kelani explains this creative choice as informing the use of specific images or words (a drum, a forged gong, or a customary practice/belief) in the titles of his films. 3.  When I drafted this chapter, the transfer of festivals online in response to the restrictions and lockdowns forced by the COVID-19 pandemic had not occurred. The NYAFF not only moved the 2020 festival online but also developed smaller screenings and included a few filmmakers’ panels. 4.  The International Book Fair of Radical Black and Third World Books was an exception to this practice and has more in common with the new book festivals than with its peers in organizational and curatorial terms. For a comprehensive account of the book fair, see Sarah White et al. (2005). 5.  I have deliberately repeated the word “appear” in these sentences to indicate that the reality may be different and to avoid presuming that these new programmers will not revamp established practices of old book fairs. The scare quotes around the word professional in the last sentence are necessary because of how AMLA Network conceives of its work, as we will see later. 6.  Diverse interventions in this respect include books, articles, and other outputs by such authors as Edward Said (Orientalism, Culture and Imperialism), Johannes Fabian (Time and the Other), Martin Bernal (The Black Athena), Gayatri Spivak (The Postcolonial Critic), James Clifford (The Predicament of Culture), Samir Amin (Eurocentrism), and Toni Morrison (Playing in the Dark). 7.  See Palma (2011). 8.  See also 114. Clearly, Jameson could have written this after seeing one of Okwui Enwezor’s shows in the United States or Germany, having missed the boat on mbari. However, the collecting prestige of the late style of artist El Anatsui leaves the claim that such arts are not “made . . . for the permanent collection” open to question. 9.  The Banham Collection at Leeds University is one depository for the print versions of Ogunde’s plays that I know, and it is perhaps the only such resource available in a systematic manner, perhaps other than those in the personal collection of the scholar Ẹbun Clark, whose doctoral thesis was completed at Leeds. During the COVID-19 mandated

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lockdown in 2020, the staff at the university’s Special Collections were very helpful in providing digital access to some of the materials. In the event, however, I discovered that the depository did not have everything. 10.  See Olus.ọla (1981). 11.  This was how Ogunde characterized himself during the exchange with the colonial superintendent of police who withdrew the permission for a scheduled performance in Jos in 1946 (Clark 1979, 36–37). 12.  In developing an awareness of this opera and its aesthetic possibilities, I owe much debt to Ẹbun Clark’s pioneering work on the dramatist, and in particular to her sense of the historical importance of record keeping, having taken the trouble to document a live performance and place it in the appropriate contexts. My approach to discussing this opera is to extract a text—in production—from the recorded event and ascribe to it the status of an autonomous work discussed in context. This approach thus differs from Clark’s analytical focus on a general form-and-content description, important as that was for her purposes. 13.  Focusing primarily on the opera Strike and Hunger (1945), Oliver Coates has made a persuasive case against the dominant reading of the troupe’s operas of this period for the theme of nationalist resistance, stressing instead a dramatization of the “expectations of reciprocity” (2017, 170). Coates’s argument is convincing; however, the difference between an explicitly nationalist critique and an allegorical use of Yoruba ethics of reciprocity in communicating the opera’s message is one of emphasis, and Ogunde frequently returned to such allegorical uses throughout his career, especially in the controversial Yoruba Ronu (1964). 14.  Quoted in Clark (1979, 120). 15.  According to Ulli Beier (1954). 16.  Although the songs were performed in Yoruba, Clark chose to render them in English, and except one knows the original versions in subsequent LP production, the sonic impact is entirely unfelt to a Yoruba speaker. 17.  In the version of the song in another performance featured in the BBC/NTA documentary, Ogunde can be seen exorbitantly pointing to himself on the line “It shall be well with me.” 18.  In an email response to my question about the genesis of Àyànmọ´, the film, Clark wrote: “I left studying Ogunde Theater when he moved his theater and thus Yoruba theater to the film industry. My 1982 interview with him was done to challenge him that he had all along used the theater as a means to an end: to generate enough capital for his move into cinematography. He didn’t deny it because he knew I had evidence of this through his numerous references to films in his adverts” (Clark, email communication, 8 February, 2022). 19.  For a detailed account of this episode, see Clark (1979, 56–61). Ulli Beier (2001) has also told the fascinating story of how the ruling party attempted to court the Duro Ladipọ theater to serve as its mouthpiece, and as a possible rival, based on the perception that Ogunde was on the side of the opposition. 20.  I am dubious about “elitist” as an appropriate term in characterizing these films, giving the reconfiguration of modes of production and circulation described thus far. Without discounting the importance of class orientation in artistic appreciation, I think that changing contexts, the reaches of communication, and so on play a role in the perception of the status of works that are made available in festivals. 21.  The Caribbean Artists Movement was a precursor, also, to the aforementioned International Book Fair of Radical Black and Third World Books. See note 4 above. For the history of the Movement, see Walmsley (1992).

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22.  For a general discussion of Diawara’s films and books, see Ades.ọkan (2021) and Diawara’s collaboration with Galerias Municipais/EGEAC (2018) for curatorial context. In another context, Dovey (2019) has made a case for seeing Paulin Soumanou Vieyra as the precursor to the filmmaking practices in Diawara’s work and in those of contemporaries such as Betti Ellerson and Samba Gadjigo. 23.  In his foreword to Through African Eyes: Dialogues with the Directors (2003), Richard Peña, program director of the Film Society of the Lincoln Center, enters elaborate qualifications about these categories. It is possible that the initial lukewarm attitude toward the idea of an African film festival in New York was an expression of the desire to protect African American works from being lumped with the general production from the continent. 24.  Email communication, 20 August 2010. 25.  I am aware of the risks of writing in a historical manner about a phenomenon that is evolving, and so I have maintained a generally exploratory style in taking account of these initiatives, and do not intend this to be a history as such. On the contrary, my general interest in textualizing ephemeral or structurally evolving practices demands that I bring scholarly attention to them in a way that may inform better-resourced historical work in the future. 26.  In writing about this initiative, I did my due diligence to double-check and crosscheck facts, working with the responses I got from the founders. Though CACE founders are Ugandans, Mogami, a coconvener of AMLA Network, is identified as being “from Gaborone, Botswana.” The idea, it appears, is to underscore the transnational, though obviously Africa-centered, character of this network. 27.  Twitter Direct Message communication, 12 June 2018. 28.  The shift to the past tense in this section is informed by the fact the CACE’s programs went into a hiatus in late 2019, as I indicate at the beginning of this chapter. Its Twitter feeds and handles continue to be active. 29.  The keynote speech was subsequently published in the journal East African Literary and Cultural Studies, on the basis of which the quotations from the speech have been amended. See Mwesigire 2021. 30.  The African literary activism Daily (paper.li). 31.  For a critical view of the issues surrounding FESPACO, see Barlet (2017). 32.  I owe this quite evocative phrase to Brent Hayes Edwards (2005, 8).

3. The Gr iot’s Compositions in Ti m e 1.  By “the multifaceted nature of imperialism,” I am not only agreeing with the argument in Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s essay “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism” (1985) that “to reopen the epistemic fracture of imperialism without succumbing to the nostalgia of lost origins, the critic must turn to the archives of imperialist governance” (259), but also extending that engagement beyond the history of European imperialism. 2.  Ojwang (2013) discusses Migritude extensively in terms of queer identity and community in East African Indian literature, pairing the work with Ghalib Shiraz Dhalla’s Ode to Lata. A special focus section of the Minnesota Review (2020), coedited by Ashna Ali, Christopher Ian Foster, and Supriya M. Nair and titled “Migration from a Comparative

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Perspective,” includes articles that discuss Migritude. See especially Vanita Reddy’s essay (67–84), the postface by Ayo B. Coly (169–173), and Patel’s prose poem-like contribution, “What We Talk about When We Talk about Movement” (167). Shọla Adenẹkan (2021) also discusses Patel’s work about digital platforming of texts (49–50) more extensively in terms of the digital queering of African literature. (See especially chap. 4 of Adenẹkan’s book.) 3.  I call this page-long text the “Author’s Note” for ease of reference. 4.  To my inquiry through a Twitter Direct Message, Patel responded, “Oshun—the Yoruba goddess” (19 July 2018). 5.  See Taylor (2015). 6.  See Taylor (2015). 7.  Commissioned for a dance company, the poems in Under African Skies have encountered interpretations that the author might not have intended. As he writes in the preface to the first edition of the volume, “Whereas I resisted the temptation, inexorable in performance poetry, to play up to the orature of dance, I could not help but make concessions to the requirements of meaning at the level of individual performers.” (2010, xvii). The editorial decisions in this process resonate with those that Sembene faces in his work, as we shall soon see. By returning to print in “an attempt to bring [the series of poems] to a wider audience” (viii), however, Ofeimun restores to his work some of the authorial control lessened in the performed poems. Farther in time and space from the London stage where the dancers change the music of his poems, rewriting for Ofeimun introduces a new rhythm to the printed version. For reasons of space and other considerations pertaining to the shape of this book, however, I have chosen to devote considerable attention to Ofeimun’s poetry elsewhere. See Ades.ọkan (forthcoming). 8.  When asked about his attitude toward the thematic issues in Emitaï, his film about resistance to forced military labor in the Casamance region during World War II, Sembene responds: “Each generation should create its own history and tell it with its own means. The role of the artist is to teach everyone about history. Who could talk about people’s resistance without having lived it? Historical cinema should play that role” (quoted in Gadjigo 2004, 39.) Although Gadjigo attributes this quotation to an interview by Michael Dembrow and Klaus Toller (1975 [2008]), I could not locate it in the published interview to which I had access. See Dembrow and Toller (2008). 9.  The statement quoted and used to explain Sembene’s view of the banning of Emitaï in France (39–40) is erroneously placed in 1979, when the eight-year ban ended. Sembene had apparently made those disclosures in a 1975 interview. 10.  For a useful discussion of another historian’s perspective, see Murphy (2000). 11.  For a succinct characterization of Touré, see Ọs.ọfisan (2009, xii–xiii) and Armah (2006, 298) for Sembene. 12.  According to Barry (1998), there was a historical figure named Demba Waar Sal, head of the jaami buur (the royal slave army) who served as an agent of the French colonial authority in the early 1880s. See chapter 15 of Barry’s book. 13.  “He dances to gángan (drum) on the way to the Ìwàwun campaign Àdàmὸ. serenades him to the battle of Ìjàyè” (Akinyẹle 1981, 64). 14.  See Johnson (1970, 189–199); Ọlajubu (1972, 107). 15.  Such conditions might include the translation of the opera’s English lyrics (themselves translated from French) into a language that Arẹmu’s audience can appreciate, the habitual use of the product through listening, and other possible changes in the format of its circulation.

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16.  “I have the distinct impression that the Catholic Church, whose origins are every bit as foreign as those of Islam, is achieving the very thing which the Islamic brought about: an effect of syncretism . . . Now we have black bishops who preach to the sound of tam-tams and in their own language” (Pfaff 1984, 177).

4. A da ptation or R em a k e 1.  For this reason, Hutcheon’s discussion is salutary as an acknowledgement of the scholarship of adaptation in African cinema, including an insightful reflection on Ramaka’s Karmen Gei as a variation on the Carmen operatic theme. 2.  See Ades.ọkan (2020, 6), “‘I Set out to Entertain. . . .’: An Interview with Túndé Kèlání.” 3.  See Kelani (44), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYlEBCOLs6U. 4.  By this time, the radio station had been renamed the Broadcasting Corporation of Ọyọ State, BCOS. 5.  In the interview I referred to earlier, Mrs. Oguns.ọla disclosed that the troupe later performed exclusively for the governor at his official residence. 6.  Tẹjumọla Ọlaniyan has made this observation in a perspicacious way in his essay on the illustrations of Fagunwa’s works. See Ọlaniyan (2017). 7.  Between the last celluloid films of the golden age of Nigeria cinema in 1989 and the appearance of Living in Bondage in 1992, there were several thirteen-episode soap operas in English and Yoruba. The duo of Afọlabi and Adedeji (the Adesanya brothers) were productive in this period, and the director-producer Ladi Ladebọ worked on and released several films as well. More steadily, the professionals of the Association of Nigerian Theater Practitioners, ANTP, who had made the transition from stage to the screen a decade before, continued to make films regularly. At any rate, in the career of a director in African cinema, four to five years between films was not unusual (Barlet 2000, especially 222). 8.  See Ndĩgĩrĩgĩ (2007), for an exhaustive and remarkably contextualized study of this experiment in theater. 9.  See Is.ọla 1992. 10.  The stylized use of Yoruba and the period costume add to the film’s authentic feel, but the production design lacks sufficient attention on the second point. For example, Lọla’s room in the female hostel is decorated with posters of the African American hiphop singer Brandi, hardly a face associated with the 1970s music scene. 11.  The teacher entered. Ajani was no longer attentive to what the man was saying. He was busy staring at the girl. As the man spoke on, Ajani turned to the student seated next to him and said, “But there are pretty girls on this campus!” (My translation). 12.  As Jonathan Haynes (2016, 133) observes, Is.ọla appears in the movie as a university professor, but it is the actor Laide Adewale, not Is.ọla, who addresses the students on the subject of revisionist history. 13. S.ọla Owonibi’s claim of a total of twenty-one instances of code-switching in the entire novel (2008, 207) is inaccurate because in a single chapter (7), I identified nineteen, and there are countless others in the chapters and later in the novel as well. 14.  Fẹmi Ọs.ọfisan makes this point in his obituary of Is.ọla. See Ọsọfisan (2022). 15.  On this note, it is useful to compare this kind of rewrite to the one executed by Ben Okri, rewriting his second novel, The Landscapes Within (1982), as Dangerous Love (1998)

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in part because the earlier novel was out of print, and a different kind of cultural outlook afforded an expatriated writer a new set of stylistic, psychological and social insights that might not have been available to the younger Okri in late-1970s Lagos. 16.  This attitude appears to go beyond Is.ọla and reappears in subsequent work in which he was not involved, such as Arugbá (2008) and Màámi (2011)—in other words, a widely shared viewpoint. 17.  Historical accounts are all agreed on this aspect of her public conduct. Akinyẹle’s Ìwé Ìtàn Ìbàdàn (1981) holds that “àwọn méjì nínú àwọn ẹrúbìnrin tí wó.n jѐ. wúndíá sọ ládugbó omi ńlá lùú mó.lè. latí òkè àjà, ló.gangan ibi tí ó gbé rὸ.gbὸ.kú sí, ó sì pá a kú fin-ín-fin” (101). (Two of her unmarried female slaves conspired to drop a pot filled with water on her from the ceiling, which struck her where she laid recumbent, killing her on the spot.) Jerome D. Y. Peel, quoting a missionary source, writes that “two of her slaves under Kumuyilọ’s [her adopted son] direction got into her bedroom through the ceiling and clubbed her to death” (2000, 77). Is.ọla’s play is based on Akinyẹle’s account. 18.  “But now [using digital camera], I can shoot 35mm quality on digital media and see it almost immediately, and do all these previews the same day. And if it had to go out, then maybe I could do something special to it. In other words, I have control over the means of production. I have a voice, a control over my voice, what story to tell. To me, this is absolute creative freedom. That is the basis of my excitement. Every film from Ti Olúwa Nilѐ. to Arugbá was an experiment with technology” (see Ades.ọkan 2020, 6). 19.  In an interview with Jeyifo (1984, 144), Oguns.ọla discloses that the company used a script in initial versions, and Iyabọ Oguns.ọla’s delivery mostly follows the pattern of the published play. 20.  The pairing of actors in these different formats, and especially in the climactic duel of spells is, I think, comparable to the paired appearances of the actors Ismaila Sarr and Balla Moussa Keita in Souleymane Cissé’s films of over two decades. There are many possibilities in these kinds of formal use of actors with specific skills for developing theories of African arts. See Ades.ọkan (2019) for further elaboration on this point. 21.  For these strong, feminist perspectives about Ẹfuns.etan’s political status, see Adéѐ.kó. (2017) and Ogunlẹyẹ (2004). 22.  “I, too, feel strongly that rather than be alive without the opportunity of sharing confidences with one’s lover, it is better to be dead. All fear disappears in the face of true love.” 23.  This is stated in the blurb on the DVD case of Africa Dreaming. 24.  Eileen Julien made this statement during the oral presentation of her paper at the joint conference coordinated by Frieda Ekotto and Ken Harrow at Michigan State University and the University of Michigan in October 2010. The remarks did not appear in the version of the essay published in Rethinking African Cultural Production (2015). 25.  See “Interview with Djibril Diop Mambéty,” http://itutu.com/djibril/Interview .html. Last accessed 30 October 2020. 26.  I am grateful to Moustapha Ndour and Moussa Thiao for helping translate this Wolof chant. 27.  Morton-Williams (1960, 368) also notes that the membership of an Ògbóni society includes six women. 28.  By August 2017, Afọlayan had released three films—Omugwo, Roti, and The Tribunal—all commissioned by MNET, and had begun preproduction for the fourth. The director discusses these commissions in a YouTube video produced shortly before the release of the third film: (44). Kunle Afọlayan on the 3 films he made in the last 12

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months: Omugwo. Roti and Tribunal, YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v =3yI7RjIt4VI. 29.  The term “extraverted production” affirms the concept I borrow from Paulin Hountondji, as seen in the introduction, and refers here to the different tendencies that Oliver Barlet ascribes to contemporary African filmmaking in response to “Western audiences’ demands for both exoticism and reality.” See his “The New Paradoxes of Black Africa’s Cinemas,” especially 223. 30.  During the interview, Ramaka shares the anecdotal story of a French colonial officer in Casamance who died shortly after an encounter with rioting women who confronted him with bared breasts. 31.  It’s My Man (2009) is a film based on the relationship between the scholar Eileen Julien and the Senegalese artist Kalidou Sy, narrated from Julien’s point of view. At screenings, Ramaka often stated that the film is a love story, not about Sy. 32.  The film The Figurine (2010) by the Nigerian director Kunle Afọlayan is the subject of an edited volume, Auteuring Nollywood, published in 2014. 33.  One might note a similar impulse in a film by the director Fẹmi Odugbemi about the floating school at Makòko in Lagos and note in addition that Ramaka and Odugbemi collaborate on institutional projects. 34.  Although Teno made this observation in private conversation, it is consistent with his publicly expressed view of Nollywood. For an example of this criticism, see Martin and Moorman (2015, 9–10).

5. A pproaching the Wor ld as Pl atfor m, Liter a lly 1.  As indicated in the introduction, translation is another consequential mode of creative practice in this book, and I devote extensive space to it in the latter half of this chapter. 2.  The formation that I characterize as contemporary middlebrow fiction is different from the standard usage of “pulp fiction” or “airport novels.” For an earlier attempt to describe this formation, see Ades.ọkan (2012a, especially 3–7). I return to this discussion in detail below. 3.  As readers might surmise, Achebe receives a thinly veiled satirical treatment in keynote speaker Joobe’s commentary on the fictional novel entitled The Center Cannot Hold, authored by Engelbert Chingalunga Abacha. Armah has written directly and critically about Achebe’s attitude toward Armah’s first novel in other places, including personal letters addressed to the Nigerian writer. See Armah (2010, 281–286, 2008, 18–21, 25–30). 4.  The preface to the 2008 and “the only legal edition” of Armah’s first novel, The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, in print is explicit on the fact that the author had worked out the themes of his work even in that freshman outing. 5.  Armah and his collaborators have attempted to systematize hieroglyphics as ro es Kemet or Old Egyptian. For a general description of the styles of ancient writing, see Obenga (1981, 78–79). 6.  Osiris Rising is subtitled “a novel of Africa past, present and future,” and toward the end there are indications that its US-born protagonist, Ast, is pregnant, a fact symbolic of future, and possibly similar to Ẹlẹ´s.in-Ọba’s young bride at the end of S.oyinka’s play. 7.  The impulse behind the thesis can also be grasped in a series of questions in the blurb of the novel KMT: In the House of Life (2002): “How best can Africa’s multimillennial

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history be envisioned as one continuous stream? Why did the society that invented literacy sink into the misery of illiteracy, ignorance, and religion? What creative values lie buried under the lethal debris of slavery, colonialism, structural adjustment, and globalization?” 8.  In ancient Egyptian literature, Neferty is the name of the lector-priest who foretells the future at the request of King Snefru of the Fourth Dynasty of the Old Kingdom, and part of Armah’s innovation is to make this figure a woman. See The Literature (Simpson 2003, 214–220). 9.  The Way of Companions (2018), Armah’s most recent book as of this writing, contains lengthy, frequent, and unforgiving attacks on Plato as the philosophical inspiration for the Western model of education and sociopolitical systems such as liberalism. 10.  See Gikandi (2001a). 11.  Subsequent to this publication, the Shemsw Bak workgroup issued another collaborative volume, Skhmkht Ea (On Love Sublime, 2018). A multilingual translation of an ancient African love poem, the volume includes texts in nine languages (including Akan, Bambara, Kiswahili, Wolof, and Yoruba) in addition to English, French, and Portuguese. 12.  For earlier attempts at creating a typology in African literature, see Ades.ọkan (2012a, 2015). 13.  Aramide S.egun is none other than Ọmọwunmi S.egun, author of the award-winning novel The Third Dimple (1992). She chose to publish the second novel using her middle name. 14.  This interview was conducted via email. See Ọmọwunmi S.egun (Email Interview 2020). 15.  Ẹniìtàn: Daughter of Destiny was a featured book during the BookTrek segment of the 2020 Lagos Arts and Book Festival (3–12 November 2020). 16.  For a strongly made case about the relationship between Pentecostal Christianity and state power in Nigeria, see Ọbadare (2018). 17.  In contrast to Sali and Sali’s white friend, Sandra Darwin (each treated to extensive biographical development in what might be understood as micro-bildungsroman), Nefert has very little to say about her own background. The novel is also negligent of the evocation of daily life, with the exception of one or two instances. 18.  When the US edition of Kintu, the novel by Ugandan writer Jennifer Makumbi, came out in May 2017, a brief but significant controversy broke out over the internet on the appropriateness of writing an introduction to an African novel ostensibly for the attention of American readers who could not be bothered to approach such a novel on its own terms. 19.  See Adejunmọbi and Ọlaniyan (2022). 20.  See, in particular, chapter 6, where Ibironkẹ discusses Ngũgĩ’s language politics in light of world literature criticism, focusing on Apter’s argument. 21.  In the introduction to the story, the editors of Jalada write: “A majority of the translations are based on the English version, though a few Francophone writers used the French translation to translate into their own mother tongues. And the Somali translation was based on the Arabic translation.” 22.  Other instances abound. The Nigerian translation, theatrical adaptation, and production of several Senegalese texts—Ousmane Sembene’s Le Mandat, Aminata Sow Fall’s Beggars’ Strike, and Cheik Aliou Ndao’s L’Exil d’Albouri—constitute an unstudied creative experience. Less visible but no less important are acts of cultural solidarity via language, such as Ayi Kwei Armah in The Healers making reference to “large trees, many

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of them the ọdán type” (2009, 168), possibly drawing from the opening stage directions in S.oyinka’s The Lion and the Jewel. 23.  Although Armah identifies Ndioume as a Guinean writer, an internet search lists him as Senegalese. 24.  The apocryphal story of Lewis Nkosi rhetorically deflating the argument for writing in African languages by speaking Xhosa in response sounds both entertaining and instructive, if also flippant, in this regard. For a more recent update on the debate, see Jeyifo (2017) and Ngũgĩ (2017). 25.  For a good account of the workshop system by a former Per Sesh participant, see Sule (2007).

6. The R emix 1.  One of the most comprehensive treatments of this conception of musical practice in artistic, industrial, and legal senses is the volume Sound Unbound edited by Paul D. Miller, DJ Spooky aka that Subliminal Kid, and references in this chapter rely on several discussions in that book. 2.  Adenẹkan’s discussion of Wainana’s digital presence focuses less on the author’s book and more on his queer activism online, though he places Wainaina’s coming out as part of an extensive online queer activism (144). See Adenẹkan (2021), chapter 8 mostly. 3.  For fascinating work on the notion of incompleteness as a useful critical approach in African intellectual traditions, see Nyamnjoh (2021). 4.  The Carlos-Makeba duet appears in Spell Reel, as it turns out. She had been invited to play at the second independence anniversary of Guinea-Bissau, and the event was moved indoors due to rainfall. 5.  This would be reminiscent of the scene in Sembene’s film Guelwaar (1993), where the wife of the murdered eponymous character, an activist and a Catholic, talks to the suit on the bed, while the family await the recovery of his body from a Muslim cemetery. 6.  This section culminates in an engaging reflection on Kenyan identity, or what Wainaina frames as “Anglo-Kenya” identity, where the stylistic and thematic motions powering the narrative settle as an appreciation of benga music. Harrow has read this section as symptomatic of the book’s politics (2013). 7.  Though appearing earlier, Wainaina’s famous satirical essay “How to Write about Africa” (2005) also has to be placed in the context of this blog post’s circulation. 8.  In a little-known example, the Lagos-based producer Bisade Ológundé, from whose musical themes grew the concept of the masked musician Lagbaja, discussed his experiments with musicians in the fújì and àpàlà genres based on the understanding of the nature of the instruments used by those musicians. It is fair to say that the emergence of Lagbaja was partly a result of the limits of those experiments. See the Glendora Review interview “Bisade Ologunde: I Am Still Trying to Hold on to What Moves People about Music.” The interview is unattributed, but an endnote reads, “Interview recorded by GR at 59 Ọrẹgun Road, Ikẹja, Lagos, Nigeria on Friday, 24th February 1995.” 9.  For a contemporary discussion of this particular travail in the musician’s career, see Grass (1986). The international reach of the awareness of Fẹla’s situation included musicians sporting “Free Fẹla” T-shirts, one of which jazz saxophonist Branford Marsalis wears in Spike Lee’s School Daze. See Veal (2000, 259).

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10.  There seems to be an error in Masekela’s recollection because the album was released in 1972. See Veal (2000, 296). 11.  Nzegwu’s argument rests on a historically grounded differentiation of the Victorian model of family in the Lagosian, African setting. But it also raises the question of what a traditional African family model is or was, and of several analytic occlusions based on class and location. She draws a too-tight line around Christianized African and uneducated women, minimizing the nature of class aspirations and actual manifestations of interclass alliance of the kind that came into play in the activisms of the Abẹokuta Women’s Union. 12.  The fabrics, whether real or wax print, have a long history in West Africa. In popular usage they are called ankara (perhaps a Nigerian inflection of Accra), as Ghana and Ivory Coast were hubs for their distribution. 13.  For an insider account of Cabral’s role as a founding member of the Center for African Studies in Lisbon, see “Biographical Notes” by Mário de Andrade, another cofounder. Andrade writes: “Engineer Cabral took an active part in the hatching of the political structures that constituted the MPLA” (xxvi), that is, the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola. An editor’s note adds that the first working meeting of the center took place on 21 October 1951 (xxiv). 14.  In my reading, this essay is a cleverly veiled critique of Che Guevara’s failed adventure in Congo in 1965. Due perhaps to the ghastly failure of that effort, the Cuban government opted to support the more manageable revolution in Guinea-Bissau, which had the additional encouragement of being more clearly theorized and led by Cabral. For a firstperson account of Guevara’s misadventure, see Guevara (2000); for a comparative discussion of the interventions in both countries, see El-Tahri (2009). 15.  See n 13 above. 16.  In a fascinating instance of this expanding circuit of hyperlinks, a subsequent commentary on Wainaina’s coming out, also posted on Africa Is a Country, links to a feature on NPR where the author discusses his choice of platform. The feature, in turn, includes a link where the interview can be played or downloaded.

Epilogue 1.  The exchange between the two filmmakers is pertinent also because Sembene singles out Rouch’s Moi, Un Noir (1958) as a film he admires of the cine-ethnographer’s output. “In principle,” Sembene says, “an African could have done it, but none of us at the time had the necessary conditions to realize it” (440). The technical and thematic issues of that film developing from the point of view of Oumarou Ganda, later an important figure in African cinema, are comparable to those in Sembene’s first film, Borom Sarret (1963). 2.  This conception of reuse plays a central role in the emergence of the various musical genres in Nigeria (apala, highlife, juju, fuji, pop, and waka). 3.  The late turn in Nollywood toward remakes (with such titles as Living in Bondage: Breaking Free, Nneka the Pretty Serpent, and Rattlesnake) rides on a related but distinctly reengineered track, involving perhaps stricter adherence to copyright laws. 4. S.oyinka extends this thought to Mandela’s revolutionary rejection of compromise, the basis for the title poem, thus equating the caryatid with the political figure whose possible, eventual destruction or death in prison does not negate the promise of renewal that led to his incarceration (163).

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5.  In fact, this happened to me during a Zoom class meeting in Fall 2020. In another class, a shared screen appeared blank to students, a situation we established, at length, to be due either to uncleared browsing history or using the wrong browser. 6.  Until relatively recently, my knowledge of the music of Abibu Oluwa, the Nigerian pioneer of sakara music (1904–1963), was limited to several tracks gleaned from reading and scattered listening sessions, whenever possible. Current research has intensified my interest, and I have become aware of the unmatched scope of the work of the artist, some of which sounds as if of poor quality, due to the technological limitations of their original recording. 7.  A leading African scholar agreed to provide the keynote address during the sixtieth anniversary celebration of this poet’s birthday which I coorganized. Upon return to his base, the scholar wrote to me to say that it “has been an inspiration to meet [Ofeimun] who is a truly remarkable person.” He did not know about the poet until that encounter. It would have been equally revealing to have the response of Cheah’s graduate students to the work of a writer such as this poet and essayist, and one way that platform could be deployed to counteract this skewed view of translatability (Ofeimun writes in English!) is through the digital production of cheap, easy-to-find versions of his work limited by location and the format of print. 8.  Ayinde, one who has maize for porridge in his farm My father, one who plants maize for pudding separately Ayinde, owner of “maize that ripens before other people’s” Father of Olutọmọri, “is what saves one from hunger” (1991, 71–72). 9.  One with eyes of bitter-nuts, cheeks of kolanut. He tastes the gbѐ.gìrì soup with two separate calabash-bowls (my translation). 10.  For recent, stimulating reflections on time in African cinema, see Dima (2022) and Harrow (2022).

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Email Communication A. Igoni Barrett, 29 June 2010. Souleymane Cissé, 30 April 2019. Ẹbun Clark, 8 February 2022. Tunde Kelani, 21 January 2013. Jane Plastow, 31 October 2019. Interviews Abderrahmane Sissako (Bloomington, Indiana, 10 April, 2015). Evangelist Mrs. Iyabọ Oguns.ọla (Ibadan, 12 August, 2019). Joseph Gai Ramaka (Bloomington, Indiana, 23 September 2016). Ọmọwunmi S.egun (Email Interview, 17 September 2020).

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Filmography Akomfrah, John. The Last Angel of History. In English. Black Audio Film Collective. C4/ ZDF. UK, 1995. Digital. 45 mins. Color. Bakupa-Kanyinda, Balufu. Afro@Digital. In English, French, Jula, and Yoruba with English subtitles. California Newsreel and Akangbe Productions. Congo/France, 2003. VHS and DVD. 53 mins. Color. Balogun Ọla. Ọ ` run Móoru. In Yoruba. Alawada Movies, Ibadan: Nigeria. 1982. Celluloid. 82 mins. Color. Bazalgette Felix, Max Millington, Tom Gardner, and Josh Hughes. Stadium Hotel. In English with occasional subtitles. London: One World Media. 2012. Digital. 30 mins. Color. Blomkamp, Neill. District 9. In English. TriStar Pictures/WingNut Films. US/New Zealand/Canada/South Africa, 2009. 112 mins. Color. César, Filipa, et al. Spell Reel. In Portuguese with English subtitles. Guinea Bissau/ Portugal/Germany, 2017. HD and 16 mm. 1hr. 38 mins. B/W & Color. Cissé, Souleymane. Yeelen. In Bambara with English subtitles. CNC. Mali, 1987. DVD. 1hr. 38 mins. Color. Dash, Julie. Daughters of the Dust. English. Geechee Girls Productions. US, 1991. DVD. 3hrs. 29 mins. Color. Davis, Ossie. Kongi’s Harvest. English. Calpenny Films. Lagos. 1971. DVD-R. 84 mins. Color. Diawara, Manthia. An Opera of the World. In English and French with subtitles. Maumaus/Lumiar Cité. Mali/Germany, 2017. Digital. 70 mins. Color. El-Tahri, Jihan. Cuba: An African Odyssey. ITVS International. Chicago, IL: Facets, 2009. DVD. 190 min. Color with B/W sequences. Godard, Jean-Luc. Notre Musique. Wellspring Media. New York, 2005. DVD. 79 mins. Color with B/W sequences. Gomes, Flora. Mortu Nega [Those Whom Death Refused]. In Portuguese Criolo with English subtitles. Fado Films. Guinea Bissau, 1988. 35 mm and VHS. 93 mins. Color. Kahiu, Wanuri. Pumzi [Africa First]. In English. Inspired Minority. South Africa/Kenya, 2009. DVD. 22 mins. Color. Kelani, Tunde. Akínwùmí Ìs.ὸ.lá And The Rest of Us. | Tunde Kelani - YouTube Kelani, Tunde. The Campus Queen. Mainframe Productions. In English. Nigeria, 2004. VHS/VCD. 96 mins. Color. Kelani, Tunde. Ẹfúns.etán Aníwúrà. In Yoruba with English subtitles. Mainframe Productions. Nigeria, 2005. VCD & Digital. 116 mins. Color. Kelani, Tunde. Ó Le Kú. (Fearful Incidents, I & II). In Yoruba with English subtitles. Mainframe Productions. Nigeria, 1997. VHS/VCD. 180 mins. Color. Kelani, Tunde. Thunderbolt: Mágùn. In English, Yoruba, and Igbo with occasional subtitles. California Newsreel. Nigeria/USA, 2001. VHS. 110 mins. Color. Kouyate, Dani. Keita: L’heritage du griot/Keita: Heritage of the Griot. Sahélis Production/ California Newsreel, San Francisco, CA. 1995. DVD. 94 mins. Color. Lawrence, Bert. Nigeria: Culture in Transition. New Mark International/Standard Oil Company Films. New Jersey, 1963. 62 mins. B/W. Mambéty, Djibril Diop. Contras’ City. In French with English subtitles. Senegal, 1968. 16 mins. 16 mm. Color. Mambéty, Djibril Diop. Hyènes/Hyenas. Kino on Video. New York, 2003. 110mins. Color.

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359

Mambéty, Djibril Diop. Touki Bouki. In Wolof with English subtitles. Trigon Films. Senegal, 1973. 1hr. 30 mins. DVD. Color. Mungai, Anne. Saikat. Joyana Films. Nairobi, Kenya. 1992. 93 mins. PAL. Color. N’Hada Sana, et al. O Regresso de Amílcar Cabral [The Return of Amílcar Cabral]. In Portuguese. Guinea Bissau, 1976. B/W. Pontecorvo, Gilo. The Battle of Algiers. Criterion. Irvington, NY, 2004. Ramaka, Joseph Gai. And What if Latif Were Right?/Et si Latif Avait Raison? L’Observatoire Audiovisuel sur les Libertés. Senegal, 2005. 120 mins. DVD. Color. Ramaka, Joseph Gai. Karmen Gei. California Newsreel, Arté France Cinéma, and Euripide Productions. Senegal and France, 2001. 83 mins. DVD. Color. Ramaka, Joseph Gai. So Be It [Africa Dreaming]. California Newsreel. San Francisco, CA, 1997. 29 mins. Color. Ribeiro, João. The Gaze of the Stars. California Newsreel. San Francisco, CA, 1997. Rouch, Jean. Jaguar. Films de la Pléiade/Icarus. New York, 2012. DVD. 89 mins. Color Rouch, Jean. Les Maîtres Fous. Films de la Pléiade/Icarus. New York. 2014. DVD. 28 mins. Color. Sembene, Ousmane. Borom Sarret [The Wagoner]. In French and Wolof with English subtitles. Films Doomireew/New Yorker Films. Senegal, 1963. DVD. 20 mins. B/W. Sembene, Ousmane. Camp de Thiaroye. In French and Wolof with English subtitles. Films Doomireew/SATPEC/New Yorker Films. Senegal/Tunisia/Algeria, 1988. 35 mm & DVD. 152 mins. Color. Sembene, Ousmane. Ceddo. In Wolof with English subtitles. Films Doomireew/New Yorker Films. Senegal, 1977. 35 mm & DVD. 112 mins. Color. Sembene, Ousmane. Emitaï [The Thunder God]. In Dioula and French with English subtitles. Films Doomireew/New Yorker Films. Senegal, 1971. 35 mm & DVD. 96 mins. Color. Sembene, Ousmane. Faat Kine. In Wolof and French with English subtitles. Films Doomireew/New Yorker Films. Senegal, 2000. DVD. 110 mins. Color. Sembene, Ousmane. Guelwaar. In Wolof and French with English subtitles. Films Doomireew/Channel IV/New Yorker Films. Senegal, 1993. 35 mm. 115 mins. Color. Sembene, Ousmane. La Noir de . . . [Black Girl]. In Wolof and French with English subtitles. Films Doomireew/New Yorker Films. Senegal, 1965. 35 mm and VHS. 80 mins. B/W. Sembene, Ousmane. Mandabi. In Wolof with English subtitles, Films Doomireew/New Yorker Home Video, 2005. Senegal. DVD. 90 mins. Color. Sembene, Ousmane. Moolaadé. Films Doomireew. Senegal, 2004. DVD. Sembene, Ousmane. Xala. In French and Wolof with English subtitles. Films Doomireew/ New Yorker Home Video, 2005/1975. Senegal. 35 mm and DVD. 123 mins. Color. Sissako, Abderrahmane. Timbuktu. In French and Arabic with English subtitles. New Yorker Films. Mauretania/Mali, 2014. DVD. 81 mins. Color. Taylor, Richard. Ogunde Man of the Theater. BBC TV/NTA, 1983. VHS & Digital. 48 mins. Color. Vieyra, Paulin Soumanou. Birago Diop: Poete-Conteur [Birago Diop: Poet and Storyteller]. In French with English subtitles. Senegal: Les Films PSV, 1982. DVD. 28 mins. B/W Vieyra, Paulin Soumanou. L’Envers du Décor [Behind the Scenes]. In French with English subtitles. Senegal: Les Films PSV, 1981. 16 mm. 27 mins. Color.

360

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Installation Shonibarẹ, Yinka. Lady Na Master, 2002. Dimensions: 180 x 335 x 195 cm Medium: 27 dolls, Dutch wax printed cotton textile, table

Discography Anikulapo-Kuti, Fẹla. I.T.T (International Thief Thief). Nigeria: Kalakuta 002. 1979. Anikulapo-Kuti, Fẹla. Lady. Nigeria: EMI 008N, 1972. Anikulapo-Kuti, Fẹla. Original Sufferhead. Nigeria: Lagos International LIR, 1982. Anikulapo-Kuti, Fẹla. Shuffering and Shmiling. Nigeria: Coconut PMLP1005, 1977. Anikulapo-Kuti, Fẹla. “Yẹyẹ Dey Smell.” In Fẹla Ransome-Kuti and the Africa 70 Live with Ginger Baker. Nigeria: EMI Zonophone SLRZ 1023/UK: Regal Zonophone SLRZ 1023. 1971. Dibango, Manu. Baobab Sunset [Sunsept]. Afrovision, 1976. Euba, Akin. Chaka: An Opera in Two Chants. Point Richmond, USA: Music Research Institute MRI-001 CD, 1999. Masekela, Hugh. Waiting for the Rain. Jive/Afrika JL8-838 (Contains Lady), 1985.

INDE X

Abẹokuta, 85, 114 Abidjan, 51, 54, 122, 161, 162 Abiọdun, Rowland, 62 Accra, 54, 100, 225, 281, 308, 341 Achebe, Chinua, 9, 91,191, 216; on writers as “teachers”, 6, 276, 327n4; statement at birthday of, 81, 92, 93; works by, 14, 17, 217; criticism of Armah’s work by, 218, 220; Armah’s criticism of, 328n3 Adaptation, xi, 3, 6, 8, 22, 23, 72; as adaptability, 30-31, 215; as rewrite, 214, in cinema, 171-175, 179-214, 336n1; in literature, 95, 156, 339n22; in relation to platform, 252; in relation to remix, 24, 59; theory of, 173 Adéẹ`kọ΄, Adélékè, 191 Adejumọ, Moses Ọlaiya, 96 Adejunmọbi, Mọradewun, 329n19 Adenẹkan, Shọla, 328n9, 335n2, 340n2 Adesanya, Adedeji, 336n7 Adesanya, Afọlabi, 336n7 Adesanya, Toyọsi, 190, 191 Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi, 253 Adjaye, David, 91-92, 119 Adorno, Theodor, 142, 212 Adotevi, Stanislas, 56 AFF, 108, 110, 111, 121. See also New York African Film Festival (NYAFF) Afikpo (masquerades), 62

Afọlayan, Kunle, 207, 212, 337n28, 338n32 African arts, 3, 6-8, 13, 22, 25, 28, 58; and letters, 29, 37, 46, 49, 76, 82-83, 121, 215, 249, 303, 306, 312; creative possibilities of, 276, educational system and consolidation of, 68; ethical impulse in, 31, 172-173, 308; possibilities for theories of, 337n20; socioeconomic volatilities and production of, 316, 327n8 African Novel of Ideas (Jackson), 223 Afrikan Shrine, 281 Afro@Digital (Bakupa-Kayinda), 65 Àjàní Ògún (Ọla Balogun), 13 Akan, 235, 339n11 Akinlẹ`yẹ, Larinde, 178 Akinsanya, Adeolu, 282 Akintọla, Samuel Ladoke, 106 Akinyẹle, Isaac B, 337n17 Akomfrah, John, 26 Aladekọmọ, Ademọla, 187 Aliu, Jimọh, 193 Allen, Tony, 310 Always Already New (Gitelman), 50 Amẹlẹ, Wọle, 178 Amer, Ghada, 285 Americanah (Adichie), 249 Anatsui, El, 29, 91, 332n8 Ancient Egypt, 219, 221, 222, 223, 229, 235, 247, 247. See also Kemet

361

362

I n de x

Andrade, Mário de, 291, 297, 341n13 And What If Latif Were Right? (Ramaka) 198, 211 Aniakor, Chike, 61, 90 Anikulapo-Kuti, Fẹla, 16, 21, 75, 182, 260. See also Fẹla Anthropology of Texts, Persons, and Publics, The, (Barber), 18 àpàlà (music), 340n8, 341n2 Appadurai, Arjun, 330n11 Appiah, Kwame Anthony, 88, 213, 220 Apter, Emily, 31, 217, 234, 235-236, 339n20 Arantes, Guillermo, 279 Un arbre qui crie! (Ramaka), 210, 211 Arẹmu, Odolaye, xii, 156, 312, 335 Arrighi, Giovanni, 38, 329n1 Aristotle, 45, 46 Armah, Ayi Kwei, 5, 28, 37, 66, 173 245, 305, 311, 313, 316, 340n23; adapting to platform, 214, 215, 219-230, 235, 237, 248, 259; attitude toward formal realism in fiction, 223-225, 245-247; attitude toward thematics of African literature, 250-251; composition style of, 254, 339n8; critique of Achebe by, 338n3; critique of Marxist methods by, 327-328n8; critique of Plato by, 339n9; on the commercial viability of African writing, 255, 256; on the language question, 75, 256; on the training of the griot (djeli) 46-47, 72, 155-156, 315; experience with publishers, 69, 76, 331n22; Pan-African views of, 78-79, 229, 254-255, 338nn4-5, 339n22; publishing cooperative initiated by, 230, 235, 257-258; review of Ceddo (Sembene), 148 Arugbá (Kelani), 337n16, 337n18 Assange, Julian, 303, 304 authorship, x, xi, 3, 4, 17, 20, 24, 27, 77-78, 142, 179, 186, 304, 306, 308 Awolọwọ, Ọbafẹmi, 106 Ayandele, Emmanuel A, 329 Ayẹni, Akintunde, 176, 187 Azikiwe, Nnamdi, 331n29

Baara (Cissé), 71 Bâ, Amadou Hampate, 5, 46, 47, 315 Bafatá, 290 Baker, Ginger, 310 Bakupa-Kanyinda, Balufu, 65 Baldwin, James, 87, 199 Balogun, Ọla, 13 Balogun, Saheed, 190 Bals, Hubert, 110 Bamba, Zégue, 331n27 Bambara, 235, 332n30 Bamgboye, Ọladele, 285 Barber, Karin, 18, 19, 307, 314 Barlet, Olivier, 77 Barrett, Igoni A., 113-114, 122, 249 Barrett, Lindsay, 122 Barry, Boubacar, 80, 153, 155, 163, 169, 170, 335n12 Battle of Algiers, The, (Pontecorvo), 210-211, 212 Bazawule, Blitz, 12 Beatty, Warren, 211 Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, The, (Armah), 220, 338n4 Beier, Ulli, 51, 102, 333n19 Béli, 290 Bello, Bankọle, 177 Benin (Republic), 59, 330n13 Benjamin, Walter, 28, 37, 43-45, 64, 65, 94, 305 Benson, Bobby, 100 Bentham, Jeremy, 204-205 Bergman, Ingmar, 212 Berkeley, 141 Berrian, Brenda, 147, 157, 161-162 Beti, Mongo, 180-181 Beyala, Calixthe, 12 Beyoncé, 50 Biai, Suleiman, 289, 290 Bidjocka, Bili, 57 Bimji, Zarina, 285 Blackass (Barrett), 122, 249 Blomkamp, Neill, 2 Boé, 295, 296, 297, 300 Bolter, J. David, 64, 330n19 Bonetti, Mahen, 87, 107-109, 111-113, 120, 122

I n de x book festivals, 82, 85-86, 89, 107, 120, 122, 258, 332n4 Borom Sarret (Sembene), 21, 111, 207, 341n1 Botswana, 69, 334n26 Boughedir, Férid, 77 Bourdieu, Pierre, 197, 205, 306, 307 Brathwaite, Edward Kamau, 109 Brecht, Bertolt, 45, 131, 196 Breeze, Jean “Binta”, 145 Brown, James, 282 Buba, 290 Buganda (Kingdom), 61 Buñuel, Luis, 212 Bush, George H (Bush Snr.), 108 Cabral, Amílcar, 60, 250, 289, 291, 294, 295-297, 299-301, 341nn13-14 Cabral, Luís, 290, 292-293, 299 Cacheu, 290 Cacine, 293 Cameroon, 53, 55, 129 Cape Town, 225 Cape Verde, 32, 48, 79, 261, 264, 289, 290 Caristan, Georges, 160 Carlos, Zé, 265, 299 Casamance, 40, 335n8, 338n30 Casanova, Pascale, 233, 307 Castelheiro, José, 300 Ceddo (Sembene), 25, 28, 30, 47, 48, 73, 76, 127, 132, 146-169, 171, 184, 331n30; critique of imperialism in, 80, 129; external controversy surrounding, 169, 329n4; montage in, 145, 158-160, 315; music in, 27, 74, 122, 161-162; official censoring of, 80, 147-149; Sembene’s attitude toward history in, 79, 128, 129, 149-150, 163-164, 169 ceddo, 30, 80, 146, 151-155, 162, 168-169; composite identity of, 74, 147, 169-170; defeat of, 157-158, 163-165 Celli, Carlo, 211 Césaire, Aimé, 144 César, Filipa, 25, 32-33, 49, 260, 261, 263-264, 289-294, 297-300, 301 Chabal, Patrick, 300 Cham, Mbye, 173, 330n16 CHAMS, 187. See also Aladekọmọ

363

Chapman, Tracy, 112 Cheah, Pheng, 31, 217, 224, 230-232; 233, 234, 311, 342n7 Cheers, D. Michael, 279 Chréacháin, Fírinne Ni, 327n8 Chude-Sokei, Louis, 278-279 Cissé, Souleymane, 17, 70-71, 337n20 Cissé, Youssou Tata, 79 Clark, Ẹbun, 97, 99, 101-105, 333n12, 333n16, 333n18 Coates, Oliver, 333n13 Coetzee, J. M., 14 Cobumba, José Bolama, 295 Cole, Catherine, 54, 307 Cole, Herbert M, 62, 90-94, 105 Cole, Tẹju, 325, 330n14 Composition, xi, 3, 6, 8, 22, 23, 43, 51, 62, 64, 72, 78-79, 92, 329n2; in Ceddo, 146-147, 150-162, 166, 167; in Migritude, 127-133, 144-145; as process, 97, 102-104, 178, 313, 315, 328n18; in music, 26, 65, 265, 282-283, 288, 330n7; politics of, 29-30, 121, 123, 149-150, 170-171; relation to curation, 7374; in relation to improvisation, 331n27 Contras’ City (Mambety), 20, 21-22 Cook, Kim, 130, 132, 142 Crato, Josefina, 295 Creole [Crioulo], 290, 293, 296 Crompton, Richard, 19-20 Curation, xi, 3, 6, 8, 10, 16, 22, 23, 27, 29, 50, 82-85, 207; as artistic method, 72-74, 130; as practice, 56-70, 121-122, 258; in festivals and mbari, 85-97, 107-120; in Morẹ΄nikẹ΄ /Àyánmọ΄, 97-106, 120; in relation to remix, 24, 59, 73-74, 263 Dadi, Iftikhar, 285 Dakar, 20, 95, 157, 160, 167, 197, 205, 225, 265 Damas, Leon-Gortras, 144 Dangarembga, Tsitsi, 115, 216 Darwin’s Nightmare (Sauper), 41 Darwish, Mahmoud, 198 Daughters of Dust (Dash), 26 Davidson, Basil, 300 Davis, Ossie, 184. See also Kongi’s Harvest Dawes, Carole, 95

364

I n de x

Death and the King’s Horseman (S.oyinka), 17, 65, 95, 223 Dembrow, Michael, 335n8 Demme, Jonathan, 111 Denzer, LaRay, 283-284, 288 diachronicity, 3, 28, 38, 42-46, 66, 79, 313 Diawara, Manthia, 110, 112-113, 334n22 Dibango, Manu, 30, 122, 129, 157, 161-162, 164-165, 265 diffraction, 39-40, 55, 66, 75, 76 digital culture, 3-4, 10-12, 17-32, 37, 52, 64, 174; in relation to diachronicity, 311-312; in relation to festivals, 107; in relation to platform, 247-251. See also digitality digitality, 4-6, 11, 16, 20, 24, 28, 29, 31, 48, 310; economic orientation of, 33, 303-305; in contrast to analog, 315, 330; in networked music, 64-65; in relation to creativity, 72-74;, 77, 82, 93, 95, 249, 317 in relation to extraversion and diffraction, 39 digital publishing, 11, 74, 250-251, 258-259, 317, 319 Dike, Ndidi, 29, 91 Dilemma of a Ghost, The, (Aidoo), 14 Diop, Birago, 5, 14, 46, 309-310, 311 Diop, Boris Boubacar, 75, 252 Diop, Cheikh Anta, 46, 47, 53, 78-79, 162, 163, 219, 315, 331n29 Diop, Maty, 310 Diouf, Abdou, 148 Diouf, Mamadou, 147-148, 149 discontinuity, 84, 156-157, 315; as musical technique, 264; generic, 270-271; historical, 42, 305 Djebar, Assia, 14, 276 Dosunmu, Sanya, 13 Dovey, Lindiwe, 107, 110, 334n22 East Africa, 25, 94, 316 Ede, Amatoritsero, 330n15 Ẹfúns. etán Aníwúrà (Is. ọla), 25, 28, 31, 173, 174, 176, 185, 186-193, 214; historic stage performance of, 69, 177 Ẹgbẹ Ọmọ Oduduwa, 106 Ẹgbẹ Ọmọ Ọlọfin, 106 Egypt, 207

Eilersen, Gillian Stead, 69 Ellerson, Betti, 334n22 Ekotto, Frieda, 337n24 Eloquence of the Scribes, The, (Armah), 5,155, 222, 254, 257, 331n22 El Saadawi, Nawal, 14, 276 El-Tahri, Jihan, 107 English, James, 307 Ẹniìtàn/Daughter of Destiny, 25, 32, 74, 215, 237-245, 246-247, 339n15; in relation to digital publishing, 248, 250, 255-256, 258 Enwezor, Okwui, 56-58, 74, 87-89, 285, 332n8 Eshun, Kodwo, 302 Euba, Akin, xii, 156, 312 Eymon, Florence, 161 extraversion, 38-39, 41, 66, 328n12; reversed, 9 Faat Kine (Sembene), 167, 169, 211 Fagunwa, D. O., 5, 14, 46, 187, 252, 307, 308, 310, 311, 329n19, 336n6 Faleti, Adebayọ, 178, 183, 188, 193 Fanon, Frantz, 41, 74, 118, 329n3 Fanon, Josie, 147, 148, 154 Farim, 290 Faulkner, William, 311, 312 Fẹla, 32, 75, 76, 173, 265, 278, 310, 340n9; on “Lady”, 103, 262, 279-288, 301 Fernandez, Anita, 289-290, 297, 299, 301 film festivals, xiii, 10, 49, 85, 107, 110, 208, Finye (Cissé), 71 Foucault, Michel, 204-205, 206, 302 Fragments (Armah), 220 Franco, 280 Fraser, Robert, 220-221, 246, 254 Freetown, 54 From the Cave of Rotten Teeth (Barrett), 114, 115 Fuentes, Carlos, 251 Gadjigo, Samba, 147, 148, 334n22, 335n8 Gabriel, Teshome H., 15 Gambari, Ibrahim, 81, 89, 92, 121 Ganda, Oumarou, 341n1

I n de x Garland, Muthoni, 115 Garritano, Carmela, 212 Garveyite pamphlets, 53-54, 330n12 The Gaze of the Stars (Pimenta), 195, 208 Gélinas, Mélissa, 329n6 Gérard, Albert, 5, 278 Gettino, Octavio, 310 Ghana, 51, 53, 54, 99-100, 186, 275, 279, 281, 341n12 Gikandi, Simon, 7, 31, 70, 217, 224, 230, 232-233; 235 Gitelman, Lisa, 28, 37, 42, 43, 50, 64, 181, 330n19 Glendora Review, 308 Gomes, Flora, 289, 294, 295, 297-298 Goody, Jack, 42, 64 Greaves, William, 111 Gregor, Ulrich, 146, 161 Guelwaar (Sembene), 112, 166, 340n5 Guevara, Ernesto “Che”, 151, 341n14 Guillory, John, 28, 37, 45-46, 47, 68, 331n2 Guinea Bissau, 48, 67, 74, 79, 261, 261, 289-290, 292, 297, 298, 300, 340n4, 341n14 Gurnah, Abdulrazak, 12 Gyasi, Yaa, 216 Haffner, Pierre, 329-330n6, 331n6 Hall, Stuart, 87, 88, 109 Halpulaar, 147, (as Pular) 235 Harding, Jeremy, 75 Harris, Wilson, 237 Harrow, Kenneth W., 212, 337n24, 340n6, 342n10 Hassan, Salah, 285 Hauka, 53 Hausa, 235 Havana, 289 Hayles, Katherine N., 65 Haynes, Jonathan, x, 328n15, 336n12 Head, Bessie, 69-70, 232, 331n24 Healers, The, (Armah), 157 Hennebelle, Guy, 68 hieroglyphics, 221, 235, 338n5 highlife (music), x, 54, 100, 103, 264-265, 279, 280, 282, 307, 308, 341n2

365

Hill, Alan, 331n22 History of the Upper Guinea Coast (Rodney), 40 Hochschild, Adam, 138 Hopkins, Anthony, 100 Horkheimer, Max, 212 Hountondji, Paulin J., 37, 38-39, 41-42, 52, 56, 66, 236, 253; book edited by, 257; concept borrowed from, 328n12, 338n29 Hutcheon, Linda, 173, 336n1 Hynes, Nancy, 285-286 “I'm Homosexual, Mum” (Wainaina), 25, 33, 260, 263, 266-268, 271-277 I-Zogn, 11 Ibadan, 20, 28, 51, 69, 91, 95, 97, 98, 156, 177, 178; Is. ọla’s attitude toward the history of, 171, 187-188, 191; performance of Morẹ΄nikẹ΄/Àyànmọ΄ in, 101, 182; S.egun’s experience of, 242, 256 Ibironkẹ, Ọlabọde, 251, 339n20 India, 131, 135-139, 142 Indian Ocean, 53, 122 Indian women, 129, 130, 141 Irele Abiọla, 14, 16, 46, 307, 311, 328n17 IROKOtv, 11, 207 Is. ọla, Akinwumi, 25, 30, 155, 171-179, 181, 213-214, 313; attitude toward history, 171, 187-190, 215; attitude toward social impact of art, 69, 96, 179-180, 193, 252; interest in multimedia, 186 It’s My Man (Ramaka), 198, 209 Ivory Coast, 53, 105, 341n12 Jacobs, Sean, 109, 113 Jaga, Julien, 157, 167 Jaji, Tsitsi Ella, 144 Jameson, Fredric, 94, 332n8 Jay-Z, 50 Jero’s Metamorphosis (S.oyinka), 185 Jeyifo, Biọdun, 15, 30, 57, 127, 128, 149, 170, 220, 315; on traveling theater, 177, 213, 337n19 Johannesburg, 2, 273 Johnson, Linton Kwesi, 145 Jones, Eldred Durosimi, 185 Jordan, Ken, 24, 64-65, , 265-266

366

I n de x

Jos, 333n11 juju [music], 181, 341n2 Julien, Eileen, 7, 31, 37, 195-196, 217, 230, 233, 250, 328n12 Kaboré, Gaston, 77, 196 Kahiu, Wanuri, 1-2, 6, 18, 130, Kamĩrĩĩthũ theater, 180 Kampala, 116, 117 Kanopy, 11 Karmen Gei (Ramaka), 175, 195, 198, 209-210, 336n1 Kaur, Rupi, 145 Keita, Balla Moussa, 71, 337 Kelani, Tunde, 160, 174, 182, 189, 305, 332n2; collaboration with Is. ọla, 96, 172, 176, 178179, 181, 186, 195 Kemet, 219, 221, 225, 235, 254. See also Ancient Egypt Kenya, 10, 28, 41, 55, 58, 67, 122, 267, 275; as represented in art, 130, 180, 330n13; as represented in Migritude, 136-137, 138-141, 144; digital technology in, 8-9, 328n9; urban culture in, 20, 268, 271; Wainaina’s view of, 270, 272-273, 277, 340n6 Kermode, Frank, 252 Kincaid, Jamaica, 135 Kingston, 278 Kin-La-Belle, 146 Kinshasa, 146, 265 Kintu (Jennifer Makumbi), 339n18 Kinyarwanda, 54, 268, 269, 316, 330n13 Kiswahili, 5, 54, 253, 268, 269, 278, 339n11 KMT: In the House of Life (Armah), 5, 79, 222, 338-339n7 Kodak, 205 Kom, Ambroise, 328n14 Kongi’s Harvest (S.oyinka), 13, 184-185. See also Ossie Davis Kouyaté, Dani, 17 Kouyaté, Sekou, 280 Krishnan, Madhu, 117 Kurosawa, Akira, 212 La Noire De… (Sembene), 21, 77 La Rose, John, 109, 309 Ladebọ, Ladi, 336n7

Ladipọ, Duro, 99, 333n19 Lady, x, 28, 103, 284; as remix (Masekela), 21, 25, 32, 260, 262, 265, 279-283 Lady Na Master (Shonibarẹ), 5, 261, 262, 283-288 Lagos, 54, 85, 113, 183, 225, 240, 255, 257, 285, 304, 338n33; as base for Ogunde troupe, 98, 99, 100; festivals in, 87, 112, 115; musical culture of, 264-265, 279, 280-281, 284, 308, 309; fictional representations of, 241-242, 336-337n15; social manners of, x, 103 Larkin, Brian, 48 Larson, Charles, x, 220 Last Angel of History, The, (Akomfrah), 26 Lazarus, Neil, 16, 157, 220, 306, 328n17 Lee, Spike, 112, 340n9 Levine, Stewart, 281 Liberia, 280 Liberty Stadium (Ibadan), 177, 191 Liking, Were, 107 Lindfors, Bernth, 51 Lion and the Jewel, The, (S.oyinka), 185, 340n22 Lionheart (Nnaji), 12 Living in Bondage (Nnebue), 207, 336n7 Lobato, Ramon, 330n8 Loomba, Ania, 18 Love Is Power, Or Something Like That (Barrett), 115, Lucien, John, 279 Lugajol, 290 Madenga, Tadiwanashe, 115 Madame Plastig (Ramaka), 210, 211 Madmen and Specialists (S.oyinka), 185, 198 Mahjoub, Jamal, 12 Maja-Pearce, Adewale, 216 Makeba, Miriam, 265, 280 Maldoror, Sarah, 14, 297 Mali, 48, 85, 158 Mambéty, Djibril Diop, 20, 50, 196, 198, 202, 329n22 Mamdani, Mahmood, 268, 330n13 Mandabi (Sembene), 68 Manyika, Sarah Ladipọ, 76 Mapanje, Jack, 14

I n de x Marechera, Dambudzo, 88 Marker, Chris, 20, 297, 301 Márquez, Gabriel García, 311, 312 Marsalis, Branford, 340n9 Martin, Jean-Hubert, 88 Martin, Michael T., 195 Masekela, Hugh, 21, 25, 32, 265; remix by, 260, 262, 279, 281-283, 287, 288; with Fẹla, 265, 279-281, 341n10 mbari, xiii, 29, 62, 82, 121; as art and life, 84, 91-95, 330n17; as ritual process, 89-91, 105, 309; influence on contemporary art/practice, 91, 113, 119-120, 285, 332n1, 332n8; in relation to remix (as reuse), 308 Mbembe, Achille, 37, 39-42, 55, 66, 76, 199, 236, 253, 329n3 McKeon, Michael, 19 Mediation, xi, 15, 43, 74, 79, 91, 156, 176, 308, 330n9, 330n13; as concept, 3, 24, 29, 38, 42, 307, 310; in Ceddo, 129, 151, 155; in Ó Le Kú, 184; in technology, 65, 258, 283; theater as ideal form of, 29, 51, 60-65, 82, 93-97, 143 Melas, Natalie, 75 Mensah, E. T., 100, 265 Mérimée, Prosper, 195 Miano, Leonora, 78 Migritude, x, 25, 28, 73, 334-335n2; composition in, 21, 30, 127, 129-145; critique of imperialism in, 170; performance of, 141, 171 Miles Morland Fund for Writers, 116 Milk and Honey (Kaur), 145 Miller, Paul D. (aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid), 24, 64-65, 265-266, 340n1 Mofolo, Thomas, 307, 311 Mogami, Gaamangwe Joy, 116, 334n26 Monenembo, Tierno, 217 “Mọ΄ńléwá” (Arẹmu), xii, 156, 312 Moolaadé (Sembene), 169, 202 Moorman, Marissa, 48, 181, 338n34 Morẹ΄nikẹ΄/Àyànmọ΄ (Ogunde), 25, 29, 82, 97, 101-106. See also Yours Forever Morés, 290 Moretti, Franco, 230, 233

367

Morrison, Toni, 111 Morton-Williams, Peter, 203, 337n27 Mudimbe, Valentin, 39, 88 Mufti, Aamir, 31, 217, 224, 230, 233-234; 235-236 Mugo, Micere, 7 Mungai, Anne, 59 Murphy, David, 329n4, 335n11 Musila, Grace, 56, 118 Mutabaruka, 145 Mutu, Wangechi, 15 Mwesigire, Bwesigye Bwa, 115, 116, 117, 118-119, 334n29 Nairobi, 59, 130, 141, 225, 274 Nash, Mark, 74, 331n28 Nathan, Jeremy, 195 Ndao, Aliou, 95, 339n22 Ndioume, Abbasse, 255, 256, 257, 340n23 Neshat, Shirin, 285 Neto, Agostinho, 292 Newman, Paul, 211 New York African Film Festival (NYAFF), 29, 82, 85, 107-108, 119. See also AFF New York City, 107-109, 112-113, 330n14 N’Hada, Sana na, 289, 290, 291, 292-293, 294, 295, 297 Niang, Sada, 152, 154 Nigeria, 29, 53, 59, 105, 115, 122, 142, 169, 263, 275, 279, 304, 328n9, 330n13; art in, 7, 55, 61-64, 82, 89-91, 156, 216, 265, 286, 341n2; broadcasting in, 97, 207; cinema industry in, 11-13, 176, 193, 194, 279, 336n7; cultural nationalism in, 98-99; ethnic diversity in, 240; Pentecostalism in, 238-240, 339n16; literary publishing in, 248, 319; telecommunications deregulation in, 8-9 Ndĩgĩrĩgĩ, Gĩchingiri, 336n8 Nduka, Uche, 78 Netflix, 12, 48, 207, 311 Nganang, Patrice, 251 Ngũgĩ, wa Thiong’o, 7, 13, 20, 216, 253, 276; on the language question, 69, 75, 76, 214, 252-253, 258, 270-271, 278, 332n30, 339n20, 340n24; on theatrical experiment, 180

368

I n de x

Niane, Djibril, 17, 46, 307, 311 Niger, 53 Nnaji, Genevieve, 12 Nollywood, 9, 11, 63, 85, 110, 182, 188, 190, 193, 206, 207, 328n15, 341n3; and piracy, 96, 279; in relation to African cinema, 31, 49, 121, 175, 194, 212, 304, 338n34 Nortje, Arthur, 88 Nwachukwu-Agbada, J. O. J., 220 Nyabola, Nanjala, 69 Nyairo, Joyce, 277 Nzegwu, Nkiru, 284, 288, 341n11 Ó Le Kú, 25, 31, 172, 174, 176, 181-187, 192; the novel, 175-176, 178, 253 Obenga, Théophile, 78, 220, 222, 338n5 Obis. ẹsan Hall, 101, 182-183 Ọdọfin, Saidat, 95 Odugbemi, Fẹmi, 338n33 Ofeimun, Odia, 145, 311, 335n7, 342n7 Ogbomọs. ọ, 188 Ògbóni, 203-204, 205 Ògbórí Ẹlẹ΄mọ`s. ọ΄ (Lérè Pàímọ΄ Theater), 188 Ogude, James, 8, 278, 328n16 Oguibe, Olu, 57, 58, 88 Ogunba, Oyin, 99 Ogunde, Ades. hẹwa, 103 Ogunde, Hubert, x, 25, 29, 51, 54, 63, 84, 93, 96, 99-107, 182, 332n9; as professional entertainer, 94, 333n11, 333n17; diversification into cinema, 102, 105; 333n18; early years, 98-99, 106; operas, 82-83, 94-95, 97-98, 100, 111, 127, 282, 333n13; political persecution, 106, 149, 333n19 Ogunlẹyẹ, Folukẹ, 191 Ogunmọla [Bas. ọrun], 156, 188 Ogunmọla, Kọla, 99 Oguns. ọla, Ishọla (“Dr. I-Sho Pepper”), 176, 188, 190, 191, 192, 337n19 Oguns. ọla, Iyabọ, 176, 188, 190, 193, 337n19 Oguns. ọla, Moji, 109 Oguns. ọla, Yetunde, 190 oje ogwu, 62, 94 Ojwang, Dan, 140-141, 334n2 Okigbo, Christopher, 88 Okediji, Ọladẹjọ, 19-20

Okeke-Agulu, Chika, 6, 91, 327n5 okumkpa, 62 Okri, Ben, 12, 336-337n15 Ọladele, Francis, 13 Ọlaniyan, Tẹjumọla, 16, 56, 283, 328n17, 336n6 Ologunde, Bisade, 308, 340n8 Oluwa, Abibu, 342n6 On Love Sublime (Shemsw Bak), 257, 339n11 Ondjaki, 78 One Day I Will Write about This Place (Wainaina), 21, 115, 122, 260, 262, 266, 267, 275, 302 Opera of the World, An, (Diawara), 110 Ọ` run Móoru (Balogun), 96 Osiris Rising (Armah), 222, 223, 338n6 Ọs. ọfisan, Fẹmi, 72, 96, 173, 187, 336n14 Os. ogbo, 142 Ọs. undare, Niyi, 144, 177, 328n18 Ouagadougou, 85, 111, 112 Owoh, Orlando, 282 Owonibi, S.ọla, 181, 336n13 Ọyọ, 153, 314 Ọyọ State, 177 Pakleppa, Richard, 195 Palma, Rita, 91 Patel, Shailja, x, 21, 25, 29, 30, 121, 122-123, 127, 129, 130-145, 171; aesthetic principles of, 313, 316, 334-335n2; autobiographical details by, 139-140; in performance, 130-131, 141; in relation to Africana poetics, 144-145; feminist politics of, 133-137, 141, 142-143 Parks, Gordon, 111 Peel, J. D. Y., 188, 337n17 Pélissier, René, 293 Peña, Richard, 111, 334n23 Pfaff, Françoise, 49, 146 Phillips, Caryl, 251 Pieterse, Cosmo, 94 Plan Jaxaay! (Ramaka), 198, 210, 211 Plastow, Jane, 10, 328n13 Platform, xi, 3, 6, 8, 22, 23-24, 31, 72, 174, 233, 245, 247, 321-322; as publishing interface, 10, 75, 215-230, 251, 253, 256-259, 267, 317, 323-324; in relation to adaptation,

I n de x 178-179, 185, 252, 312; in relation to curation, 69-70, 86, 115-119, 263; in relation to remix, 260, 276-277, 301, 341n16; online only, 11-12, 27, 29, 32, 48-49, 78, 81-84, 207, 248-249, 310 Polanyi, Karl, 53 Pontecorvo, Gilo, 210-211; 218 Popenguine, 222, 230 Prashad, Vijay, 144 Precolonial Black Africa (Diop), 163 Pumzi (Kahiu), 1-2, 68, 130 Quayson, Ato, 196 Radio O-Y-O, 177, 178 radio, 48, 67, 181, 300, 336n4; broadcast on, 72, 177, 187, 190, 313 Ramaka, Joseph Gaï, 25, 30, 194, 198-210, 214, 338n30, 338n33; approach to adaptation, 172, 174-175, 196, 215, 336n1; poetic imagination of, 31, 173, 195-198, 205, 210-213, 216, 338nn31 Ramos, Monica, 145 Ranciere, Jacques, 77 Ray, Satyajit, 212 Reagan, Ronald, 108 Reddy, Vanita, 130, 141, 335n2 remediation, 64, 78, 181-184 Remembering the Dismembered Continent (Armah), 222, 223 Remix, xi, 3, 6, 8, 21, 22, 23, 32-33, 48, 79, 266-278, 302, 312; as musical practice, 32, 72-73, 260, 261-262, 264-266, 278-283, 308; in Lady Na Master, 262, 283-289; in relation to curation, 24, 59, 73-74, 263-264; in relation to platform, 260, 276-277, 301, 341n16; in Spell Reel, 289-301 Resolutionaries, The, 5, 25, 32, 222-235, 259; compared to Ẹniìtàn: Daughter of Destiny, 237, 245-246; idea of cultural integrity in, 215, 220, 237, 252; use of platform in, 218, 248-250, 256, 257 Reynaud, Bérénice, 208 Ricard, Alain, 327n3 Robertson, D. W., 45 Rochereau, Tabu Ley, 265, 280

369

Rodney, Walter, 40, 80, 329n2 Róisín, Fariha, 145 Rosen, Philip, 154, 157, 158-159, 165, 166 Rouch, Jean, 53, 304, 305, 341n1 Rwanda, 330n13 Said, Edward W., 306, 322 Salkey, Andrew, 109 San Francisco, 130, 133, 137, 139, 141 S.ango, 314 Sanhat (Shemsw Bak), 235, 253, 257 Sans Soleil (Marker), 20, 297 sari, 130-144 Sarr, Ismaila, 69, 70-71, 337 Schmidt, Eric, 303, 304 Schoonmaker, Trevor, 284 S.egun, Aramide, 32, 214, 215, 238, 339n13. See also Ẹniìtàn: Daughter of Destiny Seide, Aissatu, 300 Selasi, Taiye, 56 Sembene, Ousmane, 21, 25, 30, 31, 47, 49, 78, 108, 112, 122, 123, 127, 196, 327n8; anti-imperialist politics of, 146-147, 167-170; approach to history in Ceddo, 74, 79, 80, 128, 129, 149-150, 152, 163-164, 169, 171, 191, 335n8; cultural politics in relation to cinema, 75-76, 148, 151, 154, 173, 179, 193, 214, 305, 330n6, 331-332n30, 341n1; mégotage coined by, 73, 331n26; relationship with Armah, 148, 335n11; technical approach in Ceddo, 145, 149, 155-166, 171, 189, 335n7; work by, 21, 69, 77, 111, 128, 147-148, 166-167, 202, 206, 211, 329n22, 335n9, 339n22, 340n5 Senegal, 21, 63, 67, 68, 80, 210, 211, 309; Armah’s work in, 222, 331n22; political and religious culture of, 147-148, 150, 154155, 166-167, 198, 205 Senegambia, 28, 53, 146, 147 Senegambia and the Atlantic Slave Trade (Barry), 153 Sène, Yande Codou, 211 Senghor, Léopold Sédar, xii, 80, 144, 146, 148, 150, 156, 161, 312, 328n18 Sese Seko, Mobutu, 146 Shemsw Bak, 235, 253, 339n11 Sheng, 254, 277-278

370

I n de x

Shonibarẹ, Yinka, 25, 29, 32, 57-58, 260, 301; conceptual approach of, 262, 285-286, 287-289; on Lady Na Master, 283-285 Singleton, John, 112 Sissako, Abderrahmane, 48, 195, 212, 213, 331n27 Smith, Sandra, 283 Solanas, Fernando, 310 Sotto, Wiveca, 95 South Africa, 9, 41, 85, 89, 331n29; film industry in, 207; Wainaina in, 268, 271, 272, 273, 275 southern Africa, 63, 307, 316 S.oyinka, Wọle, 14, 28, 37, 64, 88, 90, 101, 196, 220, 305, 331n29, 339-340n22; alleged opinion of Ceddo by, 169; conception of artistic (theater) form in space by, 50-51, 58-60, 83-84, 156-157; conception of mediation by, 60-63, 90, 92, 93, 94, 99; on regenerative values of art, 309, 338n6, 341n4; theater companies/productions by, 106-107, 198; work by, 17, 65, 95-96, 104, 175, 184-185; adaptation of The Strong Breed, 194, 199-200, 201, 202, 203, 208-209 Spell Reel (César et al), 25, 32-33, 48, 49, 80, 309, 340n4; as digital film, 315; as remix, 74, 260, 263-264, 289-301 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 88, 334n1 St. Louis, 167 Stoneman, Rod, 206-207 Sule, E. E., 340n25 Sy, Kalidou, 338n31 Tadjo, Veronique, 12 Taiwo, Olufẹmi, 40 Tansi, Sony Labou, 199 Tarkovsky, Andrei Arsenevich, 212 Taylor, Charles, 216 Taylor, Clyde, 112 Taylor, Rẹmi, 283 Taylor, Richard, 98 Taylor, Sonya R., 144 Tcheuyap, Alexie, 15 “Telephone Conversation” (S.oyinka), 14 Teno, Jean-Marie, 212, 338n34

textuality, x, xii, 4, 6, 17-19, 24, 27, 77, 78, 97, 186, 262 Thierry, Raphaël, 76 Things Fall Apart (Achebe), 17, 217 Third Cinema, 210, 294, 310 Thompson, Robert Farris, 27 Timbuktu (Sissako), 48, 212 Towa, Marcien, 56 Translation, 44, 86, 95, 105, 222, 232, 258, 293, 329n6, 335n15, 336n11, 342n9; and world literature, 234-235, 256, 307, 339n11, 339n21; as creative practice, 219, 230, 236, 251-256, 259, 311-312, 327nn6-7, 338n1, 339n22 translocality, 3, 28, 38, 42, 43, 50-60, 79, 89, 307, 308, 310, 315, 329n24 Trenchard Hall, 177 Troupe, Quincy, 280 Two Thousand Seasons (Armah), 220 Uganda, 10, 55, 115, 116-117, 268, 269, 273 Ukadike, Frank N., 159, 331n29 Umtata, 276 Vansina, Jan, 54, 268 Veal, Michael E., 283, 340n9, 341n10 Vera, Yvonne, 12 Vieyra, Paulin Soumanou, 149, 157, 159, 160-161, 171, 311, 327n6, 329-330n6, 331n26, 334n22 Vimeo, 48, 49 Wa Kamissoko, 79 Wade, Abodulaye, 197, 198 Wainaina, Binyavanga, 21, 25, 32, 73, 75, 115, 340n2; autobiographical details, 122, 268, 273; generic discontinuity by, 270271, 276; use of digital platform by, 260, 262-263, 266-277, 302, 340nn6-7, 341n16 Walker, Alice, 112 Walmsley, Anne, 109, 333n21 Wend Kuuni (Kaboré), 77, 196 West Africa, 5, 26, 112, 155, 207, 212, 279, 329n24, 330n13; in history, 47-48, 60, 82, 83, 84, 94, 97, 120, 157, 314, 341n12; in geography, 29, 51, 53-53, 59, 98, 100, 105, 146, 210, 307

I n de x

371

Xala (Sembene), 68, 147 Xhosa 236, 256, 340

Yè. yé. Dey Smell (Anikulapo-Kuti), 310 Yoruba, 101, 104, 172, 173, 180, 213, 252, 310, 311, 333n16, 336n, 336n10, 339n11; artistic use of, 19, 31, 96, 99, 176, 181 Yoruba Language and Art (Abiọdun), 62, 330n16 Yours Forever (Ogunde), 97 YouTube, 1, 17, 18, 26, 48-49, 96, 162, 213, 263, 296, 301, 313, 337n28

Yeelen (Cissé), 17, 70-71, 159, 208 YEM-KEM, 195. See also Ayẹni

Zephaniah, Benjamin, 145 Žižek, Slavoj, 20

Wikileaks, 303 Wilkinson, Jane, 309 Williams, Raymond, 305 Wolof, 22, 147, 202, 310, 337n26; artistic use of, 68, 72, 161, 235, 254, 331-332n30, 339n11

Akin Ades.ọkan is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and of Cinema and Media Studies in the Media School at Indiana University, Bloomington. He is author of the novel Roots in the Sky and Postcolonial Artists and Global Aesthetics (IUP, 2011) and coeditor of Celebrating D. O. Fagunwa: Aspects of African and World Literary History.