Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Brian Larkin is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Barnard College, Columbia University. He is a coeditor of Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain.

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"This eagerly anticipated book is a wonderful contribution to several fields: media studies, cultural studies, African studies, anthropology, and analyses of globalization. Brian Larkin writes with eloquence and passion, and he compels us to rethink our assumptions about the work of transnational media and the formation of identity."--Purnima Mankekar, author of "Screening Culture, Viewing Politics: An Ethnography of Television, Womanhood, and Nation in Postcolonial India"

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SIGNAL AND NOISE

Duke University Press

Contents

Acknowledgments..........................................................................................ixIntroduction.............................................................................................11 Infrastructure, the Colonial Sublime, and Indirect Rule................................................162 Unstable Objects: The Making of Radio in Nigeria.......................................................483 Majigi, Colonial Film, State Publicity, and the Political Form of Cinema...............................734 Colonialism and the Built Space of Cinema..............................................................1235 Immaterial Urbanism and the Cinematic Event............................................................1466 Extravagant Aesthetics: Instability and the Excessive World of Nigerian Film...........................1687 Degraded Images, Distorted Sounds: Nigerian Video and the Infrastructure of Piracy.....................217Conclusion...............................................................................................242Notes....................................................................................................257Bibliography.............................................................................................277Index....................................................................................................301

Chapter One

In 1932 Kano city unveiled its new Water and Electric Light Works. Based in Pan Shekara, an area just outside the city, it not only was intended to bring the infrastructural benefits of colonialism to Nigeria but was the first project of its size and ambition financed entirely by the Native Administration, at a cost of more than a third of a million pounds (Crocker 1937). Befitting such an important moment, European dignitaries traveled from Britain and from around Nigeria; the emir of Kano, chief of the Native Authority, presided over a number of Hausa-Fulani notables and the senior British officer of the North, the lieutenant governor, headed a distinguished European contingent. The opening was a spectacular event. As Mallam Dauda described it in a newspaper account, "The Southern gate of the Emir's house was magnificently decorated. Date palms had been put there and look as if they had grown there on the spot; brightly colored cloths were hung up, red, white, green, blue, and yellow and different places were railed off for people to stand in. Electric lights were put all the way around from the office of the Galadima to the Tax Office, the whole place was a mass of lights and coloured cloths of all sorts" (Northern Provinces News [NPN], 14 November 1931, 6). Along with this, stands were built for European and Hausa-Fulani dignitaries; a fountain was erected in front of where the ceremony was to take place, and near where the emir of Kano was sitting a large metal frame had been built with lights on it forming Arabic letters.

In his report, Mallam Dauda stressed the scale of the event and the size of the crowd: "There were so many that some were unable to see anything. ... The dust rose up so that one could scarcely breathe and the number of people could not be counted" (ibid). The British were more precise, fixing attendance at over fifty-three thousand (NPN, 1 December 1935, 14), though Dauda's imprecision gives a more tactile sense of the overwhelming nature of the spectacle. This was a simply enormous number of people congregated to watch the event of a work of colonial infrastructure being opened. C. W. Alexander, the lieutenant governor of Northern Nigeria, made a speech to the assembly, pointing out that many had said that this project was a waste of time, but that now everyone could see for themselves just what had been accomplished. With that, the emir of Kano threw the switch and thousands of colored lights hung over the wall and along the streets exploded into florescence. Fireworks erupted from the rooftops, "and the whole place was a blaze of light and very beautiful to see" (ibid.). There was a gasp from the crowd and shouts of "Lantiriki, ya kama-the lamps are alight." Water came gushing out of the fountain, and at the center of it all a frame of tiny lights spelled out, in Arabic script, Sarki ya gaisheku (The king [emir] greets you all).

For Muslim Hausa, Hausa written in Arabic script (ajami)-the standard mode of literacy until the British introduced Hausa written in roman script (boko)-was, and is, a domain of religion and tradition, a reserve from which the modern advances of colonialism were kept well away. The sign, "The king greets you all," thus represents the coming together of two discrete realms. On the one side, Arabic Hausa represents an intimate domain of tradition. The statement itself references the emir's power and the continuing legitimacy of precolonial modes of government. But the material the letters are made from, electric lights, represents the spectacular heart of modernity. When the emir addresses his subjects in this fashion he is melding his traditional legitimacy with a new form of government emanating from colonial rule. Engineered into these thousands of colored lights, into the streetlamps and fountains, was a new sort of authority located in technology as the visible evidence of progress. For the British, the Water and Electric Light Works was evidence of their success in promoting modernizing improvements which they were increasingly using to legitimize their suzerainty. The Works was also a public display to the people that the emir of Kano and his administration recognized the importance of progressive infrastructural projects such as this. In the latter stages of colonial rule, when colonization had to be justified to its mounting critics in the colonies and the homeland, British colonial government legitimated itself by an argument of exchange: the giving of "voluntary" political subjection in return for technological progress. What every streetlight and tap in Kano now made clear is that this form of exchange had been reproduced in Hausa society itself. The lights and fountains were not just effects of colonial rule; they were a mode of it. Mallam Dauda's account of the opening of the Water and Electric Light Works sums up the success of the initiative: "Now the waterworks and electric light have done much good to Kano. Everywhere there are stand-pipes and washing places have been built, some for men, some for women and some for children. If anyone wants these things in his house they are brought there for him and he pays for them every month. If you were to see Kano now at night you would say that it is like the stars on a summer night" (ibid.).

What must it have been like to live in Kano at that time and see the coming of electric light? To grow up with the busyness of daytime curtailed by the oncoming of night, and then one day know that night would never be the same again? What would the feeling be to know that such things as electric light existed, but until that time they always existed elsewhere in a world where Europeans lived? The coming of electricity effected a split in Nigeria between electrified and modern towns and those that remained without electric power. Those conurbations now became cities yet to be electrified, pregnant with...