The Agaba Boys: gang culture and radical insecurity in Nigeria

The Agaba Boys: gang culture and radical
insecurity in Nigeria
David Pratten, University of Oxford
Paper presented to the International Gangs Workshop, Geneva
May 2009
Draft
I begin this paper with two apparently incongruous anecdotal accounts from southern
Nigeria. 1 The first is a musical interlude. While sitting in a plane on the tarmac at Lagos
airport in January 2008 piped music suddenly caught my ear. This was not the usual inflight
jingle. It was a song I recognised and that was popular with the young men among
my friends in Akwa Ibom State. The track appears on a recently released Video CD by a
group of artists called the Royale Boys of Rumuodomaya in Port Harcourt and is
repeatedly played at music shops. The catchy chorus of the song satirically invokes the
ubiquity of police checkpoints along Nigeria’s roads and has a chorus in pidgin ‘Every
junction police e-dey, eh, eh, police e dey.’ 2
The second story is that on the morning of 21 November 2005 a protest in an otherwise
sleepy village in Akwa Ibom State turned violent. The youth of Ikot Akpa Nkuk village
raided the Divisional police headquarters. They burned down the police hostel, and
vandalized the district court buildings along with the local secondary school. The police
reported that they fired 300 live rounds at a mob of young men. When they called for
reinforcements two officers from the state police headquarters were intercepted and taken
hostage. After mobile phone negotiations the officers were released and a ransom of
N50,000 was paid.
The connection between these two stories is that they involve the same youth gang – both
the Royal Boys whose music is so indicative of Nigerian popular culture as to be played on
its flag carrier, 3 and the Ukanafun hostage takers are branches of a youth gang called agaba.
These extremes of commercial popular music and insurgent violent mobilization capture
the central feature of this paper. The broad range of agaba’s activities, styles and
performances is a product, it is argued, of the plurality of the groups’ cultural constitution.
This paper therefore examines the connections between two observations Achille Mbembe
has made about insecurity and culture. First, it is my contention that the subjectivities of
1. This paper is based on fieldwork conducted between 2001 and 2008 in Ikot Akpa Nkuk village in
Ukanafun Local Government Area, Akwa Ibom State. The research was generously supported by the
Nuffield Foundation and the British Academy.
2. ‘Every Junction Police Dey’, Wayo Bu-Ize (Gradual Movement), Royal Boys of Rumudomaya (Danco
Music International).
3. Virgin Nigeria.
1

young, generally male gang members in Nigeria are fostered out of a generalized and
profound sense of insecurity. This is what Mbembe refers to as a radical, epistemological
insecurity (Mbembe 2004: 364). This constitutes not only physical insecurity, though that
is primary, but also uncertainty in three fields: identity, authority and knowledge. First,
anxieties about identity, configured in the logics of indigeneity, are profound. To give a
brief illustration. In 2008 many young men returned to the village I work in because a
rumour in the oil city of Bonny circulated that the indigenes (the ‘sons of the soil’) were
planning to behead strangers found in the town in order to assert their rights over
employment opportunities with the oil companies. Lines of inclusion and exclusion are
constantly redefined, often in my experience to levels far below ‘ethnic’ significations to
lineage and family levels. Second, uncertainty about authority is equally significant as
suspicions about the criminal, nefarious, motivations and machinations of office-holders
from chiefs, local government chairmen to state governors abound. In the often zero-sum
politics of patrimonialism being without a patron is risky and capturing a patron is a
necessary labour. In both situations knowing what patrons are doing is paramount and
requires a constant vigilance over their behaviour, consumption and connections (Pratten
2006). Third, uncertainty about knowledge itself and anxieties over the authenticity of
information and the veracity of claims in a highly generalized context of fraud, ‘419’
tricksters (Apter 2000, Smith 2006).
How do you represent and engage with this insecure, apparently arbitrary or what these
young men call ‘rugged’ life? My contention is that within this disorder what makes sense is
a complex interaction of the familiar – the conservative – or what Mbembe calls the ‘reenchantment
of tradition’ (Mbembe 2002: 267), and an eclectic plurality of imported
registers of power and imagination. On the one hand, within a generalized context of
popular insecurity, compounded by an inherent mistrust of the police, we can appreciate
the importance of those who have the capacity to distinguish order from disorder through
familiar, if fetish, ways (Fields 1982). Yet, on the other hand, this is emphatically not a
thesis of re-traditionalization. Mbembe goes on to develop this idea in his description of
the post-colonial metropolis as a site of radical uncertainty, unpredictability, and insecurity.
Under these conditions, he says, ‘culture and aesthetics become an open-ended construction
built into existing and often misused infrastructures’ (Mbembe 2004: 364). It is precisely
this open-ended, plural, heterological construction of culture and aesthetics that I am
seeking to explore in relation to agaba gang culture. It is in this context that the plural
figures of the pre-colonial warrior, the spirit possession initiate, the Nationalist, the
gangster rapper, the frat boy, the mafia, the drug user, and the Niger Delta militant are
configured in a protean, plastic and fluid conjunction.
The literature on gang (sub-)cultures focuses (predominantly from psychological and
sociological perspectives) on marginalization, criminality, deviance and masculinity (Vigil
2003). The invocation of ‘gang culture’ in this work implies a closed world of young men
defined primarily by a culture of boundary-making (in membership, territory and
signification), of machismo (in gender relations, language, honour and embodied
aesthetics), and of cultures of toughness and testing (through aggression, violence and
intimidation). The emphasis on deviance and group solidarity as over-arching tropes in this
literature, however, neglects the internal cultural production and cultural plurality of gang
2

life. To be sure these central aspects of gang culture identified around the world are present
in this Nigerian case. However, this paper focuses on the eclectic range of cultural resources
and registers which those at the margins of society, like gang members, deploy and which
are oriented around ideas of difference and radical plurality. This then is a case study of
heterologics and ‘the encounter between the plurality of everyday practice, its irreducibility
and un-intelligibility, and the narratives of and at the margins’ (Napolitano and Pratten
2007: 10). 4
The Aga b a B o ys
Since its return to democracy in 1999 Nigeria has witnessed the emergence of an
apparently unsettling array of violent youth movements, of which agaba is one, along with a
range of ethnic militia, university campus cults and militant vigilantes (Eguavoen 2008,
Pratten 2008, Sesay, Ukeje, Aina and Odebiyi 2003). The Niger Delta in particular has
experienced a conflagration of different types of militant youth group in the Delta creeks,
the universities and on the streets of Port Harcourt which have been fostered by
sponsorship during politicians’ campaigns in the 1999, 2003 and 2007 elections
(Concannon and Newsom 2004). It is suggested that there are around 100 gangs in the oil
city of Port Harcourt, many of which are often connected in shifting alliances, 5 and whose
members are said to represent “a standing army of the dispossessed” (Africa Confidential
10 September 2004).
Such groups and their relationship to the instability of the Niger Delta region are
increasingly being studied as reflexes of neoliberalism, within narratives of ‘state collapse’,
and within terrorism studies as insurgent political movements. On insurgent political
movements Mbembe has argued that the rise of these so-called ‘war machines’ in Africa is
especially connected to the drying up of patrimonial liquidities and the formation of
enclave economies based on the extraction of natural resources (Mbembe 2003: 33). These
factors are of course especially relevant to the situation in southern Nigeria. Militia groups
in Nigeria have been precisely located in the militarization of (political and criminal)
patronage networks in which youth movements capture divergent imaginings of and
4. On the theory of difference this paper takes its cue from de Certeau’s work on heterology. Heterology, de
Certeau suggested, is a theory of social difference in which the situated knowledge of those who are
dominated turns domination inside out to constitute an elusive, sequestered site of knowledge (De
Certeau 1986). Terdiman argues that de Certeau’s heterology makes the potential reversal of
epistemological privilege a fundamental methodological principle: ‘This element at the heart of his
theory reanimates the conception of difference which heterology conceives not in some static simplicity,
but rather as including within itself all the ambiguity and complexity of social life – and all its intrinsic
propensity for change’ (Terdiman 2001: 416).
5. According to many accounts the gangs of Port Harcourt line up along two axes. One grouping is
generically known as the Clansmen and includes the militant leader Dokubo Asari’s Niger Delta
Volunteer Force along with the university cult, Black Axe, and a street gang called ‘de bam’. The
groups loosely affiliated to Asari’s arch rival Akete Tom are the Niger Delta Vigilantes, the Vikings
campus cult along with various street gangs called ‘de well’, Bush Boys and Germans.
3

provide popular counter-narratives to the legitimacy of the Nigerian nation state (Agbu
2004, Ikelegbe 2001, Watts 2003). In focusing on agaba performance this paper also
attempts to contrast macro analyses of the rise of militia-style ‘war machines’ in Africa with
an account of the situated knowledge and internal imperatives of agaba members.
Agaba’s emergence may be set against several comparative frameworks. The societies, clubs,
dances, and cults of young urban African men have long provided a valuable lens on the
dynamics of social change on the continent. Sometimes old, sometimes new, but always
creative and always of their moment, the study of young men’s cults and dances has
presented these dynamics from various perspectives. From beni ngoma (Ranger 1975),
through the Kalela dance (Mitchell 1956), the goumbe dances (Rouch 1961), the Hauka
(Stoller 1997), to the Ode Lay masquerades (Nunley 1987) these young men’s
performances speak to questions of urban adaptation, of the aesthetics of masculinity, of
encounters with the colonial and post-colonial state.
The origin of the group I am studying is rather obscure. Recent authors state that agaba was
in Calabar in the 1970s (Charles and Ikoh 2004) though further west in Akwa Ibom and
Rivers states it is considered a much more recent phenomenon. What is not contested is
the fact that agaba is borrowed from northern Igbo. The anthropologist J.S. Boston
identified agaba and agaba-idu both meaning lion - a form of horned mmaung or mask
which was common at burial ceremonies and associated with particular age sets (Boston
1960). Apart from its name and perhaps some of the masquerade aesthetics this connection
to Igbo tradition is not recalled today. The agaba groups I know began within the past
decade in the industrial sprawl of Bonny’s oil depots. Here a female water spirit, agaba,
presented herself to a young man who would be recalled later in agaba’s songs as Papa
Lucky. Since this revelation young men have initiated new lodges of the society in the
towns and villages of south-eastern Nigeria and agaba has extended from Bonny through
the rivers of the Niger Delta to the major cities of the region, including Calabar (where the
agaba groups are known as the bayside boys and the school boys), and in Port Harcourt
(where agaba groups are known as the Millennium Boys, Diobu United and 007). The
groups that I work with are located in Annang-speaking communities and are called the
Ukanafun Base Boys and Cooperate Boys. Locality, like the agaba members, however,
should not be seen as fixed but rather as enmeshed in patterns of circulation and exchange
within Port Harcourt’s hinterland. What is important to remember is that this is an
initiatory cult without elders, it has no ethnic specificity. It is of and for young men and
women.
In various reports of violence in which agaba have been implicated, including an attempted
political assassination, a major riot in Calabar and an electoral tussle outside Port Harcourt,
agaba was variously labeled as ‘area boys’ (urban street gangs), secret cults (often associated
with university campus life), and local militia (promoting ethnic agendas). Even in their
definition, therefore, this group is characterised by plurality and indeterminacy. These
categories, of course, are blurred. Each type of violent gang have their own local and
historical trajectory and distinguish very keenly between themselves, but most of the groups
are in fact very similar. They are all associated with the initiation of young men,
4

identification with a particular location, codes of conduct, slang phrases, fashion styles,
invocations of spiritual power and with physical violence.
Structurally for Annang young men of their age and standing agaba stands in for the
ancestral ekpo masquerade which has been progressively criminalized and diabolized in
recent generations (Pratten 2008). It was at one of the increasingly rare ekpo outings that I
first met agaba boys – ‘getting ideas’ as they put it. Agaba is also linked to a long historical
trajectory of improvised youth styles based on the appropriation of American popular
culture. On the university campuses for instance there have been long standing associations
of students including the Palm Wine Club (known as the Kegites) along with those
organized as confraternities. It was Wole Soyinka who is credited with forming the first
Nigerian confraternity -the Pyrates (the National Association of Seadogs) at the University
of Ibadan in the 1960s. And it is from these groups, the Kegites and the ‘Fra men’ that
agaba has appropriated much of the styles, songs, and slang present in their activities and
performances. Members of these fraternities call themselves ‘rugged’ men in their songs,
speech and in their posts to internet chat rooms. The symbolic content of these groups has
two main themes -maritime and mafia. The Pyrates, for instance, go ‘sailing’ when they
have a meeting -their groups call themselves decks and they are led by a Cap'n or Capone.
Like Agaba these groups cross-cut identities based on the politics of ethnicity and
consequently represent themselves in the use of secret slang based on pidgin or broken
English (their Jarassis or Jara - gang slang). The dominant idioms that agaba plays on,
therefore, are those related to masquerade and cult performances – ambiguously sited and
in terms of styles, language, performance and action they construct and represent particular
ideas of masculinity and the ruggedness of life.
Within this bricolage of cultural registers it is important to recall that Agaba performance
focuses on a shrine and associated spirit possession. The agaba shrine in Ikot Akpa Nkuk is
about a mile out of the village along the stream road where people collect water and bathe
and where the vigilantes execute armed robbers. The shrine is the home of the agaba spirit
which the members explain by analogy, and say that it is like mami wata, a complex of
beliefs and practices involving water spirits that bestow good fortune and protection or
wreak personal disaster in return for maintaining a relationship, sometimes expressed as
marriage with the spirit (Salmons, 1977; Gore & Nevadomsky, 1997; Drewal, 1988).
During most agaba performances one or two individual players, core and long-standing
members, become possessed by the spirit. This is neither a curative nor an initiatory form
of possession. It concerns, rather, an enriching of the relationship with agaba. As a
protective cult agaba draws on the power of the spirit and the rules of group solidarity for
protection. 6 In the secrets of the group it is important to note those such as the injunction,
‘You must not harm; or betray fellow members.’ This is a rule that is tested by players
running anti-clockwise (by the left hand-side) around the singers during their performances
and which is confirmed in ‘commensal solidarity’ when players share schnapps from the
same cup (see Gutmann, 1997: 393).
6. As such it recalls former traditions of protective cult such as àním èkím (Pratten 2007: 226)
5

Those young men who are initiated into agaba have left school, many were initiates in the
ancestral masquerade, ekpo before it was banned from playing, and before they left for the
city. In the city, in Port Harcourt or Calabar, they worked as houseboys or motorcycle taxi
riders, several of these boys had previously belonged to violent street gangs and drinking
societies in the city, and many shared a similar tale. They had returned to the village
because of the failure of patronage. Their fathers’ or uncles or employers had disappointed
them. In intimate, individual ways, their careers capture something of the crisis of
patrimonialism which is often said to have embraced the continent. Hence, in many ways
for them agaba acts as a social network and substitutes for the form of hometown
association that they cannot afford to join.
C ultura l p la y: p la ying culture
In the context of agaba performance it is important to recall the need to highlight links
between dance form as performance, and the shifting contingencies of everyday life and of
political structures (James 2000: 140, Ranger 1975). The Ukanafun Base boys perform in a
number of guises During regular Sunday performances the group practices its drumming,
dancing and singing in a lineage grove. 7 Usually 15-20 members will turn out. Agaba
increasingly performs informally at life cycle rituals – at burials, at remembrance
ceremonies for members’ ancestors, and at child naming celebrations, for example.
Sometimes they will perform as ‘the band’ at football matches, at other times they will be
the ‘entertainment when politicians visit the local government headquarters. The agaba
aesthetic shifts between these contexts. Like odelay and the distinction Nunley (1987)
identifies between ‘fierce’ and ‘fancy’ costumes, so the agaba uniforms, which involve mufti
for peace, black for an outing and red for violence, represent intention in aesthetic.
At a formal outing at Christmas and Easter, for instance, agaba is performed as a full
masquerade outing in which 40 or more members will attract crowds of hundreds.. Leaving
its shrine a little way outside the village, an agaba performance will parade to the main road
junctions and markets of the village, pay their respects by singing praise songs in the
compounds of village elders and retire to sing and dance in a lineage square. In front of the
parade is the agaba masked figure dressed in black cloth with an elaborately carved wooden
face mask of a beautiful, feminine face, with a head crown of powerful figures (a leopard,
an antelope, a solider). The masked figure is marshalled and protected while the drummers
and singers behind are dressed all in black. This attire of ‘black on black’ is in fact
deliberately confrontational as it assumes the garb associated with banned cults and armed
robbers. 8 Like the Freetown Odelay masquerades of the 1970s that John Nunley describes,
agaba performances have to be dangerous, they are a test. Successful masking is determined
by overcoming the physical and metaphysical hurdles that may impede their progress.
7. This location was adopted after protests from church and village elders that the group were conducting
their Sunday practices within sight and sound of the Qua Iboe church in Ikot Akpa Nkuk.
8. At New Year parades known as ‘cross-country runs’ agaba boys dressed as respectable old men wearing
wrappers, and the hats of elders serve to represent the community (Pratten 2008).
6

Hence encountering other masquerades or gangs or confronting the police, is common to
the ways in which successful masking is conceived.
It is important here to historicize Elizabeth Tonkin’s (1979) insights into masking as an
‘embodied paradox’ in which it is not disguise, but transformation that is key to
understanding. Masking concerns transformations which draw on the power and character
of other realms of experience - the displacement of masking points above all to the
possibility of other, impenetrable worlds of knowledge and power. The paradox is that
masks might be seen, therefore, as revelatory practices which reveal an absence; the
unknowable, uncontainable, hidden energies that lie beyond human agency and control.
Masking is the ‘labour of the negative’ par excellance (Taussig 1999).
The argument here is that young people in Nigeria appropriate the contradictions of
masking to contest their political marginality. In the post-colonial context of ‘metaphysical
disorder’ (Comaroff and Comaroff 2006) and ‘radical uncertainty’ (Mbembe 2004), the
verification of knowledge by means that are beyond human agency; the re-making of selves
out of the secrets of the supernatural are familiar and effective frameworks in the quest for
order and certainty. It is within these cultural understandings that Annang masking
practices retain their currency. And they do so in relation to and in transgression of a given,
a normative historical landscape infused with Christian ethics, and Pentecostalist
imperatives to ‘break’ with this past (Meyer 1998).
Agaba dance performances are improvisational. Individual dancers approach the main bank
of seated drummers where they combine intricate steps with flashing swipes of unsheathed
machetes and swords. One such improvisation is especially striking and provides an
important clue in interpreting the relationship between the images and self-representations
of agaba’s hyper-masculinity with the way in which women figure in their performance. The
most common female figure that appears in the agaba’s songs is the prostitute – achawo or
okpongidi – figures in songs and dance. Dressed in red an agaba boy dances on his tiptoes
and sways his hips as he imitates a female form in a style the boys call achawo or prostitute.
The apparent contradiction here of a rugged young man dancing as a woman, points to the
ways in which the hyper-masculinity of West African young men is sometimes constructed
by the conflation of gender categories. Here playing with gender identity concerns drawing
power from the deliberate conflation and encompassment of categories, to demonstrate
that qualities of courage, strength, and supernatural prowess are not limited by biological
endowment. Cross-dressing, in fact, was a common performative feature for young male
and female members of Annang initiatory societies. Vigilantes often disguise themselves as
women. It is commonly held that women sap or ‘cool down’ the power of men, especially if
their own powers are derived from the wearing of charms or the consumption of medicine
(ibok). The antidote to male medicinal power therefore is sex with women. The prostitute
dance is a statement, therefore, that agaba boys possess and project sources of power that
transcend their gendered embodiment. Here playing with gender identity concerns drawing
power from the deliberate conflation of categories, to demonstrate that qualities of
7

courage, strength, and supernatural prowess are not limited by biological endowment
(Moran, 1995: 80). 9
As Mitchell said of the Kalela dance, it is the songs that are the primary attraction, and
indeed the most informative insight into agaba gang culture. Despite the vigorous, noisy
and empowered context of the songs’ performance, and despite the often boastful attitude
of most of the members concerning their own powers and conquests, the songs themselves
reveal a surprising frankness about personal insecurities. The songs are rich in an irony that
undercuts a stereotypical image of these young men’s societies as sinister and violent groups
of hoodlums, miscreants and street urchins. As the songs are performed, and as the power
of the agaba spirit urges the performers on to ever more vigorous dancing displays the songs
themselves reveal their own powerlessness in the face of the arbitrariness of urban rugged
life. While the image of young men’s cults is based on lawlessness and violence, the songs
reveal an internal impetus to seeking support and solace in the company of cohorts. In a
similar way to gang performance around the world, whether it concerns spirit possession,
dancing or singing, these events as Ferrandiz puts it, open up social spaces ‘where
tenderness, humour, hope and solidarity intermingle with everyday tragedy’ (Ferrándiz
2004: 126).
The agaba song repertoire is extensive and many are combined and mixed up in new
choruses. Agaba songs define the marginality of youth as a category that is socially
disadvantaged, hounded by the police, excluded from normal reproductive relations, as drug
users, and supporters of radical political figures. One song is particularly resonant of the
ways in which agaba boys represent the insecurity of life in contemporary Nigeria which
they refer to as the ‘rugged life’:
Dis rugged life
I wan fash e oh
Some people rugged Sute lose their life – eh
Notorious BIG follow kill Tupac -oh
Tupac boys dey still de sail – oh
Some people rugged sute buy Mercedes -oh
As for me I go buy Pafinda
If no Pafinda na warrant I dey face – oh
Tupac boys still de sail -oh
Amo boy, notin go happen 10
The rugged life is akin, as agaba members see it, to that portrayed in the music and videos
of American ‘gangster rappers.’ This is not a glamorized interpretation, however, since
Tupac the singer mentioned in the song was a victim himself. As young men do, the youth
of this song muses on what type of car he might buy if he became rich. He would chose a
9. Cross-dressing, in fact, was a common performative feature for young male and female members of
Annang initiatory societies (Van Allen, 1972; Ifeka-Moller, 1975; Salmons, 1985).
10. Fash is from the Scottish colloquial to trouble or bother, to vex, but the singers take it to mean quit,
leave behind. Hence the ‘rugged’ life of this song is a life that the agaba boys want to reject.
8

Nissan Pathfinder jeep (‘Pafinda’), a car associated with the nouveaux riches over the
Mercedes brand of the old breed elites. Yet, with a note of resignation, he recognizes that
in reality his ‘rugged’ life will more likely end on a police charge (‘warrant’) than driving an
expensive car. In most versions of the song and like many others, the chorus line, the line
that is repeated by all the dancers, lifts the song with a note of affirmation and reassurance.
Amo boy, notin go happen -‘Amo boy’ my man, my friend, it says, you need not worry
about these things, nothing calamitous will happen to you when you have us to help you.
This is a characteristic feature of agaba songs, a call to members to be assured that agaba
will be there to protect its members and confront their enemies. Jazz down.
The rugged life is captured in other songs by the slang word ‘Worsky’ to describe war-like
arbitrariness. In Annang the idea of the rugged life is captured in the phrase anam mkpo
ntime ntime – something troublesome (things happen ‘anyhow’) life in the city for a young
man is uncertain, arbitrary, unpredictable. The ‘worsky’, rugged life of current gang-related
urban violence in Port Harcourt, for example, forms a central part of these songs especially
the poor waterside shanty settlements of Diobu. Hence the choruses of other songs include
declarations over territory, ‘Na my area be dis oh – fire me I fire you’; lamentations of gang
fights, ‘Dem for kill us – eh, for Nembe Waterside’ 11 , and calls to arms, ‘Make you no run away
if you jam egbesu boys.’ 12
The dramatis personae of the agaba song repertoire recalls, in the form of praise songs,
many prominent national and international figures. Nationalist heroes Azikiwe and
Awolowo feature in the songs and agaba members also identify themselves with minority
rights activists like Ken Saro- Wiwa, In standing up to the Abacha regime Saro-Wiwa is
more than a folk hero – he’s a tough, hard, rugged, powerful man. One of the more
contemporary references to powerful men in the agaba songs includes a praise song for
Osama Bin Laden. What these praise songs are relating is a particular set of ideas about
power that resonate in Annang’s performative concept of the powerful man – ockposong
owo – ‘performance makes a person strong’ they say and so the powerful men that agaba
represent in the songs are those who have been tested, someone who has been able to
suppress a rivals powers.
The agaba spirit likes girls, the players say – and young women in the village do skirt around
the edges of the performances. Agaba members are young men of course and many are of
marriageable age but don’t have the support from parents or their own money to pay
brideprice. In general the songs are about loss and misfortune. Songs about prostitutes
abound, as do songs about women who refuse their advances until they say they work for
Shell, or songs like this one which bemoans the inability to marry and the loss of a
girlfriend in the metropolis:
I want to marry one girl
11. Nembe Waterside is a shanty settlement located in Mile 1 Diobu, Port Harcourt.
12. The Egbesu boys (sometimes the Egbesu Boys of Africa) is the common name attributed to Ijaw
militants in the Niger Delta. Egbesu is an Ijaw warrior deity. It has been reported that the Egbesu
Boys are the fighting arm of the Ijaw Youth Council (Sesay, Ukeje, Aina and Odebiyi 2003).
9

Mi Mama no gree me oh
A beg am, a beg am, I tire
De girl turn to achawo for Abonnema
If you see Polly, If you see Polly
If you see Polly, Tell her say I de look for her
Polly write a letter, Polly put her picture
Polly picture do whatever she for do for me
Polly picture romance me, Polly picture kiss me
Polly picture do whatever she for do for me
The sense here and in other songs is to bemoan the trials and misfortunes associated with
the ‘rugged’ life which of course has to be set against an imagined normalcy, a projected
future of marriage, of a job transfer, of a getting a job with Shell. The biographies of the
agaba boys don’t always bear this out as a career trajectory, of course. Some of the older
members are leaving, but the underlying sense is that opportunities to escape the rugged
life are defined by the same sense of arbitrariness and chance.
In addition to gangster rappers, prostitutes and international terrorists, the key protagonists
in this worsky world of the agaba boys is the police who, as arbitrary, predatory characters
figure as arch-opponents of the agaba boys in their daily. The police are configured in the
group’s songs in a concept in the pidgin language of the songs as winchy – a word that
comes from witch and wicked. The boys sing:
Agaba no go die again
Na winchy people wan fire
Agaba no go die again
Police –eh, wetin I do eh?
Police –eh wetin I do eh?
You carry Luger follow me, say I blow kuma,
you carry Luger follow me say I blow kuma… 13
Oh my brother OP Flush don find me
I begin tears for my life
Oh my brother say what, say what
Anyting can happen eh 14
The sense in this song repertoire is to bemoan the trials and misfortunes associated with the
rugged life which of course has to be set against an imagined normalcy, a projected future
of marriage, of a job transfer, of a getting a job with Shell. The biographies of the agaba
boys do not always bear this out as a career trajectory, of course. Some of the older
13. Luger here refers to a pistol (many agaba boys will own a ‘local-made’ or imported hand gun. Kuma
refers to marijuana.
14. OP Flush refers to Operation Flush, one of several paramilitary anti-crime police squads that have
operated in Rivers State.
10

members are leaving, but the underlying sense is that opportunities to escape the rugged
life are defined by the same sense of arbitrariness and chance.
Finally, it is important to note the way in which this violent cult has recently entered the
market of video production since two issues are particularly striking. The first concerns the
range of genres, the performative registers in which they are performed, and the second
concerns the radical performative juxtapositions they portray.
In recent years, the rise of the Nollywood video industry has not only seen a mushrooming
of dramatic film production, but a corresponding increase in the music video industry too
(Barrot 2008, Haynes 2000, Larkin 2008). Nigerian satellite television and the plethora of
small video kiosks, broadcast and sell film and music videos side by side. The technology
allowing for the shooting of music videos and the production of cheap Video cassette discs
(the poorer quality version of DVDs) has enabled not only a broader audience for the
Nigerian music scene ‘proper’ (with producers, managers and record labels), but with a
reasonably modest budget camera crews and sound production facilities are readily available
even in remote rural districts. As I discovered on my recent fieldwork attending rehearsals
for vernacular language Nollywood films, anyone can join this great success story including
agaba groups.
The first and most famous of the agaba video discs was produced by the Royal Boys of
Rumodoyaa. They have now produced their second volume of their music. Watching their
video discs an audience will see and hear straight away that this music is not the raw
drumming and flute ensemble of Sunday rehearsals of the village agaba boys. This urban
genre has been produced and musical instruments, keyboards and guitars, have been
introduced beyond the simple drumming of routine agaba performance. The dancing
performances too have been tailored, glamourized and popularized. This is not to make a
point about any lost authenticity in this commercialized version, but quite the opposite,
that the video genre confirms the inherent plasiticy and plurality of Nigerian gang culture.
What first strikes viewers of even a brief clip of the Royal Boys’ first VCD ‘Gradual
Movement’ is the rapidity and plurality of the aesthetic and performative shifts that are
achieved. Crucial here is the cutting style of the video production. Not unlike popular
MTV-style music videos the sound track of these agaba songs is played out against a video
performance which shifts scene rapidly, every 3 to 5 seconds or so. What is striking here is
not the aping of video editing techniques, however, but the content of the various scenes
between which the scenes shift. Rather than shooting against one or several related
backdrops and angles the Royal boys’ performances is set against a dozen or more radically
different and visually arresting vistas.
Within a single song for instance, an agaba singer may appear first as an elder wearing a
traditional wrapper cloth at the waist along with long beaded necklaces and a walking stick.
This appropriation of the iconography of traditional authority in southern Nigeria may be
quickly transplanted with a wide-angle view of the agaba troupe joining in the chorus
dressed as young bare-chested labourers clearing ground and building a house. This
positive, productive, community-spirited, organized and disciplined image echoes an idea
11

of pre-colonial age set or collective labour service. In some clips the troupe appear as precolonial
warriors, complete with spears and shields. In several instances, by dancing as a
circle around trees on a beach, and with the inclusion of a female dancing troupe, the
impression presented is of an innocuous cultural dance (or ‘cultural play’ in local parlance).
The staged agaba performance is also inter-cut with shots of what appear to be more
familiar agaba performance, of men and women dancing in lines around central tables, of a
masked figure dancing and of young men congregating at agaba shrines smoking
marijuana. Juxtaposed are scenes with video effects including a computer generated car
dashboard, a superimposed skyscraper skyline that point to modernist imaginings. A shot
of a little girl dancing against a European pastoral background with snow-topped peaks in
the distance compounds the incongruity. Against these imaginings are clips of ‘real life’
with police officers standing on the road demanding bribes and street hawkers bearing their
loads between the traffic. A final genre of images is produced in Nollywood-style movie
scenes of acted of young men being chased and threatened in gang fights perhaps, and of
staged scenes of traditional shrine priests (or witches) preparing medicine.
This plurality of aesthetic styles illustrates more than editorial exuberance. Each scene
captures an alternative (and often incongruous) register of practice and representation.
Agaba performs within different visual registers each of which is productive. Each scene
shift is at the same time a different way of coding the gang members - as an innocuous
musical troupe, as a pre-colonial warrior cult, as critics of the Nigerian social fabric, as an
aspiring generation, as modern performers.
C o nclus io n
The central concern of this paper is to highlight the cultural productivity of Nigerian gang
members. Stereotypical concerns of masculinity, solidarity, toughness and testing are at the
forefront. Agaba, primarily concerns two features. First, the quest for power and protection
among young men, and of ideas of masculinity based on being tested and of proving
oneself. It is here that the secret cult provides an appropriate idiom for the organization and
protection of marginalized young men from the inequities of the rugged life. Second, agaba
concerns the coding of youth as a political category. Young men are actively manipulating
the categories of cult and cultural play that are so fiercely contested in popular discourse,
and how better to express, to represent the potency, the potential, the latent hostility of a
marginalized group than in the form of cult groups that are banned. Its here, as young men
inside agaba show themselves to be powerful and to be available as potential clients, that
agaba is central to the contemporary politics of youth.
Yet, how are we to make sense of agaba’s confusing and apparently contradictory audio and
visual repertoire? Theoretical metaphors of cultural syncretism, creolization and hybridity,
which might otherwise provide provide suitable models of cultural appropriation, appear
particularly unsuited to explaining the persistence and incongruity of difference in this
context. Instead of this notion of mixing and merger, I find it more productive to revisit
Mbembe’s argument that culture and aesthetics constitute an open-ended construction
built into existing and often misused infrastructures. In this context I take Mbembe’s
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infrastructure to refer to the underlying performative tradition of the masquerade society -
a protean and pervasive feature of southern Nigeria. 15 The continued salience of the use of
the secret society in agaba performance lies not in the mere invocation of ‘tradition’, but in
the manipulation of the ambiguous properties of practice and power with which it is linked.
And I take the open-ended construction of culture and aesthetic to refer to this eclectic
range of performative genres and registers of power and legitimacy that I have detailed in
the origins, performance and representation of agaba. This is perhaps most readily apparent
from these videos in the plurarity of registers of masculine subjectivity and their fast
cutting, radical juxtapositions of reality and imagination, tradition and modernity, suffering
and longing.
The heterological foundation of agaba aesthetics and performance therefore capture an
unsettling, decentring and violent potential. As a category that is socially disadvantaged,
hounded by the police, excluded from normal reproductive relations, as drug users, and as
supporters of radical political figures agaba performance points to a specific self-realization
of marginalization and of the blockages that prevent youth from participating in the social
exchanges that constitute Nigeria’s politics. The critique of the Nigerian social fabric which
agaba presents is powerful precisely because it arises from this multi-sited projection and
performance of disadvantage and disempowerment. The processes by which the
marginalized enact and perform their very marginality serves as social critique and ‘hollows
out’ other spaces within hegemony. It is precisely by presenting the violent potentiality of
social disadvantage that African youth demand to be and are accommodated and taken
account of. In this way youth are able to project an epistemological advantage onto
disadvantage itself.
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