Abstract
Mike Asukwo’s brightly textured cartoons captured the colorless realities of the Covid pandemic in Nigeria and circulated along with global pandemic discourses as local visual archives of Nigeria’s postcolonial disenchantment. Social media is particularly central to the aesthetic value of Asukwo’s political cartoons in producing and constraining the expression of civic agency among Nigerians. His cartoons demonstrate how everyday media practices such as the decoding and reproduction of popular culture texts online can challenge hierarchical systems of control. This chapter examines the conditions under which cultural netizens like Asukwo and his online audience make sense of the state’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic, highlighting how Nigeria’s crisis of infrastructure manifests in cartoons to accentuate the messiness of political leadership. The chapter concludes on the ambivalent valences of the social web and the digital public sphere it fosters, underscoring how social media documents the pandemic perspectives of members of the digital class in Nigeria.
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Notes
- 1.
Kingsley Omonobi. 2020. Nigerian Army did not arrest me over COVID-19 lockdown―Asuquo. The Vanguard. Accessed February 8, 2021. https://www.vanguardngr.com/2020/05/nigerian-army-did-not-arrest-me-over-covid-19-lockdown-%E2%80%95-asuquo/.
- 2.
The figure of the social media influencer in Nigeria is one that deserves scrutiny, as more people perform prestige and symbolic power through the accumulation of followership and fame in the attention economy of social media. While there are popular social media cultural producers and/or netizens who are not influencers, to be an influencer means the ability to create cultural content that generate fame and is contingent on their capacity to ‘brand’ their digital lives and monetize their cult following.
- 3.
From the thread of the post on Asukwo’s Facebook Timeline: https://www.facebook.com/asukwo/posts/10223010812879341.
- 4.
Fela Kuti, “Beasts of No Nation” (1989).
- 5.
From a commenter on Asukwo’s Facebook Timeline: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10222872928632321&set=a.2058448341395&type=3&theater.
- 6.
While not meant to be a homogenizing grid for the entirety of Nigerians, Smith’s anthropological reading of culture here gestures at a practice that is both for and against the mechanisms of corruption in the country. While every day, non-state actors speak against corruption, they are also implicated in its production and circulation among members of the ruling elite who themselves have links and networks among ordinary people.
- 7.
Asukwo tackles the narratives of the palliative in this cartoon here: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10223078251805272&set=a.1451300003066&type=3&theater.
- 8.
The first of the six-part series may be found here: https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=10225937229397925&set=pb.1250241460.-2207520000.
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Yékú, J. (2023). Cartooning COVID-19 on Facebook. In: Egbokhare, F., Afolayan, A. (eds) Global Health, Humanity and the COVID-19 Pandemic. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-17429-2_15
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