ENGAGING THE UNWRITTEN TEXT: THE ROLE OF ORALITY AND POPULAR CULTURE IN THESOCIAL ENGINEERING PROCESS OF POSTCOLONIAL NIGERIA A Thesis Submitted to the Committee on Graduate Studies in Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts in the Faculty of Arts and Science TRENT UNIVERSITY Peterborough, Ontario, Canada © Copyright by Eyitayo Gad Aloh 2015 English (Public Texts) M.A. Graduate Program September 2015 ABSTRACT Engaging The Unwritten Text: The Role of Orality and Popular in the Social Engineering Process of Postcolonial Nigeria Eyitayo Gad Aloh This study is an attempt to look at how orality plays a role in modern society to move people to action in a social engineering process. By examining the theories for the formation of publics as outlined by Jurgen Habermas and Michael Warner, I argue for the existence of an oral public and further show that it can be engineered with some of the tools provided. This theoretical foundation provides a pathway for a thorough examination of orality as a tool for social engineering and shows how the practices moved the people in the past. In this study, I posit that the oral traditions are still alive and well in modern times and still function as a tool for moving people to social action. To achieve this, orality makes use of popular culture. This study examines elements of popular culture with a view to unearthing the presence of oral modes and how they are still carrying on the same function of social engineering in a modern society. This study concludes by positioning orality as a relevant tool for social engineering in modern Nigerian society and affirms that it is still relevant in the areas of politics, literature and cultural productions with possibilities yet untapped in the area of digital technology. Keywords: Orality, Public Sphere, Social Engineering, Popular Culture , Publics, Nigeria, Literacy. ii ACKNOWLEGEMENTS A project of this nature would have been impossible without the support of several individuals. I therefore wish to express my profound appreciation to my God, Jehovah for the gift of life to see the completion of this work. I will also like to thank my wife, Joy and the children, MasinJah and Jahziah for their patience on those grumpy evenings they endured as I tried to weld the ideas together. For his patience and guidance and going beyond the call of a supervisor, including giving me unrestricted access to his library, my immense gratitude goes to Professor Hugh Hodges, who made himself a friend in the process and helped me shape the path of the thesis. Professor Margaret Steffler also took the pain to read this over more times than required and offered invaluable suggestions,. I will also like to thank Professor Charmaine Eddie for agreeing to be on my committee as well as Professor Michael Eamon who became a friend with his constructive criticism and words of encouragement. In one way or another, Professors Kelly McGuire, Sally Chivers, Beth Popham, Suzanne Bailey and Michael Epp all contributed to making me welcomed at Trent and getting on with my research. I also wish to acknowledge the support of the good people at the Academic Skills Centre for making me look good on paper and the university administration for all their financial support. Finally, I want to thank my colleagues in the programme, allies in the frontiers of scholarship. iiii TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract…………………………………………………………………………………………….ii Acknowledgements…………………………………………………………………..………..iii Table of Contents………………………………………………………………………………..iv Introduction…………………………………………………………………………………………1 Chapter One………………………………………………………………………………………12 Chapter Two……………………………………………………………………………………..44 Chapter Three…………………………………………………………………………………..77 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………………….116 Works Cited……………………………………………………………………………………..121 iv 1 INTRODUCTION Orality and the Challenges of Modern Society In the build up to the Presidential election of Nigeria that was held on August 6, 1983, the candidate for the Unity Party of Nigeria (UPN) arrived in Ibadan and was greeted by cultural dancers who chanted his praise and prayed for his success at the elections. Obafemi Awolowo mounted the podium and stated, “Today is not for song and dance. Today, we are here for serious business” (Mazrui, The Africans). To him, the oral traditions that were being invoked by the dancers could not be considered serious business. He lost the election. Ever since I watched this scene from Ali Mazrui’s documentary, The Africans,in the early 1990s, I have questioned how powerful orality can be in a society. My interest in this area further grew in 1993 when another presidential candidate in another election in Nigeria, Moshood Abiola, a traditional chief, embraced orality and built his campaign on songs and dance from across the country in order to move people to action. There appears to be a function of orality that is inherently fused withpower and shows that orality still has a role in the activities of a modern society. However, what seemed to baffle me more at the time was the fact that in academia, scholars like Ruth Finnegan, Isidore Okpewho and Abiola Irele were trying to establish Orality as a relevant field of study. I wondered at the time why the articles by Isidore Okpewho in particular had to go to great lengths to establish the relevance of a study in orality when all around me, I witnessed the presence and use of oral traditions in my immediate surroundings. For example, my mother would sing my birth praise poetry whenever I had done something good, my father recited the 2 family’s praise poetry to discipline me whenever I have done something wrong and in Lagos, where I lived during my childhood, the Eyo Masquerade Festival took over the entire city for one day and brought peasants and the rich of the society together in the open square. There have been gains made by these scholars, and today the intellectual discourse has shifted from the oral –literate dichotomy to the functions of oral traditions in the public sphere. Therefore, my objective in this project is to focus on a particular area of social consciousness where orality is a successful tool: social engineering. It is my hope that by examining this area, that affects our everyday life, I will be able to show that orality is still very much a part of our social existence. Engineering people to act in a specific manner is not just a chance occurrence, but a careful process requiring calculation and study in order to influence the people. That is why Alexander and Schmidt define social engineering as the “arranging and channelling of environmental and social forces to create effective social action”(3). While thereare exhaustive theoretical materials on how education, law, the military and indeed social movements have been able to play a role in this process, there has been little research into how oral rhetoric and popular culture are being used as a tool in the social engineering process. This is especially curious as James C. Scott, back in 1998, subtitled his book, Seeing it Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, an allusion to the failure of the western paradigm to achieve effective social action in the public sphere. With the failure of the notable schemes to improve human conditions, there is a need to seek alternatives that may help in the influencing of people for positive social actions. In 3 fact, these alternatives do not have to be new as Immanuel Wallerstein contends that “the last thing we really need are more Utopian visions”(99). This therefore compels the question: can orality and popular culture play a role in the social engineering process and provide the alternative to the failed schemes? If so, how can they be deployed and are there modern examples of a society where they have been engaged to useful effects? These questions will form the basis of this thesis which will examine, with a particular focus on Nigeria, the role of orality and popular culture in the social engineering process, and how the public responds to the influence of these tools when they are deployed. It will also look at why some forms of rhetoric are more powerful than others at certain points of the process. If presidents can sing and dance to influence public votes, then this strongly suggests powerful elements in oral rhetoric. I have chosen Nigeria as my case study as my preliminary observations in this geographic space have yielded interesting results in the functioning of oral modes in influencing public. My experience as a journalist and a writer will further enhance my information gathering in the Nigerian environment that is rich in rhetoric and oral traditions. There is also a particular focus on the Yoruba cultural experience above other ethnic groups in Nigeria and this is deliberate. I am of this tribe, raised in the customs and culture and versed in the language, and as such, translating some of the proverbs, songs and poetry from this ethnic tribe will not be an issue. These elements of orality form a major part of my arguments in this thesis, and as translation can sometimes lose the meaning of a text, I have privileged the Yoruba tradition to get my points across. However, it must be noted that I have also made 4 reference to books in which other traditions, from Nigeria and Africa as a whole, have been established to have similar effects on the society. I also will counter the postmodernist concept of deconstruction that tends to argue that oral traditions have an alienating effect by showing how the public attitude has continued to change in response to oral modes deployed by governmental authorities and other agencies for the purpose of social engineering. There is also an exploration of how oral rhetoric has been deployed in the social engineering process and how this rhetoric, rather than being a recent consciousness in popular arts and culture, actually dates back to the pre-colonial era and in reality, has never been gone from the Nigerian social consciousness.