The Return of the Mercedes: Upward Mobility, the Good Life, and Nigerian Video Film

Chapter 4 examines the popular and low-budget Nollywood video films where the private luxury car is both a highly coveted object, typically seen driving down paved roads in posh neighborhoods, and a sign of wealth that is often acquired through criminality, witchcraft, magic, or fraud.

Global (Be)Longings

You have crossed that awkward, deeply uncomfortable, sometimes shameful social state of being without a car. I mean in some countries where the public transport system works, not having a car is no big deal. But you are in Nigeria, where public transport is living hell, and owning a car can be the difference between life and social death....

Moving Pictures, Mired Cars: The Automobile in African Francophone Cinema

Chapter 3 turns to Francophone cinema, discussing in detail Ousmane Sembene’s Xala and Jean-Pierre Bekolo’s Quartier Mozart. While media scholars like Kristin Ross have often focused on the shared qualities of film and cars—such as movement, image, standardization, mechanization, and displacement—this chapter discusses how African Francophone films reconfigure the link between the moving image and the moving vehicle by disallowing the automobile to represent a continuous, rational forward movement.

Cars, Cultural Production, and Global Modernity

The motor-car is the epitome of “objects,” the Leading-Object, and this fact should be kept in mind. —Henri Lefebvre, Everyday Life in the Modern World Anyone who thinks evil of you, may this car run them over in their sleep. This car will hunt out your enemies, pursue their bad spirits, grind them into the road. Your car will drive over fire and be safe. It will drive into the ocean and be safe. It has friends in the spirit world. Its friend there, a car just like this one, will hunt down your enemies. They will not be safe from you. A bomb will fall on this car and it will be safe. I have opened the road for this car. It will travel all roads. It will arrive safely at all destinations....

Women in Traffic: Toward a Feminist Automobility

Chapter 5 looks at the way that feminist texts re-write and work in dialogue with the male-centered films and novels where the car is a sign of patriarchal power and capitalist achievement. This chapter argues that in films and novels where women are the drivers, the car figures much less as a sign of upward mobility and elite status and instead highlights the ambivalence with which financially independent women move through West African urban centers.

“No Danger No Delay”: Wole Soyinka and the Perils of Driving

Chapter 2 focuses on the tragedy of motorcar accidents through a close reading of Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka’s 1965 post-independence play The Road about Nigerian lorry drivers living on the urban periphery. This chapter reads the road as a Bakhtinian chronotope – a space-time matrix – that includes various lived times of postcoloniality.

The Hum of Progress: Motorcars and the Modernization of West Africa

Chapter 1 focuses on the history of motorization from the colonial moment to the decolonizing decades following World War II. Examining various events or episodes alongside key literary and cinematic texts, this chapter explores the many ambivalences and conflicts present in the process of motorization. The chapter also discuss how African entrepreneurs took the lead in importing automobiles and establishing a system of transportation while Europeans were often ambivalent or even hostile to the idea of motorizing Africa.