Behind the Scenes

Last updated: November 10, 2024
       

Some of the notes, questions, music, stories, and more that went into the making of this project.  

Guide questions I used for the interview episodes.

Join the conversation by sending your responses in here.

About the logo font: Bricolage Grotesque, designed by Mathieu Triay

From Triay’s website:
“My grandfather had a whole life and family with him when war forced him to move to France. Coming from a traditional background, and having witnessed the horrors of the war, he was a time capsule transplanted into a world that changed under his feet.

Bricolage is French for improvising something you need by combining or repurposing readily available materials and Bricolage Grotesque is so steeped in historical sources and references that it’s hard to call it anything else. It’s a re-interpretation of existing ideas but for a different purpose: trying to visually express [...] what it feels like to have a hybrid identity where you cannot be what you were and yet you can never truly be anybody else.”

And then, in the midst of this chaos, with all the adrenaline in the air, I noticed the two girls again, sitting high on a tree branch at a slight distance, watching the scene. I saw them fabricate the mask of the village’s Chief Goddess, clamber down the branches and walk towards us, masquerading as her. They ordered the guards to let us go and mended my cousin’s body and spirit.

As we drove out from the edges of the village, I wondered: if they could deceive the guards, if they could blaspheme against their Goddess and save strangers with their cunning, if they were so self-aware of their condition, of their village as neither the beginning nor end of the world, why had they never saved themselves, why had they never left?

from Why Had They Never Left?, a short story by Immaculata Abba, 2022, Michigan Quarterly Review mixtape

The Missing Piece Meets the Big O (book by Shel Silverstein)

The missing piece sat alone…waiting for someone to come along and take it somewhere. All it wants is to roll along with its perfect match, but some are too small, others too big, and some fit yet don’t roll. The missing piece feels sad and lonely until it meets the Big O from whom it learns a lesson about self-sovereignty.

 

The 8th Annual Lagos Studies Association Conference

Some contemporary Biafra War memory projects:

A History of the Republic of Biafra
(Samuel Fury Childs Daly)

Biafran War Memories
(Chika Oduah)

Umu Biafra
(Lotanna Ogbuefi/Tritima Achigbu)

Ozoemena documentary
(Centre for Memories, Enugu)

Essays on Biafra in The Republic  

Photo: Dominic Chavez/World Bank, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

WASSCE History textbook (2018)
(a Creative Commons resource made by historians Nwando Achebe, Samuel Adu-Gyamfi, Joe Alie, Hassoum Ceesay, Toby Green, Vincent Hiribarren and Ben Kye-Ampadu)

All chapters include a list of suggested readings, data sources and study questions to test student’s comprehension. 

Frankema, Ewout, Hillbom, Ellen, Kufakurinani, Ushehwedu and Meier zu Selhausen, Felix (Eds.) (2023). The History of African Development. A Textbook for a New Generation of African Students and Teachers. African Economic History Network.

Soldier’s Paradise

by Samuel Fury Childs Daly

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From Daly’s acknowledgement section:

From the author’s website:

Across Africa, the late twentieth century was a time of military coups and martial “revolutions.” The men who staged them had utopian visions. In Nigeria and other former British colonies, army officers remade their countries along martial lines. Some soldiers tried to drum colonialism’s bad habits out of people through military-style discipline. Others conditioned civilians to think more like they did. A few believed that making their countries into vast open-air barracks was what would make them truly “free.”

Long submerged by more hopeful ideological currents, militarism is resurfacing in African politics. Soldier’s Paradise describes where it came from.

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“So why did people put up with military rule? It was because it gave them a plan—or at least the illusion of one. Militarism offered the promise of secu- rity and order, which soldiers tried to deliver through law. Law wasn’t actually very useful for making an orderly society, but people learned they could turn the military’s law-and-order vision to their own ends. Many saw something appealing in militarism’s aggression, austerity, and independent-mindedness. Some found weapons they could turn against their rivals. Another cold truth: some found pleasure in submission. [...] Militarism was humiliating, but soldiers’ ability to shame and humble people was part of their appeal.”
p. 34

Photo: Courtesy Northcote W. Thomas/Museum of Archeology and Anthropology.

WHOM DID HE LOVE?

“Looking at the photograph, I am reminded that my grandfather had an interior life I will never know about. Whenever my parents, siblings, and I went to the village, we prayed the Rosary in Igbo every morning with the extended family but outside that, I could converse only in English, which my grandfather did not speak.

Some years after this thought, I found Chinua Achebe’s Home and Exile on the back shelves of my secondary school’s library. In it, Achebe, an Igbo man of my grandfather’s generation, recounts memories and folklore with which he made meaning of his Igbo identity before, during, and after British colonial rule. The collection’s final essay ends with a call to “others who may believe with me that a universal civilization is nowhere yet in sight” to join the “war against dispossession” which entailed a process of “re-storying” colonized people. And so began my fraught efforts to animate my personal sense of lineage. Yes, my history did not begin with colonization, but the colonial period stands between me and the part of my family’s past I don’t have access to.”

from ‘Whom Did He Love’ by Immaculata Abba, 2022, Brooklyn Rail, Critics Page.

_{The Federation of Informal Workers’ Organisations of Nigeria
(FIWON) 🔗}

FIWON provides a common platform to articulate the needs and daunting problems of informal, self–employed workers in Nigeria, aggregate their aspirations and advocate for the amelioration of their problems in a participatory way before power holders at all levels.

Workers in the informal sectors of the Nigerian economy constitute over 80% of non-agricultural employment, 60% of urban employment and over 90% of new jobs in Nigeria according to recent statistics from the Federal Ministry of Labour.

Counting an estimated population of over 65 million working people, workers in the informal sector are subjected to arbitrary and excessive taxation, limited means to meet their basic needs for social protection, access to affordable credit, occupational health and safety, affordable and accessible training for them to be able to cope with new production processes and technologies, and access to work-spaces with basic infrastructures. This is where FIWON comes in.

originally published in Lolwe magazine

Cleo Sol interviewed by Zane Lowe (Apple, 2024)