The uses of ridicule: Humour, 'infrapolitics' and civil society in Nigeria

African Affairs

Volumn 108, Issue 431, 2009, Pages 241-261

  Obadare, Ebenezer ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF KANSAS   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

AUTHORITARIANISM; CIVIL SOCIETY; POLITICAL DISCOURSE; POLITICAL SYSTEM;

AFRICA; NIGERIA; SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA; WEST AFRICA;

EID: 62849106289     PISSN: 00019909     EISSN: 14682621     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/afraf/adn086     Document Type: Article

References (104)

1. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Kessinger Publishing, Montana, MT, 2004), p. 304.
2. Mikhail Bahktin, quoted in Paula Findlen, 'Between carnival and lent: the scientific revolutions at the margins of culture', Configurations 6, 2 (1998) p. 249.
3. See Gbenga Adeboye, Extravaganza, Volume 1 (audio CD, Queen Omolara Label, 2000).
4. Ironically, the top five countries listed in the survey as the happiest are also among the most economically distressed worldwide. Nigeria is closely followed by Mexico, Venezuela, El Salvador and Puerto Rico. See Michael Bond, 'The pursuit of happiness', New Scientist 180, 2415 (2003), pp. 40-44.
5. Achille Mbembe and Janet Roitman, 'Figures of the subject in times of crisis' in Patricia Yaeger (ed.), The Geography of Identity (University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, MI, 1999), pp. 153-86.
6. Ibid., p. 186.
7. The joke about Abacha's travails in hell, for example, is fundamentally an underlying wish about where many Nigerians silently hope that particular leader (and most politicians) would wind up.
8. Notable exceptions are: Charles Geshekter and Said Ahmed Warsama, 'An introduction to humour and jokes in Somali culture' in B. W. Andrzejewski, R. J. Hayward, and I. M. Lewis (eds), Voice and Power: The culture of language in north-east Africa (1996), pp. 141-53;
9. Wilhelm Verwoerd and Melanie Verwoerd, 'On the injustice of (un)just joking', Agenda 23 (1994), pp. 67-78;
10. and Benjamin W. Smith and Johan A. van Schalkwyk, 'The white camel of the Makgabeng', Journal of African History 43, 2 (2002), pp. 235-54.
11. Anton C. Zijderveld, 'Humor, laughter and sociological theory', Sociological Forum 10, 2 (1995), p. 342.
12. Jeffrey Goldfarb, Civility and Subversion: The intellectual in democratic society (Cambridge University Press, New York, NY, 1998).
13. See in this regard Michael Mulkay, On Humour: Its nature and its place in modern society (Polity Press, Cambridge, 1988);
14. Karen O'Quin and Joel Aronoff, 'Humour as a technique of social influence', Social Psychological Quarterly 44, 4 (1981), pp. 349-57;
15. Jerry Palmer, Taking Humour Seriously (Routledge, London, 1993);
16. Simon Critchley, On Humour (Routledge, London, 2002);
17. and Chris Powell and George E. C. Paton (eds), Humour in Society: Resistance and control (Macmillan, Basingstoke, 1998).
18. Powell and Paton, Humour and Society.
19. Tejumola Olaniyan, 'Cartooning Nigerian anticolonial nationalism' in Paul S. Landau and Deborah D. Kaspin (eds), Images and Empires: Visuality in colonial and postcolonial Africa (University of California Press, Berkeley, CA: 2002), pp. 124-40.
20. Janet Holmes, Women, Men, and Politeness (Longman, London, 1995).
21. Achille Mbembe, 'The banality of power and the aesthetics of vulgarity in the postcolony', Public Culture 4, 2 (1992), p. 2.
22. Michael Watts, 'Languages of everyday practice and resistance: Stockholm at the end of the nineteenth century' in Allan Pred and Michael John Watts (eds), Reworking Modernity: Capitalisms and symbolic discontent (Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, NJ, 1992) p. 119.
23. Remarkably, although protests took place in different parts of the world, it was only in Nigeria that they resulted in loss of lives and destruction of property.
24. To these we might add the quite devastating effects on Republican John McCain's candidacy of Jon Stewart's Daily Show, Stephen Colbert's The Colbert Report, and Saturday Night Live's ruthless caricaturing of McCain's vice-presidential running-mate, Alaska governor Sarah Palin.
25. Rene Lemarchand, 'Uncivil states and civil societies: How illusion became reality', Journal of Modern African Studies 30, 2 (1992), pp. 153-86.
26. Even though I do not privilege them here, there are other possible ways of 'reading' these two examples, for instance as 'power tools' - the Danish cartoons episode reflecting the power of Western discourse about Islam, and Borat the power of American commercial culture.
27. Henri Bergson, Laughter: An essay on the meaning of the comic (Kessinger Publishing Company, Whitefish, MT, 2004).
28. Sigmund Freud, Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, translated and edited by James Strachey (Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1960).
29. G. A. Fine, 'Humorous interaction and the social construction of meaning: Making sense in a jocular vein' in N. K. Denzin (ed.), Studies in Symbolic Interaction: A Research Journal 5, 5 (1984), pp. 83-101.
30. Peter Berger, A Rumor of Angels. Modern society and the rediscovery of the supernatural (Doubleday, Garden City, NY, 1969);
31. Michael Billig, Laughter and Ridicule: Towards a social critique of humour (Sage, London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi, 2005).
32. Achille Mbembe, 'The banality of power', p. 2.
33. James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden transcripts (Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, 1990).
34. David Parkin, 'The creativity of abuse', Man (New Series) 15 1 (1980), pp. 45-64.
35. These and subsequent examples were either encountered in participant observation during my fieldwork in Nigeria, or culled from the Internet. In all cases, what is demonstrated is the ubiquity of jokes in quotidian existence, whether at the grassroots or the 'netroots'.
36. For more on electricity consumers' response to the corporation's inefficiency, see Ayodeji Olukoju, '"Never Expect Power Always": electricity consumers' response to monopoly, corruption and inefficient services in Nigeria', African Affairs 103, 410 (2004), pp. 51-72.
37. Several variants of this particular joke exist in other countries. For an analysis of similar jokes in the Hungarian context, see Lajos Csaszi, 'World Trade Center jokes and their Hungarian reception', Journal of Folklore Research 40, 2 (2003), pp. 175-210.
38. Jibrin Ibrahim, 'The state and religion in Nigeria: Force and dynamics', Afrika Zamani 5 (1997) and 6 (1998), pp. 39-66.
39. Anton C. Zijderveld, 'Trend report: The sociology of humour and laughter', Current Sociology 31, 3 (1983), pp. 1-103.
40. See in this regard Powell and Paton, Humour and Society;
41. Palmer, Taking Humour Seriously;
42. and Critchley, On Humour.
43. See also Jan Bremmer and Herman Roodenburg (eds), A Cultural History of Humour from Antiquity to the Present Day (Polity Press, Cambridge, 1997);
44. and Louiza Odysseos, 'Laughing matters: Peace, democracy and the challenge of the comic narrative', Millennium: Journal of International Studies 30, 3 (2001), pp. 709-32.
45. Murray S. Davis, What's So Funny? The comic conception of culture and society (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL, 1993).
46. Jean L. Cohen and Andrew Arato, Civil Society and Political Theory (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1997);
47. John A. Hall (ed.), Civil Society: Theory, history, comparison (Polity Press, Cambridge, 1995).
48. John W. Harbeson, Donald Rothchild, and Naomi Chazan (eds), Civil Society and the State in Africa (Lynne Rienner, Boulder, CO, 1994);
49. Eghosa Osaghae (ed.), Between the State and Civil Society in Africa: Perspectives on development (CODESRIA, Dakar, 1994).
50. Lloyd Sachikonye (ed.), Democracy, Civil Society and the State: Social movements in Southern Africa (SAPES Books, Harare, 1995);
51. Carolyn M. Elliott (ed.), Civil Society and Democracy: A reader (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2003);
52. Robert Fine and Shirin Rai (eds), Civil Society: Democratic perspectives (Frank Cass, London, 1997).
53. Rajeev Bhargava and Helmut Reifeld (eds), Civil Society, Public Sphere and Citizenship: Dialogues and perceptions (Sage, London, 2005);
54. Gurpeet Mahajan in collaboration with Helmut Reifeld, The Public and the Private (Sage, London, 2003).
55. Farhad Kazemi, 'Perspectives on Islam and civil society' in Nancy Rosenblum and Robert C. Post (eds), Civil Society and Government (Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 2002), pp. 317-33.
56. John Keane, Civil Society: Old images, new visions (Polity Press, Cambridge, 1998).
57. Maxine Reitzes, 'Civil society, the public sphere and the state: reflections on classical and contemporary discourses', Theoria: A Journal of Studies in the Arts, Humanities and the Social Sciences 7, 83-84 (October 1994), pp. 94-121.
58. In Keane's pithy statement, 'there are times and places when civilized manners can and do peacefully cohabit with mass murder'; Keane, Civil Society, p. 128.
59. Richard Boyd, Uncivil Society: The perils of pluralism and the making of modern liberalism (Lexington Books, Lanham, MD, 2004);
60. Leigh A. Payne, Uncivil Movements: The armed right wing and democracy in Latin America (Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, MD, 2000);
61. Julia Roos, 'Prostitutes, civil society, and the state in Weimar Germany' in Frank Trentmann (ed.), Paradoxes of Civil Society: New perspectives on modern German and British history (Berghahn Books, New York, NY, 2003), pp. 263-80;
62. Mary Kaldor and Diego Muro-Ruiz, 'Religious and nationalist militant groups: The dark side of global civil society?' in Global Civil Society Yearbook 2003 (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2003), pp. 151-84.
63. Simone Chambers and Will Kymlicka (eds), Alternative Conceptions of Civil Society (Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 2002).
64. Julia Roos, 'Prostitutes, civil society';
65. Irving L. Markovitz, 'Uncivil society, pluralism, Goldilocks, and other fairy tales in Africa' in George Clement Bond and Nigel C. Gibson (eds), Contested Terrains and Constructed Categories: Contemporary Africa in focus (Westview Press, Boulder, CO, 2002), pp. 117-44.
66. See, for example, Robert Fatton, Jr, 'Africa in the age of democratization: The civic limitations of civil society', African Studies Review 38, 2 (September 1995), pp. 67-99;
67. Celestin Monga, The Anthropology of Anger: Civil society and democracy in Africa (Lynne Rienner, Boulder, CO, 1996);
68. Eghosa Osaghae, Crippled Giant: Nigeria since independence (Hurst and Company, London, 1998);
69. Jean and John Comaroff (eds), Civil Society and the Political Imagination in Africa: Critical perspectives (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL, 1999).
70. James C. Scott, Domination.
71. Space does not allow for a detailed discussion of patron-clientism here (see Daniel Jordan Smith, A Culture of Corruption: Everyday deception and popular discontent in Nigeria (Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 2006) but suffice to note the important paradox that when Nigerians use humour to criticize the elite and social inequality, they simultaneously often allude to their own culpability in reproducing the very structures that oppress them.
72. See Josephine Lohor, 'The other side of Baba', ThisDay (Lagos), 14 May 2004.
73. See also Abraham Ogbodo, 'Obasanjo's wit saves the day in Port Harcourt', The Guardian (Lagos), 25 April 2004.
74. Jean and John Comaroff (eds), Law and Disorder in the Postcolony (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL, 2006).
75. Osaghae, Crippled Giant.
76. The annulment was first made public on 23 June through an unsigned document.
77. Abiodun Onadipe, 'Nigeria's troubled years', Contemporary Review 267, 1558 (November 1995), pp. 230-7.
78. Ayo Olukotun, 'Traditional protest media and anti-military struggle in Nigeria 1988-1999' African Affairs 101, 403 (2002), pp. 193-211;
79. Karin Barber, The Generation of Plays: Yoruba popular life in theatre (Indiana University Press, Bloomington, IN, 2001).
80. Olukotun, 'Traditional protest media'.
81. Pidgin English for, 'Were you to be involved in an accident now.'
82. Popular markets in metropolitan Lagos, Nigeria.
83. All major financial centres in different regions of the country. Abuja is also the administrative capital.
84. Mbembe has documented how 'popular forms of ridiculing power, jokes of a sexual nature about the men in power, their bodily functions, appetite, and so on', constitute examples of 'how the hollowness of state power is dealt with'. See Mbembe, 'The banality of power', p. 6.
85. See also the collection of essays in Thomas Blom Hansen and Finn Stepputat, States of Imagination: Ethnographic explorations of the postcolonial state (Duke University Press, Durham, NC, 2001);
86. Andew Apter's excellent study of the socio-political and discursive contexts of ritual songs of obscenity and abuse among Yoruba women in Andrew Apter, 'Discourse and its disclosures: Yoruba women and the sanctity of abuse', Africa 68, 1 (1998), pp. 68-97;
87. and Flora Veit-Wild, 'The grotesque body of the postcolony: Sony Labou Tansi and Dambudzo Marechera', Revue de Littérature Comparée 314 (April-June 2005), pp. 227-66.
88. For a specific study of how the subordinate classes engage in 'anti-politics' through language, see Tim Kelsall, 'Politics, anti-politics, international justice: Language and power in the Special Court for Sierra Leone', Review of International Studies 32, 4 (2006), pp. 587-602.
89. Olukotun, 'Traditional protest media', p. 196.
90. Recently developments in the entertainment economy have seen an explosion in the number of stand-up comics, mostly fresh university graduates who found the doors of regular employment closed in their faces. Examples are Chimamkpam Anyamkpa, Okey Bakassi, 'Basket Mouth', Ali Baba, Henry Ndubuisi, Osaghiato Okunoghae (Talk Talk), Julius Agwu (De Genius), Klint da Drunk Abagana, Emmanuel Adigwe (D'Lectura), 'Holy Mallam', Gandoki, 'I go Die', and Dammy Adekoya. For more on the consequences of the Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP) for the entertainment industry, see Jonathan Haynes, 'Structural adjustments of Nigerian comedy: Baba Sala' (paper published under the auspices of Program of African Studies, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, No. 8, 1994), pp. 17-18, 20.
91. Ebenezer Obadare, 'Playing politics with the mobile phone in Nigeria: civil society, big business and the state', Review of African Political Economy 33, 107 (March 2006), pp. 93-111.
92. In this respect, there are numerous jokes about the extent to which the average Nigerian is ready to go in order to survive the harsh economic climate. In one example, a Nigerian who had fled to the US where he was eking out an existence was asked to don the robe of a gorilla to entertain visitors at a zoo. Somehow, he ended up in the lions' section, and as a red-blooded male reached for his jugular, he let out a scream in Yoruba: E gba mi o. Mo ti ku ooo! (Help! I am dead!), only to hear the lion reply: Omo'ya, ma p'ariwo, ma je ki ise bo lowo awa mejeeji (Dear compatriot, please don't shout, don't let them sack both of us!)
93. Tim Kelsall, 'Politics, anti-politics'.
94. Isioma Daniel, 'Miss World 2002: The world at their feet', ThisDay (Lagos), 16 November 2002. .
95. See Isioma Daniel's interview with the BBC, broadcast on the BBC Africa Service's programme, Talkabout Africa, 12 March 2003.
96. Nduka Nwosu, 'Faces of a lost pageant', The Guardian (Lagos), 30 November 2002.
97. For an analysis of the entire episode, see Ebenezer Obadare, 'In search of a public sphere: The fundamentalist challenge to civil society in Nigeria', Patterns of Prejudice 38, 2 (2004), pp. 177-98.
98. Mbembe, 'Banality of power', p. 6.
99. Ibid., p. 392.
100. Siba N'Zatioula Grovogui, Sovereigns, Quasi Sovereigns, and Africans (University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN, 1996).
101. Scott, Domination, pp. 183-4.
102. For a detailed discussion of the informal realm of political struggle in Africa, see in particular Chapter 2 on 'Words' in Stephen Ellis and Gerrie Ter Haar, Worlds of Power: Religious thought and political practice in Africa (Hurst and Company, London, 2004).
103. For a more global perspective, see Partha Chatterjee, The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on popular politics in most of the world (Permanent Black, Delhi, 2006).
104. Lemarchand, 'Uncivil states and civil societies'.