African Affairs Advance Access originally published online on January 15, 2009
African Affairs 2009 108(431):241-261; doi:10.1093/afraf/adn086
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The Uses of Ridicule: Humour, ‘Infrapolitics’ and Civil Society in Nigeria
Ebenezer Obadare (Obadare{at}ku.edu) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology, University of Kansas, Lawrence, USA. An earlier version of this article, which draws on doctoral and postdoctoral research in Nigeria between 2004 and 2007, was presented at the Joint Annual Meeting of the Midwest Sociological Society (MSS), and the North Central Sociological Association, 4–7 April 2007, Chicago, IL. The author would like to thank David Lewis and Paola Grenier for their long-standing interest in the research; and Akin Adesokan, Wale Adebanwi, Marcus Lam, Bob Antonio, Bill Staples, Sara Dorman, Rita Abrahamsen, and the journal's anonymous reviewers for helpful comments and suggestions.
As post-military ‘democratic’ regimes across Africa perpetuate norms and practices that were characteristic of the previous openly authoritarian era, humour and ridicule have emerged as a means through which ordinary people attempt to deconstruct and construct meaning out of a reality that is decidedly surreal. In Nigeria jokes serve a double function as a tool for subordinate classes to deride the state (including its agents) and themselves. Jokes are therefore a means through which an emergent civil society, ‘behaving badly’, subverts, deconstructs, and engages with the state. Yet, for all its significance as a form of agency, humour has been neglected in the civil society literature, partly because of the mentality which frames civil society in terms of organizations (humour is not organized), and partly because of its almost exclusive attention to the ‘civil’ attributes of civil society (humour is, inter alia, rude). This article argues for incorporating humour into the civil society discourse, and suggests that doing so will enrich civil society analysis by focusing on both the constructions of sociality and their associated politics, and the hidden spaces in which most of visible political action originates.