AiW Guest: Pernille Nailor.

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…

Karin Barber’s 2018 monograph, A History of African Popular Culture, provides a rich and varied history of African popular culture from the seventeenth to the twenty-first centuries. Moving effortlessly from one example to another, the book introduces readers to a wide range of cultural forms, including praise songs from the Gold Coast, the Chimurenga songs of Zimbabwe, the lifela poetry of migrant workers in South Africa, as well as the mottoes painted on the side of tro-tro vehicles in Ghana. Barber invites her readers to consider these and other examples as creative expressions that deserve attention in their own right: in this way, we see how the significance of the popular realm lies not just in its content, but in how this content is expressed through form. Carefully situating her examples in their individual context by illustrating how they are produced in specific circumstances and in response to historical change, Barber argues that they form part of the non-canonical, unofficial bulk of cultural production in Africa: ‘the quotidian, often unremarked creativity’ emerging from everyday life on the ground (14).

Shortly before Barber retired from teaching, I had the privilege of reading chapter drafts of A History of African Popular Culture in one of her seminars at the University of Birmingham. This reading experience was my first meeting with African popular culture as a field of study, offering an exciting and illuminating introduction to the subject and highlighting the agency, creativity, innovation and resilience of cultural producers from Africa. Since then, I returned to the book during field research for my PhD thesis, Belonging in Afropolitan Texts from Ghana, Nigeria and their Diasporas, in Lagos and Accra, finding Barber’s approach to the field instructive in my work on Afropolitanism. My main concern here is the extent to which we can employ the book as a lens to understand forms of cultural production readily associated with ‘popular’ alongside texts more usually defined as so-called ‘canonical’ or ‘elite’ literature. 

A first glance indicates a discrepancy between the Afropolitan label and the Popular Culture framework of Barber’s book: popularised by Taiye Selasi (2005) and Achille Mbembe (2007), the term – Afropolitan, Afropolitanism – was read in connection with Selasi’s Ghana Must Go (2013), Teju Cole’s Open City (2011), and other contemporaneous literary novels. Major international publishing houses have capitalised on it (e.g. Eze, 2014, 2016, Knudsen and Rahbek, 2016), and sceptics of the term often criticised it for reflecting the cultural production and consumption of elite and/or middle-class Africans living in the West (e.g. Santana, 2013, Bwesigye, 2013, Dabiri, 2014). This indicates a poor fit with African popular culture which, as Barber explains, is ‘usually taken to mean the culture of “ordinary” people’: the aspirational, intermediate classes and ‘self-taught entrepreneurs’ who sustain themselves and their families by working as ‘petty traders, primary school teachers, taxi drivers’ (7, 1). 

And yet, Barber problematises the popular/elite binary by indicating that there is an ambiguity in the distinction because culture can be popular in other ways. Another characteristic is seen in the ways that cultural production often relies on patterns of syncretism and a mixing of old and new (for example, by adopting creative ideas that have shaped earlier generations and interlacing them with their own), or how such cultural forms are embedded in local discourse and made available to the public. While Barber’s own focus is primarily on creative forms materialising at street level and seen as distinct from those associated with the elite, seeming to suggest that she upholds the popular/elite binary, she further notes that the fluctuating and indeterminate boundaries of class also affect both the production and consumption of culture, and she illustrates how elite and non-elite genres are interdependent and mutually defining. Forms, styles, themes and tropes often travel from one genre to another, they emerge as a counterpoint to what is already existing, and flow back and forth between different social strata. For Barber, this demonstrates the ‘porousness of cultural boundaries’ (9).

Barber’s probing of the ‘popular’ has been particularly useful in my research on Afropolitan Vibes (2018), a Lagos-based concert series created by Ade Bantu and Abby Ogunsanya. In Belonging in Afropolitan Texts from Ghana, Nigeria and their Diasporas, I argue that the fashioning of the series simultaneously plays into and questions ideas of what is elite and what is popular. On the one hand, the series substantiates the elite connotations in Afropolitan cultural production: it was a glamourous event, considered one of the biggest live music scenes in Lagos at the time,  renowned for its artistic sensibility and high-quality sound and performance, as well as the producers’ ability to attract big names to the stage. 

On the other hand, the curators assembled the concert series in line with conventional ideas of the popular. This is evident in their aspiration to come up with an alternative to the commercial music scene in Lagos by creating a more egalitarian event – one which is put together as a space that is open to the crowd, welcoming Lagosians from all walks of life and encouraging people to rub shoulders with one another in sharing their passion for music, regardless of the class differences that will affect everyday life outside the Afropolitan Vibes bounds. This is further demonstrated in the pointed lack of VIP sections (a feature which is common at music events in the city), and in the curators’ decision to keep the gate fee at the events (N1,000) below average ticket prices for concerts in Lagos (although this would still be out of reach of many of the city’s inhabitants). One could argue that the setup is simply a way to appeal to a broader segment of society. 

Yet, these draws to notions of the popular are also indicative of the curators’ role as ‘crowd pullers’ who, as Ogunsanya herself noted in a conversation we had at the time, cater to fellow ‘music heads’ and not the elite (personal interview with Abby Ogunsanya, 03.10.2018). Barber’s framework nuances this ‘crowd pulling’ role  along with Ade Bantu’s deliberate attempt to detach the Afropolitan label from the context of ‘the privileged few’ by ‘taking it to the people’ (personal interview with Ade Bantu, 28.09.2018). Barber’s insightful comments on the ‘popular’ draw attention to how Afropolitan Vibes hinges on this conscious negotiation between the curators’ own ideas of what is elite and what is popular, a negotiation which helps them position their work directly in relation to their immediate surroundings.

While I draw on Afropolitan Vibes to reflect on Barber’s book here, this is not to suggest that we read the concert series as a conventional example of African popular culture, nor do I wish to ignore the implications of class in Afropolitan texts. Rather, my intention has been to contemplate how Barber’s ideas invite us to consider a wide range of cultural production, how different examples operate in relation to one another and, lastly, how cultural producers navigate boundaries in the cultural landscape – an exercise which, I hope, can also add to our understanding of Afropolitan cultural production.

Afropolitan Vibes poster and concert images courtesy of their Facebook page…

Works cited

Bwesigye, Brian. 2013. “Is Afropolitanism Africa’s New Single Story?” Asterix Journal [Online]. Available from: http://asterixjournal.com/afropolitanism-africas-new-single-story-reading-helon-habilas-review-need-new-names-brian-bwesigye/ [Accessed 22 November 2016].

Cole, Teju. 2011. Open City. London: Faber and Faber.

Dabiri, Emma. 2014. “Why I’m Not An Afropolitan.” Africa as a Country [Online]. Available from: http://africasacountry.com/2014/01/why-im-not-an-afropolitan/ [Accessed 21 January 2016].

Eze, Chielozona. 2014. “Rethinking African Culture and Identity: The Afropolitan Model.” Journal of African Cultural Studies, 26 (2): 234-247.

Eze, Chielozona. 2016. “We, Afropolitans.” Journal of African Cultural Studies, 28 (1): 114-119.

Knudsen, Eva Rask & Ulla Rahbek. 2016. In Search of the Afropolitan: Encounters, Conversations, and Contemporary Diasporic African Literature. London and New York: Rowman & Littlefield International.

Mbembe, Achille. 2007. “Afropolitanism.” In Africa Remix: Contemporary Art of a Continent, edited by Njami Simon and Lucy Durán. Johannesburg: Jacana Media (Pty) Ltd.

Nailor, Pernille. 2022. “Belonging in Afropolitan Texts from Ghana, Nigeria and their Diasporas,” PhD thesis. Birmingham: University of Birmingham.

Santana, S. B. (2016) “Exorcizing Afropolitanism: Binyavanga Wainaina explains why “I am a Pan-Africanist, not an Afropolitan” at ASAUK 2012” [Online]. Available from: https://africainwords.com/2013/02/08/exorcizing-afropolitanism-binyavanga-wainaina-explains-why-i-am-a-pan-africanist-not-an-afropolitan-at-asauk-2012/ [Accessed 1 September 2015].

Selasi, Taiye. 2005. “Bye-Bye Babar (Or: What is an Afropolitan?).” The Lip Magazine [Online]. Available from: http://thelip.robertsharp.co.uk/?p=76 [Accessed 26 September 2014].

Selasi, Taiye. 2013. Ghana Must Go. New York and London: Penguin.

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Slideshow of images from Afropolitan Vibes Facebook page

Pernille Nailor recently finished her PhD at the University of Birmingham in the UK. Her PhD thesis explores different manifestations of belonging in a diverse selection of texts associated with the concept of Afropolitanism in Anglophone literary and popular cultural production. Her focus is on texts circulating in urban centres in Ghana, Nigeria and their diasporas, and she is particularly interested in how belonging takes on different meanings in cultural production as well as how contemporary experiences of belonging are shaped by various social actors and intersect with other constructs such as gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity and class.

Karin Barber’s A History of Popular Culture is published by Cambridge University Press and is widely available.

Categories: And Other Words..., Reviews & Spotlights on...

Tags: Abby Ogunsanya, Achille Mbembe, Ade Bantu, Afropolitan Vibes, Afropolitanism, Afrpolitan cultural production, Ghana Must Go, Journal of African Cultural Studies, Karin Barber, Katie Reid, Lagos, Taiye Selasi, Teju Cole, University of Birmingham.