Foreword

Times have changed since 1987. The face of African popular culture that has emerged in the last twenty-five years was only dimly discernible, if at all, when I was writing the essay that the contributors to this special issue have so generously retrieved and reinterpreted. We have witnessed the passing of most of the old guard of post-independence politicians; processes of “democratizaton” leading to multi-party politics; the end of apartheid; the deregulation and privatization of formerly state-controlled media; the spread of social media and small-scale media technology allowing individuals to create and disseminate new cultural forms under or beyond the radar of the state; and more broadly an acceleration of the processes of globalization such that it is now much more difficult to posit the primacy of categories such as “locally produced and locally consumed arts” without much qualification. The essays in this collection brilliantly capture the newness and surprisingness of many of today’s popular genres: Internet counterculture in Kenya, “cellphilmmaking” in South Africa, the Nollywood boom. At the same time, some of the old questions remain to be wrestled with, and the contributors to this volume have not shirked the task.

I wrote the essay at the invitation of the American ASA (African Studies Association) and SSRC (Social Science Research Council), as a contribution to a series of overview pieces intended to map out emerging fields in African studies. It was an exciting idea, but not something I would otherwise have thought of trying to do—in fact I was amazed to be asked. I had been living and working in Nigeria for over a decade when the letter arrived. (It was actually their second letter, the first having apparently got lost in the post some months earlier.) I had been immersed in Yoruba culture, working in a department where Yoruba was the sole medium of instruction, and had not up till then been thinking along comparative or generalizing lines. However, I accepted the invitation—against the advice of my former anthropology professor at UCL (University College London), who warned me that no good comes of these synthetic overviews: they take a lot of time to write, and then everyone picks holes in them. I asked the SSRC for a small grant to travel around Eastern and Southern Africa in order—as I optimistically thought—to balance my perspective. I left Nigeria in 1984, and spent the following summer visiting Kenya, Tanzania, Malawi, Zimbabwe, and Zambia. (I left out francophone and lusophone Africa, and the glaring anglophone bias in my essay is something I regret.) I moved to the Centre of West African Studies at Birmingham in 1985, just as I was beginning to write the essay. And here’s an indication of how different things were then: none of us had personal computers, and the department only had two or three huge machines with very little memory, which were the object of fierce competition by postgraduate students trying to finish their theses. I remember one night, when I was right up against the final, final deadline, staying crouched over one of these primitive machines in the cold little computer room till two in the morning. But my new friend Paulo Farias—who turned out to be my life’s partner—stayed with me and sustained me with a Chinese takeaway and several cans of Heineken. Those were the days.

In the mid-1980s when I began working on this project quite a lot was being written about African popular culture, some of it outstandingly brilliant and significant. But there seemed to be no broad comparative framework or even a viable set of concepts to bring to bear on the material. Many of the existing studies were scattered by-products of research whose real focus was something else: something more “serious,” as it would have been put. But combing through the literature I was struck by the authors’ continual acts of defining their subject matter by what it was not: it was not “really traditional,” and it was not “high art” or “elite art” either. Rather than reject all this work, I tried to rescue something of...