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 tendencies 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 learned 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 commissioned 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 possessions 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, McDonald's 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 renowned 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, appropriation, naming, Ghana Must Go, Things Fall Apart, Social Living, toli

Observers are Worried

I. Ancient History

Item: Stevie Wonder records Happy Birthday on his 1980 album, Hotter Than July, to lobby for a public holiday for Martin Luther King, Jr..

Dig: President Reagan signs legislation creating Martin Luther King, Jr. Day in 1983

Paul Krugman observes:

In 1980, when Ronald Reagan won the White House, conservative ideas appealed to many, even most, Americans. At the time, we were truly a middle-class nation. To white voters, at least, the vast inequalities and social injustices of the past, which were what originally gave liberalism its appeal, seemed like ancient history.

Would history repeat itself, one wondered? Let's pursue an alternate history, if you will. After the maudlin Ebony and Ivory (1982) with Sir Paul, there was a slight pause.

Then: Stevie Wonder releases Skeletons from his Characters album in 1987, raising his voice about the South African situation.

Skeletons in your closet / Itchin' to come outside / Messin' with your conscience / In a way your face can't hide

Effect?: The apartheid government of South Africa begins secret negotiations with Nelson Mandela and company in 1988. Mandela is released two years later and becomes president of the country after the ANC wins the 1994 elections.

The power of latter day Stevie has long been noted; historians would do well to study his writings as they tease out landmarks from our cultural history. Still, along with the passage of MLK day, the USA got the ongoing Reagan retrenchment - mitigated in part by Monsieur Clinton. Guilt was assuaged: first they got votes and affirmative action, then they got the TV mini-series, and now they've even got the holiday. Reversing the perspective, I can imagine the T-shirt:

I fought for civil rights and all I got was a lousy holiday.

On the South African business, Stevie had impeccable timing, ignoring if you will the multitude who joined in that long and ongoing struggle. They say that every thing that happened before 1994 has been reconciled with truth, right? Indeed that chorus started long before the 1994 handover. We still hear it:

Move on, it's all ancient history.

II. Right on Time

Item:

Jacob Weisberg's writing represents the just before banal of the center left in the United States. This is not to say that Mr. Weisberg is stupid, merely that by the time he writes something, there is a vast "The End" spray painted on the wall. He says something just as it is about to become common knowledge.

— Stirling Newberry - The Unspeakable Truth discussing the received wisdom in American media and political circles in March 2007, namely that the Iraq war was a mistake

Dig: Barely weeks later, Joe Klein declared George W. Bush unfit to lead.

Per Newberry's spectrum of banality, Klein should be counted as being merely banal. One awaits the post-banal.

III. Risk Avoidance

Only posterity is unkind to the man of conventional wisdom, and all posterity does is bury him in a blanket of neglect.

— John Kenneth Galbraith discussing inequality in The Affluent Society, 1958

Dig the soul singer:

Predicting the loss
before I begin
So it don't cut too deep
when I don't win
I hate it when I'm right
Much rather be wrong
I'd rather be wrong

— Amel Larrieux - Mountain of When, 2006

IV. The Bully Pulpit

Ancient history
Idées fixes
Aspirations of prescience

Firm pronouncements of Praetorian guards
Breathless headlines of received wisdom
Platitudinous laments

Ride the wave, over the edge
Light as a feather
That's how the cookie crumbles

Quibbling a la carte
Trend-surfing alacrity
Toothless prophecy

Polemics of convenience
Shrink-wrapped profundity
Trailblazers of the trade winds

Timing is everything
Observers are worried

File under: observation, reflection, USA, ephemera, perception, opportunists, culture, hatchet job, selective amnesia, poetry, Africa, South Africa, colonialism, shell game, great game, Observers are worried, toli

Crawl Before You Walk

I've been working for the past 18 months in the "emerging web technologies" group at IBM. When I first joined, I was struck by a certain difference in attitude compared to my previous experiences at Lotus. "Eh?", I'd almost hear my colleagues say silently whenever I'd start discussing the merits of any technology. When they responded, there'd be a quite jaundiced sound in their voices. You'd notice the slightly arched eyebrow and perhaps a tightening of the mouth. It wasn't quite incredulity but it was fairly close to wariness. I speculated that this tendency was born of years evaluating countless Next Big Things and was simply the posture of experts and futurologists: "What are you selling this time? Tell me something new...". They've seen standards come and go and the various fashions that sweep the technology world. The group is a little guerrilla outpost of pragmatism, if you will, within Big Blue.

I am fairly cynical about buzzwords and the mechanics of technology adoption, but even my experiences of the Lotus side of things hadn't made me that skeptical. In any case I mention this because I was recently merrily surfing away and came upon the following bullet item in a laundry list of proposed features for Java Server Faces (JSF) 2.0.

Allow for bookmarkable JSF pages. More broadly, if HTTP GET can be used, it should be used.

Quite simply I caught myself saying "Eh? Eh!". My normally sedate eyebrows even arched violently. I couldn't help it.

I haven't closely followed the technology known as JSF, but I think if you wanted to quickly evaluate its prospects as an 'emerging web technology', you could do well to simply dwell on what I've highlighted. Its history, its rate of adoption, its maturity and perhaps even its future prospects are fully encapsulated in that most remarkable passage.

It is striking that it is only in its fifth year of existence that a framework for building web applications is considering allowing bookmarking and might even use the HTTP GET method where applicable.

How can one possibly develop successfully for the web without identifying important resources? That is the first plank of the REST elevator pitch. If you can't bookmark, if you can't cache, if you are invisible to intermediaries, you are willfully ignoring the web.

Technology toli readers might remember an intervention and case study on internalizing the REST style that focused on much the same aspect in the case of WebSphere Portal and its first 3 years of existence. The benefits that I outlined once the portal embraced the web are much the same that will accrue to JSF. Ed Burns and company seem to have staged a REST intervention on JSF. Head nods to them.

My first encounter with JSF was when it was announced at JavaOne in 2002. The name seemed funny ("faces" instead of interfaces?) but I'd seen worse. My snap judgement: yet another framework for building web interfaces, oh well, the more competition the better, we'll see how it pans out.

I note that I've only mentioned JSF once: outlining how its abstractions leaked mightily when it came to html buttons and forms. Three years ago, we had been forced to use it in our forms work because it was deemed "strategic" in the IBM Software Group. I didn't have the clout to affect the decision and, well, I worked to get something to ship to customers. Inwardly however I discounted that project's prospects of success based on my experience with the first releases of JSF. A demo that looks good will get you in the door; an application that works well will actually get deployed and used by Real People™.

In the same piece, I referenced the reaction to the release of Google Web Accelerator and the way it highlighted the large number of web frameworks that were ignoring the basic principles of the web architecture. It seems that those frameworks that were deployed on the broad web and whose flaws were publicly exposed in that episode took that lesson to heart. Their creators have begun internalizing the web style to its core. To take an obvious example, the latest releases of Ruby on Rails seem to be almost religious in the fervour for the gospel of REST.

I suspect that JSF wasn't widely deployed outside of 'enterprises' two years ago hence the outcry that many other frameworks faced to "fix your damn code" wasn't heard. It appears that the message has since been conveyed and that fateful item speaks volumes. REST it is. Sun is going full bore towards embracing the web. And about time too.

Laissez-faire Dynamics

I have described REST, the web style, as being laissez faire distributed computing.

This is a blessing in that its laissez faire approach has the virtue of encouraging participation by as many people as possible. Indeed its embodiment in HTTP might be one of the most successful cases of technology adoption we have seen.

To pursue an argument by analogy on the other hand, I'll note that markets regularly fail. There are the temptations of monopolies seeking rents and that the economics of affluence and attention apply. There are bad faith actors, and you need to create spaces for market lubricants: price discrimination, market makers, arbitrage etc. Income inequality, trickle down economics are widely seen when we fetishize all things laissez faire. Still, there is almost no market which is fully laissez faire; we have laws and regulations even in the freest of markets.

The reigning tension of the low end theory is between participation and control. REST, in favouring participation almost to a fault, enforces very minimal regulations. HTTP is abused daily and advocates of the web style would catch hernias if they dwelled on the extent of the abuse and didn't simply get on with things. You'll only see gentle prodding in my handwaving take at Arrested Development

• Identify all important resources
• Use the correct verb
• Respect browser conventions
• Layer Stripping and Radical Simplification

There's no coercion in these suggestions. REST is all carrot and no stick. Now the thing is that once you've imbibed the web style and embraced its minimal restrictions, you don't look back and all those externalities begin to accrue. Based on the urgency of that bullet point, I am fully confident that the next few releases of JSF will be bonafide Next Big Things ®.

Most of us had to crawl before we walked, or fall off the bike a few times before we learned how to ride. I only wish that certain technologies would fail faster or at least blunt their noses earlier. Contact with a mass audience on the web seems to be essential in this respect and this presents a dilemma.

Big companies have credibility by virtue of heft and inertia when it comes to purchasing decisions - the technologies they promote get in the door almost by default. Those who sell to big companies also know that, so long as they make the right noises about the strategic direction they are going in, they will get the benefit of the doubt. I would argue that this is only true in times of affluence. When we are all minding our purses, we look more closely at these things and will use what is expedient. Contrast the spread of web native applications like wikis to vertically integrated teamrooms and content management systems. Moreover, the web radically levels the playing field. In the decade or more since the web was adopted as the preferred platform, we have witnessed an inversion of emphasis due to its vastly wider audience and scale.

I'm reminded of the words of a fellow traveller.

I suppose I'd call myself a pragmatist.

I do whatever works. I strive to fail faster. It's the results that matter, and simplicity (stripping layers) is celebrated because time is precious. We don't have time to waste on complexity and buzzwords; we're already behind on inventing the future.

Waiting 5 years before you adopt the native architecture of the web is almost inexcusable. The web won't (and didn't) wait that long. Others will route around you and their dynamism will be adopted by the marketplace. Now it's a game of catch up on that elusive thing known as mindshare and ultimately on cold cash, rueing all those missed opportunities.

The perplexing challenge of the web remains: how do we encourage things to fail faster? Perhaps we should all learn to say "Eh?" more often.

Crawl Before You Walk, a Playlist

A soundtrack for this note

• The Pharcyde - Passing Me By
  The humourous message of this song from The Pharcyde's hugely influential debut album is that obsolescence awaits if opportunities go wanting. The chorus is wist itself: "she keeps on passing me by".
• Was (Not Was) - Walk the Dinosaur
  Fun soul music that made the pop charts: "everybody walk the dinosaur".
• Count Basie - Sleepwalker's Serenade
  It appears that the web style is exploding things at Sun and other big companies. It is only fitting that we end with a swinging track from the essence of swing, the big band at its tightest, the horns, the driving bass, not to mention the Count's percussive piano, provide the counterpoint to the ironic serenade of the sleepwalker. The album title: The Complete Atomic Basie. Eh!
  
  
  

File under: rest, technology, adoption, jsf, frameworks, design, architecture, web, http, forms, java, j2ee, platforms, software, rejection, pragmatism, best practices, 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 (spotify version)

• 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, Things Fall Apart, juju, toli

The Great Game

Whatever happens we have got
The Maxim Gun, and they have not

— Hilaire Belloc in The Modern Traveller, 1898

---

Have no fear of atomic energy
For none of them can stop the time

— Bob Marley - Redemption Song, 1980

---

Iraq isn't Africa, Iraqis shoot back.

— Robert Baer in Iraq's Mercenary King: Politics & Power, 2007

---

We see Africa as probably the greatest open field of manoeuvre in the worldwide competition between the [communist] bloc and the non-communist.

— President John F. Kennedy, 1962

---

All for you
It is all for you

— E.T. Mensah & The Tempos - All For You, 1948

Cecil Rhodes - From Cairo to Capetown

---

How long shall they kill our prophets
While we stand aside and look?
Some say it's just a part of it
We've got to fulfil the book

— Bob Marley - Redemption Song

---

When you came you had the Bible and we had the land. Now you have the land and we have the Bible.

— Unknown 'native', 19th century

---

And freedom is the issue. The stakes are that high.

— Ronald Reagan, 1986

---

There are no rules in [this] game. Hitherto acceptable norms of human conduct do not apply. If [redacted] is to survive, longstanding American concepts of "fair play" must be reconsidered... It may become necessary that the American people be made acquainted with, understand and support this fundamentally repugnant philosophy.

— Report of the United States Hoover Commision, 1950

---

One man struggles while another relaxes.

— Massive Attack - Hymn of the Big Wheel

Beirut, Lebanon, summer 2006

---

A belligerent state permits itself every such misdeed, every such act of violence, as would disgrace the individual. It makes use against the enemy not only of the accepted ruses de guerre, but of deliberate lying and the deception as well - and to a degree which seems to exceed the usage of former wars.

— Sigmund Freud - Thoughts for the Times on War and Death, 1915

---

There are only people behaving, and sometimes behaving monstrously.

— Ian McEwan disputing the notion of evil, 2002

---

Takes behaviour to get along.
Lots of behaviour to get along.
Do you really, really know that?
Social Living is the best

Do you know? Social Living is the best

— Burning Spear - Social Living

---

Honam mu nni nhanoa
(Humanity has no boundary)

— Akan proverb, Ghana

---

Ex Africa simper aliquid novi
(Always something new out of Africa)

— Pliny the Elder, 1st Century Rome

Cultural interplay is the name of the Great Game.
I wonder: who is writing today's script?


This note is part of the Things Fall Apart series under the banner of the rough beast.

See also: The Mosquito Principle

Next: The Modern Traveller (Reclaiming the Maxim Gun)

File under: interplay, Social Living, Africa, perception, quotes, insight, culture, history, politics, power, empire, perspective, observation, values, morality, philosophy, Great Game, Things Fall Apart, The Rough Beast, toli, sociology, strategy, policy

Spotted: an HTML Button

"Good god, man... How a person can write so much about HTML buttons fascinates me." - A toli commentator

Per Google, I have an unseemly amount of clout when it comes to the subject of the HTML button born of 9,000 word folktales bemoaning its general under-appreciation and lack of use.

I've always felt guilty that I didn't offer more prescription to the 50-60 searchers who daily come across that piece. Still I thought I was only stating the obvious (albeit at length, and with tongue in cheek).

Thus I was pleased to note yesterday that Google Reader switched from its misguided use of simple hyperlinked text for its "Refresh" and "Mark all as read" functions to now use items that look like html buttons. I won't bemoan their developers not using native html buttons since they've at least recognized that it is best to have clear indicators for potentially unsafe operations. I wonder when Bloglines will follow suit...

I'll echo Phil Ringnalda again:

Making the fire alarm look just like a light switch isn't an example of daring and innovative design, it's just dangerous.

These small usability tweaks add up to broaden the appeal of the web which after all is our great mass participation medium. My rule of thumb in systems design is that we should favour participation over control. I believe this notion extends to user interface design. Giving up full control of the user interface in favour of standards tends to benefit an application because it often meshes with user expectations. There is paradoxical joy to be found in a constrained design space.

A parting sidenote: for the past few months I've been working on the Dojo toolkit, that open source javascript toolkit. At a certain point it was vaguely suggested that I work on form widgets including developing custom buttons. As you might suspect, I immediately demurred and disqualified myself pointing to my paean to html buttons. My position is unchanged: in as much as possible, one should use the built-in browser components and lobby the browser vendors to implement XForms, Web Forms 2.0 or whatever standard can improve the experience of building form applications on the web. HTML forms have been second class citizens for too long yet they are essentially the equivalent of Mary Magdalene and the disciples - the foot soldiers of the web style (digression: Bill de hÓra has been grumbling of late that HTML forms are the original sin of the web). I am pleased to see movement on many fronts these days. Every little bit helps I suppose. Let's celebrate these small things:

Next: The ballad of the link

File under: html, button, design, google, usability, ui, interface, forms, web, standards, technology, Small Things, toli

The Busia Papers

Is democracy of universal application?

Not exactly small talk, yet that was the kind of question I imagined being thrown around the table in my virtual dinner party. Last year's series on Social Living didn't get very far, only personal and whimsical pieces made it past the draft stage; I never quite managed to flesh out my guided tour of Ghanaian historical engagement with that theme and didn't gave voice to my dinner companions. Which leads me belatedly to the Busia papers...

One of my side-projects, much neglected in the years since I came upon this material, is the editing of a collection of the writings and speeches of Dr. Kofi Abrefa Busia, the former Prime Minister of Ghana. In the spirit of Ghana's Jubilee Year, our 50 years of independence, I thought it would be worth sharing a few of the articles in the collection. I hope some might be of interest.

• Is Democracy of Universal Application?
  This essay, published in 1979, is taken from a special volume of articles on democracy on the occasion of Werner Kaägi's 70th birthday. Tightly argued, it cogently distills a lifetime of insight on the eternal topic. It is one of Busia's last published works and was written in exile only months before his death in 1978.

Ghanaians seem to like grappling with cultural sensitivities. I'll note in passing that our recent great export is that world citizen: Kofi Annan. For Busia, the issue was social change and democracy, its shape and its efficacy in our environs. Similarly you'll find our philosophers expounding on cultural universals and particulars (Wiredu) or whether there is virtue in cosmopolitanism (Appiah) or modernity (Gyekye). Our writers worry about mimicry (Sekyi), our historians, journalists and lawyers about tradition, our musicians, artists and even our engineers all seem to worry about communities. It's not very sexy but it befits the outlook of a small country. Still, I suppose there are worse brands than cultural interpreters.

Busia lead the country during the Second Republic from 1969 to 1972, and was overthrown by a military coup on January 13, 1972. An eminent sociologist, he had turned to politics out of necessity and his brand of conversational politics has had a lasting legacy in Ghana. His writings however have not been as widely disseminated as they should and, sadly, many are now out of print.

Busia interests me as a prime example of Ghanaians as cultural interpreters and modern travellers. His academic career was distinguished and the scholarly works were numerous. Along with the public intellectual persona, there was the family man, the religious man. Of course there was also the politician and his was a lifelong struggle for Ghana.

There was the anti-colonial struggle along with J.B. Danquah and others. There was the post-colonial struggle and disappointment - he had to live in exile from Nkrumah's one party rule watching the country decay and his friends and colleagues detained and persecuted. There was the elation of the return in 1966 and gaining power in the 1969 elections with the promise of putting the country back on the right footing. Then again, in the bitterest setback, his government was overthrown and he was exiled again. Thus he was treated to the sight of the looting and worse of his country in his dying years.

His political progeny are currently in ascendance in Ghana, and his positions have on the whole been vindicated. Still, having foresight and being right in politics while ending up on the "wrong" side is little consolation. I find comfort however in Busia's tenacity as things fell apart. He continued to question, to argue and to persuade. There was strengh in his conviction, in the words of another of his writings, that "Ghana will be truly free and happy".

The thread that runs through the writings is the working of an extraordinary and methodical mind. One sees the intellectual energy and deep thought of a great academic. It is the great curiosity of the sociologist coupled with keen political instincts. At the same time, like many Ghanaians, he was a great storyteller, he knew how to give a speech, with biting wit that cut to the chase.

Consider the celebrated lecture on The Prospects for Democracy in Africa delivered at the Eighteenth Christmas Holiday Lectures and Discussions for Tomorrow's Citizens organized by The Council for Education in World Citizenship in London on 4th January 1961. Note well the 'world citizen' motif. Here we have Busia as the ultimate cosmopolitan, advocating democracy and methodically taking apart the often spurious arguments of expedience proffered about democracy in Africa. This is fairly representative of his style, rebutting at once the opportunists at home and the faint-hearted democrats in the West that chose, then and now, to prop up authoritarian regimes.

Explaining his turn to politics:

I loved my work as a teacher, but what was the use of sitting down in the University of Ghana trying to teach people on the basis that they will go and work in a Free Society which would have respect for their ability, whatever it was, and give them the opportunity to serve their country. What was the use of doing that when I knew that they were going to go into a built-up dictatorship that would enslave their minds.

He worried that

today we have a band of leaders, some of them so anxious to strain for the big buildings, big cars and motor cycles and destructive weapons that they have forgotten that the one important contribution that the African can make to the world is to keep reminding everyone that it is out of sympathy and the love for one another that we can build eventually what is valuable and peaceful.

"People matter" was his favourite talking point. He was willing to sacrifice some measure of rapid economic development on the altar of social living. As he put it:

I am in the camp of those who place a higher value on democracy than on material value. I therefore do not think that countries should develop more rapidly, even if they could, than is feasible within a democratic framework. This is based on the belief that human beings are what matter most in the world.

His legacy is thus all about conversational politics, about maintaining an openness to participation even when it is not expedient. There's even the minor controversy he raised later on about "not ruling out 'dialogue'" with the apartheid regime of South Africa. Even if his nuanced position would foreshadow the negotiations that transpired 20 years later, it was not a popular position for an African head of state in 1971.

As I've gone through the collection I've often found the letters and more offbeat material as illuminating as the more formal works. Discussing the encounter between Christianity and African cultures, he turns the customary question around and asks instead: "has the Christian faith been adequately presented?". Or take Ghana Since Independence - a reply for example. This was a short letter to the editor in The Friends' Quarterly (January 1965) setting the record straight about the situation in Ghana then at the height of Nkrumah's one-party rule. You get a sense of his exasperation at the amount of misinformation and cheerleading of "Socialism with an African Personality", personality cults and the like. These were stark years as I considered previously.

More heartfelt also are his reflections on one-party government in Ghana, a 1964 speech to Ghanaian students. He notes:

My political career is motivated by one thing above all. By the firm conviction that I have in my heart and my mind that all men share a common humanity. That irrespective of a man's colour he is a man; and that in Africa too, we have people who, given the right kind of leadership and the right kind of opportunity, can rise to the highest that man has risen to anywhere in the world.

The rest of that speech is full of similar insight and his appeal is very direct. It is fitting that his inaugural address would reiterate this consistent theme: a "yearning concern for every individual citizen".

The final piece I'll highlight is a pamphlet titled Judge for Yourself. It was written in June 1956 as a companion to the party manifesto on the eve of the elections that would lead to independence the next year. It laid out the opposition's position on the Constitution, raising "the issue of Moral Standards" and questioning the CPP's "unwise and innefficient administration". Months later, in a memorandum titled Gold Coast Independence, he expands on the point that "there is no provision for any checks and balances" in the political structure of the First Republic. The prescient worries that "there should be provisions in the Constitution before Independence to safeguard regional and minority rights" sadly went unheeded and Ghana paid the price.

The lengthy arguments made in the years before independence were not about the necessity of independence - that was a given. Instead Busia and others focused on ensuring that the days after independence and beyond would bear the promise of communal living and achievement that Ghanaians had every right to expect. He concluded with words that are worth pondering 50 years later:

"The eyes of the world are upon us; the rest of suffering Africa looks to us for an inspired leadership and we dare not let them down. We must be prepared to give everything, life itself, to ensure that we lay sound foundations for the future happiness, greatness and prosperity of our country. Our independence must have moral foundations on which we can build our heritage of the future."

See: The Busia Papers

File under: Busia, Ghana, Africa, history, politics, culture, ideas, insight, democracy, independence, human rights, Social Living, Things Fall Apart, toli

Types and Faces

My friend Nate pointed out André Gide's Travels in the Congo to me a few months ago. We've been carrying on this occasional conversation about travel writing, perceptions, Africa, Conrad and the like.

In passing he mentioned that the book's typeface reminded him of Rob Giampietro's fascinating article on the Neuland question which discusses

"Neuland, a "display" typeface hand-carved in 1923 by Rudolf Koch but also Lithos, another "display" typeface digitally created in 1989 by Carol Twombly"...

How did these two typefaces come to signify Africans and African-Americans, regardless of how a designer uses them, and regardless of the purpose for which their creators originally intended them?

Let's have Nadine Gordimer as the token African.

Richard Wright can serve as the token African-American.

There's a discussion about the history of those typefaces and how they came to embody an authentic sense of, well, ethnicity shall we say. "Stereotypography" was how Nate put it. "Blackface" might be another appropriate pun. There's lots to say about such signifiers. I can certainly imagine further papers on "Issues of authenticity and its visual vocabulary: field lessons from Gutenberg's press".

All of which reminded me of the box of Ubuntu Rooibos tea from South Africa that The Wife had picked up on her travels. It's one of those "sustainable agribusiness", fair trade, touchy-feely things marketed by an offshoot of USAID. The brand names, Ubuntu and Mpuntu, let you know what you're getting into. In case you're not convinced, the obligatory typeface is a great signifier and adds the requisite marketing frisson of authenticity: Africa. Motherland. Earth etc.

My own copy of the Travels in the Congo arrived in the mail today, and before I could turn the page and note Gide's dedication to Joseph Conrad (all travel writing owes a debt to Conrad so this was unsurprising), I was confronted by the striking cover. I realized that I'd ordered a different edition.

Hmmm. That's more like it. Congo: breasts, nudity, enlarged ornamental lips, pygmies, natives. You don't tend to see these kinds of images on book covers any longer. They'll appear on National Geographic magazines to be sure, or coffee table books, but not on the paperback that you pull out on the bus. It appears that some cultural threshold has been crossed in the recent past, my guess is that this took place around the mid-seventies and there has been a consequent marketing realignment or adjustment.

A more subtle indicator is required and the typeface is one of the few tools product designers have, along with the product names to indicate the essence of the product they are trying to move. You need to know what you're getting but these days we don't discuss race - or at least it's always a very polite discussion. As we say in Ghana: how for do?

A theory formed in my mind that when it came time to revise Gide's work in the later 1994 edition, it was no longer culturally appropriate in the US to display nubile, big-lipped natives, even if they were all the rage back when my 1962 edition was published (that liberal Berkeley Press!). There are probably throngs of academics working on such material.

I amended the topic of the paper to "Changing mores, changing types, changing faces in representations of Africa: field lessons from Gutenberg's press". I like how academic papers seem to go with lots of sub-clauses in their paper titles.

I then remembered that Fred had discussed Then I Saw the Congo, a 1920's travel memoir by Grace Flandrau. I put in my order for that book; we all need more writing about Congo. Its cover is less exotic than Gide's. Its subtle imagery, the silhouetted rowboat of natives on the Congo river dates back to Stanley's expeditions. The mighty river Congo has great visual appeal and looms large in African iconography.

I turned around, glanced at my bookshelf and immediately noticed a couple of books that fit the visual mold. The first was In Griot Time, An American guitarist in Mali by Banning Eyre. The ubiquitous font is overlaid on his photo of Djelimady Tounkara who Teju Cole reckons as the best guitarist in the world - I won't quibble, but what about Prince?

Checking Amazon, I noticed that a later edition (2002 - only 2 years on) dispenses with our typeface-du-jour and sadly also that the musician, whose face I can no longer make out, is now squashed behind the prison bar-like guitar strings tucked in the cavernous confines of a grey guitar.

What should one make of the demotion of both the black-faced guitarist and our typeface? What was the designer attempting in the reworked cover? In mitigation, one notes that there is the green, yellow and red in the background to indicate the colours of the Malian flag, although one must add, the colours are washed out, perhaps to indicate the ancient status of the music, and of Mali. Authenticity is preserved, I suppose, although the ethnic signifiers have been toned down. I guess it's fair, there was no need to beat the shopper over the head as the original cover did. We could have figured things out from the subtitle.

Robert Klitgaard's Tropical Gangsters also jumped out to me.

It has the great subtitle: "One man's experience with development and decadence in deepest Africa". You don't quite need to write "darkness", "deepest Africa" gets the point across. Now of course Condi Rice and co. have no qualms dealing with the Equatorial Gangsters that Klitgaard deconstructs in his book, so I guess decadence is appropriate in the title. Kurtz's moral decay is quite apt when one reads things like the following hatchet job (Thatcher alert):

Equatorial Guinea had the bad luck to come to independence under Macias Nguema, whose rule was so terrible that a third of the population was either killed or fled. Though he had people garrotted, buried alive and beheaded (and their heads stuck on poles), the detail that sticks in my mind is his having 150 people executed to the tune of 'Those Were the Days, My Friend' played over stadium loudspeakers.

Tropical horrors continue to be our mainstay on the continent it is sad to say. Everyone owes a debt of gratitude to Conrad it seems.

Which reminds me... The best history book on Africa since independence is Paul Nugent's appropriately titled Africa Since Independence.

If you take a look at the cover, it's as if you are out on a safari, the zebra is quietly crossing the scene in the foreground, the wide trees spread out in vistas of the savanna, you almost expect to spot a lion lazily stepping into to the picture - or an antelope perhaps. Simba. Kimba. Bambi etc. That image has almost nothing to do with the content of this brilliantly-constructed book other than to be a prime stereotype of Africa. Indeed I can't think of an image that could do more violence to the words of this sophisticated book, focused as it is on Africa's post-colonial history and the vagaries of modernity. Is that really the image of Africa since independence?

I'm fairly sure that Nugent had almost no input on his book's cover. Like almost all authors - and certainly all the ones I've pointed out in this note, let alone those South African rooibos farmers - he would have had nothing to do with the packaging of his works. Very few authors have the clout to insist on cover art, they are spent by the time the discussion over the book title is done. Still I almost disregarded his book, judging it as I did by its cover. Perhaps those purchasing history textbooks respond to different things. It goes to show that those cues can have can great influence, whether it is overt imagery or even typefaces.

I amended the paper's title: "Types and Faces: Visual Identites and cross-cultural (mis)understandings - (re)visting the Congo through fonts".

I would normally close with a playlist - and I've had requests for a Heart of Darkness playlist, but that can wait. Instead, apropos the business of not judging a book by its cover, I'll end with a Congolese proverb:

A white tooth has a bloody root.

File under: typeface, design, culture, aesthetic, stereotypes, Africa, black, typography, graphic, history, publishing, USA, African-American, Congo, literature, race, identity, observation, perception, Gide, 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".

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