ISSUE FIVE/2000 < < African Writers. Many African writers are evi- dently being helped from the bush-path to the Super Highway of the computer age. Those who wish to or have received the print version of the Electronic African Bookworm offered free by the African Books Collective Ltd. in Oxford may well feel that an age is dawning in which literary culture and the culture of publishing in general would climb out of the bind of ill-informed conditions and debates. As both appear to agree, the bottom-line for most publishers is profit such that, as Gibbs writes, unless a subsidy is involved or unless strategic considerations encourage the pro- motion of a 'loss leader' - in this case a title that will lose the company money in the short term but contribute to profit in the long run - acceptance (of manuscripts) will be based on business-Iibe expectations that the busi- ness will mabe a profit. Whatever publishers decide to do. the Arusha Report alerts writ- ers to the danger of fecbless handling of manuscripts. Clearly from the standpoint of career positioning, the initial shunning of the mul- tinationals proved that nationalism needed to be made of sterner stuff. Rather than be- ing merely a choice between homebred capi- talism and offshore rip-offs, it called for a tougher-minded conception of the social matrix in which publishing is embedded. Ofeimun, poet and journalist, is a former General Secretary and President of the Association of Nigerian Authors Presidential rallies in colour BY DAPO ADENIYI Sunday Tumo-Ojelabi. OBASAMO JOURNEY TO THE FOURTH REPUBLIC (Presidential Campaign images in colour). Touchstone Books. Lagos, 1999, 70pp I T is not usual, least of all fashionable, for photographers to worb towards exhibitions in colour - monochrome, particularly blacb and white, is still thought to hold more pos- sibilities, and in fact curiously, more colour, than the multichromatic; what with its solid contrast of blacb against white, and between, endless possibilities for tones and shades. But the images in this collection are those of an electioneering campaign whose burst of energy, and pomp and pageantry, demand nothing less than the very elaborate - prop, costume and banners - which are impossible to recapture in any other way than in their own unrestrained flamboyance. The nature of the assignment therefore puts stress on the function of documentation from the outset, placed contradistinctively to the function of image as art, by which pictures speafe, not with any strange or sophisticated tongue, but in the direct, and the plainly decipherable. A photographer on the campaign staff is in the immediate, concerned about mo- ments, re-enacts moments, recreates scenes of note for public speculation or inspection almost with sworn objectivity. Even so, it tabes thousands of such moments to com- plete or relive the experience of campaign- ing through Nigeria - a few in some African countries. What to leave out or include pre- sents the greatest difficulty, the very tasfe of choosing, returning yet again the whole question of the photographer's leaning in the middle of disparate and conflicting roles, each vying for prominence: the photogra- pher as a diarist or as an artist. Duty at once tabes the side of the former but intuition, his own authentic self, sides with the latter. This nature of difficult blending is evident in the ultimate selections. Bland images that offer little meaning beyond the obvious, sharply contrast those coded with several, perhaps endless, layers of meaning. Some of the more obvious types represent the photographer's own private reminiscences, or side glimpses, on subjects which others would ordinarily spare no thought. Private Guards and Ota farm 1 are representative of this. The use of ostriches as home guards has not yet become wide- spread in Nigeria. Their effectiveness as nightwatch is bnown to only a few: the Pri- vate Guards of the title were taken in a mil- lionaire politician's homestead, while the spibed oil palm of the latter symbolises the presidential campaign base, the principal's Glendoro Books Supplement 14 • ISSUE FIVE/2000 • Held in their grip? © Sunday Tumo- Ojelabi, 1999 Glendora Books Supplement 15 farm retreat from which the team's thrusts across the nation commenced. In the line of private memories also is the tripartite. Eagle's Wings, one of the earliest sequences of three pictures which register their impressions in tow. As with the other sequences in the col- lection, one or two picture frames tell only a part of the story, until there is a complete reading. This device of coupling of images brings a film-reel effectiveness to the narrations. They produce an illusion of motion, one of the ways Tumo's training in cinematography at Ife probably strains to find expression. Aside from the scriptural resonances in the choice of caption. Eagle s Wingsho\ds one memory - of one day, unbeknownst to the rest of the nation, when the principal might have crashed to his death together with the entire campaign staff. The schedule was densely pacbed. accompanied by intense flight re- gimes of the campaign season: the first pic- ture captures the protruding wing of the craft, triumphant over rain-pregnant clouds below, and a vision of Nigerian earth from under- neath. The photographer it seems cocbs his ears in three directions and uses what he learns about his subject in his creative and docu- mentary worb - the public arena, his private life (a photographer afterall enjoys the same intimacy as a barber) and the assessment of critics (which qualitatively, oftentimes, is no more than an extension of the rumour mill). The solitary picture. Held in their grip? is one striking example. What originally must have been a hapless flight of the arm from a mem- ber of the cheering crowd is caught mid-air, the President-to- be's very face secured in the fold of the unknown man's palms. Tumo configured this snap, listening to public banters; before the election, it was widely circu- lated that the PDP presidential candidate was no more than a pawn on the well-contrived chessboard of certain powerful Nigerians, particularly the retired generals. Here as in a few others such as Will he gag the press?, an innocent scene is loaded with meanings the photographer's own coinage. of purely but layers But even this discourse confronts a direct refutation in another pictorial representation, Hail Nigerians 11 which shares only the rapture and the warmth of the other two of its own se- operates quence subterranean of signification. We observe the incoming president in this frame turning in a direction quite opposite to that the people are bound. Underlying is the message - and this begins to percolate to the same public - populist acclamation would not prevent this one president from, (in his persuasion), choosing a course differently from the rest of us; also many surprises may be awaiting us in the months to come. Perhaps one of the more enduring artis- tic values of this collection is the interaction between image and distance but more point- edly where the photographer breabs beyond mandatory constraints imposed by the colour bar. Unforgettable in this regard is Vic- tims of the power cut 1 where Tumo mabes effective use of natural light. In this wise, twilight, powered by the rising sunlight, washes an ordinarily depressing visage with patterned rays on a northern Nigerian wall. The pictorial excursion recording mo- ments during Chief Obasanjo's journey to- wards the Fourth Republic, which includes a sunrise series containing his final triumphal ride through Abuja's gates, leaves him affectionable. And this exceeds even the pre- sentation of reconciliatory moments with some of his hottest rivals. For me. through Tumo's handicraft, neu- trality seems long discarded to the winds. Through some inexplicable manipulation of the lenses, his images trade a confidence that becomes difficult to ignore; he goes to present - and succeeds I thinb to an extent - a leader that we can accept; a leader, to bor- row again from him. that we can trust.