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

Lamppost

lamppost: verb. To lamppost someone is to sneak up in the middle of the night to the foot of their bed (typically along with willing co-conspirators), grip its frame and lift the bed up in a swift motion until it is fully vertical. When performed correctly, the (typically) sleeping occupant of the bed will be projected in a curvilinear flight path leaving him (victims are typically male), after the working of gravity, the rotational energy thus imparted, and subsequent collision and rebound with the back wall and/or floor (cushioned somewhat by covering duvet or blanket), lying upside down on his head, bruised by the impact and rudely awoken by this quite literal upheaval.

As far as the etymology of the term goes, the lamppost designation comes from the upright look of the bed once it reaches its final position. Lamppost thus has a sense of transformation, the repurposing of beds into utility poles and, linguistically, of a noun to a verb. It suggests movement from rest into action and a catapult effect of sorts.

Sample usage: "Why don't we lamppost Tiny Tim after lights out?"

With regard to the history of this peculiar tradition, my investigations revealed only that it is ancient. It certainly was part of the curious lore of the secondary school I attended thus perhaps this practice might extend all the way back to 1597. The name, I suspect, is of a more recent vintage.

The laws of physics come into play when one lampposts and it becomes a matter of weight, force, materials and torque. Lampposting is best performed on lighter weight human beings sleeping on single beds, say with a metallic bedframe on lightly waxed wooden floors to lessen the friction. Thus in a dorm room of teenage boys, the youngest and leanest are likely and frequent targets. More satisfying however are the cases when the young ones combine to exact vengence on elder tormentors although, in these instances, one has to balance the strength of the former against the size and weight of the latter - and the prospect of retribution.

If you've ever been lampposted you are well aware about how quickly friends can become enemies. That instant when you lose contact with the mattress is a signal moment of clarity in that regard. Defensive measures against the practice include feigning sleep or sleeping with one eye open - alert for the sight or sound of rushing predators, and deftly jumping out of bed before (or even as) the bed is being raised. It is good therefore to make sure that bedsheets are not fully tucked in thus thwarting your escape.

I am relatively famous in a certain crowd for having remained asleep for almost a minute post-impact in this inverted vertical posture after a quite cruel lampposting. My case was a novel twist to the practice; the victim is meant to swiftly groan, curse appropriately lamenting his misfortune (and pain), gather up mattress, pillows and blankets and find some way to bring the bed to its formerly horizontal position. The lords of the flies who dealt with me on that occasion were disappointed by the lack of reaction and worried that neither the bed nor I would be restored before the authorities might make their appearance to investigate the commotion.

Pranks of varying degrees of ingenuity occur in any playground and community. Sometimes of course, lines are crossed from rituals of sorts into, well let's be frank, bullying. Thus hazing is a commonplace from army barracks to boarding schools. Human behaviour is endlessly fascinating and we have all sorts of ridiculous traditions that seem to stick around. I suppose that this impulse could also be translated into our politics and diplomacy. Certainly certain coalitions of the willing are apt to lamppost other nations just because they can - these are affectionately called wars of choice, but I digress.

I'll admit having lampposted a couple of people in my time. In mitigation about being an object lesson on man's propensity for appalling behaviour, I should say for what it's worth that I was a victim of said practice probably ten times (although I managed to escape half the time).

The worst lamppost I can remember witnessing was of someone whose arm had been placed in a cast just that day. To lamppost him that same night seemed a touch excessive if not cruel. It was too painful for him to maneuver out of bed even as it was lifted. I still regret not having warned the poor guy; my instinct for self-preservation had led me to leap out of my bed and, once satisfied, that I wasn't that night's target, I simply watched the rushing hordes step into action. The slingshot effect, the flight, the terrible sound...

One other irony I should mention: the most enthusiastic lampposter I knew went on to become a policeman in later life, perhaps indicating something about the likelihood of brutality and trigger-happiness in his chosen profession.

In later years I did my part in trying to curb the practice with invocations of the golden rule, love thy neighbour, do unto others etc. My results were middling. Oh well...

A few nights ago as I was falling asleep, I heard a crashing sound and rapid footsteps approaching and almost instinctively rolled out of bed. It was a false alarm, the upstairs neighbours or something and an acoustic trick. Still, I was transported back 20 years and the word returned to me. I laughed at first at the vivid memories - perhaps that was the zaniness of the act, the uplift as it were. Then I remembered the typical aftermath (picking up the pieces), shook my head and headed back to bed. I kept the sheets loose just in case.

Soundtrack for this note

• Loose Ends - Hangin' on a String (Contemplating)

  What did I do wrong?
  It's all a mystery to me

  The breakthrough song from one of my favourite soul groups - a song that set the tone for the British soul that followed. The subtitle is "contemplating".

File under: language, memory, neologism, tradition, behaviour, ritual, absurd, England, communities, youth, toli

Voices Inside

Part 4 of the Things Fall Apart series - in which we head to the library...

There is no African writer more loved, or indeed more influential, than Chinua Achebe. Wole Soyinka, Nadine Gordimer and J.M. Coetzee were the ones who won the Nobel Prizes (they were all preceded by Naguib Mahfouz of course) and, along with him and a few others, form the canon of the continent's literature (an arbitrary list). Yet, if there is such a thing as conventional wisdom on the African street, Papa Achebe is the people's champion and those others are in the ivory tower. I may admire Soyinka's virtuosity and the sharpness of his intellect (and especially the dramas) but Achebe has my heart. It's not about complexity or even readability - Achebe's narratives are sometimes as layered as the others, it's rather a more direct and emotional affinity with the reader. To apply a musical analogy to the Achebe-Soyinka dichotomy, our man Chinua is Count Basie to Wole's Duke Ellington, the Donny Hathaway to their Stevie Wonder. Or on the comedic front, he's Richard Pryor to Soyinka's Bill Cosby... Well, insert your own heroes if you will, you get the idea: we love them in different ways.

Things Fall Apart remains his most popular novel and has the aura of inevitability that that comes with being the one book about Africa that everyone recommends. There's also the orthodoxy of being assigned reading for many African school children. I tend to prefer A Man of the People or Anthills of the Savannah as I find these later novels more nuanced. Still, like many, I return to Things Fall Apart time and again.

Re-reading it recently, one appreciates the craft with which Achebe constructed his classic tale. It remains one of the most miraculous first novels, a story that possesses great emotional weight. It is specific yet universal, steeped in Igbo traditions but instantly recognizable to all who encounter it. What interests me are the messages that people have taken away from the novel hence I won't rehearse the plot here. The structure though is worth commenting on since it fits the classical heroic frame. There are three parts, in the first, the hero (or anti-hero) depending on your viewpoint is introduced at home and the seeds are sown for conflict, then there is Exile and we end with The Return and the climatic confrontation.

The shocks, as they come, simmer. In the back of your mind you vaguely expected them - the novel after all is called things fall apart. You are greeted in the epigraph with W.B. Yeats' poem, The Second Coming, and the line

Things Fall Apart; The Centre Cannot Hold

Still you can't brace yourself enough for them and this is due to the skill of a great writer. You are drawn into the world, almost lulled by the complexities of the traditions depicted. I wonder if it's the descriptions of daily life, the minutiae of rural life, that disarm you. It's much like reading African Cultural Values except it's rendered as virtuoso storytelling rather than a dry philosophy textbook. To be sure, the world depicted is not idyllic, the difficulties are much like Billie Holiday sang, it's not the "pastoral scenes of the gallant South". The shocks are described as a matter of fact but are not dwelled on - perhaps this is why they leave such an impression. As a reader, you want the author to focus on the calamity to help you internalize it. Achebe doesn't give you that satisfaction. True, he will come back to the act later on and will demonstrate its effect - if obliquely, but the point is that life goes on, a rich life force keeps on moving despite everything. The novel is a sly commentary on attitudes and idées fixes about Africa - notions which tend to dwell on the undoubted unraveling that does occur at the expense of the individual stories.

What I had long remembered about Things Fall Apart was the encounter with Europe, the ongoing struggle with the increasingly assertive and proselytizing missionaries backed by a faraway administration. The clash with colonialism and all its trappings: power imbalances, divide-and-conquer, and other tropes. In short, in my memory the novel was a fictionalized counterpart to Adu-Boahen's African Perspectives on Colonialism. This is actually a mistaken impression; that aspect is only a small part of the novel and resonates so memorably only because the novel closes very powerfully - Achebe is a strong finisher. The main thrust and the bulk of the novel is drawing out the African's perspective on things - and what a perspective. Colonialism may weigh heavily but it is treated as a footnote.

The narrative is about the sometimes bewildering encounters of tradition and modernity. There are details about the way conflicts arise and are resolved between clans and towns, hints about the struggle with the elements, the capricious weather that often leads to food insecurity, the crops that demand perpetual care. The belief system is laid out as is the occasionally faulty biology as exemplified in the way some societies deal with twins. The choice of language is crucial here in highlighting the descriptions. Achebe's authorial voice is simple, deliberate, and slightly stiff, as if passing through a translation phase. The language points to a culture of rich intensity. Things Fall Apart reads like a fable and perhaps this is where the story draws its universal appeal.

A constant risk in writing about Africa is the overuse of metaphor, or casting a wide net. Achebe, like all writers, wrote primarily for himself but also as a reaction to what he read. His first novel is a subversive commentary about metaphorical excess and cultural projections. Paradoxically the novel itself is often seen as a metaphor. The allusive style of writing contributes to the universality of the message. In this way though, it falls in the realm of philosophy something that I think is its only failing.

I will always marvel at the sting of the story's end. The rapidity of the collapse of the proverbial center is accompanied with sardonic asides - note well the satirizing of noblesse oblige. The colonial administrators entirely miss the story and speak at cross purposes. They haven't heard any of the voices that were so ably articulated.

Now of course African literature has moved on in the past half century and even around the time he wrote it, there were many other strands. Others were more playful with language; some dealt with urbanization and the lure of the city. To be sure Achebe is influential but so are many others and African voices continue to emerge. In many African countries there isn't much of an internal audience of readers but good writing does find a way out and one reason is the precedent of the response to Things Fall Apart.

Chinua Achebe's great achievement is to portray a textured Africa - one that is not an undifferentiated mass as seen from the outside. Those villagers in the distance have the same concerns as everyone and are at once mediating modernity and picking and choosing what elements to absorb. He writes from the inside and highlights the ongoing inner dialogues. These days the external forces may be slightly different but they remain mostly unseen: globalization, that thing called the market, or even, dare I say, terrorism. Achebe's response is not to dwell on them but rather to change the perspective. The lesson of Things Fall Apart is to complicate everyone's picture of Africa. Needless to say, I love his brand of complication.

I'll suggest here a musical counterpart to Things Fall Apart: Donny Hathaway's 1970 album Everything is Everything. It too was a quite miraculous debut and influential in its own way. If Hathaway didn't get quite get the pervasive cultural impact of Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder, he was in the middle of things, the consummate musician's musician, a wonderful singer and a great and talented composer.

The title song, Voices Inside (Everything is Everything), features one of the most exuberant grooves in the canon. It cuts to the chase, to the essence and the bass. Rendered live in four movements, it ends with one of the most quoted bass solos ever by Willie Weeks. You don't need many lyrics when the music is this strong and infectious. All you need to sing is a minimalist "I Hear Voices / I See People" and let the feeling that you evoke speak for itself.

It is a complete and cohesive album satisfying from beginning to end. Donny Hathaway's artistry is one that emerged fully formed and the proof is that assured manner in which he ends the album - he too knows how to close and the B-side of the album must rank in the pantheon. As a sidenote, I miss the way in which musicians could play with sequencing and moods in the LP format something that has been lost in the move from LP to CD and now to the song-at-a-time present. Consider this four song punch.

First there is direct social commentary in the driving blues of Tryin' Times which covers riots, wars, the "confusion all over the land" and "a whole lot of things that's wrong going down". It's a simple yet poignant lament of "man's inhumanity to man".

Thank You Master (For My Soul) takes you to church a place where a lot of soul music gets its emotional depth. It is memorable not least for the vocal performance but also for the pure gospel celebration of life.

After church, we head back to The Ghetto. Now the ghetto is obviously not a pleasant place, by definition it is where things are falling apart - the school of hard knocks. Still the artistry of the urban griot soundtrack that Donny Hathaway and others produced in the seventies was in humanizing the ghetto's inhabitants and making those voices inside heard. We hear the children crying, the hearty laughter and the disputes. Still instead of being overbearingly dark and scary, you get the sense of an entire world inside. The affirmative twist is in the parenthetical asides, those floating voices. They may sound cacophonous but they are vibrant and as richly textured as any.

The album ends with him making Nina Simone and Irvine Weldon's anthem his own, taking it to church, lacing the song with organ instead of his customary Fender-Rhodes. The title of the song reflects the changing of perspective, the acknowledgment of all of the individualized talent, it is a title that Chinua Achebe would surely nod his head to in approval, the title of course: To Be Young, Gifted And Black.

Next in part 5: Heart of Darkness

File under: Africa, literature, perception, Chinua Achebe, tradition, modernity, culture, Things Fall Apart, griot, music, soul, Donny Hathaway, review, essay, toli

On Blogging at IBM

Fellow traveler, James Snell, points out IBM's newly published blogging guidelines and policies:

You can read them at length there, they seem fairly reasonable, even if couched in the obligatory corporate PR self-congratulatory bromides about "innovation-based companies". I wonder, are there any companies that claim to be anti-innovation?

Blogging@IBM

IBM blogging policy and guidelines

Responsible Engagement in Innovation and Dialogue

1. Know and follow IBM's Business Conduct Guidelines.
2. Blogs, wikis and other forms of online discourse are individual interactions, not corporate communications. IBMers are personally responsible for their posts. Be mindful that what you write will be public for a long time -- protect your privacy.
   [snip]

Use your best judgment... Ultimately, however, you have sole responsibility for what you choose to post to your blog.

Don't forget your day job. You should make sure that blogging does not interfere with your job or commitments to customers.

The day job injunction is one about focus. When it comes to Freedom of Expression, companies know that they can't control what someone does on their own time and indeed that it can make the workplace a happier one if employees can pursue their muses. My own management chain have worried periodically about my focus. It hasn't been much use telling them that the Technology toli is actually my attempt to gain ideas that feed back into the day job or indeed that I've been blogging about Forms Glue of late. Or even that my education has been all about learning to handle balance and coping with daily insanity of which there is much in large bureacracies. Some just look at the blog and get scared by the veritable outpourings in this land. "How can he possibly write all this they must be asking?" Well I do have weekends, mornings and nights, right? At least I hope I do... Of late the 5am to 7am shift while drinking tea, reading the news and enjoying the early morning sun has been very productive and prolific. Thus at best they can only give a gentle reminder, day job doesn't even get a number in the guidelines.

The good news is that I have only pressed against the spirit of a couple of these guidelines. The one about "Clients, partners or suppliers should not be cited or obviously referenced without their approval" in particular.

And for these I would invoke the "Use your best judgement" plank as a justification.

I like to link. Like the hyphen, the hyperlink is promiscuous, sociable and an assertion of interest. Hyperlinking is the singular power of the web style; a link shares the googlejuice around and often shows that a human has made a judgment. The judgment is value neutral and doesn't imply anything other than interest (or sometimes dissent). The controversies over linking, deep-linking will continue to be fought until this is more widely understood. Links also get spammed but that's another story. A shout out to The Power of the Schwartz or to Sun & Sun (a frequent victim of The Ampersand Curse) is just that: a shout out. I certainly am not going to seek approval to link to these fine folks.

And as far as picking fights goes, it often isn't the wisest thing but sometimes it serves to clear the air (see On The Importance of Biting Satire for example). I've noted:

Sometimes you have to resort to the down and dirty column.

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

Less said on that however.

I would say a similar thing about the "Use a disclaimer" item. This is a weasely concession by overly freaked-out folks to keep lawyers employed. I do recognize that the things I cross-post at the official Inside Lotus blog should have a different tenor, coming as they do from company hosted facilities and presumably, in that respect, I am acting as the public face of Lotus. Thus I take a greater care with my words in the toli that surfaces on that forum.

On the other hand, I think it is obvious that an individual doesn't speak for a company.

In legal terms, and as the son of a lawyer, I can confidently say that a disclaimer adds no value or protection whatsoever. If someone objects to your blog post, website or email, and if they have deep pockets (say the Scientologists for example), they can, and will sue willy-nilly and tie you up in court, protestations of disclaimer notwithstanding. The wonder of the lawyer lobby is that it manages to keep risk aversion and litigation at such a high pitch in the cultural zeitgeist. It is true that oftentimes, the market will tar you with the brush of guilt by association; in economic terms therefore it is wise for companies to worry about such things. But a certain humanity is often lost by blandly avoiding controversy. There are many a company with Strange Bedfellows all over the world (whether it is in the pursuit of oil, gold or blood diamonds, paying bribes to people while later tarring said countries with the brush of corruption. It takes two to do the corruption tango.

If you really did believe (as for example many executives did in the apartheid era) that it was imperative to share in the fruits of the sweat and tears of others - sanctions be damned! like Reagan and Thatcher maintained) then one should indeed expect swift retribution from the marketplace if appropriately sensitized. I remember Barclays Bank paying a heavy price in the 1980s for such an attitude (and it is only 19 years later that they are emboldened to return to South Africa). I can think of many such examples and perhaps you could point me to your favourites e.g. watching a nice liberal mother explain to her 4 year old son why the Del Monte can of peaches from South Africa had to be put back on the shelf and the Waitrose brand peaches (without the colourful logo) substituted, circa 1988 in Brent Cross shopping centre in London.

Now employee blogging is much the same as employee use of any technology, be it phone, email or the web. Oftentimes, the use of said technology can be very productive and useful (in moderation) and indeed it can sometimes save lots of time and keep the employee focused on corporate business. If I'm able to arrange renewal of my license over the phone or the web during my lunch break, I presumably wouldn't have to take an afternoon off work to head to the DMV. I recently joked in passing about how I recently had to respond to an anonymous email from some department or other to justify maintaining my office phone since it had seen relatively little activity in this era of instant messaging and email. It is incidents like that that lead people to talk all too often about "faceless corporations". That legal fiction of personhood is frequently invoked by companies but often conveniently forgotten when the lights go out.

American society is deeply litigious and gets stuck on the notion of explicit adherance to the letter of the law as opposed to the European notion of staying within the spirit of the law and letting an experienced judiciary adjudicate when the boundaries are overstepped. This means that there is a vast industry of tax and accountancy lawyers who specialize in weaseling out of the letter of the law with new tax shelter products every year engaged in an arms race with the IRS.

In this vein I would suggest that if Lotus was Old Europe, that IBM is heartland America, a New World of slightly puritanical rectitude. Coming from a culture that is often reacting to the fights between these two elephants, I would say that each approach has its merits and that perhaps the grass should have some say in these things.

Sometimes of course, this excessive concern for litigation has benefits for society, for the greater good as it were. Cambridge sidewalks tend to get cleared fairly quickly when it snows since people who twist their ankles and fall in front of your house will get their 50 cents and more in legal revenge. In comparison, English and French sidewalks were treacherous in the winter time - it often felt like a tightrope or walking the plank (in my tradition of metaphorical excess). There is also huge innovation in the kinds of cups that are used for coffee to prevent litigation-induced scalding. I don't drink coffee but I am amazed at what I see people holding when they walk out of Dunkin Donuts or Starbucks. It's Nuclear Star Wars leading to good old Teflon all over again.

The 401K account, which is about the only thing other than the plain providential, and literal, lottery, that Americans will have for retirement if Dubya and Cheney have their way with Social Security - what with their continued focused and highly selective war-mongering, and deficit spending like proverbial Palm Wine Drinkards, is just a case in point about this phenomenon. A lawyer took a look at the tax code, found a loophole and now every dinner table conversation is about the 401K. Following up on the same idea, it is plain fact that the Roth IRA is the most popular political and economic innovation of the past decade. Bless you Senator Roth, wherever you are, you citizen you.

On the other hand this is the same tendency that leads to much inhibition. The US has half of the world's supply of lawyers and the world's largest insurance industry and for good reason. I shouldn't even mention the reinsurance industry and the whole stack of derivative products founded on this litigious risk mitigation tendancy.

Playground swings are no longer as fun since manufacturers have shortened the rope to prevent high velocity and now parents will strap you in like a pilot. Where is the thrill of youthful daredevil inventiveness going, I ask? My cousin famously broke his arm as a child on our playground swing and he is much the better for it. He bacame a far more sensitive soul once he had to be confined to a cast and realized his limitations and the wisdom of the repeated warnings of his parents and entire family. Actually it was the traditional healers of his father's village of Taviefe in the Volta region of Ghana who set his arm in place, armed with their inimitable herbs and centuries-old experience. We turned to tradition as opposed to modernity. A great respect for tradition and confidence in his roots was fostered in this experiece. Certainly in family lore we all know better where we come from.

I can't imagine my Auntie Grace filing a lawsuit against the swing manufacturer, or her sister in whose backyard the great swing was to be found, or perhaps even her nephew, me, who was in attendance at the fateful fall and who didn't intervene. That however is the degenerate kind of thing that would happen, and does happen fairly frequently in the US where the ties of family and societal culture are sometimes loosened into anomie.

There are already far too many emails emanating from corporate accounts with noxious disclaimers, clogging up mailing lists everywhere and causing comprehension problems. They are a public nuisance and there is no reason to add further disclaimers to the mix.

As you might have guessed, I dissent on that front, my Blogger profile simply says "Oh, and I work at Lotus/IBM". The Girlfriend Fiancée says that that tag line is "a little unprofessional" but it wasn't chosen without care. This joint is an individual one, this is a someone's voice you are hearing, engaging and thinking aloud in public conversation.

I think that suffices. What do you think?

Update: My friend Justin adds some Mediocre Indian Cuisine to the advertising mix. Join me in welcoming another jaundiced Lotus/IBMer to the blogosphere. He started the blog before these newfangled stamp of approval thingimijigs were published and we are all the better for it.

There is another post lurking about where and how people at IBM blog, but that's another conversation for another early morning, right Tessa?

Soundtrack for this tale: Brooklyn Zoo by ODB


File under: blogging, ibm, policy, culture, Lotus, law, freedom, history, communities, life, politics, economics, business, corporations, ghana, roots, tradition, technology, toli

Tradition and Modernity

A very good article on tradition and modernity by Justus Amadiegwu in the Guardian going over the nexus between superstition, tradition and modernity in Nigeria - this applies equally well to what I've lived through and know of Africa.

I thank God I am still here

I should be dead by now; my twin brother is. You could say I am living on borrowed time, but I prefer to say I am blessed.

Decades ago, my mother committed the then unpardonable sin of giving birth to twins. To western couples, particularly those on IVF, the joy of multiple births is tempered only by recalculation of the household budget; to an Igbo parent in those days, however, there was only one outcome of bearing twins or triplets: the babies' instant death.

There can be no greater contrast of cultural norms than the one between my life as a Nigerian in London and my Igbo upbringing

I am from Imo state but my wife is from Okija, Anambra. The town hit the news earlier this month when 50 bodies and human remains were discovered in the latest ritual killing. Some of the victims were mummified but at least four had been killed recently.

The international media were enthralled by the body count and tales of 'black' magic. It had taken a common murderer fraudulently plying his trade as a dibia, or witchdoctor, no time at all to traduce the traditions of the Igbo people.

The practice of worshipping idols is embedded in the culture. It was part of our ancestors' way of life for hundreds of years before the arrival of the white man and the Christian religion.

Paganism, idol worship, consulting oracles: I have practised them all and seen many things in the process, though I am now a Christian. [...]

Although I have moved away from many of the traditions of my fathers, there are some that remain with me and that I hope to pass on to my own children.

For example, Igbo tradition requires that before a couple who profess to be in love get married, the background of the potential family must be investigated.

If the family are found to belong to the Osuhs or Ohus, they are immediately rejected and the marriage proposal is automatically annulled. This is also the case if there is a history of sudden deaths, madness or long-term illnesses such as MS, leprosy or sickle-cell anaemia.

Talkativeness (especially in women) and flirtatiousness are equally undesirable characteristics and further causes for rejection.

Once the investigation is complete and the family has been cleared of all these traits, the couple receive the blessing of both families to proceed with the engagement.

Yes, mumbo-jumbo - ogwu, otumokpo, juju, voodoo - really does exist in some Nigerian traditions

I have lived through some of these things and I thank God that I am still here to tell the tale.

The context for the article is a touch morbid - ritual killings - obvious fodder for the tabloids - I would have wanted an unprompted commissioning of such an article since this is well worth discussing at any time. He does touch on the guts of the issue: that there is such a thing as culture and tradition and it is a powerful force in human affairs and it informs, competes with, and sometimes overwhelms those other forces in modern life: science, and mathematics, religion, capitalism, economics etc.

What's in the cultural mix as you grow up often translates into your so-called 'values' and has a great deal of influence on your behavior. Thus superstition is alive-and-well even in the highly developed West: What is the fear of Friday the 13th, after all? Why do so many buildings not have a 13th floor? Why is there no #13 in my apartment building? Opportunist politicians the world over exploit these tendencies in the rhetoric of their nationalistic/populist appeals. Dismissing people as pagan or primitive barely captures their essential complexity.

Superstition looms large in African popular culture. In appealing to local, oftentimes rural, audiences, the artist in traditional societies needs to draw on the motifs the audience is dealing with. Consequently African films, music, poetry and fiction cover this territory incessantly sometimes poking fun at these traditional belief systems sometimes lamenting their loss as they intersect with the modern world. This seeps out also into daily life, take for example this recent piece

Panic at Nigerian 'killer calls'

Nigerian mobile phone users have been anxiously checking who is calling them before answering them in recent days.
A rumour has spread rapidly in the commercial capital, Lagos, that if one answers calls from certain "killer numbers" then one will die immediately.

A BBC reporter says experts and mobile phone operators have been reassuring the public via the media that death cannot result from receiving a call.

He says that in such a superstitious country unfounded rumours are common. A list of alleged killer numbers has been circulated but no-one is reported to have died from answering the phone.

The BBC's reporter in Lagos, Sola Odunfa, says that the current scare story is reminiscent of a rumour that spread a few years ago that a handshake could cause sexual organs to disappear.

That rumour turned to tragedy as mobs rounded on people accused of making organs disappear. Despite the massive public interest, no-one was found to have lost their organs.

My uncle used to teach a course on these issues 30 years ago at the Harvard Law School looking at it from the legal standpoint (namely how to negotiate issues of law in the context of traditional authority and mores). To this day, this is probably what his students most remember him for, not his legal acuity or insight, but rather this meaty and almost sociological issue and the endless conversation and anecdotes it evokes.

My dad's friend, the philosopher Kwame Gyekye, has the standard academic works in this area at least as it relates to Africa: the general textbook African Cultural Values: An Introduction and the more heavyweight research Tradition and Modernity: Philosophical Reflections on the African Experience.

Both are well worth reading to brood over the essential complexity of human behviour. Although I've now lived 2 thirds of my life outside Africa, I can't deny the powerful appeal of some of those traditions. I may live the hi-tech software engineer's life, pose as the jaded and skeptical intellectual but African cultural traditions, warts and all, still contribute to this Koranteng's Toli thing.

See Also: The Nigerian Elections - A matter of confidence

File under: Africa, tradition, modernity, religion, superstition, culture, values, psychology, philosophy