After the failed attempt by the underwear bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutalab, to blow up a plane in Detroit last Christmas, one could say (in Hollywood-speak) that Akunyili and many Nigerians pushed back against the American media and government by making the case that even though Abdulmutallab was the Nigerian actor in this straight-to-dvd terror sequel, Britian and Yemen should share the director and co-producer credits for providing the schools of indoctrination for the stunt he pulled. Nigeria, at best, should only get an acting credit.

Nigeria may have won that bout with the U.S. government finally acquiescing and scratching the country’s name off its “terror-watch list,” (and recently from the list of major drug trafficking countries), but Nigerian notoriety is alive and well on the collective American screen. African bloggers have long claimed that Nigerians have replaced cold war Russians as Hollywood’s new go-to bad guys in 2009 – see 2 ’09 blockbusters, District 9 and opening scenes of X-Men Origins: Wolverine. In other words, Nigerians are the new “ridiculous super villains of the modern age.” This editorial, which ran in Nigeria’s ThisDay newspapers last year, rightly points out that, apart from Abdulmutallab’s underwear shenanigans, District 9 and PS3 ad campaign cited earlier were both produced by the American entertainment conglomerate, Sony. But the editorial failed to mention in what it claims to be a “war” between Sony and Nigeria, that the depicting goes further back. In 2003, Sony, via Columbia pictures, also released the Antoine Fuqua action flick, Tears of the Sun. You would recall it starred a poker faced Bruce Willis, who, along with some bad ass Navy Seals, are dropped into Nigeria Igboland to rescue Monica Bellucci from some Hollywood concocted genocide. Like Akunyili, the Nigerian ambassador at the time to the United States also sent Sony this letter condemning its depiction of Nigerians as machete wielding villains, and he also included the silly request that the film be withdrawn from circulation.

Nigeria’s 50th independence anniversary is just around the corner (Oct. 1st). So how is Nigeria perceived on the gut-level of American pop culture? I thought it will make a good read to extract some points from a just concluded research paper looking at evolving trends in the depiction of Nigerian notoriety in American television and film. But first, lets get on the same page. A culture/entertainment industry, at least the American version of it, is a capitalist, ideological and speculative–as in an ideas and innovation generating–space. At its best, it takes early cues from a very diverse culture and comes up with new uses for stereotypes or other cues of mass understanding in ways that can change how Americans perceive themselves – and others. At its worst, it simply recycles old and harmful stereotypes and ends up deepening every manner of ideological entrenchment. cough-Fox News-cough. Because of the global reach and sheer scale of the American culture industry, it’s safe to say it serves mass understanding on a global and unprecedented scale.

Slowly eroding from the American television landscape are the depictions of generic Africa princes. Back then in Coming to America (’88), Eddie Murphy came from somewhere called – Zamunda? Even till 2000, in season 2, eps 4 of the West Wing, the late South African actor Zakes Mokae ruled some HIV/Aids ravaged place called Equatorial Kundu. Numerous iterations of the African prince character type showed up time and time again, often as a love interest in 90s African American sitcoms. You can find glimpses here and there in everything from Living Single to A Different World. A more recent take on the character is Leonard Howze’s role as Dinka in Tim Story’s 2002 sleeper hit, Barbershop. But today, Prince Akeem from Zamunda is probably less of a pop culture reference in comparison to exiled Prince Nkomo from Nigeria, who emails you spam in the name of Jesus because he needs your “help” to retrieve his royal loot from Nigeria. This season 34, ep. 18 SNL cold open lets you measure to a fraction a brain synapse the degree of instant recognition American audiences now have for references to so called Nigerian princes. American pop culture mainstream is literally littered with references to email scam jokes, all prefixed by “Nigerian.” You can drop “Nigerian” before anything; even “monkey-pox“. Thanks Boondocks. Try telling an email scam joke without the Nigerian prefix. It’s not as funny. But there maybe a twist to the joke. According to Variety back in ’08,  SNL alum Tracy Morgan was to star in the comedy Fresh Roommates. The plot feels like the evolution of Akeem into Nkomo as well as the merging of both ideas into one:

“…what if one of the emails isn’t a scam. Story kicks off when a young man answers one such email during a drunken stupor. Soon thereafter, the spoiled son of a deposed African dictator (Morgan) shows up at his door, looking to secure his inheritance.”

Nigerian notoriety is also easy fodder for various crime shows, especially the Law and Order franchises. As the deep voiced narrator claims, these stories  are ripped “straight from the headlines.” As early as 1992, plots revolving around Nigerians and storylines about heroin drug mules started appearing in Law and Order season 3 eps like “consultation” (arguably pulled from a U.K news headline) or on Homicide: Life on the Street season 5 episode “deception.” It is interesting to note the proximity of the appearance of these storylines to a 90s’ Nigerian economy clobbered to a pulp by the fallout corruption, military coups and from the IMF’s Structural Adjustment Program (SAP) policies badly implemented in the mid-80′s. Don’t remember SAP? Don’t bother with the wiki. Watch Onion News’ American political pundits discuss the topic and Nigeria in harrowing detail.

Charles Tiv wrote in his book on 419 that the transition of 70s era “OBT” con men (acroynm for “obtaining” in Nigerian government documents) to 90s’ 419 scammers started in the mid-80s. This was largely in response, he argues, to an economy reeling from IMF loan conditions that called for free markets, no protections, no subsidies and the devaluation of naira. Exacerbated by corruption, the resulting depreciation of the naira, high inflation and shredding of whatever social welfare net was still there left many Nigerians to their own devices. There have always been the drug mules, mail fraud and then email scam artists. But the economic nose dive of the late 80s and 90s added a new generation to the criminal ranks. By 2004,  Nigerian storylines involving ritual killing debut on the season 5 Law and Order Special Victims Unit (SVU) episode, “ritual.” Ironically, one of the results of SAP and Nigerians left to their own devices was Nollywood. And one of the fallouts of the growing popularity of Nollywood films around Africa and rest of the world is the association of Nigerians with the bizzare, and with ritual killings.

But like plots in Hollywood or punchlines in pop culture, a static, non-evolving Nigerian notoriety also becomes a cliche. Like the premise to the proposed Tracy Morgan flick, we’ve already begun to see new twists. Add to the list this Identity Guard commercial and the 2009 pilot episode of Leverage. There isn’t enough time or space here to thouroughly go over a Hollywood curiosity like the film Mister Johnson (1990). Based on a book by colonial expat Joyce Carey and directed by Bruce Beresford, who had lived in Nigeria at a time, the cast included Hubert Ogunde, Tunde Kelani, Femi Fatoba with Maynard Eziashi playing Johnson. Set in the colonial 20s, the character Johnson comes across as persistant, clueless, a bad bookeeper, creative, innovative, has a zero grasp of nuance, childish, ambitious, audacious, reflexive, and always too happy; or you could say, always happily scheming. Though Johsnon was stuck in the colonial era, the character seems a walking, complex microcosm of Nigeria at 50.

Fela on Broadway/Photo: Monique Carboni

NYT theater critic, Charles Isherwood, fires the first volley in the Fela! backlash, and I must say about time too; like a Barack Obama inevitably losing some luster, i thought the backlash against Fela! was also inevitable; the more rave reviews a musical about a radical Nigerian musician garnered, the more its Bradjelina-adopted-African-orphan existence on Broadway became a “big girl now” and, alas, its protective skin of white guilt/political correctness begins to peel.

For covering fire for his contrarian mad dash, Isherwood hijacks a line from David Mamet’s problematic–check Alyssa’s review–new play, Race – “I know there is nothing a white person can say to a black person about race which is not both incorrect and offensive,” and that said, apart from Isherwood’s concerns about the whole disneyficationof Fela’s milieu, taking a pair of scissors to the article, Isherwood’s  bone of racial contention seems to be:

…the emphasis in “Fela!” on the spectacle of African culture tilted the show a little too closely toward minstrelsy. It evoked an unsettling feeling I can’t say I ever had before at the theater…. In contrast with characters in recent plays like Lynn Nottage’s “Ruined” and Danai Gurira’s “Eclipsed” — both of which explore the hard experience of African women by depicting fully developed lives caught in trying, sometimes terrible circumstances — the women of “Fela!” are largely festive window dressing.

Attired in eye-catching, vibrantly colored, flesh-baring ensembles, with their faces painted, they strut around the stage and the theater looking exotic, imperious and sexy. So too do the male members of the ensemble, who also bare a lot of flesh but have little to do other than sing and dance.

Hence my discomfort. The presentation of African culture as a feast of exotic pageantry has the potential, at least, to reinforce stereotypes of African people as primitive and unsophisticated, albeit endowed with astounding aptitudes for song and dance. Although some of the dancers have individual moments, none are given individual voices; sometimes they simply drape the stage like gaudy décor. And the way the dancers weave in and out of the audience repeatedly seems ingratiating, a sort of seduction that almost sexualizes the performers… In frolicking so exuberantly among the theatergoers, “Fela!” sometimes seems to turn its ostensible characters into flashy sideshow entertainments, to elevate sensation over substance.

Readers threw 108 comments back at him along with an invaluable window, for me at least, on everything I find fascinating about the tangled web of ideology, rationality and representation. But before getting into that, as a Nigerian (who through Fela’s lifetime only visited the Shrine once and on a night Fela didn’t even play) my prior analysis on the musical (which I saw in Dec ’09) is here and it squashes as well as preserves some of what Isherwood just said. Scanning the litany of comments, the closest thing to the position I’d take on the issues of representation raised in Fela! is echoed by commenter 95, who spits this:

Fela was such a complicated and in many ways deeply misguided individual it is very hard to conceive of a Bway show approaching his story in anything but the most superficial way. The feel-good African exuberance that seems to dominate the show is something that could be re-created on a Bway stage, but it reflects only one side of Fela and that side only partially. It is wrong to fault the show for turning Fela into a fetishist, because, he himself was a fetishist who turned himself into a fetish. There was undoubtedly authenticity and enormous courage in that, and brilliant musical innovation, but there was not much in the way of engagement with the real problems of Nigerians–at home or in the world.

That comment goes with the below excerpt of  my thoughts after viewing Fela Kuti – In Concert and the documentary Femi Kuti: Live at the Shrine:

The Shrine in its present reincarnation feels like a self watering flower pot for growing the good ganja that is Afro-beat music and the concessions its political dimension has to make to the patriarchal, bottom barrel, mass consumerist leanings of free market economics is already constructed into the music and embedded in its imagery. Fela’s genius was his ability to smuggle all of life’s frustrations, a political agenda, and, most importantly, a potent patriarchal and sexual iconography under the body paint and masks of negritude and Africanism. The sexual and the political are therefore co-dependent forces in Fela’s brand of Afrobeat – and Femi’s too.

In other words, what Isherwood misconstrues as signifiers of the primitive, the hypersexualization of the performers, the spilling of the performance off the stage and into the audience (no doubt something Bill T Jones thought would substitute for the call and response dynamic in Fela’s music) and the overall seduction of Fela! wasn’t all invented by Bill T Jones and co, but are all aspects of the Africanist politics, beliefs and iconography via which Fela frees himself from middle class values to embrace patriarchy, turn his female dancers literally into brides or priestesses of an Orisha, creating a context in which they are the objectified fixtures of that Orisha’s shrine (the Orisha in this case being the spirit of Fela’s dead mother I would imagine) and within which the their objectification is “permitted” and their sexualization merely a by product.

All the above results in an overall seduction that’s uniquely Fela’s own brew and he used it to fuel Afrobeat’s engine and mass appeal. Call it Fela-economics. That said, Isherwood can be forgiven for not knowing how deeply embedded Africanist trappings and the fusion of Yoruba deification turned sexuality are in Fela’s milieu, but he shouldn’t be forgiven for staying in the evaluative box that refuses to see Fela, as one would any other Western artist, as intuiting his own business model and simply being a business man. In other words, Isherwood is not wrong for imposing a Western framework on Fela! He just imposes the wrong one.

Out of the 180 sticks and stones thrown at Isherwood, these pile stand out. In reaction to Isherwood’s assumption that the musical should be substantial in addressing Africa, commenter 38 fires:

The play has no obligation to speak for all of African culture–can’t be done, and no one should expect it to. “Fela” is a portrait of a particular figure, a Nigerian musician whose shows were known for their spectacle. As a devotee of Fela’s music for 25 years, I found the portrait of him to be faithful and well-researched. The play captured magnificently the excitement, aura, spectacle, and delicious grooves of a Fela show. Would Mr. Isherwood fret about “Mamma Mia” misrepresenting “Scandinavian culture”? Of course not–everyone knows that play is just entertainment on Broadway, as is “Fela.”

…or substantial in the vein of Lynn Nottage’s “Ruined” or Danai Gurira’s “Eclipsed,” commenter 83:

My question is why would ‘Ruined’ be your inspiration for going to see FELA!? There is no logical connection…unless Africa is one undifferentiated mass to you. Would you go see a musical set in France just because you’d seen a play set in England? People need to interrogate their own (mis)understandings of the continent instead of blaming a brilliant musical production because it didn’t serve up their one-size-fits-all vision of Africa and Africans!

In addition, commenter 100 thinks Isherwood is asking too much of this musical:

Of course Broadway isn’t going to give genuine Nigerian culture an outing. That’s not what it’s there for. Broadway gives Broadway entertainment under the thin guise of a window into something else. Was The King and I remotely accurate about Siamese culture or history? (Music: Rodgers, choreography: Robbins) Was there anyone in New York who knew that country at all, and knew how phony it all was? Phony but wonderful. Sixty years later, Thailand is a major tourist destination and Thai restaurants are all over the city and the land. The show helped to make Americans curious. Fela may do the same vis-a-vis Nigeria or even the impossible complexities of enormous Africa… Broadway chews up other cultures and spits them out, the way birds chew the food they bring home to nourish their young. The other cultures are not hurt by this – the taste arouses an appetite for more.

Commenter 34 couldn’t shake the feeling of “cultural tourism” in attending FELA! and suspected what provoked Isherwood’s reaction was the “somewhat puzzled look on a sea of upturned white faces … as if neo-colonialism was happening…” Commenter 43sees the term “minstrelsy” as the only frame of reference Isherwood could use to explain his discomfort with seeing an unapologetic black sensuality – “… the players on stage are commanding and in command of their sensuality — not shuckin’ and steppin’ as minstrelsy would imply.” Commenter 94 brings it home:

I am sick and tired though of hearing white people tell me how to behave “properly” so as not to reinforce stereotypes. In Nigeria, women dance by shaking their back-sides, sorry if it makes some middle-aged white man uncomfortable, but that’s just how we do it….I don’t complain when I see white people line dancing!

Commenter 57, who worked with Fela in the 80s, speaks of a “mother-fucker Fela,” but it is commenter 89 who mentions the other radicals in the Anikulapo clan that deserve a mention, if not a Broadway musical of their own:

Fact is, in the world we are today, Nigeria is really too far away from America for a serious and commercially successful treatment of the kind of issues the reviewer seems to be looking for in America. Fela was really just an anti-authoritarian and a magnet for the young and restless, but putting him up in too much a serious way as some sort of human rights hero would be a bit much. I mean, in real life Fela had two siblings, Olikoye and Beko. Olikoye was a Professor of Pedriatrics who did excellent work in public health education and public health administration. Beko was also a medical doctor who was a REAL leader in human rights issues throughout most of his adult life. None of these guys married 27 wives. They were disciplined and worked SERIOUSLY the way an ACLU guy or an AMA guy would work. Beko went to prison for his opposition to governments probably as much as Fela did. If someone was doing “serious” work on the topic, they would have to include these gentlemen (since Fela’s mother came into the show). But that is a lot of serious work. For a lot less money. And much smaller audience. So, just enjoy it show. It’s a musical.

And, hmmm…,  commenter 102 thinks, perhaps, Isherwood and NYT are up to something:

It seemed VERY peculiar to me that the Times, more than two months after the opening of “Fela!,” felt the need to provide revisionist “balance” to all the praise the show has justly received. It’s almost as though the paper wants to provide cover for reactionary theatergoers (and Tony voters) who don’t want any challenges to their conventional notions of what a Broadway musical can and should be. I sure can’t remember any reviews expressing retroactive misgivings about, say, “Billy Elliot” a couple of months into its run.

Apparently the profiling has started. CNN talks to Rafi Ron, frm. security chief at Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv, and frm FBI agent Mike German about calls to ditch all the silly political correctness and to agree that if it looks, walks, and quacks like one, it should be profiled a duck: CNN Video

The gist of what Newt Gingrich said about profiling:

We know how to identify these enemies but our elites have refused to do so. In the Obama Administration, protecting the rights of terrorists has been more important than protecting the lives of Americans. That must now change decisively. It is time to know more about would-be terrorists, to profile for terrorists and to actively discriminate based on suspicious terrorist information.

Oh, and here is Ann Coulter on profiling. She thinks the word “Nigerian” is a “warning sign”:

Since Muslims took down Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988, every attack on a commercial airliner has been committed by foreign-born Muslim men with the same hair color, eye color and skin color. Half of them have been named Mohammed. An alien from the planet “Not Politically Correct” would have surveyed the situation after 9/11 and said: “You are at war with an enemy without uniforms, without morals, without a country and without a leader — but the one advantage you have is they all look alike. … What? … What did I say?”

The only advantage we have in a war with stateless terrorists was ruled out of order ab initio by political correctness. And so, despite 5 trillion Americans opening laptops, surrendering lip gloss and drinking breast milk in airports day after day for the past eight years, the government still couldn’t stop a Nigerian Muslim from nearly blowing up a plane over Detroit on Christmas Day. The “warning signs” exhibited by this particular passenger included the following: His name was Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. He’s Nigerian. He’s a Muslim. His name was Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. He boarded a plane in Lagos, Nigeria. He paid nearly $3,000 in cash for his ticket. He had no luggage. His name was Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab.

All valid arguments. Those “Others” who strap on bombs to blow the rest of us up are disproportionately Muslim and are doing so to defend Islam. Hence the source of this overwhelming assurance that the so called “rest of us” have a magic bullet cocked and democracy need not be this hard or inconvenient. In other words, trim the fat or “political correctness” off our freedoms by authorizing more powers to whoever needs it and legislating the means to profile those who fit said “pattern.” Sucker alert! It’s also a pattern a terrorist doesn’t necessarily have to, or need to, fit.

Like Mike German makes clear, fundamentally, there is no terrorist profile — “beards,” “i heart sharia” tee shirts, “Arabic names,” “a burka-rer of women,” “extremist behavior,” “country where passport was issued” and so on are all helpful in shrinking the recruiting pool. But when terror is now a service you can outsource and push comes to shove, all those tell tale signs generate “false-positives” or intangibles; can’t someone who is determined to blow himself up also be as determined not to exhibit any of the stereotypes? In case you don’t deal drugs, it’s called a “change-up.” Furthermore, if you chase after intangibles–or things that don’t necessarily need to have a fixed address–to keep up you end up going after everybody – everybody includes Americans too.

Yep, the terror suspect is a Nigerian with bad taste in underwear, but the silver lining to all this might be a failed father with the good sense to snitch on his son. He admitted his failure, he screwed the code of family and religious honor and he went to the authorities, physically, to snitch the boy out. In doing so, he might have put the first crack in the freakin’ dam of Islamic distrust. Every other mother and father of a radical, if they choose to follow Umaru Mutallab’s steps, now know what to do. And there it lies in a nutshell. There is no way to defeat Islamic extremism without the help of moderate and peace loving Muslims worldwide. By all means, profile them.