Review

Reviewed Work(s): Postcolonial Automobility: Car Culture in West Africa by Green-

Simms, Lindsey B.
Review by: Dante Barksdale
Source: Africa Today , Vol. 64, No. 4, African Artistic Practices and New Media (Summer
2018), pp. 119-120
Published by: Indiana University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/africatoday.64.4.10

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but of linking township musicians with otherwise limited mobility into
networks in an open-ended production of relations that produce kwaito
itself. He links this to an analysis of kwaito’s layered sounds, claiming that
the emergent property of its individual layers taken together is kwaito. Free-
dom, then, is not about individual agency, but about the human networks
and mediation necessary to render an individual voice audible.
Kwaito’s Promise is an invaluable resource for scholars interested in

africa today 64(4)

contemporary South Africa, African music and popular culture more broadly,
and the relationship between aesthetics and politics. It is particularly suit-
able for graduate courses in African studies and (ethno)musicology. The
text is elegantly written, weaving together a body of material of impressive
depth and breadth in a way that is clear and easy to follow. Steingo’s account
foregrounds class difference and is generally sensitive to the dynamics of
gender and sexuality in the spaces he describes, though more reflection on

119
the gendered dynamics of nonprofessional kwaito would be welcome. He
uses lyrical and musical analysis sparingly and compellingly to forward his

Book Reviews
central arguments. Kwaito’s Promise outlines important new directions
for studies of popular culture and media in Africa and beyond, particularly
in how it intervenes in the ways we conceive of global flows, technology,
aesthetics, and ultimately, freedom itself.
Catherine M. Appert
Cornell University

Green-Simms, Lindsey B. 2017. POSTCOLONIAL AUTOMOBILITY: CAR

CULTURE IN WEST AFRICA. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
280 pp.

The growth of automobile culture and automobility, described as the “auto-

mobile’s promise of autonomous, unfettered mobility,” intersect with lit-
erature, media, and film in Lindsey B. Green-Simms’s work, Postcolonial
Automobility: Car Culture in West Africa. Green-Simms weaves together
modernity, freedom, and social relations throughout her work to emphasize
that the car is not merely a means of transportation, but a status symbol and
a metaphorical and literal representation of varied things to various people
in West Africa.
Green-Simms begins her work with an overview of the history of West
Africa—from 1898 through decolonization to the contemporary age—to
create the backdrop to the artistic works she incorporates in subsequent
chapters. At the beginning of the twentieth century, French colonial officials
in West Africa alternately embraced and tried to impede the proliferation of
automobiles, beginning with the celebration of the first automobile ride in
West Africa in February 1900. During the interwar period, the introduction
of Fords, along with driving and the newly organized professions associated

Africa Today Vol. 64, No. 4 • Copyright © The Trustees of Indiana University • DOI: 10.2979/africatoday.64.4.10

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 with driving, made automobility much more feasible. Colonial governments
began investing in infrastructure to promote modernization and motoriza-
tion in the post–World War II era, and later, postdecolonization governments
adopted the idea that infrastructure and technological advancement were the
roads to modernization.
The second chapter opens with the fact that Nigeria has the world’s
highest fatality rate for automobile crashes. The chapter focuses on Wole
africa today 64(4)

Soyinka’s play The Road, which centers on Nigerian truck drivers. The
uncertainty and chaos of the road is entwined with Yoruba mythology and
the story of Ogun, god of roads. The third and fourth chapters revolve around
francophone and Nollywood cinema, respectively. African cinema, especially
from the francophone countries, uses the car as a status symbol that repre-
sents things about the driver or owner. Ousmane Sembène’s Xala (1974) and
Jean-Pierre Bekolo’s Quartier Mozart (1992) portray cars as symbolic mani-
120

festations of problems experienced by the characters. The breakdown of El-

Hadji’s Mercedes-Benz in Xala serves as a sign of his impotence, and cars in
Book Reviews

Quartier Mozart serve as signs of the patriarchy. The fifth and final chapter
subverts the generally male-dominated genre of automobility by focusing on
feminist texts and integrating those works into popular patriarchal works.
Green-Simms repurposes another film by Sembène, frequently called the father
of African cinema, in her final chapter. Sembène’s film Fait Kiné and Ama
Ata Aidoo’s novel Changes: A Love Story center women in automobility as
a means to independence and autonomy, but as Green-Simms argues, not as
a sign of upward mobility or Nollywood glamour, instead serving as a model
for how car ownership affects the lives of middle-class African women.
Green-Simms expertly uses several examples from famous plays,
novels, films, and popular videos to serve as vignettes of West African auto-
mobility and explain the cultural phenomenon of cars and how they serve as
examples of the contradictions of modernization and globalization.
Dante Barksdale
University of California, Davis

Palmer, Ian, Nishendra Moodley, and Susan Parnell. 2017. BUILDING A

CAPABLE STATE: SERVICE DELIVERY IN POST-APARTHEID SOUTH
AFRICA. London: Zed Books.

In Building a Capable State, Ian Palmer, Nishendra Moodley, and Susan

Parnell seek to understand how South Africa’s governments—local, provin-
cial, national—have progressed in delivering services. The authors take into
account the country’s history and recent transition to democracy, as well as
its geographical and political challenges. They support their work with data
on a variety of basic services and comparisons with similar countries. The
study that emerges is both sympathetic and pragmatic.

Africa Today Vol. 64, No. 4 • Copyright © The Trustees of Indiana University • DOI: 10.2979/africatoday.64.4.11

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