/ 24 May 2013

Chronic: A late-colonial enkwayary

Chronic: A Late Colonial Enkwayary

Two point-eight billion naira

Oil money issy missing

Dem set up enkwayary

Dem say money no loss-y o …

Money no loss, dem shout again

Enkwayary come close o.

E no finish? E no finish? E no finish?

So sang the great Nigerian musician-prophet Fela Anikulapo Kuti, as quoted in a piece by Akin Adesokan on the “real world of Nigerian power”, which means politics plus gangsterism, whatever the official ritual of an “enkwayary” when the “oil money issy missing”.

In South Africa we are watching many such enkwayaries now (Farlam, Seriti, parliamentary probes) and recall famous other ones, including the then public protector’s whitewash of certain wrongdoing in the “Oilgate” case exposed by this newspaper, when some oil money wassy missing.

Adesokan’s piece is tucked away, without a headline of its own, as an adjunct to Authority Stealing, the lead piece in Chronic Books, the supplement to Chimurenga Chronic, in turn an extension of the arty-literary publication Chimurenga.

Between them these two publications provide a host of reviews, pieces of reportage, gobbets of fiction or memoir, and the like.

There’s an awful lot to read here, with the main Chronic being the size of a tall newspaper, though on better paper, and the books extra in the shape of a large-format magazine. I found the latter much easier to handle than the former, which kept sliding away in fragments — unless that’s part of the political aesthetic in hand.

In both, however, some of the type is often eye-clenchingly small, leaving one with the sense that a lot had to be squashed in.

Where illustrative material is used, it is used well and is a welcome relief, though it would have been great to have the innovative and fascinating graphicisation of an “excerpt” from a piece by poet Rustum Kozain (The Muezzin and I — A Partial Lexicon), extended over more pages and thus made more legible. I felt like I was reading the Rosetta Stone with a magnifying glass.

In terms of issues, Chronic and Chronic Books range across the post-colonial (or, as Kozain would have it, late-colonial) world, exposing multiple contradictions and a bewildering range of trajectories across this landscape.

In Chronic Books, the great filmmaker Mongo Beti returns to his homeland of Cameroon in an archival piece from the early 1990s — “the years of fire” — to stoke the flames, while in Chimurenga Chronic, another filmmaker, Jean-Pierre Bekolo Obama, speaks from the same country today, calling provocatively for a “recolonisation” of Cameroon. (“Even when it comes to safeguarding our cultures,” he says, “it’s the white folks who care the most.”) That’s just one contrast that strikes one, but there are many others. This late colonialism gives rise to all sorts of morbid symptoms, many of which are ripe for interpretive activity.

Niq Mhlongo, Sean Jacobs, Andile Mngxitama and the Mail & Guardian’s Niren Tolsi write from or about South Africa (from landlessness to cricket), and a Q&A with Mahmood Mamdani on his recent book, Define and Rule, helps to frame many of the discussions of post-colonial subjectivity that unspool across these paired publications.

It’s impossible to list them all, or even to sum up their content with any degree of exactitude. And perhaps one should resist totalisation, anyway, as the pieces on monuments remind one.

I particularly liked the pieces on “sonics”, whether Islamic or Kongophonic, as well as Paula Akugizibwe’s piece on “Zamrock”, rock ’n roll on the Copper Belt; Akugizibwe also has an excellent piece titled My Life as a Seventh-Day Adventist (in Swaziland): “Jesus waits in the swimming pool …”

Somewhere in the distance, echoing in the sonics of my South Africa today, I hear Fela: “Dem set up en-kwayary … Dem set up enkwayary …” Yes. And Jesus waits in the swimming pool.