By Prof Terhemba Shija
One of my most favourite comedians of late has been a man with stupid looks in an over-sized green shirt, but with a sharp intellect called Brain-jotter. He has created a huge sensation on the social media by turning the 41-year old palmwine music of the little known Sir Mike Ejeagha into a spectacular marvel.
The genius in Brain-jotter’s enactment is not merely the resuscitation of the highlife genre; nor the vigorous twerks of dancers to the percussions of Ejeagha’s stringed box guitar, but the absurd meaningless chase that takes place between the two dancers to round up the performance. This classic display of afterthought really intrigues me.
Why do the two performers walking towards and past each other on a lonely path twerk and carelessly kick their legs in unison but then end up chasing each other? Why is there a sudden somersault in behaviour?
Comedy is strangely a very difficult vocation, particularly in a country undergoing harsh economic and social problems like Nigeria. It is easier to make people cry than to make them laugh. Those who succeed in creating humour in most cases are born funny. They possess personal traits that effortlessly provoke mirth, or help suspend the sense of tragic existence for a while.
It takes a man with a comic disposition to calm down the nerves of a hungry and angry audience. Accordingly, our society appreciates and rewards comedians perhaps more than it ever did to practitioners of tragedy. We now have scores of home-grown millionaire pranksters, stand-up comedians, social media influencers, MCs and 3D artists dominating the Nigerian celebrity list, of which Brain-jotter is one.
This particular Brain-jotter prank itself is a product of an afterthought. Human nature, not being perfect, does not necessarily trust its senses while in quest for the best. It relies on its instincts and thoughts for perfection. We all engage in a series of afterthoughts reversals, corrections and innovations to attain perfection.
Ejeagha’s music may have been perceived as perfect at the time of its composition in 1983, but it takes a stroke of artistic afterthought by the brilliant internet-savvy comedian to imagine that such music could be kept alive through unique steps of buffoonery.
Our world is indeed a vast field of infinite possibilities. No idea or occurrence is final. We live and operate in a protean laboratory in which the brave and the brilliant conjure up ideas easily from otherwise innocuous events.
It’s possible that Brain-jotter’s idea in the afterthought of one dancer chasing the other emanates from the sudden realisation of the betrayal enacted in the Igbo folktale of the tortoise and the elephant conveyed in Ejeagha’s music. It is natural to imagine that the elephant which felt cheated in the race to win the King’s daughter in marriage had started chasing its rival, the trickster tortoise. So even the giant elephant is forced to realise how intellectually deficient it is in everyday living among inferior animals.
This is a pleasant reminder that African traditional folklore could still be as useful in modern art as it was in precolonial times. It only takes the thoughtful Mike Ejeagha to recreate them and also the Modernist Brain-jotter to uplift them to contemporary art with unique African identity.
The danger in our overhyped computer age is that we tend to believe that science could one day spare us the rigours of human thoughts and actions. We brag about our age being the ultimate of human civilization.
We have computerised or automated services in virtually everything we do with the hope of rendering the mistakes-prone individual redundant. Aircrafts are flown on autopilots. Factories are run by robots. Bombs are dropped by drones. Orgasms are obtained by sex toys. Cars are driven without drivers. Essays written by AI. We are increasingly losing faith in the capacity of our brains to help us cope with the challenges of our time. We delegate machines to think for us to avoid incidences of afterthought or mistakes.
Please pardon my “wanderings in my wonderings” to use the words of Professor James Tsaaior I’m really scared about the effect of the collapse of thoughts in the electronic age.
