Wahala dey like wetin?: theorizing crisis in Nigerian cultural forms

Abstract

As a peculiarly Nigerian valence of crisis and disorder ubiquitously referenced within cultural forms, the term Wahala offers an important vantage point for understanding contemporary narrativizations of crisis. This article takes the phrase Wahala dey like Bicycle, a slang expression popularized in the country in 2020, as a starting point from which to rethink crisis, chaos, and adversity as narrated in the Nigerian social imaginary. I argue that Wahala provides the conceptual hinge with which to theorize crisis, not only as a condition of social debilitation that pivots between disorder and agency, but also as an instrument of social mobility that derives from endemic disorder as its propellant. Placing this discursive idiom and its echoes in the Nigerian slang-scape in conversation with Wole Soyinka’s Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth, I trace how it illuminates debilitations of endemic crisis, as well as the juncture of incapacitation, spatial contingencies, and agentic action that Nigerian subjects navigate within and transcend in their everyday lives through modes of improvisation. In mapping a geography of crisis, Soyinka’s novel demonstrates how endemic disorder and social unease manifest across the landscape in a conflict-prone social environment, allowing us to understand the itineraries of subjects who must invent meaning, control, and survival within such social geographies.