ABSTRACT
‘At Okokomaiko-Lagos, I was a witness to the story of a cat that transformed into a human being (an aged woman)’, avers Nigerian editorialist Amaechi Ukor (1997), writing in a piece meant not only to be placed in a local newspaper but to be posted on the World Wide Web for a global audience. What is more, Ukor and his colleagues at the Post Express Wired want this global audience to know that such transformations are not ‘traditional’ in a simple sense but are as much a part of their fractured experience of modernity as is their ability to reach both national and transnational readers. Indeed, the general theme of Ukor’s editorial is that modern Nigeria has become a place of ‘horrifying realities’, where people are daily outraged by events and practices unheard of in the precolonial period. The unsettling quality of Nigerian life at the beginning of the twenty-first century is marked by a different attachment to material reality – whether through virtual relationships, mediated by the electronic press, or through signs of another virtuality on Nigerians’ home ground: the seeming ubiquity of what evangelical Christians see as satanic witchcraft and magic in the country’s teeming cityscapes. In this chapter, I will therefore consider three different subgenres of Nigerian popular press narratives about magical modernity, seeking to understand why Nigerians mark their experiences of modernity differently from most westerners – if, indeed, they do.
