AiW Guest: Elizabeth Olayiwola.

AiW note: This is one of two linked reviews of Emeritus Professor of African Cultural Anthropology at the University of Birmingham, Karin Barber’s latest book, A History of African Popular Culture (2018, Cambridge UP), with our thanks to the Journal of African Cultural Studies (@AfricaJacs) for putting us in touch with both reviewers…

The very first sentence of Karin Barber’s 2018 book, A History of Popular Culture (New Approaches to African History, Series Number 11) – “popular culture in Africa is a product of everyday life” – will hit anyone familiar with the field as strikingly apt.

Through the rest of this far-reaching and perceptive book, Barber builds on this opening as she draws on several examples around the continent to furnish her opening statement. In this, she argues for the beauty and creativity that accompany the ordinariness of everyday life in Africa, a beauty she notes has been excluded by conventional Western media, re-stressing said media’s privileging of poverty and war on the continent as against the resilience and lived experience put forward daily by the men and women who constitute a good percentage of its population. Barber’s counter is an argument for the people as being the architects of their art – converting one art form to another, creating, in some cases, access to what has been labelled as “high culture”. Nevertheless Barber balances her position, avoiding romanticising the struggles that birth street creativity and popular media and admitting, rightly, that there are also a lot of under-harnessed talents on the street, buried under the pressure of survival.

This book lays a beautiful foundation to the evolutions in and of media space; this sets the ball rolling for popular culture as it emerges in a variety of African spaces. Barber convincingly explains how globalization, liberalisation, deregulation and innovative technology has changed media production and consumption, offering an in-depth analysis of the implications of all of these vectors on cultural forms. As always the case with this book Barber supplies sufficient examples to elucidate this point: the examples of Kenya and Ghana illustrate how governmental policy privatising the media houses led to deregularization, which in turn brought about liberal approach to media practice. Radio programs in both countries became more engaging, opening up to street language; in Nigeria, the growth of an unregulatable internet space allows for comic yet critical interpretation of socio-political aspects of the nation-state by individuals under the cover of anonymity; while in Tanzania, producers of epic novels are able to boycott the difficult traditional publishing and distribution by employing Facebook as a publishing tool; Barber demonstrates how pentecostals in Kinshasa sort through available media for innovative ways to create popular genres, employing video technology to reach the globe; and finally, to help rethink globalisation and emphasise south-to-south or south-to-north cultural flow, the book examines the phenomenon of Nollywood and its demonstration of how small-scale media intended for personal use can grow into a massive industry 

Indeed, the range of examples from different regions keep the book close to its title, while reaffirming Barber’s position as an ancestor on the subject. Barber has a track record for extensive and in-depth research, attesting to her tenacity in approach and evident in the research trajectory of A History of African Popular Culture. She continues to bring to her research her deep, layered experience working closely in the field with makers of popular cultural forms. For instance, her reference to the Nigeria Yoruba theatre group in chapter six is an outcome of many years of ethnographic studies of the Yoruba theatre, and the examples she draws on there are clearly a product of an enduring relationship with her case study: she attended rehearsals, slept in halls with other members of the group, even becoming a cast member.  

In this sense, the book demonstrates the ways that Barber’s engagement with and subsequent theorisations of popular culture in Africa have helped to frame various pathways for others in the broader field of associated studies, chief amongst them being the study of Nollywood (Hayness and Okome 1998). The book clearly demonstrates the principle that a research method that will be able to capture the ephemerality and essence of a phenomenal work of popular culture cannot proceed from a rich library somewhere in the global north, but from a cultural site. Researchers must pay due diligence and respect to observe the nuances of the culture that birth an art. Barber’s theorisations can be trusted because they are born from a long-standing practice of the ground-up approach. 

The ground-up approach, as she points out in The Generation of Plays (2000), is an approach that seeks interpretation beyond the relatively static product of a finished text. Instead, analysis is continually being found and so is subject to reinterpretation, drawn from careful and detailed observation of various elements right from pre-production, through production processes and beyond into post-production manifestations of alteration. “Ground-up” allows one to see how everyday informal interactions and experiences provide features that create meaningful changes which themselves are eventually absorbed into an existing genre, making way for change there, and that sometimes form styles of their own.  

This is another fascinating argument that Barber cements through A History of African Popular Culture, in reference to the life cycle of a cultural form. She rightly states that new generic forms emerge from the innovative use of older ones; no creative work is an island of its own. Barber’s arguments play out on the Nigerian scene flawlessly; from the materials of stand-up comics, to the narratives of evangelical films, to the exchanges that happen on social media platforms: cultural forms are reinvented daily. 

I have found it instructive to think through Barber’s theorisations about the act of reinvention with contemporary examples that I have observed in Nigeria. The established Nigerian comedian Kenny Blaq, for one, has recycled versions of the old school jùjú music of Ebenezer Obey – a style of popular music, derived from traditional Yoruba percussion – ending up with a riot to watch. The most famous Nigerian evangelical filmmaker, Mike Bamiloye, has also re-invented the popular Ofor (incantation) genre, which was a stable feature of the Yoruba theatre tradition of the 80s and way before, remixing it into his evangelical video narratives.

Also productive to consider are those areas of cultural forms seen around the fascinating attempts made by Nigerians at creating their distinctive signatures on social media platforms, infusing everyday language into social media text. Recently in circulation are e-stickers and memes – bearing images of stars or everyday people, and occasionally a random white-skinned guy, for example – which are accompanied by inscriptions derived from everyday Nigerian street slang, such as: “you deserve my salute”, “Oshey!”, “Ewoo”, “Naso!”, “Mama the Mama”, “Gbayi!”, “My guy wey sabi”, “Orisirisi”, “Sabi person”, “Tuale”, “Shaku Shaku”. This is by no means an exhaustive list, and these prolifically available, endlessly reinvented and circulated re-labeled stickers exemplify the clarity of Barber’s statement that “everyday speech, for example, is a fundamental site of often brilliant innovation” (Barber 2018, p.14). 

However, I found a potentially underexplored area through A History of African Popular Culture in the interesting economics and attendant status shifts that increasingly have come to accompany popular cultural forms. For example, in Nigeria, many of the popular stand-up comedians started as poor artists, with the fabric of their sets often emerging from jokes about their economic struggles, which the audience could relate to and, so, laugh hard with. Of late, and certainly by the time of Barber’s book’s publication, most of these comedians have climbed the economic ladder and so have been making jokes about their expensive trips abroad, while some even target those in the audience who cannot afford a VIP ticket or a table. A History of African Popular Culture was published in 2018. At the time, tickets to a Kenny Blaq gig were ranging from 1500 Naira (for a regular ticket) to 2,000,000 Naira (for a table), while other famous comedians were charging even more than Blaq. Customers who pay for a table get the privilege of seating close to the stage and the table is usually adorned with drinks and snacks as a complimentary part of the package, usually serving about six to eight. In a concomitant sense, there are those people dealing with popular cultural forms as audience members that have also increasingly found ways to become established as new kinds of popular artists themselves, gaining prominence in and amongst the audiences for these comedy shows, for example, also finding ways of monetising their fame, through tickets advertisements and sponsored sales, and/ or digital monetisation, via their YouTube channels, Facebook pages, and other socials.  

While many established comedians have described their beginning as a form of “starting from the gutter”, their shows now take them in and out of Africa regularly, while the popular social spaces of the internet furthers their reach, increasing opportunities for fame. The commercial success of these comedians in this area of popular culture shows that there is a business angle to popular cultural forms that needs further interrogation, and that may pave the way for fresh adaptations of Barber’s theorisations. This is where A History of African Popular Culture is, and remains, a timely intervention. Barber’s is a book that, rather than sealing up a field or attempting to establish itself as a final authority, takes the approach of inviting others to further theorise, opening itself and the wider field up for further investigation, debate, and research. 

Works Cited

Barber, Karin. A History of African Popular Culture: New Approaches to African History Series. Cambridge University Press, 2018. 

Barber, Karin. The generation of plays: Yoruba Popular Life Theatre. Indiana University Press, 2000.

Haynes, Jonathan and Okome, Onookome “Evolving popular media: Nigerian video films.” Research in African Literatures, vol. 29, no. 3, 1998,pp. 106–28.

Elizabeth Olayiwola, Ph.D. teaches Film Studies and Production at Kwara State University Malete, Nigeria. She is a Nollywood scholar craving a niche in gender and Nigerian evangelical filmmaking culture. Elizabeth is passionate about merging practice with theory and as such she initiated the Film for Development series. She is Lagos Studies Association (LSA) Fellow and a beneficiary of several conference and workshop grants funded by prestigious bodies such as DFG, German Research Foundation (2022, 2003), European Research Council (2020), British Academy (2019), Africa Studies Association USA (2017) and World Bank (2017). 

A History of Popular Culture is published by Cambridge University Press and is widely available.

Categories: Research, Studies, Teaching, Reviews & Spotlights on...

Tags: Ebenezer Obey, ground-up research, Journal of African Cultural Studies, Karin Barber, Kenny Blaq, Mike Bamloye, Ofor, The Generation of Plays, Yoruba Theatre