Karin Barber

Popular Arts in Africa

All the acts of the drama of world history were performed before a chorus of laughing people. Without hearing this chorus we cannot understand the drama as a whole. Mikhail Bakhtin In the last three or four years we have witnessed an upsurge of interest in African popular art forms so strong that it promises to become a movement. The individual researchers scattered over the continent, who for decades have been pursuing their interest in these arts in isolation, are suddenly finding that there is a forum emerging. Issues formerly raised piecemeal, mainly in short articles and often as a sideline by people whose principal expertise lay in some better-established field, are now getting full-scale treatment in the detailed monographs that are appearing from different parts of Africa. It seems the right moment to set out the scope and possibilities of this field, and to lay claim to a central position for it in the humanities and social sciences. The most obvious reason for giving serious attention to the popular arts is their sheer undeniable assertive presence as social facts. They loudly proclaim their own importance in the lives of large numbers of African people. They are everywhere. They flourish without encouragement or recognition from official cultural bodies, and sometimes in defiance of them. People too poor to contemplate spending money on luxuries do spend it on popular arts, sustaining them and constantly infusing them with new life.

How man makes God in West Africa: Yoruba attitudes towards the Orisa

The idea that gods are made by men, not men by gods, is a sociological truism. It belongs very obviously to a detached and critical tradition of thought incompatible with faith in those gods. But Yoruba traditional religion contains built into it a very similar notion, and here, far from indicating scepticism or decline of belief, it seems to be a central impulse to devotion. The oriṣa (‘gods’) are, according to Yoruba traditional thought, maintained and kept in existence by the attention of humans. Without the collaboration of their devotees, the oriṣa would be betrayed, exposed and reduced to nothing. This notion seems to have been intrinsic to the religion since the earliest times. How can such an awareness be part of a devotees ‘belief’? Rather than speculate abstractly, as Rodney Needham does (Needham 1972), about whether people of other cultures can be said to ‘believe’ at all, it seems more interesting to take a concrete case like the Yorba one where there is an unexpected–even apparently paradoxical–configuration of ideas, and to ask how these ideas are constituted. Only by looking at them as part of a particular kind of society, with particular kinds of social relationships, can one see why such a configuration is so persuasive. The notion that men make gods is by no means unique to Yoruba thought. It is present to some degree in a number of traditional West African religions, and in some, such as the Kalahari one, it can be seen in an even more explicit form than in the Yoruba one. A comparison may help to show how it is the constitution of social relationships which makes such a notion not just acceptable but central to the religious thought of the society.

Popular Reactions to the Petro-Naira

During the last decade, the flow of oil revenue into Nigeria has expanded spectacularly, dwarfing other sectors of the economy. Its implications for development, for the growth of a commercial capitalism, and for the corresponding emergence of a more defined class structure are crucial issues about which much has been written. What we have heard less about, however, is how the ordinary people of Nigeria react to the floods of petro-naira which they themselves cannot reach. Fortunes are being made out of oil, but the living conditions of the rural and urban masses deteriorate as agriculture declines and the urban centres become overcrowded with the jobless and the impoverished. What are the attitudes of these people to the petro-naira? The answer to this question is no less important than an analysis of the hard economic data for our understanding of what is actually going on in Nigeria today.

African-language Literature and Postcolonial Criticism

The ‘postcolonial’ criticism of the 1980s and 1990s — which both continues and inverts the ‘Commonwealth’ criticism inaugurated in the 1960s — has promoted a binarized, generalized model of the world which has had the effect of eliminating African-language expression from view. This model has produced an impoverished and distorted picture of ‘the colonial experience’ and the place of language in that experience. It has maintained a centre-periphery polarity which both exaggerates and simplifies the effects of the colonial imposition of European languages. It turns the colonizing countries into unchanging monoliths, and the colonized subject into a homogenized token: ‘that most tedious, generic hold-all, “the postcolonial Other” ’, as McClintock puts it — an Other whose experience is determined so overwhelmingly by his or her relation to the metropolitan centre that class, gender and other local historical and social pressures are elided.1 Despite intermittent claims to specificity, this model blocks a properly historical, localized understanding of any scene of colonial and post-Independence literary production in Africa.

Quotation in the Constitution of Yoruba Oral Texts

Any genre of verbal art, or any single instance of a genre, can be understood in terms of the way it is constituted a s text. Research on oral verbal art usually proceeds by collecting a number of examples of a recognized, named genre (a particular kind of poem, song, dirg e , chant, tale) and then examining them for the “characteristic features” they s h a re. But the analysis should not stop there. We need to presume that textuality itself is culturally specific: that there are diff e rent ways of being “text,” and that genres recognized as distinct within a given cultural field may nevertheless share a common textuality. To grasp the specific aesthetic mode of any verbal art, then, we need to understand how it is marked, and constituted, as text. To develop this argument, I find it necessary to take issue with the prevailing emphasis on oral art as defined exclusively by p e rf o rm a n c e .

Oríkì , women and the proliferation and merging of òrìṣà

The proliferation and overlapping of spiritual beings is a feature of many religions. Saints in popular Catholicism and Vishnus avatāras in Hinduism represent, in different ways, the possibility of spiritual beings that are simultaneously one and many, clusters or series of manifestations whose inner relationships are often not fully explained. Yoruba oriṣa are in good company. However, the way in which multiple aspects of gods are made and maintained clearly varies from one religious repertoire to another. I suggest that it is important to look at the means or medium by which fractions of gods are established, in order to understand how the relationships between them are conceived. Yoruba oriṣa can scarcely be apprehended without taking into account the specific textuality of the oral genres through which they are created, maintained and communicated with.

Cultural Reconstruction in the New South Africa

one wants to visit. A country that forged its culture in the hard mills of violent and relentless struggle is now decompressing in a rapid, uneven process of political liberalization and cultural reinvention, promoting transformations of outlook and behavior in which economics lags behind. This is a transition above all in identity and self-representation. New cultural developments, bubbling up all around in daily life, in turn demand a fresh scholarly analysis. The contributors to this volume have chosen to engage with the perspective of cultural studies, allied to postcolonial and globalization theory. These points of view provide a loose amalgam of opportunities to reflect critically; to look at genres and cultural sites hitherto neglected, including the apparently ephemeral and trivial; to look beyond genres and artifacts to sport, built space, the road; to look at new phenomena-the digital revolution, the rise of township tourism, new operations of African economic migrants, new efforts by the media to promote a rainbow nation. Few areas of inquiry within African studies could attract more interest, for cultural change is obviously central to the creation of the new South Africa. It is through expressive forms that the political revolution can most immediately be lived out: in reconciliation, in refashioning of personal and collective identities, and in the rediscovery of a common humanity. Giving a key role to culture is of course nothing new in South Africaone reason, perhaps, why there is such expertise in cultural analysis in

When People Cross Thresholds

Abstract This paper makes a very preliminary and provisional attempt to relate the discussion in Jane Guyers Marginal Gains (2004) of disjunction, thresholds, and multiple scales of value characteristic of economies in the Atlantic zone with the disjunction, profusion, and fragmentation characteristic of artistic genres of the region, especially praise poetry. It suggests that their underlying common property is an intense focus on the making and unmaking of persons. In a region where social and political self-realization is open-ended and depends upon acquiring people, and where people are transactable, transitions between multiple conditions of personhood can take place, but some thresholds cannot be crossed. One of the key ethnographic examples in Marginal Gains—the Niger Delta—is revisited to suggest possible lines of further inquiry into this aspect of the originality of cultural production in the zone of the Atlantic trade.

Readings in African popular culture

views of the field oral tradition revisited socialhistory, social criticism and interpretation women in popular culture little genres of everyday life the local and the global.

An archive of Yorùbá religious ephemera

An archive of ephemera seems almost a contradiction in terms. If archives come into being because governments and individuals preserve papers they consider to be worth keeping, then an archive should be a crystallisation of past and present values concerning texts. Most of Nigerias archives are in fact that kind of crystallisation, whether they are local government records, newspaper collections, Arabic-language chronicles, or little-known collections of personal letters and diaries, preserved because the individuals concerned, and subsequently their heirs, had a sense of their value. Unlike these treasures, the archive we are going to discuss here is an artificial creation for a specific purpose, an aggregation of print and media texts that hardly anyone in present-day Nigeria would think were worth collecting and preserving. It is one outcome of a collaborative project funded by the British Academy, involving ourselves and two colleagues from SOAS John Peel and Louis Brenner to investigate the role of the media in the constitution of new religious publics in Yoriibaland. The aim was to cut a narrow but deep slice into contemporary social history in western Nigeria. We selected a particular geographical focal point (the suburb of Ibadan called Agbowo) and a particular temporal frame (1996-9, the duration of the project funding but also, as it turned out, the last and darkest three years of military rule before General Obasanjo converted himself into a civilian and became President of the first elected government in Nigeria for 16 years.) The 1990s were not only marked by ever deepening financial crisis, recession and disorder; they were also a period during which the longstanding live-and-let-live cohabitation of Muslims and Christians in western Nigeria which is evenly divided between the two faiths, and formerly remarkable for the non-politicisation of religion unravelled into ever more strident and polarised competition and antagonism. An array of increasingly evangelical, uncompromising Christian sects emerged to confront an increasingly purist Islam. Just at the same time, new media technology became widely available, notably desk-top publishing and video tape; and with the proliferation of states and the crumbling of government revenues, the long-established medium of TV became fragmented and vulnerable to private interests. Thus the explosion of religious activity, led by Born-Again Christians, coincided with unprecedented means for colonising and exploiting public space.