“Yahoo-yahoos and Twitter kweens”: Internet technologies in contemporary Nigerian fiction

ABSTRACT

This article examines the representation of Internet technologies in two recent Nigerian comic novels, Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani’s (2009) I Do Not Come to You by Chance and A. Igoni Barrett’s (2015) Blackass. Departing from founding mythologies of the Internet as a space of global assimilation and extending beyond extant postcolonial concerns with technological exclusion or malfunction, the article demonstrates how Internet technologies facilitate forms of global subjectification that amplify rather than diminish national consciousness. Reading Nwaubani’s representations of “419” email fraud alongside Barrett’s experimental approach to Twitter form, the article shows how both novels critically reflect upon the globalizing potentials and limitations of Internet technologies from the perspective of a “post-development” Nigeria. It argues that these novels depict characters dialectically engaging with national and global contexts – mobilizing national stereotypes to address global audiences – yet, in turn, redeploying global capital (financial and cultural) to achieve more localized forms of status.

KEYWORDS:

• Novel
• Internet
• globalization
• national identity
• Nigeria
• post-development

The “discursive landscape of the Internet” (Nakamura 2002, xii)

In A. Igoni Barrett’s novel, Blackass, the narrator expresses her disdain for the father of the protagonist, Furo Wariboko:

He resembled a fisherman straight out of a daguerreotype, a wastrel who hadn’t netted a catch for years and yet fatted himself on the cassava from his wife’s farm, and then went to pose for the camera because he was the only one not at sea when the colonialists came calling. He annoyed me on sight. (Barrett 2015, 167)

The narrator, a millennial Nigerian (like the author whose name she metafictionally shares), considers Furo’s father an embarrassing residue of colonial stereotypes of the “native”:¹ a “fatted” idler, passively displaying himself for the colonial camera. In contrast to the ethnographic mediation represented by the daguerreotype, Igoni prides herself on understanding the important truth “that we are all constructed narratives” (83) and of recognizing the liberating possibilities therein. Against the colonial daguerreotype, the novel thus positions a different technology – that of Internet social media platforms – as a new, vital site for self-fashioning, for the construction of self-chosen stories and identities.

Such notion of technologically facilitated “becoming”, and, more specifically, of the shedding of limiting aspects of identity, is of a piece with foundational discourses around Internet technologies, particularly those emerging from the Global North. As Lisa Nakamura (2002) observes, in the “short decade” of Internet utopianism – “those crucial years in which the discursive landscape of the Internet was being formed” (xii) – cyberspace was typically conceived as a utopian site of spacetime compression and as transcending prior boundaries of distance and identity. It was considered a space of global assimilation, in other words, an instantiation of Marshall McLuhan’s imagined “global village”, with the “digital citizen as an ideal cogito whose subjectivity is liberated by cyberspace” (Nakamura 2002, xv). In this respect, the “discursive landscape” of the Internet has always been deeply connected to that of globalization, with globalization figured (most recently) as the result of Internet communications penetration, and the Internet figured as metaphor for globalization processes broadly.² Like much globalization discourse, discussions of the Internet have posited national and racial identities as the prior, restrictive identity categories from which the technology may “liberate” us.

This kind of technological narrative, focused on the World Wide Web, has, however, been doubly challenged in recent years. Crucially, there has been a growing critical recognition of “digital divides” in access to technology, and of the ways in which “online discourse is woven of stereotypical cultural narratives that reinstall [existing] conditions” (Punday, quoted in Nakamura 2002, xii). Beyond this, however, there has also been a reorientation towards social media platforms (rather than web browsing) as the paradigmatic form of Internet usage and hence a rethinking of the function and possibilities of Internet technologies. Social media, argues Abigail de Kosnick (2019), produces conceptions of “internet platforms as performance spaces” (20), with users paradoxically drawing on those aspects of the self considered most personal in order to generate the self as spectacle: “what is intimate becomes more exposed and what takes place on a large scale is often experienced as intimate” (31). By contrast to earlier ideas about virtual escape from real-world identities – the liberation of subjectivity into “ideal cogito” – social media sees real-world identities as a source of extractable intimacy: precisely that which is to be “exposed”, and exaggerated, online (Nakamura 2002, xv).

This article considers two Nigerian comic novels of the post-millennium period, Barrett’s Blackass and Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani’s (2009) I Do Not Come to You by Chance (hereafter Come to You), to examine how they stage the relationship between Internet technologies and the inscription of the self as global and national subject. Both novels chart the post-1999 period in which Nigeria emerged from effectively three decades of martial law and reopened to circuits of neo-liberal globalization and foreign direct investment (FDI).³ In Come to You, the focus is on the email technology that has become notoriously linked to Nigerian cybercrime (advance fee fraud); in Blackass, the new social media technologies of Twitter and Facebook take centre stage.⁴ This article charts the ways in which the novels humorously engage and challenge Internet imaginaries of global assimilation, instead proposing narratives of technological self-fashioning that dialectically foreground Nigerian national identity, particularly with respect to dysfunction and postcolonial anomie. Unlike extant studies of West African technological cultures, which focalize ideas of technological failure or breakdown – for example, Lindsey B. Green-Simms’s (2018) excellent study of automobility as “misplaced idea”, or Brian Larkin’s (2008) suggestive readings of technological collapse and piracy in Nigeria’s video culture – this article considers instances in which Internet technologies function optimally, in fulfilling their promises of connection to global publics.⁵ However, I argue that this does not result in circumnavigations but rather re-exertions of national identity. Moreover, the article interrogates how themes of technology, globalization, and national identity are mediated through the novels’ distinctive engagements with technological form. In Come to You, concerns with the longer history of technological development in Nigeria are reflected in emails whose form recalls an older epistolary tradition. In Blackass, a more radical experimentation with form, meanwhile, probes the divergent technological capacities of social media platforms and the literary text itself.

Post-development technologies in I Do Not Come to You by Chance

In tackling the subject of cybercrime (known vernacularly as yahoo-yahoo and 419), Come to You engages one of the most globally iconic manifestations of Nigerian engagement with Internet technologies.⁶ Frequently conducted by unemployed young people from higher-education backgrounds, 419 crime depends on a lack of official employment opportunities, weak or corrupt law enforcement, celebration of “instant wealth [ … ] regardless of source”, and on the possibility of culturally gullible and yet wealthy targets (Akanle, Adesina, and Akarah 2016, 218).⁷ Accordingly, it is often regarded as emblematic both of national corruption broadly and of the emergence of specifically globalized forms of crime. Nwaubani codifies almost all these features in her depiction of protagonist Kingsley Ibe, an aspirant engineer from Umuahia, whose dreams of graduate study and marriage are undermined by state corruption, and who turns in desperation to 419, under the mentorship of his maternal uncle, Cash Daddy.

Nwaubani’s focus on 419 (and exclusion of any depiction of more localized uses of Internet technologies) thus foregrounds the technology’s global dimensions. Emails are principally a means to reach and to appeal to transnational audiences – to hack into the imagined wealth of Euro America. Crucially, the globality of Internet technologies does not, however, entail assimilation into any universal post-national imaginary; it does not mean transcendence of place. Rather, its use as a tool of global appeal means precisely redeploying national and racial stereotypes, reifying the contours of Nigerian identity in the global imagination. Thus, the 419ers pose as “Haija Mariam Abacha”, widow of the late President Sani Abacha, whose deposition by coup has led to “THE NIGERIAN GOVERNMENT [ … ] GO[ING] AFTER MY FAMILY’S WEALTH” (Nwaubani 2009, 151; original capitals). They pose as Christian evangelicals, as AIDS charity workers, and, in a particularly striking example, succeed in reversing an unsuccessful target who suspects their scam, by playing on the stereotype of 419ers themselves: “YOUR EMAIL HAS CHANGED MY LIFE AND FORCED ME TO CONSIDER MY WAYS [ … ] PLEASE, IS THERE ANY WAY YOU CAN POSSIBLY ASSIST ME TO START SOMETHING USEFUL?” (Nwaubani 2009, 206; original capitals).

In each case, the scammers draw on aspects of Nigerian national identity (corruption, military violence, religiosity) prominent in mainstream Euro American discourse and media representation. To underscore this, Nwaubani has the 419ers implore “YOU MUST HAVE HEARD REPORTS OVER THE MEDIA AND ON THE INTERNET” (2009, 152; original capitals) about Abacha’s fate; between sending emails, Cash Daddy is depicted perusing a newspaper headline: “SCOTLAND YARD ARRESTS NIGERIAN STATE GOVENOR IN LONDON WITH £2 MILLION CASH” (180; original capitals).⁸ Highly attuned to representations of the nation in foreign outlets, the 419ers design their personas to correspond to the visions of Nigeria already sensationalized in the press. Accordingly, their scams are frequently viewed as credible and rewarded with financial gain: having played the repentant cybercriminal, Kingsley receives “$600 the very next day and a letter full of advice on how to turn his life around” (207).

A notable aspect of the novel – and of the email deceptions it depicts – is its engagement with seemingly outdated tropes. A choice example is when the 419ers construct an email on behalf of the abandoned astronaut, Air Vice Marshall Ojukwu:

Professor Ignatius Soyinka

Astronautics Project Manager

National Space Research and Development Agency

(NASDRA)

Plot 555 Michael Opara Street

Abuja, Nigeria

Dear Sir/Madam,

Urgent Request for Assistance – Strictly Confidential

I am Professor Ignatius Soyinka, a colleague of Nigerian astronaut, Air Vice Marshall Nnamdi Ojukwu. AVM Ojukwu was the first ever African to go into space. Based on his excellent performance, he was also later selected to be on Soviet spaceflight [ … ] Soyuz T-16Z [ … ]. While his fellow Soviet crew members returned to earth on the Soyuz T-16Z, being a black man from a Third World country, AVM Ojukwu’s place on the flight was taken up by cargo, which the Soviet Union authorities insisted was too valuable to be left behind. [The email goes on to request assistance in claiming Ojukwu’s flight pay and interest]. (103)

Intriguingly, the 419ers draw on Cold War geopolitical references – namely the Soviet Union, the Space Race, and the “Three Worlds” geography of alignment⁹ – in other words, references to a cultural period that substantially preceded the time of the Internet technologies through which the appeal is staged. Moreover, the email itself is formatted in the older tradition of letter correspondence, complete with letterhead address and formal opening to an unknown recipient.¹⁰ Distinctive features, such as the email address itself, are not reproduced; nor is there sustained engagement in the novel with issues of email interface. While Nwaubani pays detailed attention to the 419ers’ reproduction of the discourse and orthography of “bureaucratese” – she notes their production of “a Death Authorisation Certificate, Next of Kin Affirmation, Bank Recognition Form, and Deceased Demise Declaration” (156) – there is relatively little engagement of the technological distinctiveness of email systems. Emails, both as a particular textual form and as a representation of a particular technocultural age, feel underspecified in Come to You.¹¹

Indeed, the story’s crowning scam entails a face-to-face meeting between Cash Daddy, disguised as the “Minister of Aviation of the Federal Republic of Nigeria” (198), and his most high-profile target, Mr Winterbottom, in which aspects of physical performance and persuasion appear more central than technological dexterity. Replete in costume of “flowing, white, embroidered agbada and grey cap”, Cash Daddy commands the room through sheer bodily charisma; Kingsley remarks of his voice that “There was something about [it]. It had a certain irresistible attraction like the smell of fried chicken” (202). Moreover, Cash Daddy’s speech emotively draws once more on a repertoire of distinctively pre-Internet cultural paradigms (Biafran secession and the Cold War): “‘The time for unity has come’, Cash Daddy proclaimed [ … ] ‘One Nigeria! My dear friend, it’s at times like these that I understand why America had to fight the Cold War. You understand what I mean?’” (202).

The novel’s ambivalent engagement with the technologies and temporality of the Internet age is, I argue, strategic. Nwaubani uses the theme of 419 activity, and its appeals to (predominantly) western “investment”, to parody the longer history of development in Nigeria. The obsolescent nature of certain references thus serves the parodic purpose of heightening implausibility – in addition to dated cultural paradigms, the novel features victims with names such as “Edgar Hooverson” and “Mr. Del B. Trotter” – but also gestures back to earlier moments of technological development history. In particular, the Cold War references point to technological development discourses that dominated the second half of the 20th century, as articulated in Harry Truman’s 1949 “Fair Deal” inaugural address. Truman’s proposals, writes Arturo Escobar (2012), sought to replicate “the world over the features that characterized the ‘advanced’ societies of the time – high levels of industrialization and urbanization, technicalization [ … ] the widespread adoption of modern education and cultural values” (4; emphasis added). This technological vision subsequently shaped the engagement of both Cold War powers with the formerly colonized, or “undeveloped”, world, whose allegiance was sought in exchange for the capital and technology needed to advance them. Cold War technological development programmes thus represented a highly imported, or “top-down”, model of progress, disseminating from the “advanced” societies to the rest of the world.

Such 20th-century technological development discourse is heavily parodied in the novel’s prologue, which details the courtship of Kingsley’s parents. Kingsley’s father, Paulinus, is depicted as returning from Europe to his unnamed village, where he is a source of fascination and suspicion for having been to “university in the white man’s land” (Nwaubani 2009, 6). Henceforth identified simply by the epithet “Engineer”, his proselytizing faith in a “modern”, technocratic education is vividly depicted in his visit to the school, where the children are encouraged to show him their exercise books: “Engineer perused each book page by page and smiled like an apostle whose new converts were reciting the creed” (4). However, instead of Christianity, this “creed” is now the secular achievement of standardized literacy and technological advancement represented by the exercise book.

Indeed, a seemingly perfect embodiment of Truman’s modern technoscientific subject, Paulinus is described first noticing Kingsley’s mother, Augustina, “curiously, as if he were peeping through his microscope at a specimen in a laboratory” (6). He proceeds to woo her by explaining the concepts of evolution and of “the nature/nurture controversy” and enthuses that the outcome of more widespread education in Africa will be “great inventors, great doctors or engineers” (9). Soon he is promising to marry Augustina on the provision that she complete a university education. Predicated on the hopes of technological modernization, their courtship and vision of the future are bound in the upward mobility of a scientific education. Later in the novel, their son sneers: “You people should continue living in your dream world” (Nwaubani 2009, 326).

That the Cold War modernization projects will, from the perspective of the contemporary plotline appear as an obsolete “dream world”, is prefigured in the prologue’s parodically mythical quality. Structurally and temporally isolated from the main body of the novel, the prologue is rendered in a folkloric language of proverbial sayings and hearsay, and of the generic, functional names – “Engineer”, “Teacher”, “Aunty” – conventional of folk genres. Augustina’s and Paulinus’s Latinate forenames invoke a kind of “Golden Age”, while the narrative voice replicates the superlative form and simple, personified causation of myth. Though such rhetoric also invokes a specifically Nigerian honorific culture – one that bleeds extensively into 419 textual conventions (Kperogi 2018, 229) – its total effect is to present previous modernization efforts as belonging to a distant, if not altogether fictional, past. Indeed, focalized through the childlike naivety of Augustina, such tales of the “advanced” world and the technological promises with which it is imbued acquire an enchanted glaze: the fantasy of “too much time in the palm wine tapper’s company” (Nwaubani 2009, 4).¹²

Nwaubani uses this prologue, then, to instantiate two sharply distinctive time periods and imaginaries within the novel. One is the obsolete world of Cold War technological development; ironically, this is the one often invoked by the 419ers in their emails and performances. The other is that of present-day Nigeria, which is rarely invoked by the 419ers in their performance of Nigerian identity, but which constitutes the environment of the primary narrative.¹³ As Peter Ribic (2019) suggests, the novel thus poses the question of how to bridge these periods, in which “the social signposts that guided the first and second post-independence generations have been weirdly rearranged [ … ] and yet retain their old positions in the cultural imaginary” (432) – that is, where the only remaining legacy of earlier development efforts is the “residual belief in a set of antiquated ‘social coordinates’” (433).

That the social schemas of the modernization period are antiquated is made starkly apparent in the present-day portions of the book. Continued disparities in global wealth and living standards allow 419, as a “mode of production”, to flourish: having witnessed the failure of the previous generation’s technological promises, the 419ers derive their living wholly by the short-term capture of external wealth. Contemporary Nigeria is, moreover, depicted in a persistent language of bodily survival and physical exertion that seems at odds with the mechanistic fantasies of the space-race era. For instance, Kingsley first approaches Cash Daddy for help with paying his sick father’s hospital bills: Cash Daddy accepts and, moreover, insists upon feeding Kingsley, there and then, from the “gigantic refrigerator” (Nwaubani 2009, 92). An early glimpse of the other 419ers comes when Kingsley spots “five young, equally well-fed men sitting around the dining table. They ate silently, but eagerly, making sloppy, kissing sounds as they licked their fingers” (110).¹⁴ Nwaubani’s depiction of contemporary Nigeria revolves intensely around corporeal needs and fulfilments – much humour is derived from the range of synonyms with which Cash Daddy is described as belching, farting, and perspiring – in which the vaunted ambitions of technological development seem conspicuously stalled and living standards are still measured around physical securement.

Indeed, the novel’s contemporary Nigerian imaginary might be conceived in terms of what Jamie Peck and Adam Tickell (1994) describe as “jungle law”: a social mode produced by neo-liberal erosion of social welfare institutions and the production of a “harshly competitive global environment” (321). Importantly, jungle law competition is conceived as a consequence of resource scarcity, rather than as having productive possibilities – put differently, jungle law is a mode of survival, not of development. Behind the eccentrically dated personas that the 419ers project in their emails, contemporary Nigerian identity in Come to You is instead located in the experience of what James Ferguson (2006) has called “post-development”:

Once modernity ceases to be understood as a telos [ … ] the stark status differentiations of the global social system sit raw and naked, no longer softened by the promises of the “not yet” [ … Today’s] success stories are more likely to be seen as proving the power not of education and developmental uplift, but of luck, ruthlessness, or even criminality. (186–187; emphasis added)

Hence, among themselves, the 419ers frame their relationship to their targets in the language of jungle predation. In an image repertoire that, as Suleman Ibrahim Lazarus (2018) shows, is accurate to real-life cybercrime expressions, the victims are designated mugus (foolish, stupid).¹⁵ Trying to justify 419 practice to his lost love, Ola, Kingsley argues that “My mugus were merely fulfilling their role in the food chain” (Nwaubani 2009, 258), invoking a predator–prey binary of necessary exploitation. When Kingsley expresses moral reservations, moreover, Cash Daddy, mistaking the response for fear, assures him that “Kings, there’s nothing to be afraid of. What can a white man do to you? Oyibo people are harmless” (180). Ironically reversing the colonial order, Cash Daddy nonetheless espouses a world view of unmistakably colonial legacy, with its stringently territorialized and racialized conception of strength.

Perhaps the most striking instance of this jungle imaginary and its relationship to technoscientific promises occurs when Kingsley encounters a former classmate, Andrew Oyeinje, at the airport. Now a member of the Nigerian diaspora in the US, Andrew possesses a “Masters in Cyber Informatics from Rutgers, a Masters in Tetratonic Correlations from Cornell, a Masters in Data Transmogrification from Yale” (245) – a list of conspicuously US-based technological accomplishments that mark his difference from Kingsley’s more illicit know-how. Indeed, Andrew goes on to chide Kingsley for failing to complete his formal education, a gesture that reveals his apparent naivety about the opportunities of contemporary Nigeria – this notwithstanding his positive luxuriating over his return: “I’m sooo glad to be back home” (245). With the effusively informal spelling, so at odds with the grandiose tenor of Andrew’s titles, Nwuabani constructs a parodic vision of a man whose uncritical investment in a technocratic foreign education goes hand in hand with a fatal misapprehension about how Nigeria really works.

The “real” Nigeria promptly rears its head when Andrew’s passport is stolen. Again, the scene is rendered in an animalistic language of instinct and survival, with Kingsley marvelling at an immigration officer’s ability to “sniff out a prospective heavy tipper” (243) and noting that “poverty had a way of sharpening the smell” (244). Andrew’s distress is in turn dismissed by Kingsley in a language that, again, evokes jungle competition and Darwinian advantage: “Once you faced the harsh facts and learnt to adapt, Nigeria became the most beautiful place in the world” (248; emphasis added). Reinscribing the evolution theory of his father, Kingsley conceives the world as a chastening “survival of the fittest”, in which deprivation conversely becomes advantage. In the jungle, one is forced to adapt in ways that become, in turn, a source of pride and self-sufficiency: hence Kingsley attributes Andrew’s pasty complexion to the fact that “the wicked Nigerian sun had not smiled on him for a long time” (244). In the neo-liberal jungle economy, it is paradoxically those who are most imperilled that become fittest: the “wicked sun” is really a “smile” – a blessing in disguise.

Nwaubani’s novel thus uses the 419 email to parody the longer history of technological development, of which Internet technologies are the most recent chapter. Rather than being an index of progress, Internet technologies represent, in this narrative, the depredations of the neo-liberal Nigerian state – itself partially a product of earlier technological development failures – which push the characters to cybercrime. Internet technologies might serve useful ends, but not in the idealized ways embodied by Andrew: it is the 419ers’ (ab)use of email systems that represent the heart of the cyber-possibilities here. Instead of offering a route into “global assimilation”, the scammers’ activities see them doubling down on precisely those national stereotypes from which “the digital citizen” was supposed to have been liberated. Crucially different to discussions of technological breakdown in postcolonial contexts, Nwaubani’s text shows email technologies functioning optimally. The 419ers’ operations are not afflicted by Nigeria’s well-known power outages, by limited access to computers, or by other such instances of “technological collapse” (Larkin 2008, 234). But even in optimal form, Internet technologies are shown to facilitate globalized interactions in ways that dialectically intensify the (negative) exceptionalism of national identity.

These reflections offer a waypoint into Blackass, which, though published only six years after Come to You, depicts a considerably different technological imaginary; namely, it depicts localized uses of Internet technologies, rather than exclusively transnational communications; it centres social media platforms; and it engages far more substantively with the formal properties of the technologies themselves. However, I will show that it shares its predecessor’s concerns with the relationship between Internet technologies as a vehicle for global assimilation and the making of “global subjects”, and the paradoxical intensification of pronounced forms of national consciousness.

Twitter form in Blackass

Unlike Come to You, which, I have argued, structures global difference at the heart of its narrative, Blackass more extensively engages with the assimilationist imaginary of Internet technologies and their global publics. Such preoccupations are signalled in the novel’s central narrative conceit: that of Furo, the protagonist, becoming white (eponymous ass cheeks excepted). On the one hand, Furo’s biologically impossible metamorphosis (introduced via a Kafka epithet) necessitates a metaphorical reading: whiteness here comes to stand for the upwardly mobile, post-racial, neo-liberal global subject. Hence, Furo’s transformation occurs shortly after his invitation to a marketing job interview and many of his changes might be interpreted as products of success, generically: greater respect from colleagues and superiors, increased sexual attractiveness and social confidence, greatly enhanced global mobility.

On the other hand, Barrett retains too great a stress on the physical aspects of Furo’s transformation for us to wholly embrace a reading of whiteness-as-global-subjectification. Furo continually struggles with the corporeality of his white body in Lagos: of “the persistent presence of a nose that smarted from sunburn” (Barrett 2015, 48), of “hands covered with reddened spots, as if mosquito bites were something serious” (53). When at the end of the novel Igoni and Furo become romantically involved, she remarks upon his phenotypically white lips: “thin, barely there, different from mine” (259). Moreover, the novel involves various scenes that see characters attempt to exploit Furo for precisely this epidemiological whiteness – such as the businessman Umukoro, who seeks to use Furo as a front-of-house for the company’s dealings with multinationals, since “you white men like to do business with your own kind” (196). Furo notably senses “that Umukoro saw him as no more essential than cake icing” (197; emphasis added). These scenes thus demand a more literal reading of Furo’s whiteness, establishing that it is Furo’s skin pigmentation that Umukoro and others seek to commodify and not any broader socio-affective qualities of the neo-liberal “global subject”.

In its vacillation between these alternate ways of understanding Furo’s transformation, the novel thus posits a deep ambivalence about the relationship between the global and the post-racial/post-national. It asks to what extent globalization processes afford assimilation into universal publics and identities, versus to what extent globalization is merely the guise, as Sakiru Adebayo (2019) has it, for “post-imperial white privilege” (144). This question finds particularly striking expression in the novel’s middle chapter, “@igoni”, which takes place primarily via Twitter. Having recently encountered the newly transformed Furo in the Palms Mall, Igoni is determined to get to the truth about this eccentric figure, and begins to cyberstalk him. Her investigations lead her to the Twitter account of Furo’s sister, Tekena, who has opened the account to seek information about her missing brother. Described by Igoni as a “schizophrenic” medium (Barrett 2015, 81), Twitter proves highly apposite for exploring the novel’s unstable and contradictory internet imaginaries.

Qualities of disjuncture are foregrounded in the section’s very structure and formatting: as Dianaross Cheno Rono (2017) notes, the Twitter section functions effectively as a “frame” device, introducing the narrator’s relationship to the primary narrative (29). However, unlike emblematic examples such as The Canterbury Tales or Wuthering Heights, the frame is not narratively established before the beginning of the main story. Instead, the frame intercuts partway into the main story – notably at the climactic point whereby Furo realizes his transformation is incomplete: “Your ass is black!” (Barrett 2015, 74). Disrupting the conventional third-person, omniscient narrative voice with which the novel opens, the chapter continually switches thereafter between Igoni’s first-person narration and the formal reproduction of Tekena’s Twitter feed, complete with timestamps, limited characters, retweet markers, “@” marks, and fake Uniform Resource Locators (URLs). Where Igoni is prone to loquacious vocabulary – “rigmaroles” (78) and “serendipitous” (89) – Tekena’s tweets are abbreviated, informal, and vernacular. The discordant, interlayered voices and the striking shift in form thus renders the chapter dramatically disjointed from its surrounding narrative, underscoring its thematic preoccupations with disjunction, dysfunction, and the collision of contradictory imaginaries.

The assimilationist imaginary is, appropriately, represented by Furo’s Twitter page:

[It] displayed as its profile photo an image of sunglasses-wearing Neo from The Matrix and the profile name was “FW” [ … ] a digital persona whose final breath was drawn at 00:13 on 18 June. “Nepa bring light abeg,” he tweeted, and then nothing ever again. (Barrett 2015, 86–87)

With the culturally anonymous initials of his name and picture from the iconic Matrix franchise, the profile invokes idealizations of the Internet as assimilationist space. Prophetically “whitefacing” (Neo being played by the white-presenting actor Keanu Reeves), the profile seems to predict our protagonist’s ascension beyond the culturally and racially specific (or limiting) circumstances of his birth, into a universal, futuristic cultural imaginary.

And yet Furo’s plea to NEPA (the National Electric Power Authority) simultaneously displaces this, revealing the cleft between the ultra-high-tech Matrix imaginary in which he seeks to participate and Nigeria’s distinctive technoculture. Recalling Come to You’s ambivalence about the indexical relationship between technologies and “progress”, Barrett depicts a scenario in which one has achieved access to advanced Internet technologies without having reliable access to older, industrialized technologies – such that Furo must still beg the state to “bring light”. Seemingly encapsulating what Reginold Royston and Krystal Strong (2019) describe as “Africa’s emerging infrastructure [ … ] of ‘leapfrog’ innovation” (249), Twitter is depicted as a crossroads site, where an assimilationist global imaginary is both projected and undercut – a site for registering both fantasy and its disillusionment.

This theme continues across Tekena’s Twitter feed, through which is assembled a collage picture of Nigerian dysfunction, corruption, and state failure with respect to her brother’s disappearance. She tweets about the police’s demand for bribe money to continue the search, and the discovery, when the family is advised to look for Furo in Ikeja mortuary, that abandoned corpses are being stacked up on the roof.¹⁶ The tweets underscore an image of negative Nigerian national exceptionalism, with one follower replying to the morgue revelations that “Naija should suffer a natural disaster!” (Barrett 2015, 88) – singling the country out as a benighted source for divine punishment. Strikingly, the story of Furo’s disappearance is interspersed with other, apparently spontaneous, tweets testifying to Tekena’s engagements with global consumer culture: “17: 30 | God I LOVE this picture! twitpic.com/bzR76on via @JimmyChooLtd” (85; original capitals), “21: 05| I <3 Rihanna! #justsaying” (86). The Twitter feed format produces a sharply juxtaposing narrative form that heightens the discord between the universal global culture signalled by consumerism and international celebrity, and the highly exceptional image of national space represented by the morgue scandal. Global and national are channelled – despite their visual proximity – into comically discordant registers.

Barrett amplifies the comic effect of this difference via the reproduction of Twitter’s recognizable visual format, which homogenizes the form of the tweets even while their content is wildly disparate. Indeed, Barrett draws playful attention to form, drawing on the gap between the visual and technological dimensions of Twitter and the capacities of the literary text, with URL hyperlinks gesturing outward to a pictorial world that the reader cannot follow. Both the luridness of the morgue photos (and of the pornography that one follower cynically attaches to the hashtag) and the global brands and commodity items that Tekena covets are left forcibly to the imagination. If, as Ato Quayson (2007) assesses, global culture is, by another name, “late capitalist image culture” (647) – “spectral globalized processes [ … ] materializ[ing] in commodities and their attendant imagescapes” (Quayson 2014, 129) – then Barrett’s ludic engagement of Twitter form permits neither kind of image to claim full power. Both the fantasies of global consumer culture and the horrors of Nigerian dysfunction are transposed to a pictorial zone outside the text, continually asserted yet also truncated within the text itself.

If the above examples attest to social media’s role in visualizing and projecting an aspirational, assimilationist global culture – even one that is continuously undercut by national realities – the second half of the chapter introduces a different relationship between national and global modes of subjectification. Here, national difference is asserted in affirmational form when Tekena becomes embroiled in a confrontation with members of the African diaspora, over the Twitter account “@afrikais1country”. Tekena retweets the reaction of one offended user, @kweenofsheebah, who considers the account name to be racist, only to discover that @kweenofsheebah’s own reasoning is merely that: “10:01| O_o RT ‘@kweenofsheebah: @afrikais1country Ethiopians are a proud people. We’re not like the rest of you African booty scratchers. #HornPride’” (Barrett 2015, 90). @kweenofsheebah’s commentary soon descends into a mud-slinging match with various interlocutors, each retweeted by Tekena under the original hashtag #HornPride. @kweenofsheebah launches a volley of national slurs, retorting to one user that “10:10 | #HornPride RT ‘@kweenofsheebah: @naijapalaver Nigeria was colonized just like the rest of Africa. Ethiopia was NOT’” (91; original capitals) and sneering that “your people were dragged to the US to pick cotton & get whipped!” (91). In their targeted vitriol, the tweets reprise the section’s earlier negative portrayal of Nigerian identity, here extended historically to encompass the national tragedies of colonialism and enslavement.

Notably, however, despite the continued projection of negative images of Nigeria, this exchange becomes a source of pride and showmanship. Tekena concludes the exchange with an exhilarated bow to her audience: “11:50 | My fingers hurt from all the RTing but this has got to be the best fight ever! And a BIG hello to all my new followers!!! #HornPride” (Barrett 2015, 92; original capitals). Another user expresses delight, moreover, that Tekena “has put Lagos on the map!” (92). Visibility in the global forum leads to an intensified awareness of national identity and, crucially, a concomitant delight in the spectacle of self – this despite the pessimistic image of Nigerian national identity that both Tekena and @kweenofsheebah ultimately share. Unlike in Come to You, where distance and deception between global interlocutors underpins the narrative, Twitter here appears as, following Marshall McLuhan, “a global theatre” (Quayson 2014, 20). It is a space of thrilling immediacy and “co-presence”, in which identity is live performance (De Kosnick 2019, 28).

Instead of effacing the national, global technologies thus provide a forum for staging, witnessing, and amplifying difference – and, in this space, visibility and volubility are the sole important currency. Indeed, Barrett’s replication of Twitter form animates this theatricality, as the gaps between the timestamp markers grow increasingly short to indicate the escalating fight, and the heavy capitalizations and exaggerated punctuation of the tweets suggest dramatic, spontaneous outbursts. @kweenofsheebah’s final reported tweet (reshared by Tekena with a smiley emoji) reads: “11:51 |:-) #HornPride RT ‘@kweenofsheebah: All you Nigerian scammers tweeting threats at me, I’ve nothing to say to you’ ” (Barrett 2015, 92). In the technological global theatre, to have “nothing to say” is an admission of defeat: her arguments with her Nigerian audience have not so much been rebutted as exhausted – it is irrelevant that Tekena’s own depiction of Nigeria has been a litany of complaints. Though the exchange has not exactly established an alternative, positive discourse on Nigeria, the Nigerian participants nonetheless triumph by “being on the map”. This victory over the virtual space is further mirrored by the narrative space of the novel, as Tekena’s tweets go on to dominate a further two pages – while @kweenofsheebah is dispatched into ignominious invisibility and silence.

Conclusion: Strategic adaptations

Taken together, Come to You and Blackass illuminate the different global significations of Internet technologies, beyond straightforward imaginaries of assimilationist space or, indeed, postcolonial exclusion from such space. Rejecting both these models, the texts see Internet technologies as enabling more complicated and more partial forms of global integration. Specifically, both texts see Internet technologies resolutely reproducing national and racialized identity categories. However, these identities are presented in complex interaction with real possibilities of global connection – including real opportunities to derive economic and cultural capital.

In Come to You, emails are an access route to wealth not available within national space; in Blackass, anger at national scandals can be instantly alchemized into glee at national self-spectacle – the invigorating sense of one’s presence before expanded publics. Together, the texts reflect on what happens when global technologies meet prior striations of nation and race, revealing that while such technologies cannot provide means of escape, they can be strategically purposed in the hands of those who have cannily “faced the harsh facts and learnt to adapt” (Nwaubani 2009, 248).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (South, West and Wales Doctoral Training Partnership [SWW DTP]).

Notes on contributors

Penny Bicol Cartwright

Penny Bicol Cartwright is a Leverhulme ECR Fellow at the University of Oxford. Her current project examines representations of cultural heritage commodification in novels from Ghana, Zimbabwe, Britain, and Ireland. She completed her PhD at the University of Bristol in 2020, examining representations of “globality” in post-millennium Nigerian and Kenyan literature.

Notes

1. Unlike the real author Igoni Barrett, “Igoni” the narrator is depicted as a transgender woman, a storyline of metamorphosis and self-discovery that ambivalently parallels that of Furo, the racially transforming protagonist. It is, in part, Igoni’s realization of her gender identity that prompts her interest in Furo and her conviction, despite the novel’s complex racial critique, that “I had got my story, and he, too, deserved to get what he wanted” (Barrett 2015, 261).

2. As Frederick Cooper (2001) notes, the discursive history of globalization has a much longer history, involving “a back-and-forth, varied combination of territorializing and deterritorializing tendencies” (191) and a number of different enabling technologies. While Internet technologies are not the exclusive technological figure for globalization, they are, today, the privileged one.

3. Much of Blackass’s early action centres on The Palms mall: “the first Nigerian mall of indubitably international standard [ … ] a milestone event not only for the Lagos rich, but also [ … ] for politicians eager to showcase the investment paradise that was newly democratic Nigeria” (Barrett 2015, 55).

4. This refers to the practice whereby a scammer promises the target significant financial renumeration for a service that requires the target to pay a smaller advance fee. Common examples include paying a deposit to “free up” frozen bank funds.

5. See Green-Simms (2018) and Larkin (2008).

6. This is due to 419 being the section of the Nigerian penal code under which cybercrime is prohibited. See Lazarus (2018).

7. The celebration of instant and illegitimate wealth is, Larkin assesses, a legacy of Nigeria’s 1970s petroboom, which produced extravagant incomes largely disarticulated from the rest of the economy and “inaugurated the spectacular corruption that makes 419 letters believable to their victims” (2008, 221). See also Apter (2008) and Barber (1982).

8. Such examples importantly blur the distinction between Nigeria’s formal and informal spheres, revealing criminality to extend all the way to official Federal positions. As already noted, 419 is a source of fascination in Nigeria partly for how it reveals the porosity between formal and illicit economic circuits, with official institutions frequently aiding and abetting 419. For more on (in)formality in this novel, see Ribic (2019).

9. See Escobar (2012), Worsley (1984), and Tan and Acharya (2008).

10. 419 correspondences (as in Nigerian English broadly) frequently deploy formal address, as Farooq A. Kperogi (2018) demonstrates. However, I draw attention here to the use of specific letter conventions.

11. One notable exception is Kingley’s explanation of how they get the address names: “Using software that could crawl through hundreds of serves, [we] fetched thousands of email addresses in one go. I encouraged [us] to always be on the lookout [ … ] for rarer names [ … ] a Wigglseworth or an Albright or a Letterman would most likely be receiving their first ever email blast of all time” (Nwaubani 2009, 176).

12. An allusion to Amos Tutuola’s ([1952] 2014) novel The Palm-Wine Drinkard.

13. Kperogi discusses how negative connotations of 419 have come to inhere in the use of Nigerian English altogether, such that merely expressing oneself in Nigerian English may involuntarily “project” a criminal identity. My point is rather that the 419ers (largely) do not voluntarily mobilize images of a neo-liberal/criminal Nigeria in their narratives.

14. For more on relationships between food culture and power in Africa, see Bayart (2009).

15. Though mugu signifies “stupid” in Nigerian Pidgin English, it is also a Hausa word meaning “sadist”. Thanks to the JPW peer reviewer for pointing this out.

16. This has resonances with the real-life mortuary scandal at Ikorodu General Hospital, where a 2013 investigation found that corpses were being allowed to decompose and were often handled outside (Ibekwe 2013).