Nigeria Content Online

I have to say that
there are times when I am happy that I will be long dead by the time
the book as a medium of communication, dies. Otherwise, I would miss
the delicious messiness of my weekend mornings, surrounded by
newspapers and magazines. Every now and then I would also actually
download a story, and proceed to enjoy it at my leisure when I have the
time. And so I recently had a great weekend reading from two of
Nigeria’s powerful and lovely owners of words – Chimamanda Ngozi
Adichie and Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani. The New Yorker has a lovely little
tale by Adichie called, intriguingly, ‘Birdsong.’ The UK Guardian has
Nwaubani’s essay, ‘Nigeria tribalism: a personal love story’ in the
Comment is Free section.

Adichie’s story
showcases her intimate knowledge of Nigeria, in many instances it is
quite moving. You almost wish you were in a room alone with Adichie and
her story listening to it unpolished, without the ruthless discipline
of the editors of the New Yorker. Stripped clean of the edge that is
mostly Nigeria’s drama, it comes across as sanitised for a Western
audience. In some places, the story has the hallmarks of an Uwem Akpan
classic – edited relentlessly until it becomes cold wooden prose. It is
not all Adichie’s fault; there are Western audiences to satisfy and the
publishers make sure that words like “panel beater” never make it to
the West. Who needs the drama of explaining the delicious difference
between “mechanic” and “panel beater”? But the heart craves ogbono soup
that is not garnished with the pretence of cucumber rings. You know,
sloppy, draw-soup, primeval, dripping all over you, that sweet savage
nectar of the gods.

Adichie’s story
goes nowhere because, there is nowhere to go to. Reading ‘Birdsong’,
one wonders, what is the purpose of these lives, lived in the
conspicuous consumption of mediocrity? The main characters eat, make
love, and shit over and over again. In Nigeria, life is good and
aimless. If you are rich. Life is hell and aimless. If you are poor.
This is Adichie’s genius; she effortlessly narrates the aimlessness of
a people. Sometimes I almost understand why some of our writers write
only about the past. Stories like ‘Birdsong’ remind us of what is
missing in today’s Nigeria, what some would describe as the “moral
clarity” of our people’s past.

I thoroughly
enjoyed Nwaubani’s piece; she describes the tension in relationships
among the major “tribes” of Nigeria. I cringed at the word “tribe” just
as I did after recently re-reading several invocations of it in Peter
Pan Enahoro’s ‘How to be a Nigerian’. But then don’t our people use
“tribe” in discussions? Who says, “na my ethnic group?” The unintended
consequence of political correctness is to distort history. I could
make a compelling argument that “tribe” as Nwaubani meant it is a
distinctly Nigerian term. Transferred on to a white paper read mostly
by condescending patronising know-it-all white liberals, the meaning
could get lost in its translation. I am glad that Nwaubani’s editor did
not do to the piece what Adichie’s editor did to Birdsong. In the hands
of a Western editor the New Yorker almost rendered Adichie’s
potentially beautiful piece into the kind of clinical stuff that Uwem
Akpan is famous for. This is all the more reason why we need to support
our own home-grown newspapers and publishers and editors who know a
panel beater from a mechanic, our tribe from their tribe etc.

The two stories offer a great commentary on how we should record
our history. What is the role of the writer in faithfully documenting
the lived life? I believe that a writer should be faithful to the exact
words used in dialogue. If someone calls someone a nigger, I would say
so, not say, someone called her the N word. This is not the same as
legitimising its use. I have complained about the gods of political
correctness ruining the history of our discourse and their delicious
rhyme, flow and poetry… Try saying “abeg go jo, were! mad man!” And
then try saying “Please go away, you emotionally challenged person.”
And of course this is all a roundabout way of saying I miss the raw,
brilliant unfettered poetry of Fela Anikulapo Kuti. For that reason
alone, I am afraid to go up to New York to go watch Fela on Broadway. I
might not like what I see. And I might be alone in that assessment. Who
needs the stress of being alone? Nwaubani’s authenticity is refreshing.
We are going to lose her though. Soon she will be writing clinically
sanitised pieces for the New Yorker and the Guardian, she will be a
superstar whose secretary will not take my calls. And I will remember
that magical afternoon in Lagos as she sat with me in a buka sharing
amala without meat. I regret now that I did not have someone snap us a
picture for when she was… one of us. It is all good; everything is as
it should be.

The cover girl for
the September 1960 Nigerian Independence special edition of the
historic DRUM magazine was in fact a South African, Patience Gcwabe,
described as a “stage entertainer” from Johannesburg. Inevitable
perhaps, for a South African publication that started life in 1951 as
“the first black lifestyle magazine in Africa.”

Also the first
Pan-African magazine, 240,000 copies of DRUM were being distributed in
eight countries within a few short years. Among these countries were
Kenya, Tanganyika (now Tanzania), Uganda, Ghana and Sierra-Leone.

The Nigerian
edition, introduced in 1953, was edited by Nelson Ottah, with
contributions from the likes of Cyprian Ekwensi, Sam Amuka and the
photographer, Matthew Faji. In ‘Drum Beat in Africa’, published in
September 1959, TIME Magazine wrote of DRUM: “In the Nigerian capital
of Lagos, 19,000 copies go on sale at 4am; by sundown of the same day,
all have been sold.” The Nigerian DRUM was a bestseller, therefore, and
it is the special edition published on the eve of Independence that now
comes up for consideration. Fragile with age, the copy has survived
half a century of tumultuous history, thanks to the uncommon foresight
of an owner that lovingly preserved it, as a memento to momentous times.

Though concerned
mostly with Nigeria, it is really a West African edition; advertisers
list outlets in Lagos, Aba, Kano, Accra and Freetown as standard. A
child ill with malaria in a Nivaquine advert has the Guinean name,
Sekou; and some features insist on banal regional commonalities, as in
the case of an article on beauty tips that asserts that “West African
girls have always had good complexions” – who knew?

Pan-African

The South African
interest never completely goes away, reinforcing the continental reach.
There’s the cover girl, for a start. Two pages of words and images are
lavished on the “torrid” Phatha Phatha dance sweeping through South
Africa at the time. DRUM was said to be so successful in its
originating country that even illiterates ‘read’ the images, and so the
magazine had to communicate in images as well as in words. The
‘Africa’s Great Leaders’ feature on the inside back cover eulogises
Mangaliso Sobukwe, founding president of the Pan-Africanist Congress
who led protests against the Apartheid regime’s notorious pass laws on
March 21, 1960 – the day of the Sharpville Massacre. Sobukwe was
already a ‘prisoner of conscience’ by the time of the September 1960
edition, serving a three-year sentence for “incitement”. And so began a
spiral that led to solitary confinement on Robben Island before release
in 1969, followed by house arrest.

Sobukwe’s ordeal
was an ominous sign of what was to come for other visionary African
leaders. But it was a sign only; the reality was still very rosy.
Patrice Lumumba of The Congo (which also gained independence in 1960)
had still not met his brutal death. Nigeria was gaining her freedom;
there was hope. 50 years on, the reader views the DRUM page on Sobukwe
with sadness, for him and for Africa as a whole.

Today and Tomorrow, Yesterday and Today

DRUM documents the
infrastructural rush in Lagos to ensure a “chromium-plated atmosphere”
for the independence celebrations, for which 250,000 visitors were
expected from 90 countries. Extra grandstands are erected at Racecourse
(Tafawa Balewa Square); and Tinubu Square gets dug up for a fountained
roundabout. Federal Palace Hotel, then known as the £1m ‘Palace Hotel’,
then the best in Africa, is taking shape under scaffolding. In charge
of all this was the head of Planning in the colonial administration,
Colonel A.E Hefford, who is shown behind his desk. But as Matthew
Faji’s images show, Nigerian workmen were the ones that sweated and
toiled to get the gleaming new architectural pieces ready for October
1.

“On Victoria
Island, there will be the gigantic Nigerian Exhibition… it’s theme will
be ‘Nigeria – Today and Tomorrow – was how DRUM announced the
Independence Trade Fair held in what became Bonny Camp. The art
component of the exhibition brought to prominence the likes of Bruce
Onobrakpeya, now a venerable old man of Nigerian art. By its title, the
‘Nigeria Yesterday and Today’ exhibition, which opened at the National
Museum in Lagos on September 1, 2010 – seems to be a conversation with
that more illustrious, 1960 exhibition. The similarity in titles either
betrays a lack of new thinking, or how little things have changed or
evolved in 50 years.

The new socials

More about how
little issues of the Nigerian public space have changed, later. But to
return to the adverts in DRUM in 1960, a cursory glance shows how they
expressed the aspirations of the new Nigerian middle class in the era
immediately before, and after, independence. The need to better oneself
through a British education, is filled: “Let me help you through your
G.C.E,” offered the bespectacled Mr. F Bradshaw, all the way from
Bennett College, England. There’s another advert from Mayflower College
in Croydon. On the facing page to Mr Bradshaw, another bespectacled
white man, an illustrated physician, recommends Phensic.

Then there was the
lure of travel overseas. The advert for Lux has the “Lux-lovely Shade
Thomas of Lagos”, the precursor to Suzy Martins who starred in
television and billboard commercials in a later era. The advert boasts
that Shade Thomas “has been in England for over four years.” Quite what
this fact has to do with her choice of toilet soap, is never explained,
but it sends the message that glamorous young Nigerian women of class
ought to travel. Next to the Lux advert is another one for Vogeler’s
Curative Compound. An illustration shows a young, jet-setting Nigerian
couple with a ship in the background under the headline, ‘Off to
England’.

Lots of product ads
are targeted at the new socials: Snowfire Face Powder, Max Faxtor Pan
Cake makeup, Star Lager, Dubonnet and Kingsway Supermarket (the
Shoprite of its day). Lots of adverts for the pools too (Cyprian
Ekwensi contributes a piece about the new gambling phenomenon). But the
working classes aren’t entirely forgotten: Barclays Bank D.C.O invites
“the thriving textiles trader” to open a savings account. As for DRUM’s
cartoon strips, for some reason, the characters are all Europeans with
European concerns. A page about the Nigerian love of gold, however, is
spot on.

Before Nollywood

A column by Coz
Idapo, ‘West African Whispers’, talks about the Nigerian public’s love
for Indian movies. He marvels that though he knew no Nigerian who could
speak a word of Hindi, “yet millions of Nigerians like Indian songs”
which are “languorous, sugar-sweet and painfully nostalgic.” The column
goes on to identify a deeper reason for the love of Indian films in the
50s and 60s (and well into the 80s), and by so doing, ‘West African
Whispers’ hit a nail on the head.

Decades before the
advent of Nollywood, “an articulate Nigerian” told Idapo: “Until the
Indian movie-makers invaded the Nigerian market, I was in the habit of
thinking that only Europeans and Americans have culture and history,
and tradition and supermen, and fencers, and all that. Well, I go to
Indian films because they help to convince me that Nigeria can even
start to produce her own films.”

On tribal affiliations

‘West African
Whispers’ also touches on a chiefly cousin who tended to bemoan his
declining stock in a democratic Nigeria. The cousin pepped up on
hearing of “the recent appointment of the Ooni of Ife as Governor of
Western Nigeria.” The Ooni, Oba Adesoji Aderemi – also head of the
socio-cultural group, Egbe Omo Oduduwa – makes an appearance in another
piece that asks, ‘Do we want tribal unions after independence?’ 50
years on, we are still asking the same question.

DRUM also mentions
the Ibo State Union (headed by Z.C Obi) and the Ibibio State Union –
Arewa did not figure in 1960, for some reason! – and calls for them to
be disbanded. Stating that “everything outworn or out-moded should be
left entirely behind” after independence, the magazine declares, “In
the great task ahead, there will be little or no place for interplay of
tribal loyalties.”

Kidnapped

Also eerily
prescient still, is a piece about kidnappings in Nigeria at
independence. Trafficking for some sort of modern slavery and more
macabre reasons, is suggested. And who should turn up in the piece?
Ayinde Bakare, “a well known Lagos musician” (and father of present day
highlife singer, Shina Ayinde Bakare) is photographed and quoted,
citing “juju” as one of the kidnapping methods. In 2010, kidnappings
are regular on the news; 15 kidnapped schoolchildren have only just
been released in Abia State. Here’s what DRUM said: “KIDNAPPED. An
offensive word. A spine-chilling word that means great sorrow for many
families in Nigeria today.” DRUM could have been commenting about these
times.

The Sage

The lead story in
the Independence edition is a special on the late Obafemi Awolowo,
leader of the Action Group, the Opposition party. In stark contrast to
today’s manifesto-less politicians, Awo installed a full Shadow Cabinet
of Opposition ministers including Solomon Danship Lar (Minister of
Works), A Rosiji (Finance Minister), J. S Tarka (Commerce) and Anthony
Enahoro (External Affairs). The 1963 treason trial had not even
suggested itself to the imagination.

Sumptuous black and
white images hint at the lost grandeur of Awo’s political vision. He is
photographed in his book-lined study in Oke Ado, Ibadan; amid the
endless volumes, he looks like a man in his natural environment, a well
read man. How many of our politicians can boast of such a ‘real’ study
of books today – the current Ibadan strongman, Akala? With the 2011
elections looming, Awolowo could have been addressing the country of
today when he tells DRUM: “You can classify the electorate into two
classes… those who follow a party whether it is doing the right thing
or not, and… those who examine the policy and programmes of a party
before voting for it.”

Minister Johnson

A counterpoint to
the Awolowo special, is a two-page spread on ‘Our Political Glamour
Boy’, the then Minister of Labour, Joseph Modupe Johnson. If the five
images of him in the magazine are any indication – Johnson took his
leisure time and dressing very seriously indeed. A happy-go-lucky
boating fan, he tells DRUM “I love to go round unbeaten water tracks…
Boating is a pastime people should think about”. The magazine pips in:
“If we had boats like him, we would.” The minister goes into fine
detail about his bargaining strategy when shopping for fabrics in Ereko
and Balogun markets, saying, “To be well groomed is the A.B.C of social
success.” True, but I’m not sure this should be a Labour Minister’s top
discussion topic.

And back when ‘Gay’
still only meant ‘Happy’, Minister Johnson is described as “a gay beau”
who would be remembered in future as a “gay firework of new Africa.”

The reporter
assures that Johnson also gets busy reading files on trade disputes and
strikes and gives to the poor, but the image of the “high society”
figure who attends “rounds of parties” has stuck, for this reader at
least. The colourful character says his flamboyance is just an
expression of his “African personality”.

I’d never before heard or read about the Minister of Labour at
Nigeria’s independence, until I read the DRUM edition of September
1960. And there I was thinking Modupe Johnson was just a primary school
I attended briefly in Surulere, Lagos, in my youth.