In 1977, when OPEC came of age, an oil-rich Nigeria hosted Africa's
second world Black Arts Festival (FESTAC '77) to celebrate the
"individuality, the antiquity, and the power of the Black and African
World."
Featured as a black world's fair, FESTAC produced an extravagant
spectacle of ethnic diversity, Nigerian nationalism, Pan-African unity
and utopian modernity which literally staged as "cultural tradition" in
Nigeria's National theatre. Throughout this festival of cultural
revival, from its planning stages in Lagos to the closing Durbar
ceremony in Kaduna, a distinctive ideology of black culture and
Africanity emerged which owed much to early ideas of Negritude and
Pan-Africanism, but in key respects diverged from them. This divergence
can be identified in specific events, such as the falling out between
Lt-General Olusegun Obasanjo, Nigeria's Head of State and Grand Patron
of FESTAC, and Senegal's President Leopold Senghor, who abdicated his
position as FESTAC's co-patron and virtually boycotted the festival. It
can also be understood in relation to Nigeria's distinctive federalism,
which, recently traumatized by the Biafran War (1966-70), sought to
stabilize the distribution of political power between competing ethnic
blocs. But the underlying "secret' of FESTAC's cultural project,
motivating its representations of culture and race, was the development
of a state-regulated oil economy which revitalized the nation with
unprecedented wealth.
This essay will examine how FESTAC '77 celebrated the marriage of
"cultural tradition" with "fast capitalism" in Nigeria (Watts 1992),
commodifying culture in the National Theatre through its forms of
exhibition and display (cf. Karp and Lavine 1991). This investment of
culture with commodity—value—a veritable fetishism of "fetishes"—masked a
complex series of ethnic conflicts and class contradictions which
intensified under oil-capitalism. For unlike the imperial world's fairs
of Europe and North America, which deployed racial and cultural idioms
to naturalize colonial hierarchies and essentialize alterity, race and
culture functioned in FESTAC as commutable tropes of radical inclusion,
seeking to neutralize the paradoxes of state wealth and power in a
universalizing black nationalist ideology. And unlike socialist humanism
of Senghor's earlier Negritude movement, celebrated in Dakar in the
first Festac of 1966, FESTAC '77 signalled Nigeria's triumphant
emergence as a significant player in global capitalism.
In fact, FESTAC celebrated a movement of articulation between Nigeria
and the world economy which centralized the state to an unprecedented
degree, overwhelming regional control of Marketing Boards initially
established under British colonialism—cocoa in the west, palm oil in the
East, groundnuts and cotton in the north (Helleiner 1966). These latter
cash-crops dwindled in prestige and value compared with petro-dollars
commanded by high grade oil, inflated by OPEC, and sold to the highest
Western bidders. Nigeria had already reorganized its three regions into
four (1963), then into twelve states (1967), and again into nineteen
states by 1969.
A series of National Development Plans accelerated by oil-capitalism
in the 1970s, however, lubricated the domestic economy in a state
spending spree. A utopian vision of economic growth and modernization
swept the nation as the government built new highways, doubled salaries
in the famous Udoji Reform, and expanded the public sphere with new
hospitals, schools and parastatal industries. Fast-capitalism indeed.
Nigeria proudly proclaimed its role as the political and economic giant
of black Africa, enshrined this message in its National Theatre, which
served, in the words of FESTAC President Chief Anthony Enahoro (later
dismissed for embezzling funds) as "the centre of Nigerian national life
(Indigo, n.d.:16).
THE NATIONAL THEATRE
"The spectacle is the existing order's uninterrupted discourse about itself, its laudatory monologue."
—Guy Debord
Located in Lagos and built for FESTAC within a network of new
highways, the National Theatre established the "exemplary center" (cf.
Geertz 1980:11-18) not only of festival activities, but also of new
Nigeria. Its circular structure, occupying 23,000 square meters of
ground and riding thirty-one meters high, resembles the hub of a
cosmographic wheel radiating out through architectural "spokes" and
superhighways to embrace the modern world. Viewed from the outside, the
Theatre's facade resembles a crown rising out of the earth, as if
linking the wealth of the land—its chthonic traditions and subterranean
oil—with national territory and sovereignty. A closer look reveals the
Nigerian coat-of-arms perched like a jewel at the center of an
architectural diadem. This image evokes a new association between the
military hat which also resembles the Theatre's facade and sports the
same coat-of-arms in its "crown." These are symbolic musings to be sure,
suggesting possible interpretations of FESTAC's cultural cathedral in
the popular imagination.
Viewed from within, the National Theatre offered state-of-the-art
facilities. The Theatre hall was the major showpiece, providing an
extravagant venue for cultural performances and "dance-dramas", 5,000
seats, a rotating thirty-three by forty-four meter stage, an orchestral
stand, a rampart of stage-lights, and a set of earphones at every seat
which were hooked up to interpreter's booths equipped for simultaneous
translation into eight major languages.
Radio and television booths were also installed to broadcast FESTAC
performances to the outside world. Should you need to relieve yourself
during a FESTAC performance, closed-circuit video consuls in the
hallways and lavoratories allowed you to watch the show as you went
about your business. The smaller Conference hall, with 1,500 seats,
boasted identical translation facilities for foreign delegates and
visitors, for it was here that the much vaunted FESTAC colloquium took
place, with scholars from forty-one countries presenting 269 papers on
ten listed sub-themes of Black Civilization (Appendix A). As we shall
see, these two major venues served the two basic components of FESTAC
'77; the choreographed performances of traditional cultures and dramatic
arts, and the more intellectual exchange between black and African
scholars. Equally important, however, were two large Exhibition halls
which displayed traditional sculpture, musical instruments, and
architectural technology, as well as modern art works, mostly by
Nigerians.
A modernist vision was thus clearly inscribed on the surfaces and in
the spaces of the National Theatre, embracing the latest audiovisual and
administration technology in black Africa's largest and wealthiest
country. As a champion and herald of a new black order, Nigeria played
host, through its National Theatre, to self-styled Black United Nations
which invited representatives from the widest reaches of the black
world, and which not only rivalled the Organization of African Unity
(OAU) in scale, but challenged its authority in the FESTAC Colloquium as
well as in the popular press (Olusanya n.d.: 24 appendix B) In the
official discourse of FESTAC's organizers, which included the Grand
Patron and Head of State Lt-General Olusegun Obasanjo and associated top
military brass and Federal Commissioners, FESTAC's goals were made
explicit: "To succeed, we must restore the link between culture,
creativity, and mastery of modern technology and industrialism ... to
endow the Black Peoples all over the world with a new society, deeply
rooted in our cultural identity, and ready for the great scientific and
technological task of conquering the future" (Iwara and Mven 1977:7).
The modernist hi-tech National Theatre was an appropriate venue for this
great "restoration," staging cultural tradition for privileged
representatives of the black world's imminent emancipation.
We can appreciate FESTAC'S popular appeal in the affirmation of
common origins, racial brotherhood and shared colonial and cultural
experience that was voiced by elites on behalf of the masses and
disseminated by the mass media. FESTAC was, after all, a grand party.
Juju music superstar King Sunny Ade dominated the airwaves with his
welcoming song, "FESTAC for Black People," as Nigerian hospitality
achieved new heights. Interviews with academics and government officials
flooded the press, expressing quasi-utopian visions of a prosperous
future while invoking Nkrumah, Du Bois, Garvey, C. L. R. James among
other Pan-African Heroes. Leftist intellectuals like Wole Soyinka and
Biodun Jeyifo added dissenting voices, prevailing the chinks in FESTAC's
populist facade and calling for greater mass participation through a
more genuinely popular theater. Even Soyinka—who founded the University
of Ife's Guerilla Theatre Unit—participated in the FESTAC colloquium,
where he criticized the OAU for its lack of unity and, in an
uncharacteristic turn, called for Swahili as a Pan-African language
(Soyinka ref.). But to appreciate the role of the National Theatre in
"restoring the Link" between tradition and modernity, and to grasp the
political transformation of culture which this great restoration
entailed, we must go beneath FESTAC's overt ideology and examine the
hidden hegemonies which operated behind the scene.
The first hidden hegemony concerns the rationalization of
"traditional culture" into state-regulated categories of space and time.
Spatially, FESTAC's planning committee divided the black world into
sixteen zones comprising 75 countries and communities, extending
throughout Africa to include Caribbean countries like Haiti, Monserrat
and the Dominican Republic; Latin American countries like Venezuela and
Brazil; as well as "black" communities in North America, Ireland, India,
Papua New Guinea and West Germany. Clearly an imperial imagination was
at work, echoing if not consciously reproducing the branches of Garvey's
Universal Negro Improvement Association. But over and above the
countries themselves, the bureaucratic logic of FESTAC's planning
committee offered equal time and space to its participating
representatives, providing its rotating 33 by 44 meter stage to guest
performers and allowing two hours and 15 minutes for each production. In
the Exhibition Hall, similar parity was accorded to exemplary visual
and plastic arts displayed on walls and in cases.
The point is not that all black and African cultures were thus
exhibited, but that in principle they could be, for each represented the
same message in a distinctive idiom and style, i.e. "the individuality,
the antiquity and the power of the Black and African world." In the
bureaucratic semiology of the National Theatre—at once a place and a
performance—all "traditional" signs acquired the same contemporary
meaning within the master narrative which shaped official display.
Through the legislated equivalence of spatial and temporal categories
(in Foucault's terms its "architecture of distribution"), the National
Theatre homogenized ethnic differences into distinctive representations
of equivalent cultural and "racial" value—that of the black African
world entering the mainstream of industrial capitalism. And as FESTAC's
events progressed, "traditional" dance gave way to "contemporary dance
theatre" and ballet, while the Exhibition Hall turned to modern Nigerian
and African artists. The culturally differentiated past was thereby
assimilated to Nigeria's modernist agenda (cf. Appadurai 1990:4).
In FESTAC's official program, the rationalization of "traditional"
culture culminated in the colloquium on Black Civilization and
Education, shifting registers from the dramatic and aesthetic to the
overtly intellectual. Termed the "heart of FESTAC" by the Grand Patron,
it was more appropriately its head, an "intellectual awakening" designed
to celebrate the Black world's heritage, decolonize the black scholar's
mind once and for all, and articulate FESTAC's goals in a program for
future action ("the Lagos Programme"). The colloquium featured opening
address, public lectures, and the reports of five working groups
representing 35 countries and international organizations such as the
OAU, UNESCO and even the Holy See. Topics were organized around five
conjunctive themes, concerning the relation of Black civilization to 1)
Arts and Pedagogy, 2) African Languages and Literature, 3) Philosophy
and Religion, 4) Historical awareness and African Systems of Government,
and 5) Science, Technology and Mass Media. It is not the substance of
these discussions which I shall address, but their formal categories,
their implicit "progression" from art to science, and the communicative
context itself.
The Colloquium Proceedings reveal a wide range of often dissenting
views regarding the definition of the Black world, appropriate
educational strategies and developmental ideologies, and the politics of
the OAU. One can almost feel Nigeria's head of State squirm in his
chair as Wole Soyinka lambasted "the robots of leadership with their
narrow schematism" (45) while damning his government with faint praise.
But underlying and ordering the range of positions, and manifesting the
power of the Nigerian state—administered as it was through an
international Colloquium Committee—were the categories which structured
the discursive field itself. The Colloquium established an archive of
knowledge, planned to fill six volumes, which would attest to the
intellectual integrity and unity of Black civilization. If select
scholars offered particular views, it was the Nigerian State, through
Col. (Dr.) Amadu A. Ali, the Hon. Federal Commissioner for Education and
Colloquium Chairman, which authorized the presentations and published
proceedings. Under the guise of a unified object of knowledge, the unity
was imparted by the Nigerian Government and its military regime of
truth, which forged the categories of the archive. If the depth and span
of Black Civilization could not achieve consensus among the
participants, it could be categorically imposed by the organizers.
Moreover, the epistemological division of labor, represented by the
five working groups ranging from the arts to the sciences, recapitulated
western Imperial themes of social evolution and progress. When speakers
deviated from FESTAC's developmental agenda, the heroic narrative of
Africa's ascent to modernity restored the official story (cf. Corby
1992).
Like the bureaucratic semiology of the performing and visual arts,
which converted cultural difference into equivalent ideological value,
the Colloquium produced a master narrative of Black Civilization which
subsumed dissenting voices. And in its triumphant march from traditional
arts to scientistic modernity, rewriting the past to take on the
future, it reproduced the hegemony of the Nigerian state. This can be
seen in the Colloquium's opening ceremonies, initiated by the Grand
Patron himself, who poured a "traditional" libation of water and alcohol
to honor unspecified gods and ancestors, as well as the important
guests at his high table, which included the Yoruba Oba (King) of Lagos,
King Moshoeshoe of Lesotho, President Sir Jawara and President Siaka
Stevens of Sierra Leone. Young girls in "traditional" dress brought
calabashes with kola nuts that were broken and distributed among
dignitaries. The Grand Patron thus established himself as the patron of
the Black World in what served as a distinctively African opening,
uniting members in a secular church. The libation was followed by the
FESTAC Anthem, sung by the FESTAC Choir, to which the assembled official
delegates stood at attention. FESTAC's President, Col. O. P. Fingesi,
delivered opening remarks, followed by the Colloquium Chairman—both top
ranking officers in the Nigerian military government. Through this
opening and ordering of communicative acts, and in the Pan-African
Language of fraternity and communitas, the Nigerian state established
itself at the center of the Black world, with the military government in
charge.
REGIMES OF VALUE
"The Spectacle is the other side of money: it is the general abstract equivalent of all commodities"
—Guy Debord.
The rationalization of tradition discussed thus far, linked the past
to the future in programmatic statements which assimilated cultural
difference with the authority of the petro-state through the logic of
FESTAC's administration. Although Nigeria was wealthy, it had much to
worry about, given the hated "ethnic balancing act" of keeping the
federal republic together in relative concord. Within FESTAC's arena of
secular ritual, the idea of cultural traditions was highly politicized.
Nigeria's numerous minority cultures, such as Efik, Ibibio, Isoko and
Tiv, competed with the politically more powerful Hausa, Yoruba and Ibo
ethnic groups for both time and space in the National Theatre, where
they performed abridged segments of their "traditional" festivals. As
FESTAC became a multi-media stage for integrating Nigeria's diverse
cultures within an overarching nation, it also became a contested site
in which ethnic minorities competed for national representation and
recognition. FESTAC's rationalization of tradition defused Nigerian
ethnic politics by according different cultural phenomena equivalent
value within a unified Nigeria and larger Black World. For this
abstraction of identity from ethnic diversity became the formula for
modernity itself. As in the capitalist marketplace, ethnic (rather than
individual) identities were realized through the production and
consumption of standardized exchange-values, except that here the
surplus- value of Black Civilization accrued to the Nigerian state. It
is perhaps no coincidence that the final and "highest" form of Knowledge
in the colloquium's archive was Black Civilization and Mass Media,
privileging a technology of power which reproduced ethnic identities as
commensurable icons and simulacra for mass consumption.
This latter aspect of rationalization shades into a second hidden
transformation whereby culture itself was commodified. FESTAC
demonstrated that an oil-rich Nigeria placed a premium on cultural
traditions, which it financed, "reproduced" on stage, marketed for
tourists. A new class of culture-brokers emerged, selling the images,
icons and ideas of "traditional" Africa to a broad range of national and
international consumers. Indeed, FESTAC '77's trademark of a sixteenth
century royal Benin mask became a familiar symbol of Nigerian grandeur
spanning a wide range of spectrum of meanings: of African Kingship, of
cultural genius, of European contact and Portuguese "trade" (primarily
slaves), of British intransigence (the British Museum refused to return
the mask), and above all, of commodity-value. No other image was so
mass-produced and commodified, both in souvenir replicas and on fliers
and broadsheets which sold the idea of Festac under the sign of African
Sovereignty (plate 5). This iconic association of African culture with
commodity-value was in fact allegorized by the Festac Flag. As explained
in a promotional book published by the International Festival
Committee:
The Flag of the Festival is a tricolour flag of three equal
perpendicular rectangles. The two outside rectangles are black and the
central rectangle is in gold. Over the gold is superimposed centrally
the festival emblem. The Black colour represents the black people of the
world. The gold colour represents two ideas. It represents the wealth
of the culture of the areas and peoples embraced by the festival. It
also stands for the non-black peoples associated with black people in
the Festival (137).
Here the FESTAC emblem performed a double synthesis; first by
connecting all black peoples with the wealth of their "culture," and
second, through the ambiguity of the gold rectangle, which brought the
wealth of black culture to "non-black peoples."
Visitors were indeed welcome to attend FESTAC and enjoy its
festivities. They were also welcome to purchase works of art: not
original antiques, of course, but replicas and contemporary paintings
and sculptures. As the promotional FESTAC book announced: "The
acquisition of any works of art exhibited shall be made through the
International Festival Committee. The price of each work shall be shown
in (US) dollars. The price of each work shall include local taxes"
(152). Here is the consumption of culture commodified. The "pure value"
of an exhibited culture, unperturbed by local taxes, was measured in US
dollars—the international currency of global capital and key ingredient
of industrial development. The road built by FESTAC from tradition to
modernity was thus forged through a series of commutative reductions;
first, by assimilating cultural diversity to a singular Black
Civilization, and second, by commodifying culture itself, measuring its
value in dollars and selling it to international consumers. Culture (the
past, tradition) and capitalism (the future, modernity) were thus
reduced to the "general equivalent" (Goux 1990:3 at passim.) of the
money-form.
Not that FESTAC was banking on cultural commodities to invest in the
black world's future. But Nigeria did have oil, which it sold, like
black culture, through a state-appointed committee. Oil for dollars, art
for dollars, the equivalence was confirmed by the spectacular scale of
the festival itself. Nigeria's oil-wealth—black-gold indeed—appeared as a
form of money-magic which emanated from the ground and was tapped by
the government (Barber 1982; Watts 1992).
Conspicuous spending, fleets of hi-tech FESTAC buses, and the
intensified consumption of luxury imports brought the signs of
development without its substance. By equating petro-dollars with the
value of black culture—after all both were indigenous resources—FESTAC
created a dramaturgy of state power (cf. Cohen 1981) which masked the
material conditions of Nigeria's new prosperity.
Briefly stated, Nigeria's goal as a developing country—to build an
efficient and productive economy—was implemented from above, by a state
which swelled the civil service, imported commodities and expensive
technology, while promoting little indigenous production.
If new wealth circulated through the private sector, it was mainly
acquired through patronage networks that provided coveted access to
state resources. The Nigerian ruling class was primarily a state class,
based less on the exploitation of wage-labor and more on the
exploitation of state power and wealth, through a de facto market of
government contracts, licenses and officers (Berry 1985:13-14).
Moreover, it was a growing class financed by exceptionally high-grade
oil. As the state expanded into the public domain, forestalling
organized assaults on its position by absorbing whole sectors of the
economy together with their internal class divisions and tensions, it
internalized the entire process of class formation (ibid.), recruiting
the educated elite into the civil service while providing free education
and hospital care for the masses. It was a dizzy time, as
administrative structures, civil servants, and employment opportunities
proliferated, as cash and commodities accelerated in complementary
flows, as fortunes of well-connected "contractors" appeared overnight
without any apparent relation to investments or hard work. The magic of
Nigeria's nascent modernity was based on unproductive accumulation that
was financed by the state, Obasanjo was indeed the Grand Patron of state
clientelism, building a modern black nation on black gold and culture.
It was only a matter of time before the growing demands on Nigeria's oil
revenues would far outstrip their value.
It was thus within the diatic of a self-consuming state—a rapidly
expanding public sphere that was simultaneously privatized by kickbacks
and subsidies (Watts 1992:37)—that FESTAC's commodification of culture
made ideological sense, masking divisive ethnic cleavages and the
absence of indigenous production through the production of Indigenous
Culture. As a dramaturgy of power, FESTAC obscured the growing class
divisions that were absorbed by the state, reproduced by its clients,
and objectified by the "fetishism" of both "traditional" culture and
imported commodities, cut loose from their moorings and reduced as they
were to exchangeable signs of modernity. Through FESTAC's forum of
public culture, ethnic differences and class formation were subsumed by
the inclusive horizons of blackness. FESTAC was for black people because
the state was expanding at its own expense. Within Nigeria's spectacle
of Black Civilization, the contradictions of the oil economy were
nowhere to be seen.
It is here that I would like to return to the racial dimensions of
FESTAC's conception of Black Civilization. I have mentioned that
"blackness" functioned as a category of radical inclusion, assimilating
cultural, national and ideological differences to rationalized forms of
commodity-value. Blackness assumed the semantic function of a
super-class rhetorical function of master-trope, unifying FESTAC's field
of different communities, cultures and nations into common heritage and
program for future development. This assimilation expanded the horizons
of the black world; first qua Africa, which the colloquium unified by
tracing "negro-African" languages back to Ancient Egyptian (Obenga
1977:94-104); second, to the black diaspora which disseminated out of
Africa through the European slave trade; and finally, to non-Africa
blacks like Austrialian and Papuan aborigines, whose "blackness" derived
from an ambiguous combination of phenotypical attribution and former
colonial subjugation. We may note that this third extension was never
completely absorbed, but repeatedly surfaced in the designation "Black
and African World," thus sustaining an implicit cleavage within a larger
global field.
But I am less interested in whether or not "blackness" was a racial
category as such, than how and why its racial overtones provided a
spectrum of historical, cultural, national and transnational meanings,
it also retained a racial inflection which was never entirely
eliminated, even by the most "enlightened" attempts to define it
non-ascriptively, as in the words of a Commissioner of Education: "What
makes the race is what it has actually achieved (David-West n.d,: 27).
FESTAC's category of blackness is significant precisely because it
pushed the idea of race to its limit. Embedded in concepts of history
and culture, it could not be entirely reduced to these concepts, but
assimilated them to the master-trope of blackness instead.
To be sure, FESTAC's black world owed much to the ideologies of
Negritude and African Personality which preceded it, and which it
reformulated along more modernist lines. As a racial idiom, it must be
historical within the anti-colonial struggles and nationalist movements
of Africa and the Caribbean, and must take into account the racial
taxonomies of the colonial imagination, against these movements of
Africa and the Caribbean, and must take into account the racial
taxonomies of the colonial imagination, against which these movements
developed their meaning and momentum (creating in Sartre's famous
phrase, "anti-racist racism). As such, FESTAC inherited a historical
discourse about blackness, one which encountered new contradictions in
the country which celebrated Black Civilization with such unprecedented
excess. For in FESTAC, blackness was wedded not only to historically
specific forms of rationalization and commodification—old black culture
turned new mass culture—but to a specific modality of universalization
as well, all of which derived new meaning and impetus from the discovery
of oil. As Nigeria's oil provided fresh blood for a new and revitalized
Black world, Nigeria's wealth became the cultural wealth of all black
people's nations (cf. Coronil 1987). As a tradition mixed with
modernity, as culture mixed with oil, so oil mixed with blood.
Rationalized, commodified, universalized, and thus fetishized, culture
was assimilated to racial identity because "blackness" represented the
general equivalent of an imagined transnational community.
CLOSING CEREMONY
"The history which creates the relative autonomy
of culture and the ideological illusions of this autonomy also
expresses itself as history of culture"
—Guy Debord
Nowhere was the spectacular conversion of colonial genealogies (of
"race" and "tribe," capitalism and empire) into postcolonial identity
more striking than in FESTAC's closing Durbar ceremony. Held in Kaduna,
the Durbar extended FESTAC out of Lagos into the Islamic emirates of
Northern Nigeria, remapping the festival onto the country's vast
political geography to celebrate Islamic jihad and theocratic rule. Amid
the "4,000 horses, 500 camels and 2,000 grooms, footmen and ratist,"
who took part in the Durbar, General Obasanjo praised the Northern
emirates for their precolonial statecraft and the challenge they had
posed to the architects of British overrule:
I believe this is one of the few countries in which colonialists have
found it necessary to leave traditional power structures more or less
intact. This system met by the British had its own rules, its laws and
its bureaucracy. The British no doubt found the emirate system so
effective that they had no choice but to adapt it to suit imperial
objectives (West Africa, 14 Feb., 1977:311).
No doubt indeed, for the emirate system provided the very model for
Indirect Rule which Lugard championed on formerly "acephelous" societies
through the creation of warrant chiefs. Whereas Lord Lugard was
attracted to the Hausa-Fulani emirates precisely because of their
aristocratic ideology, administrative machinery, and "sultanistic"
control, for Obasanjo they became precolonial templates of indigenous
"democracy" and interethnic unity—themes of FESTAC that were ritually
consecrated by the Durbar ceremony itself. He proclaimed:
The durbar is a device whereby the emir can judge the popularity of
his rule as well as an indication of loyalty of those governed to his
rule. By that simple control-device and despite ethnic diversity of the
territory, a collection of people are able truly to present their basic
unity. In witnessing the durbar and savoring its splendid spectacle we
are symbolically paying our respects to a civilization that existed here
in this country, as well as in many other parts of Africa, at various
times in our continental history before the advent of imperialists from
Europe (ibid).
Through his universalizing rhetoric, Obasanjo projected a "Northern"
ritual of Islamic hegemony (which included a powerful clique of
political bosses and oil-ministers known as the "Kaduna Mafia") onto a
Pan-African continental field to create national unity out of "ethnic"
diversity. The Durbar was to the "traditional" Hausa-Fulani emirates
what FESTAC was for Nigeria and the wider black world—a "splendid
spectacle" of political identity and indigenous cultural value.
Like the cultural performances and the FESTAC Colloquium held in the
National Theatre, the Kaduna Durbar played to a distinguished line-up of
international guests among its 200,000 spectators. In addition to the
forty-two "traditional" rulers and chiefs, the Kaduna State Governor and
various Federal Commissioners, there were six African heads of State
and a Prime Minister from St. Kitts. But the star V.I.P. was none other
than Andrew Young, then President Carter's UN representative whose very
body combined the "blackness" of Africa with American superpower and
spectatorship. As one journalist reported, Ambassador Young knelt in
respect to the Sultan of Sokoto, "the most important of the numerous
traditional rulers who attended the Durbar" (ibid.). This act of
international fealty was widely publicized by the media, since it
concluded Nigeria's historic journey from periphery to center-stage in
the world theater of capitalism. In a show of final glory, the Sultan
led the Sokoto state contingent in military formation, full speed toward
the assembled world leaders and dignitaries in a "customary" mock
attack: "Deafening applause shook the arena when the sultan galloped at
the head of his contingent on a splendidly caparisoned horse to the
visiting Heads of State in the grandstand, who all rose to their feet in
recognition of the 'Commander of the Faithful'" (ibid.).
One of the greatest ironies of this concluding event can be found in
FESTAC's reworking of historical memory, in the collective repression of
the Durbar's role in establishing colonial authority. We know from
Cohn's work on Victorian India that the Durbar ceremony has a curious
genealogy that traces back not to Africa, but to Colonial India, when
Lord Canning, the first imperial viceroy, held "Durbars" to incorporate
Indian rulers within the British empire (1983:167-9). Modelled on court
rituals of Mugal emperors, these Durbars became the colonial ritual
par excellence,
"with English officials acting as Indian rulers" (ibid, 168),
reproducing (and as Cohn brilliantly demonstrates, misconstruing) the
political economy of gift exchange and status hierarchy around the
imperial crown. It was through this strategy of ritual appropriation
that the British promoted the Royal Titles Act of 1876, which
established Queen Victoria as empress of India and prepared the way for
the apotheosis of colonial ritual—the spectacular Imperial assemblage
(ibid. 185).
The Durbar was transplanted from India to Africa through none other
than Lord Lugard himself, who came of age in British India where he was
imbued with the colonial male fantasies of Kipling, conquest and tiger
hunting, before heading off to Africa (Perham 1956). Lugard staged his
first African Durbar to inaugurate the Protectorate of Northern Nigeria,
an event which took place "shortly after daybreak on the first day of
January, 1900, the dawn of the new century" (Callaway 1987:57). Thirteen
years later, Durbar held in Kano marked Lugard's appointment as
Governor-General of Nigeria. Amid fifteen thousand "native" horsemen
following their chiefs, Lugard stood at the center of the military
spectacle, a self-styled hero of the British empire. Here he received
the Northern Emirs as loyal colonial subjects. As one officer at the
scene observed: "There were 800 West African Frontier force, and about
300 mounted infantry, with turbans and lances, and there was the
galloping 'Salute of the Desert,' with Emirs dismounting to kneel and
make obeisance to him" (quoted in ibid. 59) and as Callaway (ibid.)
records, two subsequent Durbars were staged for British royalty; one in
Kano in 1925 for Edward, the Prince of Wales, and another in Kaduna in
1956 for her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth, in which "the chiefs made a
special request to the Queen to wear ceremonial dress and tiara; she
graciously obliged despite the fact that the event was held in the
morning when the heat was already shimmering."
I do not want to suggest that the Nigerian Durbars bore no relation
to indigenous ceremonies. Just as the British in India reinvented Mughal
court rituals to consolidate their authority, so in Nigeria the state
rituals of ruling Emirs were appropriated for imperial ends (cf.
Kirk-Greene 1959). But to hail the Durbar as a symbol of indigenous
glory just twenty-one years after Queen Elizabeth's colonial
"beatification," as Obasanjo did at the very scene of the event in
Kaduna, does seem to stretch the limits of popular credibility. In
FESTAC, however, the proof was in the performance itself, and in the
spectacle of black horsemen and statesmen affirming common cause. After
all, the Nigerians were only doing what the British did before them, by
putting themselves at the center of the Durbar and making it their own.
Thus sketched, the genealogy of the Durbar traces the history of
colonial and postcolonial conversions—an argument of shifting origins
and invented traditions; a refashioning of master narratives, national
cultures and African identities; a selective remembering and forgetting.
The same royal pedigree applies to FESTAC itself, which was modelled on
the colonial expositions and world's fairs of Europe and America, only
clothed in African custom and costume. By hosting FESTAC, and even
housing foreign guests in FESTAC village, Nigeria entered the mainstream
of international commerce and placed itself as the center of the
postcolonial African world—a black world with expansive frontiers that
shaded into lighter hues at the edges. To judge FESTAC'S multi-media
spectacle of culture a success or failure is of course beside the point,
since all such festivals boast impossible dreams. But it does mark a
crowning moment in Nigeria's turbulent postcolonial experience, when the
state remade the nation in a Pan-african image of the commodity-form.
And when, for a few breathless years, the country—"awash in
petro-dollars" (Watts 1989:2)—was a spectacle to behold.
If, as I have argued, FESTAC '77 offers a model case of culture
commodified under oil-capitalism, I do not mean to reduce it to a single
ideological function or formula. FESTAC may have masked the growing
contradictions of an oil-rich rentier state, producing a spectacular
vision of the black and African World before Nigeria's oil boom went
bust, but this is only where FESTAC's story begins within the larger
problematics of modernity and identity in postcolonial Africa. Clearly,
any self-conscious recuperation of "tradition" simultaneously grounds a
vision of "modernity," and what varies in projects is not only the
semantics of this grand opposition, but also the poetics of historical
memory, what Raymond Williams (1973:12) calls the "structures of
feeling" which inform collective recollections. In this retrospective
light, FESTAC's oil-based spectacle of Africa writ large, and its
techniques of illumination and statecraft, represent a significant break
from the imperial conventions of seeing and knowing the self through
the other.
We know from the growing literature on European and American world's
fairs and exhibitions, on what Hinsley (1991:344) calls "carnivals of
the industrial age," that the initial marriage of culture and commodity
value (inaugurated with London's Crystal Palace in 1851) produced
imperial visions of the "natural" world which appropriated other
cultures as objects of knowledge, and arranged them in various racial
hierarchies with white at the top and black at bottom. Crucial to such
ideological productions, engineered with the latest technology and
anthropological expertise, was a realist rhetoric of direct observation,
the creation of what Mitchell (1989:220) calls "an object-world" in
what were "endless spectacles of the world-as-exhibition" (ibid. 222).
The moral orders, national identities, natural taxonomies, and Darwinian
dynamics that were reified by these extravagant exhibitions and were
embodied by the unlucky natives (Egyptians, Apaches, Dahomeans,
Patagonians) corralled into fairgrounds to exhibit their lifeways, are
now too familiar to further review. I merely wish to emphasize the
specific perspective which constituted both the colonial subject as an
object of knowledge, and the epistemological subject—the I/eye of the
world's fair—as the producer and consumer of the objective truth, in a
space where "the primitive" could be seen, but could not see. And of
course, complicit with this vision of imperial order was a poetics of
nostalgia for the disappearing savages, displayed as they were by the
very technologies of their appropriation of displacement.
It is against these imperial forms of knowing and feeling that
FESTAC's spectacle of Africanity can be compared, not only as an
inclusive ideology of racial equivalence, but also as a form of
objectification. For it was through FESTAC that the Nigerian state
produced a postcolonial African subject, one which bore witness to its
own modernity by gazing at itself. This is not to deny that FESTAC meant
different things to different people, and sustained many illusions and
ambivalent identities. But following the universalizing function of the
general equivalent, with its universal money-form as the measure of all
value, FESTAC neutralized the colonial gaze which for so long held
Africa hostage, first through the authority of scientific racism, and
later, in the anti-colonial nationalist movements which inverted racial
hierarchies but left their principle intact (cf. Mudimbe 1988).
As for FESTAC's ethos, it was anything but nostalgic. Seeing itself
in the mirror of cultural production, at once a reflection of forgotten
achievements and self-styled "programme" for brighter future, FESTAC
produced a collective body in ecstasy. For better
and
for worse, it demonstrated the postcolonial African subject (whatever
and wherever he or she may be) could acknowledge and celebrate its own
ambivalence—its
multi-cultural,
transnational,
historical "hybrid" and unstable identities—in that global language of
commodification which only oil-money could afford.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Appadurai, Arjun. Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy.
Public Culture 2 (2) 1990:1-24.
Barber, Karin. Popular Reactions to the Petro-Naira.
Journal of Modern African Studies 20 (3) 1982:431-450.
Bennet, T. The Exhibitionary Complex.
New Formations 4, Spring 1988.
Breckenridge, Carol. The Aesthetics and Politics of Colonial Collecting: India at World Fairs.
Comparative Study in Society and History 31 (2) 1989:195-216.
Callaway, Helen.
Gender, Culture and Empire: European Women in Colonial Nigeria. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1987.
Coleman, James S.
Nigeria: Background to Nationalism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1958.
Corbey, Raymond. "Ethnographic Showcase, 1870-1930". Paper presented
at the Institute for Advanced Study and Research in the African
Humanities, Northwestern University, 29 January 1992.
Coronil, Fernando. "The Black El Dorado." Money Fetishism, Democracy,
and Capitalism in Venezuela. Ph.D dissertation, University of Chicago.
Coronil, Fernando. "The Magical State: History and Illusion in the
Appearance of Venezuelan Democracy". Working Paper #112, The Helen
Kellog Institute for International Studies, Univ. of Notre Dame, 1988.
Debord, Guy.
Society of Spectacle. Detroit: Black and Red, 1983.
FESTAC '77. London: African Journal Ltd., 1977.
Goux, Jean Joseph.
Symbolic Economies: After Marx and Freud. Trans. Jennifer Gage. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990.
Greenhalgh, P.
Ephemeral Vistas: The Expositions Universelles, Great Exhibitions and World's Fairs, 1851-1939. Manchester, 1988.
Hinsley, Curtis. The World as Marketplace: Commodification of the
Exotic at the World's Columbian Exposition, Chicago, 1893. In Karp and
Lavine (eds.)
Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display. Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991. Pp. 334-365.
Ihonvbere, Julius O. and Shaw, Timothy. Towards Political economy of
Nigeria: Petroleum and Politics at the (Semi-) Periphery. Aldershot:
Avebury, 1988.
Indigo. Festac '77: Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture. n.d.
Ivara, A.V. and E. Mveng (eds.)
Colloquium on Black Civilization and Education VI. I. Lagos: Federal Military Government of Nigeria, 1977.
Karp, Ivan and Steven Lavine (eds.)
Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display. Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991.
Mitchell, Timothy. The World as Exhition.
Comparative Studies in Society and History 31 (2) 1989:217-236
Mitchell, Timothy.
Colonising Egypt. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988
Ohiorhenuan, John.
Capital and the State in Nigeria. New York: Greenwood Press, 1989.
Onoh, J.K.
The Nigerian Oil Economy: From Prosperity to Glut. New York: St. Martin Press, 1983.
Perham, M.
Lugard: The Years of Adventure, 1858-1898. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956.
Rassol, Ciraj and Witz, Leslie. "The 1952 Jan van Riebeeck
Tercentenary Festival: Constructing and Contesting Public National
History, "Paper presented at the African Study Workshop, University of
Chicago, 17 November 1992.
Rydell, Robert,
All the World's a Fair: Visisons of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876-1916, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1984.
Watts, Michael, "The Shock of Modernity: Petroleum, Protest and Fast
Capitalism in an Industrializing Society." In A. Pred and M. Watts,
Reworking Modernity: Capitalism and Symbolic Discontent. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1992:21-63.
Watts, Michael. "State, Oil and Accumulation: From Boom to Bust"
Society and Space 2, 1984:403-428.
Watts, Michael and Lubeck, Paul. The Popular Classes and the Oil
Boom: A Political Economy of Rural and Urban poverty. In I. W. Zartman
(ed.).
The Political Economy of Nigeria. New York: Praeger, 1983. P. 105-144.
Williams, Raymond.
The Country and the City. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973
(Reproduced in full from http://quod.lib.umich.edu)
