Globalization, Oral Performance, and African Traditional Poetry

Abdul-Rasheed Na’Allah

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9783319750798
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: African Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book discusses globalization trends and influences on traditional African oral literary performance and the direction that Ilorin oral art is forced to take by the changes of the twenty-first century electronic age. It seeks a new definition of contemporary African bourgeois in terms of its global reach, imitation of foreign forms and collaboration with the owners of the primary agencies. Additionally, it makes a case that African global lords or new bourgeoisie who are largely products of the new global capital and multinational corporations' socio-political and cultural influences fashion their tastes after western cultures as portrayed in the digital realm.

© The Author(s) 2018

Abdul-Rasheed Na’AllahGlobalization, Oral Performance, and African Traditional Poetryhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75079-8_1

Begin Abstract

1. African Art and the Crisis of Poverty and Social Divisions in a Global Era

Abdul-Rasheed Na’Allah¹

(1)

Kwara State University, Malete, Nigeria

Abstract

This chapter introduces the concept of poverty and social divisions in the global century and the place of African art within this reality. The author presents his theoretical framework and defines the major terms and concepts used in the book, explaining where some of them deviate from their traditional connotations. At the end of this chapter, the history, form and status quo of Ilorin social class are discussed and the place of Dadakuada oral poets established therein.

Keywords

Global agePoverty Dadakuada Western hegemonyCommunal values

End Abstract

1.1 Introduction

The new global age has created a new set of bourgeoisie in African communities. The new global lords, who, capitalizing on their increasing reach for electronic age amenities, and the increasingly superior power of multinational companies and their own ability to collaborate and align with them, are the new occupants of the community’s bourgeois ladder in Africa. They have become elephants that calculate their dancing steps from the strange sounds of imported drum instruments. Their global reach and material richness enable them to develop thick necks for which no local blacksmith can provide good-enough gold lace. To them, the diamonds of the local mines as well as the indigenous blacksmiths are odor-filled, stark evidences of African poverty and miseries: only gadgets in Europe and America can produce their styles of necklaces and give them the scent befitting their global stature (read Peter Sloterdijk and Karen Margolis for the self-serving aesthetic of the western bourgeois). Yet, Ilorin is not only open to western global hegemony, it has strong influences from Islamic and Arab countries as a predominantly Muslim community, even before British colonization. Our conversations here will focus mainly on the impact of western global hegemony on Ilorin, while also discussing the Muslim or Islamic factor to its new cultural character formation.

Globalization trends have shown us, even more clearly, that in a largely poverty-ridden community such as we have in Nigeria, as contended by Chidi Amuta,¹ every social class of that community—feudal, new global lords or bourgeois, downtrodden or proletariat—has a different perception of art. Although a minority population, the new global lords or bourgeois of the twenty-first century easily network within the global machinery to amass wealth and to draw for themselves the “comforts” of the electronic age. In particular, the new global lords take special pride in portraying themselves as the copycats of globalizing western European culture and American artistic taste.

On the other hand, the downtrodden people and the peasants who are at the receiving end of the remnant crunches of globalization take art as a communal property and are concerned for the apparent signs of the disappearance of traditional values . They hold on to their artistic performance, believing that art ensures the survival of life, tradition and culture of the society and, most importantly, that art reflects on the socio-economic and political yearnings of the community peasants who, as the producers of art in traditional Africa, are also the traditional producers of all raw materials in society. K.M. Dolgov’s contentions about artists in society summarizes this position:

Throughout history artists have tried to combine production with humanistic aims and have sought forms of ownership, social, organization…which would, as far as possible, be conducive to the harmonious development of man, the formation of his civic virtues, and the realisation of each individual’s talents.²

It is therefore crystal clear that art in the face of the twenty-first century’s rampant and wild globalization, to an oral performer, must be dialectic. According to Vassily Krapivin,³ to be dialectical is to serve “the progressive revolutionary forces in (a) struggle against the obsolete order for the society’s progressive development.” Revolutionary forces in a new globalization age, rather than what they were in the Cold War era, must mean to the common person or peasant of Africa the forces that protect the indigenous values and fight the massive electronic age’s intrusions into his or her community. The new progressive forces insist on “reversal changes” to upholding community traditional values and sustenance. The more ethical value of beauty (read Dietrich von Hildebrand ) seems thrown overboard in the new wave of globalization.

It is clear to me that in the new globalization age, to be a radical is to vehemently reject the hegemonic forces of the new global order and to insist on protecting the traditional values of your culture and community. The advocates of dialectics, therefore, observe the inter-relationship of all objects, processes and phenomena in society and insist that society can only continue to be progressive if it maintains constant motion and development against the globalization forces of western hegemony. They push for community modernization within the reality of local values and reject the idea that development or modernization must result in the abandonment of their traditional communal ways, identity and moral perspectives. It is to be new formalists, who insist on following the footsteps of their ancestry even as they uplift the traditions of their lineage to new heights.

It is easy to understand this view of the African downtrodden in our new global world if we understand Frantz Fanon’s⁴ contention that the actions and philosophy of the downtrodden are often informed by their patriotism and the truth of the socio-economic deprivation to which they are subjected. It is such patriotism that constantly enables them to retain their position as true progressives in their traditional community. Patriotism can have different meanings in a global world, but to the downtrodden, it often means to resist the displacement and destruction of their local values and identities. This is not an easy fight to wage in a global world.

The new global and bourgeois lords, who are the new powers of the new global age, swimming in excessive economic, political and technological strengths, hold what is best described as a celebrative view of art. They are less concerned about traditional community values, which they now see as decayed and outdated. They are eager to import the new global culture through their collaborations with the global businesses and multinational companies. Collaboration is sometimes seen in the way they blindly patronize everything western and actually abhor their local community products. If they cannot attract McDonald’s or Burger Kings to their city, they will collaborate with multinational companies to create their own Mr. Big for hamburgers and meat pies.

For example, they encourage their children to patronize Play Stations^TM and all sorts of video games or watch 24-hour television stations because they believe these are superior to the open community children’s games in which children dance, sing, play with mud and forge age-group friendship and solidarity. They encourage their children to adopt rap and hip-hop, not as chanting modes that originally emanated from traditional Africa as many African performers contend, but as a new cosmopolitan hybrid culture of a westernized global world in which community identity and moral values are meaningless. To them, CNN and the BBC have extended to their homes New York’s and London’s cosmopolitan feelings and they can now call themselves New Yorkers and Londoners from the corners of their local domiciles (or if they have already performed the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca, Al-haji New Yorkers and Alhaja Londoners). They propagate the legacy of art for art’s sake. Their classicist formalist vision of art, which I will discuss at length in the next chapter when we review the nature and content of the new global lords or bourgeois aesthetics, respects only an art that escapes from the biting socio-economic realities of society.

This new formalist literary principle similar to the one ridiculed in the dramatic works of Femi Osofisan, Morountodun,⁵ and Olu Obafemi, Suicide Syndrome,⁶ is aimed at luring the downtrodden into escapism, having gotten some of them intoxicated from the luring beauty and often subtle tabs of formalist’s literary and artistic compositions. The new global lords or bourgeoisie see beauty mainly in western creations. They thus influence African art and oral literary performance to imitate the West. To the new global lords, imitating imported western taste is the new index of achievement and superiority in global society. They also realize the scope of their political atrocities in society. They want the masses perpetually acritical so that the status quo remains rigid; unchanged. They would, therefore, not welcome songs ...