New Wine,Old Wineskins: Authorship and Digitalizing Nigerian Oral Poetry through New Media Technologies

Introduction

In a digital cultural ethos where communication technology has reached vertiginous heights, the traditional idea or concept of authorship has been comprehensively altered or transformed. Authorship has now become radically destabilized and exists in a perpetual state of flux. It circulates freely in continuous, never-ending, ever-increasing shifts and gets constituted and reconstituted. Concomitant with this irredeemable destabilization is the very authority of the author which before now was sacrosanct and unassailable. Forms of knowledge that emphasize anonymity and pseudonymity have also gained remarkable currency in discourses surrounding the author, authorship and authority. This digital turn has its accompanying profound implications for the (hyper)text, (hyper)textuality and (hyper)textualization, performance and performance space, orality and writing, among other associated logics bordering on artistic and cultural production in this postmodern world. Thus with digitalization, information relating to these concepts also gets ‘transmitted much faster and in a higher quality than previously possible’ (Franklin et al., 2005: 314).

The capacity of the text as a mutating agency has also expanded incredibly such that textuality has become an idea on the move, a kinetic process whose motions now constitute a continuum as it gets produced and reproduced over and over again. With these continuous shifts and unstable relations between authorship and texts it is impossible to determine the direction in which they are headed (Bartell, 2001). The computer age, which is consistent with a postmodern culture, has reconfigured traditional ideas and analogue applications and introduced a new order of making sense of the world and structuring our identities and relations with it. Rosalind Brunt et al. (1993: iv) characterize the postmodern as ‘the age of satellite transmission and digital storage’ where ‘all that is clear amid the confusion of voices is that old cultural assumptions no longer hold’ and that ‘the difficult distinction now are not only those between high and low cultures but also those between state and market, national and multinational cultures’.

Following this redelineation of the boundaries of the text, and by implication the author, there is beginning to emerge a substantial body of literature on the person of the author and his/her assumed authority and mastery over the epistemic properties and hermeneutic strategies that negotiate textuality. As Bolter argues, authors and authority are not stable concepts as ‘the values of stability, monumentality, and authority are themselves not entirely stable’ because ‘they have always been interpreted in terms of the contemporary technology of handwriting and printing’ (2001: 16). This current concern exerts profound implications on the Barthian argument about the death of the author ¹ as well as the Foucauldian idea of what the author is. ² And perhaps one will also add that, because meaning always exists as the soul of language, the science of signs, the issue of signification as to what is the meaning of meaning has also become central in the figuring out of authorship and textuality.

Roland Barthes’ (1977) conviction of the author and his/her sentencing to the gallows inaugurated the fashionable birth of the reader, the consumer of the textual commodity. But before Barthes etches a lapidary inscription as the epitaph of the author’s tombstone, his position has come under increasing and intense interrogation. For instance, if the author is truly dead as he pronounces, who conducted the autopsy to ascertain the reality of death and the causal agent(s)? And another question: is the author’s death so final and eternal? Are there no possibilities of his/her resurrection, at least for a specific moment? Why is it so easy for Barthes to murder and hurriedly bury the author in a dune of sand like Moses did the Egyptian? Why is this death of the author at the instance of the birth of the reader? These questions, like others, are critical and participate actively in the debate on the author, authorship and authority in our digital age where computer technology has re-charted the course of authorship (Zimmerman, 2001).

But in giving substance to the news of the death of the author, Barthes’ poststructuralist affiliations and persuasions drive him to imagine the text as a tissue of variegated issues converging together; disparate threads forming a loom; or many tributaries finding their commonality in a confluence. The text, therefore, constitutes a nodal point for the convergence of a grammar of ideas, a set of quotations represented through writing. It is in this perspective that we can fully understand and appreciate his postulate which has become definitive that:

[…] a text is made up of multiple writing, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations of dialogue, parody, contestation, but there is one place where the multiplicity is focused and that place is the reader, not, as was hitherto said, the author. The reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a text’s unit lies not in its origin … (Barthes, 1988: 170)

In a sense this argument does not altogether play exclusionary politics against the author. This is because the author is still implicated in the drawing together, the grafting of the multiple strands of writing from the innumerable sources of culture into the text thus constituting the site for dialogic encounters and contestations. The text becomes a phalanx of cultural quotations because the author wills it. He is responsible for the aggregation of these ideas and quotations. But as Barthes impresses on us, that is where the road the author is travelling ends and that of the reader begins. The reader must increase; the author must decrease. Here we can also begin to sense that intertextuality as a site for the communion of texts in healthy and robust but also adversarial dialogue is hinted at by Barthes. Intertextuality initiates a forum where a cavalcade of texts as cultural allegories meet and grapple with each other, and to appropriate Pratt’s elegant phraseology, in a ‘contact zone’ and quite often ‘in asymmetrical relations’ (Pratt, 1992: 6).

The birth of the author is important and central in the estimation of Barthes because it is the reader that is crucial to the interpretive grids and the networks of meanings that are embedded in the text, not the author. Focusing on the author as the ultimate authority in the determination of meaning is limiting. This is because the author, incapable of exercising complete mastery of the range and complex of meanings he inscribes in the text, only limits their proliferation. It is the reader who, objectively, teases out these meaning systems and accounts for them. With the reader there is free, uninhibited rein to meaning, an infinite possibility where meaning regresses interminably, eternally. The framing of signification in the signifying process, therefore, resides not in the author, but in the province of the reader (Coney and Steehouder, 2000).

The Barthean imagination, therefore, constructs the author as a cricket figure. ³ A cricket is an insect saddled with the unfortunate fate and destiny of laying its eggs dutifully but not living to see them hatch as it dies soon after without beholding its young ones. However, the emergent generation of crickets, a metaphor for the text, snarls into an independent existence away from the parent cricket, the author. What matters now is how the crickets live their lives and the way they are nurtured by nature and are perceived in the order of epiphenomena and creation. This conceited metaphor bears some relevance to the autonomous existence of the text after the throes of the author and the beginning of the dynamic agency of the reader in the exegetical process to mine its plurality of meanings.

But as persuasive as Barthes’ argument may seem, namely that the author’s dynastic reign is short-lived and the reader’s endless, there is a counter-reading which also inscribes itself into the texture of the discourse. In ‘What is an Author?’, Michel Foucault (1987) engages Barthes with an argument which is no less fascinating, no less compelling. According to Foucault, the author’s death is too hastily announced by Barthes. In reality, the author is not dead. What is dead is the discourse which is embedded in the contours of the text. By implication, therefore, the arguments that constitute the text, to Foucauldian rhetoric, are the ones that die, not the author who actually continues his/her life thereafter. Indeed, to Foucault, the text, rather than hasten the death of the author, endows him with a more meaningful life since it is the text that creates the author as much as the author also creates the text. In other words, the inherence of the text prefigures the continued existence of the author.

As intriguing and convincing as the argument by Foucault is, it is important to observe that there is no closure to the text as he appears to suggest. The text is an open-ended entity, just like the discourses it incarnates are also a process, always renewing and reconstituting themselves. In this schema, therefore, the text does not enjoy finality and the discourses it generates and nourishes do not get and cannot be neatly resolved. That this neat resolution is an impossibility is because the discourses the text thrusts up get implicated in other textual discourses. This is precisely because they spill over the boundaries of the text and engage in intertextual dialogic encounters with other texts, sometimes of the same generation and space, at others of a different generation and spatial configuration.

Similarly, one gap that exists in the interstitial fabric of Barthes’ position is his advocacy of the complete erasure of the author from the landscape of the text. To be sure, the author cannot be altogether dead otherwise there would be no biographical criticism or even recourse to the contextual contingencies of the text. These, no doubt, yield insights into the multi-layeredness of textual significations. The text cannot always sufficiently account for the amalgam of meanings that inhere in its supposed stable and coherent structures as meanings can also circulate and get distributed beyond the frontiers of the text. It is in this regard that it is incumbent on the reader to concentrate on the text, but not exclusively, by casting out of its borders for the enrichment of his reading strategies through the webbing into the text of extraneous meaning modes which are not actually alien, foreign or tangential to the text. Without this casting around, textual readings and negotiations will suffer impoverishment.

Barthes’ argument on critical reflection can be understood as simultaneously adumbrating digital rhetoric and embedding it as it frames the text and textuality, author and authorship in ways that have been hypostasized in Web 2.0. For it is with the inauguration of the web that the erasure (death rather?) of the author has been most fully accomplished. This is essentially because authorial determination is more pronounced and consistent with a scribal culture/tradition and printing technology than with digital processes. The internet with its associated formats like the web, blogs, wikis and other social media apparatuses has intervened as an instrumental mediating agency in the redefinition and reconstitution of authorship in ways that were un-thought of previously (Warschauer and Grimes, 2007). Indeterminacy has now become the governing norm and where the determinate identity of the author and her/his authority were inherently sacrosanct as in writing and printing, a fluid reconceptualization of authorship has now been installed with the web. But even here there are subtle ambiguities and overlappings as in some situations like blogs, distinct authorship can still be ascertained. However, the argument which needs to be conscientiously made, and which Muriel Zimmerman agrees with, is that, with digital technological advancements, the relationship between author and reader with their roles is unstable and keeps shifting and re-shifting (Zimmerman, 2001).

If these issues about authorship, textuality and signification constitute a contested site in the discursive existence on writing, it can be better imagined how they deeply embed orality. This especially concerns the performance text as an entity whose integrity is only fully realized before an active and involved audience whose participation as an engaged jury confers a sense of immediacy and urgency on the performance process. The performance as text especially when mediated by digital technological processes undergoes radical shifts and necessitates the proliferation of authorial voices and interventions in a virtual community of authors and texts in conversation and dialogic networks. In Cyberliteracy, Gurak (2001) implicates the World Wide Web and its defining character of interactivity, anonymity, pseudonymity, speed and coverage as intrinsic to the changing and shifting perceptions of author and text.

The Beginnings of the New Musical Poetic in Nigeria

Nigerian music has its roots dating far back in pre-colonial traditional societies where oral artists entertained and educated their local audiences. Later in its evolution which follows the path of history with fidelity, practitioners like Hubert Ogunde, Dan Mariya Jos, Fela Kuti, Atule Hon, Victor Olaiya, Sonny Okosun, Bongos Ikwe, Orshio Adaaker, etcetera emerged on the scene. While some of these artists started their musical careers during the colonial and nationalist period building up to independence in Nigeria in 1960 from colonial Britain, some operated after independence. Although a neat historical mapping of this musical tradition may be difficult to achieve due to obvious overlappings and interpenetrations among the periods, it is significant to observe that there has been a history of contiguous relations among the phases through the exploration of themes and concerns and the influences each preceding generation exerts on the succeeding one in terms of linguistic idiom, imagery, dedicated craftsmanship, deployment of metaphors and tropes in the distillation of relevant messages and patriotic fervor.

In recent history in Nigeria there has emerged a galaxy of talented poet-artists who have been mobilizing their creative ingenuities and sensibilities to negotiate the Nigerian condition through the instrumentality of the resources of the oral or spoken wor(l)d. Thus a new musical awareness and trajectory has emerged and is concentrated around major commercial and industrial cities and towns like Lagos, Abuja, Port Harcourt, Enugu, Aba, Kaduna, Ibadan, Jos, Makurdi and many other state capitals and towns across Nigeria. This is particularly so of Lagos, the nation’s commercial nerve centre and former political capital which boasts of the largest concentration of these poet-performers. Besides its cosmopolitan character, Lagos provides a most salubrious space for the emerging artists to articulate their artistic expressions because of its hustle and bustle. And because it has one of the largest population densities in Nigeria, Lagos represents a synecdoche of Nigerian nationhood. Its population, put in the neighbourhood of 15–17 million, ⁴ makes it one of the fastest growing cities in the world.

In addition, the city is also home to many clubs and recreation centres where these artists perform and also have their musical productions. There are also many radio and television stations and studios in Lagos which help in the process of artistic production and circulation. And there is healthy patronage too from lovers of music and the arts. Recently there has emerged a constellation of patrons and patronesses who have established social clubs and relaxation joints where daily performances by these artists are held in the evenings. On weekends the boisterous and gregarious life that defines the city is enacted through convivial events like marriage celebrations, naming rituals, house warmings, title holding events, local town unions, and with the return of democratic governance after the military interregnum that lasted until 1999, political gatherings also attract the presence of these poet-performers. There is no event that is not celebrated with gaiety, pomp and pageantry, including funerals, in Lagos and Nigeria generally. ⁵ Most significantly Lagos enjoys this prominence because it is a microcosm of Nigeria, a representational site for Nigeria’s cultural diversity and a mosaic on which the nation’s heterogeneous cultures and ethnicities are firmly etched.

It is commonplace to listen to the virtuosity of these artists in the ever-busy and chaotic Lagos traffic played on car radio and stereos, commercial buses and, indeed, the ubiquitous vendors of these musical productions who sell them in the meandering traffic jams. Lagos and the other cities have become centres of national consciousness and patriotic zeal because they are fertile for the nurturing and luxuriance of talents. They also provide raw materials and resources like scenes, lived experiences, deficit in public utilities, private/public morality, state governance, etcetera, which are processed by the artists into themes, subject matter, lyrical compositions, and their elaborations into artistic articulations through performances. These issues structure the realities that are consistent with modernity and the contradictions that negotiate and interrogate national reconstruction and reinvention in a postcolonial nation-state such as Nigeria.

The artists themselves are as many as the centres of artistic creativity which provide the spatial settings for their creative engagements. The musical pantheon is long and intimidating: Idrees Abdulkareem, Tony Tetuila, Tu Face, African China, Zule Zoo, Zakky Azzay, P-Square, Sunny Nneji, Timaya, Alariwo, Lagbaja, Femi Kuti, Seun Kuti, Azadus, Daddy Showkey, Asha, Banky, Paul Dee, 9ice, etcetera. They are massed under variegated musical generic typologies ranging from the more ‘traditional’ to the ‘modern’. Some of these typologies include: juju, Afrobeat, highlife, fuji, swange, apala and reggae, rhythm and blues, and hip hop, etcetera. There exist clear fusions and interpenetrations quite often among the genres and a neat and tidy categorization is notoriously difficult to accomplish. All of these poet-performers have their musical corpus reduced to CDs, VCDs, DVDs, and on the internet through YouTube and other social network formats.

Against this backdrop their musical productions fill the airwaves through digital radio and television, and form the theme songs as well as caller and receiver tones on mobile telephone networks all over Nigeria. This underscores the level of popularity and patronage the artists enjoy among the population. Indeed, the artists are patronized by these mobile telephone networks including Mobile Telecommunication Network (MTN), Zain (Airtel), Globacom, Etisalat, and Visafone, among others, and adorn their billboards as celebrities for promotional and advertising purposes. As a result many of the artists are enjoying phenomenal success in their professional musical careers. Their music also features as theme songs and soundtracks in the Nigerian video film industry, Nollywood, where some of the artists also participate as movie stars.

Though of varied musical proclivities, the artists are, however, united in their elemental engagement with narrating the nation and instituting national discourses that generate active participation from diverse publics. Their musical performances therefore possess a high utilitarian capital as they valourize a socio-political and cultural quality which is relevant to modernity and contemporary societal engineering processes. Many of these musical talents are preoccupied with the quasi-private issue of the vicissitudes and harrows associated with daily existential realities in a depressed economy like Nigeria where poverty levels are abominably high. Images of poverty, hunger, anger, uncertainty, fear, crime, injustice, etcetera, are a ritualized presence in these musical compositions. Importantly, too, there are moments of love, tenderness, joy, laughter, feasting and celebration. This is, perhaps, what made the late legendary Afrobeat artist, Fela Kuti, characterize his compatriots as people with elastic patience and resilience, a people ‘suffering and smiling’. ⁶

But while some of the artists are mainly but not necessarily concerned only with issues of private morality, others cross the threshold of privatist engagement and invade the public frontiers of discourse. This group does not stand aloof to merely contemplate the turbulent currents of national existence but elect to plunge into them. In this regard they become involved in the distillation of loud and large commentaries on the state of the nation through the appropriation of public space as a strategy for the valorization of the welter of painful and debilitating paradoxes that define the nation. In their disillusionment and disenchantment they lament the spent destiny of a nation which inspired great hope at birth but is despondent now; a nation so rich and yet so poor, so powerful and yet so weak, full of dreams but yet struggling to wake from discomfiting nightmares.

This patriotic zeal which is a quality of their musical accomplishments thrusts these artists as nodes of national consciousness and renaissance, the voice of the voiceless and silenced majority, the scourge to the national conscience, custodians of private/private morality (though some of them occasionally abuse it too), social crusaders and purveyors of culture. They are seen as a patriotic vanguard that speaks back to power in its multifarious manifestations and disguises. Indeed, some of them, such as Idrees Abdulkareem and African China, instituted counter-discursive skirmishes with the authorities during the civilian administration of former President Olusegun Obasanjo. ⁷ Idrees metaphorically referred to Nigeria as a creaky, decrepit and chaotic nation like the Lagos mammy wagon called Molue which is a menace on the roads and is called a mobile coffin prone to accidents because of its road unworthiness. This precipitated angry reactions from the state which branded him as unpatriotic and subversive. ⁸

Thus besides providing the psychological salve and orifice for the harassed and harried population as entertainers to relieve their purgatorial lived experiences, the artists also rankle the raw, open and festering wounds of the nation with the artistic strategy of applying the healing herb on them for therapeutic efficacy. Their musical engagements as such constitute an alternative narrative of nationhood which counters the official one volunteered by the state and its zealous satraps. Whether they often succeed or not, it is sufficiently clear that they are fulfilling the protocols of their artistic vocation with varying degrees of sophistication, magnitude of involvement in national debates, experimentations with form, and thematic elicitations.

Authorship and the New Musical Poetic in Nigeria

Many of these artists are veritable heirs to long musical traditions and cultures thereby constituting themselves as receptacles of the transition from tradition to modernity, continuity and change. They can be said to be carriers of traditional culture as they function as vehicles through which it is transmitted or transplanted into the modern moment. In a sense, therefore, their musical oeuvre enacts a transcultural and transgenerational transaction between the past and the present and even initiates a dialogue with the uncharted temporality of the future. They are, as such, beneficiaries of migrant metaphors and tropes from the distant traditional past which they creatively re-process and re-invest in their musical expressions for the immediate needs and urgent aspirations of modernity and its haunting pressures. These migrant metaphors and tropes refer to the poetic and incantatory quality of the message inscribed in these musical compositions, the very voice of tradition which has resiliently survived the vagaries of time and travelled through the historical continuum to the present digital moment.

The digitalization of these vagrant, mobile metaphors and tropes through the instrumentality of the musical compositions of the artists has, no doubt, endowed them with an alternative mode of existence which assures them of continuity and participation in a (post)modern culture. Because of the historical specificity and cultural particularity of these metaphors and tropes and their rootedness in tradition, this new musical poetic as espoused by the artists is part of that cultural unconscious, a constellation whose insistent message feeds from the past and the contingencies of postcoloniality and postmodernity. There is, therefore, an antiphonal character or call and response pattern to this musical tradition. The present gestures to the past and the past reciprocates by responding to this stimulus from the present in a unique dialectic of musical relations which benefits profoundly the digital fortunes of the enlarged life this musical tradition has acquired.

As is to be expected, this transhistorical transaction embodied in the new musical poetic by the Nigerian artists complicates and problematizes the traditional definition and signification of the author, authorship and authority, on the one hand, and text, textuality and hypertextuality, on the other. In the classical sense, an author is the one who initiates the process of artistic and cultural production. ⁷ As a result her/his image is consistent with the work and defines it. In the same way, the authority for the interpretation of the work, ‘text’, also lies exclusively with the author since the text owes its very existence from the creative loins of the author. In traditional societies where oral communication constituted the essential medium of creativity, texts were integral coefficients of primary orality and the character of the author was largely refracted through anonymity. The assumption was that the text, as a sum-total of the grammar of cultural values of the community, was communal property and so belonged to the canon of texts which was common to society. This somehow erased the distinct character of individual authorship and the proprietary rights accruable from the text.

It is, however, true that even in such circumstances of assumed anonymity of authorship, certain artists inscribed their distinct individualities on their texts either through the invocation of their genealogical histories, personal signatures through the imputation of their names in the texts, or both. ⁹ What perhaps sustains the argument about communal authorship inheres in the fact that, in the appropriation of these texts by other members of the community, they brought to bear on the same texts creative additions which were original to them thus making the texts reproductions of the earlier versions. Text and textuality assumed that sense of communality as a creative product owned by the commonwealth and hence the significant effacement of individuality in textual production.

A writing culture and printing technology in the wake and shadows of the Guttenburg revolution reconstituted the calculus of artistic production in favour of individual authorship. With writtenness texts became actively associated with their authors such that they bore their names as markers of individual ownership with commensurate proprietary prerogatives. The legality of this private ownership is forcefully registered with the copyright which restricts the uses to which the text can be applied to such as mechanical and electronic photocopying, recording, or storage in any retrieval system, except with the permission of the author. ¹⁰ The legalese encapsulated in the words provides adequate protection to the person of the author and confers on her/him the status of individual ownership. Communality in this sense can be minimally shared if there is more than one author: co-authors. But here, too, their identities are inseparable from the text.

In the digital epoch which is refracted as the age of secondary and tertiary orality, ¹⁰ an age to which the emergent Nigerian musical artists belong, authorship and authority have substantially become unstable, fluid, contingent and transitory. The text also is in a state of rapid transition, in mutation just like the personality of the author. In particular reference to these Nigerian poet-performers, many of them have drawn from the inexhaustible pool of oral traditions and cultures, with some of them appropriating wholesale musical traditions in the past which are then reinvested with their own creative interventions to make their artistic articulations compelling and relevant to the contingencies of modernity. It is my proposition that in the peculiar contextual circumstances of the new musical poetic in Nigeria, this is precisely the habitus or interstitial space where the crisis surrounding the author and authorship in a digital ethos can be located. This has to do with the trajectory of interconnectedness between the past and the present in the forging of musical forms whose hybrid and palimsestic status enables them to share qualities inherent in tradition and modernity. This is where the extended metaphor of old wine, new wineskins also finds relevance and justification. I shall buttress this argument using some of the artists as paradigms.

The Old in the New, the New in the Old: The Digital Turn in Nigerian Music

The co-habitation of the old and the new, and the new and the old in the emergent Nigerian musical experience beginning roughly in the 1990s can be located in the proliferation of digital technologies which liberalized the modes of artistic and cultural production and weaned them from their essentialist analogue procedures. The new musical poetic quickly took advantage of this digital innovation. In their musical practices, these oral artists dug into the quarry of oral traditions for form, structure, content, linguistic resources, and imagery with which they fashioned new and fresh social themes, political commentaries and cultural projects/statements that negotiated the contradictions of Nigerian modernity. Thus in their artistic experiences they constituted the new wineskins into which the old wine of the oral/spoken wor(l)d settled with freshness and originality. Appropriately, therefore, the voice of tradition was enlarged and infused with a modern meaning through the instrumentality of the digital ethos. This has resonances with the biblical narrative of Isaac and his two sons, Esau and Jacob, where you have two subtle competing traditions: the hands of Esau but the voice of Jacob.

The subtle competition here is not so much a negative one. It is essentially a competition for authorship and the soul of the text. This contestation is very visible in musical compositions that borrow from tradition and incorporate the borrowed material almost wholesale in digital formats. This is evident in the music of Zule Zoo, an accomplished member of the new generation of musical artists. Zule Zoo draws heavily from the Swange tradition of music, Swange being a protest musical genre among the Tiv of central Nigeria in what is geo-politically called the Middle Belt. The music has its roots in colonial Tiv society but has flourished since then with the years following the 1967–1970 Nigerian civil war and the discovery/exploration of oil in the early 1970s as its golden era. The war and the oil boom became fertile for the flourishing of the musical tradition because they volunteered it a fund of themes as a result of the private/public amorality and malfeasance of the period.

In the main, Swange is a protest musical tradition which emerged to undermine and ridicule the gerontocracy that characterized Tiv pre-colonial society. One major casualty of the rehearsed ribaldry that Swange championed was the exchange marriage or marriage by barter (Yam Ishe) which was a preferred custom among the Tiv. In it, a man would take his daughter, sister or even distant female relation to give to another man who also needed a wife in exchange for his own female relation as a wife based on mutual agreement and consent. If a man did not have any woman to exchange, marriage became difficult even if he was of age. However, with colonialism came the introduction of a cash economy, waged labour and the development of urban centres. The essentially agrarian economy yielded some grounds to the new economic regime and young people could migrate to the towns for paid labour. This made them to be nominally out of the direct moral checks and superintendence of the elders who enforced the strict codes and imposed a vigilant gerontocratal culture and patriarchal system. As the new salariat, the youth rebelled against tradition as with their wages, they could pay dowry or even elope with a prospective woman to the town where the legitimacy of tradition was limited. With the abolition of exchange marriage by the colonial administration, the youths became triumphant and more daring.

It is within this historical schema of the disjuncture between tradition and modernity that Swange emerged. The songs celebrated the crumbling of tradition deploying an ill-tempered and sarcastic idiom which derided gerontocracy and the phallic order which the youth considered heavy-handed and authoritarian. It incorporated into its corpus of protest sensibility a morally offensive imagery that was replete with vulgarity and undisguised sexuality, an anathema to Tiv tradition of scrupulosity in sexual matters. Its dance patterns were similarly heavily sexually suggestive and allusive. A typical lyrical composition will serve as a fitting example:

Kpaa ikur Aondo la agba,

Or va a wan mape ga.

(Fuck the vagina let the heavens fall,

Nobody brought their child here).

The language here is unashamedly raw and unpretentious in a sexual sense and irredeemably offends Tiv morphology of morality and sexual sensibilities. But besides its lurid language and overt representation of sexuality, the song is heavily nuanced and encoded with significations. First, the word Aondo is multivalent and exists in interpretive elasticity. It could refer, in a theological perspective, to God, the ultimate moral authority that is here being challenged by an immoral social category. At the same time it could just mean the heaven’s vault or the sky falling, in which case it is a mere astronomical metaphor to underscore the reckless imagination of the youth in their exuberance. Second, within the strict limits of Tiv sexuality, a couple cannot copulate throughout the period the mother is suckling the child until after it has been weaned and started walking gingerly. This sometimes takes two to three years. In this cultural schema, child occupies a polyvalent linguistic space: it means a baby who is not old enough and so an inhibition to conjugal relations. It also signifies a young, nubile girl who is not married. And because pre-marital sex is outlawed among the Tiv, the liberated youth, with colonial infiltration, flouted such codes guarding the sanctity of virginity as anachronistic and in their permissiveness dismissed it. The words ‘Nobody brought their child here’ is a veiled declaration of independence in all ramifications including matters of sexuality for the young.

Another example which ostensibly looks like a counter-discursive song to the above but is actually part of the musical tradition negotiates the prurience and uncontrollable libidinal drive of the youth who would sleep with a woman soon after she has given birth:

Ior mba gberen kusa mba daghen

Kwase ka nana mar sembelee

Tso ilu ve ape kpaanaa…

(Those with scars like nails are immoral

When a woman has just delivered

They still want to fuck…)

What is underwritten here is the sexual laxity of the youth who belonged to a particular age grade system in Tiv society and marked their identity with facial scarifications shaped in the form of a long nail across the face close to the cheeks. This historical epoch coincided with the moment of transition from tradition to modernity under the colonial administration when strict codes of moral conduct were relaxed such that a man would want to sleep with a woman who was just delivered of a baby. This song actually occupies a contested site in the interpretive grids that seek to unravel it. It seems to be a counter-cultural caricature of the youth and the new culture of permissiveness by the denizens of dying tradition. On the other hand, it represents an attempt at self-parody and self-censure by the youth themselves as a strategy of humouring themselves and luxuriating in their new found freedom.

I have attempted a historicist navigation of the Swange musical tradition so as to establish the traditional derivation of Zule Zoo’s musical practice as he appropriates it, and how he creatively embellishes and endows it with a new mode of existence deploying digital technology. Zule Zoo actually lifts the lyrics word for word from the original except that he combines the Tiv version with pidginized linguistic permutations. One telling instance is the following song:

Daddy oo daddy

Daddy wen you go on a journey

Somebody enter for mommy house

He sit for mommy bed

Mommy push person

Person push mommy

Small time mommy

Fall yakataa kwagh bee

The man don de do

Kerewa owa kerewao

Kerewa owa kerewao…

The song in simple language presents a child who, out of youthful ‘innocence’, reports its mother’s adulterous relations with a stranger/lover while the husband/father is away on a journey. Apparently the mother is not within hearing distance – or even is – because the motive of the child is difficult to establish. However, in lurid details, it relates to the father how the sexual act was initiated and executed or consummated: the man entered mommy’s house, and sat on mommy’s bed. Then at a point the man pushed mommy, mommy too pushed the person (apparently referring to foreplay), then finally mommy fell down on the bed in a compromising manner. The man then started the sexual act and this is captured in the last two lines implying the sexual act proper.

Zule Zoo, who is very familiar with the Swange musical tradition, invades the courts of tradition and invokes this song though with a different artistic strategy and intent. His method is clearly not to encourage moral corruption or protest against hegemonic tradition but to condemn immorality in both private and public domains. In other words, he differs differently from the strategic concerns of the youth who deployed Swange as a means of subverting and compromising traditional culture. His protest is against moral ruination especially in an age where the HIV/AIDS pandemic has decimated families and populations in Nigeria. Against this agonizing backdrop, a married woman who engages in adulterous relations puts herself and the entire family at risk and so deserves to be exposed even by her own child. This is an old message which has taken on an urgent new meaning within modern societal structures and realities. Pidgin is a widely spoken language in Nigeria. It permeates all social strata and is perhaps the most accessible linguistic medium for all classes of the population, including the uneducated, and so becomes appropriate for the propagation of such a sensitive message.

But the question which inevitably arises is that, given the reality that Zule Zoo is not the original composer of the song as it existed in the past, but he has now benefitted from it, incorporated it onto his oeuvre and reduced it to digital formats like CDs, VCDs, DVDs, and with his name boldly inscribed on it, who really owns the song? Is it the now anonymous composer who might have died and cannot lay any authorial claims to it or is it Zule Zoo who has endowed the song with a new existence and fresh meaning using digital technology who is the authentic author? This is a moral question but also has important implications on the processes of artistic and cultural production in a modern world where digital forms are the defining markers. But much more fundamentally the whole concepts of authorship and authority, text and textuality have been complicated and rendered fluid and in a state of perpetual flux. The artist may claim authorship and proprietary rights but the original author has been long consigned in the eaves of history. The popularity of this song made it to resonate on the airwaves when it was released and became caller and receiver tunes on mobile telephones announcing Zule Zoo as a sensation.

The other example which buttresses the argument about the prevalence of the old in the new and the new in the old through the instrumentality of new media technologies is the music of Tu Face who is also one of the rising stars in the new musical poetic in Nigeria. Incidentally, Tu Face is also from the same geographical location as Zule Zoo as they are both from Benue State in the Middle Belt. But that is where their kinship begins and ends. Tu Face appropriates a musical generic typology that occupies a middle position between soul/rhythm and blues and local musical compositions and styles. This musical trajectory is less committed to the burning issues of national discursive existence and the political contradictions that the nation is intermeshed in. His musical sensibility gravitates to love and the light-hearted pastimes which provide a cushioning and balming effect on the absurdities and harrows of our human existentialist condition.

In Tu Face’s musical practice there is a discernible pattern of romanticizing and idealizing the African woman as a beauty of celestial proportions. Indeed, he gives the women he idolizes such adorable names like ‘My African Queen’, ‘Girl of My Dreams’, etcetera. This artistic glorification of the African woman is reminiscent of Negritudinist poetics, especially the brand espoused to and popularized by Leopold Senghor, the late poet-president of Senegal. It is debatable if Tu Face is sufficiently aware of this poetic tradition which before him idealized the African woman as a quintessential black beauty whose natural endowments were enhanced by the colour of her pigmentation and the nakedness of her body, a metaphor for the virtues of innocence and openness. Though it is difficult to establish a link, especially in an intellectual perspective between Tu Face and movement Negritude, it is safe, however, to observe that judging from the deft deployment of feminist images in his music compositions, Tu Face benefits generously from the common pool of African and Black cultures and traditions in the forging of his musical imagery as he shares strong resemblances with Negritude.

The synonymy in the poetic sensibilities of Negritude and Tu Face is paradigmatic of the fact that just like history is a continuum, so also there is textual continuum. This textual continuum represents the continuous interaction of cultural texts in the course of history as they are engaged in a transhistorical transaction which is mutually beneficial and self-sustaining. Unlike the linearity of Western history, African/Black history is conceived in terms of circularity where events integrally related repeat one another. This is manifest in the recurring events, situations, and themes which underscore the circular character of history as expressed by Black epistemological and hermeneutic traditions. It is important to look at the inherence of this common theme which Tu Face shares with Negritude by considering one of his compositions entitled ‘My African Queen’ as an example:

Just like the sun

Light up the sky

You light up my life,

You’re the one I ever

Seen with a smile so bright…

And just yesterday,

You came around my way…

With your supernatural beauty

You are my African Queen,

Girl of my dreams

You take me where

I’ve never been…

And that is the African beauty.

It is here also that we can begin to observe certain levels of influences from the past that have shaped Tu Face’s artistic experience. If Negritude is the valorization of the sum total of African/Black values in terms of culture and civilization, and an assertion and affirmation of African cultural ontology in all ramifications, it follows that the themes and concerns embedded in the musical compositions by Tu Face espouse to that cultural revolution of affirming the culturality and civilization of the Black personality against the cultural imperialism and onslaught of the West. It is interesting that, though he operates in a multicultural milieu which is defined by hybridity and the occlusion of cultural and racial differences, his sense of distinct cultural identity drives him to identify with a ‘Black Queen’ who is the girl of his dreams. Though in the strict rhetoric of cultural politics, this may be deplored as a flagellation of cultural difference, such difference is not altogether lacking in current cultural discourse even in the West.

Indeed, with Tu Face, heterosexual relations, not necessarily of intimate sexual intercourse, appear to have structured the core of his music. And within the social and moral configuration of his society, this is relevant because life is not all about a suffocating and engrossing work ethic but also that of intimacy at the familial as well as other levels, what the exigencies of a traumatized life in Nigeria appear to have largely foreclosed. In another example, he demonstrates yet again the consuming passions that love evokes in individuals and the heightened responses this elicits:

When I look into your eyes

I see fire in there;

Fireee…

When you look into my eyes

You desire in there

Desiree…

I’m hoping that you’ll

Be mine someday…

The concern with love, affection, and relations between the two sexes in the music of Tu Face, though examined within the amplified context of cultural longing and belonging in the present plurality the world celebrates, foregrounds a number of important issues. First, it is illustrative of the fact that the new musical poetic in Nigeria constitutes a vast canvas on which various thematic concerns can be inscribed. Some of the preoccupations, though of public nature and concern, do not occlude the inclusion of issues that are in the private domain dealing with love, domesticity and private morality. His position seems to be that we cannot all be vocal public analysts and commentators and so, while some overtly engage issues of clearly public relevance such as politics, business/economy, education, public utilities and defence, others should concentrate on more privatist concerns which nevertheless have an impact on the public good.

The other issue borders on the nature of the text in a digital technological context where the text exists in transition and radical instabilities as against the traditional idea of its coherence. Intrinsic here too is the problematic of the author whose monumentality and stability as an authority is also being increasingly interrogated by new media forms which have significantly reconfigured the entire field. Like other poet-performers in the emergent generation of Nigerian musicians, Tu Face is also a new wineskin in which the old wine of the past has been preserved. From his lyrics, themes, symbols and imagistic iconography, especially of the Black Queen, it is possible to establish a connection between the past and his musical styles and compositions. As already established, the cultural philosophy and intellectual tradition of Negritude seems to have dictated the rhythm and character of his musical practice.

Central to this seeming umbilical cord that unites his music to Negritude can also be the metaphor of the woman as mother of the nation which Negritude also incorporates in its poetics. Even though the artist idealizes the African/Black woman as a beloved, what was also fashionable in the courtly love of the Elizabethan poets, this idealization resonates the general cultural episteme in Africa that the woman is a mother, not just of her biological children but also of the entire nation. This trope is bedeviled with ambivalences and ambiguities. To many feminists, it represents the gender politics within the economy of phallic desire which apprehends the woman as an object of the male gaze because of her beauty ready for conquest; a rich alluvial earth for his cultivation just like the imperial gaze saw colonized enclaves as cultural zones to be violated. Conversely, it also seeks to explain the strategic and critical place of the woman in societal engineering in Africa. The question which arises then is: how originally original is Tu Face as an artist if his musical compositions have benefitted from earlier traditions as we have tried to sketch?

Conclusion

What has emerged from the negotiation of the new musical poetic in Nigeria is that, in an electronic age where digital and satellite technology have eclipsed traditional analogue modes of artistic expression, the ideas surrounding authors and authority have irretrievably changed. In particular, computer technology and internet resources such as the web, blogging, wiki and other social media processes have turned authorship, authority and textuality into an infinitely aggregative, additive and evanescent phenomenon (Ong, 2002: 31–39; Whittaker, 2000: 8–9). Authorship and textuality have also assumed the character of multiplicity, fluidity and un-fixity (Lanham, 1995: 16). In their hypertextual dimensions which are afforded by the electronic media, authorship and textuality have no beginning or end, and no margin or centre, only links or nodes (Bolter, 2001: 86–87). The capacity of the text and the author to be multicentred and in turn recentreable impacts on the proliferation and dissemination of meanings beyond the person and authority of the author (Landow, 1997: 57–58).

The musical compositions of Nigerian poet-artists therefore participate in the digital and electronic processes of artistic and cultural production as they have reduced to digitalized forms using new media applications. This music exists on CDs, VCDs, digital radio and satellite television, YouTube, mobile telephony, video films, etcetera. Through their web and internet presence, the musical compositions become virtual property since nobody owns the internet (Reddick and King, 2001: 17). This alternative existence accorded the music has increasingly problematized the issue of authorship as a multiplicity of authors is involved in the musical production process. This is evident in the roles of the producers who edit, rearrange, and transform the text to conform to the gestalt of production, thus becoming co-creators with the author. The music can also be remixed in which case the rhythm, tempo and instrumentation can change through the instrumentality of digital appliances and the involvement of other authors radically altering the hierarchy of production from a vertical to a horizontal one (Atton, 2002: 27). Besides, many of these artists have also drawn from oral traditional re/sources with clear implications on the nature of the text and the author.

One fascinating aspect of the digitalization of the new musical poetic in Nigeria is the role of the marketers, some of whom pirate these compositions and so pervert and undermine the assumed coherence and linearity of the text and individual authorship. Through their creative additions, especially the inclusion of commercial advertisements as part of the compositions, they also participate in an electronic process of widening the scope of authorship thus making it unfixed. Another significant participatory reality by the marketers is the selection of the compositions from their original albums into a varied ensemble which necessitates the co-habitation of various, wide-ranging musical artists occupying the same space in a particular ensemble of selected compositions. Though the individual artists remain recognizable, the selection process introduces an added dimension to the reality of authorship as the music exists in a dispersed space and time thereby complicating issues of authorship. On the whole, the interactional continuum which exists between texts of oral tradition and (post)modern electronic inventions constituting the oral poets as veritable heirs to both traditions is also what refracts them as new wineskins into which the old wine has collected and settled.