by Andrew Apter

When Nigeria hosted FESTAC 77 to celebrate the cultural foundations of the ‘Black and African World’, it was fashioned after Senghor’s festival mondial des arts nègres (FESMAN 66) held in Dakar eleven years earlier. Like its predecessor, FESTAC featured the dance, drama, music, arts, and philosophical legacies of a ‘traditional’ Africa that was regimented by opening and closing ceremonies and exalted as a framework for black nationhood and development.  And if FESTAC was planned on a far grander scale, funded by the windfalls of a rising petrostate, its kinship with FESMAN was further solidified between both heads of state, who would serve together as co-patrons of Nigeria’s cultural extravaganza. What began as a diarchic alliance, however, soon devolved into a divisive debate over the meanings and horizons of black cultural citizenship.  At issue were competing Afrocentric frameworks that clashed over the North African or ‘Arab’ question. Should North Africans fully participate, as Lt-Gen. Olusegun Obasanjo maintained, or should they merely observe as second-class citizens, as Leopold Sédar Senghor resolutely insisted? If Nigeria’s expansive and inclusive vision of blackness was motivated and underwritten by its enormous oil wealth, Senghor refused to compromise his position, precipitating a face-off that ultimately lowered Senegal’s prestige.  

To understand why North Africa became the focus of these competing definitions of blackness, I turn to the 1969 Pan-African Cultural Festival in Algiers, where Négritude was disclaimed as counter-revolutionary.  Placed within a genealogy of postcolonial Afrocentric festivals, the struggle over North Africa in FESTAC 77 shows that the political stakes of black cultural citizenship were neither trivial nor ephemeral, but emerged within a transnational field of racial politics and symbolic capital accumulation.

Le Divorce

I first encountered the ideological fracas between Senghor and Obasanjo over ‘the Arab question’ during my archival research for The Pan-African Nation: Oil and the Spectacle of Culture in Nigeria, a study of the paradoxes of oil-prosperity through FESTAC’s mirror of cultural production (Apter 2005).  Interested in how oil-capitalism generated the illusion of development by masking an inverted system of deficit-production, I understood the conflict in geopolitical terms when an oil-rich Nigeria displaced Senegal as West Africa’s regional powerhouse by assuming leadership of the Economic Organization of West African States (ECOWAS) and by remodeling the global horizons of blackness. Bolstered by oil and its global commodity flows, if FESTAC was for ‘black people’, it was also ‘for everybody’, as proclaimed on the airways by the jùjú musician and superstar King Sunny Adé.  As far as Nigeria was concerned, Négritude, like its founding father, was falling out of touch with the changing fortunes and tempos of the times. 

Housed in the Centre for Black and African Arts and Civilization (CBAAC) within Nigeria’s National Theatre (built specifically for FESTAC), the International Festival Committee (IFC) papers run from the first planning meeting in October 1972 until the concluding session in February 1977, documenting a fascinating trajectory of changing plans and committee debates among FESTAC’s zonal representatives.  Problems with ‘Arab’ festival participation first appear in the minutes of the 7^th IFC meeting of 29 November -3 December, 1975:

At the current meeting of the International Festival Committee, one of the 16 zones, which is the West African Francophone Zone (1) headed by Senegal, has been spear-heading a move to exclude the North African countries from fully participating in the Festival, contrary to the decisions of the International Festival Committee.  The Zonal Vice-President, Mr. Alioune Sène, the Senegalese Minister of Culture, has gone as far as to threaten that Senegal will not participate in the festival, if the Colloquium, which is the heart of the Festival, is not restricted to Black countries and communities. This in effect means that Senegal is trying to exclude North Africa from fully participating in the Festival.

Thus Senegal initiated the opening challenge to the ‘Arab countries’ of the North Africa Zone, whose presence at the FESTAC Colloquium—on the theme of Black Civilization and Education—it would only authorize as ‘non-participating observers’ who could listen but not speak, and who would be barred from submitting papers.  The Nigerian response was swift and decisive, issued from the then Head of State, Brigadier Murtala Muhammed (before his assassination three months later), stating that such discriminatory nonsense would not be tolerated:

While the Federal Military Government would not like any African country or Black community to withdraw from the Festival, it wishes to affirm unequivocally the basis on which it originally accepted to host the festival; that is, full participation by all member states of the Organization of African Unity, Black Governments and Communities Outside Africa and Liberation Movements recognized by the OAU.

Speaking for the festival at large, and the international community of participating states and communities, Nigeria asserted sovereign authority over an emerging body of black and African zones which both included and cross-cut independent nation states according to membership in FESTAC itself.  Not only the member states of the OAU, but also its recognized liberation movements, which included SWAPO in what is now Namibia, and the ANC under apartheid South Africa, and those black communities in North America, Europe, and even Papua New Guinea which comprised ‘nations within nations’. Within such expansive black cultural horizons, North Africans would enjoy full citizenship rights.

Indeed, hosted by Nigeria and remapping the African diaspora, FESTAC had the trappings of a Pan-African nation, with its own emblem, flag, stamps, secretariat, and identity cards for registered participants that served as passports for entry into FESTAC Village.  Breaking from the strictures of Négritude and its ‘Negro-African’ sub-Saharan focus, a new definition of black cultural citizenship accompanied a new black world order animated by oil. For participating black communities and liberation movements, black cultural citizenship in FESTAC trumped national citizenship.  Senegal’s call for limited North African participation was not merely seen as divisive and discriminatory, but as a form of second-class citizenship, ironically reproducing the very form of disenfranchisement that Senghor and his black confrères experienced in interwar Paris (Wilder 2005). Vilifications of Senegal and its doctrinal leadership soon erupted into Nigeria’s popular press.  Commander O. P. Fingesi, the Nigerian president of the IFC, was widely quoted that ‘if the North African countries should be barred from the colloquium on the ground of the colour of their skin, it would amount to racial bigotry in the most nauseating sense’. Andrew Aba wrote in the Sunday Standard, ‘Today I want to hammer down the nail on the lid of the dead orphan called Négritude’, adding that its ‘masks, rivers, tam-tams, erect breasts, bamboo huts, black Madonnas and swinging buttocks are no use in present-day Africa, if we are to survive the world’s technological culture’.  One editorial diatribe against ‘the Black Frenchman’ exclaimed that ‘Négritude is the whiteman’s Trojan horse to African culture; Senghor and his French masters should be ignored’. More sober protestations against Senegal’s position appealed to North African linguistic and cultural inroads into so much of Sub-Saharan Africa, manifest in Islam, Swahili, the Tuaregs of Mauretania and Mali, the Fulbe/Peul/Fulani societies across the Northern Sahel, and all manner of historico-cultural crossings, inspiring one editorial call for ‘our intellectuals [to] take up the challenge posed by the bluffing Senegal’.  Senegal had a few allies in its principled stand against non-black participation in the Colloquium, such as Ivory Coast, but support hardly followed along francophone lines. Adding to the developing fault line, Sékou Touré’s Guinea promised a counter-boycott ‘if Senegal was allowed to have its way’.  

By May 27^th, 1976, with Olusegun Obasanjo newly installed as Nigeria’s Head of State, the crisis reached a breaking point when Senegal announced its withdrawal from FESTAC, citing principle over politics in opposing ‘Arab’ participation in the Colloquium.  In the words of Alioune Sène, who as Senegal’s Minister of Culture also doubled as vice-president of FESTAC’s Francophone Zone, ‘Arab culture is different from that of the black community and they would have nothing to offer us in that aspect.’ Nigeria responded by reaffirming its commitment to full participation for all OAU member states, and retaliated by removing Alioune Diop from his position as Secretary General of the IFC, stating conflicts of interest that shed further light on the lineaments of black cultural citizenship. Addressing the ninth official meeting of the IFC, Commander O. P. Fingesi explained:

The Secretary-General, in the person of Alioune Diop, had to be relieved of his duties following the confirmation that the Senegalese Government had taken the definitive decision to boycott the Festival…That decision of the Senegalese Government…did consequently compromise the position of Dr. Alioune Diop, who is a Senegalese citizen, as well as the Secretary General of the International Festival Committee.  It must be emphasized that the move to relieve Dr. Alioune Diop of his responsibility as the Secretary General of the IFC was in no way a direct personal affront to him.  It was a decision that had to be made purely on issues of principles as well as pragmatic realities. (my emphasis)

What stands out in this anodyne proclamation is how Diop’s Senegalese citizenship became a political liability for the greater good of FESTAC’s sovereignty, necessitating his removal by virtue of a higher authority that controlled access to an emerging Pan-African nation.  For Diop, FESTAC’s black cultural citizenship trumped Senegalese citizenship and the political community to which it was wedded. Diop was replaced by Cameroon’s more compliant Ambroise Mbia as the new IFC Secretary General, after the entire Colloquium committee was reorganized to wrest control away from its francophone planners.

By 26 August, 1976, a peace between Nigeria and Senegal was brokered, and Senegal rejoined FESTAC, albeit with diminished responsibilities and wounded pride as Senghor’s co-patronage was permanently rescinded.  Wole Soyinka played an important role in establishing a ‘compromis dynamique’ between Senegal’s philosophical principles and FESTAC’s practical imperatives, heralding the rapprochement as a victory in African diplomacy ‘in keeping with the true spirit of African brotherhood and unity’.  Even if it was too late to reinstate Alioune Diop as Secretary-General of the IFC because his successor had already been installed, Senegal reentered the comity of black nations with its FESTAC citizenship fully restored. But the question remains, why all the sturm und drang?  Why did Senegal put so much on the line when it marginalized North Africans and waged its boycott?  What was at stake over ‘Arab’ participation in the Colloquium, and why was Senegal so adamant in its racialist refusals?  It was Dr. Garba Ashiwaju, chairman of FESTAC’s National Participation Committee, who identified the root cause of Senghor’s animus in the First Pan-African Cultural Festival hosted by Algiers from 21 July – 1 August, 1969.  The festival is worth revisiting not only for the Fanonian model of revolutionary culture which it promoted (Fanon, 1965), contrasting with Négritude’s cultural conservatism, but also for the more militant contours of black cultural citizenship that it brought into focus.

The Battle of Algiers

When the OAU hosted the First Pan-African Cultural Festival from 21 July – 1 August, 1969, liberation movements in Angola, Mozambique and Rhodesia were in full swing, while the SWAPO-led Namibia was still occupied by South Africa, representing struggles for national self-determination further fueled by the Cold War superpowers vying for influence throughout the continent.  A related shift in African socialist paradigms was also occurring—in many ways articulated by the Festival itself—whereby the first wave of populist socialism of the late 1950s and ‘60s, modeled on the socialist communalism of ‘traditional’ Africa societies, was followed by a second wave of more militant regimes that would seize control in the 1970s, embracing scientific socialism with its Vanguard Party while renouncing the false consciousness of traditional culture (Apter 2008).  It is hardly surprising that a more revolutionary definition of African culture was on the Algiers agenda, with its Symposium theme addressing ‘The Role of African Culture in the Struggle of Liberation and African Unity’. Nor is it surprising that it was in this venue, evoking the Algerian revolution and the critical spirit of Franz Fanon, that Senghor’s philosophy of Négritude was so militantly dismembered.

Problems began with the discursive restrictions that insulated official representatives from popular critique.  Presentations during the plenary sessions were limited to the heads of national delegations, none of which ‘could be answered from the floor’. During the break-up sessions on substantive themes, journalists and ‘uninvited foreign observers’ were kept out of the conference rooms, sequestering dissenting views from public dissemination.  It was under such conditions of ‘systematically distorted communication’ ,appropriate for the monopoly of a vanguard party line, that the assault against Négritude gained declamatory momentum. Guinea opened the charge at the first plenary session with a forty minute recorded message by Sékou Touré, stating that there is no black culture, white culture, yellow culture…Négritude is thus a false concept, an irrational weapon encouraging the irrationality of based on racial discrimination, arbitrarily exercised upon the peoples of Africa, Asia, and upon men of color in America and Europe’, a theme amplified by Mamadi Keita, the head of the Guinean delegation: 

Holy Négritude, be it Arab-Berber or Ethiopian-Bantu is an ideology auxiliary to the general imperialist ideology. The Master transforms his slave into a Negro whom he defines as being without reason, subhuman, and the embittered slave then protests: As you are Reason, I am Emotion and I take this upon myself…The Master assumes his preeminence, and the Slave his servitude, but the latter claims his right to weep, a right that the Master grants him…One easily understands why the imperialist propaganda system goes to such trouble to spread the comforting concept of Négritude.  Négritude is actually a good mystifying anaesthetic for Negroes who have been whipped too long and too severely to a point where they lost all reason and become purely emotional.

Négritude has long been criticized for reproducing the formal oppositions of colonial discourse if revaluing their meanings to celebrate African cultural agency, but the progressive dimensions of the movement and its contributions to black nationalist politics were given short shrift if acknowledged at all.  Henri Lopès of Congo-Brazzaville decried ‘the pigmentary belt’ imposed by Négritude across the African continent, while Paul Zanga of what was then Congo-Kinshasa found the doctrine ‘out of date as an historic movement’, recognizing its former importance and ‘the need to transcend it’. Wabu Baker Osman of Sudan joined the fray, voicing his criticism in Arabic of a racial philosophy that could only ‘serve the interests of the colonialists who have worked for two centuries to characterize people of different continents according to racial criteria’.  But Dahomey’s Stanislas Adotevi delivered the final of coup de grâce in his concluding remarks of the final plenary session. Denouncing Négritude as a reactionary ‘mysticism’ that impeded the progress of African development, Adotevi identified a fundamental flaw in its recuperative approach to African socialism, one that looked back to a traditional past rather than forward toward the African revolution: ‘Négritude, by pretending that socialism already existed in traditional communities and that it would be sufficient to follow African traditions to arrive at an authentic socialism, deliberately camouflaged the truth and thus became ripe for destruction’.  Not only negating Négritude’s discourse, but the central proposition of its socialist humanism.

Needless to say, the battle over Négritude was not just one of words, but of spaces from which to speak.  Responding to Adotevi, Senegal’s Minister of Culture, Youth and Sport, Amadou Mahtar M’Bow attempted to defend Négritude in more nuanced and dialectical terms, but the damage was done.  Lindfors (1970, 6-7) reported that other Senegalese delegates such as Alassane N’Daw and Lamine Niang contributed papers quoting liberally from Senghor, which were distributed but not read.  In effect, the discursive deck was stacked from the start. The négritudistes were largely excluded from the discussion, present more as observers than full-fledged participants.  Placed in the broader festival contexts of FESMAN 66 and Algiers 1969, Senghor’s opposition to ‘Arabs’ in the FESTAC Colloquium was a form of retaliation and revenge, giving the North Africans a taste of their own medicine while restoring his doctrine to the Pan-African stage.

It would be a mistake, however, to reduce the Arab Question to a bruised ego and vindictive personality.  Such motivating factors may help explain why Senghor put his reputation on the line at FESTAC 77, but do little to illuminate the contours and characteristics of a transnational form of black cultural citizenship that was emerging not only within these festivals, but also between them, over space and time.  One characteristic clearly apparent in the doctrinal debates over Négritude’s purview, as they contested the limits of the ‘Negro-African’ world, highlights an important semantic slippage between race and culture in which the diagnostics of phenotype were never fully eliminated.  Both the critics in Algiers and in Nigeria’s FESTAC assailed the race-based exclusions of Négritude’s blackness, declaimed (as we have seen above) as ‘a pigmentary belt’, a colonialist delusion, and after Senghor’s attempted ban of North Africans from the FESTAC Colloquium, ‘racial bigotry in the most nauseating sense’.  To be fair, Senghor’s doctrine is far more complex and humanistic than such dismissive attacks suggest, emplotting a dialectical movement of opposition and synthesis that sought nothing less than the ‘civilization of the universal’ in its politico-philosophical telos. And yet it was precisely such ‘racisme antiraciste’, so termed by Jean-Paul Sartre in his preface to Senghor’s edited Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache (1948), glossing a self-negating racism destined to achieve its own transcendence, that nonetheless persists and lingers despite the most adamant culturalist disavowals, a theme rigorously pursued by Gilroy (2000) and reworked more recently by Mbembe (2013). The lurking racial essentialism within Négritude’s blackness, and its associated forms of black cultural citizenship, can be philosophically negated, officially rejected, but never fully eliminated or transcended because it persists, not as a relic of racism, 

but as the historical condition of its possibility. Such finer distinctions, however, fell on deaf ears at the more militant Algiers festival, which forged a high-profile alliance with the Black Panther Party and a cultural politics of what Meghelli has called ‘transnational solidarity’ (2009).

Not that Algiers was all politics and no culture.  Cultural affinities uniting Africans and their overseas descendants were celebrated and elevated in dance, music and drama, as when jazz legend Archie Shepp invited some Tuareg musicians to jam during one his sets, providing ‘living proof’ for poet Ted Joans ‘of jazz still being an African music’, while reaffirming Miriam Makeba’s pronouncement that ‘We are all Africans, some are scattered around the world living in different environments, but we all remain black inside.’ But black culture in Algiers was forward-looking and revolutionary, unified and motivated by the shared struggle against Euro-American racism and imperialism—bringing French colonialism and America’s prison-industrial complex within the same oppositional battlefield. And it was here, within the festival’s transnational community that a distinctive form of black citizenship emerged, based not only contra hegemonic racial orders, but also ‘positively’, on inclusive rights of political recognition that took precedence over the sovereign authority of western nation-states.  In this context the presence of the Panthers in Algiers posed more than an embarrassment for the United States government, but ramped up their struggle to international proportions.  The Algerians built a new, two-story Afro-American Information Center which was lavishly stocked with Black Panther pamphlets and posters, where the invited Panther delegation held court (figure 1).  These included none other than Information Minister Eldridge Cleaver, arriving after eight months of exile from the United States via Cuba, together with his wife Kathleen Cleaver, who was the party’s Communications and Press Secretary; Emory Douglas, who served as Cultural Minister; and the party’s Chief of Staff, David Hilliard. 

Articles in the party’s newspaper, ‘The Black Panther’, illuminate the multiple meanings and dimensions of black citizenship as it intersected with conflicts in the United States, the Middle East, and with liberation struggles throughout Africa.  Eldridge Cleaver was initially welcomed in Algiers by supportive crowds shouting ‘Power to the People’ and ‘Al Fatah will win’, explicitly identifying the black struggle in America with the plight of Palestinians after the Six Day War of 1967, together with Yasar Arafat’s Palestine National Liberation Front, the insurgent wing of the PLO.  Standing next to an unnamed Al Fatah official, Cleaver proclaimed that although ‘we recognize that the Jewish people have suffered’, nonetheless ‘the United States uses the Zionist regime that usurped the land of the Palestinian people as a puppet and pawn’. The Panthers’ solidarity with Palestinian refugees expressed a shared experience of discrimination and disenfranchisement, a denial of full citizenship within the United States and Israel that brought both struggles together.  Indeed, ‘The Black Panther’ featured full articles on Al Fatah and its calls for armed resistance and radical change, honoring heroes of the revolution like Ribhi Mohammad and William Najib Nassar, who made the ultimate sacrifice. But if Cleaver’s solidarity with liberation movements in Africa and the Middle East resonated with the radicalizing directives of the OAU, it was the latter’s recognition of the Black Panther Party as the revolutionary vanguard in the United States which empowered Cleaver and his comrades.  

In a press conference called by Panther Chairman, Bobby Seale, and Chief of Staff, David Hilliard, who had recently returned from Algiers, the take away from the festival was all about Eldridge.  When asked about the festival, Hilliard replied:  

The only report that I have to bring back to Black people in particular and to the American people in general is Eldridge’s wish to return to America… Eldridge has stated that he would return today, if he could have his day in court.  So that I am here, along with Bobby and the Black Panther Party nationally to create some machinery in order to bring Eldridge back to America, because this is where he prefers to struggle.

Emerging out of a flurry of questions as to whether they were working on a deal (‘No’), whether Eldridge trusted the courts, and when in fact he might be expected to return, were the Panthers’ concerns with due process and citizenship.  On the question of Cleaver’s imminent return, Hilliard explained: 

Well, that’s dependent upon the actions of the mayor of San Francisco in offering Eldridge protection, as he would any other citizen, and also the actions and attitudes of the governor of California, –if they’re willing to cooperate in terms of letting Eldridge return and have his regular appearances in court, then he’ll return today.

Needless to say, Cleaver would be expelled from the Party in 1971, and would not return to the United States until 1975, where he did serve an eight month prison sentence.  But the Algiers festival brought out problematic dimensions of his citizenship, both at home and abroad, bringing significant political calculations into play. The Party framed the need for adequate city and state protection as the right of any ordinary citizen, not only for an exiled fugitive of justice, but for all black people who were taking up arms to protect themselves against the police, or ’fascist pigs’.  Moreover, Eldridge’s vulnerable citizenship at home was balanced against different ambiguities in Algeria. When asked if Eldridge would remain in Algeria, Hilliard replied: 

That’s not clear, you know.  I don’t know how permanent it is. We were only offered that center in Algeria and that we were invited there only for the cultural festival and when that’s ended, I don’t know what’s going to happen. I’m not sure.

Hilliard’s uncertainty reflects the ephemeral character of Cleaver’s cultural citizenship in Algeria, circumscribed in space and time by the parameters of the festival itself.  The Panther’s didn’t know if Cleaver would be allowed to remain in the country after the celebration ended and the guests went home. But if Cleaver’s citizenship was activated throughout the festival, would his political welcome extend post festum?

The question is bigger than Cleaver himself because it addresses the shifting and permeable boundaries between ideology, rhetoric, and realpolitik.  If, as I have argued, black cultural citizenship was a significant political status worth fighting over in the festivals of Dakar, Algiers, and Lagos, then how did it resonate beyond the festivals themselves, with broader struggles for liberation and recognition?  To address these issues, we reframe conventional distinctions between transnational festivals and nation states; between the performance and institutionalization of what is called citizenship.

We have seen how Senghor’s humiliation in Algiers struck a serious blow, not to be easily forgiven in FESTAC 77, even if it was French West and Central Africans rather than North Africans as such who had voiced the most vicious criticisms of Négritude.  But beyond the politics of Afrocentric principles and doctrines are the forms and modalities of black cultural citizenship which these discourses of Africanity framed, generated and promoted. Returning to ‘le divorce’ between Senghor and Obasanjo, how are we to understand the meaning of black and African citizenship in the context of FESTAC 77, and the problematic placement of North African (‘Arab’) participation?  

First, we have located FESTAC’s black citizenship within the Pan-African nation that Nigeria produced from 15 January – 12 February, 1977; replete with its secretariat, employees, security forces, FESTAC village, food distribution system, transportation system, identity cards, and sovereign territories based in Lagos and Kaduna, represented by the FESTAC logo and flag.  Hosted, administered and financed by Nigeria, FESTAC’s ‘Black and African World’ was national in form, imperial in scope, and self-actualizing in its capacity to become a transnational sovereign entity. Clearly for Senghor, the North African delegation at FESTAC was at best entitled to a form of second class citizenship, as observers but not participants in the FESTAC Colloquium.  From this restriction—had Senghor succeeded— they would have been barred from negotiating the ideological horizons of the Black and African World. That Senghor failed, and suffered a loss of both personal and national prestige, proves that within the context of FESTAC itself, black cultural citizenship was a highly valued form of political capital—not a secondary representation of national citizenship but a recognized form of entitlement sui generis.  Indeed, it was within FESTAC’s political community that Senegalese citizenship became a political liability for Alioune Diop, who was relieved of his post as Secretary General of the International Festival Committee (IFC).

Second, we have located FESTAC 77 within a genealogy of Afrocentric festivals that developed institutional frameworks and networks of participation over time, even as these shifted, conjoined and split apart.  Senghor’s initial status as FESTAC co-patron derived from his inaugural role in hosting the Dakar Festival mondial des arts nègres in 1966, establishing something of a blueprint for postcolonial celebrations to follow, but one that was derailed by the 1969 Pan-African Festival in Algiers and its more revolutionary model of national culture.  It is highly significant that Senghor’s campaign against the North Africans in FESTAC revisited the attacks against Négritude in Algiers, and therefore only makes sense in relation to prior festival colloquia and participatory frameworks.  In this sense, the cultural battle of Algiers carried over to the Senegalese fracas in Lagos, revealing how FESTAC’s black cultural citizenship was partially embedded in prior festivals.

Third, we have related the citizenship of festivals to its cognate forms within the states, communities and liberation movements of its participants.  By recognizing black cultural citizens within non-black states like the US, Canada, and Apartheid South Africa, without recognizing the states themselves, FESTAC constituted a de facto black empire that cut across the global colonial and neo-colonial order.  This aspect of what Holston (2008) calls ‘insurgent citizenship’—establishing transnational solidarity between the racially disenfranchised and dispossessed—was epitomized by the prominence of the Black Panthers in Algiers, whose militant fight against white power at home resonated with the Palestinian struggle, the liberation movements in Africa, and a new wave of revolutionary socialist regimes embraced by the OAU. For Eldridge Cleaver, living in exile, black cultural citizenship was eminently personal, a matter of freedom and incarceration if not life and death.  Granted ’festival’ citizenship and sanctuary in Algiers, where his longer term prospects remained uncertain, we saw how his negotiations to return to America focused on the concrete protections of full citizenship at home. 

Finally, the manifold dimensions of black cultural citizenship exposed by ‘le divorce’ and ‘the battle of Algiers’ reveal complex pathways and fluid boundaries between the politics of festivals and nation states.  Conventional approaches to world’s fairs and cultural festivals cast them as dramatic forms of colonial and postcolonial theatre, representing ‘real’ countries, cultures and political projects in ‘secondary’ symbolic performances and displays.  From this perspective, delegations represent actual states and communities in symbolic terms, as simulations or artistic expressions of the larger world beyond. The lessons of FESTAC suggest an alternative approach which destabilizes the ontological distinction between real world and staged representation, according the ‘exhibitionary complex’ a primary status in structuring political entities and projects. If from the first perspective, cultural citizenship within a black world’s fair is a secondary representation of ‘real’ national citizenship, from the second perspective, treating the festival as a sociopolitical entity sui generis, its endogenous forms of citizenship and recognition are real unto themselves.  Black cultural citizenship within Afrocentric festivals is not a simulacrum of an external reality, but occupies a place within that reality—not only of recognized rights and duties, but also of violence and utopian possibilities. If such an approach seems far-fetched and counter-intuitive, perhaps we should return to the French Revolution, and—as Mona Ozouf (1988) so brilliantly reveals—the birth of modern European citizenship through its choreographed festivals.

An shorter version of this paper was presented at a public discussion at The Chimurenga Library installation at the main branch of the San Francisco Public Library which focused on the work of African American artists, writers, and performers who participated in pan-African festivals of the 1960s and 1970s. Read more here.

Early in 1977, thousands of artists, writers, musicians, activists and scholars from Africa and the black diaspora assembled in Lagos for FESTAC ’77, the 2nd World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture.

Devised by Chimurenga and edited by Ntone Edjabe, this is the first publication to consider FESTAC in all its cultural-historic complexity, addressing the planetary scale of the event alongside the personal and artistic encounters it made possible.

Read more here and view sample spreads from the publication below.

Deji Toye looks at the legacy of arts funding in Nigeria and questions whether the longstanding trend of patronage over policy remains in the interests of the benefactors rather than the creators of the works or the wider public audience.

George Ufot had a problem, which did not start as one, but now was. He had just been elevated to the position of Director of Culture in Nigeria’s federal civil service. It was early 2010. So important was this position that, during the country’s long years of military rule, it was one of those sequestered from the ordinary line of succession and had been occupied for many years by a military officer.

What was going to make this achievement even more groundbreaking for Ufot was that it coincided with the impending consideration of Nigeria’s revised cultural policy by its highest government body, the Federal Executive Council (FEC). Ufot had been barely six years in the service when the original policy was formulated in 1988 and it had taken 14 years for anybody to even begin to consider a serious review. Since that time, cultural issues had become increasingly integrated into development discourse and concepts such as “creative economy” and “cultural industries”, new-fangled at the start of his career, were now on firmer ground. Moreover, with a modicum of respectability coming the way of Nigeria’s motion picture industry – so much so that it has acquired its own ‘something-wood’ sobriquet – there should have been no problem in convincing the government that culture now mattered.

It was therefore ironic that the matter of naira and kobo peed on Ufot’s parade. The civil service being the civil service, it turned out that until the arrival of the document at the FEC chambers, the cultural silo had not informed the fiscal silo, let alone sought the latter’s contributions to policy proposals on tax incentives for corporate contributions to the arts. And the revenue service, being the revenue service, hates people cutting taxes on its behalf. Following the all-too-expected protestations, the revised policy was returned to sender, with the clear instruction that all inter-ministerial fault lines be dealt with accordingly before the document would be entertained sometime in the future.

In reality, Ufot’s worry should have been less about whether, and more about how, corporates are supporting the arts. Nigerian businesses have always wanted to hang out with the arts, or at least be seen to be doing so. And in the absence of a government policy that prioritises and incentivises areas of arts-spend, this frolic can sometimes appear to be driven by a ‘flavour-of-the-month’ level of commitment.

The New York Times had noted the shifting of financial support for the arts “from wealthy patrons to corporations” from the 1970s onward. By the 1980s, major Nigerian companies began something of an arts-grab. Major oil companies and banks competed for the ‘patron of the visual arts’ crown. Although the local subsidiary of Mobil, the giant American oil company, had a head-start in its collaboration with the Metropolitan Museum to launch an exhibition of ancient Nigerian art in New York, it was Standard Chartered Bank that would eventually take the throne, with its direct acquisition of some 150 works by Nigerian artists over a period of 10 years from 1989. Mobil, for its part, would become a major sponsor of Nigerian athletics. The contest ultimately set off an ‘artworks in calendars’ fad, introducing the work of a new generation of artists to the wider public.

On the other hand, the trophy for the ‘theatre patron’ of the time went to another corporate, the Nigerian International Bank (NIB). With its annual drama project in the early 1990s, the bank, now operating under the name Citibank, returned the big revue to the Nigerian stage, following a hiatus of more than a decade since the hosting of the second World Festival of Black Art and Culture (Festac) in 1977.

The lasting impact of these extravaganzas on Nigerian art is doubtful though. In terms of purpose, they mostly conformed to what the New York Times article noted as the tendency of the corporate patron to favour “safe art” to the detriment of challenging, new ideas. Take the NIB drama project for example: it brought together the biggest names in the value (if somewhat rusty) chain of theatre production – an old script by Ola Rotimi, directed by himself now, or a Wole Soyinka directed by a Dapo Adelugba then. Soyinka and Rotimi had been connected with the Ife-Ibadan universities axis, which almost single-handedly developed the theatre academia in Nigeria from the 1960s onwards. Adelugba might not have been the first Nigerian professor of theatre, but his distinguished combination of scholarship and artistic adroitness in acting and directing meant that he had acquired a larger stature than Joel Adedeji, his senior and the pioneering academic in the field. Add to the mix actors who were veterans of Orisun and Ori Olokun projects, or newly redundant young turks of the more recent Ajo theatre experiment. These were the safe hands in which NIB trusted its annual revue.

In the end, the NIB project cannot be credited with charting any new direction in Nigerian theatre.  Unlike the earlier, if less grandiose Ajo project, the NIB discovered no new playwrights or directors, much less actors. Ajo, a collaboration between Fred Agbeyegbe, a Lagos city lawyer, and Jide Ogungbade, a young director, had itself been a manifestation of the ‘wealthy patron’ phase in Nigerian theatre. Agbeyegbe, who made his fortune in commercial law not completely unaided by his position as a functionary of the ruling National Party of Nigeria (1979-1983), was seeking an outlet for his plays.

Agbeyegbe’s scripts could not hold a bush lamp to the works of Soyinka, Rotimi or John Pepper Clark-Bekederemo (JP Clark), or the younger Femi Osofisan and Bode Sowande, who were taking over from them in the university theatre tradition. But the project, while it lasted, brought into mainstream Nigerian theatre fresher faces, such as directors Ogungbade and Ben Tomoloju, and a generation of actors who would dominate the stage for another decade, even holding out long enough to constitute the mainframe of Nollywood once it emerged in the early 1990s. Tomoloju, himself a playwright, journalist and musician, would in particular go ahead to broadly influence the Nigerian art scene. He established the influential art pages of The Guardian newspaper in Lagos.

Nor did this phase of corporate patronage of the arts leave any lasting mark on visual art practice in Nigeria. Unlike the global Mobil collaboration with the Met, which at least worked with that museum to develop curatorial programmes around unfamiliar arts of the world, making them available to their American audiences while diversifying the permanent collection of that institution to this day, the Standard Chartered Bank acquisition did not spin any institution-building initiatives. Of course, it did put money in the pockets of artists, but that is something which the private individual collectors already did well. Despite some 150-odd acquisitions by the year 2000, the bank would never rival private collectors such as Oladele Odimayo, Femi Akinsanya, Sammy Olagbaju or Yemisi Shyllon. As the Spanish architect, Jess Castellote, noted in Contemporary Nigerian Art in Lagos Private Collections, Nigerian individuals remain the biggest collectors of contemporary Nigerian art and individual collectors often go beyond a collector’s call to take the kind of career-boosting interest in their favourite artists, such that the relationship takes on the tone of patronage.

Not surprisingly, it is these individual collectors who have now begun to think institutionally, setting up various foundations aimed at proper documentation, professional curating of shows, and organising residencies and workshops. The Omooba Yemisi Adedoyin Shyllon Art Foundation (Oyasaf), for example, initiated a fellowship programme in 2009 that sponsors graduate-level study in Nigerian art by international scholars. The proprietor, Yemisi Shyllon, himself recently co-edited Conversations with Lamidi Fakeye, a major publication on the works of the famous carver. He is perhaps the largest donor to the collection of outdoor sculpture at the Freedom Park, a project of the Lagos State government which has seen an old colonial prison in the commercial district of Lagos Island converted into a cultural centre.

Other collectors who have published major documentary work on their favourite artists, or their collection, include Okey Anueyiagu, whose 2011 book, Contemporary African Art: My Private Collection of Onyema Offoedu-Okeke, documented the largest collection of the artist’s work by any single individual, and Femi Akinsanya, who sponsored the publication of Making History: African Collectors and the Canon of African Art, edited by Sylvester Ogbechie and documenting one of the largest private collections of traditional Nigerian art.

The Sammy Olagbaju Charitable Foundation might not be as active as Oyasaf at the moment, but then, Olagbaju is a major founding spirit, and current chairman, of the Visual Art Society of Nigeria (Vason), which is bringing together the efforts of these private collectors with a permanent gallery now opened at Freedom Park. In addition, he sponsored the Castellote publication, which is perhaps the single most eloquent tribute to the role of private collectors to date.

Other institution-building initiatives include the Yusuf Grillo Pavilion established by the perennial public office holder, Rasheed Gbadamosi, at his home on the outskirts of Lagos and named for some of the pioneers of Nigerian art, the Zaria Rebels. The rebels were a group of pioneering students in Nigeria’s oldest school of higher art education, who, in the early 1960s, broke ranks with their European teachers and the official curriculum and went ahead to establish the major schools of art in various Nigerian higher institutions. The Pavilion’s annual event operates as a form of retrospective of the works and careers of major Nigerian masters, many of them members of the rebellion or their direct protégés.

Yet, none of the foregoing is meant to propose the ‘wealthy patron’ as an answer, even a placeholder, for the still yawning gap in corporate support for the arts in Nigeria. For one, some of the above-mentioned initiatives have the potential to be self-serving and, as noted by the curator Bisi Silva in the Castellote book, often reek of the overweening hegemony of the private art collector in the Nigerian art scene. Silva, the artistic director of the radical Centre for Contemporary Art, Lagos (CCA) and a juror of the 2013 Venice Biennale, has noted that the implication of this hegemony has been “the commodification of art at the expense of experimentation or of conceptual depth”. Any wonder that avant-garde careers such as those of Segun Adefila in theatre, or Jelili Atiku in conceptual art, have benefited so little from both wealthy patrons and corporate sponsors, in spite of the best efforts of Adefila’s Crown Troupe of Africa and other institutions like the African Artists Foundation and Silva’s CCA?

Business is looking up

In spite of what might be suggested by the influence of the wealthy patron on Nigerian art for the last three decades, the reality is that the seed of a new era of corporate giving was already being planted by 1989. This was when a group of industry leaders, who had themselves been wealthy patrons, launched a fund for the building of a cultural centre in Lagos. Bonded under the aegis of the Music Society of Nigeria (Muson), the group included Akintola Williams, Nigeria’s first chartered accountant whose firm remains the Nigerian affiliate of Deloitte & Touche, the late Ayo Rosiji, who straddled Nigeria’s political and corporate terrain for some 50 years before his passing in the year 2000, and Louis Mbanefo, a scion of the pioneering family of lawyers from the east of the country. Raising N143 million within some four years, the Muson Centre was opened in 1994. The majority of its funding has come from corporates and its two most important halls have been named after large oil companies.

Although primarily dedicated to the promotion of music, especially classical music, the centre hosts anything from genteel recitals to popular concerts. The Muson’s music school, located in the centre, awards internationally recognised diplomas, while its annual festival embrace diverse disciplines of arts. Its official programme might be elitist and reflect some of the conservatism for which corporate sponsorship is already notorious, but its halls are available for hire to independent cultural producers.

This would include producers such as the lawyer-turned-director, Wole Oguntokun, regarded in some quarters as the most prolific theatre producer-director in the country today, and whose career has been incubated in the Muson space. By the early 2000s, with the gradual fall into decay of the National Theatre in Lagos (built for Festac 1977), and due to the increased campus violence which made the venue at the University of Lagos unattractive for theatre going, the Muson Centre was the de facto national cultural centre.

The example of the Muson Centre has something to say for the limitations of the ‘wealthy patron’ tradition and the possibilities of collaboration with corporate patrons in sustainable, programmatic promotion of the arts. It started at about the same time as the Ajo project, and another important theatre project of the time, the PEC Repertory theatre. The PEC Rep was established by J.P. Clark and his wife, Ebun, to try the repertory theatre tradition in Nigeria. It was housed in an old, disused hall leased from a sleepy trust which had managed the property on behalf of the government for a couple of decades. Using the subscription model, the well-connected Clarks had been able to enlist a circle of the Lagos elite to subscribe to seasons of performances in advance. Whatever their relative successes were, both the PEC Rep and the Ajo experiments were to wind down after a decade or less.

The Muson is no doubt a lesson for patrons in other disciplines of the art. The folks in visual arts at least have taken that lesson seriously with the formation of Visual Arts Society of Nigeria (Vason) in 2006. Gbadamosi, a founding member of the group, was a past chairman of the board of trustees of Muson. The Vason has promised to build a museum and art centre of its own.

But even without being seduced into grand projects on the scale of the Muson Centre, corporate patrons are becoming more programmatic in their giving to the arts. Take the example of the Nigerian Prize for Literature established in 2004 by the country’s leading upstream gas company, Nigerian Liquefied Natural Gas Limited (NLNG), alongside another national prize for the sciences. With the prize money of US$100,000, NLNG attaches superlatives like “highest” and “most prestigious” to the description of its literary prize. Nigerians may pay more attention to the Caine Prize for African Writing, but when one considers that the UK-based prize, covering the entire continent, is worth one-tenth of the NLNG prize, the growing draw of the latter is understood.

The NLNG prize seems to have restored the crystal shoes to a discipline of the arts which was, for some time, the Cinderella of the lot. During the 1980s and 1990s, literature was the scorched patch. Nigerian writers, through the Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA), awarded themselves what passed for the only respectable set of prizes at the time. The collapse of the book industry chain meant that most of the benefits of a reward system were absent. Prize moneys often went unredeemed, even where prizes had been named after sponsor corporations, and although prizes were often awarded to unpublished works, these winners remained unpublished for years thereafter. Also, with the absence of the agency role of strong local publishers, a whole generation of Nigerian writers remained under the international radar. Helon Habila’s winning of the second Caine Prize in 2001 marked a symbolic return. Nigeria has dominated that prize ever since.

Citizens’ initiatives such as that of the Committee for Relevant Art (Cora), the organisers of the Lagos Book and Art Festival, were instrumental in placing literacy and literature at the centre of national discourse even through the difficult periods. So much so that, by the early 2000s, a crop of Nigerian professionals began to put their money where their rhetoric had previously sufficed, by establishing publishing houses  whose focus was on creative works, even when there was little prospect of making significant profit. Muhtar Bakare, a banker, is behind the Farafina imprint, which is representative of this new attitude.

All in all, what NLNG did was to make the promotion of literature attractive to the corporate patron. Institutions like Fidelity Bank and Farafina Trust have worked with Habila and the novelist, Chimamanda Adichie, to carry out writing workshops for young Nigerian writers with measurable results; some participants have gone on to make the shortlist of prizes such as the Caine. Other industries, from telecommunications to breweries, continue to deepen their footprint in the promotion of literacy, reading and education.

And Business says to the Arts: “Can we do business?”

The institution that surely takes the cake for investing in the arts is the Guaranty Trust Bank (GTB). Its commercial investment in the Lagos art centre, Terra Kulture, charted a new course that has brought the mantra of “trade not aid” from international development discourse into the relationship between corporation and art in Nigeria. Terra Kulture is a centre for cultural production and a thriving business. Its average annual growth rate of 65 per cent between 2009 and 2011 won it a place in the top 50 Nigerian businesses, as noted by the Tony Elumelu Foundation and AllWorld network, an organisation co-founded by Michael Porter, the Harvard strategy professor.

In terms of programming, Terra Kulture does not only rival the Muson Centre, but also has created a more liberal space where more experimental art, from spoken word poetry to fashion and stand-up comedy, can thrive. It was in its hall that Segun Adefila finally resurrected the repertory theatre culture in Lagos in 2006, with his monthly show, Buk-art-eria. The organisation’s Theatre@Terra, in which different directors take turns to stage weekly productions, has run since 2007 and must now take the crown for the most number of scheduled productions hosted by any theatre in Nigeria outside of the academic setting.

The success of GTB’s commercial investment has not derogated from its charitable giving to the arts. In 2011, the bank announced a partnership with Tate Modern in the UK which, as it told its shareholders at the end of that year, is “aimed at promoting different genres of African Art to global art communities”. Specifically, the collaboration creates a dedicated curatorial post at the Tate to focus on African art and to establish an acquisition fund to enable the Tate to increase its collection and annual African art exhibition programmes. In short, the GBT-Tate collaboration may yet do for African contemporary art what the Mobil-Metropolitan collaboration did for traditional Nigerian art 30 years ago. In 2012, more than 60 per cent of the GBT’s budgeted funding to the arts was directed at the Tate project.

The late Tayo Aderinokun, the bank’s former CEO, had in fact been so bullish about corporate giving to the arts that he had co-founded, and was chairman until his passing in 2011, the Art & Business Foundation (ABF). The ABF, now chaired by the Ghanaian-born Lagos corporate lawyer, Myma Belo-Osagie, helped to set an agenda for corporate giving to the arts in Nigeria. Its premier project, funded ironically by foreign grant from the Ford Foundation, is the resuscitation of the National Museum, Lagos.

The medicine for the culture administrator

The GTB-Tate pact is illustrative of what is currently wanting in business support for the arts in Nigeria. Even with the best intentions, misplaced priorities can result in a mismatch between spending and impact, with unintended consequences. For example, one would have preferred a situation in which GBT had directed its institution-building gift toward the Nigerian museum, the pet-project of its late CEO, rather than a British counterpart.

Nigerian art is currently on the surge internationally. Bonhams, the UK auction house, has run an annual sale of African contemporary art since 2009. As is to be expected, Nigerian entrepreneurs are also not completely oblivious of the developments. From a one-off auction in 1999, Nigeria now has two established auction houses, hosting between two and four sale events per year. Robert Mbonu, a Lagos banker and a collector, recently launched the Art Exchange project, which, as he recently told Omenka, a Nigerian art and lifestyle magazine, is aimed at further unleashing the financial value in Nigerian art works by transforming “prized works of art by masters and legends from mere decorative pieces to art assets”.

These different dynamics, working together, may result in a situation whereby the most important contemporary Nigerian works of art will only be viewed in western museums and galleries. This is already the fate of the most iconic works of Nigerian traditional art, from those of the ancient Ife and Benin traditions to the early 20th-century carvings of Olowe of Ise. This trend could be reversed if strong policy redirects business impact on the arts in the direction of strengthening Nigerian public and private institutions to acquire the choicest of Nigerian arts.

This should be the concern of George Ufot as he takes the typically long and tortuous walk toward presenting a further revised, draft policy to the government.

This article was originally published in the Chronic (March 2013).

In this issue, artists and writer from around the world take on the philanthropic complex to unravel the philosophies of dependency and power at play in the civil society of African states. To read the article in full get a copy in our online shop or visit your nearest stockists.

Early in 1977, thousands of artists, writers, musicians, activists and scholars from Africa and the black diaspora assembled in Lagos for FESTAC ’77, the 2nd World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture. With a radically ambitious agenda underwritten by Nigeria’s newfound oil wealth, FESTAC ’77 would unfold as a complex, glorious and excessive culmination of a half-century of transatlantic and pan-Africanist cultural-political gatherings.

As told by Chimurenga, this is the first publication to address the planetary scale of FESTAC alongside the personal and artistic encounters it made possible. Featuring extensive unseen photographic and archival materials, interviews and new commissions, the book relays the stories, words and works of the festival’s extraordinary cast of characters.

With: Wole Soyinka, Léopold Sédar Senghor, Ahmed Sékou Touré, Archie Shepp, Miriam Makeba, Allioune Diop, Jeff Donaldson, Louis Farrakhan, Stevie Wonder, Abdias do Nascimento, Keorapetse Kgositsile, Mario de Andrade, Ted Joans, Nadi Qamar,Carlos Moore, Ayi Kwei Armah, Ama Ata Aidoo, Johnny Dyani, Werewere Liking, Marilyn Nance, Barkley Hendricks, Mildred Thompson, Ibrahim El-Salahi, Jayne Cortez, Atukwei Okai, Jonas Gwangwa, Theo Vincent, Lindsay Barrett, Gilberto de la Nuez, Sun Ra and many others.

And featuring new writing from: Akin Adesokan, Moses Serubiri, Harmony Holiday, Semeneh Ayalew, Hassan Musa, Emmanuel Iduma, Michael McMillan, Dominique Malaquais and Cedric Vincent, Molefe Pheto, Ugochukwu-Smooth C. Nzewi, Hermano Penna, Alice Aterianus.
.

Published by Chimurenga and Afterall Books, in association with Asia Art Archive, the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College and RAW Material Company, 2019.

From 23 – 25 October 2019, Chimurenga will install its Pan African Space Station (PASS) at The New School’s Arnold and Sheila Aronson Galleries, New York City. 

The three-day broadcast, which will run from 3pm – 7pm (EDT) daily, will explore the participation of African American artists, activists and intellectuals in the 2nd World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture, FESTAC ’77, held in Lagos, Nigeria, in January-February 1977. The nearly 700-strong US delegation at FESTAC ’77 was “the largest single group of African Americans ever to return to Africa in one body” (Ebony Magazine), and featured luminaries such Sun Ra, Stevie Wonder, Audre Lorde, Alice Walker, Jayne Cortez, Barkley Hendricks, Betye Saar, Louis Farrakhan, Faith Ringgold and many, many more. The poet Kalamu ya Salaam described the event as “the culmination of the Black Art Movement oriented artistic conferences, festivals, and gatherings”.   

The PASS landing at The New School will close on 25 October with a rare performance of composer and trombonist Craig Harris’ jazz suite titled FESTAC ’77 at the John L. Tishman Auditorium. Harris travelled to Lagos as a member of Sun Ra’s Arkestra, and this composition responds to that soul-stirring experience. The concert is free and open to the public, however seating is limited. To book please go to: http://bit.ly/FESTAC77

This event will also include a presentation of Chimurenga’s new book on FESTAC ’77, the first publication to consider FESTAC in all its cultural-historic complexity, addressing the planetary scale of the event alongside the personal and artistic encounters it made possible.

(Photograph: Calvin Reid, African-American delegation at FESTAC. Lagos, Nigeria, 1977)

Speaking to Chimurenga’s ongoing research into the legacy of the seminal Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture (FESTAC ’77) held in Lagos, Nigeria in 1977,  this playlist pays tribute to artists and thinkers who participated in the festival and ensuing conversations.

Through our own research into the sonic archives from and around the event, as well as curated conversations and reflections with collaborators across the world through our itinerant radio project, this playlist is an audio supplement to our new book on FESTAC 77,  which is the first publication to consider the festival in all its cultural-historic complexity.

FESTAC 77 Mixtape

Featuring Randy Weston, Mandla Langa, Carlos Moore, The Blue Notes, Keorapetse Kgositsile, Michael McMillan, Miriam Makeba, Gilberto Gil, Tabu Ley Rochereau, Ray Lema and of course, Fela Kuti (voiced by Kolade Arogundade), who organised a counter-FESTAC during the official event in 1977.

Listening to FESTAC 77 with Ntone Edjabe and Kodwo Eshun

Chimurenga editor-in-chief Ntone Edjabe and Kodwo Eshun of The Otolith Group in the Chimurenga Library, set up at the Showroom in London in October 2015,  listen close to records from or recorded for FESTAC ’77.

A Diary of FESTAC ’77 with Michael McMillan 

As a 15-year old Michael McMillan wrote an essay that led to him being chosen as one of the “Black Britain” delegates at FESTAC ’77. Time travellin’ via the Pan African Space Station (PASS) the Showroom in London in October 2015, Michael McMillan delved into his personal arkive to recall the life-changing experiences.

Tam Fiofiri, Funsho Ogundipe and Ayeola in Conversation – LIVE at Freedom Park, Lagos

“It is said that Sun Ra introduced the Moog synthesizer to the jazz world. The man who introduced Sun Ra to the Moog is Tam Fiofori.” – Ntone Edjabe

Tam Fiofori is one of Nigeria’s most accomplished photographers who has chronicled Nigeria’s history in albums of photographs over decades. He is a filmmaker and media consultant with documentaries like ‘Odum’ and ‘Water Masquerades 1974’ that were screened at FESTAC ’77. He was also Sun Ra’s manager. Recorded live at Freedom Park, Lagos in 2016.

Finding Fela Tagores

Ntone Edjabe exploring the roots of Afrobeat, Cape Town in 2012.

No PASS but 9 PassportsVideo Player00:0001:26

“West Wind is the wind that came from Ghana in 1957… Ghana is our West, you know? Freed our people, now it must unite us.”

Miriam ‘Mazi’ Makeba performing live at FESTAC 77, Tafawa Balewa Square, Lagos, Feb 11 1977.

A mix by Ntone Edjabe, on learning of Miriam Makeba’s passing, November 9, 2008

Reviving the Blue Notes

an excerpt from Myriem by Boris Boubacar Diop

an excerpt from Myriem by Boris Boubacar Diop

Fire embassies, it was madness. The President had to make a televised speech to calm the spirits. Her courtiers had finally had no choice but to confess the truth to her: “Excellency, Mrs. Dembélé has not committed any crime, and besides, it is, uh … Excellency, a crime that no one ‘has committed. We have been rolled in the flour, Excellency, but you, the intellectual giant, you the greatest head of state in the world, etc. The President then began to shout, mouth full of drool, eyes on fire: ‘I will kill you all! Poor fools, you have covered our country with ridicule! ‘ The President was all the more furious because he knew very well that he could not kill anyone. It was not done anyway, it was always won.

But what could he do? It was not possible to set me free and say like this: it was a mistake, there was never a boat named Palomero, no street child was ever missing and the city of Strindgahm does not exist anywhere on this earth.

The president was completely stuck. I suppose he began to curse the day when, by weakness or calculation, he cried in front of the whole country. This is how this unusual thing happened. A young Republican journalist had just questioned her on the exact number of children ‘sold by Myriem Dembélé to the pedophile network of Strindgahm’. What do you want me to say to you, madam? thundered the President, raising his arms to heaven. A child or a thousand is the same, it is the same scandal, madam! After a brief pause, her eyes were veiled with sadness and we saw a big tear slowly running down her right cheek. He had quietly wiped it off before immediately composing a more normal attitude. The scene lasted only a fraction of a second, but the promptness of the President to wipe his tear was generally perceived as evidence of extreme modesty. The relatives of the President proclaimed everywhere that, under his appearance of hard, the man had a heart of gold and no one could doubt his love for street children. The president’s tear was displayed on television several times and commented on by a crowd of political scientists, sociologists and psychologists during highly learned debates. Despite their many disagreements, the experts agreed at least on one point: the tear of the President being out of his right eye and not his left eye, the economic situation was bound to improve. We had really approached the catastrophe. the man had a heart of gold and no one could doubt his love for the children of the street. The president’s tear was displayed on television several times and commented on by a crowd of political scientists, sociologists and psychologists during highly learned debates. Despite their many disagreements, the experts agreed at least on one point: the tear of the President being out of his right eye and not his left eye, the economic situation was bound to improve. We had really approached the catastrophe. the man had a heart of gold and no one could doubt his love for the children of the street. The president’s tear was displayed on television several times and commented on by a crowd of political scientists, sociologists and psychologists during highly learned debates. Despite their many disagreements, the experts agreed at least on one point: the tear of the President being out of his right eye and not his left eye, the economic situation was bound to improve. We had really approached the catastrophe. the President’s tear coming out of his right eye and not his left eye, the economic situation was bound to improve. We had really approached the catastrophe. the President’s tear coming out of his right eye and not his left eye, the economic situation was bound to improve. We had really approached the catastrophe.

…

(c) Boris Boubacar Diop

One can argue that great literary works are rarely about good sentences or syntax. Given a good literary mind, these are insignificances that will normally sort themselves out. More often than not, it is the pulse of the mind behind a piece of work that either turns it into a shoddy bundle of words, or a creation that will find resonance across cultures and connect peoples experiences in ways unenvisaged before. Such minds have been seen in geographically disparate corners of the world: Nawal el Saadawi in Egypt; Augusto Roa Bastos in Paraguay; Abdullah Hussein in Pakistan; Ngugi Wa Thiongo in Kenya; Boris Pasternak in the Soviet Union; Steve Biko in South Africa; the list is endless.

Whilst this is a literary pantheon that many a Zimbabwean writer can only dream about belonging to, one hopes that perhaps an urgent pulse is entering the work of Zimbabwean writers, both established and the upcoming writers.

Thankfully, in spite of or because of the difficulties that Zimbabwe is going through, the turn of the century has seen a quiet adjustment in the publishing of fiction, giving new voices a better platform to be heard.

In this regard there has been amaBooks Short Writings From Bulawayo, Volumes I to III, Weaver Press short story anthologies Writing Still and Writing Now, of which a natural progression ought to be Writing Nervous, for it is a nervous pulse that beats beneath the face of any Zimbabwean, be it a writer or a crack lipped mother in the rural areas who knows first hand the kind of tricky relationship a child can have with its empty stomach, or a nurse in diaspora who dreads the text message from her family asking her to wire more money back to their family who find themselves increasingly unable to look after themselves in an economy ravaged by inflation, the unemployed citizen who braves the aquatic predators of the Limpopo to become an illegal immigrant in South Africa, or the firebrand intellectual who dabbled in utilitarianism of a Stalinist variety advocating the tearing down of the social fabric and national institutions in the name of the final revolution, the third chimurenga and now finds him/ herself sitting at his/her desk; pondering the question of again cutting whatever is left of our national nose to show what we are capable of when push comes to shove. All are in a nervous condition; all are hostages. That includes the president himself, who held hostage by his own will, is nervous about the future. Nervous because although he may have seen the moral shallowness of imperialism, colonialism, global capitalism and mutations of such, far from raising himself above such moral conventions, he continues to live in a moral depravity that he makes up for by exercising brutal power over ordinary citizens. His would be a fascinating contribution to Writing Nervous.

That Zimbabwean writers of wildly differing opinions, whether inside or outside the country, find themselves moved to commit pen to paper in larger numbers, is a healthy development for Zimbabwean literature. And it is perhaps fitting and natural that such developments should be accompanied by the appearance of the above mentioned short story anthologies that have given new writers platforms to be heard. Gone are the euphoric and rather innocent days when the unknown short story writer had to look to the magazines Parade and Moto or the Sunday Newspaper supplements to cut their teeth.

Those were the days when Auntie Rhoda, Parade Magazines famed agony aunt, had the answers to all the citizens questions, from the challenges of living with alcoholic husbands to handling bad tempered mothers in law who were going through a mental pause (sic). Today the social pulse is a different one, the questions are bigger and perhaps true of Cameroonian scholar Achille Mbembes view of many a post colonial African country: a reality that is made up of superstitions, narratives and fictions that claim to be true in the very act through which they produce the false, while at the same time giving rise to both terror, hilarity and astonishment. No doubt there are still issues that Auntie Rhoda would still be able to take in her stride, but even she would probably quiver at the thought of an impending whack on the head were she to give answers that are sympathetic to one political truth at the expense of another.

Because of this, it is appropriate that some of the tricky questions be dealt with in these recent short story anthology series; the conversation can no longer be with Auntie Rhoda, but amongst the writers themselves.

Perhaps due to these and other developments, new writers have come into visibility, myself included. These include Stanley Mupfudza, Gugu Ndlovu, Andrew Aresho, Edward Chinhanhu, Chris Mlalazi and Lawrence Hoba among many.

Some have come into the public eye through the British Councils Crossing Borders programme, amongst them, Chaltone Tshabangu, Adrian Ashley and Blessing Musariri, while from the diaspora poet Togara Muzanenhamo, Stanley Makuwe and Petina Gappah (who was recently shortlisted for the 2007 HSBC-SA PEN Literary Award along with Chris Mlalazi) are emerging. And to add an urbane and gritty realism to this cacophony of voices is a gang of spoken word practitioners like The Teacher, Manikongo, Lucius, Comrade Fatso and Mbizo who, through their performances at The Book Caf頰oetry slams have over the years been creating another row in the choir, right behind such seasoned performance poets like Chirikure Chirikure and Ignatius Mabasa.

The names mentioned here are only a handful picked from many equally good writers. In the years to come, some will be able to tap into the national psyche and produce inspired and great works, while many more of us, will be lost in the fog of our condition. Today, with the aid of digital chatter, our perceptions of our epoch are set to multiply dizzyingly, and from this heap of words, facts, fictions, sophistries and startling lies, one hopes that something will emerge, something that will at least measure up to the past works of names such as Charles Mungoshi, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Yvonne Vera, Chenjerai Hove or Shimmer Chinodya. No doubt, the hurdles ahead are many, and the intellectual demands on the writer or poet of today are greater.

Whereas yesteryear it was enough to talk of Zimbabweans suffering in the colonial era and during the war, today it is the fictions of liberation that must be put under scrutiny; it is time to ask harder questions, and perhaps soberly consider, creatively enquire and consider in our own different ways, such assertions as those of Czech born playwright Tom Stoppard who in reference to communism in Eastern Europe suggested that revolution is a trivial shift in the emphasis of suffering. To question continuously, put ones finger on a nations pulse and at the same time hold the mirror to its collective face without flinching, one imagines, is the staff of works whose worth is not only judged by syntax or the number of adverbs.

Brian Chikwava is a Zimbabwean writer who lives in London. In 2004 he was the winner of the Caine Prize for African Writing and is currently is working on a novel alongside a short story collection.

An Essay by Mike Abraham
2008

Germiston station has a very long platform. It is located at the base in a fork of the railway network that split the East Rand between Pretoria and Springs. This junction serves the vast industrial area on the East Rand ferrying human cargo to and from workplaces all over the Witwatersrand and also to transport goods and products of cheap and hard labour from the mines, processing plants, steel foundries, chemical and electrical production lines through all ports across many borders to distant corners of the world for others to consume.

Here at Germiston Junction you’ll find people from the furthest townships, always tired; tired of too little sleep, too hard work, too long travelling and tired of always watching out for cops. Not having dompas papers in order can mean the difference between reaching home at ten in the evening or ten months later. Dependent on where you live and work, it is often here that you change from one train to another.

The junction is a hive of human energy and activity, with cops always at hand to harass black travellers for stolen goods, ganja or other contraband, but mainly for that dreaded dompas. Here everybody seems in a hurry, rushing in all directions with all sorts of cargo as they chase the next train. Brides travel from cracked hard hands of those in faded and dirty work-clothes to greasy, greedy, fleshy palms of those in uniforms as if a ticket to get onto the train. Earlier, in the late sixties or early seventies, a train loaded with oil, chemicals and other flammable products ran out of control at the station, bursting into flames, causing scores of deaths and injuries. Some still talk about the explosion, the unbearable flames, the heat and the bellowing black smoke, the smell of burning human flesh mixed with industrial pollutants, the deaths of fellow-workers and the running and screaming of survivors. My father was on the platform that day, also changing trains on his way to work. He ran, he survived.

It is here that the wiseguys, the outies, the ouens mastered the art of staffriding. If you’re from somewhere on the West Rand on your way to Pretoria and you know you’ll miss a few trains at Germiston if you take the all-stations, so you jump on an express and alight from a fast moving train – which always seems to pick-up speed as it enters the Germiston just to make it more difficult for the staffriders. Here platform politics rhythmically play out the politics of the land; white against black, rich against poor, workers against bosses, people against machines. But the staffriders lived and died in that little space between train and platform, between roles.A split second of misreckoning and it’s all over. Here timing is a matter of life and death.

We are in the mid 1980s. I have just returned from the Pretoria side of the East Rand on my way to Springs. My cargo is political contraband, hidden in washing powder boxes, carefully opened at the bottom where the contents were emptied and the box then filled with illegal political material and glued meticulously. I also have my ghetto blaster with me, those ones with the long PM10 batteries – its insides also removed and filled with more political material I am been couriering around from one part of the East Rand to another.

Sitting on the platform at Germiston station a train approaches at high speed on the Springs line, clearly an express. It is not going to stop at the station, the rhythmic noise of the train tells you that. I leisurely step back, prop myself up against one of the high-powered electricity pylons – always coolly keeping an eye on the the cops. Then I notice it. Almost synchronised with a stealthiness about it, the rebirth of Staffrider plays itself out. Above the hypnotic clanging of the train you can hear distinctive banging sounds not part of the train’s noise, not quite the sound of gun yet not far off, not quite staccato either, rather chaotic. Sounds that make you turn towards the noise quickly, tensely and ready to respond appropriately – we are a nation on edge. So, my attention is captured by the banging noise from the high speeding train and I turn to witness the most daring township jazz, the bravest poetry, the sweetest dance moves. The outies are showing their stuff. Here, on this platform, you don’t break a leg, you lose your life.

Through many windows and doors where the banging sounds come from, hands push out, searching, feeling for something to grip onto. Then one leg, and a second leg, through the window. Then some adjustment of the body to sit in the best position, tense yet relaxed, waiting, calmly shaking with the rhythm of the train, waiting for the right moment. Up to five or six riders on the same pole, all hanging out of the train at angles most convenient for the grip, hand preparing the next move. The train rushes past half the platform and all of us on the platform say soft prayers as we see the white of their eyes, focussing, concentrating; the wind tucked in work-clothes and making their cheeks look puffed. And then, a rat-a-tat-a-tat, almost endlessly as a sea of soles hit the tarmac of the platform, young men shouting, swerving, twisting, jigging, jagging as they avoid colliding with each other, some adding an exaggerated twirl as they give vent to the last of their pent-up adrenaline. Laughing loudly and continuing conversations interrupted by this moment they rush across to the other side of the station to another platform to wait for another train. Eyes shining with daring and defiance they disappear. Brothers with Perfect Timing. They’ll be back tomorrow.

I stand there breathing heavily with the young brothers, experiencing their moment, feeling their exhilaration and smile to myself. This is my second contact with staffriders. I’ve felt this way before, when I picked up my first Staffrider in 1978.

In the 1970s our house was a hangout place for many BC cats, they partied here, they drank here, met partners, fell in love and celebrated here, broken hearts mended and sorrows drowned with cheap wine and the wise counsel of my old man. Here plots were hatched and politics debated, from the takeover of the Bush University SRC to rehearsals of Manifesto’s and many other things happened here. Diliza Mji met Albert Torres, one of the last SASO leaders at Bush, here. I remember the whispers around the house when a cousin brought Mapetla Mohapi (supposed to be serving a banning order in the Eastern Cape) – or was it someone else? – to sleep over after a meeting; Johnny Issel (or someone else) too violated a house arrest banning order to visit, meet discuss or join a party.

In the boys’ room on the grey-blue wall there was a huge black fist painstakingly put together with small pieces of black gaffer tape by Henry. There on the table in the middle of the room, in between term papers and LPs was Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth, SASO’s Black Review 1977, Edgar Snow’s The Long March and Mao’s On Contradictions. And the chess board with a white king lying on his side surrounded by black knights, a bishop and pawns propped on top of it all, signs of the last game lost by someone who will have to buy the booze next time. I went into the room looking for Hugh Masekela’s The Boy’s Doin’ It! And there was Staffrider!

My oldest brother, Henry, was absolutely ruthless in keeping me away from politics – after warnings by father and beggings by mother. “Don’t let your brothers get involved in politics, they still at school, let them focus on their school work,” they had told him. He had already done his first stint in detention by then. And I had already thrown my first stones, burnt my first barricades, cried my first teargas tears, and stolen Paulo Freire to study in the open veld behind the township, instead of going to school. It was too late. Nothing that was going to stop me from joining this revolution.

The cover was defiantly alluring, the art work, a pencil, charcoal sketch or something similar, captured all the pain, anguish, torture and crucifixion of being black yet rebelliously flexed its muscles with the focused and concentrated stare of the staffriders I’d later meet at Germiston Junction. Forgetting Bra Hugh I walked out of the room with Staffrider put in my school bag, where it joined Cry Rage and The Iron Heel – for the next day when my friend Weber and I would read it thoroughly.

I read and re-read Mafika Gwala, Oswald Mtshali, Ben Langa and many others; I studied the photographs and art works, learnt about theater, drama, art and poetry collectives of far flung townships in the Eastern Cape, Durban and Jo’burg. The pages breathed life into the Malopoets. I saw all the black suffering and I saw more black resistance and knew I was a staffrider too. That same year I became a Staffrider vendor at the bus rank. I even built up a small group of loyal readers, including some of my fellow students.

As I wander the new South Africa, around Newtown, Berea, Yeoville, Melville and sometimes Rosebank I see young people chasing a recording deal, funding for one or another project, connections for a show or some publishing contact and I yearn for staffriders, for those who jumped off fast moving trains with the grace of dancers, who did not wait for handouts, dared, defied and took the leap. A time when the arts were not merely entertainment, something added on at the end of the speeches, after the rally, or sneaked in-between fiery speeches – Staffrider was the clenched-fist, the speech and the rally too.

An Essay by Ivan Vladislavić
March 2008

I joined Ravan Press as a social studies editor in 1984. The press was then operating from an old house in Berea, practically the last house left in a neighbourhood of flats and hotels. On my first morning, Chris van Wyk, the editor of Staffrider, showed me around the office. After he’d introduced me to the people in sales and dispatch, we went into a small back garden and crossed a patch of lawn to a coach house backing on to the service alley. It was an incongruous building, a relic of the early days of the city, now serving as a store room.

I followed Chris up a wooden ladder into the attic. This awkward space, which must have been meant for hay bales and harnesses, was crammed with books in teetering piles, Muriel at Metropolitan, Call Me Not a Man, Dusklands – the hardcover edition, which had not sold well – back issues of the Spro-cas reports and Staffrider. A little high-rise Hillbrow made of books and magazines. That evening I took home a set of the magazines, including the banned issues retrieved from mislabelled boxes, and over the next few weeks, while I was finding my feet in the house, I read them from cover to cover.

When Staffrider first appeared in 1979, I had found it strident and humourless. As a member of the Lionel Abrahams writing group, my first published work naturally ended up in The Bloody Horse and Sesame, which were altogether more suburban than Staffrider. But a young person’s ideas can change radically in five years. By 1984, I had spent a year abroad and I had discovered the light political touch of writers like Herbert, Kundera and Kiš. My sense of the country and my place in it had shifted. I pored over the five volumes of Staffrider in my Yeoville flat as if they might offer me a job description along with some solutions to the dilemmas of a young writer.

The most striking thing about the magazine, even today, is its sense of place. The topography is clearly more important than the typography. Every contributor is tagged to a town or township, sometimes to a cultural group (the Kwanza Creative Society of Mabopane East, the Guyo Book Club, Sibasa). The first editorial made it clear that this arrangement aimed to support writers with a ‘direct line’ to their communities, although those writing and publishing as ‘unattached individuals’ were also welcome. The idea was to reflect and reinforce community mobilisation around culture in the wake of ’76.

For an individual in search of symbolic attachment, as I was, Staffrider held out a simple promise. Here was a South Africa in which Meadowlands and Morningside were on the same page, where Douglas Livingstone of Durban and Mango Tshabangu of Jabavu were side by side, with nothing between them but a stretch of paper and a 1-point rule. The resonance of such a simple idea is almost impossible to recapture now, but in the demented, divided space of apartheid it was bracing. All the other borders the magazine crossed between fiction and autobiography, written and spoken word, lyrical flight and social documentary rest on that first idealistic gesture. The magazine belongs to all who live in it.

Of course, it was more complicated than that. The lines between writers and their ‘communities’ are no clearer than anyone else’s. As Mike Kirkwood later pointed out (Ten Years of Staffrider, Ravan Press, 1988), the design principle ‘conferred “community” on writers living in a state of blissful anomie’. The real differences in politics and aesthetics could not be resolved in the layout. In time many of the quieter voices fell silent, drowned out – or feeling that way – and the magazine became repetitive. It has its share of half-baked prose and overcooked poetry. Yet it was never merely a political megaphone. There was always room in its pages for Shabbir Banoobhai’s delicate poems, Joel Matlou’s surrealist folktales, Njabulo Ndebele’s supple essays.

The magazine was an expression of its time in other ways. Chris van Wyk was editor, writing teacher, mentor and friend to more writers than I can remember, especially the beginners. He spent half his time at the kitchen table or on a rickety bench in the garden, drinking coffee and talking with some poet who had come all the way from Evaton or beyond, the handwritten work spread out between them. That was the hallmark of the submissions: written in longhand in ballpoint in a school exercise book. In the end, all this talking and advising was bad business: a commercial publishing house is not meant to be a writing school. But it was good in every other way.

For readers, literary magazines come and go, drifting from the bedside table to the back of a cupboard or the dustbin soon enough. In publishing houses, the archive, the short shelf of publications growing year by year, painfully slowly, concentrating a ridiculous amount of effort into a confined space, has a dense, enduring presence. At Ravan, Staffrider was the truest expression of the publishing house’s history and spirit. The magazines were part of the furniture: you found them under your coffee mug at the end of the day. Twenty years later, they are still amazingly familiar to me. The sight of one in a second-hand dealer plunges me into another time and place.

Volume 3, Number 2 (June 1980), which celebrated Zimbabwean independence, has Paul Weinberg’s photo of Comrade Bernard, a young ZANLA guerrilla commander, on the cover. There is a comment from him inside: ‘All I want to see happen is true liberation, the suffering ended and a country that serves its people.’ This particular issue was incorrectly billed as Volume 3, Number 1 on the cover, and the mistake had to be corrected by hand: someone went through all the copies and stuck a patch of paper with a handwritten correction over the typo. These little bandaids move me as much as anything the magazine ever published.

An Essay by Lesego Rampolokeng
May 2008

Down from a couple years beyond 30/30. it was the age of cerebral haemorrhage.

The oppression monster was thirsty. YET tabloids were in flight on slaughtered chicken-wings, darkest science witchcraft… Could only track rites of human sacrifice… caught between bullet & gullet, turn to what?

It came from that time when the mind was contraband…
Before we had the need to pretend different.

1994 Ravan Press ran rejection slips that said they did not publish ‘that type of thing anymore’. I battle still with what that meant. Coming down Rabasotho street, turn that. Away from the dumping ground, parallel the rail-line (was a time when you found babies on both (the trash or the tracks, that is… your choice, Sandile) & get to where Mthuthuzeli Matshoba passed for the back-cover photo of his one book, Mzimhlophe station, Orlando West.
Famed, Nobel laureates, wilful amnesiacs, first millionaires, years soweto’s only legit nightclub, the super-astral, the subterranean, original spot-runners, groaners & croakers, mass child-murderers, priests pimping for more than just Jesus, blades having dice & eyes vie for space in the dust between the intestines & the worms… boots squashing all… muddy beginnings, those… Call Me Not a Man, the searing bleeding cry of a book was titled… chopped & cut up bits first floated to surface in Staffrider.

None of it plastic… the flames saw to that.

Mandlenkosi Langa in the midst of ghouls that gloated over human passings… Ingoapele Madingoane… when slaughter reduced language to human waste, black rain took different definition… & seed was gone to the toxic wind:
khumbula my child, that’s where you were born… calling remembrance upon the seed.the genesis vision. Behold My Son called up the dawn of Afrika day… & then soon gone down.
Matsemela Manaka called out ‘Let us create & talk about life… That was before the slime-light glow of The Word as fashion-show. Let Art be Life… same expression today bought. auction blocked up. The slaves chain themselves to it. The business muse tilts the justice scales.

To staff-ride means taking or shaking the train, on the hoof… back-front-sideways.death-dance down the years wrapped in romance, here… mutilation, there… amputated limbs. Staffriders hip-hopped before the fact while their heads got lobbed off. Hormone-charged on top of the whistles of watchers, sometimes grannies & tannies claiming them for the girlies in the backyard. Proclaimed Abakhwenyana… sons-in-law, until they were maimed. Or worse, would never run again in reverse.or forward ever!
Those whistles were Mission Station Identification crackling thru past the clanging metal on shrieking skull… isiparapara… sound of takkies flapping across concrete. Slip, fall, get mashed up & watch the audience get tickled to cackling. And banana peels sought to turn the sick humour on. & keep the revolution green.

And then… speak to someone out the side of your mouth & you’ll be warned not to staffride. So there we go, sliding down this platform.

Form & content standing in contest?
Sometimes the message came in headless.
Or the messenger-tongue sick of aesthetic talk, took it to the street.

Think Regina Mundi… allah poets. Spirit us black in time.
Before political expediency metamorphosed little victims until smoking revolutionaries.

Nape Motana distilled pain.
Setuke’s marathon man was in bondage.
Eugene Skeef, Malopoets… .when blood on skin was mural.
Ignoramus splashed senses across the sheets, Tshilidzi!
(80s states of emergency saw versions of retrogression.
young lions drew their roars from antiquity… 90s and on bodies in the mine can’t compete against platinum concerns. irrelevance.)

young frustration was turning a line against the book-binding. Or the book-bound. Perception up from the Shakespearean., to hit the brain-boil-blood-bubble equilibrium in a three strike body-slam.
Most was ‘creating on the trot’.
The enraged freedom-beast lashing torn appendages against the cage… but… ah, it was just the page, man.

Night of the white termite’s no b-horror title but Shaka’s prophecy come again, yet again. this time in prose. it was years later the red-ants came. Under newer skies. But we had the blackjacks then, of whom ‘call me not a man’ spoke.

On the graphics-front…

It was surreal coming down, before the -isms.dark, in whatever sense. Magadlela, hassan, mogale, nhlabatsi. Bleeding pencil drawings, serrated woodcuts, it seemed. Dipped in life/death-fluids. The bravely informed call some naÔve. Put it all in cubes & the prism-shine.
Shebeen scene. Gunbeams refracted off glasses to light prison.
Ghetto dusks where the sun was bodies going down.
Brute police to the baton at Africa, the continent sprouting tentacles digging in & outward to touch the universe.
           It was “I am an african’ before the coming (back) of the Renaissance-Man.
           Or (as BC had it, then): wine in London was still blood to the Sowetan.
           Confuse that road not with the way of the Christian.

out of Rondebosch came the god-statement : there are no black poets. Ok then, steeping up prose-front:

Joel Matlou, Careless Man Was a Useless Man the magic rendered closest enough to the ground for Tutuolaphiles to get orgasmic on, without being adult-toy approximation. Future gone past without passing -ism.
Plus it came with its own illustration just in case minds present couldn’t tune in without de pikichas.
No external force for any change…
& sticking it to legend’s depths, Bheki Maseko’s Mamlambo… the township gone astral rolled in The Word as Deep Space Music.

No editorial intervention except from within. As freestyle as origin.
(back-twisted hindsight would perhaps deem that bound-to-go-boom)
as it came so it was tossed into the commune.
Solo duo group creation.
(perhaps also programmed to shelf-destruct, it was not on the stock of any book-chain that had commercial respect)
thus also ran its distribution, sale-point were also the individual labs, contributor-distributors would have been it, except then was no BEE sneak-talk.
For its reach the mag hit the dust-patch.

Re-vision frelimo on a portuguese bum-rush.
& the great Zimbabwean was inspiration drawn, before jongwe became fried chicken. Lancelot Maseko came staffriding from Zim down south.
& now of course the rusted battle-axes are out, they wash them in blood, they are to lay claim.
& that juice doesn’t colour today’s ink.

Staffriding time we were tripping out on inverted weeping willows. Much like the stone-pillows resting on crushed skulls.
Gutterflies decked out in scatological colours.

Gears changed & Chris van Wyk, installed as editor, declared ‘africa… breast of mother’ imagery dried up. Saw malnourishment in that, called time-out for a re-fuel. the engine’s stalled, since.
Yes, how many drums can you beat before the palms split?
Tears falling/rolling upward.
Perverse romantic. Death of lyric?

The spot of ground we trod. Context. Time’s great dictation. Got it all locked down. Still, mediocrity knows no excuse. Apartheid created some. & when it played “dead & past” they went extinct. The others continue to ride our hell’s wagon.
well, those who swallowed the cross bleed vinegar, thus say the Black Scriptures
as quoted by Reverend Narcissus Nigger. Also, Lord of the Spies used to be lowest curse, but now is king of the high-rise. So it goes, travelling nowhere.
In this fiddle-verse era, baby-butt-soft song itching for hardcoreness going vibratobetween his vaseline lips, word-warrior worms on his own dong, self-bone-enthroned ‘raised himself from the bottom’ (they say who know left right & wrong)to make a diddle-arse career… .out of middle-class hysteria…
massa-man vibration, yeah ya… fi real.
So, is there a free-zone magazine on the horizon, furthest away from Pig Business, Literary -Politan & politician with fartistic ambition?

Cosaw & Andries Oliphant tried to put kindling to the latent & the dormant, to dead avail. the railway sleepers had been carried off. Up freedom hill… portend nothing, never be another, that is, without the cosmetic surgery/advertisement.

by Peter James Hudson

November 2010

Spear: Canada’s Truth and Soul Magazine launched in Toronto in 1971. Soon after, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police’s secret service wing opened a dossier on the magazine labeled “General Conditions and Subversive Activities Among Negroes (Canada).” But the RCMP never really considered Spear (aka publication 4060) much of a threat. Spear, they observed, “contains generally non-political articles and bright pictures featuring black models, marriage and other happenings in the black community in Toronto.” It was an assessment in line with the aims of publisher Dan Gooding, Jr. and 

Spear: Canada’s Truth and Soul Magazine launched in Toronto in 1971. Soon after, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police’s secret service wing opened a dossier on the magazine labeled “General Conditions and Subversive Activities Among Negroes (Canada).” But the RCMP never really considered Spear (aka publication 4060) much of a threat. Spear, they observed, “contains generally non-political articles and bright pictures featuring black models, marriage and other happenings in the black community in Toronto.” It was an assessment in line with the aims of publisher Dan Gooding, Jr. and editor J. Ashton Brathwaite.

In an early editorial Brathwaite declared Spear‘s middlebrow ambitions. He wanted to create a Canadian version of Ebony, Jet, Tan, and Essence, the pretty, vacant African-American rags appealing to Black upward mobility and the iridescent accessorizing of Black Power as Black consumerism. However, budget constraints restricted the design of Spear‘s first issues, generating a rather modest aesthetic. With their duotone covers, amateurish layout, and often lackadaisical copy-editing, Spear‘s initial numbers more resembled a self-published “little” magazine than a slick gazette announcing Toronto’s nascent Black middle class.

But few “little” magazines published centerfolds. Fewer still sponsored the Miss Spear competition. Its contestants were drawn from the pool of Black models gracing the magazine’s pages, their photographs accompanied by short, leering, Playboy-esque captions written by Brathwaite focusing on the dimensions of the models’ “fine brown frame[s].” An example: “Wow! Sister Lyn, you sure got a fine brown frame. Your hot pants look fine too, but with a figure like that who do you think will bother about whether your pants is hot or cold! Hmn!” Or “The Sister with the hotpants on is Vie Anderson, a receptionist aspiring to be a model. Quite a hot pair of pants! But that brown frame is definitely a much hotter item!”

Yet Spear, which, incidentally, Brathwaite described as a “family magazine” that avoided “carrying stories on violence, crime, obscenity, and other items which we think will offend the moral standards,” was more than just female pinups. For good measure, it published beefcake photographs of shirtless brothers flexing their muscles at the local gym. It also contained a mish-mash of profiles of local Black personalities, reviews of local Black cultural events, and opinion pieces on the nature of race and racism in Canada, the vexed relations between West Indians and Afro-Canadians, and the pressing issue of interracial marriage and dating. Brathwaite, whose self-published Niggers This is Canada is perhaps the greatest ever novel on the Black Canadian experience, contributed an International Rap Up, a wry digest of political dispatches from the Black World. He also wrote a series of long opinion pieces, including an unanswered “Open Letter to Horace Campbell,” that decried the purported intellectual snobbery of the Jamaican pan-Africanist, and an essay that posed the question, “How Black is Angela Davis?” Not very, according to Brathwaite: she’s a Communist. Meanwhile, the awful Black nationalist poems by one “Negrophil Osopher” made way for those by Sister Dionne, a teen-age Dionne Brand making her poetic debut. Sister Dionne’s “Behold! The Revolutionary Dreamer” contains the fire, if not quite the elegance, of her later, award-winning verse:

How can you be a stoned revolutionary
Look at every nigger on the street
Maybe in your dream periphery
In your existence contradictory
You can see, can imagine
Yourself to be
Holding in one fist power and speed
But it’s only horse power you see
Instead of the great human power it could be
Soon the man is gonna see
If he hasn’t already
That, nigger, you’re a weak freak
WEAK — FR—-E—AK
Cool, nigger, can you see your dreams creak?

After Brathwaite changed his name to Odimumba Kwamdela and went into self-imposed exile in Brooklyn, Brand was one of a number of editors, including Ghana-born journalist Sam Donkoh, future Share publisher Arnold Auguste, and the Guyanese-Canadian polymath Arnold Itwaru, who manned the helm of Spear through to the 1980s. With the changes, the journal’s quality improved and Spear‘s pages came to embody something of the cultural paradoxes of Black Canadian middle-class being. Thus, celebratory wedding notices were paired with Femi Ojo-Ade’s dense, theory-driven treatise “The Throes of Black Alienation.” Advertisements for living room sets combined with a three-part interview on white supremacy and capitalism with Roosevelt (Rosie) Douglas. Douglas, the late Prime Minister of Dominica, was at the time sitting in a Canadian jail waiting trial for an arson charge associated with student protests at Sir George Williams college in Montreal. Sometimes the juxtapositions were sublime. Spear occasionally found a sort of harmonic convergence of the parallel galaxies of Black political and aesthetic radicalism. In one issue, a profile of Jamaican diva Grace Jones ran next to an interview with Trini Trotskyite CLR James.

The moment wasn’t sustained. By the early 1980s, whatever radical edge Spear maintained was dulled. The advertising from local business was dwarfed first, by announcements from the Canadian government’s multicultural programs, and then by full-page spreads (replete with Black consumers) from Air Canada and Molson’s, the Canadian brewing conglomerate. The Black World dispatches disappeared (as did the Miss Spear centerfolds), replaced by recipes for Christmas cocktails and pensèes on proper table-settings. For the final few issues before it suspended publication in 1987, what was once Spear: Canada’s Truth And Soul was re-tagged as Spear: Canada’s Black Family Magazine. Brathwaite’s initial vision, and the RCMP’s early impression, appeared fulfilled.

by Nancy Rose Hunt

Beginning nearly fifty years ago, in 1968, Kinshasa has seen an explosion of underground street comics and the man regarded as the master of this form is the self-proclaimed Emperor and Majesty, Papa Mfumu’eto the First. From 1990 to the early 2000s, Papa Mfumu’eto produced over 200 comics, in 115 separate titles, with some series comprising up to 40 instalments, and nearly all of them have been in Lingala, the vernacular of Kinshasa’s streets.

Papa Mfumu’eto first rose to fame with his comic about a cannibalistic urban dandy. This big man transformed himself into a predatory boa in his bedroom to consume his sexual prey: a young woman who unwillingly accepted his invitation home. A sequel playfully engaged with Papa Mfumu’eto’s own sudden popularity in Kinshasa, with depictions of his readers eagerly buying Super-choc no. 2 to learn whether the boa-man is fact or fiction. True he was, they soon learned, as the snake-man vomited up his meal of a woman as cash. Dollar bills by the hundreds filled the big man’s bedroom, while shocked Kinois readers, shown in the final frames, stayed glued to the unfolding news.

Readers interpreted this snake-like figure spewing out dollars to be Mobutu, the head of state, long rumoured to combine money, women, and sorcery with power.

These were common terms in Kinshasa’s vernacular – ingestion and expulsion, power and eating, wealth and malevolence. Idioms about the abuse of power were salient during the last moneymad Mobutu years, as rumours swirled about his use of poisons and other nefarious technologies to eliminate enemies and keep his grip on power.

Over the years, Papa Mfumu’eto has captivated diverse audiences with a varied output about the everyday and spectacular in Kinshasa. His comic booklets tell of the visible and invisible, of ancestors, spirits, and of scary creatures acting upon lives in decisive, mystical ways. His trajectory of fame is part of his narration. He often talks and writes about himself in the third person, portraying himself as a special, fantastic hero, and referring to himself as the First or “your much beloved” when addressing fans.

Irony, too, is everywhere in Papa Mfumu’eto’s comics, manifesting in strange, mixed-up, animalhuman creatures clutching deadly technological objects. His hierarchies are subtle and everyday, moving between well-dressed bigmen, famous musicians, a ruthless head of state, and ordinary women and children.

Papa Mfumu’eto’s prolific production has continued into the 2000s when he has begun painting as well. But he hasn’t entered the global comic or art circuits, almost wilfully circumventing them to keep his focus on his Lingala-speaking publics in Kinshasa and the Lower Congo region. His print technology remains simple and monochrome (except for covers in bright colours).

His output is almost miraculous, given the difficulties of sustaining production, but he has never sought an audience in more lucrative markets elsewhere. He remains true to his readers, captivating them with stories drawn from the reality of their everyday existence.

His comics have long contained an impulse toward diagnosing medical, social, and spiritual problems. He likes to intervene with a guardian touch, extending moral messages about domestic and sexual lives to his readers, often through eerie stories that produce laughter and unease. He represents adultery as an occasion when occult forces intervene. In Likambo ya Ngaba, for instance, during a clandestine visit to a hotel for sex, a woman becomes fastened to her partner by a machine with a lock device.

Permeability between life and death is another recurring theme and it’s at the heart of his longestrunning series, Tshilombe Bernard, about a character oscillating between life and death. The series lasted three years, 20 issues in all, with the hypermodern subject dressed in suit and tie flickering between living and dying, while the pages filled with caskets, graveyards, fancy clothes, and other signs of life, death, and fame. Mwasi ya Tata shows continual misunderstandings between a small boy and the wife of his father. The theme of a child caught between a parent and a new lover or spouse appeared again in his famous series, Muan’a Mbanda, about children growing up in a household of cowives, at risk of rivalry and its results: hate, hunger, and revulsion. Papa Mfumu’eto’s comics about children have always had a strangeness to them. In one, a baby born in the night merges with her old grandmother into a new being that possesses a young wife, Nzumba. Soon this spouse and her husband are beset by calamities and disorders, while not realising the mysterious baby is the responsible, poisonous agent.

While his style has varied over the years, Papa Mfumu’eto’s comics all include strong images and striking covers. His texts are carefully rendered and sometimes excessively detailed, the tiny words often filling an entire page. His innovative layouts produce the surprising tempo of his plots, whether in a single booklet or across a series. Household troubles and national grief, whether rooted in sorcery invasions, sexual rivalries, or human animosities, combine with wondrous flashes of celebrity and power. Through all of it the selfproclaimed Emperor and Majesty chronicles life in Kinshasa: past, present and future.

This article first appeared in Chimurenga Chronic: The Corpse Exhibition & Older Graphic Stories (August 2016) 

Spearman… Lance Spearman – the name synonymous with the intrepid hero of the photo-comic staple, African Film, started by the publisher of South Africa’s Drum Magazine, produced by fledgling writers and read voraciously by 1970s Nigerian schoolboys, including Uzor Maxim Uzoatu, who dreamed of wars and victories other than those around them.

The Biafra War had just ended in January 1970, but at the age of nine I felt none of the general despondency that gripped the country. All I could think about was war and heroism. So much so that I fabricated fibs to my credulous mates of how, in the company of some diehard Biafran war commanders, I had brought down enemy Nigerian planes from the sky with the aid of a special magnet called Magnetor.

It was against the background of lapping up heroes in the post-war broken city of Onitsha that I came into the unforgettable company of Lance Spearman. I met Spearman through a dog-eared copy of the photo-magazine African Film, given to me by Jude Akudinobi, who was then a secondary school student at Christ the King College, Onitsha, where his father taught alongside my uncle, the linguist J.O. Aginam. Shortly after seducing me into the arresting world of Lance Spearman, alias Spear, the selfsame Jude took me with four of his younger brothers to Chanrai Supermarket and asked us to pick any novel of our choice. Remarkably, I chose a book, The Good, The Bad, The Ugly, without any knowledge whatsoever of the classic Western movie starring Clint Eastwood and Lee Van Cleef. The daredevilry of the novel’s toughie, Desperado Tuco, became aligned to the intrepidity of Spear in my imagination and came to define my growing-up years.

It nearly led to a tragedy. One of the local Onitsha boys who could not bear my hyperactivity brought a friend of his to fight me. The entire neighbourhood gathered to watch. It took no time at all for me to floor the boy, using him to “stone the ground” as we used to say. The boy passed out, and the fellow who had brought the floored fighter was now accusing me of killing the lad, saying, “Have you seen what you have done to him?” It took some heart-stopping moments for the boy to be revived. Reality invaded my fantasy world and the threat of a stint in jail or even the hangman’s noose effectively marked the end of my brief career as the local Lance Spearman. Witnesses of the incident still rib me about it to this day, especially Jude Akudinobi who, perhaps unsurprisingly considering his love for African Film, would take a doctorate in film studies, and now lectures at the University of Southern California at Santa Barbara.

In the heady days after the Nigerian Civil War the look-read photo-magazine African Film starring the dapper Lance Spearman was our hebdomadal staple in Onitsha, the overpopulated township that earned its mark in the world of letters on account of the market literature available there. Some Monday for sure, as Nadine Gordimer would put it, the paterfamilias of the Akudinobi family shelled out one shilling for a copy of African Film magazine, and another shilling for Boom magazine starring the Tarzanlike Fearless Fang. Scores of us had to make do with each edition of the magazines until finally the wear and tear triumphed over our reading.

Spear was our darling crimebuster par excellence, a cigar-chomping champion who was a serial lady-killer in the mould of James Bond 007. Riding in his Stingray coupé with his trademark Panama hat on his head, Spear showcased the urbane and the modern. Talking through his walkie-talkie and drinking scotch-on-the-rocks, Spear was indeed the toast of the generation. The breathtaking car chases were grist to the Spear mill that kept us hooked for weeks on end. The modernity of technology added cubits to the appeal of Spear as the role model of the new age of ultra-modern architecture, sharp women and sharper criminality in Nigeria.

Given the anti-apartheid politics of the era, no mention was made that the magazine originated in South Africa. A Lagos- Nigeria address was on hand as the place of publication. It was only much later that I learnt that African Film was originally produced out of South Africa by the legendary publisher of the influential Drum Magazine, Jim Bailey. In the manner that Drum offered fledging writers, such as South Africa’s Can Themba, Nat Nakasa and Nigeria’s Nelson Ottah their break in magazine writing, African Film provided work for about 25 writers, some of whom were students of the University of Lesotho. Initial photo shoots were undertaken in Swaziland, and the strips were then sent to London for mastering before their eventual transnational distribution all over Africa. In the end the publishers had to settle for printing by local subsidiaries. The leading man who starred as Lance Spearman was a fellow named Jore Mkwanazi, a former houseboy doubling as a nightclub piano player, who had been discovered by the white photographer Stanley N. Bunn. Spear had for ready company Captain Victor, the police honcho who forever wore his uniform. Spear’s swanky lady assistant, Sonia, was a study in independent womanhood. His young sidekick, Lemmy, lent to the cast a measure of humane and vulnerable precocity not unlike the role of Jim Hawkins among the pirates of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island.

You would always trust Spear to get out of all troubles, given that Captain Victor, Sonia or Lemmy could pull a string or two on their own to stave off the enemy. The dialogue was hip and contemporary, in the manner of the racy thrillers of James Hadley Chase, the hottest writer we cherished back then. The lines were indeed riveting, such that one readily committed them to memory. For instance, the thug bearing down on Sonia gets the following words from Spear as he steps forward for a fight: “Woman-beater, try me for size!” Before the hoodlum can get to the races, Spear lands him the sucker-punch, saying, “You have a glass jaw!” With the fallen thug crying “Aaaaaargh!” Lemmy would congratulate Spear thus: “Attaboy, Spear!” The archetypal antagonist of Lance Spearman was Rabon Zollo, who had lost an eye and thus wore the hideous black eye-patch. Zollo was menace in overdrive. There were other villains like the Hook-Hand Killer who, as the name suggests, killed with the evil hook on his hand. The criminal mastermind was known as Dr Devil. There was Mad Doc with the bespoke serum that had the power to shrink people. Who will ever forget the antics of Professor Thor, who could read the thoughts of people through his vile machine? There was the other professor, Rubens, who used the organs of animals to produce the werewolf. The menace of the Cats almost overwhelmed Spear; it was quite daunting doing battle with cat burglars in black masks and claw gloves that could climb and scale all heights. Hilda “the Head Huntress” was yet another villain who left a mark on the adventures of Lance Spearman. It was the thrill of a lifetime to savour the spells of Spear’s confrontations with diabolical insurance agents, sinister diamond thieves and baleful power syndicates. The cosmic, end-of-the-world wars of Lance Spearman reverberated and resonated with us in an increasingly corrupt post-war Nigeria. Spear offered hope. He stood as the positive force that could save humankind.

Then hope vanished suddenly. It was in the course of 1972 that the supply of African Film stopped, for no reason whatsoever. We were not abreast of the high-wire politics of apartheid, the Cold War and suchlike. The rumours flew fast and free that Lance Spearman had died. We couldn’t believe that Spear could ever die, for as all Nigerians know, “Actor no dey die!” We had to make do with smuggled back issues of African Film dating to the years of the Nigeria-Biafra War. We devoured the back issues, waiting for the inevitable day when the unbeatable Lance Spearman would make a triumphant return.

We are still waiting. We have yet to see the return of Spear, of hope, of the final triumph of good, but the memory lingers of the dynamic action scenes, the assorted camera angles and the ever suggestive sex acts. Black like all of us, Spear served up a counter to white images of heroes such as Superman. In the age of the so-called Blaxploitation films featuring Richard Roundtree as John Shaft and the former American football player turned film star Jim Brown, who beat the living daylights out of white folks, Spear was akin to the local boy who made good, an exemplar of the middle class youth culture of the race. A potent symbol of a possible future for Nigeria – still within grasp, but forever illusive.

This article first appeared in Chimurenga Chronic: Graphic Stories (July 2014), an issue focused on graphic stories; comic journalism. Blending illustrations, photography, written analysis, infographics, interviews, letters and more, visual narratives speak of everyday complexities in the Africa in which we live.

July 2008

The premiere issue of Black Images: A Critical Quarterly of Black Arts and Culture announced Toronto as an unlikely centre of the Black World, proclaimed the arrival of a beast called Black Canadian culture, and served as the vehicle for its elusive, visionary editor, the Jamaican-born Rudolph “Rudy” Murray – and his literary alter ego, R. M. Lacovia. Murray, along with a group of West Indians and West Africans mostly associated with the journalism program at Toronto’s Ryerson Polytechnical Institute, founded Black Images in 1972. It wasn’t the only black publication in Toronto at the time. Periodicals like Harold Hoyte’s Contrast and E. Ashton Brathwaite’s Spear already served the growing black community in the city. But Black Images differed from these rags with its explicit Black internationalism and its self-conscious literariness, in many ways taking up the mantle of Jan Carew’s extraordinary Cotopaxi, which published a single issue in Toronto in 1968 and counted Murray as an associate editor.

The early issues of Black Images paired coverage of Toronto’s Black arts scene with more theoretical expositions on pan-African culture. Profiles of Black Canadian artists like playwright Lennox Brown and musician Richard Acquaah-Harris appeared next to essays on the African roots of New World Black music and critiques of Cheikh Anta Diop. They published a history of black Canadian publishing from its origins in the nineteenth-century newspapers like The Dawn of Tomorrow and an extended interview with Brazil’s Abdias do Nascimento. Poetry by Jamaica’s Cliff Lashley, the Puerto Rican nationalist Alberto O. Cappas, and Ramabai, a “Young Poetess from Trinidad,” (and one of the few female contributors to the journal) appeared alongside Robert A. Hill’s introduction to the “The Negro’s Fullest Part,” Marcus Garvey’s speech before the Eight International Convention of the Negro Peoples of the World, held in Toronto in August 1938 at the UNIA’s local headquarters at 355 College Street.

Black Images‘ first issues were rangy, energetic, and irreverent – if not always good. Lennox Brown’s important if somewhat self-regarding manifesto “A Black Castle: The Crisis of Black Culture in Canada” veered between inspired poetry and leaden sociology. In his review of Austin Clarke’s 1971 novel When He was Free and Young and Used to Wear Suits, Keith Jeffers complained that the book was “strained and contrived” and “corny in expression.” He goes on to accuse Clarke of depicting Barbados as if he were a tourist “striv[ing] painfully to create an exoticism,” before criticizing him for not being Black-Power enough. JoJoh Chintoh, apparently mystified that Toronto’s John Belfon was a painter and a Jew begins his profile by stating that “John Belfon is painter and a Jew” and over the next few paragraphs says little more than that.

With the publication of the second volume of Black Images in 1973 a noticeable shift occurs. Though still based in Toronto, the Canadian content is reduced. And while still under the stewardship of Rudy Murray, the cadre of Ryerson J-School hacks is jettisoned (as is the iffy writing, the poetry, and the puff pieces) and a group of newly-minted PhD’s, the first generation of post-Independence, professionally-trained West Indian and West African academic literary critics, takes their place. Consequently, Black Images loses its amateurish vim and becomes more coolly professional and its reactionary polemics are replaced by considered, occasionally staid, scholarly appraisals. The focus on the Black World remains, but the journal becomes noticeably less pan-African and more pan-Caribbean with a significant portion of its pages given over to the giants of Haitian and the French Antillean literature, to Jacques Stèphen Alexis, Renè Maran, Aimè Cesairè, Frantz Fanon, Édouard Glissant, Lèon Damas, and others. Meanwhile, a loosely articulated theoretical stance developed within the journal that saw a break with racial nationalism and an attempt to chart a more diverse, pluralistic, and complex set of aesthetic and formal lineages of black literature. This position is exemplified by J. Michael Dash’s “Marvelous Realism – the Way out of Negritude,” where he argues that Jacques Stephen Alèxis’ notion of writing Haitian history through le rèalisme merveilleux, introduced at Prèsence Africaine‘s Black Writers Congress held in Paris in 1956, offered an early, if tentative attempt, to come out from under the overbearing tenets of Marxism and break the consanguinary shackles of Negritude.

This professional transformation was reflected in Black Images‘ design. The first issues were eight-and-a-half by eleven inches in size. Its black and white covers had conceptual but bold designs while inside, its three-column format made use of photographs, line drawings, and provocative call outs that disrupted regularity of the page grid. Its layout made judicious use of white space, especially when formatting the poetry, though occasionally, the text was reduced to a barely-readable size to ensure that longer articles fit within their allotted page assignments. By contrast, later issues of Black Images shrank to a digest format. Its text was set in a wide, rigid single column. The cover designs were made up of simple announcements of the theme of a given issue while the line drawings and call outs of the early issues were largely excised and its pages held unbroken blocks of type.

Through these changes at Black Images, Rudy Murray remained a constant, though perhaps paradoxically, anomalous, figure. For reasons unknown, Murray adopted the pen name R.M. Lacovia and in the brief period of Black Images existence, from 1972 to 1975, writing as Lacovia, produced a body of writing that is astonishing in its breadth and original in its approach, yet remains practically unknown today. In the early issues, Murray/Lacovia writes on Trinidad’s Ismith Khan and Jamaica’s Roger Mais and traces the influence of Fanon’s thought through Hegel, Marx, Kojeve, and Sartre before reading the Martinician’s work from a “Neo-African” perspective. He revelled in making startling and unexpected juxtapositions in his writing: he compared Shaft to Klute; Georgia, Georgia, written by Maya Angelou and directed by Swedish director Stig Bjorkman (who he calls “another Gunnar Myrdal“) to Antonioni’s Blow Up; and V.S. Naipaul to Canadian media prophet Marshall McLuhan. But Murray reserved his finest work for that most difficult of Caribbean authors, the Guyanese novelist Wilson Harris. Over the course of two extended essays, Caribbean Aesthetics: A Prolegomenon, and Landscapes, Maps and Parangles, Lacovia attempts a systematic, if gnostic, exegesis of Harris’ writing. Caribbean Aesthetics traces the African, Asian, and Amerindian resonances on Harris’ poetics while Landscapes, made up of a collage of quotations from Kant, Averroes, and Ghazali, sutured together by short bursts of theoretical prose, grapples with Harris’ use of geography, space and metaphysics. Visually, Landscapes is a strikingly beautiful work. While both it and Caribbean Aesthetics appeared as separate monographs under the Black Images imprint, Landscape‘ text is reversed, white on black, offering a graphic illustration of the principles of reversibility and doubling in Harris’ writing.

Murray contributed to almost every issue of Black Images but besides an essay in the Journal of Black Studies and another in The Black Academy Review, he didn’t publish anywhere else. After 1975, with the appearance of the final issue of Black Images in 1975, he apparently stopped writing altogether. Still, though Black Images, like Murray’s writing, are practically unknown, despite its short life it remains the most audacious and smart Black journal to have emerged from the white north.

This and other graphic Stories available in The Chronic, Graphic Stories.

“The Third World was not a place. It was a project,” writes Vijay Prashad in his book the Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World. We map the project via its multiples manifestations and imaginings – from Bandung and Cairo as the Capital of African Liberation Movements, to the Planetary Assembly in Tanzania,on to the Non Aligned conference and failed 2nd Bandung, to the Solidarity Conference of the people of Asia, Africa and Latin America, in Winneba, Havana and Conakry to its termination in Algiers, along the way the Sino-Soviet conflict, tri-continentalism and the Afro Asian Writers Association. This and other maps in In the new Chronic, On Circulations and the African Imagination of a Borderless World.

By Brent Hayes Edwards

The Nigerian superstar bandleader Fela Anikulapo-Kuti hosted a covert summit meeting in the summer of 1977. He received an unexpected, extended visit from Lester Bowie, the mercurial trumpeter of the Art Ensemble of Chicago. Their time together went unheralded and undeclared, a private conversation in the midst of what may have been the most tumultuous period in Fela’s tumultuous life. It is surely one of the more peculiar encounters in the history of black music: the African American and the African, the jazz instigator and the Afrobeat agitator, the doctor and the Chief Priest, the playboy and the polygamist, the scout and the dissident, both down and out, both uprooted and broke. They parlayed not on a stage but in a smoky hotel room. Bowie, who’d once proclaimed that “the only good school for a musician is the road,” was famously peripatetic; in addition to jazz groups, he’d played with army bands, carnival bands, marching bands, and funk bands, toured with blues and R&B hitmakers (including Albert King, Little Milton, Jackie Wilson, and Fontella Bass), and even played circus trumpet with an outfit called Leon Claxton’s Harlem Review. A few years earlier, he told an interviewer that he aimed to play in the widest variety of circumstances he could because it “broadens you,” forces you to find out “what works and what doesn’t”: “I’ve tried to play in just about any kind of situation. I could play with a bus. A motorcycle. A baby crying. You learning how to deal with all these different sounds. It’s all about sound. You don’t play bebop licks with a truck going down a highway, you have to have something that works.” But, in his first trip to Africa, Bowie travelled the farthest for a unique challenge: to figure out what fit with Fela’s tight-knit hybrid of James Brown, modal jazz, and highlife. To “deal with” the sounds of Lagos in the midst of the perverse and fleeting euphoria of the oil boom. Months later, you could hear the traces, as a string of LPs appeared: Sorrow, Tears, and Blood, Palm Wine Sound, No Agreement, Dog Eat Dog, I Go Shout Plenty, Colonial Mentality. Even on the tunes where the solos are taken by Tunde Williams (the regular trumpeter in Fela’s band, Africa ’70), Bowie is listed on the jacket as “Guest Artiste.” Sometimes, there’s even a hint of editorial comment, as when Ghariokwo Lemi’s hand-drawn cover for the LP of Stalemate notes the participation of the “Guest Artist on Trumpet, Lester Bowie (a good Afro-American).”

*        *        *

In the time when order had not yet been established on earth, Orunmila came down from the sky to see how things were progressing. He was met with a barrage of questions and complaints from the orishas, human beings, and animals, who were all clamouring to know their rightful place in the world. The inimitable Eshu, trickster, mischief maker, walking contradiction—the orisha with the biggest wooden stick, but a creature so small he had to stand on tiptoe to put salt in the soup—made a proposition: Orunmila should present each creature with a simple question, to which he or she must give a direct response. The answer would determine the creature’s destiny and proper circumstance.

Orunmila found this an excellent suggestion, and went about questioning the creatures of the world, one by one. He asked the guinea fowl, “Do you want to wear a cord around your neck?” “No,” said the bird, and so to this day it roams the yard without being tied or bound. Some animals were disdainful or petulant. “Do you want to eat from the ground?” the giraffe was asked, and when she scoffed at the suggestion, Orunmila caused her neck to stretch and condemned her to reach up into the trees for food. The horse, asked whether he would carry a load, sneered, “Who’s going to make me do it?” and Orunmila condemned the animal to be a beast of burden.

The human beings were asked whether they wanted to live inside or out, and they answered, “Inside.” So it came to be that men live in houses. Meanwhile, Eshu, who could not pass up an opportunity to sow confusion and dissension, was trying to think of something clever to say. But Orunmila surprised the orisha by turning and asking Eshu the same question as the humans: “Would you rather live inside or outside?” “Why, outside, of course,” Eshu sputtered, and then immediately attempted to change his reply: “No, no, on the contrary, I want to live inside.” Orunmila gave Eshu a stern look and said, “You were the one who proposed that each creature must give a direct response to a simple question. But now you are trying to unmake your own answer. I will have to take the first words that came from your mouth.” And so Eshu was condemned to live outside: just beyond the threshold, at the gateway, in the marketplace, in the middle of the crossroads.

*        *        *

Lester Bowie decided to go to Nigeria on something of a whim at the end of May 1977, after performing with the Art Ensemble at the Moers Festival in Germany. He had enough money for a one-way plane ticket and about $100 in cash. Bowie had planned to support himself by playing any gigs he could find, as he had done when he lived in Jamaica for a number of months in 1975-1976. But he quickly discovered that he’d miscalculated the cost of living in Lagos. After the taxi from the airport, a meal, and a $50 room at the Hotel Bobby, he didn’t have enough money for the next night—and he didn’t know anybody in Nigeria. “And Nigeria,” as he would tell one interviewer later, “was really OUT. I thought, This is it, man. You’ve done it! Finally you’ve bitten off more than you can chew! This is it!”

That night, he went up to one of the waiters in the hotel restaurant and attempted to explain his situation, saying that he was a musician and that he was looking for a place he might be able to play. The waiter gave him the once over and said, “You need to go see Fela.” Bowie, who had never heard of Fela, responded eagerly: “Where does this guy live?” The waiter smiled as he walked back into the kitchen and said, “Just get in any taxi and tell them to take you to Fela.”

Bowie found this advice somewhat dubious—to him, it sounded like getting in a cab in Manhattan and saying, “Take me to Miles’s house.” But, with no other options, he decided to risk it. The next morning, he grabbed his horn and headed to the street. The first taxi driver he tried didn’t seem at all surprised at the request, and took Bowie to a hotel where, the driver said, Fela was staying with most of the members of his band.

Wondering what he had gotten himself into, Bowie stepped out of the taxi in the hotel courtyard and looked up at the building. The place was called the Crossroads Hotel. As he strode toward the lobby, a short man came out and approached him. “Hey, man. What’s that you got, is that a horn? Is that a trumpet?” When Bowie nodded, the man went on: “Where are you from?”

“New York.”

“Do you play jazz?” asked the man.

“Yeah, I play jazz.” Bowie wondered whether to ask him about Fela.

“You must be heavy then,” the man commented.

“Well, you know, a little.” Bowie smiled in spite of himself.

The short man paused and then proclaimed, in a conspirational stage whisper: “Listen, my friend. You’ve come to the right place.”

“Why is that?”

The man looked around at the other people passing in the courtyard, and explained, “Because we’re the baddest band in Africa.”

They both laughed. It turned out that the short man was a guitarist in Fela’s Africa ’70. He took Bowie into the Crossroads to the suite of rooms the band was occupying. It was eleven in the morning, but Fela was still asleep. Another musician disappeared into an adjoining room to wake him up. The curtains were drawn, with only a thin crack of sunlight shining into the suite they’d entered, and the air was hot and cramped. As his eyes adjusted, Bowie realized that the modest space was almost impossibly cluttered with a dizzying array of items—trunks, suitcases, cardboard boxes, music instrument cases, clothes strewn on every surface, plastic buckets and basins, empty and half-empty bottles of cola and beer, a few books, and great piles of multicoloured fabric on what seemed to be mattresses distributed on almost every available inch of the floor. He realized that there were a surprising number of people in the room, as well, men and women in various states of undress, most of them still sleeping. There was a slight but distinct scent of marijuana.

A small, wiry man clad only in a pair of tight blue underwear emerged yawning from the other room and stared at Bowie in the half light. Bowie stared back. “Who’s on duty?” the man barked, and a woman appeared out of the layers and mattresses on the other side of the room and approached. She opened the curtains and everyone in the room squinted at the sudden brightness. Some on the floor pulled covers over their heads or shielded their faces with their hands. A few sat up on their elbows to peer at Bowie.

The wiry man came over to Bowie, stepping nimbly over the bodies on the floor, and shook his hand. “You’re Lester Bowie, of the Chicago Art Ensemble,” the man observed. Bowie assumed that this was Fela, although the man did not introduce himself. His body was taut and muscular, and up close, Bowie was taken aback to notice that the man was covered in a gruesome pattern of what seemed to be recent scars—rows of thin slices on his shoulders, a welt that looked like a burn mark on his stomach, ugly dark red dots (from the tips of cigarettes?) along one of his forearms, a scab at his hairline. Around his neck, he wore a cord with a clasp at the end, to attach a saxophone, and also a chain necklace of thin circular iron links, from which hung a small bell the size of a walnut.

Bowie began to explain his situation; he’d brought a few of his records (Les Stances à Sophie, Fast Last, Bap-tizum) as a sort of sonic curriculum vitae. “No, no,” Fela dismissed them, and turned to the woman who’d opened the curtains, growling something in pidgin that Bowie didn’t quite catch. She pulled a record out of one of the boxes near the window, and brought it to a portable phonograph that was sitting on a low table in the middle of the room. Fela opened one of the black cases on the floor and brought out an alto saxophone, clipping it on and looking at Bowie with a sly smile that was almost confrontational. “Let’s play together, my brother,” he said.

Still standing near the door next to the guitar player, Bowie took his trumpet out. Strangely, it was easy to ignore the people lying around him on the floor; it was as though he and Fela were alone in the room. The record was a sort of “Music Minus One” compilation, a piano trio playing straightforward changes. A medium-tempo blues. Bowie thought to himself, What the hell, and started to blow. Fela stood by the table and listened, licking a saxophone reed but making no move to play himself. When Bowie reached the turnaround on his second chorus, he heard Fela exclaim, “Stop, stop! Hold it! That’s enough!” Bowie lowered his horn, and the woman lifted the needle off the record. “That’s enough,” Fela repeated in a severe tone. Then he broke into a grin as he turned to the guitarist: “Go get his bags. He’s moving in with me.”

*        *        *

In January 1977, the Nigerian military government of General Olusegun Obasanjo hosted the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture, popularly known as FESTAC. Organized as an enormous, expensive announcement of the country’s emergence as a global force (underwritten by the newfound petrol wealth), the festival carefully constructed the representation of Nigerian national culture, emphasizing the “traditional” and ignoring the majority of contemporary artists in the country. Fela had been asked to serve on the planning committee for the musical events, but publicly resigned in the summer of 1976 when he realized that FESTAC was, in his words, “just one big hustle.” He proffered a nine-point proposal for reform on his way out the door (arguing that the festival should, among other things, “re-educate the common man in Nigeria and Africa in general, about the truth of Colonial forms of African history and religion”), and in January he held a “counter-FESTAC” of nightly concerts at his club the Shrine in the Surulere district of Lagos. Despite the festival’s attempts to dissuade extracurricular activity, many of the visiting performers (most famously, Stevie Wonder) made a pilgrimage to jam with the Africa ’70.

The pianist and composer Sun Ra had been invited at the last minute to bring his big band the Arkestra to FESTAC. The festival offered no money up front, and many of the members of the band had been sceptical, but Sun Ra apparently chastised them: “Your ancestors came to America without a cent. How much money do you have?” “Fifty cents,” answered one of the musicians. Sun Ra said, “That’s fifty cents more than your ancestors had,” and insisted they make the trip. Musicians in the Arkestra later reported that when a Nigerian at the airport yelled, “Welcome home, Sun Ra!” as the Arkestra got off the plane, Ra responded acidly, “Home? Your people sold mine. This is no longer my home!” Not every interaction was characterized by such hostility: Sun Ra told one Nigerian journalist that his music was an attempt at “opening the way for the people of Africa to be part of the space age. Since they were never formally invited to be a part of it I am inviting them to join.” (Still, he considered it “unwise” to visit the Shrine, and refused to go; some of his musicians went on their own to play with Fela.) When the journalist asked how he had been able to attract such an impressive number of “creative people” to play in the Arkestra for so many years, with so little financial reward, Ra mused: “Well I guess it’s just that they are out of it. They’re out of it, and since I am way out they just had to come and join me.”

*        *        *

Fela met Bowie at the Crossroads because his former communal home, the “Kalakuta Republic,” had been destroyed by Nigerian army soldiers a few months earlier, on February 18. Fela referred to the attack as the “Kalakuta massacre,” and at the tribunal the Lagos government set up to inquire into the cause of the events, he called it a “planned and mechanized burning.”

The Kalakuta Republic was a small, fenced-in compound at 14A Agege Motor Road in Surulere. In size it was modest: a yellow two-story building with a slanted roof made of corrugated iron, surrounded by small outbuildings that included rehearsal studio and a health clinic run by Fela’s brother Beko. In the courtyard, there was a small plastic swimming pool and a petite menagerie: a monkey who clambered near the entrance, a donkey in the yard, and the shaggy Alsatian, Wokolo. On the side of the main building, above the doorway, there was a painted logo: a silhouette of the African continent next to a thick-lined black “70.” On the top bar of the “7,” “Fela Anikulapo Kuti” was inscribed in white, and an image of Fela’s face looked out from the middle of the “0.”

Kalakuta housed most of the dozen or so musicians, the more than two-dozen female dancers and singers, and much of a staff that—according to John Collins, a music writer who’d stayed there in January 1977 while working on Fela’s never-completed autobiographical film The Black President—included bodyguards, drivers, a valet, a public relations officer, a lawyer, and an electrician nicknamed Nepa, after the acronym of the Nigerian Electrical Power Authority (the residents of Lagos joked that it really stood for “Never Expect Power Always”).

Tension had been building for months between the residents of Kalakuta and soldiers stationed at the nearby Abalti Barracks. Many considered “Fela’s boys” to dominate the neighbourhood by fiat, especially on Saturday nights, when traffic would come to a halt around 1 A.M. for the slow procession of Africa ’70, in full regalia, to the “Comprehensive Show” at the Shrine club a couple of blocks away. The appearance a few months earlier of Fela’s thunderous hit record Zombie, comparing the army to the undead—“No brains, no job, no sense”—did not help matters. (When one soldier criticized the song as a deliberate provocation, Fela told a reporter for the Lagos Daily Times that “Zombie was for African mind and not for soldiers,” although he added somewhat contradictorily that many soldiers were regulars at the Shrine.)

In mid-February, a couple of the drivers for Africa ’70 were involved in an altercation with an army corporal who was serving as a traffic officer at Ojuelegba-Yaba Point Road. A group of soldiers came to Kalakuta intending to detain the drivers, but Fela refused to turn them over, noting that the army was not the police, and that it had no authority to arrest citizens. The next day, nearly 1,000 soldiers massed around Kalakuta. The army had the power cut off from the compound, and Fela responded by turning on a private generator he had installed on the grounds, which electrified the fence.

There ensued an extended, chaotic exchange of projectiles—rocks, bottles, bricks, cudgels, tin cans—thrown in both directions across the fence. Fela went onto the second floor balcony and attempted to speak to the soldiers, while some of his musicians shielded him from the hailstorm with a big black umbrella. He said later that he wanted to be seen by the crowds that had gathered to watch the stand-off, “to place the judgment on the public mind,” as he put it. Meanwhile, Fela’s 77-year old mother, Funmilayo Thomas Ransome-Kuti, one of the great heroes of Nigerian independence (who in the late-1940s had organized legendary anticolonial protests among the market women in Abeokuta), ran out into the courtyard, yelling “We want peace, we want peace,” until some of the men dragged her back inside.

A schoolbus passed the house, and dozens of young children leaned out of the windows, raising their fists in the Black Power salute and yelling, “Fela, Baba-o!” Incensed, the soldiers stopped the bus and whipped the children as well as the bus driver. Finally, a soldier threw a jerrycan full of kerosene onto the backup generator, which was sitting on a Ford by the fence. The generator caught fire and the soldiers burst in.

The government inquiry into the incident in March and April heard testimony from 183 witnesses who recounted the brutal fury of the soldiers’ invasion of Kalakuta. Fela was beaten into unconsciousness, as were many of his musicians and staff. His mother was thrown out of a first-floor window, breaking her leg. An undetermined number of the dancers were raped, or violated with knives, bottles, or sticks. The residents were then taken naked through the streets on open carts to holding cells or to the military hospital. Firemen testified that when they arrived on the scene, the soldiers forcibly kept them from entering. Kalakuta was utterly destroyed.

Fela was held in prison for twenty-seven days. The final blow came with the report from the tribunal. The Lagos State Government found that “an exasperated and unknown soldier” had set the fire, and exculpated the military for any responsibility for the destruction. Although Fela attempted unsuccessfully to sue the military for damages, his most powerful response was a song he recorded nearly two years later, a thirty-minute indictment called Unknown Soldier, in which Fela’s saxophone solo screeches and squeals with a caustic, barely controlled fury.

*        *        *

This is to say that Fela and Lester Bowie met at the crossroads in more than one sense. Years later, Bowie didn’t remember whether Fela’s leg was still in a cast when he arrived, although he plays in the ensemble on Sorrow, Tears and Blood, the first session Fela recorded when he was able to go back to the studio; the album cover bears a photo of Fela standing in front of a drum kit playing a tenor saxophone, and wearing a knee-high cast on his left leg. In any case, it must have been obvious to Bowie that he’d arrived in the wake of trauma. “He was hurt,” Bowie said simply to one interviewer, adding that he “used to go to court with [Fela] when they were giving him a lot of problems.”

What does it mean to share a space of musical interaction when the world is crumbling on every side? Two styles of uncertainty learn to dance at the crossroads. The outcast shelters the wanderer. How do we listen to the encounter? What does it sound like? Is it violent, uneasy, distracted, mutually supportive? Part of what’s complicated is that, although Fela continues to dominate the music—commonly taking lengthy solos on electric piano or organ and tenor or soprano saxophone, as well as singing the lead—he makes space for Bowie, not just as a member of the horn section, but as a solo voice. When he does, the drama resides in the cohabitation, a familiar African American brassy insouciance speaking about, and in the midst of, a postcolonial African militancy. What do you play to “fit” the state repression of the arts?—a suffering that’s not yours but that, in some sense, you’ve come to find, in a larger, unending search for the sound of something called blackness, a sound that might be shared or passed on? Does your own suffering stay in the bag? Or do you fit precisely by not fitting, by slipping a blade into the music, by tugging it, note by fugitive note, out and away from a city that would crush it?

One of the most memorable of Lester Bowie’s solos with the Africa ’70 is found on a simple instrumental track called “Dog Eat Dog.” It opens with a two-chord, eight-beat interlocking pattern shared between the two guitars, with drummer Tony Allen playing a single hit on the snare every two beats. Fela’s electric piano meanders above them, somehow shrill and wooden at the same time, until the music is suddenly granted depth with the entrance of the shekere and the bass (walking an ostinato of two ascending groups of quarter notes) and then, the horns. About six minutes into the tune, Bowie takes a two minute solo that opens leisurely but devastatingly with a single note, an ambiguous major-9th, held for a full twelve beats. Then, as the horns riff behind him, he flees in quick-footed runs that smear into inaudibility, soiling the edges of the harmonic fabric. He closes buzzing at a single note in the middle register, wrenching it into something that sounds like a squelched exclamation of a word that strains just beyond the threshold of decipherability. After Fela takes an excursion on electric piano, Bowie solos again with the same puckish authority before Fela moves to tenor sax.

To hear the piece as a diasporic encounter, one would have to consider the ways Bowie’s near-vocal exclamation is echoed later when Fela momentarily removes the sax from his mouth and moans a mournful phrase—Aye-aye-aye-aye-aye-aye!!—that seems to announce the insufficiency of the instrument, an impatience with its limitations. Why is the song called “Dog Eat Dog?” If it’s meant to be a dirge or a diatribe, why does it make us dance? Are we meant to take it simply as an observation on the sorry quagmire of competitive greed—a comment on the perverse appetites of oligarchy? Or could we hear it as a description of the jostling enacted in the music, two strong solo voices clamouring for space, aggressive and voracious but fully aware of the slippery slope of their hunger?

*        *        *

Bessie Head’s 1974 novel A Question of Power makes recourse to a striking figure in its depiction of the psychological instability of a young Coloured woman. The main character, Elizabeth, a refugee who has fled the cruelties of racist South Africa to live in a rural village in Botswana, is tortured by voices in her head—internal recriminations, stereotypes, and attacks that she refers to as “records,” as though she is burdened with a perpetual inner jukebox of racial hatred. “Someone had turned on a record inside her head,” we are informed at one point without explanation. “It went on and on in the same, stuck groove: ‘Dog, filth, the Africans will eat you to death. Dog, filth, the Africans will eat you to death.’” The book equates the world-reordering power of racism with the infectious allure of a song you can’t get out of your brain. Elizabeth is “broken” not just by the voices of hatred, but also by the “records” that others force on her in the casual viciousness that infects their day-to-day banter. One patronizing Danish aid worker constantly berates Elizabeth with her own “favourite record,” a nonchalant contempt for the Botswanan villagers: “I don’t understand these people. They don’t know anything at all, and they’re so lazy. . . .” Elizabeth’s unfaithful lover Dan attacks her with abusive remarks, “records” that go “round and round in her head the whole day.” He cheats on her brazenly and repeatedly (with a succession of women that for her are only euphemisms and attributes: Miss Sewing-Machine, Miss Wriggly Bottom, The Womb, Miss Pink Sugar-Icing), and then crushes her with comments that reverberate in her mind: “You are supposed to feel jealous,” or “You are inferior as a Coloured,” or “I am the king of sex. I go and go. I go with them all. They’ve been specially created for my desires. The road to me is past all those women. But need you try? You have nothing.”

Unexpectedly, the only alternative is offered by a young, white American just out of college with a degree in Agriculture who spends a few months in the village working on the collective farm. Tom is “crude” and “exhibitionistic,” the kind of brazen Westerner who feels at ease everywhere. And yet, Elizabeth is surprised to realize, he is possessed of an unusual wisdom. When she first meets him, he is singing poorly (but exuberantly) as he works in a garden: “Hello, Dolly. This is Lewis, Dolly. It’s so nice to have you back where you belong. You’re looking swell, Dolly. I can tell, Dolly. You’re still growing, you’re still going, you’re still going strong. . .” Elizabeth listens carefully to the words, since for her they “fitted her own circumstances! Maybe Dolly had been to hell and back.” She asks Tom, “What happened to Dolly?” and “Why is Lewis greeting her like that? Was she in trouble of some kind?” but Tom says he doesn’t remember.

Still, this is the beginning of their friendship. It starts with music—oblique, misappropriated, mediocre, perhaps, but a common ground of sound that neither corrodes, nor haunts, nor tortures, but instead opens up whole new realm of questions, associations, and references. A music of the crossroads, then? In the mid-1970s, Fela explained why his music wasn’t sorrowful: “Despite my sadness I create joyful rhythms. . . . I want to change sadness. I want people to be happy. And I can do it by playing happy music. And through happy music I tell you about the sadness of others. So they will come to realize that, ‘Oh, we can be happy!’” The music points you to an outside, in other words, an entirely different path. Or, as Lester Bowie put it, “one of the immediate goals of our music is to stimulate thought. . . . It makes you think about everything. You start thinking about yourself and once you get people thinking, they think of many things. They think of how to make a better mousetrap. Music can open people’s minds up.”

*        *        *

The first Louis Armstrong record that Lester Bowie heard was Ambassador Satch, when he was about 14 years old. Somehow it seems appropriate, given the photo on the jacket of the Columbia LP of a smiling Armstrong in a long tuxedo jacket with a small suitcase in one hand and a trumpet cradled under his other arm. The album is a compilation of concert recordings of the Armstrong All-Stars on tour in Italy and Holland in the fall of 1955. In the liner notes, the producer George Avakian quotes a journalist who says that “American jazz has now become a universal language. It knows no national boundaries, but everyone knows where it comes from and where to look for more.” Armstrong himself tells Avakian about the Russians who, on a previous tour, had sneaked into West Berlin to see the All-Stars: “Hardly any of them could speak any English, but that didn’t bother them or us. The music did all the talking for both sides.”

Ambassador Satch is raucous New Orleans-style polyphony, one of the most thrilling documents of Armstrong’s too-often dismissed post-war band. In the Milan concert, the band plays the “West End Blues,” which Armstrong had first recorded in the summer of 1928 with his Hot Five. As Avakian glosses it, “Anyone without his original recording (CL 853) is missing one of the finest performances in the history of the recording industry.” But it’s intriguing to imagine being a young Lester Bowie hearing this version of the “West End Blues” before the earlier, justly celebrated one. The leisurely quality of the 1955 version is remarkable: Armstrong plays the famous unaccompanied introduction with effortless virtuosity, inserting a few minute hesitations and slight variations, particularly a proliferation of flourishes in the concluding run, as though to let us know that there’s no reason to reproduce the original exactly—although he could if he wanted to. The call-and-response vocal chorus, in which Armstrong’s scat is intertwined with Edmond Hall’s clarinet, slides close to articulate language in a sort of mumbling acquiescence, son to father, parishioner to priest: Ba-ba bo dee faden / Yes, fad-de, mm-mm / Yes, vo-zan, fapa jo-sigh-igh-z / Oh yes I know. Likewise, in “All of Me” (another take on a classic recording from a couple of decades earlier), the scat chorus drifts in and out of intelligibility, as isolated phrases bob up out of liquid phonemes: “Oh, can’t you—,” “I’m no good without you, baby,” “Oh, take my lips,” “Your goodbye—.” In the place of the lyric “You took the best, so why not take the rest,” Armstrong improvises a laugher with one of his nicknames (“You have your Pops, so don’t abuse them chops”), and it’s difficult not to wonder whether Satch had just been in a mood to meditate on the significance of paternity on that particular December 20th in Milan. But for a young Lester Bowie, starting with the copy rather than the original, the LP must have provided a crystal clear demonstration of the irreverence native to genius. And in that sense it might help to explain the mood of one of Bowie’s most notorious records, his version of “Hello Dolly” on a 1974 album called Fast Last, which some have heard as a satire of Armstrong’s late style. “Some of the sounds seem humorous, but it’s not necessarily humour,” Bowie once explained regarding to the raspberries and splats and hoarse whispers that populate his playing; “actually I’m just extending the sonoric range of the instrument.” Just finding a means of egress, to put it differently; or looking to take a trip. In 1972 Bowie told a journalist that as a teenager, having read the story of how Armstrong joined King Oliver’s band, he used to practice with his horn aimed out the window, hoping that Armstrong would ride by and hear him and hire him and take him away.

*        *        *

The Kalakuta Republic was inspired in no small measure by Fela’s first trip to the United States in 1969. Stranded without a means of income, without valid papers, and without support, Fela’s seven-man band drove across the country by car, hoping to find work in Los Angeles. As he told the writer Carlos Moore, “We weren’t in the America we’d dreamt of. No, man. We were in trouble! No gigs! No bread! No shit! Nothing! And our visas finish-o! I said, ‘Now we’re illegal immigrant motherfuckers!’ No visa, no work permit. . . . Stalemate!” When we recall that the exclamation was the title of one of the tunes Lester Bowie recorded with the Africa ’70 in Lagos, Stalemate takes on multiple meanings. On the one hand, it is an allusion to Fela’s blocked position in relation to the authorities and to his record company, Decca, which in the wake of the February 1977 conflagration had refused to release records the company considered “seditious” (such as Sorrow, Tears and Blood). Bowie may well have been present when the entire Africa ’70 organization occupied the Decca offices in the Anthony Village section of Lagos toward the end of the summer, in a desperate, failed attempt to demand the release of the music and the payment of royalties. On the other hand, Stalemate may be an evocation of a blocked situation in a larger sense: a dead end, an aborted attempt at experimentation and discovery. Just as Fela never forgot the African Americans who helped him survive and eventually flourish in L.A., one might suggest that he set up Kalakuta with the vague intention of returning the favour. “When I came back home,” he explained to Moore, “I said to myself: ‘All African countries should open their doors to Africans from everywhere, especially those in the Americas.’ . . . So the idea of creating a place open to every African escaping persecution began taking shape in this my mind. Was that my first pan-Africanist idea? Maybe. At any rate, that’s how the idea of setting up a communal compound . . . came about. A place open to everybody.”  In an interview collected in a FESTAC souvenir brochure, Fela boasted of the pluralism of his vision of Kalakuta, which he intended to gather not just musicians, but also “dancers, dry-cleaners, plumbers, drivers, tailors, electricians, acrobats, boxers, bouncers—every man from every profession in the world. No one is invalid in Kalakuta Republic.” So Fela built a Republic for Bowie, but the trumpeter showed up a little too late. Instead, they found themselves together at the crossroads, exiled from that diasporic safe haven, scrambling to earn enough to pay the bills. They played Stalemate, that is, in the hope of extricating themselves from one.

*        *        *

They “just hung out,” Bowie would say later. They would talk about “music and its ramifications. What it implied. What is it. What can it be used for.” Because the government had closed the Shrine, and actively prevented other clubs from showcasing the Africa ’70, the band mostly lingered around the hotel during the time that Bowie was in town. They did give some informal performances in the courtyard of the Crossroads, and recorded often in the studio. Now and then, Bowie recalled, Fela would ask, “Lester, you feel like playing tonight?” They’d find a concert, pack some of the band in a bus, and go sit in and play. But they spent a great deal of time just talking.

Often they’d talk in a room at the Crossroads, or in the courtyard, surrounded by Fela’s musicians and dancers. But with Fela, Bowie had the sensation that they could have a conversation in a crowd, with other people at their elbows, that was more intense, more intimate—more private—than a conversation with most people on a desert island.

One afternoon they were sitting in a bedroom in the hotel, Bowie on a chair by the dresser, fingering a Cuban cigar, and Fela on the king-sized bed, nearly naked as usual, splayed across the pillows. He was smoking a huge joint, and not making much of an effort to keep the ashes off the sheets. He would inhale slowly, longer than seemed possible, and then exhale the smoke in languid puffs, clouds of it massing and dissipating around his head.

There had been a lull in the conversation. Bowie was contemplating whether to light the cigar or to save it for another occasion. It was the first one he’d seen in a month. He looked up at Fela. “Why was your place called Kalakuta?” It was something he’d never asked about before.

“In 1974 they locked me up for eleven months in a prison here in Lagos called Algabon Close, my brother,” Fela replied. “That’s how I got the name. The cell they locked me in was called Kalakuta. In that cell, my brother, I met people of high intelligence—men with brains—people who will do much better for our society outside than inside a cell at Algabon Close. I asked myself: Why should these men be locked up here? Or is Algabon Close the new accommodation or hostel for men with brains? One of them, his name is Rock-well. My brother, this man has an exceptional talent. He was detained a long time ago for forging Nigerian currencies, but they could not take him to court. You know why? Because there is no difference between his forged note and the genuine Nigerian currency note. They brought people from Interpol and Scotland Yard, they brought microscope and every machine manufactured by man to detect and difference in the notes, but they could not find any slight alteration, so you know what they did? They locked him up at Algabon Close without trial. They knew they could never convince a judge that Rock-well’s currency note was forged so they threw him into Kalakuta. That cell in Algabon Close, to me, my brother, is the home of intelligent people. So I decided to name my Republic after Kalakuta because the people of Kalakuta Republic are intelligent people.”

Bowie looked nonplussed. “But if there was no proof, how do you know he was really a forger?” he asked, still fiddling with his unlit cigar. “What if they just said that so they could put him away?” Deep within the cloud of smoke, Fela just stared at him with a pitying half-smile that said: My brother, you haven’t understood a damn thing.

*        *        *

The Kalakuta Republic was described more than once as a farce. John Darnton, the New York Times Nigeria correspondent (who was summarily expelled from the country when he attempted to attend the tribunal regarding the Kalakuta incident in mid-March 1977), wrote that “Authoritarianism has an appeal for Fela, who, despite his sympathies for the underdog, is in many respects a mirror image of the militaristic society he criticizes.” Fela controlled everything in the compound, from the distribution of resources, to the resolution of disputes, to the handing-down of punishments, especially among the women. Many found it hypocritical that the punishments apparently included beatings (called “FBs” or free beatings) and even confinement, in a “symbolic” wooden hut in the yard that was named either “Kalakusu,” “Kalakosa,” or “Kalakanu,” depending on who was telling the story. It was tied shut only with a string, but the confinement was real, they said. Fela himself matter-of-factly told a reporter for The Punch that “Without discipline, no organization can run effectively. And the way we do it is very democratic.” But if there was no difference between Kalakuta and the military government, how could Fela claim to be fighting for the people? Can a mirror image be a critique?

Commentators offered a variety of explications of the name of his former prison cell. Fela told some that when he went to East Africa, he learned that Kalakuta was a Swahili word that meant “rascal.” “So, if rascality is going to get us what we want,” he would say, “we will use it; because we are dealing with corrupt people, we have to be ‘rascally’ with them.” In a Daily Times article of March 17 that promised to explain “What Kalakuta Means,” Fela is quoted as saying that the word refers to “the moving boat that never reaches destination.” Another journalist, Lindsay Barrett, contended that Kalakuta was a “linguistic corruption” of Kolkata and, as such, a reference to another notorious prison of the former British Empire: “The Black Hole of Calcutta,” where an exaggerated legend has it that, in 1756, an Indian rebel commander had 146 captured English troops stuffed into a tiny, windowless prison cell without food or water (when the guards returned the next day, 123 supposedly had died, many still standing because of the cramped conditions).

The compound merited the name “Republic,” Fela declared, because “I wanted to identify the ways of myself or someone who didn’t agree with that your Federal Republic created by Britishman. I was in non-agreement, man.” In fact, when Bowie was in residence the Africa ’70 recorded a tune called “No Agreement,” which features another fine solo by the trumpeter. The song is built up around the hesitating figure of a rhythm guitar lurching between two notes. After solos by Fela and the great baritone sax player Lekan Animashaun (whose sound was the cornerstone of the Africa ’70, much as Harry Carney’s was in Duke Ellington’s orchestra), Bowie takes his turn, starting with a breathy huff and puff that explodes into descending major-6ths, piercing shots in the dark. Purrs and growls unfurl into lyrical phrases that sometimes end on a pinched note, or chromatic ducks and feints and half-valve curls. After a raspy descent into the lower register of the horn, Bowie’s solo ends abruptly with a yelp. The music stops entirely, and then kicks in again, a few seconds later. One would be tempted to assume it’s two separate takes, spliced together, except that the rhythm guitar flubs the ending of the first part (continuing four notes into another repetition of his pattern rather than stopping). And then Fela is audibly sings the guitar part to start up the music again.

The lyrics are minimal, an antiphonal reiteration of the title: “No agreement today, no agreement tomorrow.” Fela elaborates the phrase as a refusal of silence, a refusal of complicity in the abuses of an oppressive regime: “I no go agree make my brother hungry, make I no talk / I no go agree make my brother homeless, make I no talk.” If Kalakuta is a critique, it holds up a mirror that exposes the fault lines and hypocrisies of the military state, without itself claiming purity or transparency. It means: We are rascals. We are lost at sea. We swallow up Englishmen. This is the reason the awkward pause after Bowie’s solo needs to stay in the recording: it is a crack in the glass.

*        *        *

Bessie Head’s first major literary success was a short autobiographical essay called “The Woman from America,” which was published in the New Statesman in August 1966. Rough-hewn and frank, it is a discussion of her relationship with Jane Kerina, an African American aid worker who had come to live in Botswana with her husband to work with refugees from South West Africa. They had quickly become friends, and “The Woman from America” is a fascinating portrait of the politically strident and outspoken visitor. “She descended on us like an avalanche,” Head writes, explaining that “it took a great deal of courage to become friends with a woman like that” because Head herself was “timid and subdued,” like “everyone” in her village, cowed in the face of authority “because authority carries the weight of an age pressing down on life.” “It is terrible then,” she goes on, “to associate with a person who can shout authority down.” Head published another essay about Kerina a couple of years later, where she advances a surprising and somewhat disturbing claim: “It seems to me that it is only the Afro-American, because of what they have suffered, who is capable of this deep compassion. Because when I compare her against us I really see the African continent as if filled with a lot of squabbling, petty-minded, vicious little tribalists who are likely, as in the case of Nigeria, to repeat the petty little bigotry of the tribal wars all over again, until the Gods, being fed up with this nonsense, send in some other colonial power to divide the continent of Africa up again for their own ends.” And yet, what kind of person chooses the troublemaker, Head seems to be asking herself—becomes friendly with the agitator? It amounts to a choice, she concludes. Which road do you take? “It has come down to this. Either the woman is unreasonable or authority is unreasonable, and everyone in his heart would like to admit that authority is unreasonable. In reality, the rule is: if authority does not like you then you are the outcast and humanity associates with you at its peril. So try always to be on the right side of authority, for the sake of peace.” And yet, she goes with the rascal.

*        *        *

The April 1977 tribunal report was especially disturbed by the association of the word “Republic” with Fela’s compound. It called for the prohibition of the use of “Republic” to describe any individual’s “domain” within the Federal Republic of Nigeria. “The use of the word is not only misleading,” the report worried, “but . . . leaves the impression of a separate and distinct republic proclaimed within the Federal Republic of Nigeria in defiance of the constitution.” This conclusion was echoed in editorials throughout the country, as in the magazine Spear’s argument that “no single person should try to set himself above the laws of the land. Nor should anybody set up a republic where morals and decency are cast to the birds.”

The ethnomusicologist Michael Veal, in his excellent biography of Fela, comments that “‘politics’ to Fela ultimately represented a desire to empower the masses so that they might lead dignified lives and attain life’s basic necessities, rather than any real desire to participate in the political process.” But one might suggest on the contrary that even as small and as theatrical a gesture of claiming the word “Republic” is nothing if not an attempt to “participate in the political process.” The furore of the official response is proof of the seriousness of Fela’s challenge. One could go back as far as the entry for “République” in the Encyclopédie of Diderot and d’Alembert, in which de Jaucourt contends that “it is in the nature of a republic that it only has a small territory; otherwise, it can hardly subsist. In a large republic, there are large fortunes, and in consequence little moderation of minds.” A man is tempted to think that he can be great without his country, and even “on the ruins of his country.” More recently, writing about the French understanding of the term, the historian Pierre Nora has pointed out that as the putative “expression of the general will,” a republic “requires its outcasts.” A republic, he suggests, is “thirsty for a combative unanimity.”

The Kalakuta Republic made the point that any self-professed Republic is necessarily founded on exclusion. The young writer Chris Abani, who was imprisoned with Fela at the Kiri Kiri maximum security prison in 1985, writes in a poem dedicated to the musician that the Kalakuta Republic was named “to honour the death / of conscience.” (The corollary, of course, is that “truth is a risky business,” as Fela apparently quipped to Abani, smiling his gap-toothed smile.) But it might not be possible for this point to be made from the street. That is, it might not be possible for there to be a “Crossroads Republic” in any real sense of the term. Fela goes on to rebuild Kalakuta elsewhere, but when he and Bowie meet, it is in a kind of limbo or afterlife, in a gap between declarations of independence.

*        *        *

In his later years, Bowie would sometimes tell interviewers that he’d stayed with Fela for five months, or six, or even seven. In fact, he seems to have been in Lagos about three months, basically during the summer of 1977. The Art Ensemble played at the Jazz Showcase in Chicago in mid-April, and Bowie participated in the AACM Festival of avant-garde jazz broadcast by the radio station WKCR in mid-May, before performing at Moers in Germany in a duet with the drummer Don Moye on May 27. He left from there to go to Africa.

Bowie wasn’t in Chicago for the series of concerts to celebrate the 12th anniversary of the AACM in mid-August. He came back to the States through Europe. The photographer and manager Isio Saba remembered that Bowie stayed with him in Rome when he arrived from Nigeria. He must have arrived there around the beginning of September, since he played in the Laboratorio internazionale di musica creativa e improvvisata, which matched Bowie and some of the giants of European free jazz (Steve Lacy, Evan Parker, Enrico Rava) with various younger Italian musicians. In the final concert, on September 14 in Modena, he performed a duet with the pianist Antonelle Salis. They ended their show with a brief, elliptical version of “Hello Dolly.”

Fela and his band left Lagos as well in late September or early October 1977. The Africa ’70 couldn’t survive if it couldn’t play concerts, and they were offered a long-term gig at the Apollo Theatre in Ghana.

The next April, Bowie recorded two albums in Italy with a quintet including the reedman Arthur Blythe, the pianist and organist Amina Claudine Myers, the bassist Malachi Favors, and the drummer Philip Wilson. The 5th Power, recorded for Black Saint, is the better-known of the two (it has long been available on CD). But on African Children, the more obscure LP the band recorded for the Horo label at the Mama Dog Studio in Rome, there is a twenty-minute tune titled simply “For Fela,” which  Bowie said was his own adaptation of Afrobeat. It is not clear whether Bowie was aware that they recorded it just three days after the death of Fela’s mother, who had never fully recovered from the injuries she suffered in February 1977.

*        *        *

“Hello Dolly” is of course a song of return, a prodigal coming back where she belongs. On the version of the tune on the soundtrack to the film, Barbara Streisand sings, “I feel the room swayin’ / For the band’s playin’ / One of my old favorite songs from way back when / So bridge that gap, fellas / Find me an empty lap, fellas/ Dolly’ll never go away again.” When Louis Armstrong sings his version of these lines, welcoming Dolly into the club where he is performing (and stealing the scene in the process), he revises the fourth line, commanding: “So show some snap, fellas.” Might the implication be that the gap cannot be bridged, somehow—that we cannot simply step over the distance that divides us? We can demonstrate some discipline, however, here characterized as a certain sound—a resonant friction—and an alert, quick-witted mastery of time. Might we say then that Lester Bowie, in his 1974 recording of this song, is attempting to honour that snap, that sharp departure, rather than indulging in the pretence that a new version can bridge the distance back to an old favourite song? Bowie’s fellow traveller, the cornetist and conductor Butch Morris, may have said it best when he commented on Bowie’s approach to tradition in his playing, his admirable way of “pointing back without quoting.”

Fela’s Unknown Soldier makes no call for reconciliation or forgiveness. On the contrary, it insists on distance even in the midst of its fire. The opening call-and-response seems peculiar in a song that gives witness to a “massacre.” Fela announces, “I never come again / I still dey faraway,” and he tells us, “Just wait small make I reach where I dey go.” In response, the female singers passively intone a repeated echo, “where you dey go,” as though they are watching him turn the corner at an intersection down the road. Hearing this introduction, we look in two directions. There is the promise of the song, the deposition it will record. And simultaneously, there is the promise of the voice’s escape, never to come again, as it slips away to some unknown republic.

*This interview originally appeared in print in Chimurenga 8: We’re All Nigerian! (2005).

A conversation between Jude Anogwih and Ayodele Arigbabu

Jude Anogwih: I find it interesting how the idea of the National Theatre as an institutional organisation just sits there in a wide open space. It’s a bit embarrassing, but it is also exciting, because if you are to imagine that land mass … imagine that as an artist village, and the kind of activity that would be going on there. The nature of our products, the nature of intellectual context, the creative energy that would really be evolving there. It would be like some sort of a high-tension power space.

Ayodele Arigbabu: Haawww, well, that’s if wishes were horses, as they say, but then, there is an artist village there, isn’t there? On the fringes…

JA: That’s just a bit of the entire land mass, you know? I’m looking at the entire space; so…

AA: So you are looking at scale?

JA: Well, if you may use that term…

AA: Because what you are talking about exists in some form, especially when you are looking at this scale, excluding that activity to a scale that will fit to the size of the National Theatre, not just its physical size, but also the emotional and symbolic image and baggage that the structure carries. So I suppose what you’re looking at is scale, exploding all those activities. But what’s missing, what’s preventing that scale currently, in your opinion?

JA: I’m also looking at another aspect, which is more like reactivation. I know quite a lot exists already, you have the national galleries there, you have the artist village there, the workshop for creating sculpture… you also have the National Theatre, and then you have very relaxing spaces. But I’m looking at how we can reactivate these energies. Currently, they are playing their role in a most minimal way, but how do we get them to bring out the best of what they can offer, within a wider perspective, possibly as an international space for artistic collaboration and intervention. I think my emphasis is more on how to reactivate the space.

AA: Yea, that’s what’s missing, why? Because some of the things that you are suggesting, I agree should be happening there, and some of those things are happening but at a very small scale. I mean there is a National Gallery there, but I don’t know how many people visit that place. You have the artist village and the other cultural things happening around there. So, my question is, if that huge building is there, that land is there, and that intention to have this things happen is still there, and is evidence in the fact that people are still there trying to do this thing, then what we are complaining about is not being done at the right scale? What’s missing, what’s needed for that reactivation? To make it happen at the scale?

JA: Why don’t we look at cross-collaboration of ideas and practice? Maybe we look at some synage that can come out from the National Council for Arts and Culture (NCAC), working collaboratively with the artists’ workshop or working with the National Theatre staff; each person drawing resource and information from the others and possibly seeing how these collaborations can come into some hybrid forms. But let me come back to my earlier word, reactivate. I didn’t say its not active, but more about building up its capacity to maximize the output and possibly make it more vibrant and attractive to people and to draw on the the existing ideas and activities already going on there.

AA: Ok, but let me ask a question, you’ve been in practice for a couple of decades at least?

JA: Definitely! AA: Of what use has the National Theatre been to your career as an artist, especially in the last 10 years? How central has it been to your practice? That’s an interesting question. As a kid I remember watching the broadcast of the FESTAC 77 activities in the National Theatre. The dance, the music, it was so amazing and it was one of the things that nourished my intent, my desire to be an artist. And then all through my schooling, we always encountered the National Theatre one way or the other, especially when it cames to African culture and arts. And this was also another amazing time for me, I mean learning about the Ghanaian culture, learning about southern dance and activities from Tanzania, from Morocco, from all over, you know? I think at every moment I am inspired by the physical structure of the National Theatre, the beauty of the landscape and the diversity of interest. Aside from all this, one can have a bottle of beer at the corner with pepper soup and hang out with friends and get some fresh air. So for me there has always been a very interesting inspiration that I draw from this structure, either from its activities or from the physical content of the place, and also within the visual of work within.

AA: So, the National Theatre has provided you with essence of nostalgia: But I have not seen it impacting directly on your career, beyond the services provided in giving you a connection with what happened during FESTAC, that historical concept. It seems that the National Theatre is becoming nothing but a shell, it’s just the building: if its about abe igi (under the tree) where people drink beer, there are lots of spots in Lagos where people drink beer. If it’s about the Society of Nigerian Artists (SNA), they have space at Freedom Park. Indeed, there are other venues that are taking care of some of these things that might have occurred or been housed within the National Theatre. For me, this makes the NT redundant, a space that has outgrown its use. So why don’t we just advise the government to create a performative event, in which the National Theatre is rigged with explosives , and its blown up, and the explosion is recorded as video art, so that at least the building can be put to some use and is demise becomes a huge event at a monumental scale compare to FESTAC, and then we can clear the debris away and build an estate from that land. And then we can all go to sleep and stop worrying about this terrible building that has not achieved anything for us in the past few decades.

JA: You know, I wouldn’t buy that idea of blowing up the National Theatre. I rather buy the idea of reformation. As an artist, and in line with my practice, my work is never finished – after 10, 20 years I could go add some elements, I could take out or totally dismantle the whole piece and rearrange it. So I’m rather looking at the idea of reconstructing the National Theatre. I’m very careful about this word we call structure. I know to somebody like you, an architect, it would mean bringing in new material, taking away or possibly erasing the entire structure and having a better place and then you would have another dimension take form there. For myself, I think its about bringing in certain things that will change the original perspective or the original functions of this building. It’s an amazing building, it’s something that should be kept as a symbol of national pride. Now, if it’s not meeting our expectations, what do we do? How do we reactivate it, how do we reconstruct it? How do we reposition? You see it’s a very beautiful space in the sense that you can imagine that space being run as a residency space for artists, as a home for artists. Ok, and then we can make more spaces for theatre, for an art school… imagine a whole lot of activities going on there, all building on the history of the structure, building on the original or initial intent of that structure. It was built to unite the Africans culturally, which is still a very utopian idea, because I don’t think there is any need for us to talk about Panafricanism, when we know we can all grow individually, independently and also meet the expectations of others. So I’m looking at the idea of reconstruction. I wouldn’t blow up the National Theatre; I would only rescale it, give it new functions and take away certain elements, keep others for historical purposes. A place that takes its history from something that happened in the past, from a lesson we might have learnt from the misappropriation and misuse of resources. It could even break ground for intellectual research on corruption, on the misappropriation of funds, on bad governance, on maladministration, and then invite artists to create works on these topics.

AA: Don’t you think you are indulging in wishing for utopia? I mean that in two ways: First there is the economy behind the whole idea of cultural production and managing the cultural space. And if you look at the global scene, funding for culture is not doing very well. If government has not been able to manage power generation, which is very very central to the existence of nation; if government could not run a telephone service and has to rely on private entities to manage these basic …

JA: I’m sorry my friend, if the private sector can reactivate the telecom, what makes you think that the private sector is not interested in reactivating the culture industry, with special emphasis on the National Theatre? Government wants to sell off the structure… AA: Then let them do it, because I hate the idea of everything depending on the government. But don’t you think if the government sells it to private interest, then you are putting your heart in the hands of capitalists who care all about profits. They might be able to make more profits if they put up malls, and maybe cinemas and just forget about live theatre. JA: Super scary, but I remember earlier, I made mention of capitalists. I think it doesn’t have to be sold to capitalists, but governments could create a fund or an independent organisation, that requires private influence. The government can also see that these people have all power to make the best use of that space, not really turning it into a money-making environment. I’m not a fan of government selling it to Mr Money Bag. Im not interested in that because I know it’s going to turn into some kind of hotel, into some kind of pure water factory, just because he needs to make his profit. But I am interested in a group of people or minds taking up that structure and running it on behalf of the nation. If they abuse the opportunity, basically we get rid of them and they suffer the consequences of their actions, but they have every power to determine what position or how that space is used.

AA: Yea, but what if they are not able to run it and keep it afloat, in terms of recovering the money used in such a huge facility, and even for creating all this programming that we are talking about, which, you must agree, is hardly ever break even? So, if at the end of the day, they can’t win that war against commerce, then what’s the point if they are just going to do less than what the government could have done. Now the other perspective that I want to talk about in terms of my question about this utopia of the National Theatre that is blossoming with activities… In the first place, is there enough of a national consciousness and zeal in the people to sell it? Is there enough demand for the kind of culture that we produce? That’s the other thing required to support such a huge facility. Is our dream for that space not a bit unrealistic, both economically and in terms of existing demands. Are our dreams not as huge as the dreams of the military government that was flushed with oil money at that point in time they thought the next thing to do was to build a massive structure, which was fine for FESTAC, but immediately after FESTAC, it became too much to handle. So maybe if they had even built the National Theatre in such a way that it could have been scaled down immediately after FESTAC? I think they did that with the aquatic center for the Olympics in London. It was designed so that during the Olympics they have it at the full scales, because of course they were going to have a large turn out of people and after the Olympics, it was designed so that they could take away some part of it, and it would be suitable for the immediate local community after the Olympics, not too big for the community to handle. So I’m just doing a reality check here, I love the National Theatre – just in case people are wondering who is this idiot who is suggesting we blow up such a building. I am emotionally attached to that building, but let’s do a reality check, are we not trying to fit a utopian dream into a space that is not ready, that does not have the capacity to accommodate it?

JA: Let’s go back a little, like you said, how many people are aware of the cultural activities going on in this country? I think with a bit more research, we would find that the cultural industry in this country has generated more funds both local and international over the years than any other sector. The only problem is that most of these are not properly documented. We don’t have the record of number of people who are coming to Nigeria or travelling within in to attend cultural activities. And let’s not forget our artists who are moving into the world. How many contacts are being made? What ideas are they bringing back and how are these integrated to sustain their interest and profession? I think a little research would reveal that this country is hungry, people of this country are hungry especially for good things, especially for cultural things. People don’t just want to drive out and listen to music, they want more than music, they want a live performance and they want to sit with the actors and the musicians and the performers and the artists and get an understanding about what sustains them, and why they do what they do.

AA: I’ve been trying to sell theatre tickets for a few years in this town [Lagos], they don’t necessarily get sold out just like that.

JA: I know, the reason is that these days most cultural activities are illusive. It’s only the rich, the people who are well-travelled and enlightened who are considered consumers of culture. But consider an example: we were at Bariga, on the street corner, I remember, in December 2009, and we had a street intervention programme and we had projections and performances, we engaged the the entire street, fish sellers…. everyone stopped at a moment to refresh and enjoy themselves before going back to their homes or work.

AA: Oh yes, but they didn’t pay for it

JA: They never paid for it

AA: Ha! Ha!

JA: Ok, but I am coming to how the resources had to be generated. And it brings me again to the idea of exaggerated things. We exaggerate things in this country, we exaggerate the price, we exaggerate the idea, so much so that we have lost the meaning of cultural exchange: people – artists and community – coming together to produce something that their reciprocal interest can sustain. So I think we really need to reason carefully, you know, so much is bloated in this country which is not good for us, especially in the creative industry. Look at Nollywood! Nollywood is so locked up in the space that they don’t want to collaborate with anyone else, or when they see you coming, they think you are coming to take a whole chunk of the cake or whatever they are enjoying, you understand? AA: I find that strange, because Nollywood is…

JA: I am putting more emphasis on collaborative ideas, and the flexibility to bring them to fruition. Why don’t we key into basic things like festivals and art fairs and see how we can grow them, move them forward a little. It doesn’t take much, I’m sorry, I’m always optimistic about doing things in the right ways, with the right people and we shouldn’t exaggerate the way we publicise things. These guys pay billions of naira to publicise/advertise on Third Mainland Bridge and then they transfer the cost on you and me. And for Gods sake, if you are over-taxed or if something is overpaid for, you do that once, you wouldn’t want to do it a second time. You lose total interest and then you seek alternative places to get your message across, and you just realise you have to go to that beer parlour under a tree and listen to the sound coming from the speakers… it gives you almost the same feeling as if you were listening to a live performance in any other place. Fela made it very beautiful for everybody, the ordinary man could go to the shrine and watch Fela perform live, have his drinks, interact extensively and go away inspired.

AA: Yeah, but Fela’s shrine still exists in some form, as the shrine run right now by Femi Kuti, it was and is still is providing music. So why then are we looking for the National Theatre if there are already other spaces doing these things?

JA: Maybe we should take out that word “national”, I hate it with passion because that is what causes the confusion in this whole structure.

AA: So when you remove “national”, it becomes theatre

JA: We can also reconstruct that word “theatre”, it could become like a play house or like an artist city.

AA: That is a more interesting idea to me…when you say an artist city, then you are describing Lagos to me, because Lagos is an artist city, because there is a performance every second on the street of Lagos. If you go out there, the conductor on that bus is ready to give you a performance.

JA: There is a difference between a spontaneous and well articulated program, creative program and what happens on the street ok? Lagos is a huge super active eccentric space and it inspires me.

AA: You are going to dangerous ground now because when you are trying to separate the heart of the conductor from the orchestrated heart of the actor… You are going to a dangerous ground.

JA: No, no, I still come back to the idea of linking each form, but careful linking, done with very intelligent and worthy perspective. I can’t just take a bus conductor who needs to shout, demonstrate and do other things to earn a living and then tell him, ‘leave that bus that’s going to Iyana Ipaja, come here, come and shout, demonstrate and earn nothing’. But I can take my crew, get into the bus, tell the bus driver ‘shout, scream, do your business, earn your money and then we do our documentation’, and we also make you happier, you know by promoting what you do and also encourage you. And the next time the bus driver is off duty, he’s going to come see what he did last time with those guys that came with camera in the bus. A conversation between Jude Anogwih and Ayodele Arigbabu

AA: Perfect, perfect, you have solved the problem for me, we have deconstructed the idea of National Theatre. We have taken the national and thrown it in the dust bin. We have taken theatre and we have turned it around and it has gone beyond even the idea of a play house and to an artist city, which Lagos actually is. Thank you, so can we now forget about the National Theatre and talk about something else. If the entire city is an art space, and the entire city is designated as such and it’s in the DNA of the city to create and promote art … if that sort of thing continues and it expands, that might also be part of why the National Theatre is not working, because the arts have diffused across the entire city, so is there a need for the National Theatre?

JA: Remember we have already thrown that word away, and we have reconstructed the second, which means there is no need for a National Theatre. Good, look, it could be just a space like every other space, where interest comes into that place, interest chooses to create dimension out of that place, interests choose to replace it or move it around. It’s a free working table – for example, my work as an artist entails making drawing on any surface; those drawing can at a point become sculptural, I call them all out and they become three dimension pieces that can form an installation. But it is still all about working with a space.

AA: Don’t you think its counter-productive to try to graft or force energy into the space?

JA: Look, creativity is the most beautiful thing in life. I think of an idea, I don’t bother myself about the material or medium, because I know, that creative force or idea is going to direct me to the kind of material that will help to bring it out in its best form. It will also direct me to other multiple materials that can also give it multiple dimensions and meanings. So we have to be flexible with this dynamic structure of creativity. You can’t force something into an idea. You can’t force an idea into an individual. You can’t force energy into a space, but you can, with careful insight, observe how that energy migrates into any space or any part of that space. And then when that happens, you see you get excited and you either begin to create dimension out of it, or you begin to articulate it in more defined ways, or you begin to make sketches or scans that might guide you towards redirecting that energy – like channelling a river to where you want it to be more functional. But remember, energy is like a river, it never forgets its root and it will take you back to the source, and that means there is a lucrative practice at all times and you can enjoy moving your idea, situating your idea, interacting with your idea, sharing your idea as a form of collaborative content. And this will give you new inspiration and content. You have created a mark or network of creative channel, and you can’t exhaust it, unless someone somewhere says ‘I don’t want to do this’ or ‘I just want to refresh and build into something like an hybrid form’. This is what I’m looking at. It’s not complex.

AA: So what is our agreement? We have agreed that we don’t need the National Theatre. Also to make the space available to other lucrative energy and see how that guides and protects the space. If we are left with this place, what can you do with it?

JA: This place is hungry for a whole lot of creative activity. I know this place used to be a printing press. So as a writer, I know what this place meant for the work that I do. So, I would bring it back to its original form. There would be all sorts of machines, with designers, and also a small space for the writer, where he can think and receive more inspiration for his work. I would make it an outlet where everyone comes together, learns from one another and inspires one another. We have to find a way of pushing out this creative energy, so it will meet the needs of the people.

AA: It all boils down to capital. The energy is out there, although it might be scattered, with people doing their different things, but if you want to bring that together to form a critical mass, it all boils down to question of capital. I mean the solid cash.

JA: Do you know that if you have a very wonderful idea, there are capitalists out there, who are ready to give you the financial support you need? But it is things like Big Brother, Project Fame and Idol that get the biggest support these days. Does it mean that no-one has ever come up with a very good theatre idea? What I’m suggesting is that people need to create more platforms, to think a little bit more, to be positive in their aspirations. I am an addict of positivity; I believe everything can actually work out.

AA: I would like to see a program with a strong emphasis on digital communication in literature, publishing films, visual and video art in the practical and not theoretical sense. Also live performances that rely heavily on digital should not be left out. Just like a festival in UK, called Time Wave, which is all about digital media. People now use digital like never before. By taking the notion of National Theatre beyond something archival, it will make it something like a time capsule. It would really be interesting to have such a festival whereby we showcase our culture as Africans, but stretch out the point that technology is not strange or alien to us. Part of why the country is the way it is, is because we don’t engage sufficiently with the future.

JA: It’s a shame that we don’t go to the schools and universities where we have these young minds. If we could encourage and support these young minds, it would really make a whole lot of difference. We should come together and think about how we can create something like a miniature of what we want in the future.

The African Cities Reader is a biennial publication that brings together contributors from across Africa and the world to challenge the prevailing depiction of urban life on the continent and redefine cityness. This articles appears in the third ACR, published April 2015.