In a tradition that reminds us of medieval and Renaissance depictions of biblical narratives in European art in which ancient, biblical personages are represented in the contemporary European habits and fashion of the day down to clogs, berets and scarves, the Divine personages in an Mbari are always represented in contemporary apparel from the highly decorative body paintings of the early 20th century, to full European-style fashion in the 1970s complete with laced shoes, ties, and breeches for the men, and full, contemporary women's attires of flowered blouse, wax print wrap-around and high-heels, even mini-skirts as we see in Cole's photograph. In another one of Cole's Mbari photographs from the period, this time of another Mbari in the neighboring town of Obeama Agwa, the thunder god is dressed like a highly placed civil servant in sleeve shirt, stripped neck-tie, dark trousers, and dress shoes, a wristwatch prominently strapped to his wrist while his partner, the earth goddess is dressed in a lace blouse and fine wrap-around and wears a hair perm quite popular with young, West African society ladies in the 1960s. To the right of the Divine family, a figure dressed like a municipal security official makes his entrance while above them, perched on platforms, two short figures keep sentry.

In the photograph initially mentioned, the above tableau is replicated in the Divine family group; four larger than life-size modeled figures of the goddess, her baby on her lap, her lover the thunder god to her right with a distinguished fedora hat on his head, and flanking them both, her daughter in polka dot blouse and blood-red mini-skirt with a fancy handbag on her lap, and on the opposite side, the goddess's son in a yellow polo dress and fashionable haircut with a three-knob transistor radio nestled on his lap. It is the figure of this young man, son of the earth goddess and prince of the heavens, sitting erect in this sacred family group sculpture with a transistor radio on his lap that stays with me: An Igbo god with a transistor radio.

Every element in this image is significant for a number of different reasons, but I'll stay with the figure of the young god and his transistor radio because I grew up not far from the town where Cole recorded the Mbari sacred group, and I grew up with transistor radios. They were as much an integral part of my childhood as were masquerade dances and moonlight fables about magical kingdoms, fairies and spectacles in the animal kingdom, and they were my window on a world which, though evidently, physically distant from my immediate surroundings, was nevertheless only an extension of those surroundings rather than a different world. At the height of the Biafra war when a throttling economic blockade made it impossible to import items like electronics into the fledgling republic, my father began to deal in transistor radios. The odd hours at which he brought home his wares always left me with a disquieting feeling that there was something illicit about the trade, but I also saw and lived with some of the most beautiful transistor radio sets ever made: the Philipses, the PYEs, the Grundigs, some of them as old as radio technology itself, dug up by desperate, war ravaged families who pawned them for food. I inspected them, compared them, marveled at them and when no one was watching, touched and caressed them. I marveled at the magic behind the invisible, little people who were buried in those boxes, yet spoke and sang and made music like normal humans.

Other than the inevitable British Broadcasting Corporation from which my father and the rest of the Biafran citizenry gathered their news of the outside world and the progress of the war, and the local stations to which he turned every Sunday morning for songs by Jim Reeves and other American gospel singers, my father's favorite station was Radio Santa Isabel, a Spanish service which broadcast out of Santa Isabel, Fernando Poo in the tiny, newly independent African Republic of Equatorial Guinea. Although the strict Christian sect that my father ministered to forbade dancing, which he never engaged in, he and his friends nevertheless loved the fast, loopy Central and East African guitar music out of Santa Isabel which was far more exciting and danceable than the more sedate and philosophical war-time Biafran 'highlife' music.

In same way that they effortlessly switched between the war propaganda on the Voice of Biafra and the diplomatic propaganda on the BBC, so did they navigate with equal ease between patriotic fervor for homegrown music and the genuine desire for the uplifting guitar wizardry of music from far beyond the Bight of Biafra. As the war raged and the death-tolls rose, my father's friends would come around of an evening and request that I turn on the radio and tune them into Radio Santa Isabel, and they would sit around, occasionally dance, not understanding a word of the Spanish broadcast yet reveling in the window of freedom that the little box on the mantle opened to them. While they fought war and famine in that hinterland of Igbo country with neither electricity nor other basic utilities that are commonplace in the West, the transistor radio broke them through an otherwise impregnable blockade and the attrition that was waged on them daily, and reunited them with the rest of the world which was theirs by right.

At age five I was hooked to the transistor radio with its carbon batteries and string antennae, its short-wave frequencies, and for the rest of my childhood and youth, it would help define my world in rural West Africa. Late at night, after the communal drumming and moonlight stories at the foot of my uncle, after wondrous adventures with the tortoise and the ram in the land of the spirits, I would turn in and instantly turn to the transistor radio and it would stretch my world and imagination even further afield beyond seven hills and seven seas to lands as yet unimagined, cultures whose names I could hardly pronounce, geographies that I came to know and own without physically stepping out of my immediate surroundings, worlds that would puzzle and enchant even a young god. Unlike my father and his friends, my destination was not Santa Isabel which was only a few hundred miles off the coast; with powerful short wave radio I could broach all frontiers and reach all cultures, from the hinterland of China to the American outback, from Ireland to Papua New Guinea. Languages differed, and so did geography, but to my youthful mind, it was all one big world and I was part of it.

On the face of it, the above would not explain the figure of the young Igbo god with a transistor radio, but it does and we shall get to it presently. There is also, a far simpler explanation for the image. In the 1960s when the Mbari that Cole recorded in Igbo country was made, the transistor radio was a novelty especially in the rural areas, just like the Japanese parasol was in urban Europe at the turn of the 20th century. Radio itself was a rarity, a marvel of modernity, and because very few owned it, the radio receiver was a status symbol. Across West Africa we find other images from the period where the transistor radio appears as a signifier of class distinction and sophistication, or at least a pretense to social mobility. Society photographers adopted it as a prop in their studios to lend a distinguished look to their clients, as we see in quite a number of studio portraits of the citizens of Bamako by Malian photographer Seydou Keita. The transistor radio was a mark of urbaneness and was most closely associated with an emerging middle class. Because Mbari is a gesture of veneration, a religious art whose purpose is to flatter the gods, it was logical that they should be depicted with the status symbols of the day; debonair apparel, cool hairdo, the finest jewelry, and in the case of the youthful deity, a three-knob radio receiver. We are reminded of American artist Naim June Paik's installation, TV Buddha, which was made a decade later than the Agwa Mbari sculpture group but also at a time when television rather than radio was the significant global status medium. In Paik's sculpture installation, the Asian deity is shown sitting relaxed in his customary lotus position, watching a futuristic black and white television set crossed with a computer, his face serenely reflected on the empty screen.

In a previous era the status symbol among the Igbo would be an iron staff or metal anklet signifying valor, achievement, and nobility. Among the Yoruba it would be a beaded crown, among the Akan a trove of gold jewelry and custom, hand-woven fabric. As with every other culture, by the 1960s these attributes had found a different array of new signifiers that ranged from silver- or aluminum-plated bicycles (known as The White Horse) to fancy cars and electronics. None of these was inconsistent with the value structures or traditions of representation within which they occurred because they were part of the existential realities of these cultures. Some of them were necessities, others were mere frivolities, but even the frivolous were an integral part of the facts of being. Whatever their sources or provenance, and whatever the context or circumstance in which they made their appearance, such items and mannerisms were already inevitable elements of society's account of its present, which is why they appeared among not only humans, but the gods, also. Tales that associate gods and deities with such symbols abound across West Africa. In one such tale, Esu, the Yoruba deity of serendipity and messenger to the Yoruba pantheon, enacts one of his morality plays while riding a bicycle, and in the light-hearted manner in which the Yoruba relate to their gods, some have suggested that it was indeed a motorcycle rather than a bicycle, that Esu was riding. It makes little difference because, irrespective of their provenance and history, all things are made of the elements of the earth, after all, and the Earth belongs to the gods. As the novelist Chinua Achebe very succinctly puts it in his essay, Home and Exile, "those who inhabit the world of proverbs do not spend sleepless nights worrying about provenance."

The youthful deity's transistor radio may also be understood as a fashion accessory, and the Divine sculpture group clearly indicates this by placing the transistor set on the young god's lap in exact same position as it places a ladies' handbag on the lap of his sister who is seated opposite him. Both rest their props daintily on their laps as part of their casual but carefully chosen outfit, he with his polo shirt and she with her blouse and red miniskirt. The idea of the radio as a fashion accessory is one that we also find in other parts of West Africa, not the least among the nomadic peoples of the West African Sahel who use it not only for news and bearing as they travel, but also to complete their outfits on festive occasions. Among the different traveling Fulani of the region, a radio set placed to the ear may be ubiquitous, but it can also be turned into a fashion statement to fit with dark sunglasses, sometimes brightly colored parasols, and plastic toy guns. In this context, the radio, though a novelty, becomes even less of a curiosity because novelty is to fashion what breath is to life, and fashion, perhaps far more than any other element of culture, finds its catalysts and draws its strength from outside its own provenance. In every culture, fashion is the stream through which elements from abroad flow most easily and become visible. While other elements of culture such as language and faith may require effort, even coercion or imposition in order to take root, fashion rides on the curiosity, spontaneity and narcissism that are essential attributes of our nature. Beyond the ideologies and dogmas that stipulate group identity, fashion taps into the innate, individual desire to be distinct, to stand out, to look and feel good, to impress others. It builds on the subtle competitiveness of individual vanity and the infinite creativity of the individual mind. Driven by this desire, the individual either invents or locates and adopts elements out of the ordinary, beyond what is normal or customary, and this could take the form of a feather on a hat, a folded umbrella used as a walking stick (for which a certain innovative Englishman was scorned for years on the streets of London in the 18th century until his curious mannerism caught on with everyone else), or outlandish flaps and buttons, frills and scarves. The daring narcissist, who propels fashion and taste in every society, also cares little for the source or provenance of the item or mannerism for as long as it brings distinction. Eventually, what begins with one individual is adopted by the group, after the inevitable disavowal and derision that stem from collective skepticism and fear of the new, and once the transition is made and an item of fashion is adopted, it becomes part of the culture.

It should come as no surprise, therefore, that West African cultures, like all other living cultures, experience constant manifestations of cultural infusions from outside, and that these are registered most visibly through fashion. In her picture book on African adornment, Africa Adorned, Angela Fisher notes that young Wodaabe men and women with their "love of outlandish fashion and great sense of fun" search for objects in the marketplace with which they can create new and exciting ornaments. "Into their traditional festive attire," she further observes, "they incorporate odds and ends that they feel will make them look even more stunning Items such as suitcase locks and imitation gem stones are made into decorative neck pendants by the men, while the women add small hand mirrors to their embroidered skirt designs and hang torch bulbs beside leather amulet pouches as part of their decorative belts." Other examples go even further back in time. Excavations in Igbo-Ukwu in the heart of the Igbo country in the 1950s and 1960s revealed the burial chamber of a prominent, 9th century monarch whose elaborate regalia and royal paraphernalia have given scholars reason to speculate that part of it might have come from as far as the Muslim cultures of the Sahara. In his book, In Search of Africa, Malian scholar Manthia Diawara describes a more recent, urban scene from the early 1970s involving himself and his friends:

Sly put on a mud-cloth vest with a V-sign drawn on the back and 'SLY' written vertically on the vest's front, on both the left and the right. He wore juju necklaces and bracelets. He had on Levi jeans ornamented with holes and fringes. I wore a red cotton-and-polyester short-sleeved shirt with 'Keep on Truckin' ' written on the back of it. Over the shirt I put on my embroidered blue-satin jacket, combining these with blue bell-bottom trousers and my red clogs from Denmark. When I had added my Venetian-glass necklace, my cowry-shell juju bracelets, and my dark glasses, people admired us on the way. We felt good about that.

Further on in the book, Professor Diawara mistakenly describes his attire and that of his friends as "kitsch", a term that he might also readily apply to the apparel of the Wodaabe described above. Like many other late 20th century scholars and theorists of culture, he fails to understand that there is no kitsch in culture; only culture itself, because every culture is an amalgam of disparate and seemingly incongruous sources and references none of which bears or revolves on an inherent authenticity and all of which, instead, ride on hidden narratives of transition, interpretation, and transfiguration, mutating as they are invented and reinvented, forming momentary coagulations and then, dissolving and disappearing. The occasional traces and residues that such cultural coagulations leave behind are often mistaken for culture itself, or cultural authenticity, but there is no such thing as cultural authenticity and the traces are of mere ossifications, signifiers of atrophy beyond and above which living cultures strive and thrive. Islam, a religion born among nomads without permanent or monumental architecture, arrived in Europe in the 10th century and reinvented the architecture by adopting the existing traditions and inserting key, new markers of distinction. Victorian Europe transformed its aesthetics and taste by proliferating elements from Japan and the rest of the Far East as part of a new, epochal sensibility which came to be known as japonisme. This new sensibility touched everything from philosophy (Schopenhauer) to art (Van Gogh, who stated that his whole art was informed by Japanese aesthetics) and prepared the way for modernism in Europe. In a decade of crisis and war in the 1960s, American youth signified their will for peace by transforming fashion and the rest of American popular culture with elements from several, distant cultures from Asia to Africa, as well as the laid-back, sedate philosophies of Zen Buddhism, all of which evolved into a new philosophical and cultural sensibility averse to the predominant, conflict-oriented ideologies of previous generations. Such parallels are useful to the extent that they remind us that the insertion of disparate and seemingly incongruous, extraneous elements into a culture is not a peculiar phenomenon but rather its very lifeblood. References and mutations become living culture rather than debts or incongruities, and it is this creative and regenerative disposition that West African cultures colorfully and unabashedly manifest.

The 19th and 20th centuries were a significant period in the history of West African cultures, for it was during this period that their relationship with Europe changed from a trading relationship to one of colonial domination. Europe's adoption of the colonies as extensions or outposts of Empire meant that European cultural presence intensified, often through intervention or imposition. France, for instance, regarded the peoples in its colonies as citizens, albeit citizens without rights, and they were expected and encouraged to live up to what it considered the privilege of belonging to France, the "father" country. They were required to manifest their francité, their Frenchness; to adopt the language, faith and mannerisms of the French, and to locate themselves at the tail of the long and glorious history of the conquering Gauls. The British who were more subtle but no less insidious, introduced their language and mannerisms, too, but regarded their subjects as no more than vassals in the colonial outback.

Needless to say, colonialism made a very visible and long lasting impact on the peoples and cultures of West Africa, and moved societies in directions that might have been unimaginable otherwise. Worldviews were challenged, social and cultural formations dislocated, languages brought under crisis as new tongues rode on the exigencies of larger socio-political formations to subdue minority structures and agencies. In the understanding of many, the nature of engagement between Europe and these cultures led to no less than the collapse of centuries of intact sensibilities and socio-cultural structures, a case of things falling apart. Certainly, the engagement produced a new individual destined to navigate between multiple senses of self, between the idea of citizenship in a vast empire, and belonging to a subject group. The vehemence with which European cultural agency undermined worldviews and cultural values in the colonies also led to a phase of uncertainty in the subjects' confidence in the validity of their own cultural patterns and handles on existence. In particular, the encounter produced generations of West Africans of different cultural backgrounds, who were educated in ways and ideas that placed them apart from the cultures of their origin. This "alienation" has already engaged numerous scholars, but the encounter itself was not without precedent.

Prior to the arrival of Europeans, these cultures had met and withstood similar onslaughts from North Africa and the Middle-East that would transform them in many different ways. Today, many West African cultures especially to the north and the west identify themselves as Muslim, and countries like Mauritania and Senegal all but equally regard themselves as Islamic countries. In countries like Niger, Nigeria, Sudan, even Senegal, bitter differences abound between Muslim and non-Muslim citizens, much of it fuelled by politicians and fundamentalist rhetoricians. However, many of these cultures did not know Islam until a few centuries ago, and like the experience with Europe, their encounters with Arab and Islamic cultures were no less cantankerous or complicated, with ideology and faith producing violent disequilibrium while underneath its outward vandalism and disruptions, myriad subtle exchanges took place. Aspects of existing worldviews and faiths were perpetually transformed, others resiliently persisted, while new elements took root and flourished. Old gods were displaced by new gods, old enmities by new ones, yet new identities were forged, and new energies absorbed into the bloodstream of culture, among them new traditions of scholarship, for instance, that gave rise to such remarkable institutions as the University in Timbuktu and the great libraries of the Sahel that are only now being rediscovered and restored.

In same vein, the violence that colonialism wreaked on West African cultures and the aftermaths of that violence which include depletion of the natural and human resources of the region, the advent of apparently unworkable social formations, and perennial political instability, are but one aspect of the story. The other aspect is that the cultures also found certain elements of European culture sufficiently curious to be engaged, even embraced. The fact of colonization itself aroused both deep curiosity and a determination to investigate and understand the mystery of European guile. Royalty and the nobility across West Africa sent their children to Europe to discover and obtain the white man's tricks. In time even whole towns put resources together to educate their promising youth in Europe, as we find most poignantly illustrated in the work of Chinua Achebe, the continent's finest narrator of the colonial experience. In Achebe's novel, No Longer at Ease, the protagonist Obi Okonkwo, is sent off to England with a scholarship from his town's Union which was formed, according to the story, "with the aim of collecting money to send some of (the town's) brighter young men to study in England." In order to accomplish this, the novel tells us, the townspeople "taxed themselves mercilessly." In a speech at the young man's farewell party, one of the leaders of the town noted: "In times past, Umuofia would have required you to fight in her wars and bring home human heads...Today we send you to bring knowledge." It was understood that in the face of their new reality--what some might call modernity--it was crucial to know and understand the other side from within, and the town was willing to sacrifice on behalf of that mission. At the end of the party for the young scholar, the novel tells us that:

They shook hands with him and as they did so they pressed their presents into his palm, to buy a pencil with, or an exercise book or a loaf of bread for the journey, a shilling there and a penny there—substantial presents in a village where money was so rare, where men and women toiled from year to year to wrest a meager living from an unwilling and exhausted soil.

It is tempting to question the wisdom of a people who would send off their brightest youth to imbibe the ways of a marauding enemy, especially when we consider that, as noted earlier, some of those young people would end up alienated from their own cultures as a result. Some might even locate this practice within the logic of a colonial psychology of inadequacy which compels the colonized to seek the superior ways of the colonizer. However, that does not approximate the logic at work, for a people who were willing to take such trouble, even go to great lengths of self-denial to send their children to master the narrative of a strange enemy, certainly had more compelling reason than a feeling of inadequacy. Their goal was new information, new knowledge that provides a handle on a new reality. The town leader compared this knowledge to trophies of war, something that belongs to the adversary, a possession that enlarges the stock of knowledge but also prepares the culture to better engage that adversary. In that sense, to observe and absorb aspects of Europe, therefore, was not to simply emulate or mimic Europe, but instead, to imbibe it and own it in same way that a people might consume their adversaries in order to enhance their strength. Obi Okonkwo's grandfather, the tragic hero Okonkwo had given his life in a headstrong, headlong battle against the European incursion, but Europe prevailed and colonization occurred, and in the face of that fact, the cultures needed a new strategy of engagement with Europe and the predicament of its presence.

Quite significantly, the strategy was not a fruitless one, for not every one of those youth sent off to understudy Europe fell by the wayside of alienation. It was the same generation: Nnamdi Azikiwe from Nigeria, Kwame Nkrumah from the Gold Coast, Leopold Sedar Senghor from the French colonies of the Western Soudan, Amilcar Cabral from the Portuguese colony of Guiné, among many others, sent to the West on scholarships raised with sweat and blood, who would lead the nationalist movements that eventually forced Europe to reconsider its colonial mission in Africa. From the very belly of Empire in London, Paris and Lisbon, they plotted its downfall.

Just as important, however, is the fact that the desire to understudy and understand Europe was also inspired by a less politically motivated quest for knowledge; the will to discover. The same desire has always inspired societies and cultures throughout history to reach beyond their borders in search of novel ideas that might improve their way of life or add to their trove of stories. In the past, European monarchs sponsored explorers, travelers and emissaries to seek out the mysteries of distant lands. In 1177 a curious Pope Alexander III (Orlando Bandinelli) sent off his personal physician Philippus with a letter to the great Christian monarch, Presbyter Johannes (Negus of Ethiopia), ruler of Abyssinia and Greater India, eager to learn more about the King's fabled land. Although the poor doctor and his mission perished in Palestine, Umberto Eco tells us that the legend of the Priest King and the curiosity and spirit of adventure that it generated allover Europe were of "decisive importance in the expansion of the Christian West toward the Orient." The same curiosity inspired Africans to seek the mystery of Europe. The figure of the African youth with a book in hand that one finds in my work, for instance, may signify the colonial heritage in Africa, but more significantly, it testifies to a tradition of inquisitiveness and genuine quest for information which is the bedrock of transformation in every culture. Africa's quest for knowledge of other worlds is therefore neither peculiar nor questionable, and if in time it has produced mixed results; that, also, is the way of all adventure.

Important as it is, the violent and disagreeable disruptions of the colonial experience or previous encounters are seldom, explicitly registered in the visual cultures of West Africa. In fact, almost the entire period of European colonial presence in West Africa goes without much direct reference in the visual culture beside a few sarcastic images of Europeans in the form of statuettes of or mask faces for comic masquerades. What appear ubiquitously in the visual culture are the positive legacies of the encounter; new tools and conveniences such as bicycles, motor vehicles, airplanes and other forms of fast transit, sewing machines, portable umbrellas that made life much easier whether it is in the blistering heat of the Sahel or the perpetual precipitation in the rain forest; signs and symbols of the new political structures that replaced both the old systems and colonialism itself in the form of celebratory portraits of anti-colonial leaders and independence fighters as well leaders of thought, business and industry; and reaffirmations of positive values such as education, self-determination, collective aspiration, and so on. We find motifs for these legacies and values in painting, sculpture and music, for instance, but it is in fashion that they are most visible and eloquent.

With the introduction of industrial wax print textiles in West Africa toward the mid-20th century, it became easier to record or communicate ideas and values with far greater visual prominence as part of textile design, than before. Political leaders and their parties used them to canvass support by incorporating party symbols and slogans into the design, manufacturers used them to advertise their goods, and organizations and unions used them to celebrate common goals or faith, or for other propaganda. A new 'tradition' was born by which West African cultures would henceforth be identified with wax print fabrics, and the people discovered a new and very effective mass medium not unlike radio. Needless to say, the story of the advent of wax print textiles in West Africa is riddled with unsightly colonialist, mercantile machinations complete with opportunism, coercion and stereotypy. It is part of the greater and as yet unexhausted story of European manipulation of colonial resources, aesthetics, and needs across the vast geographies of empire from Asia to Africa, in the service of global, imperial commerce; and the trail of returns or revenue always led back to Europe. When it was first introduced, the fabric was made in the imperial dominions in the Far East and patented to textile mills in Manchester, England and in the Netherlands, among other European centers. Then it was shipped off with its garish "native" designs to Africa where it was embraced at first because its foreign provenance imbued it with a prestige quality. In Nigeria, for instance, children were named after one such brand of prestigious wax print, The King George. My own father was one such child. In due course, however, the wax print fabric would gain ubiquity for reasons of its easy availability.

Once it found acceptance within certain West African cultures, its source and the technology behind it became less significant and there was no philosophical hair-splitting among the general populace over whether it had or lacked authenticity, or whether it belonged in the culture or not. What was important was the innovative ways in which the form could locate itself within culture through what we might call positive points of embrace; ways in which it could be owned. In time and as local involvement in production increased, the wax print fabric in West Africa would come to testify to some of the most imaginative and compelling uses of worn fabric and textile design in the history of fashion and fabrics. It became a theatre for popular narratives of West Africa's modernity and postcoloniality, recording commemorative dates and events such as the end of colonialism and other political victories, philosophical exhortations and aphorisms, and chronicles of the historically momentous and the mundane, the politically significant as well as the everyday. Recently the material has also become a critical space in contemporary art, especially in the work of the Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare who uses the wax print to essay a layered discourse of ambivalence around the West's shared colonial heritage with Africa. Taking the material outside its traditional use as worn fabric, he makes art objects with it that critique received knowledge about this heritage, especially the fictions of authenticity versus contamination or integrity versus rupture that have come to attach to the heritage as well as the fabrics and their narratives.

It is important to note that despite its ubiquity, the wax print fabric was never embraced fully by the more ideologically motivated elite in West Africa except as a form of mass media. There have been notions in recent scholarship that African Independence Movement leaders embraced wax print fabrics as part of their ideologies of African cultural nationalism but such notions are mistaken because despite their use of these fabrics for campaign propaganda purposes, these leaders always held the fabrics suspect, and instead identified more with indigenous hand-woven, cotton fabrics and apparels because it was easier to establish a direct relationship between the later and pre-colonial history and national identities, beside the obvious fact that the wax print, though initially aimed at the elite, eventually became part of popular apparel to better serve colonial and ultimately expatriate, commercial interests. However, it was ideology more than class that underpinned the rejection of the fabrics by the elite, especially the political elite, and this is significant because it reminds us that at the crossroads of culture, ideology serves as a filter, a border post through which the streams of culture are critically screened for elements of supposed contamination. Such regulatory intercession, though it is not to be dismissed entirely without exploration and explication, nevertheless seldom succeeds in effectively countering the more organic propensities of culture.

We began this brief introduction with a reference to an image of a West African deity with a transistor radio. We also touched on a childhood story of encounters with the transistor radio. We return to those references because the transistor radio is a powerful trope for culture itself. The radio is a metaphor for innovation, communication, reception, exchange, dissemination and circulation, and though it is never entirely innocent or free, on the level of signs the radio is nevertheless symbolic of the free flow of elements and ideas between and across locations. The image of the young god with a radio tells us of a culture that is invested in this free flow, a culture that is eager to listen, to keep abreast, to tune into the wavelengths of human heritage and open its feelers to ethereal signals from other cultures and other lands, a culture with a ready handshake. Certainly, a culture that is willing to trust its gods with radios indicates to us that it is an open and receptive culture, a republican society where elements, viewpoints, inventions and innovations may circulate and flourish irrespective of their provenance; because curiosity is alive and healthy and curiosity is the sparkplug of culture. Though the Igbo example encapsulated in this image may not apply in all detail to every West African society, since the cultures are not necessarily identical, it is nevertheless representative in many ways. While some may read it as indicative of a culture too quick to embrace others, the history of human societies teaches us that such disposition is indeed the pattern of culture, for even as societies squabble and duel, and engage in the most horrendous wars over faith, ideology or dominions, the lesson of history is that often they are simultaneously locked in an embrace at the level of culture, with elements coursing between and flowing through whether in the form of stolen artifacts that leave their impact on aesthetics and taste, usurped architecture that proceeds to shape tradition, or knowledge and ideas that are either consciously adopted or find their way into everyday life. The details of exchange will depend to some degree on the nature of power relations between the societies involved, and patterns of dominance may emerge at the level of the visible, but dominance and power are the domains of ideology and seldom does ideology prevail over the propensities of culture. It is no surprise that the collapse of ideology always leads to an avalanche at the floodgates of culture.

Cultures are porous. That is their nature. They have no borders in the sense that we understand borders; as clear cartographic demarcations, gauze fences with manned entry points, blood lines drawn in the sand. Instead, cultures are like streams in the ocean, often coursing in opposite directions, sometimes of different temperatures and immediate sources, yet all belonging to the same great source and constituting the same great mass. They are inextricably connected because they consist of the same fundaments and rest on the same bed. Like water, it is only when cultures are frozen and petrified that they sit in blocks separate and distinct from each other. In The Foley, a novel by South African writer Ivan Vladislavic, one of the characters, a hardware man named Mr. Malgas uses a bath sponge to illustrate a complex project to his wife. Sitting in the bathtub at the end of the day, Malgas picks up the sponge and holds it up to his wife. "Take this sponge," he says to Mrs. Malgas, "Solid, not so? Look at the surface here...Full of holes, craters...mouths, leading to tunnels, souterrains, catacombs...twists and turns. Squeeze it...full of water." Malgas is describing a visionary house that never comes to fruition, but he is also describing something else, something more fundamental and convoluted; something perennial. He is describing culture, for cultures are like sponges which appear solid and definite of contour on the outside, yet are rifled through with holes, perforations, pockets and holding chambers, with one half made of the solid that is visible to all, and the other made of different elements, neither intrinsic nor extraneous, without which they are incapable of that outward stolidity that we ascribe to them. The visible contours of culture are but only a holding structure, a shell. The holes, craters, tunnels, souterrains and catacombs, twists and turns are the unguarded passageways through which elements of culture permeate societies and circulate within them; they are the crevices in which the substance of culture resides. Like borders, ideologies may forbid and prohibit, but culture is more generous and encompassing, more variegated and subtle, more vulnerable; human. As nature forbids a vacuum, so does culture abhor impediment, and just as societies survive regimes and dogmas to reinvent themselves, so does culture prevail against overdetermination and stricture.

West African cultures are living cultures, and like all living cultures, they heave and swell with elements in constant transformation and transition. The stimuli for these transformations may be generated within through desire for exploration, the will for change, or even as a result of the overarching impositions of ideology and faith. They may also come in form of impregnating residues left in the wake of encounters with other cultures, and the history of the region is replete with such encounters and residues. Ultimately their greatest strength and fascination as cultures lie in the nature of their responses to these stimuli, and the richness and diversity that they enable. That is the lesson of the god and his transistor radio.

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