Cover art by Alanna Fields

 

Black Archival Practice II is a collection of reflections, celebrations, and prefigurations of and for the past, present, and future of the Black lives in the Archive(s). The essays in this issue center the work of Black women in the archive(s) as archivists, researchers, historical subjects, artists, and mothers as a way to expand current understandings of how Black archival practices get imagined, contested, and negotiated within traditional archival spaces and in spaces intentionally coded as Black.

Beginning with the remarkable cover by Alanna Fields, Black Archival Practice II announces its subject as a fugitive departure from tamed, disciplinary modes of archivy. Fields’ work is a new kind of archive that conceals as much as it reveals; and, just as it reveals the persistence of Black life that is often veiled in the archive(s), so, too, do the essays in this special issue.

These essays speak to the complexities of documenting Black women’s intellectual histories through Queen Mother Audley Moore’s Archives, Samaria Rice’s Black maternal archival praxis and the memorialization of Black death, an exploration of collective ethics of care in Black archival practices via the history of a community-led rediscovery of the free Black community of Weeksville and a Brooklyn, NY-focused digital humanities project, an intimate exploration of “hoarding” and home archives in Black communities through an atypical multi-generational collection, the use of dirt as enslaved Afro-Texan women’s testimony, and the application of Black feminist witnessing to reveal racial violences obscured in legal archives.

While the seven essays in this issue range in their use of various theoretical and methodological lenses, each author offers an approach to Black archival practice that both integrates and exceeds the practices of traditional archival work and research. Together, these pieces trouble the principles of traditional archives practices and celebrate, dissect, and testify to the power of Black archives, archivists, and archival practices in ways that are both rigorous and generative.

We invite you to engage with the essays in this issue as a means of thinking about the possibilities and realities of archives and archival practices that attend to Black life in public and intimate spaces—and all of the liminal spaces in between. In these pages, we hope you will find transformative inquiry, creativity, and hope; that you will be as moved and inspired as we have been by the authors, their words, and their muses.

– Tonia Sutherland and Zakiya Collier

 

For a limited time, access the introduction “The Revolutionary and Radical in Black Archival Practice,” by Sutherland and Collier, and “Disorderly Distribution: The Dispersal of Queen Mother Audley Moore’s Archives and the Illegibility of Black Women Intellectuals,” by Ashley D. Farmer for free.

Personal subscriptions are $44 USD and include 4 issues. Volume 52 (2022) includes the above issue, plus Post-Soul Afro-Latinidades, and the upcoming issues Black Archival Practice I and Black Religions in the Digital Age.

In volume 53 (2023), keep an eye out for The Shape of Things to Come: Africology and the Rise of Afrofuturist Studies, a special double issue for Unsafe Words: Black Radical Pleasure II, and more. For volume 54 (2024), we’re working on Baraka’s Blues People at 60, Black Women’s Speculative Fiction (CFP), Ceddo: Black British Independent Film, and more…

Cover art by Shantel Miller

 

Black Religions in the Digital Age assembles six innovative essays that explore the intersections between Black religiosity and technology. These essays provide introspective views of intricate interconnections between Black religions, including African Traditional Religions, Christianity, witchcraft, and trans/posthumanism, and emerging digital technologies such as the Internet, social media, software applications, and virtual reality. As a result, these scholarly renderings lay the groundwork for a new subfield called “digital Black religion.”

On the cover, Shantel Miller’s Back in My Body beautifully captures a little Black girl freely playing in a room set apart from authoritative eyes. Similarly, scholars of digital Black religion, like those whose work fills this issue, are also freely at play. Operating outside the normative boundaries of religious studies and Internet studies, these scholars, in their own way, employ diverse methodological approaches to create new theories that capture the dynamic relationship between Black people’s engagement of technology and religiosity.

In the opening essay, Erika D. Gault considers how digital activism and digital cultural outputs empower Black users to create alternative life-affirming pathways, resulting in a new way of conceptualizing Black religiosity through a lens of digital activism. N. Fadeke Castor’s essay draws from the wellspring of virtual ethnography to advance a theory of political activism. She turns her attention to the various ways that practitioners of African Diasporic religions use social media and video conferencing software as modes of resistance against racial hegemony. Both essays capture the ways in which digital Black users use religion to push back against socio-political agendas of antiblackness.

The next three essays enter this conversation of antiblackness through Black beingness. In his essay Philip Butler presents “digital spirituality” as a biotechnological code that is most evident in Black people’s creative usage of digital tools to grapple with the mundaneness of life, while Marcelitte Failli considers how Black womxn and femmes witches employ social media to construct personalized and collective worlds defined by Black beingness. Michael Brandon McCormack further nuances Butler and Failli’s discussion of digitally-influenced modes of subjectivity. Specifically, McCormack’s essay illustrates how Black youth create virtual sacred spaces that offer a counter-narrative against an anti-Black world.

While this issue focuses on the “digital age,” the last essay by James Padilioni Jr. argues that digital technologies should not be viewed as something new. Instead, digital technology is best viewed as an extension of analog-algorithmic processes operating in Black Diasporic communities well before the digital age. A claim that he substantiates in his positing of Hoodoo as a cybernetic technology. Collectively, these essays show the nuanced manner that Black digital users are intentionally playing with definitional boundaries of Black religions, presenting new understandings of Black religiosity that are informed by liberation, spiritual citizenship, world building, transhumanism/posthumanism, life affirmation, and cybernetics.

– Margarita Simon Guillory

 

For a limited time, access the introduction “Playing on the Margins: The Emergence of Digital Black Religion,” by Margarita Simon Guillory and “Assembling an Africana Religious Orientation: The Black Witch, Digital Media, and Imagining a Black World of Being,” by Marcelitte Failla for free.

Subscribe to volume 52 (2022), which includes the above issue, plus Post-Soul Afro-Latinidades, Black Archival Practice I, and the upcoming Black Archival Practice II. Personal subscriptions are $44 USD and include 4 issues per volume.

In volume 53 (2023), keep an eye out for The Shape of Things to Come: Africology and the Rise of Afrofuturist Studies, Unsafe Words: Black Radical Pleasure II and III (CFP), and more. For volume 54 (2024), we’re working on Black Women’s Contemporary Speculative Fiction, an issue on The New Black British Cinema, and more.

Cover art by Alanna Fields

 

This issue on Black Archival Practice is a collection of reflections, celebrations, and prefigurations of and for the past, present, and future of the Black lives in the Archive(s). The essays in this issue center Black(end) archival knowledges as a way to expand current understandings of how Black archival practices get imagined, contested and negotiated within traditional archival spaces and in spaces intentionally coded as Black.

Beginning with the remarkable cover by Alanna Fields, Black Archival Practice announces its subject as a fugitive departure from tamed, disciplinary modes of archivy. Fields’s work is a new kind of archive that conceals as much as it reveals; and, just as it reveals the persistence of Black life that is often veiled in the archive(s), so, too, do the essays in this special issue.

These essays speak to transformation through witnessing and testimony in the archives, Black women stewarding collections of their own experiences, Audre Lorde’s queer and deviant library science practices, the questioning of what we know and from where we know it in Octavia E. Butler’s archival practices, poet Arna Bontemps’s Black archival labor in the Fisk University W.E.B. DuBois collection, the use of narrative prose to probe the limits of care and affection in undoing archival harm, and an interview with Black Bottom Archives Director Paige “PG” Watkins that thoughtfully engages abolitionist organizing with Black memory work.

While the seven essays in this special issue range in their use of various theoretical and methodological lenses, each author offers an approach to Black archival practice that both integrates and exceeds the practices of traditional archival work and research. Together, these pieces trouble the principles of traditional archives practices and celebrate, dissect, and testify to the power of Black archives, archivists, and archival practices in ways that are both rigorous and generative.

We invite you to engage with the essays in this issue as a means of thinking about the possibilities for seeing and celebrating Black life in spaces that have traditionally been understood as anti-Black or as hostile to Blackness. In these pages, we hope you will find transformative inquiry, creativity, and hope; that you will be as moved and inspired as we have been by the authors, their words, and their muses.

 – Tonia Sutherland and Zakiya Collier

 

For a limited time, access the introduction “The Promise and Possibility of Black Archival Practice,” by Sutherland and Collier, and “Narratives of Interiority: Archival Practices of Care and Affection (and its Limits)” by Paula C. Austin for free.

Personal subscriptions are $44 USD and include 4 issues. Volume 52 (2022) includes the above issue, plus Post-Soul Afro-Latinidades, and the upcoming issues Black Archival Practice II and Black Religions in the Digital Age.

In volume 53 (2023), keep an eye out for The Shape of Things to Come: Africology and the Rise of Afrofuturist Studies, Unsafe Words: Black Radical Pleasure II (CFP), and more.

Pioneering Black British independent filmmaker, Henry Goule Martin, died at 70 years old on May 13^th of this year after months of a struggle with cancer, which he, characteristically, kept private. Though his name might be unfamiliar in the United States, Martin started the important production company, Kuumba in 1982 along with two other Black pioneers—Menelik Shabazz and Imruh Bakari. This company would provide a base for the Ceddo Film and Video Workshop founded later that year. In an era of notable Black film/media collectives such as Isaac Julien’s Sankofa and Black Audio, Ceddo made a significant mark as the center of radical Black filmmaking in London for over a decade. For example, the workshop would produce seminal films, including Milton Bryan’s, The People’s Account (1985), Shabazz’s proto-Afrofuturist Time and Judgement: Diaries of a 400 Year Exile (1988) and D. Elmina Davies’ groundbreaking womanist documentary, Omega Rising: Women of Rastafari (1988).

Shabazz was the well-known director of Burning an Illusion (1981), only the second film directed by a Black director in British history and winner of the Grand Prix at the Amiens International Film Festival in France. He would direct others including, Step Forward Youth (1976), Time and Judgement: Diaries of a 400 Year Exile (1988), The Story of Lovers Rock (2011), and publish the magazine, Black Filmmaker in the 90s. Imruh Bakari directed films such as Riots and Rumors of Riots (1981), Street Warriors (1985), The Mark of the Hand (1987), and Blue Notes and Exiled Voices (1991). Devoting much of the years since Ceddo building the filmmaking infrastructure of the African continent, Bakari directed the Zanzibar International Film Festival (1999-2004) and has developed screenwriting and production projects in Tanzania while teaching and publishing critical works as well as collections of poetry.

Martin was never a member of Ceddo. But he worked closely with the collective, producing Bakari’s Blue Notes and Exiled Voices and The Mark of the Hand, and devised and ran Screenwrite (1993), an influential screenplay program for Black writers, in association with the British Film Institute and Channel 4 Television. While maintaining this commitment to Black independent film and filmmakers, he worked in the wider British film industry, even directing a season of early 80s children’s television program, Everybody Here.

Born to Trinidadian parents Claude and Vida Martin in Lewisham Hospital, London, in 1952, Henry Martin returned to the island at three months old to spend his formative years in the heady climate of Carnival culture in the capital city, Port of Spain. Across the street from his home in the Woodbrook neighborhood was the legendary Little Carib Theatre. This hub of cultural activity drew into its orbit everyone from Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott to dance pioneer Katherine Dunham, and the great African American singer/activist, Paul Robeson. Also nearby was the pan-yard of the equally legendary Invaders Steel Orchestra. It was in between those spaces of cultural activism that he would develop his political and artistic sensibility in advance of his return to England in the very early 1970s. He returned already a pan-Africanist, but one who had discovered that ideology as much in the anti-colonial street culture of Port of Spain as in the zones between theatre and pan-yard.

His experiences with film in the Caribbean had taught him the power of the moving image. This led him to study film at the West Surrey College of Art and Design. There he committed himself to bringing Afro-Caribbean street culture and politics into film, a mix he believed could be revolutionary. His first film expressed that Trinidadian influence, a short documentary for the Arts Council of London called Grove Carnival (1981). Without dialogue it told the story of a day in the life of the Black community as it prepared for the Notting Hill festival. But like his colleagues in Ceddo, his work was also made in response to the almost annual series of riots that had rocked England since 1976. That first film would inspire his next, the controversial documentary on the militant music and culture of Ladbroke Grove, Grove Music (1981). It was a community he’d become a part of, the late night shebeens, the squats, the hustlers, and revolutionaries. That was why the film featured local musical legends Aswad, and the Sons of Jah. It remained Martin’s favorite of his films. He felt it enabled Black people to finally speak honestly about their interactions with the police as well as express unfiltered views of their lives in England.

However, the honesty that the film portrayed would lay the foundation for why he would eventually abandon filmmaking. Despite the enthusiasm of viewers and the fact that the very influential Channel Four bought the film, its release and advertising was so limited as to effectively ban it. It seemed to Martin and his comrades in Kuumba that this was due to the allegation by theater owners and others in the film industry that Grove Music affirmed and encouraged the violent confrontations between racist police and the Black community. This charge was not unfamiliar, having been made against many of the early films of Shabazz and Bakari, and later, in relation to Ceddo’s, The People’s Account. As well as documenting lived realities, these films had in fact been made to document the police harassment and violence towards Black people that instigated the uprisings in the first place.

That charge would also feed a level of street-level support that other collectives could not boast. Yet despite this support, his authentic voice as a filmmaker, which blended the music and cultural activism of street culture with Pan-Africanism and anti-colonialism, had been stunted. The sabotage of Grove Music, though, wasn’t enough to diminish his commitment to independent filmmaking. Nor did it diminish his radicalism: his next two films focused on transformations in the Caribbean as the islands lurched from colony to neo-colony: Grenada, Is Freedom We Making, and Trinidad and Tobago—Money Is Not the Problem, both from 1983.

He returned to his interest in Black street life and culture with the drama Big George is Dead (Kuumba Productions, 1987) made for Channel Four. On it, Martin worked with one of the very few Black female producers at the time, Deanne Edwards. This film starred two of Britain’s finest and most highly praised Black actors, the late Norman Beaton, and Rudolph Walker CBE. Both relished the freedom to perform outside of the stereotypical roles available to them in mainstream British media. But beyond its notable performances and a script by Black writer Michael Abbensetts (1938-2016), the film is remarkable for its depiction of Caribbean migration and generational change. Told over the course of one long night carousing in Soho, Big George is Dead remains one of the most evocative stories about the racial transformations of British street culture ever filmed.

Where Shabazz and Bakari remained engaged with the ups and downs of independent filmmaking, particularly after the drying up of formal support from the British Film Institute, Channel Four, and the Greater London Council, Martin made a momentous decision. Feeling that too much of the support for his films required that he betray his independence, he retired. In his own words, he was a revolutionary, not a hustler, though he freely admitted that the latter could be just as vital to the task of liberation.

Henry G. Martin leaves behind a loving family, many friends, and a network of Black writers and filmmakers grateful for his work and mentorship.

Cover art by Cienna Smith

Post-Soul Afro-Latinidades convenes social commentary and scholarly critiques on the post-soul aesthetic’s ideological entanglement with Afro-Latino subjectivity, expressive culture, and political thought in the US and Latin America. Historical and cultural contiguity provide the rationale for this long overdue intervention. The post-soul condition and sustained interest in Afro-Latinidad by US scholars emerged simultaneously in the wake of the Civil Rights and Black Power/Black Arts movements. Recognizing this harmonic convergence, the co-guest editors of this special issue bring together writers and scholars who variously embrace, reject, and modify conventional understandings of Afro-Latinidad and the post-soul aesthetic.

Cienna Smith’s innovative rendition of the Orisha Oshun graces the cover, figuratively signaling the issue’s understanding of post-soul Afro-Latinidad as an inherently diasporic, elastic, eclectic, and transnational concept of ethno-racial belonging and identification. The issue opens with “Naming Loss: An Interview with Naima Coster.” Coster, a best-selling novelist of Dominican, Cuban, and Curaçaoan heritage, discusses her views of the post-soul aesthetic and shares with the co-guest editors how being an Afro-Latina writer shaped her MFA experience, her themes and characters, and the marketing of her novels. Examining the impact of US Soul music in Panama, Matti Steinitz traces how Black Power symbols, styles, and discourses provided many young Afro-Latin Americans across the hemisphere with a means to break with prescribed nationalist and folkloristic identity constructions of blackness. Moving the discussion southward to Brazil and forward to the present, Bryce Henson explores singer-songwriter Karol Conká’s music, videos, and role on Big Brother Brazil to examine the tension between mestiço-oriented brasilidade’s erasure of blackness and the Brazilian post-soul aesthetic’s use of Black Brazilian musical genres and social movements to disrupt that erasure.

The next three articles investigate post-soul Afro-Latinidad in video games, social media, and trap rap. Examining the Sony PlayStation video game Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales (2020), Regina Marie Mills argues that Miles Morales, as Spider-Man, is a post-soul superhero who invites readers and players to contend not only with what it means to be Black but also with the marketability of blackness and Afro-Latinidad in post-Civil Rights America. In her article, Omaris Zunilda Zamora examines how Cardi B’s trance-inducing social media presence challenges Black feminism, Chicana feminism, and the post-soul aesthetic to substantively engage, rather than elide, Afro-Latina epistemologies. Calling attention to Mexican-American rapper Kap G and the post-soul South, Rodolfo Aguilar contends that Kap G’s sonic fusions of cumbia and trap rap symbolically represent the Latinx transformation of Atlanta’s demographic landscape and hip hop scene.

The issue concludes with “Our Patrias Cannot Liberate Us from Anti-Blackness: Post-Racial Myths in the Latinx Diaspora,” a personal essay by Ayendy Bonifacio. Using the day that he became a US citizen as a point of departure, Bonifacio meditates on the anti-racist protests stemming from the murders of Rayshard Brooks, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery, asking Latina/o/x communities to come to terms with their histories of anti-blackness.

– Trent Masiki and Regina Marie Mills

 

For a limited time, access the intro and “Naming Loss: An Interview with Naima Coster” for free.

Personal subscriptions are $44 USD and include 4 issues. Volume 52 (2022) includes the above issue, plus Black Archival Practice I and II, and Black Religions in the Digital Age.

In volume 53 (2023), keep an eye out for The Shape of Things to Come: Africology and the Rise of Afrofuturist Studies (CFP), Unsafe Words: Black Radical Pleasure II (CFP), and more.

Cover art by Diedrick Brackens

 

From the introduction, “Going Electric” by Paul J. Edwards:

“Dylan is not alone in producing speculative knowledge of Black trauma within circuits of white American poetics. Ezra Pound provided the only first-person account of the death of Louis Till, Emmett Till’s father. Executed by the US Army at a detention center near Pisa, Louis’ only chronicler was his fellow prisoner, Pound, who recorded only fleeting mentions of the man in The Pisan Cantos, noting Till’s nickname by his fellow prisoners and a slightly longer passage that functions as a eulogistic note. Again, this moment is marked by its apparent ambiguity. It only becomes legible to scholars after Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam murdered Emmett Till a decade later. Maddeningly, Louis’ death was kept from his family until it was used to smear him and his dead son, suggesting that the Tills shared a genetic predisposition—like all Black men—to assault white women. Such a sardonic line retrospectively seems oddly Dylanesque with its inclusion of Louis’ death with a sense of a feast being prepared. In either case, in Pound and Dylan, the Black body can only be speculated on, never quite in focus but instead more citational than critically engaged with. Although Pound and Dylan do not feature in this issue, each of our contributors counter the obscurations of Dylan and Pound’s white poetics.”

Issue also includes the following:

• Violent Illumination: Street Lamps as Sites of Lynching and Black Resistance, by Leah S. Yared
• When Militancy Was in Vogue: Amiri Baraka, Langston Hughes, and the Precarious Desires of White Audiences, by Zachary Manditch-Prottas
• Sex and the Future of History: Black Politics at the Limit in Sutton E. Griggs’ Imperium in Imperio, by Melissa A. Wright
• Book Reviews: Ebony Magazine and Lerone Bennett Jr.: Popular Black History in Postwar America by E. James West / Sid Ahmed Ziane; Dear Science and Other Stories by Katherine McKittrick / Cera Smith; Childhood in Contemporary Diasporic African Literature: Memories and Futures Past by Christopher E.W. Ouma / Daniel Chukwuemeka; Infamous Bodies: Early Black Women’s Celebrity and the Afterlives of Rights by Samantha Pinto / Margarita Lila Rosa; Black Sexual Economies: Race and Sex in a Culture of Capital edited by Adrienne D. Davis and the BSE Collective / Kirin Wachter-Grene

For a limited time, read the introduction and “Violent Illumination” for free.

 

Personal subscriptions are $44 USD and include 4 issues. Until the end of 2021, you can subscribe to our 51st volume here.

In our 2022 volume, keep an eye out for Post-Soul Afro-Latinidades, Black Archival Practice (two issues), and Black Religions in the Digital Age. Our 2023 volume will include issues on Afrofuturism, and more…

 

Aerial image in the University of Ibadan. Image from Wikimedia.

 

The city of Ibadan in south-western Nigeria is historic for many reasons. In this case, it was once the intellectual hub of the country and arguably, the Anglophone sector of West Africa. The seminal quartet of modern Nigerian letters comprising Chinua Achebe, Christopher Okigbo, Wole Soyinka and J.P. Clark Bekeredemo all studied at the University College Ibadan (now University of Ibadan) in the 1940s, 50s and 60s. The same is true of the first major generation of literary critics and theorists.

And so, it isn’t surprising that another significant figure-Harry Garuba- of the Nigerian literary scene emerged from the Ibadan school of poets and literary artists. Garuba, sadly passed in 2020 and Sanya Osha in this essay, explores what the culturally rich city might have meant to him and what he in turn personified for the sprawling metropolis.

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The historic city of Ibadan in South-western Nigeria is home to the University of Ibadan, the country’s first university. But it is also a city of startling contrasts, mystique, and secrecy. Capital of the Western region for a time, it has never completely shed its aura of deep mystery, even as an endless influx of cosmopolitan denizens flooded its world-renowned university and urban conurbations in search of refined company, rustic serenity, knowledge, and off-beat experiences.

Harry Garuba was a distinguished professor of literature and African studies at the University of Cape Town, South Africa before he passed in 2020 due to leukemia. He had been a brilliant student at the Ibadan university which was established by British colonial authorities in 1948. More importantly, Garuba was an influential poet whose groundbreaking first collection of verse, Shadow and Dream and Other Poems (1982) inspired an entire generation of poets, writers and academics most notably, Remi Raji based at the University of Ibadan, Onookome Okome at Alberta University, Canada, Nduka Otiono at Carleton University, Canada, Afam Akeh, a London- based poet, and many others who made their mark in the worlds of academia and creative writing. Indeed, for a significant length of time, he was a fulcrum around which all major literary figures, initiatives, and activities on campus converged. Arguably, this attraction was not due to an inordinate exercise of power or undue force of character. Rather, it stemmed from the lambency of an ineluctable Warholian disposition.

At Ibadan, Harry also commenced his career as a young academic when he was still in his early twenties. The main campus was virtually ‘everything’ with its own vast residential quarters, not excluding rows of rickety stalls and kiosks that served as eateries and tuck shops at what is called the Black Market. Other similar arrangements can be found at Abadina, the quarter meant for non-academic staff and low-end workers. At the Black Market, apart from eating and drinking, theatre students and lovers held drama rehearsals. There were stores everywhere. You didn’t have to leave the campus for much and there was a shop that was once well stocked with the written works of the brightest minds the world had to offer.

And so the campus became a city-within-a-city. As a result, this curious relationship led to a dichotomy between city and varsity.

Virtually all of Nigeria’s major literary icons and intellectuals—Chinua Achebe, Christopher Okigbo, Wole Soyinka, John Bekeredemo Clark, Abiola Irele, Michael Echeruo,  Ben Obumselu, Isidore Okpewho,  Ken Saro-Wiwa, Femi Osofisan and so many others—passed through the city and varsity at significant stages of their lives and careers.

Expatriates such as the late Ulli Beier, the irrepressible cultural catalyst, worked at Ibadan along with his then wife, Suzanne Wenger, who had facilitated the famous Oshogbo school of art that promoted the talents of Twins Seven Seven, Jimoh Braimoh, Rufus Ogundele and other notable artistic luminaries. They were also pivotal in establishing the Mbari artistic collective that offered a platform for the likes of Duro Ladipo, Kole Ogunmola, and a young Orlando Owoh, a great exponent of highlife music. Wenger would later become a well-respected high priestess of traditional spirituality, the river goddess Osun specifically, in Osogbo, calmly receiving and nurturing acolytes from all over the world until her final days.

The city of Ibadan and its illustrious varsity loomed under this formidable pedigree. As we walked as students through the hallowed corridors of the Faculty of Arts, we were never allowed to forget this lofty history nor the colorful personalities who inscribed their kaleidoscopic narratives drawing richly from their transformational personal experiences and inimitable perspectives on life and art. Bekeredemo Clark immortalized the city in a poem in which he remarked that it was a place browned with dust and rust glittering underneath the sun like fragments of broken china. Such a metaphor captured both the brokenness and inexplicable allure of the city. In a way, Clark (who passed in October 2020) was a poet who captured and represented the city’s vernacular cosmopolitanism.

Wole Soyinka, Nigeria’s Noble laureate, has a long and intimate relationship with both the city and varsity where he once studied and worked. There, he plotted his numerous artistic adventures and staged his first major act of political rebellion by holding up a regional radio station to protest an election widely believed to have been rigged in 1965.

One eerily bright and sunny afternoon in the early nineteen nineties, whilst walking along the narrow road that ran in front of the central administrative block, Soyinka spritely hopped out of a barely stationary vehicle, sighted Harry and greeted him warmly like a long lost friend. Having been entertained by a plethora of tales pertaining to Soyinka’s legendary self-regard, I was quite amazed at the depth and sincerity of the warmth he demonstrated towards Harry who was much younger than he.

Harry, being the consummate raconteur, always had delectable anecdotes to share about our numerous literary heroes. This was not out of place having been taught by the likes of Biodun Jeyifo, a Harvard emeritus professor, and the ever so proper Dan Izebavye, who managed to uphold an ethic of fair play, propriety, and humane considerateness even whilst scrupulously adhering to varsity rules. Undoubtedly, much of Harry’s social and cultural grooming also came from mavericks and perennial barroom fixtures such as the late Joe Emordi (fondly called Oga Joe), a formidable thespian in his own right and Sam Loco Efe, the also deceased great Nollywood actor who was already an established Ibadan legend long before he found renewed fame and controversy in the frenetic film industry cities of Lagos and Onitsha.

Life swirled drunkenly in cloudy beer mugs and sometimes became crossed-eyed with blind rage and bitter regret. Dreams flitted away in columns of cigarette smoke until the first glow of dawn wiped afresh the misty bar louvres. How could one ever forget the transitional impact of the irascible theatre director and professor, Dapo Adelugba, who held court in his cluttered and dusty office on the last floor of the faculty building?

The countless attractions and distractions of the varsity often kept us from exploring the hidden delights of the city, which were generally considered to be less cosmopolitan and therefore probably less valued. In my opinion, this was a huge mistake.  Harry, for instance, never learnt to speak Yoruba properly even though he had a Yoruba middle name, Oludare. The varsity was obviously viewed with awe and slight perplexity by the indigenous dwellers of the city’s inner precincts. The varsity had been constructed according to the vision and expectations of white colonial masters with considerable care and precision that is lacking in many areas around the city. It was believed that only favored initiates were cherry picked to experience the guarded delights of the varsity.

In his remarkable memoir, A Mouth Sweeter than Salt, the extraordinary Ibadan historian Toyin Falola irreverently captures the hidden mysteries of Ibadan in a manner that those of us locked within the innards of the varsity, unfortunately, did not really care to explore. When we ventured into the labyrinthine precincts of the city, we often did so as slightly snobbish and absent-minded tourists, carelessly going through the motions.

In varsity poetry circles, perhaps the most influential artistic figure with an Ibadan background was Christopher Okigbo, who is firmly etched within the pantheon of poets that mysteriously legislated over what was acceptable and possible from an artistic point of view. Although he was sadly killed during the Nigerian Civil War fighting for the Biafran side in 1967, his presence was felt in every poetry reading we held in both formal and informal settings, including our interminable after-hours drinking sessions.

Okigbo’s accomplishment confirmed the belief that we could be cosmopolitan artists even when our geographical circumstances were fairly circumscribed. Also, it was indeed possible to discover submerged postcolonial resources within the English language from which we could forge a new poetic vision and sensibility quite distinct from the Eurocentric paradigm. Perhaps this was the most powerful allure Okigbo held for us, including Harry, of course.

However, one thing we couldn’t have anticipated, flush as we were with youth, was that Okigbo’s talent and unique vision were singularly his own and not to be shared with those  who stumbled through the maze surrounding the path he had so ingeniously discovered. Okigbo, in short, was not to be followed. We could only marvel and gaze forlornly from afar at the magnificent horizon unearthed in those astonishing cadences of his remarkable and ethereal poetry.

In his art and academic writings, Harry did not do much to interrogate the connections between city and varsity, except perhaps with a cursory reference to Sango (the Yoruba deity of thunder and lightning) in his most famous essay, “Explorations in Animist Realism: Notes on Reading/Writing, African literature, Culture, and Society” published in Public Culture in 2003. Rather than drawing its primary inspiration from Yoruba culture and mythology, this essay is, instead, a compelling feat of postcolonial theorizing.

While the varsity was a site of ever-encroaching cosmopolitanism, the city held onto foundations of culture and language that have so much to reveal to us. Ibadan was a settlement, stabilized at the end of the nineteenth century after a century of warfare with other towns that tore apart most of Yoruba land. Innumerable slaves were snatched away to the New World, social fragmentation ensued and old political alliances crumbled.

The British colonial authorities established a semblance of social order in 1893. In essence, Ibadan eventually settled to civil life after a protracted reign of guns and swords. Today, it is difficult to sense a history that is drenched in blood, upheaval, and wanton destruction. Instead, the refinements of language, civility, and culture are so much more valued.

Indigenes of Ibadan are known as Mesiogo, a very peculiar concept applied only to the true born. “Mesi” means to reply, “ogo” means fool. And so Mesiogo means to reply promptly to a fool who is subsequently kept in the dark about one’s true intentions.  This characteristic is associated with the real children of Ibadan. In addition, Mesiogo incorporates a shifting sense of ambiguity, not as a counterproductive imperative, but rather as an unmistakable quality of existential resilience, that is, the ability to extricate oneself from a quandary with grace, skill, and finesse. Falola adds his important insights, claiming “mesiogo is a strategy of knowing when to fight, when not to fight. It is about understanding codes of behaviour in a highly stratified society.” Bola Ige, the former governor of Oyo State and a serving minister of the federation before he was assassinated under mysterious circumstances in 2001, published an edited volume that attempts to explain the concept as an existential practice.  We, the admirers of Okigbo, missed the full import this vital skill, taught in the indigenous Ibadan way whilst we lived in the city.

The Okebadan Festival is one of the most important in Ibadan’s cultural calendar. During this period, indigenes flock to the streets singing songs of excess and vulgarity to mask rites of social renewal, re-invention and consolidation. To the casual observer, the festival at first glance, may appear to be a carnival of decadence and transgression but is instead a crucial exercise in social cohesion, rejuvenation, and goodwill. It also serves as a collective prayer of seasonal plenitude and agricultural abundance. Indeed, the Okebadan Festival is intimately associated with harvests and the promise that comes with them. This tradition was not often emphasized amongst those of us whose worlds revolved largely around the university where we received most of our cultural and intellectual nourishment.

The tension between city and varsity can be ascribed to the fact that the former favored neo-traditionalism and the latter pursued a slightly triumphal cosmopolitanism. These two tendencies do not readily mix well and the disjuncture may have prevented both city and varsity from attaining their full potentials in postmodern times. The late Garuba was an unabashed representative of cosmopolitan strain of the city, but he would have been an even greater raconteur if he had embraced the neo-traditionalist element most cosmopolitans would rather not entertain. Indeed, Ibadan gave us more abundance than we knew what to do with and remains a city to which you always have to return.

 

Sanya Osha is the author of several books including Postethnophilosophy (2011) and Dust, Spittle and Wind (2011), An Underground Colony of Summer Bees (2012) and Ken Saro-Wiwa’s Shadow (Expanded Edition) (2021) among other publications. He works at the Institute for Humanities in Africa (HUMA), University of Cape Town, South Africa.

 

 

 

I write this appreciation as a teacher recognizing another. Mistress Velvet was a true educator in every sense of the word. They extended wisdom in so many realms of their life. Their influence and impact on others is hard to calculate in its radiant expansiveness. So many have come forward to celebrate them. They were deeply loved in Chicago—our adopted city—central to organizing circles and many other Black, queer communities. So many people have and will continue to speak to Velvet’s imprint and power from internal places and spaces far, far more intimate than I could ever hope to articulate. I met them only once and I was fortunate to receive their permission to record that evening in writing, to share with others. Our conversation was, in their own words, “important” to them. It was equally significant to me. I have shared it widely; I have taught it in my classes. Their knowledge requires deep listening.

It was 2019 over an opulent meal in a dark and handsome dining room. Nestled in our leather banquette I was instantaneously drawn to their energy and generosity as we discussed the shape and contours our conversation for The Black Scholar would and would not take before we began it. We spoke about all manner of things within that framework, some of which appear in the published interview; we took our time. At the end we hugged, “glowing” (in Velvet’s words) from the conversation and vowing to get together to celebrate the issue’s release. That was spring 2020; our reunion never happened. In the fall of 2020, I virtually introduced them to a collaborator—a photographer based in New York. Velvet’s participation in the still-developing project (one I hope will be made public in the near future) would be, both the photographer and I believed, integral. They embodied the project’s ethos through their coalescing practices of education, activism, caretaking, advocacy, sex work, and political organizing. Though they transitioned before they could take part, I trust their spirit and legacy will materialize emergent Black, queer, kinky futures that will bless and guide and shape us all. That is how they lived every moment on this plane. Let their words speak for themselves.

Forever Velvet.

Kirin Wachter-Grene
Assistant Professor of Literature
School of the Art Institute of Chicago

Wachter-Grene’s interview with Mistress Velvet, “Caretaking in So Many Ways: A Conversation with Mistress Velvet,” is free to access and read until the end of June.