ayemidun

Of Progressives and Demagogues: A View on South West Politics

2010-11-19T07:46:00.000-08:00

Fayemi and the Usual Suspects:

The evil that walked the rugged landscapes of Ekiti was not Segun Oni. The evil was a brand of regressive political system that President Obasanjo promoted since 2003. The guy was said to be a gentleman, Segun Oni, personable and humane, but so was Chris Ngige, who, however, would get an Abiku redemption, partly because of the public outrage that attended his mauling by Uba and co, and partly because he put up a fight at least. No matter that his was a tarnished courage: admitting to the knowledge that election which brought him to power was rigged before that Pilate who sought no water to wash his own hands off the dubious deal, Ngige should have resigned. But then man must chop. He could now be seen in the fold of ‘the progressives’, popping champagne to celebrate a well deserved victory of Dr. Fayemi. But I still don’t get it, what is the difference between Segun Oni’s ouster and Ngige’s?

‘Progressive’ as a political platform is quite movable in our definition here. You see, Ayo Arise, that implacable political mugger and the deposed governor, Segun Oni, and (horror! horror!) Gbenga Daniel, the Oloogun of Ogun State, had rubbed shoulders with Tinubu, Bola Ige and Bisi Akande during the giddy days of AD. And regally allocated a pride of place on the podium, as newly sworn in governor Fayemi addressed his supporters, was that Ajantala, Ayo Fayose, the juvenile ex-governor of Ekiti whose ridiculous sense of governance as drama and deception, outraged no less a grand reprobate than the ex- president Obasanjo. I have said it repeatedly that the success of Tinubu in politics was partly because he played his politics as fiercely as the PDP hawks, marching them fire for fire, and partly because he was able to convince his publics that his own brand of politics was better and, well, progressive. But he was a progressive with tenacity of a fascist, Tinubu, quite unlike Bisi Akande, Segun Osoba, Lam Adesina and so on in the 2003 opposition as the remaining of South west lay, another Troy, after the plunder of Obasanjo’s ruthless guile.

The Politics of Progressivism:

Progressivism in Nigerian political practice has an untidy and vague character: a long, dishearteningly ambivalent history. From the days of Awolowo and Zik, Tafawa Balewa and Okpara.- the horse trading in the first republic parliament, the peculiar mess of the south west and its causative mega egos, then the making and unraveling of certain cult personalities. The concept of ‘a little to the left, a little to the right’ that defined the political calculation during Babangida’s transitional travesty also problematised such neat categorisation. In a more familiar milieu, to people of my generation at least, we have seen people like Bola Ige, Tinubu, Buhari, Shekarau and Bisi Akande provide a kind of alternative force- a fierce and committed front of resistance- against the rampage of the ruling party in the country, but they have had to walk with most strange bed fellows sometimes. Even Abubakar Atiku, as a victimized VP, was briefly a poster boy for the ‘progressives’ during those days when he kept winning one lawsuit after the other against his overbearing principal, OBJ. In Ekiti, Fayose is such character. Well, the progressives could use the chap’s seeming grass root popularity, his dodgy antecedents in governance notwithstanding. It is almost as if you fall out of favour with the ruling elite, you are automatically accepted and investitured a progressive.

Saraki and Five-Decade Old Confidence:

The quiet but certain storm gathering on Kwara sky is not without its antecedent mythology. But the demystification of Chief Sola Saraki can only be half-achieved if the ‘progressives’ band together against Oloye’s ravenous but beneficent dictatorship. Pardon my oxymoron, it is just that a lot of Kwarans- I mean ordinary men and women, not the amphibious and largely diasporic elite, may readily describe Sola Saraki a progressive leader. It is a matter of perception .But the so called progressives (read elite) of Kwara will never rally on a common front. They always play disruptive loyalty to a common cause. I bet some of the emerging contenders for Kwara Government House come 2011 might even be paid to split the ranks of the opposition. The old man knew this as he threw jabs at the opponents during the formal declaration of his daughter, Senator Gbemi Saraki, a candidate in the next governorship election in Kwara. His was a five-decade old confidence, a knowledge of the other that the other might not even have of their own position.

The Real Progressives:

Personally, I award the medal of ‘progressive’ politics to the spirit of the people of Kano and Lagos states in 2003 and 2009 who have braved all odds to ensure their votes matter in electing their political representation.

Of Brigandage and Demagoguery:

Parenthetically, however, what actually troubles me is the lack of creativity among the new crop of political actors, quite unlike their Pentecostal clergy buddies. We are being short changed on two fronts: these guys refuse to delight us through precarious but entertaining demagoguery of politicking, yet deny us development value of democracy. They do not serve us juicy histrionics, ala Adelabu , to make us give them the due of having at least ‘worked’ for the spoils. Neither do they weave elaborate webs of guile through practiced charm and gift of garb or through real and vibrant grassroots’ irruptions ala Saraki. These are the qualities that defined the political practices of older times. The endearing gravitas and charisma of the stormy petrel of South West, Adegoke Adelabu for instance or the ironic lyricism of SLA Akintola’s oratory or even the corrosive colourfulness of Okotie Eboh. What about the structural socialist attitude of Sola Saraki in Kwara. Adedibu’s welfarist tyranny would have come to mind here, if not for the notorious garrison commander role he ended his political life with.

But the new crop of politicians since 1999 is an irreverent lot- brash, brazen, rash and irresponsible. They simply force their way to power, through elaborate system of distortions and terror. They do not canvass your vote; the campaigning is just a celebration of victory. They are so insensibly corrupt that IBB points at them to play down his own mega sleaze! Was he correct or was he? Check out the macabre dances in the House of Assembly. Not only that they do not want to play politics through gradual connection to the constituent interests, not only that they see the patronage of the Godfather as highly modern and politically correct, they also see public service as a direct opposite of politics, almost a taboo converse. Well, I know, like all of us now, they are a by-product of military incursion into politics, that is, when they were not indeed the military. I could almost Imagine David Mark or Oyinlola barking ‘move, move, double up’ to his infantry of thugs during electoral rampage.

Now these famous (or infamous depending on who you are) names I mentioned above – Saraki, Adelabu, and probably Adedibu, are some of the best minds of their generations. They are counted in the league of the great politicians like like Obafemi Awolowo, Ahmadu Bello, Aminu Kano or Alex Ekwueme, Adesanya, Enahoro, Adebanjo and so on, no matter how you see them. But more importantly, in my mind, those guys typify the real demagogues, imbued with trickster unsettling tendencies for systemic disruptiveness. You detest the plan but adore the mind; you abominate the politics but salute the strategy and argument. And that exactly is my point, my allegation against the Iboris and the Alams, the Oyinlolas and Daniels.

It isn’t easy to capture public imagination let alone a fair chunk of the people’s loyalty. I recall that the late Dadakuada crooner, Odolaye Aremu, while singing the praise of Adedibu, said Adedibu was literally half of Ibadan. And this was the time before garrison politics of Ahmadu Ali and OBJ, a time when the former Awo’s follower commanded a large followership in political decision in Oyo state. So if Adedibu was half of Ibadan, all he needed practically was only one head, a sole accomplice, to become the majority! Same Odoolaye Aremun once said of Olusola Saraki that he was like the sole raining season in Kwara, which permeated with relief.

Fayose and Alao Akala nearly typified this tendency towards emotive populism among the new guard of the south west. Giving the way Fayose captured public imagination of the highly sophisticated electorate of Ekiti, his undoing was his unbridled immaturity, lack of common sense and tacky combativeness. Akala, on the other hand, has always been a grassroots man, even before he ventured into politics; he’s an avatar of sorts (believe it or not) in his Ogbomoso north constituency, a place where his limited talent and education would have continued to loom large if he had been wiser and stayed in there. Now he has to contend with the idiotic smugness of largely sybaritic elite of Ibadan whose ‘non-Ibadan indigene’ credo negates even the constitution of the city’s monarchical democracy. Good thing, the other two near- demagogues in Ibadan, Dr. Victor Olunloyo and Richard Akinjide can see through the smokescreen of their less talented compatriots of the ancient city. But they can help Akala get better by goading him into assembling a cabinet of young and visionary professional to run his policies, like in Lagos- an almost impossible feat, I know, given the man’s bucolic and visceral bombast.

A Big Man with Two Houses!

These are moot points, again. But I refer you to Kwara one more time. Pardon my solecism, I know Kwara isn’t supposed to be in South West but it’s just that it really is, forget the dodgy political permutations. So chief Sola Saraki, knowing full well that the constitution of Kwaran society, highly patriarchal and supremely Islamic, will have a problem accepting the candidature of her daughter, Senator Gbemi Saraki, informed the people that he did not request for her to be turbaned as the Chief Imam. He, he reminded them, who famously owns only two houses in all his almost sixty years in politics and public service, did not want the hungry horde to erode his son’s achievement in the state. His chief wish for them was to bequeath vital continuity governance in which the sister would build on the achievements of her brother. Oloye often speaks to his folks like a leader who recognizes the servitude of his position. And two houses for the ‘whole’ Saraki in this era of Cecilia Ibru, of Ibori, of David Mark, of Obasanjo! Sad though that the senator, in her pursuit of history as the first female governor in Nigeria, might not stand up to the competition on her own legs. Needless to say at the end of that declaration fiesta, old palms were greased and new ones motivated. The crowd unleashed into the traffic that evening was hugely joyous.

2010 Caine Prize

2010-07-13T01:36:00.000-07:00

It is a beautiful story, Stickfighting Days, Olufemi Terry's story that won 2010 edition of the Caine. A darkly beautiful story weaving an heroic culture of stickfighting with life of extreme privation and precarious existentialism. Reading the shortlisted stories earlier before the announcement of the eventual winner, I could have sworn that Terry's would win; but then there are other beautiful stories: The Life of Worm by Ken Barry, How Shall We Kill the Bishop by Lily Mabura and Soulmates by Alex Smith and so on.

olufemi Terry is from Sierra Leone.

Beyond Gadaffi: Nigeria, Federalism and Other Quicksands

2010-03-24T04:56:00.000-07:00

cross-posted at nigerianstalk.org

Though identity, as a category of self perception and self-determination, is considered unhelpful and mischievous because of its tendency towards entrenching xenophobia and ghetto mentality in globalised discourse, but one might be persuaded, in the light of recent ethno-religious violence in Jos, and especially the politics of responsibility that attends it, that what can be indeed helpful for Nigeria’s federated policies is a serious engagement with the identity question.

The dichotomy of indigene/settler is not exactly clearly spelt out in the constitution, as it were and despite our so-called federalist arrangement, people relate to one another in practically all aspects of life based on tribal memory and religious differencing and, of course, the consequent narratives of otherness permeate the political economy. Plateau state has been the recurrent theater in which the tensions and implosion of our tardy federalism are being violently enacted in recent memory, but we all understand that it can happen any where in the country. In a country where even the armed forces men are implicated in murderous ethno-religious conspiracy, how more can we be bound to violence?

We are in fact in more trouble than we thought. Reading Olakunle Abimbola of The Nation newspaper’s Feedback from his March 16th Republican Ripples column – ‘Jos and a Nation’s Dirty Underbelly’ published on 21st, one will be inclined to hesitate a while before calling Gadaffi a mad man. The partisan sentiments expressed by most of the reader-commentators are so astonishingly idiotic that the columnist has to write an italicized preamble before the text messages, warning readers that what they are about to read may yet ‘be more lethal than brainless marauders, sent by evil sponsors, massacring defenseless women and innocent children’. Most of the comments constitute the most base in our ethnic and religious sentimentalism.

Despite the knee-jerk reactions attending Gaddaffi’s unsolicited and shortsighted comment from the government people, one cannot deny that his summation has some sentimental value among the much victimized Nigerians. Most of the southerners that commented on Abimbola’s piece simply desire the peace that self determination which splitting the country will bring about can afford them, while the Northerners see Abimbola’s piece as partisan and anti-north. Some one wrote: ‘The Fulani Arab Jihad moves on inexorably. So stab the sky with your index finger and shout one Nigeria or Allah Akbar!’

It is still a wonder to me how much of the identity consideration of the Nigerian by another Nigerian wraps around each’s religious belief. Yes, most of the violent clashes in northern Nigeria arise from the contention for resources control and political power struggle, but yes again, religion is the platform for mobilization to violence. After all, there are a lot of peripatetic Igbo people which their mercantilist presence in Jos and its environs. Is it a miracle that there has not been any major violent clash between them and their Berom hosts? Or between the large communities of Yoruba settlers who have been in the state as far back as the Hausa-Fulani settlers. In fact there is a belief, albeit unconfirmed, that a Yoruba had once been Gwom Jos!

Is it then any wonder that those who usually mouth the ‘let’s divide Nigeria’ dictum are usually from the south divide? And this doesn’t necessarily have much to do with oil resources being in the south (although the north’s hard federalist stance might have something to do with that fact). And they are not for most part unaware of the fact that separation of a patch-work country like Nigeria along any line (religious or geographic) will surely be untidy and will definitely deepen the schisms we seek to remedy. The reasoning is that homogeneity of culture and value system tends to produce in-built mechanisms for conflict resolution: think of it, in a place like Kwara, Oyo and Kogi, where large populations of Moslems and Christians co exist, you don’t usually have mobilization for economic or political struggles riding violence on the wheels of religion. At any rate, a Yoruba Moslem is just a little better than an infidel in the core north.

It is going to be the most difficult thing in the world whatever can make Nigeria achieve the ‘trans-ethnic’ and ‘post ethnic’ identity that Professor Biodun Jeyifo talks about. And the process is not even being thought about let alone initiated. What with the people with the most inflexibly tight and un-hyphenated identity in the country, people whose cities are divided permanently to reflect physical ascription of otherness fight in, and over, another’s land on the basis of national identity!

We can intellectualize these things all we want, but there are no more startling discoveries to be made as far as the causes of violence in northern Nigeria are concerned. Olakunle Abimbola’s getting a lot of verbal bashing (sentimental fool, people like you will rot in hell, among other verbal stabbing), because he dared to damn political correctness and nail the issue home to its proven veracity. If the self-indulgent Katsina legislator that was throwing empty verbal darts at Gadaffi on TV the other day had expressed such outrage at the Jos carnage similarly on air, may be we would have been on the way to true consideration of a federalist identity. Struggles for economic and political empowerment might still be less unwieldy within the federation of this crazy quilt if we de-emphasise the factor of religion as basis for ethnic and territorial identity and for violent mobilization in the northern Nigeria.

swashbuckling me!

2010-01-15T07:31:00.000-08:00

esta tierra
este aire
este cielo
son los nuestros
defenderemos- Fidel Castro

I am not so sure if this revolutionary words from Castro can be relevant as a rally cry in the situation of Nigeria, but I have signed on to a petition instigated by NEXT, 234.next.com, asking for the president to let go of power, with the words. Never harbour any socialist/ marxist tendencies but for our collective sanity, wouldn't the president allow us to be unsickly governed?

This earth is ours
and the air
and the sky
we will defend them
Sounds er Castro, alright.

Of Mutallab,Football and terorrism

2010-01-15T07:17:00.000-08:00

This entry originally appeared on www.nigeriantalks.org

These days whenever you walk into a bar, you are almost always certain people will
be watching or arguing football, European. The debate on the soccercolonisation of Nigerian youth consciousness is more or less foregone. But the tragic thing is that virtually all informal discursive space has been insidiously compromised because of this collective hysteria for European football. I mean when was the last time you witnessed a serious socio-political debate at a bar, a vendor’s stand, a bus stop? Yet these are a useful, national culture of street parliamentary: vibrant, moveable confabs enriched with diverse imagination and admixed on highly informed commentary, shrill sentimentalities, uneducated but sometimes imaginative conjectures and sometimes near- accurate mythologizing. These forums, reserved largely for those who do not usually have access to avenues of discourse like the newspaper and the internet, are now been endangered by a tenacity of ‘a single story’- the European football.

Even when the president has been absent- some say missing- for more than 50 days; even when the legislature seems grounded in timid idiocy; even when the Federal Cabinet is hushed in cultic embrace of criminality watching, as the nation is reduced to aspirations of 4 or 5 individuals led by the First Lady but cheer-led by the ever consociated minister of justice, we stick to our foreign passion. And you would have thought the attempted bombing by citizen Farouk of a plane over the USA would have caused a solemn break, however brief, from soccer frenzy, to ruminate on human elements of our systemic collapse. No. On 26th of December, the day after the incident that shocked the whole world, my people were still seen at the bar and other places discussing stale victories and losses of foreign leagues .Maybe they could not be bothered. Maybe football offers a kind of therapy, an escape, from the sordid realities around them. What more, it is better to lavish your emotive resources on a thrilling, sensually pleasing spectacle of football than waste them on impassioned commentary on the polity, which will not reduce the subscription fee of the cable networks. Even an a-soccer cynic like me allows a glance or two, once in a while, for the kinetic spectacle of the round leather game.

That was what I was thinking, nursing a lone bottle, last night at a bar in Ilorin, Kwara State, when someone shouted at someone else, amidst a rather frenzied football argument, to shut up and stop behaving like Mutallab. There was a momentary cessation of the babelling, I supposed a lot of people had not heard what preceded the mentioning of the name, and within like 20 seconds ,eyes passed from face to face until all heads turned to the owner of the voice; he apologetically shrugged and said quietly, I mean fanatic. I could have sworn I saw a momentary fear in his eyes, a moment before voices rose again. I took a good look at this guy, he looked like a banker that had come to the bar straight from work- tie and all. Probably not a Muslim in a town preponderantly Muslim, he could have realised at that suspended moment, that there was no way to gauge what people in Ilorin thought of Mutallab and his action.

Yes, we know a larger section of world Muslims frown at terrorism and that many governments in Arab world are participating in the global effort to rid the world of Islamic terrorism, but when we have a respected local opinion shaper like Mohammed Haruna reminding us why Abdulmutallab was possible in the context of American hegemony and murderous interference in the political economy of many a Arab country, we could not be sure that we, as a nation, collectively condemn Mutallab’s idiotic adventure. Haruna, writing in The Nation, reminded us that US’s self-serving foreign policies, powered by her interests in Big Oil in the Arab nations, which have seen criminal invasions of Arab countries and killing of thousands in the process made, global terrorism possible. This is not a new argument, yet Haruna dedicated two columns, two weeks, to tell us how American economic imperialism in the Middle East has continued to criminalise Islamic beliefs and practices, therefore making people like Mutallab take to terror as a weapon of protest. One would have thought, killing of innocent passengers on board, some of whom might be muslims, would not have led to evacuation of troops from Afghanistan and Iraq. But then, the statement would have been made, wouldn’t it? And if other Muslims had perished in that plane, one cannot be too sure of their chances in the after-life, even if one conceded Mutallab his eternal bliss of multiple virgins, as they might not think of themselves as fighting any holy war.

But Haruna was right; and he would have been more so if it had happened that Mutallab had taken Yemeni citizenship before his misadventure. His misadventure would have been a mere shock to us rather than the catastrophic dimension it has now taken, if he had renounced his Nigerian citizenship before boarding that plane. Nigerians are not all Muslims and we might not all share in the Islamist romanticism and sense of injustice that inspired young Mutallab, but now we are all going to be told to step out of line and be strip-searched at airports all over the world; we are all going to be punished for politico-religious convictions of an impressionable young man. There is nothing sensible for any Nigerian, even if muslim, to fight an Arab war at our collective expense.

These are things we expect public commentators like Mallam Haruna to address. Many enlightened Nigerians- muslim or Christian (like the enlightened American commentators that Haruna copiously quoted)- are aware of and sympathetic with the colossal injustice going on in the Middle East for instance, but we still object to these things erupting unwarranted violence in our country. So we expect public commentators, when they question America’s reason for including Nigeria in the list, to remember that we have always lived with such extremist tendencies in Nigeria. America overreacted, yes, but we are also known to have overreacted more than once when we decided to slaughter people for holding different religious views. Terrorism need not be targeted at the US, need not be global, to be deemed so; the routine massacres that occur in Kano and Kaduna and a lot more northern cities in the name of religion and ethnicity are terrorism. Remember the recent Bokom Haram atavism. Yet unlike global terrorism, there is nobody to be held responsible, to be prosecuted, no country to be bombed- a case of unknown Yankaba, I guess. And do we really think the little Jihads that dotted home landscape did not contribute to Mutallab profound ignorance and his fantasy of Islamic millennium?

Let us not be so bothered in locating Mutallab geography and psychology of influences in his foreign education, his existential loneliness, his background of privilege. Let us be bothered more by the ruination of Nigerian body politic. As Princeton Lyman pointed out, Nigerian has been deconstructed by its internal contradictions. Corruption and bad leadership have continually made project Nigeria a still birth; our sullied international profile has taken another feather of ignominy- thanks to Mutallab: we are done f or. Let’s not even start to wonder if Mutallab was Ghanaian, would American include Ghana in the terrorism list. No!, they would not: Ghana, despite her sizable muslim population is not known for violent extremism. Ghana has shown commitment to sustainable democracy, forward-looking economic planning and leadership that is ready to work with people in mind. Besides, Ghanaian president would have contacted President Obama immediately for resolution after the failed terrorist attempt, but we don’t even have a government in place. So how much different are we from Somalia that we object to sharing pride of place with on that list? When we get our acts together and resolve the avoidable implosions of our national structure through good governance, we might not need to shout ourselves hoarse before Nigeria, as an international brand, becomes credible again.

Back to my bar moment: There could be a justification in the tag of Mutallab that the gentleman put on his overzealous interlocutor. Football is a game of extreme passion, fierce faith, dogmatic commitment, irrational belief. Have I described a religious temper? Yes, football can take on religious experience and it has recorded its own bloody history all over the world, hasn’t it? And if Mohammed Haruna can deploy Mutallab’s action as metaphor for liberating impulses, why couldn’t our man equally see the zealousness of this fanatic fan of an English team in such terms? My thoughts couldn’t have been beer-sodden, could they?

amputations,nollywood and other images

2009-10-28T03:50:00.000-07:00

The post below has been published on nigerianstalk:

Nigeria has always been a country of fantasized greatness since the collapse of the first republic. But the rebranding antics of the minister of information have added a risible dimension to the fantasy ride. This is not because the branding project is not necessary or even desirable, but because the project is geared towards a mere white wash; a spread of powder over an intolerably burnt face.’ Great nation, good people’. Yes we are good people but we are atrociously bad too, just like any other country. So what is the depth of thought here? Mere cant will not do, the paradigms to be pushed off the slopes are all too visible for any sloganeering cover up.

Nigeria celebrated its last Independence anniversary under a pall of a series of explosive image-attacks. The ones that seemed most irritating to the fire brand Mrs. Minister of Information appear to be (a) the portrayal of Nigeria as a country of fraudsters in the Sony website ad and (b) the portrayal of Nigerians as enterprising ritualists in the Hollywood-South African movie, District 9.Do not mind the intractable spate of arbitrary and unexplained assassinations in the country; nor the rot in the education sector ; nor the total collapse of security and economy; nor the endemic corruption among the ruling/ political class, and its corollary among the dispossessed youth- desperation for quick wealth, a situation that makes Sony’s wise-assed slur possible in the first place. I cannot be sure if the irony of it all struck Dr Akunyili when the chairman of her own branding project committee, the actor Pete Edochie, was recently kidnapped.

We could understand the minister’s especial grouse with the movie: aside making a hash of her much refrained-branding project, her political benefactor and former president of the country, General Obasanjo rtd., has had his personal image mauled in the ritual mud of District 9’s Obedsanjo. But wait awhile: who was trying to implicate the former president in the wizards’ brew of some screen-created pagan Nigerian exiles? Who had such audacity to tie the General’s name with his conquered country’s marauding diaspora of alien flesh eaters? For those who do not know, the name Obasanjo is not really a common Nigerian name, not even in Egba from where the former president comes. I think someone had mischievously chosen that name for the leader of the District 9 Nigerians to drive home a sly, rubbishing point. See, why not Adesanjo, Olusanjo and other such ‘Sanjo’ mutations that are more common? What, were they trying to paint the Nigerian community among those aliens as a macrocosm of Obasanjo’s Nigeria?

I did not see District 9 until recently. In fact too recently, for it was on the same day that Mr. Segun Ajayi, Action Congress agent in Ido Osi, caused a commotion at the on-going Ekiti Election tribunal. The man, whose leg had been amputated due to a gunshot attack from the PDP thugs during the election, brought the putrefying rump before the sitting, as an exhibit (or a kind of evidence in case the PDP lawyers attempted to claim he had never really had a leg before the election). While the whole court went into an odour-attack from the moldy leg-evidence, a tragic image flashed through one’s mind, a sad, ironic association of that amputation, a symbol of political violence and ritual dismemberment, with the other- an alien dismembered limb thrust on Obesandjo in District 9.And the tragic irony becomes more biting when one remembers that former president Obasanjo was, by indirection (no thanks to his political credo of ‘do or die’ which his party took to heart in Ekiti), responsible for the violent reduction of Segun Ajayi’s leg.

No doubt, as it has been famously expressed, that most of the dark impressions of Nigerians as a ritual-minded, scam-minded people get exported largely through the efforts of Nollywood movies. A Nigerian reviewer of District 9 suggested that the movie has bought into the sentiments of Nollywood creations but without the context. For really who was the Dibia that divined the ritual potential of the alien flesh to Obedsanjo and co? There must be a Dibia, a Babalawo, the Wise One, if the creators of District 9 had thorough digested the Wooden lessons of Nolly ventures.

I recently came across a series of Pieter Hugo’s photographs on Time Online photo gallery, taken from a book about Nigerian movie industry, Nollywood: The Stars of Nigeria’s Movie Business. The photographer had asked the actors to ‘recreate Nollywood myths and symbols’ like they do in movie sets. The results of these re-enactments are a bit unreal, even for Nollywood movies. There is one odd photograph of a Escort Karma in Long Jacket, a comic mask and an axe, standing on the middle of a road with a captured, fuzzy image of traffic about him. I think that picture could well be taken from a scene of any Hollywood horror film. A particularly horrifying one features Gabazzini Zuo in a suit and tie, standing over a disemboweled cow in a ritual setting, holding its bloody entrails to his chest- a ritualist in suit: could you think of a more fitting oxymoronic image of a sophisticated savage? Aside the fact that the names of most of the actors that posed for those photographs are not easily recognized in Nollywood, their bizarre representations also stretch the imagination of the Nollywood’s costuming really far.

Those photographs are captioned with insights that are no doubt from the book: ‘the plot revolves around situations familiar with the audience’ and these are listed, ‘witchcraft, bribery, prostitution’. Also Nollywood’s preferred aesthetic is ‘loud, violent and excessive’ and this aesthetic is supposed to spring from our ‘rich oral and written story telling’ and ‘deeply rooted in the local collective imagination’. But Nigerian story telling aesthetic is not loud and violent. Those Nollywood movies and their ritual templates do not exactly represent the realities of Nigerian experience. Those barely literate film makers have no time for research or historical truth, and they do not know the word aesthetic; they are only interested in creating their own fantasies for pure commercial purposes. Nigerians of District 9 are part of the damage Nollywood is inflicting on Nigerian image. Here we are, ye good woman of Brandingville.

the tragedy of Oyo's employment sheme

2009-10-09T04:06:00.002-07:00

'By the grace of God, the state has purchased 180 cars to be used as taxis under its public transportation scheme, and so we are encouraging university graduates to apply....'
Those words were attributed to Mr. Kehinde Agboola, Oyo State's commissioner for Establishment and Training!The tragedy here is two-fold:first,it shows how tragically deep our generation has sunk into exploitable hopelessness and secondly,how atrociously senseless and clueless our politicians/leaders/policy makers are in providing solutions to socio-economic issues like unemployment.The commissioner even had the absence of mind to point out that, after all, other Nigerian graduates travel abroad to drive cabs. Not that we expected better or more rational development programmes from this tribe of politicians running around the country looking for hide-out for their stolen patrimony;since the truncation of progressive politics in 2003, in the south west Nigeria especially,it has been a reign of total beffudlement.In Nigerian politics as in the flood,only flimsy stuffs flow on the surface, to paraphrase some one .

nobel literary surprise

2009-10-08T09:07:00.000-07:00

Well, we now have another surprise winner of the Nobel in Literature: Herta Muller.Yea,I know the name is probably srange in your part of the world, but I have been re-educated again, after the last two winners- and i hope you would be too-in how small our known world could really be. The Poet Mani Rao-yea, another strange name- puts it better: the songs we know are the songs we sing.Shouldn't we extend our intellectual radar beyond London and New York? Re-educated mainly by stuff on internet, I now know she indeed is a house hold name in Germany and that she has written some fine works about her growing up under the bleakness of human evil.She was awarded the prize for her 'concentration of poetry and frankness of prose' in depicting the 'landscape of the dispossessed.She is 56.

Of Kan, Verissimo, Memory and Poetry

2009-09-22T08:48:00.000-07:00

I bought Toni Kan’s book of poetry, Songs of Absence and Despair, on the attraction of a single line- a title of one of the poems- What is a Boy Without scars? To me that is a very profound poetic question in the context of a memorial examination of childhood. Besides, it recalls the African American Jay Wright’s lines from Boleros, ‘What is a boy but a boy who waits for his solitude to tell him who will relieve it’. But i am not so sure Toni Kan has been reading the master poet for the rest of the poem, like most poems in his collection, falls so flat with ‘bruised elbows and bleeding knees...loose skin and flayed flesh’.

Toni Kan, who, i hear, once said he was a good writer, could indeed be that, but I am sure he did not mean in poetry department. That Cassava Republic published collection of poems comes across as a not- so- attractive sister who accompanies a more beautiful sister (Nights of the Creaking Bed) to a ball. It is no wonder that the critical reviews that the collection of stories, Nights, enjoys in the Nigerian newspapers have largely ignored the collection of poems.

The collection, Songs, fails from poem to poem, to aesthetically elevate those songs with original arresting and poignant imagery and metaphors that the subject matter deserves. For a collection that calls to memory to mediate realities, the metaphors are indeed weak and threadbare where you expect they would levitate.

Memory is a powerful motif in literature. It admits of an almost unrestricted grope into the mind, the senses, desires and abstractions of time. Memory is a trope of poetic freedom for what is important is how things are remembered not how they were. It is not that Toni Kan has not taken this poetic liberty for reconstructive advantage, it is only that he has done so in an uninspiring manner, with an uninspiring language, given his stature in contemporary Nigerian literature.
Hear him:
When I think about you
I think of fragments lacking wholeness...
And shed tears frozen like stalactites
Tears that blind and chook like needles...
And
Memory is the rage in our hearts
This fire that will not be quenched
Memory is the balm that will not dull this ache

Now compare these with these lines from I am Memory by Jumoke Verissimo:

I am a stream with no course;
A maiden with charred beads...
The beads of waiting, the beads of wanting
The beads are weighty
I wait.

I am memory of passages
Leading home to discontent...
The memory of a pain that pines for esteem.
Now these are lines taken at random from the two collections. I am not sure that the excerpts represent their parents well, but what I wanted to point out is the way language is being ‘poeticised’ in both collections. For indeed what is poetry? What do we want poetry do? Don’t we expect poetry as a literary performance to spread a veil of lyrical grace and signification on experience; to work reality through codification of images and metaphors; to assemble the familiar with refreshingly new linguistic mediation; to tuck the world into the aesthetic trousers of the word?. Jumoke Verissimo’s book seems more faithful to the art of poetry, despite it being a debut work.
Both collections address self-apprehension and passion for the public: both offer a way of looking back, of grieving loss, of keeping hope and faith close. But Verissimo’s book is a nobler effort at poetry. Her treatment of memory motif as a viable space of concretising the ritual of nostalgic experience in elegant language and fine lyricism is highly commendable

Naija, Hip hop and Aesthetics of a Youth Culture

2009-07-11T10:51:00.000-07:00

Most Nigerians of my generation have often found one reason or the other to define or defend them selves in the context of assigned social perceptions of them. From music to Literature, to educational achievement, we have had to be measured up against standards of the past, quite unfairly, I dare say, given the facts of times. Naturally we rebel, sometimes to emphasise difference and, sometimes, for the fun of it. Of course, every generation views the one after it with a kind of critical suspicion bothering on nostalgia for a time gone by; and the one before with an impulsive desire for departure. It is the impatient nature of this desire to depart from the ‘old’, this will to clear a definitive space of identity and representation that incidentally ruptures what should have been a fluid passage of time. Dr. Abati’s piece in his column ‘Crossroads’, in The Guardian on Sunday of June 21, on the crisis of identity and contemporary Nigerian music, has kick-started a debate coloured with a lot of generational tensions. But it is good that Dr. Abati has inaugurated this debate, after all, hip hop in the USA, where it originated from, has created its own distinctive critics, criticism and journalism. Naija hip hop needs this kind of critical engagement for its own health and sanity.

But every generation defines its identity and cultural orientations, and mine- this Yahoozee generation - is defined, largely, through the cultural cognition of the hip hop practices. Well, that is a break in tradition, as Dr. Abati rightly pointed out in his critique of Nigeria hip hop scene, since the earlier generation referred to did not do music in hip hop tradition. These musicians ‘of soulful, meaningful tunes’ of the 70’s and 80’s, who Abati so romanticized, however, did not inscribe any coherent musical tradition as it were: They practiced within different and diverse genres but there is hardly any homogeneity of aesthetics, a structure of rhythm or political ideology – indeed, no identity of passion to define their works as a tradition aside the fact that they inhabited same space of time. So there seems to be no tradition to be broken as such. Unless we can honestly bind artistes as different as Tunji Oyelana and Haruna Ishola, Salawa Abeni and Rex Lawson, with a recognizable artistic or aesthetic umbilical cords! On the other hand the hip hoppers operate within a rich and vibrant tradition that boasts of impressive ancestors as Work songs, Gospel, Blues, Jazz, Black Arts and other African-American cultural practices. This tradition is best not alienated from its African roots!

Hip hop movement began under the conditions of deprivation and poverty. And maybe if men and women of my generation had had a tiny bit of opportunities and resources (relatively stable economy, stronger educational sector etc) that the generation before it grew up with, maybe we would be more mainstream in our cultural practices, maybe we would pay more attention to orchestra and musical notes and boardroom dances, may be we would be less conscious of poverty mentality in our creative productions and sing of beauty of Tafawa Balewa Square and glittering lights of Abuja nights, instead of Kokolettes and Barcadi. But this is a generation twice dispossessed, hopeless except for the succour of creative vistas opened up by hip hop, stand up comedy and hip hop-influenced fashion industry

Let us also remember that hip hop is very much aware of its nature as a youth culture, as ‘street’; it is aware of its own outside-ness and rebellion which have always marked it down for the margins in terms of power and tolerance. If the earlier practitioners had not embraced their cultural disenfranchisement from the main stream (much the way the earliest practitioners of Jazz did) with aesthetic sense of its internal identity, the industry would not have had a culture of entrepreneurship so successful that hip hoppers now occupy places in world millionaire list.

I think it amounts to self contradiction to admit these young people are practicing hip hop in one breath and accuse them of ‘irreverent and creative’ language use and imitation of western clothing style and attitude, in another. Hip hop as a part of urban culture operates as a mesh of styles, attitudes and variegated representations. Designer labels are as integral a part of hip hop register as is expensive liquor; so is the attitude of clothing. Olu Maintain or 9ice does not have to be an alcoholic to praise the status drinking Moet confers on the drinker: it is a prop for ‘bragging rights’, merely, a verbal swagger. It borders on what Rha Goddess called the ‘idea of struggle, of being able to tell…and live a rags-to-riches story’. You would hear it in Olu Maintain’s ‘Story of My Life’, in Ajasa/9ice’s ‘Fe nu won so’, in D banj’s Mo bo lowo Won’.

Irreverent creativity of language use by Nigerian hip hoppers is better contextualized in the idea of the ‘community of meaning’ in popular culture. Meaning in hip hop, as in Afro Beat, is generated through a process of signification that reflects complex systems of codes, tropes and ‘lexical approximation, easily recognizable to those who belong in the community.’ Hip hop language is as irreverent as Ginsberg’s was when he wrote Howl, a book that inspired the upsurge of Beat tradition of poetry in America, and influences the incantatory output of poets of Black Power Movement like Amiri Baraka. It does not really matter whether Nigeria is reduced to naija, what is important is how ‘naija’ is projected to the world. Naija is a term of endearment; a term we variously used when the ‘elderly’ law makers throw chairs in the hallowed chambers or when the ‘young’ Chimamanda wins a literary prize. Naming, especially, is aesthetics. Public Enemy, Dbanj, Africa Bambata, Lord of Ajasa: do we not sense a kind of desire to transgress identity here? What would it profit his music if King Sunny Ade was known as Isola Adeniyi Adegeye? How much aesthetic identity does ‘Barry’ enjoy when his music is being praised among his fans that are too impatient to mouth his longer real name? Orlando Owoh does sound better to me than Owomoyela on the album jacket!

And contrary to the opinion that Nigerian hip hoppers merely ape western artistes, it is important we ‘notice’ that there is a way that Nigerian hip hoppers can lay claims to a nationalist aesthetics in that process. The texture and meaning of Lord of Ajasa‘s or 9ice’s music, for instance, will make it difficult to conclude they ape any foreign influences in their compositions. 9ice’s linguistic innovations, for instance, is almost unprecedented: to some of us who are witnessing the regression of artistic purity of language use in contemporary Fuji and Juju, 9ice’s songs surely appeal to some tribal memory lost with ‘Alawiye’ texts. Hip hop is supremely aware of its space, its place in wresting meaning out of the street of its experience. That is why Kwaito in South Africa and Genge of Kenya speak the world wide vernacular of hip hop, though their significations and references reside in these countries.

Despite the lamentable incursion of international capitalist agenda into hip hop industry which ‘globalises’ hip hop music more as commerce than art , some hip hop artistes all over the world can still lay a claim to the pristine tradition. How unfair it would seem if 50 Cent and Talib Kweli, Lil Wayne and Lupee Fiasco, Durella and Djinee, Bigianno and Etcetera are tied together in a critical blame. I believe, like a lot of other right-thinking young men and women of my generation who listen to hip hop that the industry has a lot of ‘unreflective’ artistes, but to associate names like 9ice, Banky W, Sound Sultan or Tuface(yes Tuface) to ‘meaninglessness’ is failing to grasp the psychology of a generation. Hip hoppers are moieties of diverse creative tempers or orientations and it will not be critically justified to reduce them all to curious pieces outside the normative board.

The Festschrift for Prof.Dan Izevbaye

2009-06-27T09:02:00.000-07:00

absent for quite a while on this blog, i believe iam back now,for good. a lot of stuffs must have passed through time which i could not track down on this page:but it is good,the world simply happened to me.i can now say to me that iam welcome.

***
i got a copy of the book, The Postcolonial Lamp: Essays in Honour of Dan Izevbaye, edited by Remi Raji-Oyelade and Niyi Okunoye.Now because of the not so robust state of literary criticism and theory(indeed the sorry state of knowledge production generally) in Nigerian academia,those still interested in literary knowwledge should get a copy of this book.Not because it is necessary different from other books we have seen in the tradition of "---in honour of", but because of illuminating depth of a few of the contributions in the book.

Pius Adesanmi's esssay especially touches a strong point in the troubled water that literary and critical enterprise has become in (African and)Nigerian Departments of English and Literary Studies.The critical paths forged by the earlier literary critics like Izevbaye,Irele,Obumselu, Eceruo and so on have not been sufficiently widened to walk with the contemporary writings of literary,cricism,
theory and discourse.For instance who is studying Ofeimun with passion and critical vision with which Ogunba,and Izevbaye had studied Soyinka? Who indeed is giving more than a short- review critical attention to Bamidele-Thomas,Abani,Helen Oyeyemi,Habila the way Izevbaye and Anozie dissected Okigbo? At least Osundare,Osofisan,Ojaide,Williams,Jeyifo,Garuba,Darah,Afejuku,Amuta walked almost the same moments as critics and creative writers.

Altough, Adesanmi's contention is what he calls 'appearance of African absence' in contemporary literary theory,the critical debacle also boils down to the fact of lack of zest for serious critical work by the literary scholars in the Nigerian university. Incidentally, this blogger,as a student, had also asked the same question from the subject of the book,Prof. Izevbaye in an interview intended to be published in a student magazine. The question was on why the African scholar of literature has refused to participate in the post-colonial debate.(We had recently encountered Harry Garuba's Animist aesthetics).

Imagine:A lecturer(with Phd) in a Nigerian University recently condemned a Master's thesis as being too"over sabi",with tall "grammar" echoed another, a professor!The candidate had thought he was using the 'language of the trade' to investigate Walcott and Oguibe.It is this kind of disregard for 'elevating' language of discourse -which indian post clonial scholars have raised to a level of theoretical value-that Adesanmi bemoans in Nigerian critic.

No less illuminating are other essays by Isidore Dialla, Remi Raji,Sola Olorunyomi,Laura Moss,Harry Garuba and so on.

for marechera

2009-04-09T06:41:00.000-07:00

This

Iam exhuming this poem i wrote after reading 'The Mindblast'. I encountered him first (and got knocked off with awe)at a literature class in the University- House of Hunger, The Black Sunlight,'Thought Tracks in the Snow'etc.Who has not read Marechera? Now as they celebrate his life and work at the University of Oxford,UK, i offer an ode.

marechera

wield a typewriter like a conscience
a nomad finger, tapping on the nerves of truth…
these keys aren’t too keen on hiding these skeletons

dirt is aesthetics
if you can feel the purse of darkness,
lay words to tend a sickness within:

and without the healer belongs to the stricken tent;
demons lurk in the details of propitiation
and they do not always wear pale skin now, do they?

what if a rucksack is a corpus of vision?
what if you see beauty through the eye on your soles?
will home be defined in relation to exile?

home is the context the mind
battles for a text; life darkly lived
in an open-eyed dream- and exile
unwieldy like a lingo of this god

bloggers speak literature

2009-03-30T10:48:00.000-07:00

Below a review of Nigerian literary blogs i wrote for nigerianstalk.cheggiout.

Literature is always a minority affair. Even in the blogosphere where we are continually inundated with massive proliferation of voices and concerns. Yet, a literary blog posses more danger to structured scholarship than any other kind of blog. The idea of a literary blog is to widen access to works of art and extend the reaches of critical activities. But the word ‘critical’ is used guardedly here because the supposed democracy of the blogosphere, which admits of individuated (oft exaggerated) rights of voice within the multitude of voices, can also translate to ‘uncritical’ adventure for the blogger-reviewer! The danger is that the peculiar character of blogosphere as a site of discourse, its nature of immediacy, might not lend a strong, well thought-out spine to literary opinions and commentary and therefore might create a situation of ‘attenuation of taste and conservatism of judgment, to borrow words from Ronan McDonald.

Yet the blogsville should not be a place where literature goes to ruin. And Nigerian literary bloggers, it seems, still cede the rights of place for critical erudition on, and dissection of, literary works to a few (rarefied) academic journals, a small number of e-zines devoted to literary activities and (although less ebullient nowadays) art pages of newspapers. Most Nigerian literary blogs approach the treatment of literary materials with a reportorial light-heart rather than academic diligence. It is just as well. It is however hard to find a blog devoted entirely to profiling Nigerian writers-their biographies and their works- in the way anglocamlit.blogspot.com is doing for Cameroonian Anglophone Literature.

Molara Wood’s wordsbody is perhaps the most popular literary blogs in Nigeria and one whose views are taken seriously by a lot of readers. Although Wordsbody covers the broad spectrum of the arts, its literary slant is quite noticeable. The blog’s last entry is in December ’08 and it announces the Farafina’s Visual Arts and Literature Event. This event included a film screening of MW’s own ‘Molara Wood in conversation with Ben Okri’. It will be greatly rewarding however to visit her old posts.

Somaila Isah Umaisha’s everything literature is one of the most vibrant, most engaging literary blogs in the country. The latest post explores the link between sports and culture through the background of recently concluded National Sports Festival in Kaduna. Umaisha reports that the culture content of the Sports event included 300 contemporary performers and 200 cultural performers, a festival play, The Royal Chamber, written by award winning playwright, Yahaya Dangana and a festival poem read by Alkasim Abdulkadir, the national publicity secretary of Association of Nigeria Authors. The report is accompanied with photos from the events.

Kingsley Keke’s poetry blog, Poetivation posts a poem ,’Life’, dedicated to his new born niece, Rihanna, ‘and every newborn babies(sic) in the world’ The short poem traces the growth of Rihanna from the yoke to uterus to labour and the breaking forth ‘like a rushing of tap’. Such imagery.

Onyeka Nwelue of Castle of the Writer reproduces a paper he presented at PAGES as part of the exhibition, ‘The World is Round’. The paper is titled ‘The Writer’s Work as Geographer’. Nwelue in the paper discusses how the joy of seeing description of a recognizable place in a book enhances a reading pleasure. He describes how he (together with friends) has discovered to his pleasure that the house Chimamanda herself used to live in matches one described in Purple Hibiscus as Aunty Ifeoma’s .He concludes that ‘fictionalizing real settings with the real names can help a city, a country by luring more tourists into it’. A good read though a little not as deep as expected for a topic that describes a creative symbiosis between literature and the map.

Eromo Egbejule of The Barbecue Republic reviews Oyeka Nwelue’s book, The Abyssinian Boy, situating its thematic concerns in ‘the social political cum ethnic cum religious links between Nigeria and India. The book gets his critical rebuke for its excessive use of flashback device and incredibility in the part where a 62 year old woman in a Nigerian village is said to be gay. Aside this textual harm as noticed by the reviewer, the review is generally sympathetic and the book is predicted to win an award this year.

Jude Dibia’s JUDE DIBIA discusses the protest of gay rights activists to the Nigerian law makers in relation to the proposed bill that legalises arrest of suspected homosexuals by the Police. Jude Dibia examines the protest of these ‘invisibles’ against a repressive law within the context of his novel, Walking with Shadows about challenges of the homosexuals in an unaccommodating society.

Osondu Awaraka of Incessant Scribble posts to announce his relocation to the US and its enabling possibility for more efficient blogosphere experience. He also announces the list of books he’s waiting to review on the blog; these include Helen Oyeyemi’s The Opposite House, Habila’s Measuring Time and Sefi Atta’s Everything Good Will Come.

Wole Oguntokun of Laspapi announces the continuation of Soyinka’s Death and King’s Horseman at Olivier Hall of the National Theatre, London till may. Wole Oguntokun who is better known for his light-hearted column, The Girl Whisperer, in ‘Life’ magazine of Nigeria’s The Guardian on Sunday ,( The Girl Whisper is also posted on ‘laspapi’) is a Lagos based theatre director and consultant to the research crew of National Theatre London on the play.

The two ladies of The Bookaholic Blog post a short review of Doreen Baingana’s Tropical Fish- Tales from Entebbe. Describing the arresting nature of the book cover, the blog also notices that Ms Baingana’s effort is bold as it tackles ‘hard and sensitive issues such as faith, cohesion, religion, evolution of culture…’and so on. You might want to read the review to prompt your search for the book.

The unusual Suspect in Ilorin

2009-02-18T10:30:00.000-08:00

The story of the goat arrested by the Nigeria Police Force for armed robbery has generated a lot of fuss. The outrage and incredulity that attended the ‘bizarre’ incident have been infectious and, of course, the cyber space has had its fair share. How could a man, a robbery suspect, being pursued by a vigilante group, suddenly change to a goat! Of course it had to be a grand conspiracy by the men of the Nigeria police ‘to shield the real suspect away from justice’, someone said: such mumbojumbo is not new to this controversial force. But then it has been established that the suspect goat was captured and brought to the police station by a local vigilante group.

I had imagined that the police would be momentarily confused beyond action: What to do with this piece of fetish? What to do with this suspect-man-goat? Reports. Consultations. More consultations. The goat was caught in the act, wasn’t he? He is the suspect! Shock. Disbelief. Outrage. But that was not what happened evidently. The goat was taken into custody, ‘understandingly’, some one said, and the media blitz that followed nearly blinded the force.

In the thick of the media outrage,however, the apparently embarrassed police issued a statement reminding us that the suspect had been arrested by other people, the men of the vigilante group, who dragged it to the police station and then informed the media. Unless we accuse this local vigilante group of following their own hidden agenda or better still conniving with the police to introduce a metaphysical dimension to the case of attempted theft in order to hamper justice, the explanation of the police must suffice. Although what to do about the goat is another matter.

But some police reforms activists were already bemoaning the low level of education among the police according to BBC News online which cited more sources to corroborate this factor of ignorance. It would make sense. Otherwise which ‘enlightened’ national police will arrest a goat as suspect of car theft? What educated mind will accuse a goat of witchcraft? Thanks to efforts of people like Teju Cole (Next on Sunday, Feb 15) who have been able to situate the story in context of representations, of reproduction and reception of knowledge. Thanks, because a whole lot of more ‘educated Nigerians’ have been going about calling the policemen shameless and illiterate, without pausing a bit to consider the possible contradiction in their argument ,without first rummaging in their own bag of received norms.

My point is simple: If these policemen had had PhDs in, say, criminology, would they have been more discerning to the absurdity of the suspect goat? Would their cultural background have prepared them to respond with reflection rather than reflex? I do not think so. Because reflection would have meant turning away from the absurdity of the case, while their cultural reflex enabled their belief in the possibility of a man-goat. In Nigeria (since I cannot speak for other African countries) these things are not so strange. At least they should not be. After all this same media had recently reported the case of former chairman of a national corporation, a US educated gentleman, who had burnt millions of naira in the darkness of a cemetery ,on the order of a witch doctor, to secure favour of the politicians. And less than one hour drive to the west from the town where the incident of the goat took place, an Islamic cleric had once claimed he was drafted to ritually bury live cows to ensure victory for the immediate past president at the polls. It was also reported in the media, though the machinery of the state quickly ensured the report was not widespread.

A few weeks ago, in his Talakwa Liberation Courier series in The Guardian on Sunday, Prof. Biodun Jeyifo came up with a rather cheeky title for his Sunday column, ‘The God of Suddenly’. That essay details the extent to which the promise of miracle by the modern time church leaders on the one hand and the expectation of it by the church goers on the other hand, defined the religious temper in today’s Nigeria and consequently the growth of the church. To ensure the growth of the church, the pastors must be capable of performing miracles, so they in turn have been known to have resorted to witch craft, sorcery, and necromancy and so on to keep it real. See? our realities are seriously mediated like that, in such commingling of existences.

Now, Teju Cole poses the question I am driving at: how do you know what you know? He draws instances from urban legends like UFOs, to Kafka’s Samsa to Ovid’s Metamorphoses. I know I will have made a spatio-temporal mis analogy by saying this, but I still will that theological explanations can be found in the bible to explain the Ilorin’s incident: Devil-Snake in Eden, King-beast Nebukadenezeer(how do you spell it?), and the epiphanic horse that spoke on sighting an Angel. We, with our education, will believe these ancient, unbelievable stories because they are part of the sacred collection, but we will be too embarrassed to admit the complex terrains of our cultural realities. Much as we would wish to banish it, polytheism is not entirely dead in Africa (well Nigeria), and it is this possibility of alter-‘native’ realities and existences that those police men who detained the unusual suspect recognized before the media’s klieg lights forced on them a dialogue of denial.

For Duro Ladipo, For Marilyn Monroe

2009-02-10T09:11:00.000-08:00

I recently got a copy of a book,Duro Ladipo-Thunder–God on Stage, written by two of my former teachers in the university, Drs. Remi Raji and Sola Olorunyomi in collaboration with Abiodun-Duro Ladipo, Ladipo's wife. The book is like a source book on Duro Ladipo, the Nigerian legendary theatre god and cultural nationalist per excellence, who died in 1978. Even some of us who did not have the privilege of watching Duro Ladipo perform on stage got to know about this remarkable man through marvelous stories all over the place about his earthly exploits in Yoruba theatre and culture. How he was taller than every one, how he spat fire from his mouth ala Sango. Ladipo, whose enactment of Sango persona almost became his own essence, assumed a dimension of the mythic in our imagination. This book has helped illuminate our knowledge of the man of ‘Bode Wasinmi’.

Shortly after I finished reading that remarkable book, and by some strange coincidence, I stumbled on Vanity Fair’s October 2008 edition with a cover story on Marilyn Monroe’s documented life. Now, while I am not trying to draw some non-existent links between Ladipo’s and Marilyn Monroe’s lives, what I see in both stories are two remarkable people who by stroke of sheer determination honed their extraordinary talent against odds and ended up capturing the public imagination beyond their times.

Monroe would be the first modern goddess of popular culture (in the international sense of it) and despite the razzmatazz of her extravagant lifestyle, the stereotyping of the ‘beautiful but brainless blonde’ she has been identified as an actress of immense talent and a very profound individual. She was as much goddess of the divine as of the profane. After her death, she becomes a martyred saint. Hollywood tried to replicate Marilyn in other actresses without success. She defined her epoch like nobody else as indicated in Doctorow’s novel about that period in history, Rag Time. Miss Monroe's life and art enabled a vast cult follower ship.

I think if cultures and geographies were swapped, a western Ladipo would have become an extraordinary legend, a religious experience. But then a Ladipo, the Sango initiate, who evidently took the metaphysics of theatre ritual beyond artifice of conventional stage craft, would not be possible. Ladipo was no Houdini, he was true to his art,he lived his art.He and his theatre group mesmerised any audiences that were privileged to witness them perform and their performances always got good reviews any where in the world they went.So magnetic also was the beauty and grace of Marilyn's performances on screen.

Ladipo’s spirit ‘departed into the loft’ amidst a thunderous hails of lightning, (a befitting departure for some one’s whose demiurge is the Thunder god himself) in 1978, while Marilyn Monroe died of overdose in 1962.One wonders how many generations it would take their stories to be historically unrecognizable, to pass into the realm of legend . The inconsistencies have already set in and this, i believe, is why the the 'archival narratives' of the authors of Duro Ladipo and Sam Kashner’s collaboration with photographer, Mark Anderson in Vanity Fair, are needed to focus us on not only the legendary but the factual in our rememory .

2009-01-25T09:55:00.000-08:00

Onyeka Nwelue's debut novel The Abyssinian Boy has been launched.Every body should get a copy for the simple reason that it is Onyeka's book.For those who don't know him,he was born in 1988!A lot of other people -like me- know him through his online presences.His determination is rivaled only by his ambition.Nnorom Azunoye in the latest edition of Sentinel Poetry online has fondly described him as 'irritatingly ambitious'. You can also read an interview he granted a fellow blogger Osondu here .That was Onyeka at the launch.The photo is from his blog

A note on Creative Suicide

2009-01-19T12:29:00.000-08:00

The incidence of suicide among writers has always been a source of concern to me, but the recent case of David Foster Wallace really flooded the concern to urgency. There have been several studies to investigate the links between suicide and creativity. Probably because of the precariously solitary and psychic nature of creative process, the writer, more than anyone else, is likely to slip across in to the other side of mental darkness. The most common of this as Kay Jamison, the author of Touched with Fire: Manic Depressive Illnesses and Artistic Temperament, has noted is manic depressive, which instigates suicide more than any other mental disorders.

Suicide is a philosophical problem, if you believe Albert Camus in The Myth of Sisyphus. It arises from the sense of the absurd, when the human soul is overwhelmed with utter absurdity of reality and the unreasonableness of continuing living. The inhalation of muchness of absurdities can indeed sink a soul into the other side of consciousness. I think it is Immortality by Kundera that a woman kills herself in order to stay in the consciousness of her estranged lover. That is suicide of rebellion which although committed with some logical presence of mind but nevertheless arises from a feeling of rejection and despair.

Suicide, of course is individually subjective. While it is evident that mood disorders walk with artistic temperament, we also cannot rule out the fact that suicidal impulse in a writer’s life might be connected with certain desire to end a creative career with a poignant, resounding endnote. To this end, will the subsequent suicide of the poet Anne Sexton be a natural result of her mental depression rather than the desire to end her career with a startling, if tragic final leap, if we remember she felt cheated when told of Sylvia Plaith’s suicide and exclaimed ‘That death was mine’? She had also applauded Hemingway’s suicide, saying ‘Good for him’.

The subject of death /suicide has been a recurrent theme in literature. Writers, overtime, have handled this subject with varying degrees of curiosity, awe and rituality, and even irreverence. But whether consciously or not, the Freudian death-drive, the urge in all living things to return to a state of calm, creeps in into the fabric of the work and character of writers who have been known to possess suicidal impulse. The signs are always there. David Foster Wallace, who has referred to his generation as ‘successful, obscenely well educated and sort of adrift’, had had to stay in a psychiatrist hospital. He had treated the subject of suicide arising from inability of communication in Infinite Jest.

Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo. The poet from Madagascar took cyanide after his dream visit to France had been frustrated. During the last few minutes of his life he wrote a most revealing cause of suicide by a writer I have seen yet:

I set my hand JJ Rabearivelo

At the age of Guerin, at the age of Deubel

a little older than you Rimbaud….

Rabearivelo’s unrealized desire to identify with European writing tradition (and to visit Europe) led to his despair and ultimately his suicide. His suicide was a masterstroke, an eventual appropriation of a shared immortality with these writers.

Vladimir Myakovsky, the Russian poet, once visited a poetess who had attempted suicide in a hospital. He asked the poetess if the wound was bad and she replied: ‘You know a shotgun wound doesn’t hurt. You feel as though someone suddenly called out to you. The pain comes later.’ One wonders if Mayakovsky thought about those words before he shot himself dead with a revolver not too long after. Mayakovsky was suffering from loneliness and rejection in love. His friend, Victor Shklovsky wrote in Mayakovsky and His Circle, ‘there was just one bullet in the revolver. There had been no friend attentive enough to remove the bullet, to follow the poet or telephone him’.

Suicide of a writer is not always a spur-of- the moment thing like a Tokyo business man who jumps out of a window because stocks have failed. The signs are usually written into their works in fey moments. The vocation of writing eventually merges into the life of the writer, marking solitude and creative vision in a fatal synergy that admits various demons and private booby traps. It involves a perennial search for truths –about oneself, about others, about the essence of the creative process itself- whose ambivalences can lead to some fatal antinomy. Myakovsky reflects on the nature of this antinomy in a poem:

I know the power of words…

They are not those that make theatre boxes

applaud. Words like that make coffins break out…

with their four oak legs….

.

Understanding Palestine and Nigeria

2009-01-15T08:52:00.000-08:00

I have gotten myself involved, quite necessarily, in circulation of literature on ‘understanding the Palestine-Israel question’ in the light of the recent face-off in Gaza. This is largely because of grossly misinformed or bizarrely uneducated opinions and comments that I am inundated with at work every day by colleagues who have obviously reduced the issue to the banality of religious sentiments. I referred them especially to the interesting piece written by King Abdullah of Jordan, the grandfather of King Hussein, which appeared in The American Magazine of November 1947.It details the Arab‘s side of the story in the whole tragic saga, through time, despite the great Jewish lobby and propaganda. It was a talk, really, given to an American audience, with clear-headed comparison of facts, logic and historical inferences and cross references.

I am especially interested in the way the King handles the place of religious misconception in the whole struggle. The reason for this is that the average Nigerian (epitomized by my own colleagues), like the American the King addressed, sees what is going on in Palestine through a most curious binary line of thinking: Christianity vs. Islam! (Yea, they know the Arab is a Moslem and the Israeli- well, Jesus was a Jew).

In a country that has a long blood-soaked history of sectarian violence, that line of thinking is an open invitation to another round of autos-dafe. That is not a new thing in my country. Any shudder in the Middle East between western interests (the US and Israel) and Arab’s will naturally translate to a crisis of religious identifications and violent Manichaeism: THEY are killing OUR brothers in the Palestine. It is amazing, as I told a Moslem colleague recently, how an Arab who he had never met would be more brother to him than me who he has known for years. He was the one that told me about a text circulating urging support for ‘brothers in the Middle East’.

I have always argued myself to seizure with my Christian friends on the injustices in Palestine; I have taken them on the history of violence in Gaza, from the machinations of Balfour Declaration and the role of Dr Chaim Weizmann in Zionist lobby, the various peace pacts and why they failed, the occupation of Gaza and so on. Now I honestly wonder if this Gaza event leads to another killing spree and I happen to be caught in the smoke, I wonder if all my advocacy on behalf of the Arabs in the Middle East will save my life from certain grisly death. To make the matter worse, I go by a Hebrew name. But we know with the level of indoctrination and brainwashing going on among the opposing peoples in Palestine and other hotspots in the Middle East,the hate will outlive the danger.

There is a way to compress the whole experience of religious understanding to one singular explanation on the accident of birth, for clearer mutual understanding between religions. For instance I have no say in belonging to any religious persuasion, I was simply born into one, and a most foreign name stamped on my forehead like a sin. I know a friend who has constantly rebelled against Christian civilization, the Heritage to which he was born, yet was nearly killed in a Jihad in Kano because his ID read Cornelius. By the way he is also married to a northern Moslem. Yet he would be killed for his bad name (to misappropriate the words of Willy the Shake).

Such is the tragic effects of essentialising narratives of identity in a singular example of my country. I cannot count how many people that have been killed in fracas resulting from argument about European league! Where is the sanity, where is the peace?

A Thought on Elechi Amadi's Abduction

2009-01-08T08:46:00.000-08:00

Sometimes reality is too complex for oral communication.
-Gordard

Few days ago, Elechi Amadi, 75, author of The Concubine among other books, was kidnapped by the militia in Niger Delta, Nigeria and freed the second day. The old man was obviously abducted in error because 300 million was demanded for his release! - A case of misinformed intelligence, I think. He was abducted from his house, a small bungalow with no 'big walls and security gates', according to the author. The abductors had thought that the writer gentleman should be rich being the chairman of the Rivers States Scholarships Board. In Nigeria chairmen of such simple government-owned service-oriented boards like that are always rich. On the second day he was released: ‘professor you are an innocent man”, they said.

But Elechi Amadi is not a rich mn: he is a quantity surveyor; he was a captain in Nigerian army during the civil war; he has been a college lecturer and has served in his state government in various capacities before. He is however better known as the author of the novel, The Concubine.

From the hours-long conversations between Amadi and his captors (Amadi called the exchange negotiations), the abductors told the writer that they do what they do because they could not find jobs despite the wealth of resources beneath their feet. They were truthful but they were wrong as the abduction of Amadi itself had proven. The effects of the deprivation and annihilation in Niger Delta have been playing on in horrid dramas for a few years now since Ken Saro Wiwa's murder. Well, we know Wiwa's struggle was open to dialogue and reconstructive debates, but the new guys in the creek are of different cast of mind. Wiwa, a writer like Amadi was murdered for daring to speak for the right of his people's continuing existence on their ravaged earth. There was injustice in Niger Delta not unlike the injustice in Palestine.But violence and self-profiteering could achieve nothing. But then these militia guys aren’t Che: they were seizing the day like mad!

That was why Amadi's abduction by the ‘post Wiwa's freedom fighters' was so poignantly ironical for so many people: Amadi was supposed to be sitting on their side at the dialogue table if the struggle was about dialogue and mutual reasoning between the Niger Delta communities and the Federal government that is, but it isn’t. The criminality and the debasement of the struggle for the soul of Niger Delta in that region by the militia are made possible because the government does not care. For the denizens of the Creek, the reality has gone beyond words, tragically: violence and criminality are merchandise they trade in the market place of self enrichment.

Plateau Blues

2008-12-31T05:14:00.000-08:00

Plateau Blues

(for Lola and Chiedu)

Barkin Ladi, near Jos, Plateau state

1
walls of cactuses, a dark path,
an invasion of shadows
announce identities of arms
and whispers

shedding names , the women
melt into shadows into lights,
blooming, like melons; voices and shadows
a happy hysteria

ladi’s night is wrinkled
with cold, importunate, prolonged,
hiding behind the reigning rocks -
a divided view, It turned out.

2

nameless trees stand, somber
chivalry, along the market road,
two lovers part into two unrevealing
shadows…

mountains rise like goddesses
fogged in night’s strange grace
over the land where water sprouts
in a taxidermic surprise

immeasurable space- these lakes,
these rivers, these biographies
miners have dug up for desire -abandoned now.

3

a dark path towards the seminary:
the trees join heads in incestuous
dialogue, widening their roots
into your mind

only a knitting heart like pam
might know the secret of their insular
copulation and the hidden memory
of their names

a wall of cactuses, bodies of dream,
a body of winds; women of sunset,
near Chi, returning, eyes full of breeze

4

i walk this earth too, kejang,
daughter of the ledges, like you,
breaking certain memory into ladi’s moments,
on these hillocks, the ground of faith
always shifting

i walk this earth with the ritual faith
In the shadows and storms,
rocks, rocks, stirring abandonment
men caress like sadness

truths float on in walls of cactuses...

***This is the first in a group of poems written in 2003 in Jos, Plateau State Nigeria during my NYSC- that is before the recent murders and arsony. Now it is a gift of memory, for the season.

Why I Blog About Africa

2008-12-23T10:11:00.000-08:00

Loomnie has tagged me on Why I Blog Africa.
It is not that simple to answer this kind of question because, Africa,for those who live in the continent at least, is such a painful riddle.Perhaps, if You approach this huge,infinite catastrophe that the continent is, with shine or/and dust of exile on your cheeks,especially exile in the west,you might be harsher and more despondent in your love for her.For some of us hunt for possibility of humour,in this general disaster.

But...
I blog about Africa because that is where I call home; where I opened my eyes for the first time to an unwieldy humanity,to harassing contradictions, where plenitude inhabits a habit of lack, for a lot of us, and where I wish to be buried like all my ancestors before me, for the simple reason of origins.

I blog about Africa because I could not love her less - she’s this beautiful but beaten woman, raped and ravaged by both strangers and her own children through fitful history-but more by her own children( a few of them actually, projectiles of briefcases) whose sperm of greed is flooding her to death. I blog thinking by so doing I might be able to braid her disheveled hair strand by strand in perfect, monodic cornrows.

I blog about Africa as an act of prayer.

I tag orisa, onyeka and afolabi

Of Oral Traditions and Saworoide/ Agogo Eewo

2008-12-16T03:20:00.000-08:00

Don’t we all like movies made by Tunde Kelani? It certainly is not just because of the level of professionalism that is evident in his works; other Nigerian film makers like Tade Ogidan, Amaka Igwe, Odua Imasuen and lately Emem Isong and Jeta Amata have been said to have raised the standards a tad higher in an industry that places such obsessive emphasis on the economic yields of movie production over any artistic considerations(so much for the 'aesthetics of poverty'). Within the overriding philistinism in Nollywood, these individuals have managed to project a promising image of the industry. What makes Kelani’s movies different, however, involves a number of factors chief of which is creative interpretations and projections of culture -Yoruba culture in this instance- in his films, which reflects his appropriation of orality as performative energy.

In Kelani’s 1999 movie, Saworoide, and its sequel Agogo Ewo, 2002, Yoruba oral traditions are employed to allegorise the story of Nigeria’s socio-political landscape in the 1990s. A whole lot of factors interplay in these movies to underline the role orality can play in forging an indigenous film practice with recognizable universal dimension. I say ‘universal’ not without some awareness of its ‘literary’ implications in ‘nativist’discourse, but with the increasing villagisation of the world and its attendant cross-cultural dialogues it is necessary that artistic and cultural productions speak in their culture as well as to others as part of global cultural education. But Saworoide’s and Agogo Eewo’s messages are not ‘universal’ in the way Totsi’s, say, would: Kelani aims largely to speak through locally mediated experiences, through memory recognizable, through metaphysics- which some cultures might consider exotic- but ultimately to celebrate aspects of African history and culture and enlighten others about these.

That is the celebratory vision in Saworoide and AgogoEwo at the level of allegorism and orality. The plot of the story (because both movies are one story) is well crafted and the dialogue rich and nuanced. Acting is never lacking in Kelani’s ensemble because the ‘naturalness’ of the old hands of Yoruba traveling theatre who have been collaborating with the theatre scholars since Duro Ladipo and Kola Ogunmola, is always felt. Take Lere Paimo (of Eda fame), Dr. Akinleye(of Idamu Padre fame), Dr Kola Oyewo, Alagba Bayo Faleti, Abiodun Oya, Dejumo Lewis and Prof. Akin Ishola and you have the most formidable cast you could ever get in this part of ‘wood’.

Apart from the remarkable Camera work for which Kelani is known, one other thing that distinguishes these movies is the language of engagement: the almost mesmerizing interplay of proverbials, songs, metaphysics, music, spectacle, riddles and so on. The political events that these movies criticize are magnified within the matrix of Yoruba oral configurations. The metaphor of ‘Saworoide’ itself is quite extensive as a symbol of legitimacy and authority, as a leash of sorts against authoritarianism, as a covenant of good governance and accountability between the ruler and the ruled- a symbol of democracy. The folksongs and riddles are well woven into the fabric of the story and two elders in the community- Baba Opalanba(Faleti) in Saworoide and ‘Iya’(Abiodun Oya) in Aagogo ewo, are made the vehicles of transmission much like in the tradition of the griots. A broad spectrum of cultural experiences is explored in both movies and a lot of figural interpretations alluded to for meaning. There are nuggets of wisdom in the plays and play songs by the children and the narrative action is brought to greater focus with missive comments of the old man. There is a certain nostalgic feeling evoked in the portrayal of the almost forgotten assisted letter writing tradition in the pre-telecoms African society with all its humour and peculiar drama. Kelani can achieve a lot of grand feats in one breath of film: remind us of our mediated existence; spring a surprise here and there on what we take for granted in our traditional culture; use the medium of film as projection of mediated consciousness not unlike what Lagbaja is doing for African music

TI OLUWA NI ILE AND TROPES OF AFRICAN MODERNITY

2008-12-03T08:18:00.000-08:00

Two things struck me on watching Ti Oluwa Ni Ile again few days ago after more than ten years I saw it first: a) deeper cultural implications of the context of the story (which had eluded my ‘unschooled’ attention in 1993) and, b) how low the standard of moviemaking in Nigeria has sunk since Ti Oluwa Ni Ile. Of course I will not enter the dangerous terrain of ‘Nollywood’ in critical search, more competent people like Dr.Akin Adesokan and Mahmoud Balogun have been investigating that area.

Ti Oluwa ni Ile was a ground breaking movie in the burgeoning Nigeria movie industry in 1993. The fact that it was a Yoruba language movie did not affect its reach across cultures in a Nigeria heavily defined and divided by ethnic and regional identities and bigotry: it was subtitled in English for non-Yoruba speaking audience.

The collaboration between the director Tunde Kelani, and traditional Yoruba theatre practitioners (which would be sustained in various efforts till date) worked so strongly in synthesizing performance with expertise. The story involves a conspiracy of a group of people aided by a high chief in the community to sell a piece of land, earmarked as a place for the gods, to a businessman who wants to build a fuel station. The illegal sale will turn out to be disastrous as the soon-to-be -displaced gods are not just whining in the cold: the perpetrators of the act shall die one after the other, as the oracle of Ifa has divined. The rest of the story describes the desperate attempts of the last person of the troika, the high chief, to defeat death.

Two events in the movie, however, strike me into aesthetic attention in the way they reflect meaning in the mediation of traditional African culture by westernization. The first is the use to which history has been put in the development of the conflict. History, which involves oral transmission of events and simple technology of memory for onward archiving, in traditional Africa, becomes a slave to legal reworking in the employ of greed and graft, for the modern, mediated consciousness of the African. History in traditional African societies is a religious experience which is used as repository of the people’s genealogy, systems of belief, imagination, psychology, medical knowledge, identity and language.

History for the Africa records more than events and people, it also codifies their entire cosmology, epistemology and ontology. It is this sense of history that is put on trial in a modern court by, ironically, a high chief of the community who should be safe-guarding the traditions against such abuse. The parody was so convincing that even the westernized medical doctor that was recently kinged in the town got vertiginous. History, ancestral as it is is employed as a modern trope of relativism to dispossess the ancestors of their abode!

The second is the curious appearance of a rascally masquerade that terrorizes passers by on the street. This lone image sums up the extent of western mediation of African culture. The first time we see the masquerade, it is harassing the lawyer to part with some money. The lawyer who is being used to ‘mediate’ history is, however busy on a cell phone. Exasperated, the masquerade whips out a cell phone from under the ‘ago’ and dramatizes, absurdly, the act of modern communication. The second time the masquerade appears, it stages an elaborate dance on the street with music blaring out of a ghetto blaster.

But what is the significance of this masquerade?
Mask tradition is an effort to externalize the spirit of the departed ancestors in most African societies. A mask confronts consciousness as an act of remembrance and worship and is venerable. The mask we see in this movie however is gadgeted with western technology- cell phone, tape player and modern dance steps. A de-defamiliarisation project of such takes place in this context. But I cannot resist casting this image in the mould of Kwame Appiah’s Yoruba Man with A bicycle, the image of hybridity and syncretism- the image that has come to define the African identity from the slave ship to Obama’s apotheosis.

The seeming sacrilegious pronouncement of the Yoruba babalawo that referred to Adam as ‘our ancestor’ will make much more sense with this consciousness in focus.

Elegy

2008-11-23T00:43:00.000-08:00

Elegy plays upon the interrelationships between art and beauty, love and obsession, desire and possession, life and mortality. Adapted from Philip Roth’s book, The Dying Animal, Elegy reflects on emotional intensity that goes into serendipity of passion between an aging celeb professor of cultural studies and a brilliant, beautiful ‘well mannered’ graduate student. The professor, David Kepesh, played by Ben Kingsley, is
a man who believes in the integrity of his ‘ emancipated manhood’ by having serial relationships with women without commitment since he walked out of his marriage years before. So when the gorgeous beauty from Cuba, Consuela, played by Penelope Cruz, walks into his life, his preconceived notions on non commitment and sexual freedom start falling apart.

A deeply reflective and poetic work, Elegy unsettles the senses in a way that makes you immobile way after the screen has displayed END. Darkly instructive in the way My Life Without Me (2003) is. A reviewer has written that the movie is pseudo erotic trying to be arty. I disagree. Another has described the movie as boring and that at the end of the movie, the audience had confused looks, which indicated they had just awakened! No thought was given to the fact that the audience might just have witnessed a mesmerizing power of a subtly beautiful movie!

The truth, I think, is that Isabel Coixet, the director of Elegy and My Life without Me, has a penchant for portraying the irrational logic of man’s decisions, his subversive relationships with himself, with other people, with the unknown; and the persistent betrayal of his nature. She is fascinated with the quotidian tragedy of man. Eroticism in Elegy is not overplayed; it is true to how a 60ish intellectual with hedonistic inclinations will react to a destabilizing beauty which has defeated the logic of his ego.

This movie could have retained its original title from Roth, The Dying Animal, which could have more striking at least for the cinema audience, but I think Coitex wanted to play with the subterranean subtext of the story itself, the tragic mystery of such destabilizing passion.

The cast, too, is very interesting: Kingsley’s wonderful as David (although I can think of better actors for that role) and Cruz had never been this compelling and terrific. Dennis Hooper looks like a Pulitzer-winning poet no doubt; and I think Patricia Clarkson could not have been more wonderful as the middle-aged lover and companion of David’s

In the Valley of Elah

2008-11-23T00:07:00.000-08:00

In the Valley of Elah by writer/producer Paul Haggins came heavily recommended by my movie vendor. Of course, Haggis is a familiar name associated with such works as Clint Eastwood -directed Million Dollar Baby (of which he wrote the screenplay) and, essentially, Crash which he co-wrote and directed

The story itself concerns a retired military policeman Hank Deerfield (Tommy Lee Jones) who sets out to find his son who had recently been returned from Iraq and now declared AWOL. He is later informed that a body found burnt and dismembered on field is his son’s. Through the help of a reluctant ally, the police detective Emily Sanders (Charlize Theron), he embarks on unraveling of the circumstances that leads to the grisly death of his son, specialist Mike Deerfield. He will soon find out that his son had not been ‘a good boy’ as he has wrongly assumed to his heartbroken wife, he used drug and shouted obscenities at women at a strip club.

Hank and Emily, in due course, discover the truth about the murder, despite attempts by the army investigators to sweep it under the rug. Mike had been stabbed several times, cut into pieces and burnt by his mates –fellow members of his infantry- with whom he had returned from Iraq.

This movie is a serious indictment on the effects of war on the psyche of the individual, especially the soldier, who participates in it. Not a war film per se, but it brings home the cruel aspects of war and how the violence and shattered humanities reflect the distorted souls of men turned killing machines (it calls to mind that great movie, Full Metal Jacket). This message is well drawn home with the scene of confession when Penning describes what transpired the night Mike was killed. The cold-bloodedness of the murder and its narration call attention to what has been described as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. The roots of this disorder are partly portrayed in the snatches of mobile phone-captured videos Hank retrieved from Mike’s personal effects at the army quarters. Soldiers were trained to be dispassionate in killing enemies be them children or women. So the casualness with which official Penning narrates the gruesome murder is both shocking and instructive. It reflects heavily in a mixture of dread, outrage and awe in Emily’s trembling voice after Penning informs the sitting that the group had gone to a chicken joint after dismembering and incinerating Mike - “you were hungry?”

The profundity of this movie revolves around things suggested however. Hank on his journey to army base after his son had been declared AWOL, sees a flag hung upside down and stops to correct the mistake telling the man from El Salvador that a flag hung upside down indicates a distress call, a SOS from a nation under siege. But after learning the manner and circumstances of his son’s death, he goes back to the flag and hangs a threadbare one sent to him by his son upside down, back. Haggis has been criticized for agitprop in this movie, but the political sentiment portrayed to a tragic effect here, is hugely popular even in the USA before the invasion of Iraq. Similarly, the scene where the battle of Elah between David and Goliath is narrated to the young child of Emily as a bedtime story, casts a multifaceted metaphor on this story. Is America been portrayed as the giant fell by a slingshot? Are the young soldiers dispatched to Iraq likened to little David who was let into the harm’s way by the king? David, Emily’s boy in the movie wonders aloud to his mother why the king allowed David to confront the giant, despite the obvious danger. Agitprop? Even a kid can see the outrage of needless human sacrifice.

One of the several mirrors this movie holds for moral reflection is in the character of Hank, a typical ex-soldier who typifies the traditional values of patriotism and faith of the old-guard in America’s preservation ala McCain. The alarm in the veteran-like countenance of Hank is only too visible upon sighting the accident of the Flag but conversely so is the desolation upon his return to wrong the flag he has earlier righted. A fastidious man at the beginning of his search, Hank’s progressive ruination is reflected after he is aware of his son’s fate in the shambles of his hotel room which reflects the desolation inside, despite his agonizingly cool mien. He despairs because he has placed so much confidence and faith in a system that will fail him and cost him his sons (his older son is said to have been killed earlier in military service).

I am not sure if Clint Eastwood, who had been approached for the role of Hank in the movie before Jones, could pull off the kind of effect Tommy Lee Jones does with his extraordinary performance in this movie. The tightly drawn, weather-beaten face, the sparsely displayed emotions on that face which, however, seem to rip through his body like an invisible spasm. He plays well with emotions the way only a veteran could. Stellar performances from both Jones and Theron. A well told story despite its thinly veiled political protest.

Retiring to the weekend

2008-11-21T00:16:00.000-08:00

Iam retiring to the weekend with a load of DVDs,and iam sure i will be opening my mouth to yap in reviewing them after on this platform.Of course that would be after sampling opinions of my friends that are movie freaks.See, those guys appall me in what they watch:weird tastes, i tell you.There is this skinny one, Niyi, whose untameable afro-ed head is always blobbing up and down as he analyses 'actions'and he naturally flips his lid if an action film does not have edge-of-the-seat,torturing car chase scenes or has little. He recently dissected the 'car chase quality' of a new film, Wanted, featuring James Mcavoy, George Foreman and Angelina Jolie.I saw the film,good piece,but the car chase ,the hyper reality flux of it, makes my vision blurry.I hate to shift my attention from here to there on a small screen space.

Wanted,however, rocks. I like the matrix feel, the mystery of the looms, the idea of having raw power which you can use as you like.Of course it goes the way of all leather-wearing assassins films:the visuals, and the comic-books' hyperboles(the original source of the story) are well played out.
Niyi had started another campaign for Death Race,featuring one of my favourite stars Jason statham and Tyrese Gibson.Race,Death Race!.He made me see that movie amidst kicks and jerks. And the only thing I relate with in it is the fact that Statham is still Statham.

Tunji, my film vendor, is less obsessive in his tastes.He is infact a candidate for eclecticism and thinks that there is a moment of the sublime one can discover in any movie no matter how trashy or idiotic it is. He selects these ones from an avalanche that usually overwhelms me any time i want to select films to see: Elegy featuring Ben Kingsley and Penelope Cruz; In the Valley of Elah featuring Tommy Lee Jones and Charlize Theron; Mad Money featuring Diane Keaton,Katie Holmes and Queen Latifah(for comic effect,he said); LXG(because i wanted to see it again);and Tarantino and Rodriguez's Grindstone duet of Death Proof and Planet Terror. Tarantino and Rodriguez i know i will like(i have been a fan of their post mordernist experimentations over time). Isabel Coitex, directorof Elegy, i know from My Life Without Me, a good movie; and In the Valley of Elah will be enjoyable if Haggins reputation with Crash is any thing to bet on.

So now iam off and in 48 hours i shall be yapping.

2008-11-09T00:36:00.000-08:00

Dr. Olando Owoh was one of those rare musicians with enormous talents which were largely un-hyped. It was amazing that his music, though highly popular across generation lines, has always received very low critical reviews. This, I think, is partly because of the perceived crisis of naming that dogged his music all his recording life in terms of genre.

Orlando Owoh, an alias for Oladipupo Owomoyela, started out in Highlife. He created a band called Omimah which would later change to first, The Young Kenneries and later African Kenneries. The word ’Kenneries’ derives from ‘Canary’ whose multi layered voice Orlando was reputed to possess. He got lessons on the electronic guitar from Fatai Rolling Dollar, the legendary highlife musician (who still performs), although he was on the service of Kola Ogunmola‘s Theatre Group as a musician. Highlife music originated from the traditional Yoruba genre termed ‘palm wine’ music. Highlife musicians overlaid the palm wine music with danceable guitar tunes and calypsonian vibes. When Orlando formed his first group, the Omimah, he deemphasized the vibrant caribbean horn arrangements that characterized highlife and emphasized on the percussion, the guitar and most importantly his signature guttural singing.

The ‘rootsiness’of Owoh’s music was however different significantly from the approach of the mainstream Highlife musicians of the time. He did not compromise the small guitar band ensemble even in the face of revolutionary huge, eclectic and kinetic designs of performance been experimented with emerging Juju genre of Sunny Ade. His music, almost highlife, almost juju, is simply dubbed Kenneries without generic specificity.

Then he started to employ crusading and provocative lyrics ala Fela in the mid eighties. Predictably, he crossed paths with the power that was. He was imprisoned for six months on cocaine possession charge; though he denied using cocaine but a local herb he called ‘Ajuwa’. He sang mostly in Yoruba but sometimes he sang in English, ‘broken English’ and pidgin. He recorded over 40 LP albums most of which were hits, and his 1995 reissue of Omimah and Young Keneries, titled Dr.Ganja’s Polytonality Blues was released in the US. He got an honorary doctorate from University of London during his London trip in 1975.

I read a manuscript for a book (that never saw the light of the day due to lack of sponsorship or fund, I believe) in 2002 by a young Orlando Owoh’s ‘fanatic’. The author of the manuscript believed Owoh was the greatest (popular) musician that sang in Yoruba at the moment. This assertion, as overtly hyperbolic as it sounds, giving the tradition that boasts of many and different genres of popular music and a vast pantheon of incredibly talented and creative musicians, is almost convincing. Almost convincing because it is not really true yet also because it can be argued to be true depending on the points.

Orlando was well stepped in the peculiar mythologizing and multi-referencing capabilities of the Yoruba language and lore. His musical discourse which appropriates proverbs, folktales, folk sayings traditional chants and so on. But he also was a bard of the urban space, chronicling our ills, our pains, joys and illusions. His music captured the public imagination in a way that even highlife legends like Victor Olaiya, Victor Uwaifo and so on never will.This is because his art was devoid of all elitism,he just sang good music even when singing praises of the royalty and the rich, he had a message and vibe that resonates across generations and music tastes. Younger musicians like Nomoreloss, Dele Bravo and Sound Sultan have borrowed from his timeless efforts.

This legend who popularized the ‘ganja lore’ passed on recently at the age of 76.

2008-11-09T00:09:00.000-08:00

I have been reading some new Nigerian writings. Some are fantastic; some are not .Some grab the middle ground. I am generally fascinated by the use of language by a writer to reflect the changing weathers of human emotions and relationships, psychology and mind. I admit these things are the most unpredictable, most intractable elements in the world, more unpredictable than the upheavals of nature, if you ask me. Of course the stuffs that a great work of literature is made of is the creative reflections of human’s mind and soul through language, that is what makes them timeless -Hamlet, Bothers Karamazov, Love in the Time of Cholera, Heavensgate, Arrow of Gods, Waiting for Godot, Midnight Children, Children o fGebelawi, God of Small Things and so on .

So has the Great Nigerian Novel been written? I have no answer to that.

I have still not read Maik Nwosu’s prose much as I love his poetry and that is a shame because I consider his ‘Ballad of the Peacekeeper’ as one of the finest poems of his generation. But I have read Akin Adesokan’s Roots in the Sky. And that is a writer with some love for language no matter the flaws of that story. He wrote about a troubled milieu that incidentally made him famous as a reporter of an underground newspaper that operated like the guerilla against the Abacha’s government. But Helon Habila’s Waiting for an Angel is also about same experience. Beautiful books both, but a lot different in matter of style and approach.

There is something familiar about the characterization of these two books though: they remind you of ‘posse characterization’ in Soyinka’s Interpreters and Achebe’s The Anthills of the Savannah. A group of young, socially conscious, sometimes irreverent, sometimes licentious, perceptive individuals fired and worried by concerns for social change. They sometimes are largely spokespersons for their society, their generations, and their milieus; sometimes they act out messianic passions, sometimes they are incapacitated by forces of rulership, sometimes they simply chronicle the events of their times. But more especially, they interpret their society.

Akin Adesokan’s book especially has a resonation closer to Achebe’s and Soyinka’s books. I have always argued with my ‘literary’ friends on how uncannily similar in terms of characterization and objectives The Anthills of the Savannah and Interpreters are. In terms of the tendency toward mythologisation of experience. Now Akin Adesokan has offered similar tendencies in Roots in the Sky. There are similarities in the work from the group identification to the incantations about origins. Of course the general matter of style and substance is different from one writer to the other.

But what I enjoy most on reading Roots in the Sky is its turbulent history of publication narrated in the Afterword. It is a beautiful piece told with Adesokan’s familiar rambling breathlessness as evident in the book itself. Stating the several birth pangs and prenatal agues of dream the book had to pass through before it saw the light of day. A good read, the Afterword, I tell you. I especially enjoy the grip-breaking magic of the manuscript.

plaiting words

2008-11-07T01:37:00.000-08:00

Here is an extract from my work-in- progress book of poems:

Adjoa

my name was inflected
in your asante tongue
and that is not a memory
i touch without a sibilant passion

inebriated nights, dolorous dawns,
i can speak now holding apart
and move closer
to the vertebrate of a courtesan’s cavern

insecure joy; a halo
we hardly knew as impurity, a foreplayed
agues and foreign vowel
in my whispered name…

your echoes or fits were science enough
to veil a constant disbelief
while i, far flung, organized time
around the mythology of place

i hold the neurosis like a defeat
folded into the memory of
a garden of cactuses, tethered sensation now
memory dangles between a worship
and a wail

A little Joke

2008-10-18T10:54:00.000-07:00

A friend sent this cartoon piece to my e-mail and i have not stopped thinking about it since. It has even provoked a serious argumentative discussions among my friends,rife with gendered bigotries -the familiar machismo of the guys who insist they will become what they want regardless what their women think bla bla and of course the feminist tigritude, the insisitence on equal parts in all decision making and, especially, the economy of relationship...But what excites my imagination really in this cartoon is the banal: what the woman will like the guy become after 'or something'. When women say that i know, from experience, they probably have the exact 'something' in mind.lol

Aravindji is the new Booker man

2008-10-18T10:46:00.000-07:00

Adiga Aravindji, 34, a first-time Indian writer, has won this year edition of the Booker Prize with his first novel, The White Tiger. The announcement, of course, sparked off the familiar emotions among the Nigerian literati- oh an Indian writer again!- admiration for a powerful literary resurgence from another former colony of the old Great B mixed with frustration that the economy of their own country (Nigeria) has practically made book publishing impossible for them especially inside the country-note the emphasis-the success of Chimamanda Adichie, Helon Habila, Iweala and a few others, is affirmed elsewhere.(The marvelous publishing story of Akin Adesokan's Roots in the Sky is a case in point of the sad tale of publishing in Nigeria), By the way, Aravindji, though Colombia-Oxford educated, lives in Mumbai). I have not read this book, but given the extraordinary antecedents of Mr. Aravindji- Rushdie, Arhundati Roy,Desai etc etc- I believe we are promised a great read.

'Battle at Kruger' on National Geographic

2008-10-10T06:26:00.000-07:00

The lessons learnt from the battle at Kruger, South African safari resort, are as varied as there are interpretations of the incident. The incident was shown on National Geographic channel on 2nd of October. The commentators interviewed about the events are professionals in different areas of wildlife experience: from wildlife documentarists to photographers to scientists. But all of them arrived at a conclusion that something profoundly touching, something thought-provoking happened at Kruger. And to think that a bunch of holiday-making tourists were the ones that captured this wonderful moment, moment that would be the dream of all wildlife documentarists and photographers, with their amateur camera!

Well this is the story. A bunch of safari tourists to Kruger were capturing the wildlife with their camera when they focused on a team of African buffaloes sauntering towards a pack of lions lying in wait for prey. On sighting the lions the buffaloes naturally turned back and ran for safety .The lions pursued them, attacked a younger buffalo and dragged it across the ground to the precipice of a river. Now, that was where the miracle started. The lions were all over the buffalo, holding it in all places except the windpipe through which lions naturally kill their preys. The lions weighing about 300 pounds each kept crowding over their prey for some while when they got an unexpected shock from the river: a crocodile weighing about 600 pounds suddenly grabbed the bull by the leg and tried to drag it away into the river from the lions.

Naturally the lions all stretched for the tug which saw the croc losing the prey to the land and the lions. Then, as if the other bulls that ran away before went to reinforce, a large and bellicose group of African buffaloes arrived with a fight, and circled the lions. After what seemed like a brief moment of awkward strategizing, a certain especially pissed off buffalo attacked (actually lifted and tossed) a lion with its horns. The fight was hesitant with sporadic charging from the bulls’ camp and unusual tact and coyness from the lions. At a point the seemingly mangled prey sauntered a way from the lions grip and nearly got mulled by its charging elder, into the safety of its kind. The lions were chased and scattered all over the place. The battle at Kruger.

This incident makes three fundamental existential statements for any one who believes or suspects there is a force like destiny. First, while didn’t the lions attacked the buffalo in their usually manner of gripping by the windpipe? Second, why didn’t the second attack from the monster crocodile severe the young bull’s limb despite its fierce dimension (we all know how ferociously a 600 pounds croc can tear at matter)? Then why did the other buffaloes come back to fight and save their own after having escaped from the lions’ attack before? While it is possible that the ‘saved’ buffalo might still fall prey to the same pack of lions, it seems also that fate has saved it this time from a certain grisly death.
I could almost see all the professionals documenting wildlife, and who have been looking for such break in their carrier to capture such poetic moment for years, green with envy. They lay in wait through years only to have a bunch of lounging holiday-makers capture their would-be moment of glory in an amateur camera through a din of guffawy commentary. That is another lesson in life.

before i left...

2008-10-09T09:38:00.000-07:00

hello,everybody.been out in the limbo of late and i feel like letting you know what was up. been reading the contemporary nigerian novels i.e novels by young, post-festus nyayi-kole omotoso, novelists. you know them.what with the pervading media hype.you know this generation combines creativity with a lot of gravitas.we do things with postmordern fluidity-media and advertising and literature and plastic arts etc occupy a nearly blurring space....so as i was saying about what has kept me busy, i need to mention a joyous discovery i made on watching 'ti oluwa ni ile' by tunde kelani again few days back after so many years of seeing the movie.remember the seemingly rascally egungun scene?remember? of course you have forgotten;it has been a long time. i promise to share the discovery with you. and did any one see the 'battle at krugger' on national geographic the other day? you did not ? you missed one hell of an existential lesson...now iam jumping iam jumping...later,man

All Mourn the High Chief

2008-06-13T01:30:00.000-07:00

Now that Lamidi Adedibu is dead, are we witnessing the end of mythology in Nigerian political landscape? For the life of this man was nothing but a self-invented myth of grand proportion that tragically, however, loomed darkly on our consciousness. Ibadan, the capital of Oyo state used to be a rallying point for real politicians who warred with the weight of ideas. The gravitas that Adegoke Adelabu brought to national politics has become stuff for recurring fables, so has the intellectualization of public policies of Awolowo. A lot of people could not easily forget the oratorical ebullience of Ladoke Akintola, a consummate orator who laced political speeches with extended metaphors .Whatever leads to the collapse of old western region was far from political banditry, the mould of which Adedibu instituted in the nation's body politic. The Frankenstein has sin ce birthed scions in the like of the gangling Uba of Anambra. He should come to the funeral and pay homage.

Imagine a rhetorical question by the way of a headline in a national daily the morning after Adedibu's death: Adedibu's Death- End of Amala Politics in Nigeria? The truth of the matter is that we are not witnessing the end of any Amala politics unless maybe in Ibadan.It a big maybe because I hear that Gbolarumi, former deputy governor who also was Adedibu's PA has continued the tradition even before the Chief's demise. And what term will one employ to describe Sola Saraki's stronghold in Kwara. People go in droves for daily handouts in his house as much as they thronged to Adedibu's house. Yea, Saraki doesn't do the banditry thing, he uses the insight of a careful researcher to capture people's imagination and consciousness, he can gauge public mood and knows what they need. But people don’t need handouts, they need better life.

Adedibu was the bull in our glass house, the bully who was a high chief. ‘Adedibully’ even got a national ‘honour’ of commander of garrison by the president! He made the state law makers impeach Ladoja,the governor of Oyo state;He sent thugs to attack the state Broadcasting Corporation; ordered the public flogging of a speaker of the state’s House of Assembly; he defied the law enforcement agencies at will and dined with the most powerful in the country. This man held a whole state ransom, and a former attorney general called him leader. So much honour for a man who used to be a butcher and errand boy in Action Group in the 60s.

He had a philosophy of accountability: I will give you political power and in turn you surrender the state treasury and your will to me. Had he been reading political strategists? No, the nearest he got to any political strategy was a tutelage under the great Awo. He had little education but a lot of ambition. The story was told that he woke up one morning from 16- bottles- of -stout induced stupor and decided to conquer his world. He followed Awolowo, but he didn’t understand the abstractions of his politics. He must have thought that Awolowo should not have racked his brain for theories of political power. It was easy, he convinced himself, feed the hungry youth, inebriate their heads with intoxicants; they in turn will persuade the populace who the real baba is in politics, of course with different weapons of coercion. Violence was his political language, Adedibu, he didn’t know any better, but he knew like Machiavelli that a covenant without sword is just words.

But he was a great man of sorts. He took a deliberate, dangerous road to sit atop the game of power. He must have weathered a lot of storms, a lot of scorns too giving his lack of formal education. He got to the height of glory and power and could scornfully call a PhD- holder director of a national parastatal stupid on national TV. Was he a local hero? Well he fed multitude. Was he a rogue? Well he sure wielded a dagger. But most importantly, he was one of us. He reflected the ambivalent relationship between economy and politics in Nigeria. How cheaply the economy of survival can manipulate the politics of integrity. I have seen a group of almost 80 years old women, leaving a political rally late in the night, 200 naira in hand each, hike a ride home in the boot of a taxi! That is a common picture from Ibadan to Kwara. The people are hungry when they are fed they will kill for you in gratitude. I don’t think that reflects the power of the giver of the food, rather it reflects the surrender of will of the receiver at the altar of survival.

Adedibully had lived the good life he desired, or what can one say for some one who could single-handedly remove a state governor despite the power of the latter’s office. He was mourned: disheveled men and women cried incessantly at the funeral. The whole of Molete came to a standstill, and only a few funerals of famous people in our recent memory can boast of such huge crowd as laid Adedibu to rest. He might not be widely loved, but he sure was well respected.

ayemidun: 6 quirky things about me

2008-05-31T04:47:00.000-07:00

ayemidun: 6 quirky things about me

6 quirky things about me

2008-05-29T04:57:00.000-07:00

i got tagged by loomnie

rules:
The rules:1. Link the person(s) who tagged you… . Mention the rules in your blog…3. Tell about 6 unspectacular quirks of yours…4. Tag 6 other bloggers by linking them…5. Leave a comment on each of the tagged blogger’s blogs letting them know they’ve been tagged…

6 quirky things about me

1- i spend at least 30 minutes in the toilet every morning with a book (magazine,tabloid any thing to read) before going to work. it sort of prepares me for a day of alertness ahead ;

2- when i see any body of water no matter how small i think of a deluge .even water in the bath tub! see, i, as a kid, once saw a kid drowned with all shouts and gasps and desperate helplessness. i think that is not the way to go for me so i avoid as much as possible any stream of liquid that is not coursing towards my mouth;

3- i have this rather embarrasing habit of chewing in my sleep. i have never caught myself doing it though,but every body who has had the misfortune of sleeping in a room with me swears they cannot sleep with the grating noise that my teeth make. my mother once thought it was spiritual,so i got a laying on of the hand from some prophet,yet my teeth seem to prefer being on duty when iam not;

4- i naturally forget my dreams upon waking up unless iam playing the game of draught in it;

5- i once fancied myself some sort of Stephen Deadalus (remember that wakabout in Joyce's works?).But the archetype doesn't work for me any more except when i remember that part where some one goes-'it is only the wine that can unloosen the tongue of Daedalus;

6-i consider 'there is wisdom in wine' a quote credited to Aristotle as the most well thought-out in the world.

so i tag
laspapi
dipo tepede
bellanaija
agbekoya
ayomifull
foreveryourlady

LASHING OUT IN SA

2008-05-28T05:53:00.000-07:00

When the Ghanaian government in 1969 sent Nigerians living in Ghana away from that country, it was stated, among other reasons that Nigerians were taking over all commercial opportunities, leaving the Ghanaians at economic disadvantage in their own land. Sadly, this sentiment, as nebulous as it sounds, has surreptitiously resurfaced again almost 40 years later. There is some personal poignancy here: my parents were among those who were ‘fearfully’ bundled off on a ship to Nigeria, losing irretrievably in the process, their business and a sizeable portion of their life. Life of the immigrant! It did not even matter if some of these Nigerians were born in Ghana; they had to leave, with an ultimatum to boot! In moments of pensive recall, my mother would narrate how my father, tired of uncertainties of exile, sold the house at a most ridiculous amount to their Ghanaian tenant and fled, all within a week! Although Nigerian government, sometime in the 80s, enacted a retaliatory law against some Ghanaians who were in Nigeria as economic refugees, the reason was far from economic nationalism as is often the case whenever hostility arises from Ghanaians to Nigerians living in Ghana. Nigerian government at the time simply wanted to prove a point. Well, that point later became a not-so-funny joke on us. Or what to make of the Ghana-must-go syndrome!

The violent wave of xenophobia in most countries of the world, from France to South Africa, from the US to Ghana, makes nonsense of the project of globalization and its borderless vision of the world. But it is more disturbing that fear of African foreigners is taking a violent turn in South Africa. Even before the democratic elections of 1994, SA had been relying on cheap and exploitable labour of immigrants from countries likes Lesotho, Swaziland and Mozambique, so what is happening now?

At least two factors seem to cook up the present fiasco. The ANC- led government has failed the ordinary people of South Africa. In that country, 40-50 percent of the population lives in poverty and 25 percent can be said to be ultrapoor. The country that has been classified as upper middle-income country yet, has one of the most unequal distribution of income in the world. Apart from a coterie of business men who had become billionaires overnight by virtue of cult economic practices of the Mbeki administration, a lot of South Africans who had been deprived of economic advantage during apartheid, have become desperate and are now looking wildly for the scapegoat. The picture that the so called rainbow country presents is that of postcolonial contradiction of so much squalor amidst affluence, picture which is sadly familiar through out the continent. Yet there was the short-sighted denialism about Zimbabwe. The farce being enacted by Mugabe had been a tragedy waiting to happen, yet SA government led by Mbeki did not see danger brewing in the neighbourhood. Now Zimbabweans are breaking borders every day in droves to SA, seeking refuge, and of course, the already underprivileged South Africans do not find it funny.

The violent lashing out at foreigners in SA can be seen as a result of this lethal cocktail but it would seem a most unnecessary and misplaced aggression , giving that most South African leaders ,who were not 'enrobbened' ,lived in exile in other countries during apartheid and of course most African countries supported their cause for self determination in many ways. President Mbeki and vice President Zuma had sought refuge in London, Nigeria and Swaziland among other countries. The unfortunate failure that Mbeki led government has been is even reflected in the inefficiency of the police to stem the wave of violence that is edging even towards Jo’sburg! What in my opinion the under privileged South Africans should pay more attention to is how to elect more responsible government that would not be too alienated from the people the way Mbeki has been. They might have been on the way there already with their current preference for Jacob Zuma who many consider a man who understands the aspirations of the ordinary people rather than the elitist and aloof Mbeki. We have witnessed the collapse of societal structures in most post colonial African countries usually due to bad leadership; SA should not go that way.

9ICE, GONGO ASO AND A POLYGLOT AESTHETIC

2008-05-13T04:16:00.000-07:00

Nigerian wave-making ‘hip hop’ artiste, 9ice, is making a bold and serious musical statement as far as contemporary hip hop in Africa goes. His new album, Gongo aso, has redefined the inter-textual relation between traditional musical elements and contemporary practice on the one hand, the harmonious interrelationships possible in the context of linguistic multiplicity on the other. His music reflects a harmonious blend of Yoruba, Pidgin and English .This practice would seem very common in Nigeria contemporary music experience; but what is not common-which is indeed revolutionary-is the depth of polyglot arrangements in 9ice’s songs.

Yoruba, Pidgin and English languages find a happier infusion in most of the songs in the album. What is truly surprising, however, is the singer’s deployment of Yoruba proverbs in practically all of the songs in the album. 9ice’s deep knowledge of Yoruba complements his obvious talent of voice and sense of harmony. His awareness of self, of the role of the singer in the song, also gives this album a strong encomistic direction; ‘Adigun Alag(b)omeji’ reminds one of the folklore .From ‘Kinda Life’ to ‘Ade Ori’ we feel a young man’s happy romance of identity, history and language in a flow of talent. If you like the Tuface’s kind of Music you will like 9ice, although the comparison is not total as they possess different kinds of earthiness despite their similar groovy flow of music.The album is 9ice.

Yahooze: Hip Hop and Materialism

2008-04-11T03:02:00.000-07:00

With some of the recently released songs by some nigerian 'hip hop' artistes, it seems now that these artistes are intent on catching up with the new trend in global(meaning American) hip hop thematics-the glorification of material wealth and its attendant perks of 'arrival'(all about benjamin,get rich or die trying).

Certainly,the coca-colonization of other lifes by the U.S is not overrated.But this line of thinking becomes problematic when one considers the fact that the American rappers are themselves black(mostly) and depend largely on the white capital and therefore white dictates for their musical productions.And white dictates seem to be-potray the black culture as sybaritic,as hedonistic, as a fetish of fun-loving lazy people.(see Eric Dyson's book on Tupac,HOLLER IF YOU HEAR ME on the economics of identity politics in hip hop)

Of course,it is not always so.As explained in Derrick Parker's book on hip hop murders, the growth of hip hop into a worlwide phenomenon started with crime finances-drug barrons bankrolling shows and sponsoring gigs on the streets of New York,Los Angeles and so on.The Nigerian hip hop culture,however, started with genuine zeal of a few young people who sought to define themselves through the hip hop culture.But things are changing.After all it is an age of Yahoozee!

Now this opens up a whole national discourse.The phenomenon of Yahooze practically crept on us all and became an exciter of public imagination.Cyberscam becomes so popular it generates a whole sub culture of entertainment!A dance style,highly gestural and suggestive developed.The gestures of hand raised to the head level contemplatively and head rhyming with the roving hand in coital thoughtfulness simulates a thought-process of a scammer thinking of strategies to dupe.This dance becomes national and from a corporate office to the motor park,it is like a bug.
Then a smart young man,Olu Maintain,cashed in on this emerging wonder,did an album titled YAHOOZEE,and it was recorded a hit.

There was an argument between this blogger and some friends recently over the quality of content in a song like Yahoozee and another hit by 9ice,Gongo Aso.This was against the background of ASA's excellent album.These songs celebrate razzmatazz,recognition and exhibitionism that attend a productive cyberscam.There are mentions of foreign currencies to waste,exotic cars to drive and beautiful girls to 'roll' with.There seems to be a similarity between nigerian cyber dream-world and gangster paradise of the American hip hop stars-the artistes live their dreams.This is even evident in the song '419 State of Mind 2'by the respected rapper,Mode9.

So from what imagination did Yahooze sensibility and praxis jump out? The desire of the nigerian youth to release their destiny from the stranglehold of the government's ineptitude and menace? Did The palpable corruption that crippled the country's economy give birth to Yahooze sleaze?Could it be the fixation on prosperity by the pentecostalist churches(where some of these artistes that are christian worship)?

But Yahooze has become a terrible beauty. A friend mentioned that it might be the first home grown dance style in recent history.!

BOOKS AND DREAMS

2008-03-14T01:07:00.000-07:00

To name one's favourites books always involves
certain difficulty:it involves a struggle between
memory and sense of style,between diverse dimensions
of perception.Every book opens distinct vistas and
fresh ideas no other book possesses.Preference and
choice in this sense therefore hinge on a reader`s
interpretive options of comparative reading. One`s
favourite`s books might not have been written by one`s
best authors, they are always ingestions that linger longer than other ingestions.Here are a few of the books that have made lasting impact on me.

LEAVES OF GRASS: There perhaps would not be a
Collection of poems as large, both in scope and
contemplation, as intense in its celebration of
existence, as this Whitman’s masterpiece. Written in
rustic, lyrically evocative language, LEAVES projects a
transcendental and democratic vision of man in
relation to things, to place, with a godlike
pronominal-I. Here every thing is sovereign and related
with other things: death ,life,
desire,space,place,time, mind and religion are all
extensions of self.
It is this democracy of every thing, amplifying
persistence that everything is part of life, part of
the `kosmos`that marks LEAVES as timeless celebration
of humanity,like no other book of poetry.

A HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE:A story like Garcia’s
SOLITUDE might not be written again. It could only be
perhaps written once in a hundred years! This novel,
that has come to personify a whole narrative genre
is verry funny, intensely lyrical, very exuberantly
marvelous, saddest most affirmative of the unknown, the
numinous that is an attestation of man’s destiny. It
weaves so elaborately a profound sense of miracle and
magic into the fabric of quotidian existence and
history.
I am yet to see a more arresting fabulous tale that
has so, unboringly,woven the
man-matter,man-spirit,man-time interfaces in such a
magical rendering.

IMMORTALITY:This Milan Kundera`s book is
essentially a triumph of form and style. Created of
gestures, multiple crevices and dimensions of love,
analytic motives of human magical relationship and
existence, this book leads the reader back and forth
in time, to glimpse the elegiac beauty and tragedy of
that man's most intense form of religion-love. Yet this
is not what you will call a love story, it is a
choreographic description of grand motives of human
beingness that make for memorial invention of
immortality in us all.

CHILDREN OF GEBELAWI: Perhaps the most important
book from north Africa, this book is easily one of the
world's literary monuments. NAGUIB Mahfouz has
re-created a most courageous ,powerfully poignant myth
of memory of human race in all its darkness and tragic
repetitiveness,in all its absurd (re)awakenings. taking
its materials from known sources this book
reconstructs metaphor of history and belief systems to
confront us with irredemptive contradictions of our
life.
Evocative in language, lyrically alluring; CHILDREN
holds your hands magically through dark alleys and
terrible inheritance of man to create a most
instructive most sombre fable of man.

BOLEROS:by Jay Wright is a collection of poems
that finds its celebratory delight in 'passion for
what is hidden’. The poems in this book lean so
spritually on art of naming, landscaping and
mindscaping.It is essentially a journey both
physically and spiritually, through geograhy and
faiths,to re-present the histories of man and gods
through their constant and absolute encounters. BOLEROS
is a rare achievement of poetic form as it explores
the dialectic of language and place, mapping out
fictive histories of spaces and worship forms from new
England to Oyo.
This is a book i find myself returning to more often
for ever-fresh insight into the spiritual in poetry.

Note-Edited version of this text had been published on Farafina online .

V-MONOLOGUE AND AN HYPOTHESIS OF DOMESTIC VIOLENCE

2008-03-10T03:54:00.000-07:00

Recently,a friend shared an experience of his friends that beat their wives and of course,the weird tendency of the women to cover the violence up by not telling anybody about it.He wondered why such criminal violence towards women should occur at all.He also was miffed at the offensive complicity of the woman in perpetuating the hideous practice by not seeking help.

This situation ,however, is as old as the relationship between man and woman, and it is in the light of this that one welcomes the efforts of those staging the nigerian versions of Vagina Monologue.The true journey to liberation (of any kind) starts with the desire to speak out.And this culture of talking,which this stage performance embodies,is something that the african women should embrace in totality.

My friend,however, has a hypothesis(though he seems pretty sure it is a theory) as to the psychological pretext for domestic injustices like woman battering and husband's philandering.He thinks a man should marry a woman that will keep him 'on his toes'.Explained:a man should not marry a woman that is less educated (and i guess less intelligent) than him.He believes that when a man and a woman operate on the same intellectual wavelengths they are not likely to have domestic wars.He mentioned how some very educated men who are married to less educated women maltreat these women.He thinks the fact that these men and their wives do not connect at a cerebral point makes a faithful,compassionate and fair relationship difficult to achieve. I think that hypothesis is very weird to say the least.

First of all the examples of the educated men he gave reveal men who are sleeping with girls who in fact may be dumber than their wives, or men who actually have educated and smart wives but still beat and humiliate them.We have heard that our age is such that two salaries get home yet the number of broken homes increases.While the figure of the philandering husband is a worrisome one to the society,that of the wife batterer is a most hideous one.If we go in line with the hypothesis above one will wonder what kind of chemistry welded the educated man and his less educated wife in the first place.And what later broke the spell.It is not any intellectual incompatibility;it is sheer stupid bestiality in the man.

The true of the matter is some men, whether their wife is a neurosurgeon or yam seller,will do what they will do.Examples abound in Nigeria of such marriage,even from the highest quarters.Then one will ask:is it then the nature of the man to be unfaithful and unfair to their spouses,to treat them with cruelty and violence? I think that is the nature of unjust and unreasonable men.It is lack of capacity to appreciate women and their essence.It is a terrible example of the worst form of patriachal dominance and suppression. The staging of v-monologue is a bold step to true liberation of the woman especially in Africa