The Pan-African Nation

“Andrew Apter’s splendid historical ethnography examines how Nigeria’s oil-rich state utilized its petroleum revenues in an extravaganza of cultural production that attempted to transform oil money into national identity. The Pan-African Nation offers an engaging and intellectually provocative account of the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture, which Nigeria hosted in 1977, an event better known as FESTAC ’77. Nigeria spent hundreds of millions of dollars, perhaps even several billions dollars, of its oil wealth to organize FESTAC, a spectacle that displayed Nigeria’s newfound riches, repackaged its many diverse cultural traditions so as to try to create a Nigerian national culture that would at once bind the nation and establish Nigeria as the center of the black world. Apter’s brilliance, and the enduring contribution of the book, is in showing not only the complex history and ethnography that situate and explain the Nigerian state’s invention of tradition and culture, but also the ways in which the manipulation of signs and symbols in FESTAC both obscured and reflected the contradictions inherent in Nigeria’s oil economy. . . . The Pan-African Nation offers a compelling account of the relationship between culture and power. The book weaves together an artful tapestry of the material and cultural transformations wrought by the influence of oil wealth. It demonstrates the centrality of cultural production in statecraft, providing what Apter describes as ‘a political economy of the sign in postcolonial Nigeria.’ . . . The Pan-African Nation . . . is a splendid book written in a clear and sophisticated style with provocative and persuasive arguments backed up by superb scholarship.”

“Building its analysis on an art project that ordinarily might be considered unrelated to oil studies, the book explains how sudden oil wealth in the 1970s brought Nigeria great possibilities and grand illusions, and how these were projected through a pan-African arts extravaganza.”