The Pan-African Nation: Oil-Money and the Spectacle of Culture in Nigeria

Walls and white elephants: Oil extraction, responsibility, and infrastructural violence in Equatorial Guinea

“…9 Construction booms in newly resource-rich states are a well-documented phenomenon. Often pejoratively labeled 'white elephants' for their unique combination of grandiosity and impracticality, critics deride prestige projects as irresponsible in the face of populations who watch aging infrastructure crumble around them as oil wealth builds airports from which they will never leave (Apter, 2005;Coronil, 1997;Vitalis, 2007;Watts, 2008). Following the Riggs Bank report, however, I would like to suggest here that white elephants are in fact central to the negotiation of governmental responsibility, negotiations in which the projects' grandiosity and impracticality are not necessarily liabilities.…”

“…Pressure on oil-exporting state apparatuses to combat 'corruption' and foment 'social investment' of oil monies has intensified over time as the social, environmental and political ravages of becoming an oil exporter grow clearer. New infrastructure in Malabo then becomes a site of visible investment (Apter, 2005), a site to which the government -accused of squandering or outright stealing oil money -can gesture to show where the money has gone. Just as the enclave offers transnational oil companies a stage on which to negotiate responsibility through the performance of removal and superiority, oil-funded public infrastructure development offers the Equatoguinean state a similar stage on which to negotiate their role in infrastructural violence.…”

“…Past the expertise required for their construction, no other expertise is required to make them 'work'. Once constructed, the work they do is to be seen (Apter, 2005). That many of Equatorial Guinea's new prestigious buildings were in fact without pipes to facilitate running water, sewage systems, or electrical wiring was neither visible from the outside nor central to the immediate work required of them by the Equatoguinean state.…”

Geology, Potentiality, Speculation: On the Indeterminacy of First Oil

“…The anticipated lack of hydrocarbons, or indeed their carefully concealed abundance, has given rise to anxious projections in the industry (Labban 2010). In addition, scholars have highlighted oil's illusory effects, that is, the mirage of prosperity oil may generate in the economies of producer states, where fantasies of progress are displaced by deception and violence (Apter 2005;Coronil 1997;Watts 2009). These effects have often been associated with oil's ready transubstantiation into monetary wealth.…”

Inherited “Ancestors’ Collections” of a Devoted Curator: The Museum of African Heritage in Georgetown, Guyana

“…Understood in this way, CARIFESTA '72 functioned as an exhibitionary complex of knowledge and power whereby the festival presented alternative forms of authoritative communication through spectacles of performance, political speeches, and a multitude of other art forms (Bennett 1988 Brathwaite (1974: 344) calls a "sense of cultural wholeness" and self-directed appropriation, which allowed for a deep-seated "fear of Africa" (347) persistent among Caribbean people to be probed and reassessed within a context of wider acceptance of emergent Black consciousness and related cultural and trans/nationalist movements. Comparable to how Andrew Apter (2005: 3) describes FESTAC '77 in Lagos, CARIFESTA '72 "revealed how the national recuperation of cultural traditions was by no means limited to local festivals and village dances, but involved" artists from the whole of the circum-Caribbean and beyond. Countries that would go on to form CARICOM the following year were especially involved, but so too were non-Caribbean countries like Brazil, Nigeria, and Ghana, "thus remaking the local within a modern framework of regional, national, and global ' communities'" (ibid).…”