USA Africa Dialogue Series - THE CULTURE OF THE TOILET-“African joking institutions combine the following elements: first, a crude scatology
I will let myself into the matter of human waste by sharing an excerpt from a paper I did on cartoons and cartoonists in Africa (take that to mean Lagos!!). I also noticed a reference to human waste.
[Humor and jokes are the engines that drive the art of cartooning in any culture, though what is funny in one may not necessarily be laughed at in another. There is a growing body of work that focus on humor, jokes and satire. The jokes told in different societies tell something about them. Mary Douglas (1991) drawing from an anthropological background makes a controversial observation when she states "African joking institutions combine the following elements: first, a crude scatology; second, a range of specific relationships; and third, certain ritual occasions (namely funerals and purifications) expressed scatologically" (p.293). How she came to this conclusion is not only surprising but raises questions. Why will African jokes be related to waste matter, death and renewal? However if Douglas' dark images are taken metaphorically as meaning throwing "excrement at one another whenever they meet, either verbally or actually" (Douglas, op cit.) they may explain the roots of acerbic humor in most Nigerian cartoons or even its performance twin, comedy. It cannot be taken that Africa has the monopoly of jokes that hurt. Arthur Berger (1993) in An Anatomy of Humor more than paints a universal picture of biting jokes.
"There is no escaping humor" he says and there is no subject, whether it be sex, marriage, politics, religion, education, work, sports-you name it-that has not been ridiculed, joked about, and used or abused one way or the other, as grist for someone's militancy" (p.1).
If humor is the driving engine of cartoons can it be assumed that the outcome of every engagement with a cartoon should result in laughter? Douglas (1991) warns that "[I]t would be wrong to suppose that the acid test of a joke is whether it provokes laughter or not" (Douglas, op cit.). The big question then will be how can a good cartoon be judged? Cartoons elicit various responses from its patrons depending on the total social situation. Berger (1993) in an attempt to answer the question of why we laugh or find something funny delves into the works of Aristotle, Kant, Bergson, Freud and others. He introduces five different theories that can be used to analyze jokes. These are: superiority, incongruity, psychoanalytic, cognitive theories, and political perspective. The relationship between humor and power presents in that "humor can be a subtle and powerful means of social control by dominant elements in the society" (Berger, op cit, p. 2). The political perspective for interpretation of jokes allows the critic to ask who is laughing and who is the butt of the joke?]
Kole
--- On Tue, 8/3/10, Moses Ebe Ochonu <meochonu@gmail.com> wrote:
From: Moses Ebe Ochonu <> Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - THE CULTURE OF THE TOILET To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com Date: Tuesday, August 3, 2010, 5:32 PM
Edward:
Just read your post. What an incisive, fresh, and insightful take!!! You're absolutely right. I was thinking about those same limitations on the universality of this mode of discourse. That's the reason I was reluctant to bless toilet graffiti as a fully egalitarian, democratic text and as a universally representative form of unmediated discourse. The truth is that the rural toilet is a completely different kind of space, conceived and built differently from the urban one. The rural toilet is often without walls, doors, and the comforts necessary for thought, speech, and scribbling. And as you posited, it is governed by a different set of social conventions and idioms. So, yes, one could use the rural-urban toilet dynamics you eloquently posited as a heuristic to tease out the urban and rural constraints on discursive flowering. Thanks for also introducing the gender dimension. My preliminary thinking on it is that it would not be out of place to assume that the female toilet space is not dominated by discourses of protest, dissent, and frustration as the men's tend to be. I'll leave it at this provocative level for now in the hope that our female members will respond.
Pius:
Who knew that I could get academic heavyweights like you and Edward all interested in a topic as unappealing as the toilet? I thought about The Beautiful Ones.... when I was writing my thoughts. There are indeed many scatological discursive subtexts in African fiction and in African contemporary contemporary affairs. Already, between mine, yours, and Edward's we have the beginnings of a rewarding, productive scatological conversation going on!!! Look, the vista of this text is limitless in the postcolony. Have you not heard about the shit robbers of Nairobi, who, my Kenyan friends tell me, take advantage of the scatological phobias of urban Kenyans to rob them of valuable possessions as they ride on buses from their jobs to their homes and vice versa? The petty thieves, street urchins, really, fill plastic bags with shit and threaten to unleash their cargo on passengers in buses and passersby unless they part with wallets, cash, cell phones, and other valuables. I am told that they have been known to make good on their threat, emptying their bags of shit on non-compliant passersby.
We have not even scratched the surface of this rich textual arena. Nor have we explored other sites where shit assumes metaphorical and allegorical semiotics in African societies. How about the subject of shit in our rich proverbial corpus? My broda, this shit thing can produce and sustain a career in the literary academic domain o. Something to bring up with your graduate students who are looking for the next chic topic. Amato should calm and let us explore all explorables (apologies to K.O Mbadiwe).
On Tue, Aug 3, 2010 at 1:31 PM, Pius Adesanmi <> wrote:
He, he he he Moses!
You don kill person with laff today! You make shit sound so postmodernly appealing! Bayero University must have had capitalist toilets for you to be able to spend time in those spaces and even pay attention to graffiti. In other universities, you either did short put or you went deep deeeep into the bush rather than subject yourself to the dehumanization of moving near those toilets! Stories of snake bite were common among those who preferred the more humanising bush option. Luckily for me, I had anti-snake African insurance (ajesara) apart from my abiku status. So every night, as I did my business in the bush, a thousand snakes fell by my left hand and ten thousands fell by my right hand but they did not come nigh me. Only with mine eyes did I see the iniquities of the wicked serpents. My anti-snake African "juju" worked in Jesus' name!
As for scatology, the thing is not limited to the toilet o. Those of us in literature cannot avoid it as "discourse." Check out A Walk in the Night and The Beautyful Ones are not Yet Born for starters. Amato has been lashing out at a recent PH.D dissertation supervised by Grant Farred entitled: "Expensive Shit". The subtitle is about the postcolonial treatment of human shit in African fiction which, much to Amato's annoyance, the author takes as a metaphorical representation of the African condition!
Human shit as postcolonial text! Na wa for dis our crazy discourse business!
My own instructive toilet experience happened in the international wing of the Abuja airport. But mine was a routine lavatory visit, nothing as urgent as the narrator's situation. Like him, I found that there was no toilet paper. Because I saw a few uniformed boys and girls outside the restrooms--janitors I presumed--I "cried" out to them. One of them, a boy of about 20, brought me a full roll of toilet paper. As I did my business, I wondered where the fellow got the roll from--it took him just seconds to produce it! When I was done, he was at the entrance waiting to be tipped. He made this clear by verbalizing and gesturing the usual obsequies. "Bros, na we dey clean dis place o" etc He got me. I tipped him and he showered me with effusive gratitude.
On the toilet as a culture, I agree with the previous commentators. The intellectual culture of the toilet has always fascinated me. As an undergraduate in Bayero University, Nigeria, I found toilet graffiti alternately inspiring, edifying, and troubling. The toilet was the most vibrant intellectual space on campus. It was were students vented against despised professors or courses. It was where they bared their academic and romantic frustrations. It was where they expressed their aspirations, anxieties, ambitions, and fantasies. The toilet was where some of them declared their amorous interests. It was a no-hold-barred space of expression. There was a lot of hateful words on the doors and walls of the toilet as well. It is easy to be offended by this, but I found it equally fascinating because it was an instructive window into the human capacity for evil thought, for hate. Students used toilet graffiti to express what they would never express in public or used it to elaborate on what they might abbreviate in the normative vocabulary of campus etiquette. The toilet graffiti, for me, represented the purest, unmediated source for the narratives of students. What fascinated me was that toilet graffiti was both public and private. Students were expressing their most intimate thoughts, fears, anxieties and hopes in the accessible notice board of the public toilet. But this was done in the temporal privacy of the toilet space, for the toilet is a private space of the one who occupies it. It then transitions to a public space when he/she vacates it. This was a creative merging of the private and public spheres, something that in my opinion scholars have not paid enough attention to as they remain fixated on the binary of the public and the private. I was so fascinated by this phenomenon that I wrote an essay on it for a campus magazine that I edited. As a historian, if anyone wants to write a history of Bayero University in the future, I would strongly urge them to look in the toilets! These "hidden scripts" would be a complementary companion to the official records of the institution. They are a treasure trove of primacy sources, a pure, uninhibited record of students' self-narration.
Coming to the West, I noticed that the intellectual culture of the toilet-space was also very advanced. The graffiti here is as fascinating as that of Bayero University. If you get pass the vulgarity, crass sexism and misogyny, and you have a stomach for egregious racism, you may occasionally stumble on profound little nuggets of wisdom. I am a fan of spontaneous, witty, mundane scribblings, so I find in some toilet graffiti a liberating intellectual refuge from the pretentious protocols of high academic culture. And sometimes, you can discover rare, edifying poetry and prose on the walls, not to mention timeless, accidental (but profoundly insightful) philosophical wit.
My take-away from all these is that scholars have yet to pay attention to the rich intellectual field of the toilet-space. It is understandable. Few people outside the medical profession are fascinated by scatological subjects and phenomena. But I do believe that toilet graffiti is one of the few universals in the realm of human expression. It is a classless space, a great equalizer--a meeting place between the disciplined highfalutin intellectualism of bourgeoisie and petty-bourgeoisie culture and the mundane, carefree wisdoms of the everyday. Intellectual expressions in the toilet-space also does not follow the contours of political economic disparities, or of the technological divide; all that is required is a pen. So, while the computer and other esoteric, undemocratic spheres of expression excludes as many as they include, the intellectual genre of toilet graffiti is more inclusive than it is exclusive. That said, it does seem like the toilet has to be deconstructed as an exclusive zone of scatological activity for a wider appreciation of its rich intellectual culture and positivist subtleties to emerge. Let the literary theorists go to work. Perhaps an essay in Social Text would get the conversation going.
On Tue, Aug 3, 2010 at 6:13 AM, IYANDA, O. (PROF.) <> wrote:
Truly, the toilet is a place of inspiration. Obviously, one budding poet was so inspired to scribble, actually etch, this short poem on the back of a toilet door at Rome airport:
Some come here to sit and think
Others come here to shit and stink
I come here to scratch my balls
And read the graffiti on the walls
Just imagine the inspiration to capture the deeds of a lonely man ion the toilet seat everywhere!
I will never forget one fateful day at the University of Benin,when I was passing water near a tree,at a spot which I thought was hidden.The staff toilet is likely to have been out of order or inaccessible. It was not a particularly user friendly place.A lecturer colleague of mine,a chap really committed to the university system in spite of its inadequacies,told me he used to flush the toilet himself using a bucket in the regular absence of running water .The student toilet was a no-go zone.Even the distant sight of the region where the student toilets were located in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences complex was distressing,from what I remember.
It would be wonderful if the situation has improved as I write this.
On that fateful day,as I eased myself in answering nature's call,a voice passed by me: "Good afternoon,sir", and moved on.
I leave you to imagine what I felt.
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