In this second part, we'll be focussing on more contemporary perspectives from West Africa.
And our first speaker will be David Paton is Associate Professor in Social Anthropology of Africa.
They will perhaps his work has concerned south eastern Nigeria for a long time.
Themes of youth violence. And today [INAUDIBLE] be talking about the arts of oil use insecurity and intimacy in the popular arts of the Niger Delta.
Thank you very much. I'm so I'm really sorry. I've got a cold the sniffles through this as best I can.
So my current research with colleagues at the University of Port Harcourt engages with the emerging field of oil culture or petro culture.
Studies aims to make visible the conspicuously invisible role of oil in everyday life and culture,
and to do so by examining the cultural history of Port Harcourt,
a symbol and a catalyst of Nigeria's incorporation into the global economy of energy capitalism.
Scholarship in the energy humanities shows the importance of investigating
how text images performance serves to stimulate and sustain the oil economy,
and how the concept of spectacle particularly helps us understand ideas of progress and prosperity upon which petroleum based economies are based.
It also highlights the intimate domestic ways in which oil structures, ways of life, and how aspirations of normative familial life.
Assumptions of ideal liberal, pluralist societies and urban regimes of living are all premised on cheap petrol consumption,
and this scholarship explores the ambivalence of oil to examines not only the promotion of oil culture,
but those forms of social commentary and moral economy in which resistance and critique suggest alternative, even post oil futures.
So what I'm looking at is how the popular arts reflect the dialectic of enchantment and disenchantment with the Nigerian petro states.
In what ways do the popular arts celebrate its profits and politics and critique its inequalities and injustices?
Is the popular culture of oil a protest culture?
Can we demonstrate the role of political ecology on cultural creativity in local arts and in the Diaspora?
So the context of this research is the Niger Delta, specifically Port Harcourt.
As I say, it's a symbol and a catalyst of Nigeria's incorporation into the global economy of energy capitalism, a colonial construction.
The city's origins lie in the 1999 discovery of oil.
The owner of coal, the only coal found in West Africa.
So huge significance to railway and steamer logistics.
So the ports of Port Harcourt was named after Louis Harcourt,
who served as secretary of state for the colonies in the early 1910s with the discovery of oil at Oloibiri in Rivers province in 1956.
Shell, Dorsey later Shell BP established its headquarters in the city.
Foreign companies were granted licences later on, including the oil giant Agip, who started production in 1962 and also located their offices.
Actually, kind of paramilitary compounds within the city of Port Harcourt say from coal,
Port Harcourt had become an important node in the global economy.
The ethnic politics of the city were characterised by the increasing frustrations of the Ijaw speaking riverine minorities at
upland Igbo domination of political and economic opportunity structures through to independence in 1960 and the Civil War in 1967.
The events of the Nigerian Civil War proved to be a significant watershed in the city's social and political development,
with the liberation of the city in 1968 from Biafran control consequent displacement of Igbo residents.
Profoundly, shift shifted the demography and property owning structures of the city.
So as a consequence, minority delta languages and cultural performances have been celebrated at the forefront of local cultural politics.
Since the founding of Rivers state in 1967, the historical landscape of Port Harcourt illustrates this history quite neatly.
One of the best known highlife musicians of the 1960s, Cardinal Rex Lawson, was a trumpeter and bandleader from Calabar.
I spread the influence of the Cuban inspired brass bass.
Internationally and Lawson's fame preceded the oil boom through his music, he spoke in kind of the Palestina of the city.
He sang in many of the local languages and celebrated the exploits of Isaac Barros abortive secessionist
movement and the Ijaw Volunteer Force Declaration of the Niger Delta Republic in February 1966.
But in terms of the political timeline of this relationship between arts and oil, Nnamdi Goomba and Obioma, who are collaborators on this project,
identify the Ogoni protest against Shell and the Nigerian government in the early 1990s and the execution of cancer.
We were in 1995 as the key historical watershed in the development of eco aesthetics in the Niger Delta and Port Harcourt specifically.
Since then, the insurgency crisis of 2007, the amnesty of 2009 mark other important watersheds.
What's emerged through this history is through literature, through film.
Photography is a production of a very standard genre and explaining the kind of circumstances of the Niger Delta
through the plight of marginalised communities duped of their rightful oil wealth by corrupt nepotistic leaders,
politicians and chiefs. So the standard representation of youth across multiple media is male and violent.
As you can see here in kind of Nollywood genre of the militants movie,
a very kind of established genre where the settings of the actors, the plots are all very similar.
You see here an image of some day the usual leader of the freedom fighters of local youth.
Sam is not only he was he the kind of figurehead of the vigilante genre of Nollywood movies,
but he now teaches theatre at the University of Port Harcourt and is another participant in this project.
So you see this kind of established genre emerge within Nollywood that focuses on portrayals and defections of warlord networks.
It traces the emergence of often faceless militant cults.
Boys seen here in caches collect controversial documentary photographs of the delta that
criticised often for a kind of National Geographic aesthetic that traces the emergence.
As I say, these kind of militant cult boys displaced and dispossessed defending indigenous rights,
usually protected by traditional rights in the different sense in their operations against the oil companies and the security forces who protect them.
So this genre, then this established genre bears witness to the structural violence world politics.
It draws out the lines of inclusion and exclusion that have led to this situation, where since 2009,
the state pays monthly stipends to former youth militants not to fight and awards contracts
to former warlords to provide security on the very pipelines that were tapped to steal crude.
So these are kind of classic images of and representations of the kind of
victims and vanguards that we associate with narratives of West African youth.
But the arts of oil in Port Harcourt capture other dimensions to this intergenerational politics and say in this paper,
I also just wanted to focus briefly on literature and masking to look at other dimensions in relation to intimacy and vulnerability.
So a little known fact, but you may have come across that date of 2014 as when Port Harcourt was the UNESCO's World Book Capital.
This was the climax of a significant literary history for the city combined.
A building on the city's literary legacy of alleged Ahmadis works great ponds, the concubine.
And so we was only at work. You might have heard of Susan Boyle,
a novel written in pidgin English about the Nigerian Civil War and recent work
and investment in By Shell in a large book centre is a huge number of poetry.
Clubs and book clubs in the city have come out of this particular moment.
And so there's a kind of celebration really, of recent work from the Niger Delta,
from Port Harcourt that's produced an important scene of Echo criticism.
And it creates what the taps to saw, for example, was described as a quintessential example of petro magic realism.
It captures the intertwining collusion of private and political interests.
Oak taps to confront signs of the Delta oil company, where trespassers will be persecuted to the sense of place, is palpable in these new novels.
Quite contrary to Gauci assertion that the experiences associated with oil are lived out within a space that is no place at all.
A world that's intrinsically displaced, heterogeneous and international.
So recent novels by Kay Negeri Yellow Yellow Jamaica Garrix tomorrow died yesterday and July after many
days highlight the perils associated with the Delta region since the militant insurgency of the 2000s.
Hear themes of personal and political loss are interwoven against the landscape of protest, violence, kidnapping, oil theft and broken dreams.
In the city of Port Harcourt,
a Garry's yellow yellow narrates the story of the daughter of the relationship between an expatriate and a local Ijaw woman.
Yellow refers to her skin colour. She moves to Port Harcourt, is adopted by a wealthy contractor,
has an affair with a prominent ex-military politician of enchantment with the comforts of elite privilege is never far from a critical realisation.
As Gary writes, the water that flowed with streaks of blue,
purple and Red Hat drops of oil escaped from the pipelines that move the wealth from beneath
my land and into the pockets of the select few who ruled Nigeria was the same water I drank.
And it's this critical exploitation of the delta environment of its youth and of yellow and her virginity that sets an unusually female
perspective on personal agency fertility and bodies against the standard political narrative of male youth protest and violence.
I'll come back to this. But overall, as Vanessa argues,
the poetry and fiction emerging from and in Port Harcourt in the Niger Delta points to a political ecology of
literature to motivate and relationship between literary production and conflicts involving natural resources.
I also just want to focus on masking and a conversation that I'm exploring between histories of
youth masking traditions and artistic reinterpretations of masking in the context of the delta.
So as many of you will know, I've been working on this particular mask.
I gather for some time in his novel, published in 1965.
Chinua Achebe in the era of God, describes the emergence of I Gather within the Riverland and describes it as a big,
heavy mask capturing masculine power and authority.
During the event, the play men with one another to mark their bravery.
In Achebe's words again, I stood for the power and aggressiveness of youth.
It captures the essence of the mask perfectly. Sometimes it's called Moby-Dick, the time of the brave, and during the colonial period,
I gather Medicaid becomes iconic of a kind of backward conservative male patriarchy.
In many discourses, it becomes the devil. A kind of evil force is captured brilliantly in the Oscar winning colonial propaganda film.
They break in beauty in 1949, which is the story of the construction of a colonial.
Thehospital, the forces of the elders opposing the recruitment of new nurses and an installation of these new facilities,
of course, are, I gather, masquerades that come out of the forest at night to intimidate these new colonial subjects.
So its origin, the origin of is in Northern Ireland.
But as Igbo traders moved across the country, so they took their masks with them.
And here's an image of I gather in southwestern Nigeria in the late 1940s and with labour migration to Port Harcourt,
I gather was performed on the streets of the poorer neighbourhoods Jobin main town at Christmas and Easter on IBO Day through the 1950s,
some of the early clubs were known as Montana, linked perhaps to the cowboy cults.
Gangs that I mentioned before that were linked to watching westerns in the
cinema with the Civil War there and with the displacement of Igbo population.
The play continues, but not in Igbo hands, in the hands of Calvary and Okereke and young men.
It moved into the abandoned property of the city and from here the play expanded.
This is the kind of first image is very blurred that I have of.
I gather in Port Harcourt and this particular play again comes from the movies.
The name of it comes from the movie zero seven. During the 1980s and 90s, the Agaba syndrome was a kind of name,
referring to the limited transition of young people between secondary school and university education.
It became a kind of label for school dropouts and the unemployed, who joined street gangs and area of movie networks.
And from there, the there's a kind of explicit association that I have to be very careful in
explaining this between I gather as a cultural performance and a masquerade troupe,
as you see here and the militant groups that led the insurgency across the delta in the early 2000s.
So it's not a correct or appropriate to sort of say that I gather kind of morphed into these cults,
but rather certain prominent individuals who are well known as the Kappa Boys led the emergence
of particular street gangs de Bama and de Waal that were themselves linked to university cults,
the Vikings and the Buccaneers to become what were known as kind of St and Creek alliances that led into the delta,
particularly after the 2003 election, when these factions and they were aligned against one another,
lined up around Asari Dokubo on the left and one kind of faction and a ticket home on the right,
who was leading another faction of university and street and creek militant groups.
That's amongst them included prominent I Gather members.
So having carefully explained that relationship,
it will come as no surprise to you to learn that after the announcement of the amnesty and the ways in which these
former militants were reincorporated into the structure of the oil economy and awarded contracts for security,
here is a thick tome that former militant warlord being installed as a traditional ruler of his community,
and it will come as no surprise to you that attack at home is today at the grand patron of I Gather.
So these kind of factions are linked and lined up.
So masquerading this, for example, concerns that kind of coding of youth as a political category is cult boys, as militants, more generally as youth.
And I gather, captures and defines exclusion in marginality of youth as socially disadvantaged,
hounded by the police excluded from normal reproductive relations.
This drug use as clients of militant leaders. They sing praise songs for Osama bin Laden, as well as remembrances for cancer.
We were and others. And like gang performance around the world, whether it concerns spirit, possession, dancing or singing these events,
this verandas puts it open up social spaces where tenderness, humour, hope and solidarity intermingled with everyday tragedy.
So I gather sings about love and loss in the city, about commercial sex workers.
They sing about women who refused their advances until they work, until they say that they work for show,
and they sing songs like this one and bemoan the inability to marry and the loss of girlfriends in the metropolis on doing that.
In my mind, over in the. I mean, am I doing good?
Fog is running. Received by the BBC, but it is air there that they had a little fire right in their body,
but that these are you bizarre to all of us and by two or four minutes of quality or by the me?
But he did not rule out any rational thought they were probably into.
So within performances that a kind of hyper masculine projecting all kinds of images of a kind of militant youth,
these songs kind of contain a sort of laconic humour that undercuts that kind of machismo that reveal
a vulnerability to losing girlfriends and to losing fights and to getting lost on life's course.
These are songs also that sing about oil here,
about Ogoni land where political elites organised as mafia as Italians become anxious about popular protest.
Like. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
I am. I am. I am I so. So these histories of youth masking intersect with oil politics.
They're about this kind of performance of construction of youth often displayed as kind of in hyper masculine context,
but with this laconic, insecure lyrical accompaniment. And in recent years,
both the music and the imagery of I gather often fans idolatrous kind of performative trope has been adopted by youth within popular culture.
More generally here in Harrisons Arab Banko, which is one of the biggest hits of 2017,
where in the video he's performing with, I gather here flavour, who is the kind of darling of the Igbo speaking world.
He talks about fusing rap into organic again is the music that goes with I Gather and more recently here, which is kind of incredible.
His recent single, which is kind of masks, meat, Black Panther meat, Afrobeats, Colaba, OK, we don't need any more than that.
OK, but let me just close with a conversation that's been emerging between this kind of popular street genre and pop music that goes with it,
and more formal artistic interpretations of of masking in work.
Like this chagrin, Ascend used to work on an oil rig, but he's now become a kind of a leading light in the Port Harcourt art world.
And his 20 09 work face like I Gather,
which is supposed to try to capture the sense in the blue of being possessed by the spirit and the external image of it.
But also, and this is what I wanted to get on to the photographic and video installation work of Zena Saro-Wiwa.
So Xena is the daughter of the murdered Ogoni rights activist,
and she's converted her father's former office in main town Port Harcourt into the city's only art gallery,
where she promotes local artists and is engaged herself in what's been described as a kind of playful examination of folklore,
food Nigeria and popular aesthetics, religion and masquerade.
And so this is a series called Men of Ojeleye. In 2014 were Ogoni.
I gather groups will get organised, the music and the kind of metal gong that accompanies the mass performance,
and they're going to be in Ogoni society.
That, I gather, was introduced in the 80s and 90s, she describes as a masquerade full of wit, personality and swagger.
It's a kind of very self-conscious revisiting of self representation here,
of laying down a kind of inverting the rules of masquerade through lying down stripped clothing.
Powell has written about how these images display a very vulnerable masculinity,
while Sahrawi was the historical and political circumstances of it just beneath the surface.
She also plays with the idea of gendered exclusions of masking by carving and performing around masks she's excluded from get it herself.
So this work and this series of photographs is displayed as part of the major
exhibition called Disguise Masks and Global African Art and the Seattle Art Museum,
and it travelled around and just to impress upon us the relationship between youth masquerade and oil.
The following year, she followed this up with a five stream video installation called Correct Boat Pipeline Correct Babies in Ogoni Mask,
not an imported mask. Like, I gather if you ever see video of this.
Correct. My mask is absolutely incredible acrobatics and they've got these very long horns, these antelope horns,
and they have to do somersaults, which is really, really hard when you've got another couple of feet on the top of your head.
So her film? Which on our show demonstrates the kind of these performances over the remnants of the oil industry.
A wellhead and abandoned flow station exposed pipeline here,
a mosque that performed to make to mark the changing agricultural seasons and emphasise the
relationship between human animal physical environments a reprinted against the landscape of oil.
So to conclude, oil is brought Port Harcourt into new postcolonial global circuits and has witnessed
the emergence of new aesthetic strategies and creative responses to ecological crisis.
These strategies seem quite varied when we look across multiple genres of the visual and performative arts.
Much contemporary documentary photography is dystopian in its aesthetic.
While most popular music celebrates accumulative excess, but perhaps the ideas of enchantment and disenchantment are not persuasive when
thinking about represents what representations of oil because they offer a choice,
but because of the necessity of embracing both positions, contrasting celebration and critique, pleasure and pain being enthralled and appalled.
The critical ambivalence seems quite pronounced in some of the work from and about Port Harcourt.
Yellow Yellow is drawn into a life of privilege, success and achievement through relationships with oil contractors and politicians.
And it's this big ailment that leads to her physical undoing and compels her to
abort her pregnancy so that she doesn't give birth to a child like herself,
a born throw away, a shallow pickin father.
And it seems to me also that the celebration of youth aesthetics captured in Sahrawi was work offers a rather
different and more complex engagement with the politics of oil and some of the more explicitly protest oriented art.
Supporting these images of spiritual, otherworldly,
natural enchanted qualities of masked bodies gain their potency because of the contrast their relationship with the landscape
scarred by rusting pipelines marked by the symbols of international capital that are loaded with a history of protest and violence.
Perhaps it can be argued from ethnographic work on agaves,
songs and from these visual reinterpretations that it's important to recognise the critique of the Nigerian social fabric,
which the arts will present that are powerful precisely because they arise from the projection and performance of disadvantage and disempowerment.
Because they capture the attention and politics of youth, not as victims or vanguards, but in terms of vulnerability across ethnography and the arts.
Then we arrive at questions of vulnerability, the vulnerability of embodied existence.
The butler relates the precariousness of social interrelation and interdependencies,
and the vulnerability that positions human bodies in the path of forces in things oil infrastructure.
Anthropocene.