Andrew Apter

From January 15 to February 12, 1977, Nigeria hosted an extravagant international festival celebrating Africa’s cultural achievements and legacies on the continent and throughout its diaspora communities. Named the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture (or Festac 77), it was modeled on Léopold Senghor’s inaugural Festival Mondial des Arts Nègres (World Festival of Black Arts, or Fesman) held in Dakar in 1966 but expanded its Atlantic horizons of Africanity to include North Africa, India, Australia, and Papua New Guinea. Festac’s broader vision of the Black and African world was further bolstered by Nigeria’s oil boom, which generated windfall revenues that accrued to the state and underwrote a massive expansion of the public sector mirrored by the lavish scale of festival activities. Festac’s major venues and events included the National Stadium with its opening and closing ceremonies; the state-of-the-art National Theatre in Lagos, with exhibits and dance-dram...

In this essay I problematize the historical development of quasi-institutionalized lesbianism on the Caribbean island of Carriacou, addressing veiled references to its “Igbo” origins in popular music and culture.  How do we interpret such muted intimations and the forms of historicity which they suggest?  I argue that a case for Igbo origins can be made if we separate gender from sexuality.  Reading Ifi Amadiume and Nwando Achebe on “female husbands” in Igboland in relation to M. G. Smith’s documentation of lesbianism in Carriacou, I identify related logics of lineage organization, prostitution and property devolution linking both cases to “queer” conjugal forms.  But where such unions were eroticized in Carriacou, in West Africa they remained strictly jural. That an Igbo form of woman-to-woman marriage was sexualized in Carriacou shows how flexible West African gender ideologies shaped queer sexualities under radically different historical conditions in the Americas.

The ontological turn asks difficult questions and pushes conceptual boundaries both forward and against the grain, challenging our standard epistemological orientations. That it replaces epistemological with ontological concerns is a position I oppose in the following reflections, inspired by Martin Holbraad's " double-bind, " one which frames a predicament that not only resonates with my own ethnographic experience but also represents something of an occupational hazard (our X-files) for many of us working on spirit-worlds. In an alternative solution to Holbraad's double-bind, based on Moore's paradox and my own exposure to Shango's wrath in Nigeria, I propose a radical decoupling of Knowledge and Belief to obviate the ontological proliferation of worlds.

When Nigeria hosted FESTAC 77 to celebrate the cultural foundations of the ‘Black and African World’, it was fashioned after Senghor’s festival mondial des arts nègres (FESMAN 66) held in Dakar eleven years earlier.  What began as an alliance between festival co-patrons, however, soon developed into a divisive debate over the meanings and horizons of black cultural citizenship.  At issue were competing Afrocentric frameworks that clashed over the North African or ‘Arab’ question.  Should North Africans fully participate, as Lt-Gen. Olusegun Obasanjo maintained, or should they merely observe as second class citizens, as Leopold Sédar Senghor resolutely insisted?  If Nigeria’s expansive and inclusive vision of blackness was motivated and underwritten by its enormous oil wealth, Senghor refused to compromise his position, precipitating a face-off that ultimately lowered Senegal’s prestige.  To understand why North Africa became the focus of these competing definitions of blackness, we turn to the 1969 Pan-African Cultural Festival in Algiers, where Négritude was disclaimed as counter-revolutionary.  Placed within a genealogy of postcolonial Afrocentric festivals, the struggle over North Africa in FESTAC 77 shows that the political stakes of black cultural citizenship were neither trivial nor ephemeral, but emerged within a transnational field of symbolic capital accumulation.