Invisible Missive Magnetic Juju: On African Cyber-Crime

Invisible Missive Magnetic Juju: On African Cyber-Crime
by Louis Chude-Sokei

"…my people simply told him to call me home with the power of his 'Invisible Missive Magnetic Juju' which could bring a lost person back to home from an unknown place, how far it may be, with or without the will of the lost person. So having paid him his workmanship in advance, then he started to send the juju to me at night which was changing my mind or thought every time to go home."-Amos Tutuola, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts

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Many markets in Nigeria have areas called “computer village,” especially in places ranging from Alaba in Lagos on the West coast to Port Harcourt in the oil-ravaged Southern Delta, and over to the famous one in Onitsha in the East, where almost anything can be gotten—today’s catch from the river Niger, counterfeit medicine, locally made “foreign” goods, even dodgy airplane parts. Look through clouds of red dust for handwritten signs advertising, “computer repair,” “speedy programming” or “internet café.” Watch your step as you avoid scores of motorcycle taxis called Okadas because you could easily knock over a table scattered with the guts of cell phones which for a handful of naira will allow you to contact almost anywhere in the world. Computer village is where the detritus of Western and Eastern digitization either goes to pile up in jagged cathode ray mountains and die, or awaits repurposing in wiry bundles and circuit board batches spread across acres that simply beg for the eye of contemporary photographers like Andreas Gursky or Chris Jordan.

It’s fascinating to imagine how these blank-screened cadaverous wholes and frayed bits and pieces have all gotten here. There’s so much black glass that it is like the landscape of an indecisive volcano. These used computers have been donated by Western charity organizations and faith-based NGOs and given the Nigerian tendency to use things even beyond their given function or recognizability, their presence here is only temporary. A great many were brought from Ghana or up from South Africa while a steady stream arrived from China even before that country began its obsessive courting of West and Central Africa. But the vast majority of these machines, parts and components have been shipped by or brought in by enterprising Nigerians who since the late 1980s have known that what would mark this generation of West Africans more than blight, violence or corruption was a hunger for Web-based connectivity, that narcotic rush of shared information.

With almost no formal education whatsoever, many would learn how to rig, rewire, rebuild and master the essentials of computing in these glorified junkyards. They learned from ragged men with soldering irons in their pockets that pushed wheelbarrows filled with screens, wires and keyboards, with the wild-eyed look of juju men drunk on that vile moonshine called ogogoro.

Read the Full Essay @ Fanzine

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Louis Chude-Sokei holds a Ph.D. in a professor of English at the University of Washington and the author of The Last Darky: Bert Williams, Black on Black Minstrelsy and the Black Diaspora (Duke UP, 2005)

Blame It On The Minstrels?

Was Jamie Foxx and T-Pain’s performance of “Blame It” at the 52nd Annual Grammy Awards evidence of the rich traditions of the Black Trickster or yet another example of contemporary “black-face” minstrelsy.

Blame It On the Minstrels?
by Mark Anthony Neal

One of the high points of the 52nd Annual Grammy Awards Show, was Jamie Foxx and T-Pain’s performance of their Grammy Award winning single “Blame It.” The duo were joined by guitarist Slash and legendary rapper Doug E. Fresh (and Foxx’s sister Diondra Dixon), in one of the Grammy’s more effective mash-up performances of the night. Introduced by Foxx’s The Soloist co-star Robert Downey Jr. “Blame It,” seemingly electrified the crowd—George Clinton raising his hands being among the more memorable images in the crowd. Yet my own enjoyment of the performance was tainted by the little “bourgeois Negro” in my head that viewed the performance—particularly T-Pain in his white tuxedo and long white wig—as little more than further evidence that contemporary black popular culture nothing but a minstrel show.

Of course that little bourgeois Negro in my head is not simply the product of my imagination but the product of a contemporary cultural discourse that continues to police representations of blackness in the public sphere, be it the film Precious, the music of Lil Wayne or countless reality shows that feature black cast members. As I’ve argued myself in a different context, some forms of contemporary black popular culture function as “digitized” blackface. Lacking the cork that some early 20th Century performers like Bert Williams and whites such as Eddie Cantor and Al Jolson had to don in order to authenticate their performances of “Negroes,” nevertheless these contemporary examples are produced with a eye towards a white consumer public that is rarely disturbed by the notion that the blackness they see on the screen is nothing but a performance.

Function though is not intent and too often the cultural gatekeepers of the “race” fail (including myself) to make that distinction, often reproducing the same troubling readings of black culture that we often attribute to white audiences, where class, gender, and ethnicity (can we think of “niggers” as some iteration of an ethnic enclave within Black America?) become the default positions for normalcy, instead of race.

This is a point that Louis Chude-Sokei argues in his book The Last ‘Darky’: Bert Williams, Black-on-Black Minstrelsy and the African-Diaspora. Writing about criticisms directed at black-face performer Bert Williams, Chude-Sokei observes, “there is no allowance here for the subtleties of his performance and its possibilities for multiple readings; indeed the idea that any subtlety could exist would have struck [critics] as being inconceivable.” (19) Chude-Sokei prefers to read Williams and many black minstrel performers within the context of trickster figures like The Signifying Monkey (Esu Elegbara) noting that in the post-Emancipation era the black trickster becomes a figure of “exile, of endless translation and an endless deferral of meaning.” (109) In light of Chude-Sokei’s observations, what often disturbs me most about the current discourses around black popular culture is that they too often foreclose the possibilities that there are other meanings to be derived from black popular culture other than those that are most palpable within America’s racist history.

Jamie Foxx is an interesting figure in this regard, given that since his debut on In Living Color in the early 1990s, he has shown a particular gift at mimicry. No one, though, has ever mistaken Foxx for Wanda (from In Living Color), Jamie King (from The Jamie Foxx Show) or Ray Charles, yet there is an element of authenticity that some would like to attach to his performance of “Blame It.” This dynamic is one of the burdens that hip-hop, in particular, continues to bear even some of the most visible icon of the genres have long provided evidence that their musical personas are just that.

One of the things that rarely get considered in reading performances like “Blame It,” is what Chudo-Sokei calls the “economy of pleasure in an embrace of one’s own stereotype.” (99) As Chude-Sokei writes, “One can imagine the threatening and liberating appeal of a black minstrel to a black audience. In light of Du Bois’s neo-Victorianism and the middle-class politics of assimilationist nationalism, in the context of a growing hegemony of the black church, this figure is an explicit and sweet threat, much like the pimp or thug or ‘gangsta’ icons in the present day context of black media masquerade.” (99) If we replace “Du Bois’s neo-Victorianism” with Obama-era respectability, Jamie Foxx and T-Pain’s performance of “Blame It” not only makes more sense, but seems necessary.