Journal of African Cultural Studies

ISSN: 1369-6815 (Print) 1469-9346 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cjac20

Afro-superheroes: prepossessing the future

Carli Coetzee
To cite this article: Carli Coetzee (2016) Afro-superheroes: prepossessing the future, Journal of
African Cultural Studies, 28:3, 241-244, DOI: 10.1080/13696815.2016.1168082
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13696815.2016.1168082

Published online: 14 Apr 2016.

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Date: 06 June 2016, At: 04:53

Journal of African Cultural Studies, 2016

Vol. 28, No. 3, 241244, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13696815.2016.1168082

Afro-superheroes: prepossessing the future

Carli Coetzeea,b*
SOAS, African Languages and Cultures, University of London, London, UK; bSchool of Literature,
Language and Media, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa

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In Popular Arts in Africa, published in 1987, Karin Barber made passing reference to the syncretic use made of Marvel Comic superheroes alongside gures from Twi folktales, in comics produced in Accra and Kumasi in the 1970s (1987). In these comics, Marvel superheroes and folklore
gures, she wrote, have in common their special powers, and a past that stretches beyond the lives
of everyday Ghanaians. In the explosion of these gures into the lives of ordinary people, their
special powers offer political transformation and access to an otherworldly (sometimes, but not
always, ancestrally supported) ability to change this world.
The increasing visibility of African superheroes (or what Adilifu Nama has termed so memorably Super Blacks, 2011) might look, from a certain point of view, like evidence of the
increasing inltration of transnational consumerism into youth cultural forms in African contexts.
The papers in this collection on Afro-superheroes argue the opposite: Afro-superheroes, the
authors show in their analysis of their often arresting material, are embedded in contemporary political and social contexts and provide us with ways of understanding the emergent present.
It is a central strand in many of these papers to interrogate the complex and intertwined
relationships between representations that invoke tradition and the Afro-hypermodernity that
references superhero powers. Harry Garuba, in an important critical intervention in his 2003
paper Explorations in Animist Materialism: Notes on Reading/Writing African Literature
claims that the scholarly investment in the opposition tradition versus modernity, and archiving
instances of re-traditionalization, might in fact be a meta-narrative generated by a certain outsider perspective on African everyday practices. Instead, he suggests, what one sees in invocations of African pasts is evidence of an animist unconscious, which operates through a
process that involves a continual re-enchantment of the world (emphasis in original). What
Garubas paper provides is a theoretical and analytical framework for reading the scripts that
our societies and our artists enact and to locate these texts within the sociocultural arena
from which they are generated. It is these enacted and embedded scripts that constitute the
archive analysed in this collection. A phrase used by Garuba that has direct relevance to the
essays collected here, and which is referenced in the title of this introduction, is prepossessing
the future. Included in the word prepossess is certainly the word repossess (with its many
cousins, such as reclaim and decolonize). But the term also manages to complicate temporality,
in a gesture that insists on agency and the political significance of even the smallest of everyday
actions.

This is a quotation from Harry Garubas Explorations in Animist Materialism: Notes on Reading/Writing
African Literature (2003), a paper which has inspired many of the contributions in this collection.
*Email: cc76@soas.ac.uk
2016 Journal of African Cultural Studies

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242 C. Coetzee
This set of papers takes up the challenge set by Garuba, to read and interpret the scripts
enacted by societies and artists; and in particular in this group of contributions, the ways in
which the scripts reference superhero powers. Garuba cautions against simplistic and decontextualized outsider interpretations, which regard animist beliefs as antihistorical and antimodern.
Instead, what he theorises (in ways that are extremely generative for many areas of study, but particularly for scholarship to do with new media, popular culture and civic agency) is that an animistic understanding of the world applied to the practices of everyday life has often provided
avenues of agency for the dispossessed in colonial and postcolonial Africa (285). This is how
we understand the superhero powers archived and analysed in the papers: as documents of the
agency and activist creativity of the dispossessed (Figure 1).
The papers in this collection are attuned not to an otherworldly understanding of superheroes,
but to everyday practices in African contexts, and in particular to the everyday practices that make
up youth cultures (for recent collections of essays on this topic see Njogu and Middleton 2009;
Newell and Onookome 2013; Krings and Reuster-Jahn 2014; Obadare and Willems 2014; Ugor
and Mawuko-Yevugah 2015). The superheroes who inhabit the papers live in a world of which
they make sense through cyberspace, mobile phones, social media and lm and video performances; these references to Afro-supermodernity do not build up a world in opposition to an imagined tradition. Instead, the authors argue that the connections between future, present and past
are complex and inected with activist potential. This understanding of our locatedness with
regard to our pasts and futures bears a generative relation to notions of what Anthony Reed
has called a performative black fantastic in his piece that shares much of the imaginary of
the papers here (African Space Programs: Spaces and Times of the Black Fantastic, 2014).

Figure 1. Visual artist Sethembile Msezane takes on the form of an Afro-superwoman/bird, during her striking performance piece Chapungu- The Day Rhodes Fell (2015). The symbolically rich Zimbabwean bird
which rises, as Rhodess statue falls, shares the political aesthetic of this collection of papers on Afro-superheroes. Of particular signicance for the arguments made here are the many mobile phones and cameras
recording the events. Photo Credit: Sethembile Msezane.

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Journal of African Cultural Studies 243

The emphasis on performativity draws attention to the agency of the artists and the performers
who are discussed in these pages, and afrms the potential of this generation of young people
in particular to prepossess their future and to repossess this emergent present.
James Yks contribution (2015) analyses the reappearance of the trickster in his paper
Akpos don come again, developing an innovative argument around the tricksters remediation
into new forms and social media. Yks Akpos is a trickster not only through the content of the
tales and jokes chronicling his exploits, but also in the adaptability to new social media forms, as
well as to the changes that take place in the circulation within transnational networks. At the heart
of these Akpos tales, then, is the continual evolution and adaptation of the spaces inhabited by,
and newly created through, technology. Duncan Omanga (2016) develops a related argument,
similarly attuned to remediation. He shows that the superhero created by the Ghanaian born
Frank Odoi provides a template for a panAfrican superhero. In the comics created by Odoi, the
west African contexts for Akokhan are embedded in new contexts in Kenyan newspapers,
Omanga argues, showing that this multi-located dissemination, alongside the formations of remediation, syncretism and elements from animist understandings of the world, are what typify the
panAfrican superhero.
Ying Chengs contribution (2016) comments on contemporary performance practices in
Lagos, Nigeria, and she argues (elaborating on Harry Garubas understanding of continual reenchantment of the world) that contemporary performance artists like Segun Adela and Jelili
Atiku use objects from contemporary urban contexts and reanimate these. The superheroes
who walk the night during a Halloween performance in Lagos, she shows, are not appropriations
of the western superhero trope; instead, they are oppositional gures who interact with the everyday life and death of ordinary Nigerians, urging them to take a critical view of the more harmful
aspects of their naija modernity.
This same sense of reinterpreting and repossessing the past is to be found in Rotimi Fasans
contribution (2016). Fasan begins with a richly detailed participant-observers description of the
Osun Osogbo festival, and traces the genealogies of the gure of Arugba in literature and orature,
contextualising the Arugba narrative within Yorb thought worlds. In an arresting shift of attention, he places the superwoman powers of Arugba, and in particular her role in saving kidnapped
children, in contemporary contexts. Arugba, in Tunde Kelanis lm version, he shows, anticipates
the disturbing events that gave birth to the #BringBackOurGirls campaign, and provides us with a
clear instance of the continuously updated relevance of Arugba who becomes a weaponised
symbol of female power, independence and leadership in a society in dire need of physical
revival, cleansing and renewal. It is particularly tting that Rotimi Fasan was making the nal
changes to his paper in the hours that his wife gave birth to a daughter1; these events provide
a reminder of the potential for our scholarship to have immediate and urgent political and personal
signicance.
Gus Casely-Hayfords (2015) interviews with Tanzanian artists Amani Abeid and Paul
Ndunguru bring to the surface the contemporary relevance of the legendary gure Popobawa,
whose unsettling presence informs the syncretic superhero narratives of Ndunguru and the
graphic visual artists of Nafasi. What seems at rst sight to be art works that reference in an
unquestioning way the Marvel superheroes, is revealed as a form of art informed by and invested
in traditions with a complex and oppositional relationship to this western archive. Nomusa
Makhubus contribution (2016) complicates and deepens our understanding of the immediate
political signicance of spatio-temporality (in particular the spatio-temporality inhabited by
black bodies). She calls this approach to the individual and collective experience of our locatedness labyrinthine time. Responding to dismissals of the Nollywood lm and video industry as
trivialising, she argues instead that epic Nollywood lms that draw on the typology of village

244 C. Coetzee

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versus city open up questions about transforming structures of governance and facilitate new
technologies of being.
The immediacy of these questions, and of the wider meanings of the work we do (and potentially could do) in the academy, informs this collection. The Afro-superheroes archived and analysed in these pages do not belong to a different world; they live among us.
Acknowledgements
I would like to acknowledge the consistently challenging discussions I have had with Joseph
Armstrong, who continues to expand his taxonomy of Afro-superheroes and who rst made
me aware of the existence of the political potential of Afro-superheroes. Thank you also to
Ketso Ratele and Kopano Ratele, who were early interlocutors around the ideas for this collection,
and to Nomusa Makhubu and Grace Musila for their useful comments on an earlier draft of this
introduction.

Note
1. We would like to dedicate this special issue to this little girl.

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