That is where we must begin once again, as Tejumola Olaniyan did in his 2009 South Atlantic Quarterly article entitled “Thinking Afro-Futures: A Preamble to an Epistemic History,” in which he cleverly tells us he will begin his preamble “in medias res.”Footnote ¹ That is indeed where the narrative of the history and future of Africana thought necessarily remains in so much of Olaniyan’s “provocations” on the state of the field, in which he puts his laser sight on the crises and debates regarding the constitution of our field and regularly recommends a broadening rather than a narrowing of our concepts of Africa and literature, as well as the role of the Africanist. The article I am responding to in this paper, Olaniyan’s recent “African Literature in the Post-Global Age: Provocations on Field Common Sense,” published here in the pages of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, seems to be something of a continuation of Olaniyan’s earlier thinking in SAQ and even of his earlier “Postmodernity, Postcoloniality, and African Studies” article of 2004.Footnote ² If we understand this latest article as a sort of elliptical or suggestive and only provisional conclusion to that trilogy, we find that Olaniyan seems to be advancing a similarly broadening shift in Africana theory and critical scholarship toward a “post-global” critical lens and even toward what he calls “planetary” thinking, which situates our concerns at a level that is “larger than global.”Footnote ³

Post-global literary studies, as he adapts it primarily from the work of Alfred Lopez, trains its sights on post-9/11 literature written by those who are the oppressed subjects of globalization, those creative writers from the global south whose writing interrogates the inequalities and disenfranchisement of impoverished immigrants, women, and minorities whose suffering results from the vagaries of neoliberal capitalism.Footnote ⁴ Always in medias res, Olaniyan expands the terrain of the post-global to include similar literature and scholarship of the global south that predates 9/11, but nonetheless expresses the alienation of the poor and working classes as a result of globalization and neoliberal policies. His brief exploration of the possibility of the “planetary” overcomes what he sees as the shortcomings of the reliance on the nation-state that dominates “global” thinking and takes responsibility for the environment and climate change. It is his notion of “planetary” thinking that I found most provocative when I first read his article, and to which I will return in this paper.

Yet it seems that in order for us to begin that discussion, we must remind ourselves to begin again in medias res. For as the world awoke on November 9, 2016, to learn that the United States had elected a narcissistic demagogue who fuels ethnic and racial strife, a practically oceans-churning eye roll emanated from people of African descent. For many black Americans who witnessed the election up close, Dave Chapelle’s public calling out on Saturday Night Live of white liberals and their privileged and willful ignorance of America’s endemic racism hit precisely the right note. The fact that Donald Trump could be elected on a platform of xenophobia and racism did not at all come as a shock to those for whom this violence is a daily lived experience.

And for many African people as well as for those who study Africa, Trump’s rise to power through his cult of personality, his enormous wealth, and his populist promises of jobs and wealth for the working man sounds as hollow as the prosperity gospel and the paternalistic promises of ogas across West Africa. Many were quick to appropriately note that Americans need not trot out their American exceptionalism even in the realm of the big man. Because although the big man syndrome is not peculiar to Africa, it is all too familiar. And it certainly isn’t new to the United States.

Although it feels for so many in the West that at this very moment, we are embarking on a new era just as Lopez and so many others suggest we did with the bombing of the World Trade Centers, Africanists will not need to be reminded by the name with which I am provisionally dubbing this era—the “Age of Oga”—that we are not in fact embarking on a new moment, nor did we do so on September 11, 2001. What we have experienced in both those moments are ethno-nationalist backlashes against the neoliberal policies that have created unprecedented and unattended to inequality, which creates division among the poorest and most vulnerable among us. Those divisions allow big-talking big men to rise up, rally the suffering masses, and ignite a radical response.

Instead of thinking of this as the birth of something new, it may just be that the West is only now consciously acknowledging a phase of governance, politics, and social relations that has long been in ascendancy and has, we must now admit, long lingered, sometimes in the shadows but often on the podiums, of democracies worldwide. Around the world, populism, demagoguery, ethnic and racial divisiveness, and clientelism seem to be de rigueur. Whether it is the cult of personality surrounding someone like Boko Haram’s (now deceased) Abubakr Shekau or the interminable dictatorship of Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe or the crony government currently being formed by Donald Trump in the United States, big man politics seems to be ascendant.

What feels new is the pervasive acceptance, institutionalization, and celebration of the oga as the new status quo. What we face now is not merely the localized power of clientele systems, but a dominant global ideology driven by ironic and paradoxical collaboration of populism and neoliberalism. Oga politics may not be new, but we are facing a new stage of increased subordination for all those who do not have access to the networks of oga power. Because today, big men hold the reigns of enormous state power and state violence. As Olaniyan observes, “What have we had as answers to foundationally failed and failing states and unprecedented global inequality? Nothing but the old formal and informal answers of more weapons, more walled up national boundaries, more deportations, more anti-immigrant xenophobia, more fanatical chauvinism of all kinds including religious, and more.”Footnote ⁵ In short, the response to unprecedented global inequality is increased global inequality. It has become clear that globalization presented us with a utopic mythology of technological access, wealth distribution, and permeable borders, which might have been nobly pursued but certainly not achieved. Instead we find increased isolation, unbridgeable chasms in wealth distribution, and heightened nationalism.

Indeed, what we now know all too well is that the rise of neoliberalism and transnational capital does more to shore up the borders—to protect national wealth and keep the “barbarians” away from it—than it does to create positive flows, exchanges, and commerce. The ever-increasing concern with policing those borders in order to protect the wealth of the nation exacerbates inequality, thus any pretension of increased access is a mirage.

You can see the decay of that dream of post-national, cosmopolitan freedom on the streets of Guangdong, China, where aspiring merchants from across Africa traveled in the early years of this century to make their fortunes in global trade, in hopes of attaining the Chinese Dream. Today, after a xenophobic “beautification” purge instigated by the Chinese government, the neighborhood around Baoshan Straight Street, once called “Chocolate City,” looks like a time capsule—only an occasional African trader now travels this crooked lane marked by fading posters that interminably advertise the campaign for Goodluck Jonathan. And what do these dreamers find when they return home? Moses Ochonnu testifies to what he has witnessed in Nigeria:

The notion that African traders had access to the global flows of capital at one time seemed obvious and inevitable, and of course now, the repression of that flow—and ostensibly the positing of it as the opposite of beautification—seems even more inevitable.

What we are confronting now is a global discourse dominated by those—Donald Trump’s surrogates and white nationalists but also Isis and Boko Haram—who would eschew both the global and the post-global in their perverse nostalgic embrace for the Samuel Huntington “clash of civilizations” model of world systems. It is a binaristic logic handed down to us from colonialism. The resulting policies and practices are based in a logic that too-neatly situates innocence against criminality, work against poverty, war against submission, patriots against cosmopolitans, responsibility against victimization, freedom against slavery, ignoring the way in which the most marginalized among us are forced into living at the intersections of those seemingly opposed categories. This kind of binaristic and belligerent thinking seems to gain the most traction when people who hold the reigns of power feel most threatened by the disenfranchised masses. It animates both those ogas who surround themselves with networks of elite power as well as those who rally the disenfranchised to their cause.

Thus, those writers and critics who would be considered “post-global” are haunted by a recognition of the not-yet-freedoms that constitute our reality. Post-global writers and critics act as megaphones for those who are the victims of the deceptions of globalization. And although we may not be entering into a new era, our work has not changed. This new expansion of oga state control simply makes that work more urgent.

I am not sure, however, that the term “post-global” really captures what we’re experiencing in this “Age of Oga.” Perhaps the “post” obscures more than it reveals here, as it often does. Perhaps something like the not-yet-global could be a more efficient and explanatory way of thinking of the promise and futurity of this utopic vision. Olaniyan does not himself reject the dreams and ambitions of the global; he merely forces us to recognize the way in which the retrenchment into nationalism and neoliberalism is a marker of the failure of that vision as yet.

The revival of the “post” in “post-global” reminds me of Paul Taylor’s critique of “post-soul, post-civil rights, postblack, and postcolonial.” He suggests that all these “posts” reflect the same “need to clear oneself a space” of postmodernism and postcolonialism that Appiah pointed to in his classic article, “in lieu of something forward looking and space claiming.”Footnote ⁷ The over-the-shoulder glance suggested by the “post” routinely sets up any new “post” for failure or at least disappointment, and “post-global” is no exception. Even in his article on the post-global age, Olaniyan suggests “history appears to be moving remorselessly against those [“global anti-global”] positions, though we do not know to what alternative position.”Footnote ⁸ It is always easier to look back than to know the future or even define the present.

In this Age of Oga, marked as it is by radical inequality in the present and unparalleled uncertainty regarding the future, it is easy to become paralyzed and wallow in one’s own sense of alienation. Yet, as those of us in the academy dwell on this past-tense post-ness once again, the average citizen and the writers who depict their lives are getting on with the work of the “space-claiming of the now and of the immediate future”Footnote ⁹ that might describe the “alternate positions” Olaniyan seeks. While academics ponder how globalization or neoliberal policies have failed us, those who are most failed by them are seeking every day solutions and counter-narratives. Some of those solutions involve bowing to the big man to gain some power in a system that denies them—as we see in young disconnected youth joining Boko Haram in northern NigeriaFootnote ¹⁰ —but others create alternative networks and informal economies that function in spite of and in opposition to power structures that would exclude them.

What African literature has to offer to those who seek a response to this moment is a glimpse into those ways of being in the world that make life on the margins not only bearable but politically feasible and even actively defiant. Those of us who have the luxury of studying, professing, and critiquing as a profession have the opportunity to amplify those space-claiming voices of dissent that are characteristic of African writers today. As a field grounded in the works of Diop and Chinweizu and Mudimbe, we write and describe the world from an angle of sight that positions Africans as not merely subjects but as the producers of knowledge, whose understanding of the mechanisms of power, economies, and cultures inform how we understand the West and its global imperial history and present. As the Comaroffs suggest:

It is from this vantage point that we recalibrate our timelines and put these global trends in world-historical perspective.

So what are some of the tactics of dissent that arise out of Africa that might redress some of the wrongs of neoliberal globalization? We need look no further than the unnecessarily maligned “Afropolitan” to find a first example of global transnationalism that transgresses boundaries, exceeds limits, and resists definitions. Although Chocolate City provides proof that not all African people have access to these transnational flows, it is nonetheless critical that we understand the Afropolitan as transcending (though not always successfully outpacing) the oppressive regimes that would forcibly define his or her role, nation, and allegiances.

The idea of the Afropolitan, at least as Achille Mbembe descrives it, is proof that we have not emerged into the era of the post-global only after 9/11. Most writers and critics alive today were born into a world that was already “post.” And all African writers since the fifteenth century were born into a world that is functionally global. As Mbembe suggests:

This anti-oppositional embrace of complexity undermines the simplistic clash of civilizations conception of geopolitics. Mbembe calls for an Afropolitan ethic that embraces the long history of global interactions and its attendant multiplicitous subject position that have characterized so many lives since the transatlantic slave trade. Despite all the exceptions made, largely by other affluent African writers, who don’t identify with the term or the affect associated with it in popular culture (and do not have to), Mbembe’s notion of the Afropolitan is expansive in its embrace of all the inevitable forms of syncretic expression that must emerge from a continent that has been so central to the global flows of commerce, culture, labor, and politics. Putting Africa at the center of global history and recognizing the transnationally informed landscape is a defiant refusal to submit to the divisive ideologies of nation and nativism that dominate globalization and oga politics.

For those who don’t have access to the spoils of Afropolitan chic, but who nonetheless navigate a world informed, created, and dominated by centuries of global exchange and for whom those exchanges have resulted in slavery, exploitation, disconnection, and disenfranchisement, there are alternative expressions of dissent that don’t require the Global Entry passport. Indeed, for many in Africa, the responses to the vicissitudes of globalization are the hustle, the informal economy, and the back channel networks that elude big man power. African writers are obsessed with the hustle lately, and they employ it in their fiction to critique the limited routes to power available to those who are not part of oga clientele networks. Think of A. Igoni Barret’s Blackass, in which the main character uses his grotesque metamorphosis into a sweaty white man to stake his claim to financial security and a sex life and thereby mock the limited access to wealth and work in Nigeria. Or Bobo Omotayo’s Honorable, whose main character decides to campaign for local office using a combination of Obama-inspired, masses-rallying social media campaigning and a patrimonial network built through explicit gift giving. Or El-Nathan John’s running satirical “How to Be a Nigerian” blog series in which he lampoons hustlers from the lowly street mechanic to the prosperity preacher to the successful politician. The popularity of Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani’s I Do Not Come to You by Chance points to the conflicted frisson we all feel about 419 email scams, which are at once a sign of rampant corruption and of resistance to that corruption. Her book is not the first to chart the terrain of the scammer—Chuma Nwokolo’s Diaries of a Dead African, first published in 2003, describes the life of a 419 scammer in the age of the fax machine. These books depict a veritable counter-culture of criminality—not an unsympathetic portrayal at all, but instead a contemplation on the structures of society that lead people to skim off the edge, steal from the unsuspecting, and carry out homegrown forms of justice.

Dissent does not come without its consequences. Fela Kuti’s protest against the bureaucratification of the government and the dispossession of the average worker in “Authority Stealing,” which serves as the epigraph for this paper, was the impetus for a brutal retaliation by the Shegari government. No one wanted to put out his album for fear of retribution, so he did it himself. Similarly, so much of the contemporary African literary scene happens through local publishers and self-publishing; authors refuse to kowtow to the expectations of the Western publishing industry or those political targets who would silence dissent. But still, for most Nigerian authors, writing itself has to be their side hustle. Undeterred by the limited financial rewards available for writers committed to writing that is locally relevant and politically critical, so many of them are architects or dentists or textbook publishers or bar tenders or shop owners by day while writing is their side hustle.

And as has been the case for so long, African writers not only find avenues of literary expression, but they also take to the podium and to the political stage. Wole Soyinka is well-known for his political punditry, journalism, and activism. But fewer people know that the poet and literary scholar Ogaga Ifowodo recently put down the pen and left the classroom for the precarious life of a politician and activist, in the hopes that he might intervene in this Age of Oga. Chuma Nwokolo has dedicated his life recently to a self-designed grassroots campaign to fight political corruption in Nigeria. The tradition of writers standing at the forefront of political activism and dissent, not only in their writing but in their actions, remains vibrant in Nigeria and is a model for those of us who feel like our position as literary critics leaves us alienated from the political struggles in front of us.

In places where big man politics dominate in Africa, civil society and government are often overlapping and sometimes indistinguishable, as Ferguson describes in Global Shadows, with civil society acting as a shadow government where the official government is failing the citizens.Footnote ¹³ This is a model for the kind of informal governance that can compete with the ideological apparatuses of the state and that can inform citizen activism at the ground level. Nigerians constantly lament the ineptitude of the bureaucracy, the failures of NEPA, the insufficiency of basic amenities and services, but they also drill their own bore holes, provide their own home security, and join citizen action groups. For better and for worse, they create their own mini-governments where they can establish networks to assist those who cannot. This network of civil society and informal extra-governmental strategies allows people to navigate a system that systematically excludes most citizens. The hustle is not a sign of individual dysfunction so much as the responsive and effective functioning of the citizenry in a dysfunctional landscape in which people are systematically disenfranchised.Footnote ¹⁴ Daily life in Nigeria becomes characterized by the hustle—but that hustle is so pervasive as not to be corrupt, but to be a way of life and an effective means of reshaping power dynamics.

Having considered Afropolitanism, hustling, and shadow economies as merely a few of the viable arenas of dissent against globalization and oga politics that we can discern in daily life in Africa, I think it’s crucial that we return to this notion of “planetary” thinking to which Olaniyan devotes one single sentence in his article, but which, to my mind, animates the ethic espoused by the piece. He suggests that the transnational ideology described by Mao in his three worlds theory was too ideological; that the “global” transcended the binaristic and ideological constraints of transnationalism but relied too heavily on the nation-state to deliver on its promises of interconnectedness; and that the post-global interrogates that commitment to the nation-state but might undermine the efficacy of universal human rights campaigns to deliver on their promises. And, to my mind, the post-global remains caught in that backward glance of space-clearing but not space-claiming.

And so we return to the planetary. What might the planetary entail or suggest? Olaniyan writes, “With the rise in rights culture also comes concerns that are larger than global, that is planetary in nature, as we can see in the expanding scholarly studies of the weather, the environment, and ecological damages and possibilities.” He continues by preemptively chiding us for our potential lack of interest:

Although I admit to a bit of hesitation or maybe even intellectual difficulty in distinguishing the term “planetary” from “global,” the more I ponder this, the more I think Olaniyan is on to something here. The planetary, as Olaniyan has formulated it, still has its focus directed at the way in which inequality results from globalization, which is no less a problem in the post-global age than it was in the global. Whereas he suggests “the global assumed a world material and experiential interconnectedness,”Footnote ¹⁶ planetary thinking might require reflexivity and reciprocity that would take into account the negative aspects of globalization and account for and attempt to redress the unsustainable cost of globalization for the global south. It might prohibit excess consumption and the drive for ever more resources being paid for by the people who are least likely to gain anything from that exploitation, as well as the environments in which they live.

What I’d like to suggest here is a way in which the metaphor of the planetary helps to promote a more responsible interconnectedness. The term “global” connotes complete, whole, entire. “Planetary” points to our position in a universe beyond our own seemingly “global” concerns, a universe in which we are but one of many bodies circulating within a larger system. It simultaneously constitutes all of what we are capable of knowing and a relationship within a vast, possibly infinite universe of interrelated planets and galaxies. “Planetary” usefully conjures up relationships and responsibility. Although global seems to smugly encompass all, which has its own useful propensity to inspire connectedness and unity, “planetary” reminds us that we are part of a larger whole, the solar system, the universe (which is not to suggest the universal, which has its own history of implying an impossible and dangerous homogeneity). In this time of pending global apocalypse, it is no doubt time we think in terms of the planetary, to understand ourselves in relation to others (not so that we might colonize Mars as people seem to be considering lately, though perhaps to preemptively critique that urgent drive toward the new frontier). By shifting to “planetary” thinking, we might better understand metaphorically our own interconnectedness and responsibility to one another in spite of national boundaries and also commit to our responsibilities to the environments we all share.

And what is our responsibility, then, as professors of the literature of the global south? Is there an ethical and ideological imperative that animates African literary studies in this post-global or planetary moment as there was for the postcolonial? We can never forget that it was student protests and sit-ins and sacrifices that made the field of Africana studies possible. I believe that activism is not only the foundation of African and African American Studies but remains crucially central to the future of the field as well. As Pius Adesanmi has said of our role in the production of postcolonial theory and knowledge, we must “inflict” ourselves on the discussion and assert the ways of knowing that grow out of an intimate engagement with African life, culture, literature, and dissent.Footnote ¹⁷ Henry Sussman and Jason Groves call critique that “theoretically driven responsible and rigorous decoding and reprogramming of messages, motives, trends, performances, and systematic aberrations, [which] has a special mission and role to play in an engagement with the composite and evolving climate of catastrophe.”Footnote ¹⁸ Contemporary African literature is replete with tactics we can employ to navigate the thorny terrain of oga politics and neoliberal globalization. As people move from the margins to speak, our role is to provide a platform for and amplify those voices. As scholars and critics, we then provide a critical apparatus for translating, synthesizing, and analyzing those counter-discourses, to affect a collaborative struggle to undermine the processes of globalization that would seek to silence those for whom the ogas do not speak.