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ABSTRACT
The global-scale wars that plagued the early 1980s did not escape the notice of the Nigerian Afro-beat musician Fela Anikulapo Kuti. Following his release from a politically motivated imprisonment in 1986, he released an album with the title Beasts of No Nation. While the title track archives memories of conflicts around the world, the song was particularly inspired by one of the speeches of the then Prime Minister of South Africa P. W. Botha, who was quoted saying: ‘these uprisings will bring out the beasts in us’ in response to the many protests by the black population against white oppression. In 2005, the Nigerian-American author, Uzodinma Iweala, published a novel titled Beasts of No Nation, which chronicles a gruesome war in an unnamed African country. Ten years later, the Hollywood filmmaker, Cary Fukunaga, adapted the novel into a film. In this article, I examine how Beasts of No Nation has travelled not only across national borders but also across medial, temporal and contextual borders. Beasts of No Nation, as travelling schemata, has gone on to build a cultural life of its own through various forms of remediation, recycling, adaptation and trans-textuality.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
2 My formulation of ‘moving archive’ draws on a number of theories and methodologies in critical archival studies. I draw from Barron’s (Citation2014) conceptualisation of ‘the archive effect’ which seeks to reframe the archival document as not merely an object or a concept but as an affective spectorial experience, a relationship between the viewer and the text. Similarly, I draw on Rodrigo Lazo’s idea of the ‘migrant archive’ which challenges fixed and hyper-nationalised understandings of the modern archive. Lazo sees the migrant archive as transnational and always on the move. In view of this, a moving archive travels across all sorts of boundaries (medial, national, temporal, cultural) and is very affective – moving – at the same time. For more, see Lazo (Citation2009)’s ‘The Migrant Archive: New Routes in and out of American Studies’. Also see Barron (Citation2014)’s The Archive Effect: Found Footage and the Audiovisual Experience of History.
3 In her essay on ‘Premediation and Remediation’ (Citation2009), Astrid Erll defines premediation as the case where existent media provide schemata for new experience and representation. She notes that premediation is the use of existent patterns and paradigms to transform contingent events into meaningful images and narratives.
4 There are many examples to cite here. First is the April 9, 2013 article from The Guardian ‘Margaret Thatcher: No Fond Farewell from Africa’, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/apr/09/margaret-thatcher-africa-fela-kuti.
Another example is the April 19, 2019 Mail and Guardian article: Margaret Thatcher’s Shameful Support for Apartheid, https://mg.co.za/article/2013-04-19-00-margaret-thatchers-shameful-support-for-apartheid.
See also the article published on Africa is a Country on April 14, 2019 titled: ‘No, Africans Don’t Remember Margaret Thatcher Fondly’, https://www.africasacountry.com/2013/04/no-africans-dont-remember-margaret-thatcher-fondly.
The last among many examples is the article that appeared on Scoop.com on April 9, 2013 titled: ‘Beasts of No Nation: What Did Fela Think of Margaret Thatcher and What Happened When She Visited?’, https://thescoopng.com/2013/04/09/beast-of-no-nation-what-did-fela-think-of-margaret-thatcher-and-what-happened-when-she-visited/.
5 In their book, Remediation: Understanding New Media, Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin define transparent immediacy as a ‘style of visual representation whose goal is to make the viewer forget the presence of the medium (canvas, photographic film, cinema, and so on) and believe that he is in the presence of the objects of representation’ (Citation1999, 272–273).
6 In an interview, Iweala admits that he used earlier narratives about child soldiers as model in writing his own story. He mentioned that he read Ahmadou Kourouma’s Allah is Not Obliged and Emmanuel Dongala’s Johnny Mad Dog among other narratives while writing his book. He also mentioned that he interviewed many former child soldiers whose stories he fictionalises and remediates in Beasts of No Nation. Read the full interview here: http://venturesafrica.com/exclusive-interview-with-uzodinma-iweala-author-beasts-of-no-nation/.
7 Iweala’s novel becomes remediated in Cary Fukunaga’s film of the same name. It also indirectly premediates documentaries like Jason Russell’s KONY 2012 and Sean Fine’s War Dance.
8 See Note 5.
12 Before the film Beasts of Nation in 2015, there were for example Newton Aduaka’s Ezra (2007), Jean Savaire’s Johnny Mad Dog (2008) and Kim Nguyen’s War Witch (2012).
13 Some examples of such ludicrous press releases include: Benjamin Lee’s interview with Cary Fukunaga in The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/oct/15/cary-fukunaga-beasts-no-nation-netflix-interview.
Another discussion appeared on The Telegraph UK with the title: ‘Idris Elba Meets his Waterloo – in Ghana’, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/film/beasts-of-no-nation/cary-fukunaga-interview/.
See also this interview published in Vulture with the title: ‘Cary Fukunaga Enters the Jungle’, https://www.vulture.com/2015/09/cary-fukunaga-netflix-beasts-of-no-nation.html.
14 The quote is taken from the preamble section of the Charter of the United Nations.
15 Media depositif is the conglomeration of heterogeneous media texts on a subject. For more, see Basu (Citation2009)’s ‘Towards a Memory Dispositif: Truth, Myth, and the Ned Kelly lieu de mémoire, 1890–1930’ in Mediation, Remediation and the Cultural Dynamics of Cultural Memory.