Politics, Jokes and Power in Africa: The View From Stand-Up Comedy

ABSTRACT

The history of stand-up comedy in Africa has often been tied to developments in popular culture, language, and performance. In this article, I take a different perspective by identifying the interactivities of politics and comedy, and how the actions, endorsements, and even censure of national leaders across different nations buoyed up stand-up performances on the continent. With specific examples from different countries, the explications in this paper show how the (in)actions of political leadership in Africa served as fodder for laughter elicitation – in Kenya, with Daniel arap Moi’s capitulation and Mwai Kibaki’s lethargy; in Nigeria, with Olusegun Obasanjo’s comedian-president posture as well as the gaffes of Patience Jonathan; and in South Africa, with Jacob Zuma’s unending drama until his resignation. These situations are equally contrasted with the experiences in Uganda, Egypt and Rwanda, where political censure is variously rife.

KEYWORDS:

• political satire
• stand-up comedy
• jokes
• African popular culture
• censorship

Disclosure statement

No conflict of interest was declared by the author.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation for its support during my postdoctoral research in Germany, during which time the first drafts of this article were written. I acknowledge funding from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (AvH), Cultural Entrepreneurship and Digital Transformation in Africa and Asia (CEDITRAA), and the Institut für Ethnologie und Afrikastudien of the Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz, Germany.

Notes

1 Some of the pre-colonial traditions have been studied elsewhere – the wawan sarki (court jester, literally the ‘king’s fool’), as well as other public humour-making traditions of the Hausa-speaking parts of the north, including southern Niger Republic (Furniss 1996; Kofoworola 2007); the yeye enactments of Yoruba-speakers (Lawal 1996; Obafemi 1996); and the njakịrị traditions of Igbo-speakers (Ebeogu 1991; Nwachukwu-Agbada 2006) among the Igbo-speakers in South East Nigeria.

2 Western Nigeria Television, Nigeria’s first television station, was founded in 1959.

3 Audio recordings are available on YouTube.

4 Evita Bezuidenhout first appeared in the theatre production Adapt or Dye (1981) but was developed as ‘a fictional character in Uys’s column in the Sunday Express in the late 1970s’, first as the ‘wife of the National party Member of parliament for Laagerfontein’ and then as several other roles of Uys’s choosing (McMurtry 1994) for over two decades.

5 Reasons advanced for this range from what has been the contested view that women are, by nature, not cut out to be as funny as men (Mizejewski & Sturtevant 2017) to the ascription of a ‘subordinate position’ to women in comparison to men (Andrews 1998, 52). Stand-up is ‘a very blokish genre’ despite (mostly lesbian) women performers creating newer forms devoid of ‘gags, punchlines and spangly waistcoats’, the hallmarks of male-dominated stand-up (Brosnan in Williams 1998, 148).

6 Moi was often seen with his rungu, which identified him as part of the Kalenjin tribe (Ochieng 2017, 171–172) and as a tool of the devil, by a clergyperson, Lucy Wangui in 2000 (Blunt 2004, 318–319).

7 Earlier, then deputy governor Jonathan was promoted to the governor of the Nigerian state of Bayelsa, when his predecessor, Diepreye Alamieyeseigha, was jailed for corruption. When Yar’Adua died and Jonathan became president, satire revolved around warnings to politicians ‘never to make Jonathan your deputy’.

8 Farooq Kperogi kept an inventory of Patience Jonathan’s grammatical blunders.

9 Crigler (2022) describes Black comedians who find themselves in formerly white spaces – schools, workplaces, neighbourhoods and the like – and jokes created around the experiences and reactions gained from such encounters.

10 Some of Zuma gaffes include mispronunciations or omissions, like calling out numbers improperly from a written speech (‘Every Epic Jacob Zuma Numbers Flop “Very Funny”’ 2017). At other times, he clownishly responded to accusations of corruption (‘Funny Remix: Jacob Zuma the Clown’ 2015), farcically threw shade at his opponents in parliament (‘South Africans Jacob Zuma Could be the Funniest President in Africa’ 2015), posted humorous videos of himself on social media (‘Former South African President Jacob Zuma Posts Humorous Video’ 2019), and repeatedly made sexist statements about his marriages and women in general.

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Izuu Nwankwọ

Dr Izuu Nwankwọ is an assistant professor in the Centre for Drama, Theatre, and Performance Studies at the University of Toronto. He taught theatre, drama, and performance studies at two different universities (Gombe and Igbariam) in Nigeria. He is a theatre scholar, teacher, playwright and essayist whose research interests revolve around African and African diaspora theatre, performances, and popular culture. He has researched taboo, self-censorship and the limits of humour in African (diaspora) stand-up and online humour acts. Previously he was a Research Fellow in the Department of Anthropology and African studies at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, Germany, where he worked on the popularity and global dissemination of African popular arts through social media under the research project group Cultural Entrepreneurship and Digital Transformation in Africa and Asia. He is a Georg Foerster Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in Germany, an Iso Lomso Fellow of the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Studies in South Africa, and a double recipient of the American Council for Learned Societies’ African Humanities Program fellowships. He has held a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio residency at the Bellagio Center in Italy, was a visiting scholar the Centre for Teaching and Research in Postcolonial Studies at the University of Liège in Belgium.