Popular Culture in Africa

The Episteme of the Everyday

Stephanie Newell, Onookome Okome

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135068936
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Popular Culture
• Index: Social Sciences

This volume marks the 25th anniversary of Karin Barber's ground-breaking article, "Popular Arts in Africa", which stimulated new debates about African popular culture and its defining categories. Focusing on performances, audiences, social contexts and texts, contributors ask how African popular cultures contribute to the formation of an episteme. With chapters on theater, Nollywood films, blogging, and music and sports discourses, as well as on popular art forms, urban and youth cultures, and gender and sexuality, the book highlights the dynamism and complexity of contemporary popular cultures in sub-Saharan Africa.

Focusing on the streets of Africa, especially city streets where different cultures and cultural personalities meet, the book asks how the category of "the people" is identified and interpreted by African culture-producers, politicians, religious leaders, and by "the people" themselves. The book offers a nuanced, strongly historicized perspective in which African popular cultures are regarded as vehicles through which we can document ordinary people's vitality and responsiveness to political and social transformations.

1 Introduction

Popular Culture in Africa: The Episteme of the Everyday

Stephanie Newell and Onookome Okome

I Looking into the Streets of Africa

The study of African popular culture in Africa has indeed moved on, with giant strides. It has attracted the best and most imaginative of younger Africanist scholars. It is no longer generally seen as a by-product or afterthought: it has moved center stage. If the big questions still remain to be answered, it is heartening to see that we now have a concentration of people who can answer them.

—(Barber 2012, vi)

In 1987 an article was published in the African Studies Review that marked a turning point in the study of African popular cultures. “Popular Arts in Africa,” by Karin Barber, was no ordinary scholarly article. In seventy-eight pages of detailed cross-continental comparison and analysis, Barber described an ambitious model for the study of diverse popular art forms. Her article helped to shape this field of research and to challenge existing definitions of popular culture in Africa, and it continues to engage the attention of scholars in numerous disciplines today, including those represented in this volume whose work ranges from literary studies, art history, and media studies to musicology, gender studies, and anthropology.

Many publications on African popular cultures preexisted “Popular Arts in Africa,” not least studies by vanguard popular arts scholars such as Emmanuel Obiechina (1971, 1973), Richard Priebe (1978), and David Coplan (1985). What this earlier research often lacked, however, and what Barber’s article forcefully promoted was a continent-wide theoretical framework for the positive identification and analysis of popular art forms, both as recognizably African and also as locally situated and distinct from one another. Crucially, Barber sought a methodology for the study of African popular art forms that moved beyond negative definitional spaces in which the popular was categorized as a kind of lack, being nontraditional and nonelite. She argued that the conventional tripartite division of cultural production on the continent into “traditional,” “popular,” and “elite” was insufficient because of its tendency to position the popular as an amoebic, hybrid, syncretic mode of production, situated in between the other two but lacking their definitional boundaries, and consequently not able to be conferred with historicity or productive political agency.

Barber’s inspiration came from the groundbreaking work of musicologists, including Coplan (1979), Chris Waterman (1982), and John Collins (1985), all of whom focused on the cultural production and self-naming practices of intermediary urban classes in African cities. Unlike the work of these scholars, however, all too often the producers of African popular art forms in the 1970s and 1980s were dismissed by academics as apolitical entertainers or as poor-quality mimics of mass-produced Western culture. This notion of inauthenticity was particularly prevalent in the field of literary studies, with its tendency, on the one hand, to canonize “great works” of literature and with its tradition, on the other hand, of condemning “mass culture,” dating back to Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and the Frankfurt School of Marxist criticism. Such a position neglected the ways in which popular arts participated in knowledge production—and in the generation of understandings—about people’s everyday worlds.

If defined in terms of absence and negativity, Barber argued, popular arts in Africa would remain stranded without the aesthetic and material visibi lity conferred on the spheres of “traditional” and “elite” cultures (1987, 10). Moreover, the audiences of African popular art forms would be seen at best as culturally illegitimate consumers of “trash” and at worst as the passive victims of the ideologies promoted by mass culture. With this in view, Barber offered a vigorous critique of the practitioners of cultural conscientization for the manner in which they dismissed some popular art forms as “trivial” and as signs of false consciousness, a position that was, in her view, “not just premature but altogether misplaced” in relation to the complex social layers present in African cities (1987, 8).

Several contributors to this volume continue this debate. With reference to postapartheid South Africa, Christopher Warnes points out that, “During the apartheid years there was a strong critical perception that popular fiction abrogated the social and political mission to document injustice, challenge preconceptions, and conscientize readers. The end of apartheid was interpreted as signalling the lifting of this literary-political injunction to be serious.” Released from the “injunction to be serious,” creative writers and publishers in South Africa have contributed to an “explosion of genres such as crime fiction, romance, chick lit, science fiction, gangster noir, and comedy,” much of it aimed at black women readers. This is not to oppose a Marxist aesthetic to a revisionist or neoliberal accommodation of popular arts. Throughout Barber’s essay one can see the influence of New Left criticism, particularly the work of Raymond Williams, whose cultural materialist approach emphasized the everyday—and the political—qualities of culture, and who developed an influential tripartite model to understand the relationships between cultural forms at particular moments in social history. For Williams, culture was mobile, discontinuous, and hybrid, leading to his conceptualization of cultural forms at any one moment as combining “residual,” “dominant,” and “emergent” elements (1977, 40–49). In her own essay, Barber takes up Williams’s notion of emergent cultural forms and attaches them explicitly to the appearance of new social groupings in African cities, particularly so with the new urban classes. She suggests that the very evasiveness and elasticity of African popular art forms are positive qualities: situated in “unofficial” spaces of cultural production, popular art circulates around the everyday worlds of people on the streets and outside the limits and hierarchies of officialdom.

In the wake of Barber’s work, this volume seeks to ask how we can understand the diverse ways in which social experiences are foregrounded in different African art forms, especially the experiences of the class of people we might refer to as the “common people of the street.” How do these people navigate the inexplicable and sometimes horrific experiences of the everyday, especially in the light of their political helplessness? How and when are everyday activities constituted into cultural artifacts? How do local audiences emerge in these performances, and what kinds of “publics” do they form (see Barber 1997b)? How do audiences engage with the fact of the everyday, and what do popular arts mean to those who create and transform the everyday into collective cultural articulations?

Barber observes that popular forms of expression serve to help people recognize and understand the ways in which their survival is circumscribed socially, politically, and economically, especially through problems such as poverty, corruption, and poor government (Barber 1987, 5–7). Similarly, this volume is about these modes of knowing and experiencing in contemporary Africa. Contributors engage with a variety of topics and themes, particularly the concept of the everyday and the formation of an epistemology of the African city in popular culture (see Förster, Maranga-Musonye, Primorac). Some chapters focus upon gender and sexuality, particularly upon women as consumers and producers of popular media (Jaji, Warnes, Reuster-Jahn, El-Nour) but also with sexuality as a type of popular performance (Adejunmobi), while others reflect on the ways in which disciplinary frameworks generate diverse perspectives on and approaches towards African popular cultures, including perspectives on the form, structure, and historicity of genres (Rea, Primorac, Adejunmobi). Many contributors—including Uta Reuster-Jahn on Swahili popular magazines, Warnes on postapartheid popular romances, and Tsitsi Jaji on francophone women’s magazines in Senegal—show that these topics are often represented differently for women than for men (see also El-Nour). By bringing women into the mainframe of popular textual consumption and creation, these contributors suggest that one can start to identify forms of interpretation that challenge prevailing critical assumptions that particular political positions—including Pan- Africanism and African nationalism—are exclusively masculinist in orientation (see Jaji).

In his chapter on the role played by local-language radio in facilitating listeners’ engagement with political difficulties in Kenya, Peter Tirop Simatei points out that Barber’s key move has been to re-situate popular culture as a productive rather than a reflective field of activity. African popular art forms do not simply mirror sociopolitical conditions nor should they be celebrated as the naïve voice of “the people” in everyday contexts. Simatei shows how the Heshimu Ukuta program, broadcast in the Kalenjin language on Kass FM, makes use of music lovers’ recollections of 1970s discos not only to remember the past but to reinvent identities in the politically turbulent present. In this way, radio programs help to present people’s proactive responses to complex and dynamic power relations on the ground.

African popular art forms offer us a vital archive of desires and imagined possibilities. If popular arts “play a crucial role in formulating new ways of looking at things,” as Barber suggested in 1987, they also contain a record of people’s desires and worldviews, meriting our engagement with them on their own terms (Barber 1987, 4). Within the ephemeral nature of popular arts are expressions of desires for future alternatives, for emergent possibilities. From this perspective, as discussed in detail below, Barber’s emphasis on “emergent” consciousness remains pertinent to the study of popular art forms. These types of texts offer an archive of what was thinkable, what was possible, what was pleasurable, and how it came to be imagined thus at its time of creation. With this archival element in view, Grace A. Musila, in this volume, offers a persuasive description of popular writing in Kenya as offering an “archive of the present,” and Joseph Oduro-Frimpong emphasizes the ways in which political cartooning in the Ghanaian popular press helps to fuel debates while also preserving those debates for posterity in “visual intellectual archives.”

II 'Popular Arts in Africa': 25 Years of Critical Engagement with Barber

Upon publication, “Popular Arts in Africa” generated a number of critical responses. One tenacious strand of criticism suggested that Barber placed the category of “popular arts” in an idealized space outside historical processes. The historian Frederick Cooper led this critique, arguing that Barber ignored the precolonial histories of African popular art forms (Cooper 1987, 99–103, see also Arnoldi 1987, Jules-Rosette 1987). Debates about Barber’s approach to historicity—particularly her association of the popular with the emergence of new social classes—continue to influence research into African popular cultures and audiences. In order to resolve the problem of an over-inclusive definition, Barber had situated the study of popular art forms in relation to the history and emergence of “intermediary” classes in Africa. Variously labeled by scholars in the years since then, as “sub-elites,” “emergent elites,” “local intellectuals,” “urban intellectuals,” “culture brokers,” and “local cosmopolitans,” the producers of African popular art forms, in Barber’s view, often bore a tangential relation to political power and embodied the “emergent” voices and narratives of nonelite social classes.

In a particularly problematic reading of “Popular Arts in Africa,” entitled “From Primitive to Popular Culture: Why Kant Never Made it to Africa,” Hetty ter Haar criticizes Barber’s use of the term “emergent” for its apparent implication that agency and consciousness did not emerge “until the appearance of African popular culture as a category of practice” (2009, 17). If “these texts and genres seem to be sites of emergent consciousness,” ter Haar asks, “[d]oes this imply there was no agency or consciousness before the emergence of popular culture? Is that the reason why African cultures were until then—but when exactly?—deemed to be ‘primitive’?” (2009, 20). In their introduction to the volume in which this chapter appears, Falola and Agwuele seem to adopt ter Haar’s notion of “emergent” to imply a state of “underdevelopment,” and they implicate Barber through a forceful subtitle, “ ‘Primitive’ to Popular Ethnographies,” in associating the notion of “emergent” with “the primitive” and “the unconscious” (2009, 7).

In “Popular Arts in Africa,” Barber’s references to “emergent consciousness” are qualified by a number of factors: first, she describes the presence of a “new emergent class” that is fluid, heterogeneous, and urban (1987, 15); from this basis, she argues “from an emergent social class come emergent popular artistic forms” (1987, 30). Second, when she discusses the term “consciousness,” it is not without contextualization, for, in her view, “popular consciousness” is inextricable from “urban consciousness-formation” (1987, 29–30). Using the examples of popular literature in Onitsha and Nairobi, she insists that “the new consciousness that popular art forms articulate and communicate is historically and socially specific” (1987, 49). Asking directly if popular art forms can be read as reflections of “popular consciousness,” she problematizes any method for demonstrating such a claim, for it requires the attribution of an unmediated, intentional communication between producers and consumers in otherwise dynamic, mixed urban environments (1987, 54).

The phrase “emerging consciousness” should be placed in the context of the broader dialectical system of the production of knowledge about self and community in any society, not just in African societies; this dialectic allows us to think of consciousness in terms of class formation and class interests, a point which Barber makes eloquently in her text. For her, the “emergence” of any such consciousness is intricately tied to specific periods and to specific economic and political situations; it is not a onetime social occurrence. Each such occurrence is tied in complex ways to the flux of social formations and systems. To suggest or imply the notion of the “primitive” in Barber’s essay, as ter Haar does, is to misread—or at least to under-read—Barber’s text.

The words “emerging” and “consciousness” are used together only once in Barber’s essay, and they are separated by one vital word: “class.” Musical idiom, she writes, “can be the locus where an emerging class consciousness is forged” (1987, 58–59). Barber’s point is not that African popular cultures are socially fluid or positioned outside history but that class consciousness is caught up in narratives and art forms, social and political in inflection, and that the contents and genres of popular art forms demonstrate a level of experimentation, playfulness, and generic freedom unconstrained by the power relations put in place by “official” sites and bodies such as editorial teams at publishing houses, curriculum-setting educational committees, local power elites, and the boards of prize committees, art galleries, theaters, and museums.

A revealing example of the role of popular arts in fulfilling the ambitions of emerging social groups can be found in the particular consciousness expressed in the popular Onitsha market pamphlets of the 1950s and 1960s. Speedy Eric’s Mabel the Sweet Honey that Poured Away (1960?) and Ogali A. Ogali’s Veronica My Daughter (1956) best capture this consciousness, which reframes the highlife modernity of women from a masculine perspective that insists on denying women social agency to pursue the newfound freedom generated by the anonymity of the city (Okome 2009). The “sweet honey,” Mabel, dies in a public latrine because of her sexual excesses, unwanted by the men of her time; meanwhile, Ogali’s Veronica is merely happy to have her own man in place of the old, illiterate chief that her father wants her to marry. Such narratives leave little space for the option of not marrying at all: Veronica merely moves from one regime of male hegemony (that of the father) to another—that of the husband (Okome 2009). What emerges from this is not just the anxiety of the men who wrote these texts but a fear associated with the awareness of a new and emerging female consciousness that emphasized self-worth and pride in decision making.

“Emergent consciousness,” for Barber, is vitally connected to class formation, urbanization, and the articulation of (self-)consciousness by members of social groups, including the newly educated sub-elites represented by the Onitsha authors in the 1950s and 1960s. This is a long way from the notion of a linear developmental path leading from the supposedly traditional towards the supposedly modern, or from an ahistorical notion of consciousness, or a decontextualized notion of popular culture. Indeed, in marking out popular art forms as distinct from other practices, Barber attempts to break with the teleologies and hierarchies that accompany binary oppositions ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Foreword
• 1 Introduction: Popular Culture in Africa: The Episteme of the Everyday
• Part I Theoretical Overviews
• Part II Gender and Sexuality in African Popular Cultures
• Part III The Place of Humor
• Part IV Popular Discourses of the Streets
• Part V Coda
• Contributors
• Index