For years, Nigerian politicians have had the reputation of being among the most corrupt of the corrupt. Andrew Apter’s intriguing study reinforces that view. His subject is FESTAC ’77, the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture held in Nigeria in 1977. Through the lens of this spectacle, Apter focuses on class formation and cultural production in postcolonial Nigeria at a time of exceptional prosperity. His hypothesis, “that print capital, spectacle, and cultural reification … represented a fundamental relationship between the commodity form and the nation form” (p. 7), explores the principal theme of the black and African modernity that emerged from traditional culture.

FESTAC was a celebration of oil wealth—oil was the impetus for Nigeria’s renewal. But the wealth derived from royalties and revenues and the growth and development were illusory, as there was no productive base. Apter elucidates axes of corruption, the association of ethnic clientelism with oil wealth, and the rise of a new entrepreneurial elite, operating as a variant of the patron–client model and diverting proceeds along kin and ethnic lines.

In its concern with horizons of blackness, the festival represented racial taxonomies of imperialism. FESTAC symbolized new life for the Organization of African Unity (OAU) a turning point for African development, producing national culture as symbolic of political unity, fashioning the festival from traditional material from OAU states, and recommodifying it, while converting colonial culture into indigenous idioms of national tradition.

It was by means of its booming economy that Nigeria imposed its vision of blackness and Africanity through FESTAC’s arenas of performance and discourse. FESTAC was “the making of Nigerian national culture within the broader black and African world … [bringing into relief] spectacle as a form of cultural commodification” (p. 89). FESTAC was culturally produced and, in turn, FESTAC produced the people [the participants in the festival], but they were cardboard objects barely related to those they represented. Like the economy that enabled the celebration, they were a sham.

Apter uses two cultural galas to more closely examine his interest in hybrid African–European creations: the Regatta and the durbar. The regatta derives from the regional use of the war canoe, which was pivotal to the development of the cultural economy in the riverine area and which mediated between Europe and Africa in the early 19th century. FESTAC’s Regatta embodied the bureaucratic ideals of the petrostate. It created a synthesis through which new icons and identities emerged, tied to the ceremonial adornment of boats. The durbar is also synthetic. It was invented by the British in India and was employed in West Africa to naturalize “the policy of indirect rule in choreographed public spectacles honoring emirs, governors, district officers” (p. 168). Through Apter’s lens, the grand durbar, the final event of FESTAC, was used to connect the black world to the world system, and, as with the “traditional” durbar, whereby the Emir judged his popularity and the loyalty of his followers, FESTAC’s durbar provided a parable for the end of General Babangida’s rule and the transition to civilian governance.

FESTAC’s embodiment of corruption, with its consultancy fees, inflated contracts, kickbacks, and mobilization fees, mirrored the waste and expenditure under oil capitalism, furthering the politics of illusion and the unstable connection between image and reality. The centrality of corruption to Apter’s book leads naturally enough to a long and engaging discussion of “the 419,” a colloquialism used throughout West Africa. Named for a section in the Nigerian criminal code, it refers to the confidence tricks involving impersonation and forgery for fraudulent gain that emerged in the 1980s. Apter’s particular interest is the entry of the 419 into politics, manifest in unstable identities, misleading images, and false numbers.

If oil wealth was basic to Nigeria’s prosperity, even as it was fake, in Eastern Nigeria, and Ogoniland in particular, oil was a disaster. Communities were destroyed and, when writer Ken Saro-Wiwa fought for the rights of the local people, which cost the country oil revenue when the oil companies partially withdrew, he was executed. Apter asks: how did Nigeria become so cannibalistic? How did everything fall apart? And he answers: because of the underlying contradictions of oil capitalism. “Money magic,” as he calls it, is rooted in local socioeconomic fields and cultural forms and was symptomatic of Nigeria’s unproductive wealth; money fetishism had negative values, it was symbolically evil, with national focus. Saro-Wiwa’s death represented “the ultimate collapse of that elusive distinction between the Nigerian state and civil society” (p. 270).

Although the book has a slightly trendy cast and following the argument is at times difficult because of complicated sentence structure, it is a wonderful ethnographic study of a modern African state. I especially enjoyed Apter’s fleshing out of the magical realism of Nigerian modernity, the signs of progress and abundance, the image, rather than the substance, of development, which took on its own reality.

[photographs, notes, references, index.]