Postcolonial Automobility: West Africa and the Road to Globalization
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Postcolonial Automobility: West Africa and the Road to Globalization A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY Lindsey Green-Simms IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Adviser: Timothy Brennan August 2009 © Lindsey Green-Simms, August 2009 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This dissertation would not have been possible without the support, mentorship, and stimulation of the faculty and graduate students in the Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature and the Department of English at the University of Minnesota. The members of my dissertation committee deserve special thanks for their continued encouragement and feedback. Timothy Brennan contributed greatly to my intellectual formation and introduced me to the ways of thinking and writing about globalization that undergird this dissertation. His vigilant attention to detail and confidence in my intellectual abilities enabled me to keep striving for precision in my arguments. John Mowitt, whose own work on the films of Ousmane Sembène has been highly influential, never ceased asking pointed and difficult questions. Cesare Casarino helped me to make sense of dense theoretical material and to think about how cinema can act as a form of philosophy. Charles Sugnet was an endless source of information on all things related to African cinema. His keen eye for various types of locomotion in African film first tuned me in to the constant and unique presence of automobiles in African urban cinema. Shaden Tageldin has been a most generous and detailed reader as well as an excellent mentor and sounding board. Three graduate colleagues have read through various portions of my dissertation. Andrew Opitz provided me with comments on early stages of chapters two, three, and four. Steven Groening, who has been my anchor and my ally throughout graduate school, read through each of my chapters, sometimes in several stages. His comments helped to rein me in and were indispensable to the formulation of my thoughts and arguments. Alicia Gibson’s final lightening round of proofreading was a godsend. I would also like to thank my peers in the Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature for their collegiality. Special thanks goes to my colleagues in Timothy Brennan’s Globalization seminar and Charles Sugnet’s African Film seminar who provided intellectual nourishment when the seeds for this dissertation were just being planted. Research for this dissertation was funded by the Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship and the Harold Leonard Memorial Fellowship in Film Studies at the University of Minnesota. A special thanks goes to the staff at the Senegalese National Archives and at Northwestern University’s Melville J. Herskovitz Library of African Studies. When I was conducting research in West Africa, several people offered vital amounts of help and companionship. In Senegal, the M’Bengue family provided me with a wonderful and loving home. With Tsitsi Jaji, I explored the city of Dakar. From Rosalind Fredericks I learned all about purchasing a used Volkswagen in Senegal and navigating unnamed roads. Francis Nyamnjoh at CODESRIA schooled me in thiofs, disquettes, and diriyankes. Françoise Pfaff was an encyclopedia of information on African cinema. And Rudy Gomes, my Wolof tutor, taught me as much about Wolof as he did about Senegalese politics, music, and 4x4s. In Ghana, Socrate Safo and his crew at Movie Africa Productions generously indulged all my questions about video making and helped me to acquire my own video film library. Cori Princell was a most faithful i travel companion throughout Mali and Burkina Faso, with whom, even in trying times, I never stopped sharing laughter. While I was in the throes of dissertating I had the good fortune to present a portion of chapter three at an African Film Conference at the University of Illinois. I would like to thank all the participants for their feedback and for suggestions that helped to shape my discussion on the history of motorization and on Anglophone video film. Comments by Brian Larkin and Birgit Meyer – whose writings have also been greatly influential – were particularly valuable. I would especially like to thank Mahir Saul and Ralph Austen, the conference organizers, for their comments on the version of my paper that will appear in the conference proceedings. Ralph was also generous enough to read an early version of chapter one and to point me in the direction of many valuable resources. I would have never had the courage to pursue my graduate studies had it not been for the unflinching support of my parents, Debra Simms and Stuart Simms, who have always showed so much pride in my academic pursuits. Likewise, the extensive praise from younger sisters, Kimberly, Carly, and Alexandra, has been a frequent source of encouragement. Finally, I would like to thank Amy Green-Simms. It would be impossible to enumerate all the ways that she has sustained me throughout this process. But whether we have been across the ocean from one another or studying at desks side-by-side, she has been my constant, my source of inspiration, and my home. ii CONTENTS Acknowledgements i Introduction: Driving while African 1 Part I: Suspended Animation 1. The Hum of Progress: Motorcars and the Modernization of West Africa 36 2. “No Danger No Delay”: Wole Soyinka and the Perils of Driving 79 3. Moving Pictures, Misfired Cars: The Automobile in African Avant-Garde Cinema 114 Part II: Consuming Mobility 4. The Return of the Mercedes: The Case of Anglophone Video Film 167 5. Women in Traffic: Ama Ata Aidoo’s Changes and Ousmane Sembène’s Faat Kiné 213 Works Cited 261 iii Introduction Driving while African The problem of commodities . [is] the central, structural problem of capitalist society in all its aspects. –Georg Lukács The motor-car is the epitome of ‘objects’, the Leading-Object, and this fact should be kept in mind. –Henri Lefebvre In Fast Cars, Clean Bodies (1995), Kristin Ross examines the rapid appearance of consumer objects – from cars to laundry detergent – in France during the decade of modernization and decolonization immediately preceding 1968. At the time, France was experiencing an unprecedented industrial growth that crystallized in a Fordist regime, and was also witnessing the final collapse of its empire, beginning with Dien Bien Phu in 1954 and ending with Algerian independence in 1962. Having closed the door on over a century of colonialism, France was happy to wash away its sordid history and focus instead on new Citroëns and all-electric kitchens. Thus, Ross argues, the arrival of new consumer goods in France helped to situate colonialism as a thing of the past: France emerged as a modern nation, while the colonies remained “dirty” and “backwards.” If the previous relationship between France and Algeria was described as a marriage, this, writes Ross, was a divorce, one where France needed to make clear that it was not Algeria, that it was not in fact anything like any of its former colonies.1 Following Henri Lefebvre who called the car the “Leading-Object” of modernity and Guy Debord who referred to the automobile as “the sovereign good of alienated life 1 and the essential product of the capitalist market” (69), Ross assigns the car the status of the central commodity of the postwar period. The car was not only central in creating new forms of factory production, it also created a newly mobile work force, a new jeune cadre, or managerial class, new urban spatial organization, and a new “sublime” experience of everyday life. In short, it established a new subjectivity that was deeply intertwined with the idea of a modern, mobile France. But if, as Ross argues, the car defined France against its former colonies, this dissertation investigates the social and symbolic function of the car in the ex-colonies, and in particular in the Francophone and Anglophone post-colonies of West Africa. On the one hand, the postwar period of decolonization and independence was a modernizing one for West Africa, just as it was for both of its two main former European rulers. In the same decade that Ross examines – the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s – the number of automobiles in West Africa more than doubled, while roads and modern infrastructure in and between cities multiplied at a quicker rate than ever before.2 Thus, to a certain extent, African ex-colonies were indeed going through their own period of urbanization and development, creating new spatial arrangements and a middle class that was not unlike the jeune cadre Ross describes. Young cosmopolitan men in Accra at the time even referred to themselves as Jaguars and cultivated a sense of style worthy of the modern, high-class car of their dreams.3 Certainly, then, decolonized Africa too must be experiencing this sublimeness of everyday life, one that, coupled with newfound sovereignty, might also produce a national sense of pride, a unity in consumption. On the other hand, however, the material benefits of independence were not experienced by the vast majority of the West African population. Despite hopes to the 2 contrary, the globalizing and homogenizing forces that Ross identifies failed to bring the same universal consumer culture to the curbside of most Africans. Whereas by 1966 one in four people owned cars in most industrialized countries, in West Africa the rate hovered just over one percent in the more well off countries, with about one in eighty people owning vehicles in Ivory Coast, Senegal, and Cameroon.4 Moreover, while cars in France, Britain, or the United States were often shiny and new objects, fresh off the assembly line, the vehicles arriving in West African ports were more likely to be second- hand, in some cases overhauled war vehicles.