ABSTRACT
One of Karin Barber’s most striking observations in her 1997 essay “Preliminary Notes on Audiences in Africa” is that popular art forms elicit creative acts of interpretation, consumption, and reconfi guration that audiences engage in when they make meaning out of such forms, and that these activities have as much to teach us as about the popular arts in Africa as texts, performances, and objects themselves. In this essay I show how the magazine Bingo, the fi rst glossy magazine aimed at Francophone African audiences, fi rst published in Dakar and Paris in 1953 and distributed across the Francophone world, mirrored its readers’ responses to the recurrent theme of modern African womanhood in a magazine form defi ned by disjuncture and variety. Like the concert party in Ghana which Catherine Cole has so richly analyzed, the magazine’s startling juxtapositions of highly contrasting stories, advertisements, and images and its many uses of collage-like aesthetics:
offered the [readership] a position from which to conduct the operations constitutive of “modernity” [in decolonizing Francophone Africa]: for “modernity” meant the power to select from and combine the confl icting and contradictory elements of social experience, rather than to endorse one homogenous state at the expense of another (for example, “Westernisation” at the expense of “tradition”). (Barber 1997, 355)
In Bingo’s pages, women were interpellated by the cross-referential links between print, audio, and visual communications featured in the pathbreaking magazine. Advertisers invited African women to participate in the process of constructing modern selfhood through consumption of goods ranging from Aspro to Kodak fi lm, while the editorial content regularly featured both gender-stereotypical pages “Pour vous Madame,” including instructions on sewing, cooking, and home décor, and full-length stories about women in new careers, including but not limited to the culture industry-singers, actors, dancers, and cover girls. When Bingo featured Binta Ba on the cover of its March 1958 issue, along with a story “Binta Ba, première Cover Girl africaine,” she was by no means a new discovery, having starred in fi lms and appeared in the pages of the American Life magazine. Rather,
Bingo’s readers were wholly familiar with the tropes of a cover story offering the minutiae of a glamorous young woman’s professional and leisure life, and the photo spread detailing Ba’s activities, shopping for fabric, listening to the radio, having a drink in a bar, reading with a backdrop of Bingo covers, and strolling the streets of Dakar à la fl âneuse, endorsed all of these forms of leisure for Bingo’s female readers. What makes the magazine so important for thinking about popular culture’s negotiations with rapidly changing gender norms is the very digest form that juxtaposed often contradictory images of idealized womanhood. Where, on the streets of Dakar or Cotonou or Yaoundé particular dispositions were sanctioned and approved over others, in the pages of Bingo readers could fl ip between various performances of tradition and modernity and collate their own collages of such possibilities.
