Timepieces

I present the following item from the Remembrance of Rogues Past collection: a campaign watch for the YEAA '98 campaign, namely the Youth Energetically Advocating Abacha shell organization that supposedly was spontaneously formed to campaign for that suffocating, murderous and dictatorial rogue, General Sani Abacha — late, unlamented and so forth.

I'm a avid collector of this kind of historical artifact and you'll sometimes find me bidding for a mint copy of the Franco sings for Mobutu album, to take a recent example and different rogue (quite a good album actually). The Abacha watch, while in the mode of praise singers and sycophants, is not your standard piece of dictator chic, it's much more functional and thus perhaps more insidious. In any case, it's worth some brief notes.

Back in the twilight zone of military rule in Nigeria circa 1998, it appeared that the dictator was feeling some pressure to make gestures towards democracy. The response was of course to think about how to hand over to himself, accordingly he devised lots of gestures. Having outlawed all organized opposition, the general decided to organize two approved political parties, "one a little to the left and the other a little to the right". Manifestos and constitutions were written, ostensible political philosophies were crafted and so forth, all by the military. The remaining question was who would lead these newfangled parties and there were any number of sycophants auditioning for the right to head these organic parties sometime in the future, if indeed elections would ever be held.

This is where the Youth Energetically Advocating Abacha came in.

The first order of business, as if this stage managing wasn't enough, was to start a whisper campaign urging both parties to nominate said dictator as their flagbearer. When more than whispers were needed, YEAA was to be the public face of the campaign, ready to whip naysayers into place. The idea was to coronate Abacha and win by acclamation the nomination from both of the parties a little to the left and right. A man of the people, he simply wanted to underlie that the youth wanted him to serve them and, moreover, that they were energetic — an obvious warning to anyone who might oppose the general. The thought was that he would face off with himself in new elections and succeed himself, or something of the sort - the main point was to hold elections.

On the one hand these actions were crude and ridiculous, on the other, they are simply sad. Whenever I look at the watch I think to the whole contingent of lobbyist firms, replete with consultants, who came up with the strategy and the inspirational name (Yeah!), the graphic designers called in to design the logo with the arrow and the wheel mechanism (perhaps fitting, for Nigeria under Abacha was on a road to nowhere), the coinage of the snappy slogan, the time spent uploading artwork and discussing typography with the design firm in California, the negotiations with Singapore factories for the production of watches and other insignia (for there were many containers worth of this stuff produced, T-shirts, key tags etc.), the shipments to Nigeria, the distribution of this largess around the country... The watch is like an open wound in the Nigerian body politic, testimony to the workings of a global criminal enterprise.

No one advocated for Abacha unless they were paid. Youth Energetically Advocating Abacha is a simple byword for coercion, cynicism and an illustration of the lengths to which people can go when in the grip of greed. The depressing thing is the sheer energy of this huhudious regime and the scale of the graft (billions of dollars were stolen for sure) — one wonders how many millions were spent on similar minor accoutrements. What a waste but perhaps such is the world of riches.

From all accounts Nigeria is much changed these days and a few of the victims of the regime are even (belatedly) getting their day in court. Perhaps it's best to move on and call this ancient history, perhaps one's outrage should be curtailed; let's leave it for the historians.

For the record, the battery never worked.

II. Measuring Time

Helon Habila in his second novel Measuring Time continues to make a claim for prominence in the roster of young lions in African literature. Instead of the claustrophobia of Waiting for an Angel (which I recently discussed) he stretches his shoulders and decides to take on entire decades of African history.

His writes in a deceptively simple style and focuses on storytelling. There's no overt lyricism; he'd claim that he is simply channeling the many stories that come to him. Still his is an ambitious agenda and he covers a lot of territory, after all his subject is modernity in Africa and all that means.

The options available to the two twins who tell the story of Measuring Time is a simple statement about Nigerian society. On the one hand, there is life as a mercenary soldier following warlords like Charles Taylor from Chad and Libya to the messy Liberian civil war. For a political junkie like me, this would be enough to focus on for an entire novel, for Habila this is merely interstitial.

On the other hand, the bulk of the book and the other twin's story is about stagnation and making do at home. There is lots of striving but precious little light. Yet the stories of the past need to be told, the politics need be engaged in - however programmatic they may be, the youth need to be taught, we all need to fall in love. There's no time to dance or to succumb to navel gazing. Life has to be lived in full.

In his populist writing mode Helon Habila is perhaps heir to Cyprian Ekwensi whose favourite subject was city life. Like Ekwensi he has a talent for empathy with his characters and draws you in with detailed portraits. He really knows how to capture moments in time. I am also reminded in this novel of another ambitious second novel that packed a lot of ideas albeit in a different genre, Colson Whitehead's John Henry Days. But perhaps we shouldn't tie a talent like Habila to others. He's writing delicate novels of ideas disguised as unvarnished, personal stories of Nigeria; the whole world is his.

III. Wasted Time (a soundtrack)

Me'Shell NdegeOcello - Wasted Time

Wasted Time, my favourite song from her appropriately-titled album, Bitter, finds Me'Shell in a suitably bitter mood. She has an unerring way of capturing an atmosphere in song. Bitterness is a transient emotion but one that is intense when one is in its grip. It's the only vaguely uptempo song of the album, building up the groove slowly as she reflects on a break-up. It's not quite a lament and she hasn't yet resolved the episode. It is a raw meditation on wasted effort. Fittingly the song cuts off abruptly, unsettling the listener. Wasted time never to be recovered.

Update: A good friend sends along a Cambodian twist for the collection: a Dictator Hun Sen "fashion" watch. He notes, "Never tried wearing it. Battery assumed dead".

File under: Nigeria, rogues, Africa, corruption, politics, history, memory, culture, cynicism, literature, toli

Bags and Stamps

Let's talk about bags if you please. Bags are in the news these days. I don't mean San Francisco's ban on plastic shopping bags. Rather I'm thinking about this type of bag. In Ghana and most of West Africa we call it the "Ghana must go" bag.

Alternatively in Ghana, and humourously, they are called "Efiewura Sua Me", literally "help me carry my bag". Indeed there's always someone at the bus or train station who needs help moving such bags. (And yes, I did help that young lady after taking a surreptitious snap with my dodgy cell phone. Chivalry isn't dead even at midnight at the bus terminal).

Last year Sokari Ekine revealed her own bag woman tendancies and opened the discussion - she's a connaisseur. In response, Georgia Popplewell noted that "in Trinidad I’ve heard those bags called Guyanese Samsonite". We learnt that in Germany, per contra, they are known as "Tuekenkoffer" or Turkish suitcase. In Boston I've heard them referenced as Chinatown totes, and called Bangladeshi bags in England, presumably after the 1970s influx of Bangladeshi immigrants.

The "Ghana must go" designation resulted from the various expulsions of immigrants that Ghana and Nigeria engaged in between the 1960s and 1980s. Many were only able to pack their belongings in such bags before fleeing, expelled with barely hours or days notice. Thus Ghana must go is ironic at best, and has mocking overtones at worst.

During the Rawlings Chain lean years in the 1980s when it wasn't simply a matter of returning immigrants and the whole country was facing political and economic difficulties (Revolution! Ghana), they were simply called "refugee bags". We were all refugees then.

In any case, the trend in naming is clear, these utility bags designate immigrants, refugees, or those down on their luck. They are emblems of hardship, relative poverty and exigency. I'll argue here that they are object lessons about the fluidity of ideas.

Pattern Matching

Let's first discuss the pattern. The majority of these bags are produced in China and it is fitting, given the interesting history of the pattern that covers them.

from: c r i s

The plaid pattern is thought to originate in the Taklamakan area in Xinjiang Uyghur in China perhaps between 100-700BC and certainly by the 3rd century. The Scots have the most famous claim to it however. The Falkirk tartan in 1707 is thought to be the Scottish debut of the tartan, the rich tradition of the Scottish plaid kilt that various families and clans adopted (this pdf shows a visual timeline of tartan). The Scottish colours are typically rich shades of red and green and only occasionally is the main colour white as in the bags.

The word plaid means a blanket, from the Gaelic plaide. In North America people use it interchangeably for tartans. The etymology of the word tartan is itself in dispute. The French word tiretaine (an amount of material), and the Spanish word tartana (a fine quality cloth) are the main contenders.

Now of course tartans were adopted wherever the British empire cast its wings. Bagpipes and kilts can be found from Ireland through Sierra Leone to India. I need only point you to this piece about tartans and turbans which lovingly traces their legacy in the Indian subcontinent and beyond. Amongst other things Ennis notes that Sikhs in Scotland have even commisioned family tartans; the headline for that episode reads: Singh Adds Spice To The History of Tartan. So: spice, the silk road and the Highlands.

Typically plaids have been woven textiles, used for clothing or decoration. The little plaid skirt evokes many associations. Like all patterns used in visual design, plaid has been applied to all manner of objects. Which brings me back to bags...

Bag Lady

The Ghanaian artist Senam Okudzeto has very personal knowledge of the history of "Ghana must go" and has incorporated its iconography into her work. If you look at the fragments of her recent exhibitions, you'll be exposed to a history of dislocation, of fractured, sudden enforced exile.

The question she raises is one of historical memory. Our plaid bags are the physical proof of the way in which the boundaries that meant nothing in our pre-colonial past now loom large in Africa. Indeed their name stems from the 1983 Expulsion Order giving illegal immigrants 14 days to leave Nigeria. But more broadly the bags refer to repeated upheavals in our lands and sub-Saharan Africa knows upheaval all too well. Still, there's a sort of existential defiance in her reclaiming these objects of loss. Divisions are embodied in the cheap, practical and functional bags.

There is considerable wit in her work although it is always combined with a wistful displacement. Note the slogan, Capitalism and Schizophrenia, and some of the quotes she highlights: "deception is fundamental to the system".

Resilience

Plastic bags then. Plastics are the great innovation of the past century and a half and well they are sources of alienation and comfort, pollution and practicality. The famous scene from The Graduate comes to mind

"I want to say one word to you. Just one word."
"Yes, sir."
"Are you listening?"
"Yes, I am."
"Plastics."

If you are confronted with packing up your entire possesions in a hurry for fear of your safety, a Ghana must go bag will undoubtedly be a source of comfort. If you're trying to pack tins of corned beef and sardines, rice and sundry spare parts along with the clothes your relatives back in Ghana lack, you will gravitate towards the Ghana must go bag. At such times, volume and weight is everything. Ghana must go bags are about the most practical and lightweight luggage that exists.

Plastic, rugged and functional, you can even wrap them with tape to ensure additional sturdiness so that they don't split when they are manhandled by underpaid bag handlers. You can place all sorts of foodstuffs in them: smoked fish, yams, meat and spices. And heck they are distinctive: plaid, woven and plastic. As such, they are fixtures in many routes serving the developing world.

I can remember the scene at JFK airport waiting in line for a Ghana Airways flight, watching a market woman and the fifteen young men who would be taking the trip with her wares - all in huge fully packed Ghana must go bags. They had brought a big truck to the airport and were blocking the entrance causing a stir as their cargo was unloaded. This was even after 9/11 but she wasn't minding the Homeland Security folks that approached. Mama Trader wasn't travelling herself but had come to supervise the dispatching of her consignment of goods home. She made it clear that she wasn't planning for any of her workers to pay any excess luggage fees. I'm almost positive they didn't; she must have had a 'business arrangement' with the airline (or at least those manning the counter). Incidentally Ghana Airways went out of business shortly thereafter. Moving right along...

Fashioning Bags

I wrote the foregoing to connect a few dots raised by a recent stir in Ghanaian newspapers. The headline read: Louis Vuitton sells "Ghana Must Go".

The images of models bounding down the catwalk at Marc Jacob's 2007 collection for Louis Vuitton raised the ire of a few commentators. An example:

credit: fashionaddictdiary

The expensive shoes the model was wearing, indeed her entire outfit, stand in sharp contrast to the utility bag she was wielding. A typical review of the show mentions

a funny cheap checked shopping bag that carried a big, passport-style Louis Vuitton stamp...

the collection was a complex refraction of the many inspirational sparks that go into the work here: pieces synthesized to project the simultaneous multinational appeal this brand must maintain

The language of the style section is too clever by half but they captured the incongruousness and appeal of the image. A complex refraction indeed. A close look at a full slideshow of Marc Jacobs' creations shows that the bags of our tale were a leitmotif of the collection.

This is nothing new in fashion; slumming is a trope in the rarefied heights of haute couture. In recent years we have seen much appropriation of the sort and things like service uniforms (UPS, McDonalds etc.) have gained a fashion quotient. This is run of the mill piracy and the kind of tongue-in-cheek sentiment we applaud our designers for.

The author of the article was incensed that Ghanaians hadn't capitalized on the Ghana must go iconography and that others were now about to make hay out of a designer bag frenzy.

Having an idea stolen can be more difficult to deal with especially when the other party makes a bigger name and money off the idea than what it was originally worth...

A tempest in a tea pot in short.

Of course I could have pointed out that a proud Ghanaian artist was blazing these trails long before Marc Jacobs got there. Indeed there is an element of theft in this episode. If you look at Senam's work, you'll also see that she focuses on the passport stamp along with the Ghana must go bag. She highlighted not just the bag, the few personal mementos, photos and such, but also the passport stamp. Those who didn't have the requisite stamp on their residency papers or passports were the ones who were forced into upheaval with only these bags to carry their belongings into the unknown. Thus issues of legitimacy and exile are part of the questions she poses in her ongoing series.

In many ways, Jacobs's shtick was only a high-profile plagiarism. I expect Senam would be tickled by the nexus of commercialization and piracy that she likely provoked. The Akan proverb, humanity knows no boundaries, is one she would have been steeped in. Not to mention that the plaid pattern comes and goes used by all and sundry. The Wife notes incidentally that plaid is in this season in all the fashion magazines and stores. It was inevitable that others would latch on to it.

In any case, what claim does Ghana have to Ghana must go? Shouldn't the Nigerians, who ironically coined the term, have first cuts of any royalties? Heck these bags aren't even produced in Ghana, we are mere buyers and users. Our Chinese friends manufacture them using their native pattern. And, as we have seen, our local name for the bags is not widely known outside of West Africa. We're not the only refugees, immigrants or attendees of the school of hard knocks.

Still like Marc Jacobs, and in the spirit of Senam, I thought a juxtaposition would be appropriate and, rather than link to the original images, I thought I'd perform a creative theft with the following image. The title should be evident:

Ghana must go versus Louis Vuitton

Bags and Stamps: a plagiarism in plaid

So to recap, a Ghanaian, by way of France and England, living in the USA, creates a collage starting with an image of Chinese-produced plastic utility bags taken by a Nigerian living in Spain - a 'theft' of the "Ghana must go" imagery, born of the interlocking episodes of reciprocal deportation and sundry exile between their two homelands, both former British colonies. The plaid pattern on said bags is originally Chinese although it is most celebrated in Scottish fabrics, and the subject of English schoolboy fantasies. Said pattern was transmitted in recent centuries over the corners of the British empire and is rightly part of Indian and especially Sikh heritage.

The symbolism of the bags is the signal subject of the work of a American-Ghanaian artist who grew up in Ghana, Nigeria and the UK (yes I should have mentioned Senam's Nigerian connection - isn't that a complication? And doesn't that explain the resonance of the Ghana must go iconography in her boundary-straddling life? Not to mention her focus on the passport stamp of approval. Sidenote: this modern traveller now has a very sensible Swiss connection, whither neutrality?)

This image is juxtaposed with a recent appropriation by an American fashion designer working for an France-based luxury company whose ironic contribution is to place a seal on the bag, contrasting the pennies on the dollar cost of the bag with a logo that is reknowned for its deleterious effects on even the fattest wallets - a logo, moreover, that is often counterfeited by Chinese manufacturers in a global shadow economy of knockoffs that are sold all over the world. The significance of the logo or stamp of approval is iconic in expressing authenticity, legitimacy and belonging, demarcating the boundaries separating countries at once, and luxury status symbols delineating the rich from the poor.

Incidentally this note was prompted by a posting by an Indian American, who is arguably more Ghanaian in sensibility than me from his few years in Ghana, said posting focused on the celebration of National Tartan Day by Scottish Americans and its implications for the desi community and diaspora.

The mind reels.

I have just booked a trip to England. My ostensible purpose is to get a stamp in my passport that will keep my notional residency in Her Majesty's lands legitimate. I am hedging my bets against this American episode; the stamp is my soul insurance if you will. Refugees all, we in Africa are no strangers to dislocation, in many ways it is our close friend. As the song goes, wherever I lay my hat, that's my home.

Modern travellers
Packing our bags
Seeking out stamps
The mementos of exiled souls

Bags: A Playlist

As usual, some music for the exiled soul...

• De La Soul - Shopping Bags (She got from you)
  The percussion on this song, a stark array of milk bottles, proves that the boys still have it, appropriating whatever beat is expedient to get the message across.
• Freestyle Fellowship - Inner City Boundaries
  The inner city griots expound

  Who is that surrounding me?
  Enemy enemy you crossed the wrong boundary
  Wicked witness wizardry
  Disappear from here and end up in a tree
  Crossed the wrong boundary

• Milt Jackson - Bags' Groove
  Milt Jackson's nickname was Bags. He is most famous as a pillar of the Modern Jazz Quartet, Django being only one of their numerous standards. Bags' Groove is a heavyweight encounter with Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins, Thelonious Monk, Horace Silver, Percy Heath and Kenny Clarke. He played his vibes and the rest is history.
• Milt Jackson and John Coltrane - Bags & Trane
  Bags and Trane is a more delicate affair, the two great soloists respected each other and are all empathy. I think Milt comes off better than Coltrane, much as Sonny Rollins came off fiercer in his Tenor Madness conversation with Trane.
• Bob Marley - Exodus
  Movement of Jah people. 'Nuff said.
• The NPG - The Exodus has begun
  A Prince album in all but name, the title track is sprawling like Bootsy and George would have done it. Oh identity.
  
• Digable Planet - Nickel Bags
  Their reunion in 2005, after 10 years apart brought such joy. (I still have a review in the draft pile). Let's hope they head back to the studio. I want some more nickel bags of funk.
• Herbie Hancock - Three Bags Full
  Herbie Hancock's contribution to this playlist is from the aptly titled Takin' Off album, an affair featuring Freddie Hubbard and Dexter Gordon mind you. This is hard bop at its best. Most airlines only allow two bags but when you fly Air Herbie, you get extra allowances for your baggage, and a bigger plane.
• Erykah Badu - Bag Lady
  I'll end with the bag lady herself. Ms Badu's Ghanaian heritage is only obliquely referenced these days, if at all; Texas claims her. Still, her musical iconoclasm is plainly mid-Atlantic, her sensibility is that of one who knows no boundaries, a musical refugee in her creative prime. This was the lead single from her last soulful album, the title of course: Worldwide Underground.

A parting question: I wonder if this note could pass as a Things Fall Apart affair. Would it be a case of social living, a comfort suite or rather that rough beast? What say you dear reader?

[Update June 5, 2007]

See also: A plagiarism in plaid

Bags and Stamps - the photo set

File under: bags, plaid, art, culture, globalization, fashion, immigration, exile, memory, Ghana, Nigeria, Africa, authenticity, design, history, collage, identity, loss, China, India, Scotland, commercialization, boundaries, plagiarism, theft, naming, Ghana Must Go, Things Fall Apart, Social Living, toli

Articles of Faith

Let's have a look at some pop art to continue the Things Fall Apart series, this time an entry in the Comfort Suite.

In considering the various responses to the themes of my ongoing series, I've been wondering what helps keep things together even when there is much cause for despair. Culture and art are the standard answers it seems. Another partial (if obvious) explanation in Africa is religion, and consequently the topic of this note is articles of faith. My entry point to the discussion will be a few Nigerian calendar posters that The Wife bought in Northern Ghana in 1999. Christianity and Islam are among the visible competitors in the cultural and political marketplaces of Africa and are no strangers to advocacy for our souls. Thus I direct your attention to a photoset: Articles of Faith.

The artist is a certain R. Nkwonta of CAS Creation; God's Providence Printers of Mushin, Lagos are the publishers. Posters and sign art of this sort are quite popular throughout West Africa. Nkwonta's are among the most distinctive I've seen. Religion and various social mores are his favoured topics and they are tackled with aplomb.

We are in the realm of pop art and agitprop - guerrilla marketing, in short, in the service of the Good Lord. Of late, there has been the move to digital presses but the motifs of traditional sign drawing have been preserved in these handpainted posters. The graphic style might be labeled folk art by ethnographers, or crude or primitive to certain eyes, indeed the strokes are broad and exaggerated. Much like traditional African theatre, or say the newfangled Nollywood movies, realism is beside the point. Rather it is all about the message, this is engaged art.

But less prose, let's start, if you will, with the downfall of Satan.

Fall from Grace

The story recounted in this poster is "The Glorious Victory" of Jesus over Satan in a hard fought wrestling match. It is worth paying attention to the panels of this low brow tale of angels and demons; a close reading is revelatory.

Each panel you'll note is accompanied with the requisite quote from scripture. A few typos notwithstanding, the point is easily conveyed. First:

Our Lord Jesus Christ is ready to high jack Satan.

Then:

Satan makes first attempt but Jesus cleverly dodged it.

English is not the author's first language but we'll admit that the malapropisms are inspired: "dogged" is a good stand-in for "dodged" since the horned Satan is behaving like a vicious dog after all - not to mention his attire. The "high jack" spinebuster is an apt counterpoint to the "down fall" of the poster's title.

Presumably God, as the Supreme Justice, is the wigged-out referee in this wrestling bout. Also note that Jesus's tattoo, with the "Gilly Mercy" inscription, seems to shift position, from arm to back to chest, once again proving that the Lord works in mysterious ways. I hope one of my Nigerian friends can step in with a translation for Gilly (it is igbo right?).

The fight is on and a curious dance seems to take place. It's not quite a foxtrot it's more like a capoeira. Nkwonta later explains that "Satan bowed with his knees to our Lord Jesus Christ". This is only fitting and we can treat the horned beast like the "empty vessel" he is.

Soon enough we get to heart of the matter namely: "Our Lord Jesus Christ has beaten Satan to self unconscious". This is accompanied by Jeremiah's prophetic warning that "I will destroy you with my hands".

The dripping blood from the wounded Satan is of no matter, this is an Old Testament aesthetic. We are told that "the Devil wanted to run away from the ring but Jesus drew him back to smash him more". As he drags Satan by the tail, Jesus's efforts are duly backed up with the words of Genesis 3:15:

I will crush your head.

My sunday school days of yore aren't too distant hence I would hazard that this verse refers to God admonishing Adam, Eve and the serpent.

Wrestling is a big tradition in certain parts of Nigeria. Nkwonta is undoubtedly a wrestling aficionado as are his protagonists who know all the high jacks and other sundry moves. We can only marvel at the technique displayed as "Jesus turned the devil upside down in order to destroy him".

Thus we see that a "pin fall marks Satan's defeat" and, finally Of course, Jesus is declared the winner.

"Up! Up!! Jesus, Down! Down!! Satan" is the ultimate message.

As the spirit descends in the form of a dove, Jesus, his six-pack abs rippling, holds his title belt aloft and delicately steps on the bleeding (and presumably permanently dealt-with threat from the perfidious Satan). Stepping on someone is about the most humiliating thing one can do; one can't understate the impact of the image is a society where respect and honour is paramount. All the time the angels smile and sing hosannas. My initial theory about God being the referee is proven mistaken, the bewigged referee is clearly part of the throng of angels. God is rather the spectral and enigmatic figure in the top right corner. The tropes of religious iconography have been duly satisfied.

Soul Struggle

We continue our discussion with a poster illustrating the ongoing competition for the soul of the African man.

No words are minced in the case of a hypocrite. The overt purpose of this exhortation is the shaming of hypocrites: those who, on the one hand, take up the the cross and bible and, the next day, turn to 'darker' matters shall we say. This is of course is often framed as a matter of tradition and modernity. There is much gnashing of the teeth in these areas and it is not just in matters of religion that this contest takes place. As an example, doctors in contemporary Africa steeped in the expensive western medical tradition often have to worry about their patients visiting traditional healers (typically dismissed as fetish priests and the like). In that case there is very real concern about the interaction of the drug regimes with herbal remedies and the plant impurities often found in them.

After heading to Church one day the hypocrite turns to worshiping of idols the next. Note the dark clouds forebodingly pregnant with tropical rain and worse. The chicken (or rather the fowl) to be slaughtered is at hand. The skull and bones, the dead animals, the bare-breasted woman in the shrine, this is the heart of darkness one might say. This is the popular conception of fetishes, juju, voodoo and traditional African religions. It is to be dismissed as superstition as testified to here by the clay or wood idolatry of the mask.

This has been a centuries old campaign in proselytizing of Africa in the encounter of Christianity and Islam with traditional African belief systems and religions. Those emblems of split allegiance are berated and ridiculed. The encomium is long

Woe to you hypocrites. You lock the door to the Kingdom of heaven to people's faces but you yourself don't go in nor do you allow in those who are trying to enter...

A sample headline in recent weeks in Ghanaian newspapers is along the same lines: Doom For Corrupt Leaders – Pastor Predicts

According to the Pastor, though this year 2007 biblically was a year of double blessings, any mischievous politician or reverend minister who intended taking undue advantage of his/her position to exploit the people especially the poor and less privileged was in for "double curses".

The accompanying image picked by the Ghanaweb editor to illustrate the devil is all pointy extremities as one might expect.

There is a long history behind Nkwonta's motif. Martin Meredith, discussing pre-independence Kenya, describes the oaths of loyalty the Kikuyu Central Association instituted in the 1920s:

the oath involved holding a Bible in the left hand and a handful of earth in the right hand pressed to the navel while swearing to serve the Kikuyu people faithfully.... [In the 1950s] the meat of a goat replaced the Bible... White farmers reported a mood of increasing truculence and incidents of cattle-maiming and sabotage.

Back in Nigeria, Rems Nna Umeasiegbu spent a decade respectfully documenting Igbo traditions, customs and stories that appeared to be disappearing and published his findings in his 1966 book The Way We Lived. His illustration of a juju ceremony is in the same vein although perhaps a few minutes later than Nkwonta pictured it.

The missionaries and colonists faced this intractable problem and the churches that were their legacy are still combating it and even apparently with greater fervour.

I recently noted that Busia commented on this issue when he asked "Has The Christian Faith Been Adequately Presented?". He framed the question as follows:

Some missionaries who have served overseas have unhappy recollections of trusted converts reverting, on certain occasions, to 'pagan' beliefs and practices. The experience was all the more stunning when the converts concerned were not the more recent ones, but Christians of long standing, sometimes with fine records of conspicuous service and loyalty. The problem takes on a new dimension when it is presented as part of the general problem of the encounter between Christianity and indigenous cultures.

He suggested a reversal of the typical context and advocated that the burden should be on the church to present itself as relevant to the local belief systems. In this vein, the art must reflect those themes - if only to subvert them; I suspect that Nkwonta is on board.

Match Made in Hell

A living religion must strive to be relevant to its practitioner's lives and interests hence we return to the sports motif with a football match between Jesus and Satan.

Despite the dastardly foul early in the game, Jesus dribbles past Satan for his first goal. As Matthew put it in his gospel "Get thou behind me Satan".

A lot of fun was had in these panels and with economy in the illustrations. Observe the Angel flying to the right of the goal post to block Satan's first attempt with an athletic catch - Petr Cech would be proud.

To punctuate Jesus Christ's first goal we return to that potent scripture quote: the crushed head business. Others translate it as "strike your head", regardless, trash talk doesn't get more direct.

The story proceeds:

Satan then makes his second attempt but the Holy Spirit was against him.

The dove, embodying the spirit, diverts his attempt and the angel goalie, who had reacted tardily and would not have made the catch, skips happily, content at not having to make a difficult save. It pays to have friends in high places.

Note, later on, that Jesus heads the ball over the hapless defenders of evil. Evidently: "our Lord Jesus Christ has set confusion in the kingdom of darkness". Again the style displayed is akin to that of the writers of the New Testament gospels who strove in their depiction of Jesus's acts to underline the fulfilment of prophecies with pointers to passages in the Torah.

Interestingly enough there is a third goal depicted "when the Lord dribbled Satan to the ground which marked his second goal". Given that the final score (in smaller print at the top right of the poster) is 2-0 for Jesus, it must mean that the header of the other panel was disallowed by the referee. Alternatively this discrepancy might be a reference to the eternal mystery of the Holy Trinity in Church doctrine. Catechists beware.

As one would expect, a victory celebration marks the end of the match.

There is much that can be asked about these posters but we'll keep our exegesis brief. Do note, for what it's worth, that all the angels seem to be women. I won't dive too deeply into this female subtext (The Magdalene Propositions); I'll only note that the issue of female clergy and ordination of such is currently rending the Anglican and Episcopal churches apart (along with the stance on homosexuality).

Similarly I'll pass over the issue of the ethnicity of Jesus. Is he simply very tanned? And what about the nappy hair? Are those dreadlocks or just your typical semitic features? The tattoo tradition? Is this simply artistic licence in the pursuit of audience empathy or is a more subversive reading warranted?

Morality Plays

Overt religion is not the only mode that Nkwonta works in; social mores and behaviour fall under his purview - his is a complete worldview. Thus we turn to the case of Madam Long Mouth and Mrs Big Ear.

This poster is more in the vein of social commentary than religious admonition. He presents a typical morality play aimed at an audience who have recently left their rural abodes. The subject is "gossiping and the evil that follows it".

The object of her neighbour's gossip is saintly and minds her own business. "Yes let them say", she mutters to herself as she heads off to her good works.

As for the neigbours, suffice to say that "every time talk talk". Long Mouth and Big Ear chat unconcernedly, neglecting their household duties, while the goat takes advantage to eat the yam from their plate.

The next day Long Mouth returns, presumably for more of the same. Big Ear is glad to hear that "another news don land". She asks "abeg wetin happen?". The goat is equally happy for the visit and brays:

Abeg you are highly welcome. Have your sit [sic].

The subtext is clear: "The more you talk, the more your mouth long, and the more you listen, the more your ear big."

The lesson is to "keep your mouth shut", your food and more will go to waste.

Nkwonta's versatility with the poster motif has been rightly picked up by a few ethnology publications. Social anthropologists would have a field day studying his full body of work. Take for example his poster of The First Lady Wine Tapper. Social uplift is his message.

Elsewhere, and less successful artistically, similar painted movie posters have been exhibited. In those cases, instead of social commentary or religiousity, it is in service of lurid commericalism as in Extreme Canvas: Movie Poster Paintings from Ghana. To my eye those don't attain the heights I've shown here.

Nigeria, like many other countries in Africa, has been struggling to regain confidence after several lost decades. Along with the millennial implications of 1999, Nigeria was then just emerging from the suffocation of the Abacha years - waiting for an angel as it were. One coping mechanism for the years of arbitrary misrule and hardship was a turn towards these new Christianities. In a matter of a few decades, these currents are now asserting themselves prominently in the zeitgeist.

You may think the sentiment here is cartoonish, or dismiss it as crude, that it could only work in developing countries where audiences are cupid. I believe that the appeal is rather in their ingenuous charm. You know where you stand when confronted with this kind of rhetoric as opposed to some of the sophisticates we see in the West that are neither here nor there. Perhaps a certain simplicity has mass appeal in these troubled times. The spread of charismatic churches has been noted in Africa. Evangelicals and baptists are on the rise everywhere. In the US currently the arguments are over conservatism, Darwin's God, atheism and the like. The new Pope, per contra, thinks we should talk more about hell these days. Milton in Paradise Lost didn't shirk from this notion and indeed dove in with the definitive account.

We often dismiss the opium of the masses as dangerous, doctrinaire and simple-minded. Yet there is considerable humour when presented with this kind of whimsy. The themes are expansive, appealing and direct. The hard knock life is a staple of the Great Game. We are starved for meaning and religious types and their printing presses are quick to fill those gaps and "educate" our souls. One needs to get down and dirty to compete in the marketplace of ideas. Hilarity is a weapon of choice.

Nkwonta seems to have fully internalized those beliefs; his creations are testament to ground level pragmatism. Springing from the trenches, he produces his tokens one panel at a time, bite-sized gestures towards a certain spirituality. This is a complex piece of advocacy, an expression displayed without artifice. Low brow it may be but this is art in full, and effective at that. You certainly can't be indifferent to these articles of faith.

Soundtrack for this note

A short playlist on our theme

• Stevie Wonder - Superstition
  Mr Steveland Morris jumps in

  When you believe in things that you don't understand,
  Then you suffer
  Superstition ain't the way

  The alternative of course is the black magic of the wonderful Higher Ground from the Innervisions album.
• Wayne Shorter - Juju
  Dense, tense and full of turmoil, this is the music of conflicted souls. It features Wayne Shorter's virtuoso saxophone pouncing from the dark on Elvin Jones drums and McCoy Tyner's piano.
• King Sunny Ade - Juju Music
  Sunny Ade's laidback juju music continues to be a touchstone in West Africa. It is a conversation that calls out to listeners to participate. There are no boundaries between the musicians and the audience. Fodder for those late nights in urban spots, seductive sounds for all night comfort suites.

Next: Faith Healing

File under: art, pop, religion, poster, faith, tradition, modernity, superstition, christianity, culture, interplay, humour, whimsy, wit, Nigeria, Africa, angels, demons, analysis, juju, toli

Africa, 1966

Part 3 of the Things Fall Apart series... I've been sidelined for the past few days by a flu - my body perhaps taking too literally the theme of this series, hence I'll extend my admittedly arbitrary week schedule, reorder things and take a brief detour to ponder some photos. Hopefully you won't detect fevered intensity in this and later writings.

Today is Ghana's 49th Independence Day, an occasion to look back in history in order to look forward. I've been thinking however not about the halcycon days of 1957, the celebrations, the happy shrugging-off of the colonial mantle, but rather about the year 1966, prompted by finally being able to obtain a copy of Africa Report magazine from that year. I scanned and uploaded a few of the photos along with some of the articles therein. Why 1966? I was asked. It was a significant year for Ghana but more generally, 40 years ago was "when West Africa lost its innocence", as a good friend put it. The military coups in Ghana and Nigeria were a major reason for this assessment; Ghana being the first country in sub-saharan Africa to gain independence and Nigeria being the largest on the continent and casting a large shadow. Thus there is a sense of wistfulness about the path of the continent, promise gone wrong barely a decade after the initial excitement and optimism of independence. To add more context for the Nigerian case, 50 years ago, 1956, was when oil was discovered in the Niger River Delta - perhaps a clue to part of the reason for the subsequent unravelling but that is getting ahead of ourselves.

The image is at once iconic and, if you consider what happened months later, ironic. It features the President-for-Life, Kwame Nkrumah posing surrounded by army officers some of whom would shortly overthrow him. Is the fact that they are looking over his shoulder a foreshadowing of the long arm of the military in African affairs? Should one read ominous portents as the magazine's editors undoubtedly intended with its selection? The president looks confident in white with his ceremonial whip in hand, as well he should. At that point he was in full bloom, the one-party state enshrined in the constitution, titles and honorifics proliferating - Osagyefo, he appears secure in his power, surrounded by the obsequious and the sycophants. Everyone is smiling. One wonders who that woman behind him is (the one on the right) and where she ranks in the hierarchy. And those black shades!

Still there is another reading of the image, and it comes down to ego and insecurity that translated itself into government policy. Thus Nkrumah's regime imprisoned leaders of the political opposition, legislated their parties out of existence, and sent away the best and brightest or any who were inclined to question. Thus Kofi Annan and many other bright young Ghanaians were gifts to the rest of the world, sent out to the United Nations instead of causing trouble back at home. For Nkrumah and the CPP apparachiks who surrounded him, cronyism was a mundane fact of life; it was the simple exercise of power embodied in the direct manner of minister-without-portfolio Krobo Edusei a larger-than-life power broker and fixer. As a sidenote, the president-for-life moniker is not hyperbole, it was a little noted executive instrument in the law books discovered after the coup. The logic being that once the state is the party and the party's will is embodied in the leader then, well you get the idea...

Now I suppose I shouldn't besmirch the legacy of a great man and erstwhile icon of pan-Africanism, black pride and the rest of it. It was said that the impact of seeing his triumphal trip to the United States and the image of John F. Kennedy holding up an umbrella to welcome him and feting him as he came to address the United Nations was to break a psychological barrier. Those countries that were perhaps hesitant about demanding independence could no longer wait. Sekou Touré of Guinea was one who succumbed to the irresistible glamour of it all. But still it is hard to bear the diversions into scientific socialism, the dissipation of the pan-African idea into overblown rhetoric, the sheer waste in other words... In Ghana, the popular overthrow of a regime that had started with much promise was perhaps a metaphor for the continent as a whole.

For those inclined for further reading, the feature articles in the issue may shed a little light

• The Winter of Discontent by Irving Markovitz - an article long referenced in CIA world factbook reports in years to come - but actually an article that is very difficult to obtain for some reason.
• The Men in Charge by Joe Kraus
  
• Nkrumah's speech at the inauguration of the Volta River project, perhaps his biggest achievement, delivered a month before his overthrow

These articles are obviously products of their time, let's start with the title of the first: Winter of Discontent. When was the last time there was a winter in West Africa? But that is nothing new, metaphorical excess is the rule in writing about Africa. Heart of Darkness ruled the roost long before Things Fall Apart came along.

Markovitz posited that Nkrumah's choices for Ghana ranged from "Chinese communalization to Moshavism or laissez-faire capitalism". When was the last time you heard about Moshavism? 1966, we must then remember, was the height of the Cold War; the great elephants, East and West, fighting for world dominance and using the rest of the world as their battlegrounds. It is hard to believe the mindset and rhetoric of that era but perhaps our own era has its own tropes. As it was, regardless of the choices made by governments in Africa, in many countries the military stepped in. Some of the coups were inspired internally, some were indeed popular but in others, either the CIA, the socialists - the USSR vying for influence, or the former imperial powers (France, England, Belgium) weighed heavily. In Nigeria, the military as an institution decided that it would hold the reigns of power. In Ghana, the NLC was rather wanting to return to civilian rule but the precedent had been set and later in the 1970s and beyond, those who did step in were less benign.

The enduring image of the year in Ghana is the sight of the political prisoners freed after the coup standing outside Ussher Fort being greeted by their families and friends. Some of the prisoners had been essentially starved to death or at best fed gari laced with sand - a quite macabre policy if you consider the already low nutritional value of gari. Well less said on that. I measure greatness based on what one does with power and on the whole African leaders have been poor in their exercise of power.

What of the rest of Africa in 1966? Here perhaps the covers of the issues of the magazine might shed some light.

Politically, personality cults and strongmen abound (from Mobutu to Jomo Kenyatta with Eyadema looming in the background). Hastings Banda became president of Malawi in 1966 and 5 years later declares himself President-for-Life following other precedents. The Rhodesia question is still unresolved. The Biafra civil war is just a year away...

A young Alfred Adu Boahen completes Topics in West African History, perhaps the most influential history textbook on Africa and one that revealed the undoubted depth of African scholarship and accessiblitity. It featured prescient analysis of colonial rule and beyond. On his road to becoming the most influential scholar on Africa, he was busy writing the follow-up West Africa since 1800.

Culturally, African literature, music and art in general is blossoming although there is a bittersweet tinge and here I'll simply note what was on the minds of the greats:

• Chinua Achebe publishes A Man of the People - a satire of corruption.
  
• Wole Soyinka publishes The Lion and the Jewel - a drama and satire of corruption.
  

1966 is like a crossroads and a good point to take stock of Africa as a whole. Looking forward, independence was gained but many countries didn't start their post-colonial journeys on the right footing. Lots of things could go right and in many ways, there was a lot of promise on the horizon, but you could also see traces of the problems of the next few decades. There has been progress forty years on but sometimes I wonder if we are still at the same place.

Soundtrack for this note

Funkdadelic - Standing on the Verge of Getting It On

Riding High in 1961

Circa 1965

Next in part 4: Chinua Achebe weighs in on the Voices Inside Things Fall Apart.

See also: The Busia Papers for another perspective.

File under: Africa, Ghana, Nigeria, history, politics, image, reflection, perception, essay, Things Fall Apart, toli

A Wedding

I'm getting married tomorrow so thought I'd share one of my favourite pieces of art in the two spare minutes I could snatch before dealing with last minute arrangements, welcoming family and friends, and the like. I figure I should spread the love around.

This piece is called "No Problem". It's by Lalelani, a young Nigerian artist who works with a blowtorch smelting metal onto wood. I've always told The Girlfriend that this chop bar and lorry park is where I want to take her in lieu of say The Islands. This kind of aesthetic puts a smile on my face and, as you might suspect, I'm all smiles these days.

Those two minutes are up.

File under: life, happiness, art, toli

On AMD, Apple, Intel, IBM and The Great Game of Chips

I posted this 10 days ago in my internal IBM Blogcentral joint but thought it might deserve a wider audience.

• The Great Game of Chips
• The Low End Theory in Hardware
• On Mobile Phones in Nigeria

The Great Game of Chips

Robert Russell points to rumours of Apple to move from PowerPC to Intel. Indeed like the question of who would be the new pope a few weeks ago, the entire blogosphere is abuzz with prognostications. Everybody seems to be concentrating on Apple's strategic outlook and admittedly they are the sexiest company in technology. Intel would be grateful, Microsoft would be curious, IBM would be unhappy but who cares about those companies, right? The Big Apple is where the action is at, right?

The elephant in the room of all these discussions is AMD.

Intel has been falling behind under the repeated onslaught of AMD's Hammer architecture, first with the Athlon which beat them in the race to 1 GHz, then the Opteron favoured by white box manufacturers everywhere, the move to 64 bit computing on the desktop where Athlon 64 rules(now that Windows XP 64 bit edition has been released, that paradigm is legitimised even though Linux and BSD were there earlier), and now in the dual core race in which Intel again don't have a competitive or affordable offering. In all of these things, Intel has played second fiddle to the fleeter AMD. They have made huge architectural mistakes read the Pentium IV which is too big, runs too hot and doesn't perform, rushed and recalled products. If you read ARS Technica, AnandTech or Tom's Hardware this would be the story that enthusiasts would tell.

It is only a huge amount of payola (read the Intel Inside war chest) that has kept people like Dell exclusively in the Intel camp. Indeed all the first tier manufacturers have AMD in their product lines. Now all affiliate programs are smart marketing and moral payola so don't read my words as pejorative. Obviously also, Intel has the edge on process technology and scale which will mitigate the fallout, but it is only a truism to say that they are have been shaken by the AMD onslaught. They, like Microsoft, can turn on the dime and become "hardcore" about a given technological approach. The problem in The Great Game of Chips is that you have those pesky fabs which take 18 months to a 2 years to turn around, thus any mistake you make ties you up for a good 8 to 10 quarters which is an eternity in Wall Street terms. In mitigation for Intel, AMD can't afford any mistakes given their harrowing corporate history and the skepticism that the market's familiarity with Intel entail. However, with their Dresden fab humming along, they've been able to have generate product at will and on time, and more importantly to control pricing: the best chips on the market always command premium pricing which AMD had never been able to have in the past. It doesn't hurt also that they aren't trying to compete with their clients, the chipset manufacturers, like Intel is so the ecosystem around their offerings is chugging along nicely.

The big bang of the web, of the data center, came about because in the hardware arena, AMD was pushing Moore's law at a furious pace to the delight of Taiwanese chipset manufacturers everywhere. Google's server farms in the past used mostly Intel but I'd hazard that the reason those servers were so cheap and disposable was the competition between Intel and the unsung AMD.

The replacement cycle for machines bought during the of the Y2K hype was a little delayed by the bust of 2000-2001 and the current Iraq war uncertainty but in the next 18-24 months the hardware arena is going to be exciting. And AMD has product, Microsoft has even been complaisant with Windows XP 64 on the software front, they too don't want a monopoly on the hardware front. While the dual core dream might be delayed, a nice dual-processor Opteron with 64 bit Linux distribution would serve most small companies very well. If you won't deal with PowerPC, IBM and others will sell you some happily.

So they, Intel, with 18 months before competitive products will come on tap, need a new high profile Dell to staunch the bleeding. Thus I'm sure they are offering huge incentives to Apple, and must be strutting like peacocks to the temperamental Steve Jobs who can afford to give glimpses of flesh under the burkha. If Apple were indeed to make the move, it would make more sense to go with lower cost AMD, much like Sun have done. If a deal is signed, Jobs would be insane to make it an exclusive one even though that is what Intel would want.

The folks like HP and DEC/Alpha who blinked and mothballed the development of their chips to fall on the Itanium sword, or Sun who dilly-dallied about with UltraSparc earlier on in the 1990s must be rueing their decisions over the past decade but those executives are mostly departed to greener pastures (Carly was even rumoured to be up for the World Bank job before Wolfowitz got the nod - again a demonstation about failure being rewarded but such is life).

When I saw the way the Power architecture was going over the past decade, I was a little frustrated that IBM wasn't burning the midnight oil in our PowerPC efforts at the same furious pace as Intel and AMD. But I suppose we've always moved more slowly. But to our credit, we (IBM) have managed to keep the Power architecture and now the Cell in the game and indeed we're patting ourselves on the back like Kingmakers. The problem is that we don't have the notebook processors or megahertz that marketers and users would like and companies like Apple like a few bragging rights. The Fishkill fab is coming along but competitors might paint it as roadkill, certainly as compared to AMD.

I still think that IBM getting out of the commodity PC business in the Lenovo deal was a huge mistake. But anyway I wasn't consulted - I'm just a software engineer not an MBA type. Presumably some bean counter run the numbers and maybe the rhetoric was about not being in commodity businesses. I on the other hand, believe that you really want to be in the high volume market, if only to get the backwash of innovation that only comes with burning the midnight oil for fear of competitors. Otherwise you relax and have grand ideas and 10 year titanic roadmaps ala Itanium. I don't see Motorola, or Nokia getting out of the mobile phone business just because LG and Samsung are now ascendant. To take the analogy further, IBM has played the Ericsonn/Sony card in the chip business and taken the flight to quality of business and "high end server machines". No consumers for us except for laptops. Meanwhile Samsung can't make enough cell phones and is turning over new models every ninety days to keep the world satisfied.

Obligatory disclaimer. The first stock I bought (outside of the widow's investment that is Big Blue) was that snappy underdog AMD. That was when I priced things out realized that the Athlon was a far better deal than the Pentium III and now IV. I also bought my dad a nice IBM Aptiva, made by IBM Canada, that was Athlon-based but some executive decided to mothball Athlons in the IBM PC business so that was a 6 month window for AMD (or was that Intel Inside dollars at work). This particular technology toli does not constitute financial advice. Past performance is indeed no predictor of future performance. You'd be insane to assume that my pontifications about technology and the Kremlin-watching that I write about has any validity in the real world.

Also keep in mind that my first tentative investments were made just before the bubble burst. And if you still think I have insight, come around my way, I have $500 of Global Crossing and $400 of Nortel stock certificates for you. At least with the Nortel variety you'd be able to buy half a glass of bland Miller Lite beer; certainly you couldn't afford Star beer or your favourite designer microbrewed concoction. More likely it will be the cheapest akpeteshie depending on which palm wine bootlegger you go to.

As for the Global Crossing paper, well store that away in pages of the most obscure library book you can find. Future historians need to know all about the hubris of the past.

Anyway I love this Great Game of Chips, consumers and the web have benefitted immensely. I hope it continues apace.

Let me end with a Coca-Cola coffin to go with your Bag of Chips (the Ga people of Ghana will gladly build great fantasy coffins for you.

The Low End Theory in Hardware

[Update] I cross-posted The Great Game snippet to Dave Farber's Interesting People mailing list and got quite a few responses.

Mark Stahlman gently corrected me

1) AMD does *not* have its Dresden Fab 36 humming along and won't until sometime next year. As a result it is capacity constrained and cannot really do any damage to Intel at the moment.

I stand corrected but I guess that is in line with AMD's harrowing corporate history which I did allude to, and also to the time lag it takes for mistakes to be corrected or for capacity to come online in the chip world. In contrast in the web world, services can be deployed by the fleetest within 3 to 6 months. Execution in the hardware world is of more critical importance, you can't deploy busloads of consultants armed with duct tape to patch your dodgy chip.

2) When it come to high-performance memory and I/O capabilities, the current sweepstakes has IBM in first, AMD second and Intel in a *distant* third.

As an Lotus/IBMer I should be gratified that you see things in such blue-tinted lenses and perhaps I too should pat myself on my software back. My assessment is that IBM has been happy to have premium pricing and to concentrate on the high end. That is fine as a strategy I suppose, but I'm interested in the ground level and the low end where issues of scale and innovation prevail instead of the scleroticism of the Ivory Tower.

If I took a walk through Google or Yahoo server farms, I doubt I'd see many high-end Power, Itanium or even UltraSparc machines.

The Low End Theory ^[1] is the lesson of Mr Moore in the data center or Jim Gray's Distributed Computing Economics

3) There is a fundamental battle going on between standard and custom parts... Where will the future volumes be? Which markets -- games, TVs, cellophones, cars, etc. -- will go which way?

This is why I call it the The Great Game. It is like the current Scramble for Congo where everyone has heard about the untold riches, copper, gold, diamonds, coltan etc (the armies of 13 countries have been in that failed state searching for plunder over the past decade, and that's before the UN, and the French got on the ground). The Great Powers want to carve out some loot from their chips (silicon after all being sand). And speaking of coltan or tantalite that you'd find in your mobile phone, the cellphone must be the greatest mass market these days the equivalent of the personal computer.

e.g. within this past year, Nigeria installed the infrastructure for 1 million cell phone lines ^[2]. From zero to over a million in a year is stunning and perhaps emblematic of pent up demand for development. I don't know the numbers for India or China, but that is a sign of a mass-market, driving the kind of innovation we used to see in the personal computer world. On this list, there's a periodic argument about whether the US is falling behind Europe, Japan or the growling tigers. It is hard to say but certainly having spent this past weekend in London, I can testify to the ascendancy of the small form factor.

The problem for the chip makers is that the price point for the mobile chips that are being sold to emerging markets is actually quite low, and the concerns are about power consumption and battery life, things that like Detroit's focus on big Cadillacs and now SUVs might make one have to rejigger the strategy and rely on huge volume. On the desktop chip side, they'll be depending on the replacement cycle, my Y2K machine is getting a little long in the tooth, or the move to 64 bit or to dual core (like the hyperthreading buzzwords foreshadowed).

Glad you like AMD -- so do I but there are still many fundamental issues unresolved as we rapidly deploy the next-generation platform and prepare for global expansion in digital services.

What I like is not necessarily the company, indeed, my stockbroker seeing my play portfolio treats me like a dilettante.

What I like is the effect the competition is having on the fundamentals of the industry. The notion that Intel is aggressively courting all and sundry to not jump ship and is rushing out dual core parts and pricing them at a level that must be painful for their cautious CFOs. The notion that Microsoft will actually sit down and support AMD64 so that those RedHat ants from the village of Linux don't get too much of a head start tickles me. The notion that Apple can show a little leg and give everyone their collective titillation quotient at the beginning of the silly season. The notion that executives at IBM have been sweating for the past few weeks trying to stem the flow is great for me. In the trenches were I live, I deal the occasional insane mandates from on high, I like others to share my pain. Plus the users all benefit. I'm looking for a nice box for my grandma and I'm glad to have a little pricing power.

[1] For the musically inclined The Low End Theory is the name of an album by A Tribe Called Quest (in the top 10 albums of the 1990s IMHO). I need to do a proper appreciation of it at some point because it is worth writing about, and at length.

On Mobile Phones in Nigeria

My original statement was

e.g. within this past year, Nigeria installed 1 million cell phone lines.

Ari Ollikainen lept right in

That's a great oxymoron!

Would you mind explaining to me what you actually mean by that sentence?

Did Nigeria install a mobile phone infrastructure capable of supporting a million cellphone conversations SIMULTANEOUSLY?

Or was a mobile phone infrastructure capable of supporting some statistical model of call holding times much << that 1 million?

Or was it a mobile phone infrastructure with an undefined service spec BUT a million cellphones were sold to the public?

Please illuminate me...

My response...

Ah... the joys of rushed emails while the server restarts. But yes a great oxymoron.

I think it was angling towards your 2nd and especially your last characterizations.

"a mobile phone infrastructure with an undefined service spec BUT a million cellphones were sold to the public?"

The actual quote I had was from a minister of neighbouring Ghana and it was

"capacity for 1 million mobile phone lines had been installed and it was fully utilized indeed they are in a mad rush to upgrade their backbone and deploy more cells"

Knowing a little about the situation in my nearby, smaller Ghana where Telenor (from Norway) where have taken over the running Ghana Telecom and are in fierce competition with a couple of other mobile phone operators Spacefon and another that I forget, there must be an element of over-selling of capacity. Spacefon, when they started out maybe 5 years ago, sold several hundred thousand cell phones having only capacity for 100,000 lines. It was rough going back in 2000-1. 5 years later, they and Ghana Telecom have built out their infrastructure to actually match the usage and the pent up demand.

Depending on who you talk to there are 80-100 million people in Nigeria, and landline penetration is known to be beyond abysmal. Knowing also the fervent economic acumen of the land of the 419 scam, it wouldn't surprise me if well say 3-4 million cell phones were sold on an infrastructure that would statistically service 1 million cell phone lines to 'western' standards.

The thing though is this

1. there was no mobile phone infrastructure in Nigeria up until the last few years
2. for the businessmen and farmers who have adopted these mobile phones in droves (and I'll handwave a few million), even though service is of an order that would make westerners scoff, it is plainly Good Enough and certainly far better than the alternatives (having to drive 4 hours on dangerous potholed roads to meet someone at their house just to discuss price or the slightest thing).

Now that you've asked, I'll dig a little further to elucidate my statistics better and perhaps will blog the results...

Thanks for keeping me on my toes...

Thus I have another Lazyweb request. Does anyone have more precise statistics about the cell phone penetration rates in Nigeria in recent years or knowledge about the details of their build out?

This is part of The Great Game of Technology series.

See also: The Low End Theory of Networks

File under: technology, hardware, chips, amd, intel, apple, ibm, sun, microsoft, hp, strategy, software, observation, ga, ghana, coffins, nigeria, mobile, phones, cell, infrastructure, toli

Proverbial Zingers

Further nuggets for the Toli Scrapbook... ala Flaubert's Dictionnaire des Idées Reçus (Dictionary of Received Ideas).

This month's zingers post covers a lot of ground. There has been a veritable effusiveness of jaundiced (and flowery - as my MIT-educated co-worker put it) prose and commentary from this joint on all sorts of topics over the past 6 weeks. I hope these proverbial zingers provide a concise counterpoint or explanation of the threads that weave all of it together.

A skewed outlook on life

He liked his women freshly jilted.

Martin Amis - Heavy Water and other Stories (2000)

See also: Inman Square Still Life

On the advisability (or lack thereof) of sending out withering emails to one's team

..like I just did this past week, and having to deal with the consequent fallout (consignment to the most menial sytem administration duties). Note to self: being right without being judicious is a fool's paradise.

Words are like bullets. When you release them, you can't call them back.

Gambian proverb

An insolent tongue is a bad weapon.

Senegalese proverb

The tongue weighs practically nothing, but so few people can hold it.

Ghanaian proverb

It is a stupid dog that barks at an elephant.

Ugandan proverb

On why I search

Minds are like parachutes, they only function when they are open.

Nigerian proverb

A touch of quasi-religious optimism perhaps

The sun will shine on those who are standing before it shines on those who are sitting.

Liberian proverb

And perhaps a desire for no regrets

The stone that lies at the bottom of the riverbed, cannot complain about feeling cold.

This one from my mother who had a little too much cognac (Christmas day 2003)

On being careful

If you want to improve your memory, lend someone money.

Zimbabwean proverb

When you are surrounded by vultures, try not to die.

Proverb from Cote D'Ivoire

On journalism in Africa

For after all our business is not only to discover wrongdoing, it is our business to expose lies, to expose smears. Not only the lies that public officials tell but the lies that are told about public officials. Much of the instability that has dogged Africa has its roots in the inability of the press to clearly tell the public which of the many rumours are true and which are not true. There is this idea that has taken root that getting access to the facts and making them public will hinder and undermine government, I have heard the argument that much of government is so complicated and so delicate that it is impossible to portray all the intricacies in a newspaper article or radio programme. In an area where democratic practices are yet to take root, I will suggest that it is in the interest of government that things are exposed.

There is a saying in my language that it is difficult for head lice to prosper on a bald man's head. If one were to take the saying further, even though I acknowledge it is dangerous to try to improve upon the sayings of the elders, head lice prosper the most in thick grown hair. Or to coin another phrase, the mould grows where the sun rays don't get to.

In the Public Eye (November 1998) - Thoughts on the difficulties faced by African journalists in obtaining public information

On The Importance Of Biting Satire

I like my satire savage. It should be vicious, biting and deeply heartfelt. The targets should feel a sharp wound.

The whimsical and comic artefacts of the best satirists are side-benefits; their purpose is really to serve as social barometers and canaries in the mineshafts of our communities.

See also Bolton's Hair: No Brush With Greatness
And 3 days later: Is John Bolton Going Down?

On the prescience of the best satirists

With apologies to Michael Froomkin, this is what I meant...

Sir Edward cheered up... It was worth decanting a really good claret. Besides he had a theory to explain why Lady Thatcher was such a passionate advocate of arming the Bosnian Muslims. Her son was an arms dealer and by backing the Muslims so openly she was bound to help dear little Markie's standing in Saudi Arabia. It was in the discovery of real motivation in politics that Sir Edward Gilmott-Gwyre found his greatest pleasure.

Tom Sharpe, The Midden (1996)

Gotcha!

Sir Mark Thatcher has pleaded guilty in South Africa to being negligent in investing in an aircraft said to have been used by people allegedly plotting a coup in Equatorial Guinea.

Equatorial Guinea 'coup plot' (January 2005)

Ergo Strange Bedfellows and the Journalistic Impulse

On language

Asankasa: noun.

1. a radio. From the Ewe language of Ghana, literally rendered it means "The bird who sings"; circa 1930s

2. a later sub-sense, circa 1960-63, in which the words from the radio should not be trusted; said new meaning arising when Kwame Nkrumah's true colours were shown e.g. the propaganda of a one-par