 I'd like to acknowledge the presence of my brother, Banting fellow here, Martin, who, together, were the two Banting fellows for Carlton two years ago, right? How time flies. Yeah, so the Institute of African Studies is very well located, and I have had general support all around, and I would like to acknowledge that. The Banting post-doctoral fellowship has given me opportunity to expand my work beyond the scope that I had actually planned. But what it has also done is it's simply complicated my life in many ways, because I was on the run with what I thought was a good project, and I could very well have ended our project focusing exclusively on Nigeria with the comparative analysis that I do, without necessarily having to visit some other cities. But the Banting has given me opportunity to do a more comparative, ethnographic engagement with what I call street stories. And so that allows me, I have been to Accra. I plan to go to some of the other hubs that I am looking at, which is Nairobi in Kenya and Johannesburg in South Africa. What I have done with this, when I had the opportunity to either participate in this brown bag or not, I gave it second thoughts in realizing how crazy this time of the year is for me, and I'm sure that Martin can also bear out where at the tail end and their reports and the whole other things needs to be rounded up. But it just turned out to be a great gift to me, because this brown bag talk has given me opportunity to investigate something that has just been there. It's been there for a while, it's been going on for a while. And being somebody who is very interested in popular cultural production, I have taken note of it, but not at a purely scholarly level. And so when I was changing Ms. Dominique, and I said, crazy, I could just as well look at what this holds, and I chose this topic. And in the course of investigating this topic and preparing for it, I found out that it's still very much of a virgin area in the sense that as we speak, I do not see that there is any publication on this. And so it presents a lot of opportunity and I'm hoping that depending on the feedback and how far I take this, I'm actually looking to carrying on because I've written a substantial part of it already as an essay, just carrying on and going ahead to conclude the paper for publication a few weeks after now. And so the title is The Adventures of... Well, I have a handout that I've passed around. If you're coming in now, you just might not be able to read it, but it's a quick read. And what it does is I found this very, very interesting. It virtually summarizes the nature of the material that I'm dealing with from a personal perspective, not my personal perspective, but somebody else's perspective. Somebody who lives in the Netherlands. She's a trend economist, but she writes a blog and she's a compulsive blogger. I mean, any day she doesn't write, it's like something has gone out of, as if a door has pulled out of the hinges. And looking at this, I found this very fascinating. So I picked, she designed this cover. This is more like a stub for the journalism students in the house. It's more like a stub because it's not a natural newspaper. And so I found this really fascinating and I got her permission. She is very strict. Even if she's blogging, she seems to be so strict about the uses of her material and wants her link to go with everything as a feedback. So I got this and then I looked at this letter. The input of this letter is significant in the sense that at this time in Nigeria, there are lots of open letters being written. The most controversial are being from a former head of state of Nigeria, from a president to a dissenting president. And so this has opened up a new genre. Not a new one. It has reintroduced an old genre, or renewed an old genre of letter writing into public consciousness at the time where everybody is obsessed with the internet and with Blackberry and so on and so forth. And so you will go through this. Now, what I plan to do with this talk is because this is exploratory and at the same time, the material is very complicated, walking through several multiple media platforms. I cannot judiciously tackle this within the time available, right? And then so what I plan to do is twofold. I'm gonna give a very short reading from here that just contextualizes my research into this. And then I'll move on very quickly. I'm gonna speed through my PowerPoint presentation because what it does is it gives me opportunity to describe the material that I'm working with. Since they exist in the multiple media platforms I'm talking about, it's multimedia. So I would like you to have a feel of it, to have a sense of it. As it moves from print, you've seen one that I've circulated into other forms. And so I will go through it and I hope that at the end I will give you a quick sense of the kind of material that I'm working with and where I am taking this to and hopefully the significance of the research. And so the title, right from the title, you could see some of the challenges that pop up. I have two spellings of a boss right there in the title represented by the bracket. Some people spell it as AKPOS without a R. If you're familiar, any incident of linguistics, familiar with some African languages, we know that spellings can be very problematic because there isn't really standard orthography for some of the languages. And then more so with this kind of material that exists in Nigerian paging for the most part, even if there are also people who write them in standard English. And then it's also material that is being written by so many people under one banner. So you can imagine the kind of chaos, the kind of chaotic material I'm trying to put a sense to and to find a single narrative, a thread connecting these disparate images and disparate representations of slices of Nigerian life around the metaphor of a boss. And so some spell it AKPOS. If you went searching for it, you'll find this. And then some spell it as AKPORS. This would be more anglicized with the air being introduced. And so the adventures of AKPOS, the maverick, street stories, humor and the Nigerian digital imaginary. So I'll begin with an epigraph from an essay, which I'm very much indebted to as I begin to theorize this cultural phenomenon called AKPOS. Whenever and wherever individuals and groups deploy and communicate with digital media, there will be circulations, re-imaginings, magnifications, deletions, translations, revisionings and re-makings of a range of cultural representations, experiences and identities. But precise ways that these dynamics unfold can never be fully anticipated in advance. In some instances, digital media have extended their reach into the mundane heart of everyday life, most visibly with cell phones. Gadgets now vital to conduct business affairs in remote areas of the world, as well as in bustling global cities. In other instances, digital artifacts have helped engender new collectivities. And this is Gabriela Coleman. It could not have end of quote, it could not have been accidental that from the country that produced and I quote Africa's first popular written literature, which is also known as Onitsha Market Literature. And the continent's largest contemporary film industry called Mollywood has materialized Africa's most phenomenal viral narrative around the adventures of a single character in the digital age, AKPOS. Although the narrative imagination is universal and scholars have indeed conducted insightful studies of the peculiarities of Africa's storytelling traditions informed by its rich oral culture. And I have in mind scholars like Abuel Irelay, Isidok Bewa and so on and so forth. There is an urgent need to focus attention on the specific social cultural experience as well as the textual practices that have influenced the proliferation of such unique popular cultural production from that country and that's my country, Nigeria. And while studies of Onitsha Market Literature and Nollywood relatively abound, there is virtually none on what I call the still evolving urban street narrative culture in the digital age in Africa. This brown bar talk offers me an opportunity to call a wider attention to and to inaugurate the much in their critical discourse of an aspect of the popular urban narratives at BOS, the Maverick. For perhaps no other character outside of the well-known folkloric tortoise of the oral tradition of fame in Africa has commanded such compelling attention in the popular narrative imagination in Nigeria than at BOS. Far from Onitsha Market Literature and Nollywood Associated with localized production around Onitsha and then up highway area to be specific of the city. And for Nollywood, both Onitsha and Lagos. And then they also cluster around the areas of the city called Idumabu and the Laba International Market. The at BOS narrative phenomenon has seized the Nigerian digital imaginary at home and in the diaspora. More than any other form of cultural production that I am aware of, the adventures of at BOS enjoys a unique and enigmatic production system. And this is what it's like. It is communally produced and circulated, crossing borders and social class through mobile digital devices. Evolving in a stunning fashion with its authorship dissolving like mist as it is transmitted across cyberspace. Unlike the producers of its analog and I'm using this advisedly analog narrative precursor in the form of Onitsha Market Literature. Producers of at BOS narratives defy easy classification. They are not a kind of semi-literate or illiterate traders who produce the Onitsha Market Literature and about whom Tomez so descendingly describes in his important collection, Life Turns Man Up and Down, published in 2001. And I quote this very condescending description. These authors and their facilitators cater to a reading public with newly discovered romance are enthusiastically embracing literacy. Here, and then you can believe this, in demotic, uncooked, mad English composed by illiterate printers in broken type. Newsprint bound in bush bruised wraps and distributed from hands to mouth is a political literature's growing pains and on display, end of quote. The producers and consumers of the at BOS narratives as I prefer to call the constellation of various narratives with multiple authorship scattered across multiple media platforms from Blackberry and other portable digital devices include the not so literate as well as the most learned professionals like the woman I talked about who is an economist based in the Netherlands. What brings them into conversation is a compulsive interest in storytelling and the comic or humorous in a society where stand-up comedy like Made in Worry, Night of a Thousand Loves and the rush of stand-up acts, stand-up acts, DVDs and shows has become a huge industry and favorite pastime for dealing with delimiting social conditions of everyday life. There are generally young and middle-aged students, bankers, professors, politicians, traders, commercial bus drivers and artisans who operate with considerable access to mobile smartphones in a country with over 90 million people or about tries the population of Canada with mobile phones. There are prognitely seven million on Facebook and other social media. So the absence of any studies of the utmost phenomenon so far is understandable. Beyond the acknowledgement of the slippery nature of popular arts in Africa by one of its pioneer scholars, Karen Barber, E. Gabriela Coleman has insightfully noted that despite a massive, and I'm quoting her, despite a massive amount of data and new forms of visibility showed up by computational media, many of these walls remain veiled, cloaked and difficult to decipher. She points out, and I quote again, long-term ethnographic research is well suited to tease out some of these veiled dimensions, however tentatively, to unearth the remarkable depth, richness and variability of digital media in everyday and institutional life. This paper is inspired by the need to rise up to the challenge of fulfilling such intellectual and progressive challenge. And so at this point, I would just move back to my PowerPoint because I just have set the tone and yeah, I would try and fit this into the time. We might not be able to take many other clips or examples of this kind of narrative or material, but you can always look up the internet and I have links that I can also share with whoever is interested. And so some key definitions because sometimes we take certain words for granted, it's barely in titles. So I thought that I have carefully chosen the word Marverick and some people might just be wondering what's Marverick about at most. And I thought I'll call attention again to these definitions of the Merian Webster Dictionary. A person who refuses to follow the customs or rules of a group. And then it goes on to say, some of these parenthetical definitions, full definition of Marverick. An unbranded range animal, especially a modelous calf. And then to an independent individual who does not go along with a group or party. This definition fits into our boss in many ways. And at the same time, he explodes these definitions in different, because he is branded and yeah, he is unbranded. In fact, there's a lot of antintesses around the character boss. And then he is an independent individual. But is it so much of an individual? Is written by a group of you, by several people in different, and it has character that is not so much, let me say, in fact, we'll be doing at boss a lot of good. If we say there is a complex character. Because characterization becomes difficult if you are approaching this from a literary perspective. I expect certain kind of consistency, but human beings are also inconsistent. And so you find at boss because it's been written by different people. Sometimes it's operating outside of our conception of him. In a way that if you were a novelist or a short story writer, you would appear to have forgotten the general trend of your character. If you wrote over some period of time and they have to get back to see, oh, what kind of character was Jane in chapter one or Ellie in the story? So you get that kind of feeling. And then I thought again, because three stories was a very difficult kind of thing to describe. And I wanted to hack back to the earlier research on this. I conceived the term street stories as part of a larger work in progress to describe mythopoic or mythopoetic oral texts produced and circulated as weapons of political reasons or compromise in multiple cultural formations within the post-colonial state. Especially in the metropolis with its complex demographics. With at boss, with at boss narrative, the social dimensions enter into the conversation. But there's also the political. Much of what I have been doing with the work that my banting and then my ongoing larger research and monograph is looking at the political elements. But this was just thrown up as I said earlier on as a gift because it gives me opportunity to look at the social angle of this whole conversation. And then humor. We can also take humor for granted. But perhaps the most revealing story or the place of humor in contemporary Nigeria is the Ben-Isabada is the uses of radical humor, infra politics and civil society in Nigeria. Very fascinating study. The essay explores the, and I quote, the powerful symbolism of humor as a social technique. According to Baderie, jokes, expensive or cheap have generally been used by the disprivileged. And this is a very beautiful word I really like that, by the disprivileged to carry cultural dose in power, subvert authority. And in some instances empower themselves. And I go on to observe that international Africans are the bad who delights in subtle re-badry is a famous, if not terrest presence. Or Baderie, you know, essay describes and analyzes how, quote, ordinary citizens in Nigeria are using humor both in coping with social asperities as well as negotiating, shaping and redefining the public domain of critical deliberation. But sadly he missed out both in that beautiful essay. And this is part of what my study, you know, helps to introduce into the conversation because I think that at both presents a late motif, one of the most compelling ways to examine this kind of role of humor in society. And then also to look at, you know, what I call digital imaginary, which I would also explain what I mean or what I'm thinking about. This is a contest that humor operates in the at both narratives beyond class entertainment. Of course class entertainment is part of it. The at both jokes, if you're reading at both jokes all by yourself and then also depending on, because humor or jokes can also be cultural. Sometimes, you know, people from some kind of place, my crack was a joke and a false flat, you know, because you cannot connect with it. And then some of that cultural context, you know, you find people reeling on the floor. But I doubt that you can deal with at both without reeling on the floor or using the ROFL, you know, that some of those, I'm sure some of our friends are already laughing, you know, you know, ROFL. These are the kind of shortcuts and short forms of expression that are so prominent in the kind of material we're working in. And so, so digital imaginary. I am thinking here in terms of J Cook's present, and I quote, present day generation of new self and body images in the new conceptual territories available in modern cultural and telecommunications interspaces. So it's rather complex, you know, because one, it's imagination, and two, it's visible and invisible. And so these are the interspaces, those crossing borders that you think of, you know, within the mind and also physical location of these citizens. Also not what is Coleman's German observation. And then I quote, although the 10 digital media may be familiar to most readers, it is what highlighted that digital media encompasses a wide range of non-analog technologies, including cell phones, the internet, and software applications that power and roam on the internet amongst others. So when we have this, have more embracing definition of the digital imaginary and the way I'm thinking about it, you will understand why the kinds of devices, you know, and the kind of multimedia platforms I'm thinking about will come into play. So, and then this is the essay, you know, if you're interested in this topic, this is a fantastic essay. So the origins or the post narratives. Now, at this point, I think I just might make a small observation about my methodology, you know, I have already described this in my preface and at the same time is being to emerge from what I'm saying. But I have had to adopt something that is a bit radical, you know, in terms of I have used some kind of open sourcing. Perhaps, let me, because I deal with that at the, you know, in a few slides after this. So let me progress with that, but you'll see the connection that I'm trying to make about the origin of the post narratives. First, there's influence of oral tradition. And I found out, okay, part of, let me let the color of the bag. What I did in trying to deal with this very sleeply material in which there is virtually no theorizing, you know, available right now, is to see the way some of the producers of this material work with it and how they say it. And then it's also contentious, you know, it's controversial, the origin, where, what is the provenance of these post narratives? There's a single, the post narrative, let's remember again, is there a series of stories, vignettes and so on and so forth about a particular character, written by several people, many of whom you do not know their authorship. All of them imagining what this character can do, what he's capable of doing. And everybody's writing, at what's did this, at what's did that? In other words, you know, there's a certain kind of, you know, virtual symposium going on around this character. So it's still an evolving story. And so there is the influence of oral tradition. And then I found, so I put this on Facebook and said, okay, you know, I'm interested in this. What do you think about that post? And I have the question that I post to the social media community and especially those of my friends on Facebook. Partly because of my work as a journalist and, you know, as well as the general secretary of the Writers Guild in Nigeria, I have, before I knew it, I had over 5,000 friends on Facebook and I couldn't take any. So I had to delete so many so that I can accommodate people that, and so I couldn't need to do that. And when I set this up, I knew what I was getting into because I had lots of these and I also made it public. I didn't restrict it to friends. So I started getting a lot of people joining the conversation. One of whom is this guy, James Yekou. I have never met him, but he's a doctoral student at the University of Saskatchewan. And then he writes back to me to say, oh, this is fascinating that he actually presented a paper at the Institute of African Studies in Ibadom on this title, Ijapa on Facebook was a strict star figure. And this clicked because this was the original idea of what I was thinking about for this particular presentation. Thank God I left that area. Yes, what it immediately does, I points to the idea, Ijapa is the tortoise in Yoruba in Igbo language in Bé and is a very dominant figure in folklore and the folk tales in Africa. And so he has this, so they, that essay maps how the relationship between oral literature, oral tradition and the at-boss. And so, and then I have already spoken about Onitsha market literature. The Onitsha market literature were pamphlets that are produced in Onitsha several years ago. And one scholar did his PhD at Cambridge on this Onitsha market literature and that's why it was introduced into the world more like the way we're trying to do with the at-boss narrative. And so the kind of imagination that shapes the at-boss narrative, sometimes even language, seems to be a legacy from Onitsha market literature. This has also been implicated in the home video in the Nollywood presentations. And so there's popular cultural analogy and some of you might know little Johnny, little Jimmy, Dennis the Menace. These are some of the characters that share some kind of DNA with at-boss. And I'm sorry, I might not be able to go into details describing all of these things so that I can quickly be able to accommodate the survey. And so there's also Funtimes comic in the 1980s Nigeria with the adventures of Bembella and Lulu created by David Lasheco Lash and other cartoon sketches in the Defund Daily Times and other publications. So there've been some kind of, these are characters cartoon strips like Little Jimmy or Dennis the Menace which begin to evolve. Somebody creates one particular and then people begin to take different angles to it, begins to produce films. And before you know it, it's gone completely. Well, at this time where Little Jimmy, Little Johnny and so on and so forth, we haven't had a kind of digital media that we have now that automatically makes things viral within seconds through instantaneous sharing. And so there's a comic nature to this already implicated by the kind of provenance that I associate with Abbas. And then Abbas's minor precursors also include Boy Alinko, Papa Jasko, all of Ikebe's super and superstory fame. I see one or two people smiling here. We tells me that some people are familiar with the references they're making. These are very humorous festival cartoon comics and then later being turned into film and then also into TV drama. So they keep evolving. There's a metamorphosis that goes on with some of this material out of the public obsession with materials like this. And so there's now that the sexy guy of Lolli magazine. So many people of the younger generation or the present day Nigeria might not even remember these guys in the process of putting these together. I've had to remember them and then to do quick searches and to find ways to connect them with this. And so the Abbas phenomenon is not completely without any antecedents. Although with Abbas narratives, we reach another level altogether. Then there's the medium worry theory. This is part of the response that I get. The medium worry is that worry, which is a part of Nigeria and the Niger Delta area. I'm questioning some methodology for a certain decision. The role of Facebook and social media and the controversial issues of crowdsourcing and open costs, open source. Oh, I got this bad, yeah. That should be as there. So I should have put another bracket as there. Cost and source, which is still very controversial in academia as new marketplaces for ideas. And so as I said, there's this conversation that I initiated on Facebook and I got really fascinating responses about the origins of Abbas and so on and so forth. Some of which are the flashing out in the essay proper. And then just to give you an idea, this is the map of Nigeria highlighting the Niger Delta area. That's this area here. And then worry is just somewhere here. Here, this is Delta, this is old Bendel. This is the old map and then this is in Cap and then you have Delta and then it does stay out of it. This is seen as one of the largest deltas in the world, wetland and creeks and so on and so forth. And incidentally is the oil bearing part of Nigeria and where a lot of the insorgency is going on with regards to kidnapping of foreign oil workers and some local workers, which has in turn spawned imitators who are also kidnapping people for ransom. So this is a place because the guys here, which is all the most spoiled, environmentally devastated area of the country that produces the wealth of the country. Nigeria is a monoculture, all over 90% of the world of Nigerians income comes from crude oil. And these are very bad. It led to the hanging of Kansaruba because there's acid rain and a whole lot of things going on here. Because of the location of this place too, there's early contact with Europeans and so on and so forth. And this is the heartland of the Nigerian Pigeon. So you can, is this substitute Nigerian Pigeon with the idea wafi, wafi language, which is the local name for worry. So worry is there. That's where worry is located. I just thought to give you this. And of course, this map shows Nigerians borders, Niger, Chad, so many countries bordering Nigeria. And this also accounts for the way the transmission of these stories rapidly as people travel because a whole lot of Nigerians also travel for different reasons. And so some statistics, I thought we should just pull this up very quickly. Nigerian population, one around 70 million. Cell phone subscribers, 90 million people. A reasonable percentage of home carry two or three cell phones. It's not unlikely to find some people actually carrying four cell phones because of the wretched nature of the services. In some places it's not finding. And so you can imagine how also people depend on these cell phones for transmission of vineyards and short narratives like their boss narratives. And then the statistics also indicates that there are 48 million internet users. And then Facebook has about 6.5 million. And I was surprised, well, I'm not surprised that yesterday I learned from a news item that 1.35 billion people use Facebook monthly, which is part of its 10th anniversary information released only yesterday. And then the most widely spoken English language in Nigeria is a Pigeon, but there are over 250 languages and ethnic groups. So you saw the area where the Pigeon is. The Pigeon also happens to be the dominant language of their boss narratives. And so if you read some of them, you might not fully understand them because it's Nigerian Pigeon. And then there's yet to be a standard orthography. So even if you know the language, the spellings differ and then they are written because they are also using mobile devices composed. There are different kinds of short forms. Some of them very laughable that you can find on some extremely creative. And then so at this point, I'd like to just give you a sense of some of the materials that I am dealing with so you can just have an idea. So there's viral multimedia narrative formats. The narratives are taking some of these forms. And I found that this is one of Nigeria's leading comedians. His name is AY and it has a channel. And then he says, look at the notes published on August 22, 2012 by AY comedian. And they has on YouTube 255 videos, many of them comedies. And he also has CDs. I have some of his CDs here. So I brought some of these DVDs. You'd be so amazed at what these DVDs cover from Blackberry babes, Twitter babes, dealing with how post-colonial Africa is dealing with modernities and the new technologies. It's so fascinating really. You won't believe the range of DVDs and cultural production that comes out from Africa's engagement with the new modernity starting from the late 20th century. And so I have this and then we'll quickly, and then it says, you need to watch what's using the worry pigeon to anchor the show of who wants to be a billionaire. Can you beat this? This is a waste and construct that is not being domesticated. And it's just so hilarious. And then it says, category comedy, drama, entertainment, and this fits in. So let's see. I don't know why this link. Oh, good. So I will quickly show us this. It's an eight minute video, but we can't take all of it. So just to give you a sense, he has a light please. It just seems to be so slow. I hope I haven't lost my internet connection. OK, there it is. Oh, something is going on. I think it's freezing. OK. OK, I can skip now. There's a program. Some of you are familiar with who wants to be a millionaire. And then he domesticated and has a boss play the role. That's how ingenious this narrative format is. It's freezing. Unfortunately, our time isn't freezing. Maybe you can talk and we can talk. You actually think this is the real who wants to be a millionaire. You are welcome to this picture and show of who wants to be a millionaire. My name is Akoos. This guy's real name is Akoos, but he just simply, you know, well, it's not his real name. His real name is AY. But he puts it and then there's a subtitle, puts the name there. And if you're not familiar with the bargain, it happened on this on YouTube. You actually think this guy is a boss. The boss has become, you know, it's become like a metaphor. And different people use it for different purposes, trying as much as possible to imagine it into an ongoing viral narrative. And so he puts a boss now. He's now reincarnating this as a TV presenter. Unfortunately, we can't take more than that. So I don't know if I can. Oh, yeah. So that's not working. Let's try this again. I don't know what is going to be better with this. But what I have here is a couple of YouTube links, you know, that would have given you a feel of how a boss operates. I think the traffic is very busy around the campus. So it looks like no luck. I have 15 minutes. So, well, the YouTube links aren't working. Then what it simply means that this aspect is not going to work for us, you know, the links that I have. I have a couple of links. And then the fascinating thing is that there is a boss apps. If you read this, you'll see what she says about the app boss apps here. He says, let me read the last paragraph. Not the last paragraph, somewhere in between there. The second page. In spite of this, I want to thank you for the great work you are doing in Nigeria. These days, it seems as if you are the only one working hard to make us forget our problems. Can you imagine that Nigeria was ranked 20th in the saddest country, and then there had been an earlier one that says they're the happiest people in the world? This is this index. App boss don't mind them, Jerry. He tries to imitate this pigeon and this very peculiar way of writing. Everywhere I turn, I see another app boss. Sute, I have headache that only Parasetamol from India can cure. On Facebook, I found original app boss. App boss, the comedian. App boss, app boss, the comedian. And app boss jokes. Space will not allow me to list the number of app bosses I found on Twitter. And the spinners from your vast business empire. I think I should just shut that off. Sorry. This looks like it just might. I have 10 minutes, so it's going to have no use. So I'll just shut this and then maybe. So it just presents. And then that's the point I wanted to make. I found on Twitter and the spinners from your vast business empire. App boss apps for Blackberry. App boss Android apps for Google Play. App boss jokes on the OV store from the OV store and so on. This proliferation of your brand reminds me of when my mother started. She tries to introduce some of those jokes. But this gives you a full range of a kind of multimedia form as that these narratives exist in. And then I also have pulled out some of these Twitter. I wanted to show you some of the Twitter feeds. It just might be possible to do that. Let's see. Yeah, this is one of the Twitter feeds. App boss joke 247. Let's see what the first one says there. And then this is another format of it. Hashtag Twitter is, this has implications for how quickly this spreads. Because they are not longer narratives. And then if you put this against the background of a Nigerian writer and they really are a world-winning writer based in New York. Teju Cole, the author of Open Spaces, who is experimenting and writing a novel on Twitter. They begin to have a sense of the Twitter verse and why there's already a DVD on it. Twitter babes. Focusing on this universe, this new technology, these new modernities. And then so the first one, teacher app boss, how was your night? App boss response, I don't know, I was sleeping. And then it has boss, I pay you $30,000 a month. And in three months, I'll raise it to $60,000. When would you like to start app boss replies? And you find all of this, so let me just get back. And this guy has over 250 of these. So with spaces like this, there's some kind of authorship. But it's actually deceptive because it might be also recycling the same joke that in other places and appropriating them with ownership. So the issues of complexity of authorship, which literary studies would really find fascinating to examine. And then this app boss app icon on Google Play. If you look at it, you'll find this one on the left. And then this is one comic guy on the other one, the red-nosed comedian. And then this is a boss joke too for logon Facebook. You can see Eddie Murphy there. On the other side, actually, is a very popular Nigerian comedian, Basket Mouth. This is a kind of modernities experimentation that's going on. How globalization is destabilizing otherwise specific spaces and bringing in some kind of conversation that goes through the diaspora and through cyberspace. I think I should return to my slide. Okay. And then, so then this is another guy. He calls himself Boveo Boma boss. It happens that some of the people who proliferated this app boss narratives that come from the Niger Delta area that we showed before because they are more comfortable with the language. And they also are more given to these kind of stories. And so because they are too, the dominant characters in app boss narratives are Urobo people, Urobo is Shakiri, which happens to be part of that ethnic group. And so app bosses, the other characters that play with app boss that you find narratives are Chuko. And then there's yet another one from what they call the South-South of Nigeria when it's divided into six geopolitical zones for purposes of leadership, political leadership. And then is from the southeastern part of the country and then is a Kaiti. So you find the narratives with a Kaiti or Chuko, which is a very Urobo name. And then different people are using the same characters, writing stories around these characters. I see there's a single narrator for these stories. And then there's another fascinating link that I found. And then it's also operating within the print. You know, this is a newspaper. I haven't been able to establish the veracity of this design if it's actually, I know there's a newspaper called The Examiner, but this might again be just a stub by somebody who is so fascinated by the app boss phenomenon that he includes it into this. So that is all you hear about app boss are all lies. And it's that boss that is actually saying that, you know. So it might be a comedian, like the one we saw who is called out boss. And this newspaper, probably a local newspaper in Nigeria is capitalizing on its popularity for reproduction. And then that's the one that we have. An online newspaper stub, my hand out, see bottom right corner. The bottom right corner there, SMS 1356 for app boss jokes. The cost is 10 Naira per day. So you find people signing up for this because it helps to relieve the tension, the stress of everyday life, especially in cities like Lagos with over 15 million people in a virtually landlocked environment. And so these are the kinds of things that people say, for example, why are Nigerians so angry, giving them the kind of corruption that is going on there? They ought to be anarchy. I think these are some of the coping mechanisms, you know, is from a psychological point of view, the psychoanalytical point of view is like some kind of a escape. You know, so this is the context and then you have this there. And so she designs that. So app boss is also a big business. And then there's one other image, you know, many of those images, apart from the one that I have shown, you have lost the producers name, the authorship, so to speak. And so they don't come with any buy lines, you know, it's not buy anybody. They become just viral image, you know, and then it's difficult to begin to trace them. These are some of the complications in the research that I'm doing, you know, in regard to having to go for that with this into publication. What constitutes, you know, people's copyright and what's not. There are a whole lot of other spin-offs from this kind of a research. And then so that's app boss, ready for a caesarean section on a kaite, his partner, note the lanterns. And then it's operating with a lantern. You can imagine how dangerous it is. But this actually does happen in Nigeria. People are operating with lanterns. A mockery of Nigeria's energy crisis and healthcare sector. So this is some of the veiled political statements and social critique that is embedded in this format. And then that's app boss and then teacher is the other character that you would find with app boss. They are so many. The first one we just read short while ago from the Twitter is app bosses exchange with Twitter. And this is why it's such a hit with students because it creates different classroom scenarios with app boss, the maverick, the trickster and different kinds of negative things about app boss. Or if you may, sometimes extremely with it. And so app boss and teacher are recurrent cliche and I'm thinking about them, but they cause essay on cliche and the kind of ways they are multiplied and circulated or motive in the narrative. So I have this on the Twitter, we can get it. And then there's the exchange here. There's a math class going on. App boss, when is my next period? You see the noted voices next month, ma. Making a reference to a different kind of period that women go through. That's how crazy app boss. And then you can see the class, his students. And then look at the gentleman by the corner there. Probably just one of these crazy app boss. What would the teacher be asking him? And you find some of these and then there's another scenario in class. He says teacher, what is a baby lizard called? App boss answers Lizzie baby. Lizzie is a name and then he says baby. You find some of these verbal play. Which is very characteristic of the language paging. And then there's a cartoon format. Very much like Denny's The Menace. There are also people who are reconstructing the app boss narrative into cartoons. Please sir, is it good to punish someone for what he did not do? And that's app boss asking his teacher. And then the teacher answers no, why did you ask? And app boss answers I did not do my assignment. So he doesn't have to be punished. He gets a guarantee before answering. Which is logical, you don't punish people for what he did not do. And then he gets that. So it's this comic fashion too. And then that's app boss squares all the Superman. This is another cartoon here. Although the image is blurred because I've had to expand it. And then I find this really very, very important. This cartoon, I wish it were stronger. The resolution sharper. Because here it keys into the Superman and then the superhero comic. Which is a vast area that has been studied on the research in popular culture scholarship. And then look at, he says, who are you? App boss, this is app boss with Superman. And then the Superman asks him app boss who are you? And he says app boss, you can see. Look at the man there, he's holding onto Superman showing an inversion of the power of app boss. More like the biblical David and Goliath. But app boss means business too. And I've already highlighted this. One of the website solicits send app boss to 700 on your MTN. MTN is a provider of telephone services in Africa. Perhaps the biggest for my freshest and funniest male. And then of course you're gonna be billed if you send it. So the guy is making money from this. And then the apps may be free, but not so the adverts. And a couple of adverts show up. And then standard comedy is big business in Nigeria. Live shows, Knights of the Thousand Laughs, which is the most popular. And I have about 12 of them. They do them every year and they hold very big shows and they are recorded on DVD and they are sold. And then you have them here, Knights of the Thousand Laughs. They should be about 14 years now running and then you have them. And then so on sale. And then some comedians such as Ali Baba, one of the more popular ones, charge up to 1.5 million Naira, which is equivalent to about $10,000 for a three hour show. That is how big a business it is. So concluding. And I conclude by drawing attention to a specific aspect of the digital media and why the importance of this kind of scholarship or this kind of research. And I quote Gabriella Coleman again. The fact that digital media culturally matters is undeniable, but showing how, where and why it matters is necessary to push against peculiarly narrow presumptions about the universality of the digital experience. Yeah, this is so important because as you have seen from this presentation, there's certain specific cities of the cultural experience or this narrative format. Yes, you might think about, you know, Little Jimmy, Little Johnny or Dennis Menes, or you might even have some other parallels. And I'd be very glad to hear any other parallels that you might have because I'm trying to extend the comparative framework for this kind of cultural phenomenon. I'd be very glad to get that kind of feedback. And then one final at-bots joke playing with digital modernity in everyday life. And this, you just wait for it. And then this also implicates the language, you know, the wuffy origins, that's a worry origins. This is worry for real. That's what it calls, you know, mom, at-bots, that fish and meat don't boil. Has it boiled? The fish and meat are cooking. And at-bots, yes, male. That's how mother is called in this specific, you know, worry area, male. You know, some of it, matamorphosis or rather, effusion of the local language and English from mother. And then if you see the kind of so-called a mother, you know, of us, male, it's so embracing, so touching, so loving, evoked in the name male. And then mom, I beg, implicate, look at, look at. Now see the words, English was run riot here. Having sometimes the same kind of meaning, but now being criticized to carry a very localized kind of intention. Mom, I beg, implicate salt and maggi, add salt and maggi into the cooking. Say implicate salt and maggi. Attach oil, you know, in the very format that you think about an attachment. So you can see the whole play, the whole range of contemporary digital modernities are played. Attach oil, that's add oil, pepper and sentence. Sometimes the crayfish then involve the leaves, you know, further add leaves, you know, to it. After 10 minutes discharge, this is a crazy menu. It says after 10 minutes discharge the pot, you know, from the fire. You didn't hear me so, are you hearing me? You should take down the pot. And then I was answers, yes, male, sure, male, this food go to download with Fufu. So it's gonna download it, you know, finally eat with Fufu. You know, also using the language of a printing, of downloading, you know, of internet usage. And then there's one more joke I'd like to share with you. I think I'm off time now. I was on bump making, you know, which is also against the framework of the Boko Haram crisis in Nigeria. Boko Haram are Islamic fundamentalists in not Eastern Nigeria who are, you know, very much terrorists killing people and all of that. And then this has not joined the, what's the narrative? Two boys Habib and I reproduces exhaled the way it is, showing you that somebody is doing this with a cell phone. Look at, you know, the choice of Habib short forms, Habib and that was, and I didn't, this exhaled the way it is with no, with a total disrespect for capitalization and so on and so forth. Two boys Habib and that was are making letter bombs. Habib, I'm not sure whether I put enough explosive in this envelope before I sealed it. Abus, well, then open it and look Habib, but if I open it, it will explode. Abus, don't be stupid. It's not addressed to you. And then sometimes you have that rider at the bottom who is more stupid, you know, and it's part of a digital conversation. They invite and then people begin to write in and join the conversation. Abus is this, Abus is, and then you see a whole lot of comments, you know, that follow that. I thought I would be able to read a poem, but I wanted to play with this and I'm gonna skip that because I have also run out of time. And then this is an image that I found to very, very symbolic because Abus is a shadow. The writers of Abus, you know, are shadows as far as, and then some of them claim othership which are questionable. But this guy uses this to promote his show. Abus, a comedian, you know, we finally reveal himself to the world. And I think the process of revealing himself has begun with this presentation. Thank you very much. I want your image to be on Carlton's website. Just say so and we'll try to remind you of your image being on Carlton's website. We appreciate that. We will record your image, but then I'll have to get you to sign a piece of paper afterwards to give you permission. So it needs to be so formal that that's what the privacy laws can require. So of course, I guess what you need to do is step up to a mic if you'd like that, of course. I'm just bringing up to do that first. I'm not sure everyone in the room knows each other. Just identify yourself first. Sure. My name is Arbita. I'm quite short. I'm in the Public History Department here at Carlton. Actually, I have two questions for you, one of which is probably not very relevant. By Maggie in the first joke that you read out at the end there, do you mean like the sauce? Okay, just because that's something we have in India too, so that kind of rungs and bells for me. But actually the entire culture of this kind of SMS jokes and stuff like that sent out daily is something that is really prevalent in India too. And I was wondering if it's something that kind of crosses class lines because that's something I've noticed there. I'm going to go to visit, so I'm just curious about how class plays a role in jokes. Yeah, I think I did mention it. In my preface that it crosses class lines. The character of the presentations of the Abbas narratives speaks for itself. Some are written, for example, where I have some of those examples. They are very international. There are a series of Abbas jokes that actually revolve around Abbas's adventures in the US, in Saudi Arabia and so on and so forth. They may be imagined, but I also imagine that these are things written by Nigerians in the diaspora who are contributing to this cultural phenomenon. And then some of them, as I pointed out, are professors. I mean, my fascination with it, I could, you know, in one quiet moment, you know, you decide to throw an Abbas adbosi that crosses your mind. Although the comedians make it as staple, but through Blackberry especially, you know, people are able to share this. Any of you can produce an Abbas joke in terms of the stock characters that exist. You know, you have a kaiti. You can decide, oh, what is Abbas done with a kaiti today? Or with Orchuko, you know, his friend and so on and so forth. So they're different people. And then humor, you know, usually I think laughter is the best medicine, no matter who you are. If you think about the shows that I talked about, who will be paying $10,000 for a three-hour show to a comedian? You can think about the class of people. Some of those shows attract as much as about $25,000, which would be the equivalent of about $130 gate fee. So they're also very affluent people, but they're also very common people, ordinary people, in everyday life. So it's, it's trans, it's trans, it crosses class. I'm going to do a follow-up to that if I may. Use my position to share and ask a question as a follow-up. And I'm Chris Rodd, I'm the director of the institute. I mean, if I'm understanding what you're saying correctly here, this is a really fascinating idea. We have kind of the collective creation of a, of a sense of Nigerian identity or in a certain way, or a sense of Nigerian personality. Collectively it's being created, which I find fascinating to think about. Because normally we think about these cultural products as being the product of an individual. And so that's interesting to me. But crossing class lines, because that was actually one of my first thoughts. As you say, there's a huge number of people that are engaged in this collective production. And that's all the people who have accessed the internet and cell phones and all the rest of it. But political scientists that I am, I immediately thought of all the people who were excluded from that. And so that's the equally large number of people in Nigeria, presumably lower class, poor, rural people, who don't have access to the internet and to YouTube and digital media in general. Half the population. So to the extent that half the population is not part of this collective endeavor, how can you really say that it is crossing class lines? Because it's a large, but still particular slice of society that is engaged in the process. So thank you very much. I think that's a very important question. My take on it is that, which I didn't quite emphasize, is that it should be noted that these narratives exist both in the oral and the written form. They exist in different... So the oral form is something I haven't even discussed at all because it's difficult to apprehend the oral nature of the narratives. Some of these are told, post-jokes told in pubs, where people, you know, they have some of these pubs now, just like the spot bar that you have here. But these ones, individual set up and then begin to take small gate fees. And then wherever, there are different kinds of social spaces where they are shared. And then more so if you think that some of them are now, you know, they are on YouTube and they cross on rates in smartphones, the pass on rate of these narratives go transcend the media that I am dealing with. I think this is looking more like a very elitist presentation, you know, because the spaces, the social spaces include the transit buses, you know, and then the actually radio station, Wazobia, which I had taken note of and I discovered in the process of researching this that I can actually listen to Wazobia is online, is online, but I was familiar with it in Nigeria. And so some of the jokes are being shared on radio, you know, and you know, the pavement radio in Africa, you know, has been so theorized. It's the easiest way people can access to information. They have their TV shows and then the comedies, actually stand-up comedies, they don't need any books or ads. They memorize some of this. And so their post-narratives transcend, you know, the kinds of structures of power that you will find, say, like a cell phone, which many people cannot afford. And even if they could afford it, they might not be able to use it that much because they do not have power to recharge their phones. And they're charging stations, you know, where the kinds of things we take for granted, people go to charging stations and then somebody sets up a charging station with a generating set and begins to charge about 15 IRAs, you know, for people to charge their phones for one hour. So yes, it does appear, because we talk about 90 million, which is roughly about half of the population, have mobile phones. And then we said about 40, you know, Internet access and so on. And this is a very wretched kind of Internet connectivity. So yes, it's important to know that but this is more than made up for, I believe, with the oral nature of the transmission of these stories, in line with oral tradition, which was, what of mouth, you know, was much of what the folk tales and so on and so forth, you know, were translated. And this culture is still very much oral, which is part of the larger work that I'm doing. Thank you. My name is Suzanne Klossin. I'm in the history department here. I had a question as well about exclusion but not around class but ethnicity. And I don't know if this is the case at all, but you said that Nigerian pigeon was the main language and that seems to be located mainly around the Niger Delta area. So I'm wondering if this is really a Nigerian-wide kind of discussion or discourse or is it excluding people who don't speak Nigerian pigeon? I actually don't even know much about what Nigerian pigeon is. Maybe you could tell me a little bit about that. And then my second question is kind of different. I mean, the humor is being used to make, at least in some cases, political commentary. And that image of the Caesarean section is to me criticizing corruption and greed and terrible governance. And I'm wondering if there's other kinds of politics that are being critiqued. The reason I asked that, as I saw in one of the tweets in the Twitter one, there was a question, what kind of AIDS education can you tell me? And the answer was use different positions with the same women instead of the same position with different women. And I wondered is, you know, that's, to me, critique potentially on promiscuity or, you know, what's the word, adultery or whatever. So are there kind of sexual or gender politics that also get critiqued in addition to the kind of high politics? Yeah, thank you very much. I think one of the downside of the post-narratives is that they're very, sometimes they're very sexist, sometimes they're radical women. And then it was one of the poses I threw up on the conversation on Facebook and I got some of those responses. So yes, you know, some of them. But again, there isn't that kind of consistency. It's a very complicated character. You know, there are instances where he speaks for women, you know, and then there are other instances, you know, where he also puts down women. You know, Kite suffers so much in his hands, you know. Actress is always a man then? Yes, yes, the male name. And then we got to exclusion, possible exclusion with Pigeon. Pigeon happens to be Nigerian's lingua franca. You know, it's a language widely spoken across board. You know, if two Nigerians meet, if they're not people of the elite, they're likely to be speaking Pigeon. And then there is also no consistency with the Pigeon, you know, as you might find with a patois, say Jamaican or any of those ones. These ones, you know, sometimes, rather than speaking the Pigeon, the type that speaks, you know, in the final section of the presentation as I was concluding, you find sometimes broken English, which was a kind of thing we found, you know, that you find on the child market literature. Broken English will be by people who are not so familiar with the Pigeon, but who are also not very literate, you know, with English language. The Pigeon, proper Pigeon, are spoken by people who have considerable control of English language, but are not deploying in a way that it serves their local purposes. And so Nigeria was colonized by the British. English is a language for business and instruction in schools generally in Nigeria. And so almost virtually, most people speak English, but that's not to say there are so many other people in the rural areas who do not speak English at all, who need people to translate for them, it's only the older generation. And so it doesn't quite exclude because it's a language of business, it's a language of social interaction. And then as it crosses borders across different media spaces, media space, it begins to acquire different kinds of character. So the exclusion might even also include people in the upper class who are not familiar with Pigeon. So you can see, you know, an inversion of that kind of exclusion that in some places, you know, people who are brought up in places where they didn't have that much kind of access, ordinary everyday people can speak in Pigeon that they will not hear because the kind of Pigeon that our boss speaks in that final is a very localized, that can exclude, I can bet you. There are even not so many Nigerians who easily decode that Pigeon because it says implicates. That's an English word. So sometimes you need to listen very carefully to its contextual situation that I use to be able to understand what it is all about. Thank you. My name is Mary, and I'm from Queens University. I wondered if you had found instances where a controversy arose in this domain, you know, whether it's on a particular platform, but transcended that domain and moved into a more serious discussion or a different forum where people actually could reveal their identities and engaged with an issue that was raised or caused a controversy in this more informal joke, you know, kind of discussion. So, for example, if there was an act post-joke that raised a controversy and then was aired and discussed, you know, either, but on a different forum where people could reveal their identities and engage with the issue that arose in that this other domain. Does that make sense? Yes, you know, I would like to point out one that might not be so closely tied to our boss, but it also happens to be one of the, one of the celebrity representations of this kind of narrative. You know, the comedian called Baskett Muth. You know, recently he cracked a joke around rape on Facebook and it was an opera. In fact, there was mass mobilization, you know, activists on Facebook, on social media, Twitter, and the rest of them. And within hours it was forced to retract and apologize. And it didn't stop at that. It was forced to restart a campaign, a signature campaign, to get him to be pulled out from global cell phones. Globacom. Globacom is one of the service providers for cell phones and so on. And he is one of the ambassadors. And the campaign was so strong that he issued a retraction and tried to issue a clarification. You know, it shows the power of the media and the power of these jokes. There isn't that kind of acute political consciousness that I would want to see invested in this. A whole lot of it's situational social interaction about that was in the classroom. Sometimes, you know, there are issues of politics and there are some other themes. I actually have downloaded, you won't believe this, 64 pages of our boss jokes. And it's by no means comprehensive. Type 64 pages. As a matter of, I see the possibility of doing something like what Thomas did with a life tones man upside down. But again, there are serious issues of copyright, possible copyright violations. Because it would be nice to see a compendium of boss jokes, thematically arranged. I have been thinking about the possibility of that kind of project. But how are you going to identify, you're likely to run into trouble with people who have evidence that they originated this. That this is their intellectual property, even if it's part of, you know, a communal narrative threat. Thank you very much. And thank you guys for coming.