This Uprising Will Bring Out the Beast in Us: The Cultural (After)Life of ‘Beasts of No Nations’

Abstract

ABSTRACT The global-scale wars that plagued the early 1980s did not escape the notice of the Nigerian Afro-beat musician Fela Anikulapo Kuti. Following his release from a politically motivated imprisonment in 1986, he released an album with the title Beasts of No Nation. While the title track archives memories of conflicts around the world, the song was particularly inspired by one of the speeches of the then Prime Minister of South Africa P. W. Botha, who was quoted saying: ‘these uprisings will bring out the beasts in us’ in response to the many protests by the black population against white oppression. In 2005, the Nigerian-American author, Uzodinma Iweala, published a novel titled Beasts of No Nation, which chronicles a gruesome war in an unnamed African country. Ten years later, the Hollywood filmmaker, Cary Fukunaga, adapted the novel into a film. In this article, I examine how Beasts of No Nation has travelled not only across national borders but also across medial, temporal and contextual borders. Beasts of No Nation, as travelling schemata, has gone on to build a cultural life of its own through various forms of remediation, recycling, adaptation and trans-textuality.