Akpos don come again: Nigerian cyberpop hero as trickster

Abstract

New media technologies in many African countries require new scholarly engagements with new forms and sites of cultural representations, as well as the political ideologies embedded in and challenged by them. This essay examines the remediation of the function of the trickster hero of oral tradition in new media technologies, and how such reconfigurations catalyse new directions for the understanding of popular culture in Nigeria. The article analyses the reconfiguration of oral poetics in new media by focusing on a possible reappearance of trickster tactics within digital media spaces. Unlike the present fascination with the Nigerian film industry, Nollywood, I suggest that such digital spaces as social network sites and Internet applications provide a more engaging media for young people to express political agency. In particular, I consider Akpos as a trickstoid character that both signifies the local currents of global media flows, and typifies a cultural urban metaphor of subaltern engagement with political hegemony in the postcolony. I conclude that Akpos tales, as affirmations of individual agency and new cultural forms facilitated by digital media spaces, enable a remapping of the contours of power in Nigeria.