Page 67 - CULTURE IN THE COMMUNICATION AGE

ULF HANNERZ

In an African town
By the time I retrieved those old notes from the depths of my closet at home, I
had moved on to thinking about culture in another, wider, context. It was after
some travel in West Africa that I had once been drawn into anthropology, and,
when I had ended up in Washington instead for my first field study, it was
because it had been a very unpromising time for the research I had planned to
do in Nigeria – the country was on its way into a civil war. But then in the late
1970s and early 1980s, I spent several periods in central Nigeria, in a town
named Kafanchan, built in the colonial era around a new railway junction. I
had actually intended to do a study focusing on local social organization, but
then the field experience itself had gradually drawn my attention in another
direction. It was not only that some of my new acquaintances in Kafanchan
would pull my sleeve and suggest that they and I ought to get into an import–
export business together; they had lots of ideas about desirable goods to import
from overseas (but fewer ideas, it seemed, about what to export). Or that they
would propose that I should take a bright and promising young nephew of
theirs along when I returned to Europe, to put him into my university where
he would get a good education and from which he could come back to
Nigeria as a rich and powerful man. Obviously these were people whose hori-
zons did not coincide with Kafanchan’s town limits. Nor was it just the
intriguing historical fact that this was a community which would not have
existed had it not been for the influences from a wider world: the simple logic
of space had brought together here one rail line carrying tin with another rail
line carrying groundnuts, on their way from northern Nigeria to the port cities
on the southern coast. Most strikingly, there was in Kafanchan that young
urban culture which was quite basically and dramatically a result of the intri-
cate and shifting blending of West African, European, and by now North
American cultures as well. From within Nigeria, and from just about every
corner of it, people of a great many ethnic groups (‘tribes’) – Ibo, Yoruba,
Hausa, Tiv, Kaje and others – had arrived in the town to find their places in its
life. Even as they brought some parts of their traditions along, however, there
were also the meanings and messages from further away. Coming through the
loudspeakers of Kafanchan’s small record stores was the switching back and
forth between American televangelist gospel, Afro-American soul music,
Caribbean reggae, and Nigerian popular music genres such as highlife and juju.
And because Nigeria had oil and was at least for some time a quite prosperous
country, one could now see brand new television antennae being installed over
the rusting corrugated zinc roofs of Kafanchan’s one-story or two-story
houses.
The wider context with which I was engaging was that of ‘globalization’ – a
keyword of our times, although, even when I began to think about some of the
things to which it now refers, it was not yet in frequent use. One may take
‘globalization’ to mean various things, and place it differently in time. Perhaps a

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