“Arrest the dance!”: rethinking Tejumola Olaniyan’s “postcolonial antinomy” and the politics of art activism

Abstract

Drawing on fieldwork on the emerging radical street performance culture in Nigeria, I reflect on the implications of Tejumola Olaniyan’s approach to popular culture and political activism, with a particular focus on his profound and provocative analysis of Fela Anikulapo Kuti’s Afrobeat. In Arrest the Music!, Olaniyan adopts a cultural-materialist approach to locate Fela’s Afrobeat in the postcolonial conditions that generated its aesthetics and politics. Rather than concentrating exclusively on the oppositional messages in Fela’s lyrics, Olaniyan excavates the “antinomies” structuring Fela’s music practices and reads these antinomies as embodiments of an oppressive yet “enchanting” postcolonial modernity. In the context of Olaniyan’s readings, I interpret the production of a radical street performance culture in Lagos in relation to the extensive processes of neoliberal restructuring taking place in urban Nigeria, and I examine in which ways postcolonial antinomies continue to structure contemporary artistic practices. This paper calls for a more nuanced reading of the politics of activist art in contemporary Africa, and especially the agonistic entanglements of local artistic activism and the neoliberal agendas forced upon it.

Keywords:

• Postcolonial antinomy
• artistic activism
• Fela Kuti
• contemporary African dance

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 By “resurrecting” Fela on the streets, performers stated that they were calling back the spirit of Fela to intervene in the current status of crisis. I have elsewhere documented and analyzed the practices of the Crown Troupe of Africa including this particular performance event in January 2012. See Ying Cheng, Performance as Transformation: Youth, Civic Agency and Street Performance Culture in Urban Nigeria (forthcoming).

2 See Hassan Momoh for a more detailed report about the demolition.

3 Felabration is the name of the annual festival and music brand commemorating Fela.

4 According to Valu, at that time Francophone African music was very popular in Nigeria, and he was influenced by the Cameroonian music and dance style Makossa. The term makossa is a Douala word which means “dance.”.

5 Qudus Onikeku is a well-known Nigerian dancer and choreographer. He was born in Lagos, and was trained in the National Higher School of Circus Arts in Chalons-en-Champagne, France. His work is influenced by Yoruba performance traditions, hip hop, acrobatics, capoeira, and so on. Onikeku established two dance companies (QDance Lagos and YK Projects Paris), which have toured in over fifty countries across the world in the past years. QDance Centre has been organizing dance events and mentorship programs on the Lagos Island, for instance Dancing Cities, danceGATHERING, EMERGENCE. The company also has a list of works that are available for global tours.

6 Adedayo Liadi (popularly known as Ijodee) is a Nigerian dancer/choreographer who is now based in France. He studied in Korea and also received dance training in Senegal and France. Ijodee was the Director of Special Duties of the Guild of Nigerian Dancers from 2009 to 2013. He established his dance company in Nigeria in 1998 and initiated the Trufesta International Dance Festival in 2009.

7 Kafayat Oluwatoyin Shafau (popularly known as Kaffy) has featured in the music videos of famous Nigerian pop musicians including P-Square, Olamide, D’banj, and Tiwa Savage. Her dance company Imagneto provides professional dancing and fitness training classes in Lagos.

8 Victory Ebinum and Marvel Ebinum are self-taught dancers who achieved global attention through dance videos and films posted online. They are now represented by a well-known international agency called AMCK Dance.

9 Westsyde Lifestyle was established by a group of dancers from Bariga who define themselves as an “Afro urban” dance crew. They have collaborated with famous Afrobeat musicians including Wizkid, Olamide, and Davido. The group is best known for the now-viral dance style Shaku Shaku.

10 “Yabis” is a slang term in Nigeria which means “satire” or “roast”. During his performances at the Afrika Shrine, Fela used to comment on the immediate social and political contexts and critique the inequalities within and beyond the country. These “truth-telling sessions” (see also Olaniyan 145–46) constitute an important part of the pedagogical politics in Fela’s music.

11 Rhythm and Blood is a monthly dance event organized by Ennovate Dance House in Oworonshoki and nearby communities.

12 In Maxism and Literature, Williams described “cultural materialism” as “a theory of the specificities of material culture and literary production within historical materialism” (5). For Williams, the term informs a non-dualistic way of understanding culture: culture is not simply a reflection of the economic base, nor is it completely independent of it. Moreover, culture plays its own role in the production and reproduction of society, making it an essential arena of ideological struggle.

13 Particularly in the chapter titled “On the Shop Floor,” Olaniyan analyzes how the “extrasonic labor” and Fela’s countercultural mode of life construct the social production and reception of Afrobeat music. From “the shop front” to the “shop floor,” he examines Fela’s musical practices as the outcome of a large music organization and culture network. He traces the production of Afrobeat music from the social life of “the boys,” “the girls,” “the visual artists” (including photographer and designers of album covers), and “the weed,

all of which constituted the vast and tangled web of relations around Fela’s music and life.

14 The term was first introduced by Williams to discuss the relations between dramatic conventions and forms of lived experiences, and it was later developed to refer to different ways of thinking and living emerging at particular historical junctures.

15 In Lagos, one is always confronted by the economic, social and cultural disparities between the Island and the Mainland. The Island, consisting mainly of Lagos Island and Victoria Island, is the center for financial activities and affluent residential communities. By contrast, the Mainland is a significantly larger area and is home to a large working-class population in Lagos.

16 Aderemi Adegbite talks about this problem of “white money” as the founder of a Yoruba culture project called Tutuola Institute, which is a part of the White Money Project. The White Money Project is a collaborative project that invites artists from the Global South to interrogate how funds from Europe often “create or … perform work catered to what is perceived to be the taste of white funders and curators. Or to present orientalist or exotic images of ‘other’ bodies and to re-shape or simplify complex content for a white audience” (White Money Project).

17 “60? A Protest Performance” is a public performance event co-organized by Lagos-based dance and theatre groups including Ennovate Dance House, Illuminate Theatre Productions and Olorunjedalo Concept in October 2020.

18 The Prince Claus Fund is an NGO well-known among Nigerian artists. The Foundation’s website states that the organization aims to provide “support to individuals and organizations for their outstanding achievements in the field of culture and development” (Prince Claus Fund). As a former recipient of a Prince Claus Seed Award, the founder of Ennovate Dance House, Valu was invited to perform during the ceremony for the Prince Claus Impacts Award in 2022. “Afro Communal Offering” was first performed at this ceremony.

19 The show was first performed in the Royal Palace of Amsterdam, and later in Alliance Française, Mike Adenuga Center, Osborne, Ikoyi, Lagos, in December 2022. Then it went back to Folorunsho Street and Ososa Street in Oworonshoki, the community where most performers are from. In March and April 2023, the team produced a Mainland community tour in Obalende, Ikorodu, Ajegunle, and Bariga, marginal communities in Lagos. In June 2023, the show moved to the square in front of the MTN Library, on the campus of the University of Lagos. The show inside the University of Lagos is part of the workshop Performing the City, which falls under the Youth on the Move: Performing Urban Space in the Global South Seminar Series Project organized by Ying Cheng, Min Tang, and Anuj Daga, and funded by the Urban Studies Foundation. See more at https://www.urbanstudiesfoundation.org/funding/grantees/youth-on-the-move-performing-urban-space-in-the-global-south/.

20 In Lagos, the term “area boys” refers to young men, typically from a lower socio-economic background, who are often associated with informal street-level economy and may engage in activities ranging from petty crimes to providing informal security services for local businesses. The term “LASTMA” is short for Lagos State Traffic Management Authority. The LASTMA officials are people employed by the state government to regulate traffic and enforce traffic laws in Lagos State. During their street performances, the dancers discussed in this paper are sometimes interrupted by the area boys extorting money, or the LASTMA officials who accuse their performance of causing traffic chaos.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ying Cheng

Ying Cheng is an assistant professor in the Department of Asian and African Languages and Cultures, Peking University, China. Her research interests include popular culture in Africa, African visual and performance arts, and cultural interactions between China and Africa. Dr. Ying Cheng is an editorial board member of Journal of African Cultural Studies. She has also been a research associate (Arts of Africa and the Global Souths) at Rhodes University, South Africa since 2017. Recently, she has published articles and chapters in African Arts, Journal of African Cultural Studies, Routledge Handbook of African Literature, Visualing China in Southern Africa, African Theatre, and elsewhere.