256 african appropriations
the terms of black and white conviviality changed. During our interview,
he explained how, despite the official end of apartheid, white and black
pupils still gathered in separate corners of the schoolyard. He eventually
came into contact with Kwaito music by socializing with children from
both groups and swapping hip-hop cds with black friends. His style of
domestic cosmopolitanism therefore developed against the backdrop of
a society in social transformation. The descendants of four generations
of white settlers had lost their privileges and were now seeking to define
a place for themselves within the new political situation. Sell’s frequent
use of the national flag, which is perhaps the most striking feature of his
performances, has to be understood in this light. It is at once an emphatic
claim of belonging and a dedicated confession to commitment—also a
clever way of branding.
As we have seen, Mohammed Jammal, alias W hite Nigerian, shares this
frequent use of national symbols. He, too, belongs to a category of people
that arrived during the colonial past. As so-called middlemen between
colonizers and the colonized, the Levantine traders of West Africa ben-
efited from the colonial economic system. Prejudices against the K’wara,
as they are called in northern Nigeria, originate in their past privileges.
A fter 1960, their allegiance to the independent state has often been ques-
tioned, as they are known to maintain ties to their ancestral homelands
and the Levantine diaspora elsewhere. It is against this backdrop that
Jammal stresses that he carries only one passport, which is Nigerian, and
that he “wrote history” by being the first “white man” ever to join the Ni-
gerian Youth Corps Service. The domestic cosmopolitanism of the K’wara
of northern Nigeria starts literally at home, through African nannies and
housekeepers, and though Jammal discloses little about his past, we may
assume that his family also enjoyed this privilege. Apart from Nigeria as
a whole, Jammal also identifies with Jos, or “J-town,” as it is called in Ni-
gerian slang, where he grew up and went to school. Significantly, Jos has a
long history of cosmopolitan encounters, attracting people from all over
Nigeria and also missionaries and development workers from Europe and
America. Committed to the well-being of his hometown, Jammal took
part in a number of media campaigns dedicated to the restoration of peace
in Jos, which since 2001, has witnessed a series of bloody conflicts along
ethnic and religious lines.