Okada are Lagos motorcyclists who earn cash by zipping customers through traffic, often with little regard for safety. The regional government recently banned okada from all major roadways, in part because the bikes are often used by robbers to flee from crime scenes. The prohibition hasn’t gone over well, however, for okada are more than […]
Sorry for the radio silence today. Working on the publicity questionnaire for my long-discussed next book, which means the light at the end of the tunnel is getting a notch brighter. Back tomorrow with deep, deep thoughts on self-destructive celebrities.
I am no great authority on Igbo music, but I think it’s safe to say that Area Scatter was one of the genre’s very few transvestite thumb pianists. The gender-bending was integral to his rock-star mythology, as detailed in Beats of the Heart: His home was filled with bones and skulls and paintings of the […]
Tags:Area Scatter·gender·Igbo·music·Nigeria
Late jump on the day, so must leave you with a classic from the late Chief Oliver de Coque, who guitar arsenal included this innovative number. Back tomorrow with some thoughts on Mongolia’s skyrocketing rate of alcoholism.
Advocates for limited government appear to have a new icon in Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Nigeria’s finance minister, who appears to subscribe to Ronald Reagan’s fabled view on the public sector. Just check out what she’s doing at Nigeria’s ports, where an alphabet soup of government agencies have been fleecing importers and exporters alike for ages: […]
Virtually every ancient mythological system included a deity who was fond of hurling lightning bolts at unfortunate humans. Concocting the notion of such violence-from-above certainly took little imagination on the folklorists’ parts, since lightning fatalities were commonplace in bygone times. In fact, as the chart above shows, it is not until quite recently that the […]
I’ve previously examined the economics of Nigerian filmaking, a business that rewards both the prolific and the extremely cost-conscious. The industry’s margins are typically razor thin because producers begin with the assumption that 70 percent of each movie’s revenue will end up in the hands of pirates. The trick to longevity, then, is to create […]
Focusing on various paying gigs today, so just a quick music clip to tide y’all over. The above is Segun Bucknor’s brief appearance in the excellent Ginger Baker in Africa; he’s the man in the lime-green vest behind the dancers. With Comb & Razor provides some much-needed background on the largely forgotten Afrobeat pioneer here: […]
As the late Art Buchwald would have been happy to tell you, Hollywood’s accounting practices tend to be garbled at best, and borderline criminal at worst. Studio bean counters are masters of obfuscation and misdirection, with a knack for making blockbusters seem like middling hits, and profitable B-movies appear like money losers. Figuring out how […]
A few days back, we touched on the challenges of undermining one’s enemy by counterfeiting his currency. Today we’d like to shift the focus to another tactic of fiscal warfare: issuing a new currency upon seceding from a national union. We all know the Confederacy did it back in the day, but it has become […]
Color us surprised to learn that Nigeria recently overtook the United States as the world’s second-leading producer of movies, behind only India. True, the vast majority of Nollywood’s “major productions” are straight-to-video affairs, but that’s to be expected in a nation where cheap DVD players reign and movie theaters are scarce. Yet the nature of […]
Tags:crime·intellectual property·movies·Nigeria·Nollywood·Yoruba
Royal Dutch Shell’s decision to settle with the family of executed activist Ken Saro-Wiwa reminded us of this disturbringly prescient piece from a decade ago. It’s an account of all the dirty dealings that surround Nigeria’s oil wealth, and how oil companies and Big Men manage to keep enriching themselves despite frequent grassroots protests (or […]
In our all-too-fleeting free time, we’ve been researching the development of Nigerian Pidgin (primarily so we can better understand the comedic stylings of Basketmouth). This exploration recently led us to another mash-up language: Solomon Islands Pijin, which shares some English influence but not much else with its Nigerian cousin. According to a leading Pijin scholar, […]
Tags:Beach-la-mar·language·Nigeria·pidgin·pijin·Solomon Islands
After a lengthy bidding process, the two-line Lagos Rail Mass Transit project is set to break ground in September. This comes on the heels of the successful revamp of the city’s bus service, which now carries 180,000 passengers per day. Can the rail project ever come to fruition in a city as chaotic (and chronically […]
The most troubling part about this story is not that Nigerian e-scammers were likely able to wheedle a few pounds out of Jack Straw’s pals and constituents (who really should have known better, given the con artists’ straight-out-of-Lagos grammar and syntax). No, what’ll keep me up tonight is that fact that Britain’s former Foreign Secretary, […]
Tags:Britain·crime·information technology·Jack Straw·Nigeria
I was researching the arms trade the other day when I came across this amazing tale from Nigeria. It involves a fisherman-turned-arms-smuggler, who was ensnared not by the police, but rather by a celebrated vigilante named Alhaji Ali Kwara. Turns out that Mr. Kwara has been a rather busy man of late, personally arresting ten […]
