Introduction

For eleven years (1991–2002), Sierra Leone was embroiled in a violent civil war that led to the death of approximately sixty thousand people, with more than a million leaving the country in search of peace and security in other parts of the world. Young people of all ages were caught up in the country's violent crisis as they became both victims and actors that played active or passive roles in the conflict. At the end of the conflict in 2002, several initiatives were undertaken by the government and its international development partners to stabilize the country and address the root causes of the conflict. However, a few years into the postwar reconstruction phase, young people in Sierra Leone, those who initially had high hopes at the end of the war, started to lose faith in government initiatives as the political elites failed to address the historical legacies of the conflict. Although the violence ended, there were no concrete policies and implementation strategies effected to address the root causes of the war. This inaction by the state was exacerbated by the popular perception of a return to the prewar status quo among young people. Now war-wearied and increasingly unwilling to use violence as a means of expressing their grievances, young people took to popular arts as the main tools of engagement with an indifferent state and its ruling class. Popular music in particular became a powerful form of sociopolitical expression, one that caught the interest and cultural imagination of both the younger and older generations. Young people started creating and producing songs on issues related to politics, the economy, corruption, and the marginalization of women and youth. The popular songs and comedy became instrumental in sensitizing the public to the concerns of young people while drawing the attention of the elites to the concerns and anxieties among the wider population.

The instrumentalization of popular arts by Sierra Leonean youth is not unique by any means. Popular arts and their everyday use by youth is common in other parts of Africa, and over the last three decades, this phenomenon has been the subject of extensive academic research in African studies. Of particular interest to researchers has been the multiple ways in which young people interact with, shape, and use popular arts as a means of socio-political expression.

Introduction

Although it has become common in African cultural studies to rate Nollywood as the most popular art form in Africa, it is perhaps more accurate to argue that the booming and vivacious Afro hip-hop music is unquestionably the popular arts genre with the highest mass appeal in Africa today. The continental reach and global popularity of Afro hip-hop were brought home to me in the summer of 2015 when I embarked on a research trip to Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, and Uganda. The music of Nigerian Afrobeat superstars such as Timaya, Flavour, Davido, Whizkid, Tiwa Savage, and other young musicians from Nigeria was being played enthusiastically in bars, nightclubs, hotel lobbies, public buses, street shops, radio and television stations, private homes, and on personal cell phones. Not only did people know the lyrics of these artists’ songs, but they could dance to the music with the unique swag of the average Nigerian urban youth. This inescapable presence of contemporary Nigerian Afrobeats across Africa is not unique, for it emblematizes the wider popularity of the hip-hop genre beyond the continent's shores. As Khalil Saucier has observed, “Today, hip hop is arguably the fastest growing component of African youth culture. It can be heard in vibrant and chaotic urban areas and desolate and pastoral rural areas of Africa. It can be heard in both private and public spaces, while being piped through loudspeakers of one's personal music device.” With its current population of about 1.2 billion, out of which almost 77 percent are young people below the age of thirty-five, there is no doubt that the Afro hip-hop genre, created and patronized by African youth, is the most popular art form in the continent today. Thus, any meaningful conversation on popular arts culture in Africa must continue to address the place of this popular genre as it stands at the very center of the continent's cultural imagination.

In the eyes of countless Nigerien male youth, no one currently epitomizes style as successfully as Wizkid, the young Nigerian pop sensation who was catapulted to global stardom in 2016 after the chart success of “One Dance,” the song he produced with Canadian rap artist Drake. That same year, Wizkid, whose real name is Ayodeji Ibrahim Balogun, was named Nigeria's best-dressed pop star by Vogue magazine (Frank 2016). On the African continent, where he has practically become a household name, he is extolled as much for his trendsetting looks as for his crowd-pleasing sound. He is undoubtedly the most famous ambassador of the Nigerian musical movement known as Afrobeats. Afrobeats (to be distinguished from the jazzy Afrobeat sound pioneered by Nigerian artist Fela Kuti in the 1970s) combines Congolese soukous, Ghanaian highlife, Ivoirian dance music, and Jamaican dancehall. In Niger, Wizkid's adoring fans scrutinize his fashion choices but also emulate them—no matter the cost. Many of them have incorporated in their wardrobe the skinny jeans, colorful T-shirts, bomber jackets, and trucker hats favored by their idol; they also copy his hairdos and his way of talking; some of them go as far as taking the alias, Wizkid. In recent years the Afropop wunderkind has expanded his sartorial repertoire to include styles ranging from high-end fashion brands to athleisure to traditional Nigerian clothes. Whether he appears in casual streetwear or formal made-to-order clothes, he ends up setting new trends—the red beret “look,” the colorful high tops paired with an all-black outfit, and so on—which his devotees quickly embrace. In sum, the Lagos-born artist always seems to be on the cusp of reinvention. One might even argue that his reputation as a fashion guru rests largely on his ability to smoothly navigate a wide, everevolving range of sartorial styles so as to keep his followers engaged and wondering about his next move.

Though Wizkid is not associated with a distinctive look or style, many of the clothes he wears are rapidly adopted by fans aiming to develop a sartorial personality that identifies them as followers of the star. In 2016 a style known as Wizkid became popular among adolescent boys after images of the Nigerian star, wearing cut-and-paste logo tees from the luxury streetwear brand Hood By Air (or HBA), circulated online.

Since the late 1980s, the lives of young people in Africa have become a major subject of interest in African cultural studies. Currently estimated to be about four hundred million of the world's total youth population of 1.2 billion, and according to the African Union, approximately 77 percent of the continent's total inhabitants under the age of thirty-five, young people and children in Africa have taken center stage in African studies in recent years, not just because of their sheer numbers but primarily because of the multiple ways in which they have exploded as powerful social actors in the continent's public domain and on the world stage. Across the continent and beyond, African youth have become key players and influencers in the realms of politics, economy, the culture industry, religious movements, and all kinds of activist endeavors for social justice and change. But as Mamadou Diouf has rightly observed, “The dramatic eruption of young people in both the public and domestic spheres seems to have resulted in the construction of African youth as a threat, and to have provoked, within society as a whole, a panic that is simultaneously moral and civic.”

The dread and anxieties about the outburst and prominence of African youth in both local and transnational public spaces have prompted several studies that have documented and analyzed the social experiences of their lives, especially the numerous ways in which young people in Africa have been impacted adversely by global and local political-economic forces. These studies demonstrate clearly how the enduring legacies of colonial domination, compounded by failed postcolonial governance and the harsh social conditions triggered by aggressive liberalization and privatization, have left many young people and children in Africa in dire situations. Most young people in Africa live amidst social crises marked by chronic economic decline, joblessness, limited access to quality education and training, poor health-care services, lack of social amenities, and a general social climate of privation, insecurity, and uncertainty.

Popular arts in Africa are steadily being produced on social media in recent years, signifying the discursive import of the internet, which Karin Barber argues is “the domain of the unregulatable” that has become “increasingly central to popular culture as more and more become connected.” Although what Jodi Dean calls communicative capitalism suggests the internet is anything but unregulatable, there is the sense in which Barber's observation signals a necessary attention to the explosion of the popular narratives being produced by netizens using social media as a playground from which they contest and critique hegemonic structures. Understanding popular culture as an arena in which many nonelite cultural producers create aesthetic forms from the quotidian realities of their everyday urban lives, I examine the implications of Barber's claim in the context of the cultural symbols of youth production and popular laughter on Instagram. My analysis examines the Instagram postings of three young Nigerian comedians as playful texts of infrapolitics that expand our understanding of the intersections of popular play and youth involvement in a digitally enabled public sphere. While acknowledging that questions about internet access and class as well as the political and neoliberal underpinnings of the internet's infrastructure naturally figure into discussions of digital culture, I focus more on the cultural productions of the networked publics that already exist among digital subjects who are generally uncritically impervious to how monetary value is being captured from their cultural and interactive encounters online.

The notion of “networked publics” refers to a “linked set of social, cultural, and technological developments,” which Ito prefers to “audience” and “consumer” because of the ideas of passivity and consumption usually attributed to them. In any case, the existence of a digital divide is not sufficient reason to foreclose the media expressions or practices of those who already have access to the internet. My analysis constructs these new media users as creative subjects imbued with authorial power, making their capacity for self-representation a pertinent development in countries in which historically they have neither been visible nor heard. One of the inflections of this newfound creative voice among young people is the production of humorous narratives that amplify the interpretive gestures of youth culture in relation to the broader social and political contexts they inhabit.

Introduction

In a national context embroiled in political-economic crisis, Zimbabwean youth have configured social spaces on social media platforms to resist political oppression. This chapter focuses on the ways in which youth respond to political oppression in Zimbabwe through the creative utilization of cyberspace and popular entertainment, more particularly, social media such as Facebook, Twitter, popular humor, and music. The chapter asserts that social media platforms now function as new forms of popular culture, which youth produce in textual, photographic, and video forms in responding to and challenging oppressive politics and regimes in Africa. While the posts can be viewed as “movements” and “emerging forums,” we assert that they are embedded in and with political tones that mediate political engagement with adamant political elites. While this is not a new phenomenon, we explore how these online spaces have been appropriated by youth as “new” and viable political instruments in responding to a government heavily backed by the military. The extent to which youth have mobilized themselves against the government on social media have of late driven the government to block the use of internet during mass demonstrations in Zimbabwe.

For instance, in the January 2019 mass protests mobilized by young people through social media platforms, the state responded by ordering a complete internet and social media shutdown for almost a week. This desperate attempt by the state to censure youth activism on social media demonstrates that the youth are not only politically innovative on social media but also that their active engagement with the oppressive state is real and consequential. Youth engagement on social media platforms in Zimbabwe spurns the idea of new media as sources of mere entertainment, as it is politically charged with varied meanings that speak to the current and ongoing political mischief in the Zimbabwean context. While the memes, video clips, political poems, and songs created by youth are somehow entertaining, the motive is mostly political (i.e., it aims to engage with a devious state that is apparently driven by the desire to subjugate its citizens through military authority and power. Even as people laugh at the memes, the Facebook wall postings, and the hilarious comments on Twitter handles, their understanding of these messages are rooted in political undertones and meanings.

Introduction

Popular culture and the creative industries are growing areas in Botswana. This is mainly due to the change in the political will to support these areas as part of the national development agenda for economic diversification. In 2011, the Botswana government established the cultural and creative industries as one of the sectors that drives the country's economy and underscored its potential to reinforce the move away from reliance on the mining and extractives industry. While this was a commendable decision on the part of the state, it is regrettable that several years later, there is still no policy that is used to drive the growth of the sector. Several programs and projects that are especially designed for the youth such as the Youth Development Fund, the Citizenship Entrepreneurial Development Agency, and the Economic Diversification Drive are in place but remain inaccessible to many. The youth remain vulnerable to the harsh realities of poverty, unemployment, discrimination, and exclusion. The reason for this, Thulaganyo Mogobe (2015) notes, is the lack of proper planning and the unavailability of resources and infrastructure needed for the sector. The biggest challenge, however, is mismanagement of resources, and failure to implement, monitor, and evaluate such government-initiated programs and projects. Due to this weakness, many of the well-intended initiatives to support young people in Botswana continue to fail. Hence, a country that has done relatively well, at least politically and economically, for the past fifty years of independence is now struggling to stay above water.

What is happening in Gaborone, Botswana's capital, is arguably commonplace and characteristic of the African postcolonial space in general. The persistent crises in Africa have been attributed to the negative impact of neoliberal policies by the World Bank and the IMF, especially the structural adjustment policies imposed on African countries since the mid-1980s. Aggressive privatization, mass retrenchments from the public sector, and the defunding of social services have all combined to create harsh conditions for Africans, especially those in urban spaces. The socioeconomic crises in Gaborone are only a reflection of a broader continent-wide problem arising from the inequities associated with neoliberal globalization. The country is wrestling to contain a plethora of challenges, including high youth unemployment, rising crime rates, staggering death statistics from road accidents and the HIV/AIDS pandemic, gender inequality, and poor governance.

In 2009 Uganda became associated with deep-seated homophobia in the popular imagination of the Global North. This fraught relationship grew in part from the international mainstream media's coverage of Uganda's 2009 and 2014 Anti-Homosexuality bills, evidenced by Rachel Maddow's 2010 interview with David Bahati, the bill's author, and the 2011 BBC documentary “The World's Worst Place to Be Gay,” which Kwame Otu theorized as a neoliberal “homophobic safari.” Videos of Ugandan parliamentarians slapping their hands on their chamber seats chanting “Our Bill! Our Bill” (Martin Ssempa explicitly shouting “eat da poo poo” to his congregation) and the nondescript images of Kampala urban youth in graphically homophobic soundbites, all circulated to the metropoles. Scholars have simultaneously refuted the depiction of Africa as inherently homophobic, while criticizing the depiction of the Global North as a space of “safe,” “liberal,” so-called democracies for sexual and gender minorities, pointing out that this notion is particularly untrue for black sexual and gender minorities. Nonetheless, these popular depictions in global mainstream media, framed as evidence of Africa's deep-seated homophobia, helped craft the most important aspect of the Global North's image of a homophobic Uganda, hence inaugurating the social figure of the destitute queer Ugandan in need of saving.

In February 2014, the Anti-Homosexuality Bill was signed into law by Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, a man who, at the time, had been in power for twenty-eight years. Despite many prominent Ugandan LGBTI activists’ disapproval, in March 2014 the United States imposed $118 million sanctions in addition to several other international organizations who cut aid to Uganda, hitting HIV/AIDS services particularly hard. Not long after, in May 2014, I found myself in Kampala responding to an acutely pointed question from an intern at an HIV clinic where I was doing fieldwork: “Why does Obama support the gays?” The question was not invoked because of my positionality as a gay man doing fieldwork in a country where it was criminalized to “aid and abet homosexuality” but in my status as a US citizen. Throughout my three months of fieldwork at the HIV clinic I found that for many of my fellow twenty-something interns, my status as a US citizen meant I had explaining to do on behalf of my “neo-colonial government,” as one young-person put it.

Introduction: Flash Fiction and New Media Spaces

Consistent with statistics in what is conventionally tagged “Sub-Saharan” Africa, the expansion of internet access in Ghana has been dramatic since the turn of the millennium. This remarkable increase in access has consequently revolutionized modes of African cultural production, particularly in urban Ghana. The prevalent nature of digital technology has in turn allowed both professional and amateur creative writers to harness new forms of imaginative expression via online media platforms. One burgeoning avenue for such endeavors is flash fiction in online spaces where these writers tend to explore issues related to themes that challenge orthodox cultural norms. They treat such themes in order to provide alternative perspectives to established socio-cultural values fostered by older forms of technology related to orality and print in Ghana. The internet allows this new breed of young writers to use these digitally based genres to extend the literary engagement with contemporaneous sociocultural issues. The creative efforts of these writers thus open up research possibilities to ascertain how this emerging genre of writing differs from and complements existing imaginative works. But, perhaps more critically, there are also attempts to understand the ways in which this type of writing stands out as a unique field of creativity.

While Ghanaian popular culture has been a subject of study for the past two decades, thanks to the excellent work of researchers such as Joseph Oduro-Frimpong, Stephanie Newell, and Esther de Bruijn, Africanist scholarship has yet to examine the exciting work being done by the mainly young, amateur writers using digital technology in Ghana, even though these writers are prolific. Flash fiction is a particularly accessible genre for these writers because of its fluid form, which on the surface appears restrictive due to its brevity but actually allows for an exploration of a variety of themes through its unique deployment of literary elements such as plot, theme, and characterization. Despite its supposed stylistic constraints, the iconoclasm of flash fiction allows for a distinctive way of addressing a wide spectrum of unexplored and contentious meanings and ideas. In “The Remarkable Reinvention of Very Short Fiction,” Robert Shapard defines the form as “very short fiction” that is “ten times shorter than a traditional story,” even though he admits that “numbers don't tell us everything.”

Africa is a continent of young people. Thus, what they do, what they think, and what they are taught matters not only to Africa but to the future of the world. As Ugor writes in the introduction to this edited collection, these young people “have exploded as powerful social actors in the continent's public domain and on the world stage.”

I first learned about the agency of African youth not through books and journal articles but through my own lived experiences. In the mid-1980s, the antiapartheid and divestment movement was sweeping through campuses across the United States (Martin, 2007). As an undergraduate at Boston University, I was already part of multiple activist organizations. By the spring of 1985, I was fully immersed in the protests, rallies, and sit-ins that were happening every few days on my campus and on other campuses in the Boston and New York areas. For the first time in my life, I met and became friends with my peers from South Africa and throughout the continent. These friendships expanded and deepened through the next decade, as I worked for a Boston-based antiapartheid organization, Fund for a Free South Africa, which was founded by exiled members of the African National Congress. My first trip to South Africa was in late 1991, a few months after Nelson Mandela walked out of prison and the nation entered a new era. The streets of Johannesburg pulsed with excitement, promise, and hope. On that first trip, I wandered for hours through this new city, simply absorbing the energy that surrounded me. I spent time with friends in restaurants, bars, bookstores, and community centers in Yeoville, Hillbrow, and farther afield. In the years that followed, I returned time and time again, because I could see and feel a different future on those streets.

Eventually, I landed in Durban with a Fulbright Award to do an ethnographic study of a desegregated school that was at the forefront of change. The “New South Africa” was being formed, contested, and imagined in that school—and schools like it—throughout the country. With my dissertation proposal recently defended, I arrived in South Africa in February 1996. I was ready to try to understand how young people were making sense of this new world, a tenuous leap into democracy and equality, after more than four hundred years of oppression.

Badjibi, the octogenarian director of one of Conakry's largest private dance troupes, spoke with me about the shortcomings of the current generation of Guinean performing artists: “I want the next generation to become like us, even to surpass us,” he said. “Our time has passed, so if they listen to us, they can go further. But if they don't listen, they will lose out. The day we are no longer here, maybe they’ll realize, but it will be too late.” The directors of dance troupes, or “ballets” in Guinea's capital city of Conakry, regularly speak in such disapproving terms about younger dancers and musicians. These elders lament that in their hurry to make it big, young performing artists play and dance too fast and aren't interested in the specific rural histories of dances they perform: hence they mix movements indiscriminately between once-discrete dances, resulting in cultural loss. Elders suggest, in contrast, that members of their own socialist generation—trained between 1958 and 1984—were loyal guardians of national culture. Badjibi's comments exemplify a broader discourse of nationhood and generation that is playing out at the level of cultural production in Conakry.

In making sense of the contestations around dance in Guinea, I employ Deborah Durham's definition of generations as “age-conscious cohorts” produced by “rapid shifts in experience.” Artists trained during Guinea's sociaist period or “First Republic” (1958–84), who now direct most of the dance troupes in Conakry, comprise the cohort of people I refer to as elders. I use the term youth to refer to those who were trained after the death of socialist president Sékou Touré in 1984. While there are arguably multiple ways of parsing either of these cohorts, much of the generational tension expressed among Conakry's performing artists may be understood through the lens of political-economic change in Guinea, namely the shift from state-socialism to neoliberal capitalism that began in the mid-1980s. Notably, while elderly artists speak of vanishing culture, dance troupes continue to emerge all over the city. Rites of passage in Conakry (including weddings, births, and circumcisions) are animated by performers who train in such troupes, and young dancers and musicians cultivate productive careers, often with international trajectories of touring and teaching.

On a continent where nearly 40 percent of the population is under the age of fifteen, scholars, policymakers, politicians, and adults cannot afford to continue to ignore African youth—a substantial and ever-growing segment of the African population and, indeed, the global youth population, which currently stands at 1.2 billion people between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four. As this bulging African youth population becomes more educated and media savvy, they are poised to become the next generation of leaders throughout Africa and the world. Understanding how populations of African youth see, observe, and engage with the world around them, especially through the production of culture, might offer scholars important insights not only into this generation's lives and experiences but also about the broader processes of social and cultural change taking place in Africa.

Many scholars engaging with youth in Africa have found the arts to be useful in understanding the unique experiences of youth cultures across the continent. Since the turn of the twenty-first century, scholars have found African youth utilizing the arts to articulate their conflicted postcolonial positionality and making sense of their global identity. Consistently, scholars of youth culture are seeing youth utilize music as a medium to contest social norms and/or express their individual and cultural identity in a globalized world. Often the message portrayed is politically driven, but in other cases it is simply a tool to amplify the voices, desires, and experiences of a generation.

But the voices, thoughts, and experiences of a specific population of youth have consistently been silenced or omitted from much literature on contemporary African youth culture—namely street children. In the context of Africa, where there are tens of millions of street children roaming its city streets, it is crucial that we gain a sense of how this population sees and engages with the world. Being an important segment of African youth culture that is little known, the broader topic of street children has gained uncharted momentum in academia. However, limited scholarship has investigated how this population makes and utilizes the arts in everyday life, specifically popular music. Since street children draw upon the music and culture surrounding them, it is essential to consider the experiences of street children who often dwell in the same urban spaces as their colleagues with shelter and undergo similar struggles surrounding postcolonial positionality and individual identity.