When Power Swallows its Grace: Poetics, Politics, and Performance in Postcolonial Nigeria

Abstract

This article theorizes the artful life of power in Nigeria. Focusing on the short call-and-response chants, the extended narrative songs, the proverbial allusions, the bald invectives, and the poetic speeches that political parties deploy within the context of elections in Nigeria, it poses and engages with questions that lie at the intersection of poetry, politics, and performance. The article asks specifically: in what ways do the verbal arts of abuse and duelling emerge outside performative spaces within which they have been traditionally studied? In what contemporary forms do they appear that transcend the often-linear approach that conceives of them as the quotidian mechanisms of resistance for ‘the powerless’? This article suggests that to fully engage with these questions, we must be ready to shift our understanding of subjection and domination as well as of tradition and modernity.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the editors and two anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful questions and detailed comments, which greatly improved the final presentation of this article. I am also very grateful to Carli Coetzee for discussion.

Notes

1 This excerpt comes from Niyi Osundare’s poem ‘Siren’, published as part of his popular volume Songs of the Marketplace (1983).

2 This argument and the range of available works before the key decades of the 1970s and 1980s are extensively discussed in the second chapter of Finnegan’s Oral Literature in Africa (2012).

3 Some other works include: Daniel Kunene, Heroic Poetry of the Basotho (1971); Richard Dorson, African Folklore (1972); Egudu and Nwoga, Poetic Heritage: Igbo Traditional Verse (1971); Ruth Finnegan, Oral Poetry (1977); Bernth Lindfors, Forms of Folklore in Africa (1977); Isidore Okpewho, The Epic in Africa (1979); Abalogu, Ashiwaju, and Amadi-Tshiwala, Oral Poetry in Nigeria (1981); Isidore Okpewho, Myth in Africa (1983); and Ọlátúndé Ọlátúnjí, Features of Yorùbá Oral Poetry (2005).

4 While the original text was published in 1970, the version cited for this article was published in 2012.

5 Whereas the study of orality is one of the oldest and most enduring of the subfields of African literary criticism, the vigorous turn in linguistics to scripted political texts appears to be more recent. Such linguistic studies include, among others, Adetunji (2006), Ayeomoni and Akinkuolere (2012), and Akinwotu (2013).

6 See Newell (2006, 62–64) for a cursory survey of relevant literature. See also Finnegan (2012) and Barber (1987).

7 All Yorùbá words and transcriptions are rendered in standard Yorùbá orthography. In this orthography, ẹ = [ɛ], ọ = ɔ, Vn = nasalized vowel, ṣ = [ʃ], p = [k͡p], y = [j], ´ = H, ` = L, unmarked for tone = M, a tone-marked nasal = syllabic nasal. Except where necessary, I have left all names un-tone-marked, following how such names appear in the public space.

8 Although I do not substantially concentrate here on these short forms, a representative example of these forms is the one-phrase chant—Ó tó gẹ́ẹ́! (‘It is enough!’)—used in the 2019 general election. This chant particularly became the rallying song of those who wanted an end to what was perceived as the prebendal, feudalistic grip of Mr Bukola Saraki—the then Senate President—on his state of Kwara.

9 I use ‘signifying’ in the general sense in which it is invoked in the study of African American verbal arts. As an act of indirection, signifying heightens its message by impeding and postponing the stability of its referent. In the absence of this semantic anchor, the audience activates what Claudia Mitchell-Kernan (2001) calls ‘shared cultural background’ for the working out of the correct meanings of these acts.

10 Because verbal duelling always involves an intermixture of personal and ritual insults, and of play and non-play, it often embodies the potential for violence (see Kochman 1983). Moreover, in a world where speech is highly potent and privileged, verbal duelling itself might constitute a primary medium through which violence is experienced or, at other times, a medium through which potential violence is modulated.

11 I by no means suggest that the features of language, speech, and verbal duelling that I map out here are restricted to African (and African diasporic) cultures and in that sense somewhat connected to the ‘“primitive,” with the “old-ways” of the “ethnics” and “folk”’ (Pagliai 2009, 62). On the contrary, I see these features as widely attested in diverse cultures of the world and, beyond this, as co-creating and co-existing with the modern values of the literate present.

12 Ayé kéejì literally means ‘a second world’ and is used by the Yorùbá to refer to the existence of a multi-earth planetary system. This belief is also encapsulated in the Yorùbá saying ayé pégba (‘there are up to two hundred worlds’).

13 It is my belief that continental African conceptions of language, verbal art, and performance overlap significantly with African diasporic ones, and cannot, therefore, be discussed in any rigorous manner independently of one another. Far from being an essentialist position, what I emphasize here are points of similarities, rather than sameness, across time and space. The forms of verbal duelling discussed here within continental African cultures, for example, find parallels in Afro-diasporic ones such as signifying and playing the dozens, among others (for a detailed discussion of these Afro-diasporic forms, see Abrahams (1972); see also Heath (1982) for the early socialization of African American children into the narrative world of language and speech).

14 In Senegal also, wrestlers adopt an agonistic verbal form known as bàkk to praise themselves and to demoralize their opponents (see M’Baye 2013).

15 By ‘plural forms’, I am suggesting here that some of the ways that verbal duelling presents in Nigeria and in many other African cultures need not necessarily be in the formal structure in which two or more groups/individuals hurl words at each other in a manner reminiscent of the modern hip hop cypher (a circle of rappers freestyling and/or battling with words). As with Igbo night masquerade songs, for example, the agonistic force of the art lies, in this case, not in the right of reply but in the monologic lampoon of individuals, groups, or actions by the masquerades.

16 Like the ritual context that defines the simemo songs of ‘dispraise’ rendered against the Swazi king (see Gluckman 1954; Apter 1983), the festivals stated, within which Yorùbá songs of abuse/proverbial songs appear, incorporate both aesthetic and ritualistic dimensions. But besides these, there are strictly social uses of Yorùbá songs of abuse/proverbial songs, such as those deployed by rivalling wives in a polygamous family compound; those found in jùjú, àpàlà, fújì, Highlife (all types of Nigerian popular music), and hip hop songs; those used in the satirical lampoon of public officeholders in Yorùbá ewì poetry; and the type used by political aspirants that is analysed here.

17 By ‘half words’, I refer to the Yorùbá speech style that makes its meanings without a full articulation of message, referent(s), and contexts. The style is best encapsulated in the proverb ‘Àbọ̀ ọ̀rọ̀ là ń sọ fún ọmọ ọmọlúàbí, tó bá dé inú ẹ̀, á di odindi’ (One only tells a wise person half a word; the word becomes ‘whole’ when s/he/they swallow[s] it.)

18 The YouTube link to the original performance in Yorùbá can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FoQNhtnCur8&app=desktop.

19 See note 18.

20 It is important to note that apart from being a politician, a significant part of Mr Adeleke’s popularity comes from the viral videos (circulating on social media) of him dancing at different events.

21 I use ‘signify on’ here in the spirit of Henry Louis Gates’s (1988) The Signifying Monkey.

22 For a detailed discussion of Yorùbá wordplay, see Bamgbose (1970). As explained earlier, ´ = H, ` = L, unmarked for tone = M.

23 ‘Arẹ́gbẹ́’ is the popular nickname by which Ogbeni Rauf Aregbesola is widely known in the south-west of Nigeria, and especially during his tenure as Governor of Osun state. Dropping the English title ‘Mr’ for the Yorùbá equivalent ‘Ogbeni’, Aregbesola appealed to the masses based on his strategic onomastic choices. As a shortened form of his last name (Aregbesola), the nickname ‘Arẹ́gbẹ́’ belongs in the corpus of these endearing onomastic selections.

24 The YouTube link to the original performance in Yorùbá can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qf04pzbeMuM&t=5s&app=desktop.

25 The APC was the national ruling party, and the PDP was the opposition party at the time of the election. The situation remains the same today.

26 This video was posted on Twitter on 27 February 2019. The Twitter link to the video can be found here: https://mobile.twitter.com/Mhzta_leycon/status/1100650743562993665

27 Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu was a former Governor of Lagos state (1999–2007) and is a national leader of the APC.

28 This video was posted on the Facebook page of BBC News Yorùbá on 29 March 2019. The link to the video can be found here: https://www.facebook.com/bbcnewsyoruba/videos/838627909817763/.

29 By ‘dialogic reinscription’, I allude here to Stuart Hall’s observation that the ‘carnivalesque is not simply an upturning of two things that remain locked within their oppositional frameworks; it is also crosscut by what Bakhtin calls the dialogic’ (Hall 1993, 113). This ‘dialogic’ character of Bakhtin’s (1984) formulation, which is suppressed in Mbembe’s (1992, 2001) formulation, is, indeed, one of the things that I wish to recentre in my analysis of the carnivalesque operation of power in postcolonial Nigeria.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Tosin Gbogi

Tosin Gbogi is an Assistant Professor of English at Marquette University, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA. His essays have appeared in Matatu: Journal for African Culture and Society, Journal of African Literature Association, Neohelicon, and Pragmatics.