Nationalism in a Virtual Space

This article begins with a quote from Iain Chambers about the physical and cultural differences of London and Lagos—but also about how those differences can be seen as an aperture, an opening, a “hinge” (in his terms) that enables movement between metropoles. There is something, if we can believe Chambers, in Lagos that London wants; just as there is something in London that Lagos wants. Generally in immigration studies this equation is phrased so as only to represent a one-dimensional directionality: from the point of view of Lagosians wanting London. But Chambers is trying to suggest that globalization and what Appadurai (1996: 5) might call the “imagination” of the globalized cannot move in only one direction. Otherwise, how can these concepts be “global” in any real sense? In the material that follows, I want to complicate things even more than this to suggest that Lagosians in London also want Lagos—or, perhaps more accurately for my own work, that Abeokutans in Pittsburgh want Lagos or Onitshans in Washington D. C. desire Abuja, Nigeria's new capital territory. For not all metropolitan immigrants from a single country come from the same metropolis, and not all nationalist immigrants conceptualize themselves as citizens of exactly the same nation. ¹

During the years 1993-97, I worked on a research project on Nigerian immigration in the west—focusing specifically on Nigerian immigrant discourses around nationalism and the “brain drain,” or “brain drainage,” as some Nigerian immigrants have begun to call it. Most of this research took the form of preliminary interviews with Nigerian immigrants about issues relating to their immigrant experience: how they came to the US, what they are doing here now, and their plans for return or eventual assimilation into American society. I also collected and read Nigerian immigrant publications as well as talked with editors and writers of these publications, trying to find out more about how these popular print media (magazines, newspapers, or irregularly published information sheets) help to spread information about and through various Nigerian immigrant communities. ²

Looking at Nigerian immigrant print media as well as talking with Nigerians currently residing in the United States helped me better to understand the importance that this group gave to the concept of Nigerian nationalism, even during the dark days of the Abacha military regime. The research also gave me a sense of the ambiguities associated with being nationalists who do not make their homes within the borders of their nation. A typical issue of a Nigerian-American publication consists of “news of home,” often taking a critical position towards the current regime but sometimes showing a very uncritical boosterism, articles about immigrant life in the west (e.g. problems between African immigrants and African Americans), society features (generally showing local Nigerian dignitaries at parties or more public functions), and entertainment news. Advertisements in these publications tend to come from Nigerian-owned businesses in the region of publication, airlines, and sometimes Nigerian state governments, asking for investments from presumably well-to-do expatriates.

Nigerian immigrants are also involved in television programming in a number of cities, generally on public access channels. ³ These programs may show Nigerian and other African music videos, Nigerian produced video films (on topics of interest to both a local and a global Nigerian audience, like the power of evangelical Christian healing), or they can be “chat shows” that focus on issues of interest to the Nigerian immigrant audience. Commercials associated with this kind of public access programming again are targeted towards the immigrant audience, informing members of that audience where to buy Nigerian or African produce, music and videos as well as, in the case of Cambridge, Massachusetts local access programming, what Nigerian lawyers in the Boston area specialize in immigration litigation.

I bring this material up to demonstrate the importance of media to these Nigerian groups and to suggest that the active production and consumption of various forms of media marks this particular African immigrant population out as one which is interested in explaining itself and its many subcultures both to itself and to a more global audience. Not only content with engaging this global audience through print and public access video, transnational Nigerians have, during the past decade, become very actively engaged in yet another communications medium. Those Nigerian immigrants throughout the world who have access to personal computers with modems or office workstations connected to local area networks are entering into cyberspace in increasing numbers and are constructing what I call a “virtual Nigeria” through the use of email, an efflorescence of websites with Nigerian content and particularly a listserv (that transcends the boundaries, as I will discuss below, of a single list) called Naijanet.

By discussing Naijanet and its denizens, I would like to begin a more general discussion of the problem of imagining a nation within a virtual space—that is, taking the nation-state completely out of its traditional context, material space enclosed by politically-drawn boundaries, locality, and reconstructing it or some simulacrum of it inside an immaterial, or virtual, space. ⁴ Another way to posit this problem might be to ask what becomes of nationalist discourse when it is freed from the physical constraints of nationhood? How would unreconstructed nationalists imagine and “build” their nation if they did not really have to deal with the material problems—like repressive military regimes, a rapidly deflating economic system and infrastructural failure—that are part of the everyday life experience of their fellows within Nigeria? ⁵ Perhaps the best way to begin unpacking these issues would be to describe “Naija,” the virtual Nigeria, and its inhabitants/creators during the 1990s. Therefore the next section of the article will deal with what we might call the social and historical topography of that virtual space: how Naija came to be, and something about its sociological makeup in this period.

Naijanet: A Brief History

According to sources on Naijanet (notably ekundayo, who was the earliest net administrator), the first move towards developing a Nigerian online network took place in 1991 when Noble “Baba” Ekajeh, then of Dartmouth College, began to forward email relating to Nigerian issues to selected friends. ⁶ One of Ekajeh's friends, having enjoyed these private mails, suggested on the Usenet newsgroup soc.culture.african that this informal posting system be transformed into a real Nigerian network. This network would emphasize news from Nigeria and discussions about social and political issues facing Nigerians both “at home” and abroad. “Naija-admin” ekundayo (Enuma Ogunyemi, a PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and no longer an active Naijanetter in the late 1990s) took on the task of irregularly scanning the Reuters news service for information about Nigeria and began to post these news updates for all interested parties, at that time consisting only of “a handful” of Nigerian immigrants.

Around the same time, Patrick Nta at Harvard began a similar network called nigeria@med.harvard.edu. Never intended as a rival for ekundayo's Naijanet (as it was now known), nigeria's membership eventually consolidated with the MIT-based list and formed the foundation for the current discussion group. Until the June 12th, 1993 Nigerian presidential elections were set aside, Naijanet grew slowly and remained mostly a news forum. However, in light of the controversy around General Babangida's refusal to allow Mohsood Abiola to take office, Naijanet became a nexus for discussion about the legitimacy of the Nigerian government, questions about the feasibility of southern/northern separatism, other issues relating to the now defunct elections, and the palace coup that facilitated General Babangida's “retirement” and the ascendancy of General Sani Abacha in November, 1993. More and more Nigerians were drawn to the net, mostly through word of mouth, and gradually any issues relating to Nigeria, immigration, and social topics of interest to Africans were discussed—making Naijanet into what was then called in the mid-1990s a BBS (bulletin board, a locus for online “chat”).

Naijanet, by 1996-97, served more than 630 members, although its growth fluctuated frequently during my tenure as resident online ethnographer. During 1995, especially around the time of the crisis over the judicial murder of environmental activist and author Ken Saro-Wiwa, it reached a height of around 750 subscribers, but it was much smaller in February 1994 when I first joined. ⁷ Then there were around 300 subscribers, with perhaps only 15-20 very active participants out of that entire number. I also noted a sharp decline in rate of growth from February 1996 into 1997: where once I could count on up to 10 “subscribe Naijanet” posts per week, this number of subscriptions in any one month became much more rare. This would seem to imply that the Nigerian immigrants who are willing to support the list, even passively, resides somewhere in the 600-700 numerical range. There are probably many reasons for this leveling off of growth, not the least of which is Naijanet's tendency towards fission during times of stress.

Some issues of discussion on the list spurred such heated debate that Naijanet has spun off at least six related online networks since 1992: Oduduwa (the Yoruba net), ANA-net (a net for the Association of Nigerians Abroad, an activist group), Naijawoman-net, soc.culture.nigeria on Usenet, Igbo—net, and Rivnet (a net for indigenes of southeastern Nigeria's Rivers State). ⁸ A number of people who were once important “netizens” of Naijanet have also begun to construct Africa or Nigeria pages on the World Wide Web; these pages act as clearinghouses of information about African and Nigerian issues on the internet at large. ⁹ Just as is the case for Naijanet proper, an interested party had to subscribe to a listserver to gain access to Oduduwa, ANA-net, Naijawoman-net, Igbo—net, or Rivnet. He or she would need to access the Usenet in order to take part in discussions on soc.culture.nigeria. World Wide Web pages, of course, are available to anyone with a modem, the proper browser software or access to the Web through their home institutions. Until the advent of African pages on the Web, which are open to any “net surfer,” the existence of Naijanet and its subsidiary nets was not widely advertised. Basically, an interested party needed to know a Naijanetter in order to learn the address to subscribe. The subsidiary nets were (and remain) even more difficult to access. People who have heard of the subsidiary nets would, during the later 1990s, post to Naijanet and request their subscription addresses from Naijanetters “in the know.”

Oduduwa, the Yoruba net, was created when other Nigerian ethnicities protested the prevalence of Yoruba “chat” on Naijanet. Since the original Naijanetters were all Yoruba-speakers, some felt that it was natural to include posts in their indigenous language on Naijanet and protested the exclusion. (Some old Naijanetters continued into 1997 to intersperse their posts with Yoruba proverbs and phrases, but in deference to this historical split generally translated them into English.) Discussions on Oduduwa took place in both Yoruba and English, and participants discussed Yoruba culture and Yoruba politics there, although they were not limited to these topics by a moderator. Non-Yoruba speakers were not encouraged to join Oduduwa, although they were not turned away if they subscribed. ¹⁰ Oduduwa, although the oldest of the fission-nets, was by no means the largest. Circumscribed by language and, perhaps, by its reputation as a forum for the old guard of Naijanet, most young Yoruba-speakers who joined Naijanet in the mid to late 1990s seemed to spend more time there and requests for information about the subsidiary net were rare.

The ANA-net was established in the aftermath of June 12th, when the highly politicized climate of Naijanet made some less politically inclined (and older) Naijanetters uncomfortable. According to ekundayo, civility began to break down on the net and people who wanted to discuss possible action against the military regime were called, among less palatable names, “political wannabees.” Some of the so-called political wannabees broke away from Naijanet and formed an organization known as the Association of Nigerians Abroad (ANA) as well as a new network—based at Harvard under the stewardship, again, of Patrick Nta. Unlike Oduduwa net, ANA-netters forwarded some of their communications back to Naijanet. For example, during 1994-5 while tensions were high between Nigeria and Cameroon because of a number of border disputes, the ANA solicited both Naijanetters and members of the Cameroonian network, Camnet, to help compose and sign a letter to General Abacha and President Biya of Cameroon. This letter asked that a diplomatic solution be sought before warfare broke out between their two countries. The ANA and ANA-net were also active during 1994's general strikes against General Abacha's government, calling for an end to military rule in Nigeria—and even taking out advertisements in Nigerian periodicals in support of the striking petroleum workers. Again, ANA and ANA-net took a leadership role in the global protests over the executions of the Ogoni environmental activists in late 1995. During 1996-97, however, ANA was a less-visible presence on Naijanet, tapering off its posts in the face of a growing and Naijanet-vocal pro-democracy movement whose members did not belong to ANA and whose solutions for Nigeria's problems were possibly more radical than those proposed by ANA. There was also fear expressed in a number of posts that Naijanet had come under the surveillance of the Nigerian Federal Military Government, which might well have had something to do with the ANA's lowered profile on the older net.

Naijawomen-net began on less specifically Nigerian grounds. Late in 1993 a discussion started on Naijanet relating to naming and gender. Women, since gender is not necessarily marked by their names in Nigerian languages, informed Naijanet participants at large that they were tired of being addressed as “Mr.” or “Brother” in every post. According to my net- informants—as I was not yet subscribed during this debate—some men on the net took the women's posting as contentious and made sexist remarks. ¹¹ An acrimonious set of exchanges ensued, and women were generally dissatisfied with the results. Early in 1994, another discussion began on Naijanet about female circumcision. Feminist/womanist Nigerians believed that this practice should be eradicated in Nigeria and elsewhere on the continent; other men and women saw the issue as being one of “tradition” and suggested that the “abolitionists” were under the sway of (alien) European feminist doctrines. Questions about the authenticity of certain netters' Africanness were raised. Some Naijanetters complained, once again, that the network was becoming too politicized. In consequence, a female netter from University of Pennsylvania (Lola) decided to start up a woman's network. As in the ANA case, Naijawoman-net postings still were forwarded, from time to time, to the main network—and Naijanet postings of interest to Naijawoman-netters are forwarded to Pennsylvania. Although a number of Nigerian women left Naijanet and, consequently, “Naija” for good during these debates, the majority of female Naijanetters decided to access both nets. However, very few male “Naijas” were ever involved with Naijawoman- net or expressed curiosity about what was being discussed there.

Soc.culture.nigeria became part of the Usenet during the late spring of 1995. Like every discussion group on Usenet, soc.culture.nigeria had to be voted for by the general population of Usenet, and it appears to have passed into existence without much difficulty. Naijanetters used the introduction of soc.culture.nigeria to educate each other about discussion on the Usenet—since it turned out that many Naijanetters during this period had never heard of Usenet and did not know how to vote or to participate on it. Most of the Nigerians who participated on Usenet, however, continued at first to use the more general forum of soc.culture.african, and soc.culture.nigeria has only recently gained a popularity remotely similar to that which Naijanet enjoyed in its heyday. I would suggest that this may have something to do with the public character of Usenet discussion groups. Anyone can join in while surfing the Usenet, and Naijanet, at least through 1997, provided a more comfortable arena for discussion than did soc.culture.nigeria, partially because Nigerians were sure that they were in the majority on the list. Having a majority space is clearly important in a culture—and not only a cyberculture—where Nigerian immigrants are all too often a small minority and where they find them must adapt their understandings and experiences constantly to those of the west.

Another addition to Naijanet's subsidiary nets was Igbo—net—a listserv that interests me particularly, since my first Nigerian fieldwork (1987-88) was with Igbo-speaking peoples. Igbo—net began during the summer of 1994, after an especially heated exchange between Igbo- speakers and members of Nigeria's other ethnic groups over the Biafran (or Nigerian, depending on your position) civil war. This exchange sprung up around a discussion about honoring the Biafran dead, a very important topic for Igbo-speaking people who still feel very strongly the loss of their lineage-mates in the war. Some non-Igbo were of the opinion that former Biafrans should “just deal” with the fact that they had lost the civil war and forget about it; indeed that they should concern themselves more with the fate of contemporary Nigeria and its (living) population. At this juncture in the discussion a group of Naijanetters revealed themselves to be former combatants, mostly from the Biafran side, who took umbrage at the thought that their sacrifices were to be disregarded and forgotten in the face of yet another military take-over in the country. One of these former Biafran combatants, Uzo O., decided that it was time for the Igbo-speakers on Naijanet to have their own discussion group, and he set up Igbo—net on a University of Texas at Austin network.

Uzo O.'s list was formally announced on Naijanet just as the furor over Biafra was finally dying down, and it raised a whole new set of questions in the minds of Naijanetters about the future of Naijanet. To Igbo-speakers' dismay, some Yoruba netters—smarting under the recent failure of the majority of Igbo people to respond to the (subsequently unsuccessful) Nigerian general strike—decried the extension of Naija by means of what they called “tribalism.” As some of the Igbo- speakers pointed out, these same Yoruba-speakers were likely active members of Oduduwa-net. As one Igbo netter put it to me in a private mail: “Why is it ‘culture' when the Yoruba netters set up Oduduwa and ‘tribalism' when we set up Igbo—net?” Meanwhile, the Igbo—net has been extraordinarily successful since its inception and continues to host very active discussions that sometimes cross over to Naijanet and soc.culture.nigeria to the present day. According to Uzo O., Igbo—net maintains an active and growing subscription, and a number of topics dear to the heart of anthropologists (there are at least three ethnographers who participate sporadically on Igbo—net), as well as to Igbo-speakers themselves, have been closely discussed. Since mid-1994, Igbo—netters have talked about the civil war and memorialization, the historical position of the Aro Igbo, the dearth of women on the nets and Igbo gender relations more generally, current Nigerian politics from various Igbo points of view, “cultural outings” of various Igbo immigrant associations around the United States and Great Britain, and people have supplied poems, proverbs and stories in Igbo and worked collectively on translations. There has even been some discussion of how best to represent Igbo's tone and other orthographic markings within the limitations of internet keyboard symbols. Igbo—net does not limit itself to Igbo-speakers, but it does caution subscribers that Igbo is a very acceptable form of discourse on the net. Still, except for a few users who are very fluent in written Igbo, many of the more complex discussions are carried on in English or a mixture of English and Igbo. Almost all Igbo—netters maintain the convention of “greeting” their fellow netters in Igbo at the beginning of each post, however, using a variety of greetings that come from every part of the Igbo-speaking Nigerian southeast.

Rivnet also had a political genesis. During late 1994-early 1995 discussions began about “abandoned properties” on Naijanet. This controversy is one of the lasting aftermaths of the Nigerian civil war, and has to do with whether Rivers State indigenes ought to retain usage of properties that belonged to members of other ethnic groups before the war. During the discussion, some Rivers State netters detected a continuing hegemony within Naijanet of what is sometimes called the “Big Three” in Nigeria: the Yoruba, Hausa and Igbo ethnic groups. In the spirit of a growing minority consciousness in Nigeria, Rivers netters decided to break off the mother net and set up a forum for discussion of southeastern minorities' issues, away from the eyes of Yoruba, Hausa and Igbo immigrant compatriots. Although an active listserv for a short period, the emergence of minority politics at the center of contemporary Nigerian politics—particularly in the detention and subsequent execution of Ken Saro-Wiwa and his fellow Ogoni activists—seems to have short-circuited Rivnet's expansion. Rivnet participants either eventually came back into Naijanet in order to represent minority viewpoints during the discussion around the military and multinational corporate repression of the oil-producing regions, or they disappeared from all Naijanet-related discursive spaces. Many of these minority netters expended their electronic efforts during this period in the building and maintenance of activist web pages, which proliferated in the wake of the sudden, global interest in southeastern Nigeria, and only now, after the 1999 Nigerian elections, are showing any interest in returning to Naijanet discussions.

In Naijanet's latter-day incarnation, anyone who was Nigerian or a “friend of Nigeria” could subscribe to the net and participate freely (although security was tightened somewhat once netters discovered that their conversations were being “overheard” by military government operatives after 1995). As with most discussion groups on the internet, Naijanet's administrator and most of its participants advocated a strong platform of anti-censorship: people were allowed to say whatever they like—in criticism or praise—about Nigeria, its present government (and any past governments), public figures, or any other issue that was suggested for discussion. Obviously this anti-censorship position has been tried over the past decade by certain “flames” directed at proponents (or opponents) of the Nigerian military, by issues relating to Nigerian ethnicity, by statements about gender relations, both in Nigeria and outside of it, and in late 1994 even by a spate of racialist remarks coming from an unknown source in the UK. ¹² The anti-censorship position has continually come under fire since 1994: for example, because of statements made regarding second-generation immigrants who chose to give pride of place to their American citizenship over their Nigerian heritage and because of the racist posts referred to above. Even though some netizens suggested censuring the people who “flamed” in the past, most participants during this period insisted that “Naija” was a community where all opinions were valued and where discourse consequently had to be freeflowing. Some of the most radically egalitarian on Naijanet actually decried the formation of alternative nets, saying that those who split off Naijanet wished to fractionalize the true spirit of the net—and therefore the true spirit of “Naija,” the virtual nationalist space they are struggling to create.

A Beginning Ethnography of Naijanet

I call Naijanet a “virtual Nigeria” or, more generally, a “virtual nationalist community” in the making. It is “virtual” in the sense that it is a community in which people do not meet face-to-face but through the auspices of words on computer screens. It is a community in the sense that people do relate to each other, sometimes with great intensity, generating both solidarity and deeply felt emotions of friendship and dislike. ¹³ I add in “nationalist,” because discourse on the net tends to take on nationalist overtones, even though these nationalists are living and working outside the boundaries of their (postcolonial) nation-state and even though the discourse itself can have little effect (yet) on the everyday political and social life of Nigeria proper. Below is a paragraph written by one of the most active Naijanetters of 1993-1995, Sola A. This post is representative of both the prevailing nationalist sentiment on Naijanet and the emotions generated by this virtual community (from Sola's March 7, 1994 posting “Re: K.C.: Monkeys work, baboons chop!”):

Although a little unusual in its emotionalism, Sola evidently spoke for a number of Naijanetters in his post. Several people signed on soon after receiving it—including a couple who identified themselves as previous “lurkers”—and confirmed that they, too, felt Naijanet to be a sort of national lifeline. ¹⁴ Sola himself further revealed that he had felt terribly alone in Pittsburgh, the North American city where he lives, until he subscribed to Naijanet. However, through the network he had met other Nigerian students living in the same urban area. By 1995 Sola had a circle of Nigerian friends and colleagues, and appeared to act as a paterfamilias to them—a role he also adopted on Naijanet itself. Evidently for the first time, Sola's children also had contact with other Nigerians, outside their infrequent visits to the country, through these Naijanet connections. Sola therefore turned his virtual community into a real, material one by the mid-1990s and felt all the responsibility and proprietorship towards the former that he already practiced in the latter.

Besides the fact that Naijanet has become a solace for lonely Nigerians in the North American heartland, what else can I report ethnographically about this “virtual Nigeria” constructed in the interstices of the “information superhighway?” First, it was and remains a male-dominated and administered Nigeria—which, of course, is not all that different from its real life counterpart. It has been suggested that only about 15-20% of all internet and other network users are women, although these numbers are changing. ¹⁵ Virtual Nigeria during the 1994-97 period probably had more female netizens than that. Naijanetters to whom I have appealed for information on this question suggest that the male-to-female ratio is in the area of 60:40 or 70:30. (It becomes difficult to know, as Naijanetters discovered above, because of the gender-free naming practices of many Nigerian cultures and the determinedly gender-free postings of many Naijanetters.) Secondly, virtual Nigeria is an overwhelmingly well-educated and articulate—in English as well as in indigenous languages—Nigeria. The majority of the members of the net during this period were in college or were college-educated; many were doing postgraduate studies, and some, like Sola above, were PhDs on university faculties.

This last should not be surprising. After all, under current immigration policies, most Nigerian immigration to the west come from the educated elite. ¹⁶ Professionals with something to offer their host country are given first priority for immigration, and students accepted at western universities find the visa process much easier to encompass than other groups. It also makes sense in that, to gain access to Naijanet and its subsidiaries, a person had first to have access to a personal computer as well as knowledge of email and the internet; such a person must also have access to someone who knew the proper addresses for subscription and entrance into the network. As noted above, Naijanet was not on the regular listserv directories during the mid-1990s; its presence was advertised strictly by word-of-mouth and word-of-mail. (I first heard of it in 1993, at an African Studies Association meeting, but I was not able to gain access to the proper addresses until February of 1994—and that after determined telephone calling and mailing among my Nigerian immigrant acquaintance.) However, not everyone on the network during this decade was in college or working in a university setting. Several active posters worked in North American and other western businesses, including the computer software engineering business. And some nonprofessionals made it known that they “listened in” during clerical working hours, hiding their Naija activity from their employers.

The slightly covert quality of Naija, the virtual Nigeria tucked away in one of the US's most powerful academic mainframes at MIT, was one of its great attractions for participants. Any would- be Naijanetter had to sign on the network publicly, giving a short biography, but, once in, Naijanet itself had something of the aura of a shared secret. Its subnets were even more exclusive, in-group knowledge, since they were usually discovered in the course of casual conversation on the net or when someone asked specifically online how to subscribe to them. As noted above, Naija had its own internal terminology as well as that shared with the other, larger fraternity of the internet as a whole. When Naijanetters wanted to make a humorous statement, for example, they used Nigerian forms of English and/or interspersed proverbs in Nigerian languages (usually with English translations) in their stories. These forays into “deep Naija” were usually preceded by a disclaimer that anyone not comfortable with “pidgin” should delete and go on to the next mail. The underlying idea seemed to be that, to participate fully in the Naija community, a person should at least be able to read (and preferably write) in forms of English native to Nigeria—not only in the academic and spoken English with which Naijanetters must deal daily in their interactions with western societies.

A netter's comfort with pidgin and other Nigerian linguistic markers was only one measure of authenticity—one level of approved community participation—on the net. Frequent references were also made to Nigerian cuisine; the expectation being that “true” Naijanetters would know (and salivate over the mention of) okra soup, eba, fufu, egusi, and so forth. These references invariably brought unfavorable comparisons to the “weak hamburgers” and soft drinks that stereotypically were said to make up the North American diet. Another measure of cultural authenticity on the list was an expressed interest in returning to Nigeria, or evidence demonstrating that any particular Naijanetter had permanent connections in his/her home country. One reason Sola (above) was so respected on the network was that he has made a point of telling Naijanetters how he funded community development projects in his hometown and taught engineering classes to students in Kenya during his summers off. He also put his own money where his mouth is and set up a fund for change in Nigeria during the mid- 1990s, beginning with a substantial personal contribution. Sola periodically gave updates on the status of this fund that list its contributors (sometimes by “anonymous,” if that was a donor's preference), their contributions, and how any moneys were used. It was a measure of the trust that his postings generated that his use of these funds was only challenged on one occasion—and this in the context of “Naija,” where Nigerians continually worried about governmental and bureaucratic tendencies towards “corruption” and “419” frauds perpetrated by Nigerians abroad.

Not all Naijanetters were as well-accepted, however, as Sola. One net controversy began in late 1994 when Erisa, a young Igbo woman in Georgia, declared that she had no intention of returning to Nigeria. As a US citizen born in Atlanta, she wanted to reap the all of the benefits of being an American. Erisa was instantly reviled by regulars on the list. She then retaliated and told her fellow netizens they were hypocrites, since most of them were the proud possessors of green cards and naturalization papers. Some of the more reasonable responses to Erisa's mail stressed the need for balancing assimilation with continuing immersion in Nigerian culture; some of the less reasonable suggested that Erisa is not really an African or a black woman at all. Male attacks on Erisa resulted in more cries of sexism on the net—and, indeed, some of the posts were extremely sexist, commenting on her (probable) unattractiveness and so forth. Men responded to Erisa's strong objections to these posts by suggesting that female chauvinism was rearing its head on Naijanet. However, the strongest negative response to Erisa came from the Naijanetter known only as “bola.” This netizen—who presented herself on the net as a woman—quoted Fanon to Erisa, suggesting that the Atlanta netter had somehow grown to hate herself as an African and calling her, among other inflammatory names, a “house nigger.” I later spoke with Erisa on a couple of occasions by telephone and she informed me that she was unconcerned with what people said to her.

Erisa continued to be a thorn in the side of some Naijanetters through her pronouncements on the net for another year or so, and she was also revealed as a very active (and sometimes controversial) participant in various African-American discussion groups on the net. During 1995, Erisa cross-posted between Naijanet and African-American bulletin boards in hopes that her own felt identity as a member of both groups could help to generate some dialog between them. This hope appears to have been dashed, however, since there was resistance on the part of both Nigerian and African-American netters to the project. Following the trajectory of other active Naijanetters (of every gender and political persuasion) in the past, Erisa transferred her considerable energy elsewhere, possibly into offline activism—at least for the present.

Conclusions

In the virtual community of Naija, a certain, educated segment of expatriate Nigeria has been engaged in trying to manufacture consensus about Nigeria's problems, find solutions for those problems, and discuss its own ambiguous position(s) in the membership of various transnational communities: immigrant, world capitalist, and academic. Iain Chambers suggests that one problem with previous theories of migration has been that historians and other social scientists have seen migration as peripheral—adjunct movements towards the metropole rather than as defining, in and of themselves, the complex histories of our own societies. According to Chambers (1994: 16), “The chronicles of diasporas—those of the black Atlantic, of metropolitan Jewry, of mass rural displacement—constitute the ground swell of modernity.” That being the case, we should not be surprised to find that the technological tools of late modernity (and even postmodernity) are utilized to keep a contemporary diaspora like that of the Nigerian immigrants discussed in this article from complete fragmentation. Print media as well as traveling entertainments like theater or musicians served earlier diasporas well in this regard, after all, and these remain important to contemporary immigrant populations as well.

At the same time, we should not be surprised to see that such a diaspora still contains its historically constituted internal divisions—or that those divisions do not disappear even in an idealized, or “virtual” space like that of Naija. Indeed, it might be argued that in a place where discourse is relatively unmediated by the painful day-to-day material realities of life in West Africa, those divisions could be even more clearly demarcated. As members of the net noted time and again during the period I observed and participated on Naijanet, one of their greatest commonalities was their relative comfort. This comfort, as they conceptualized it, enabled them to be somewhat more objective about the Nigerian life that they really do not have to live. For these technologically adept--and perhaps socially westernized too--Naijanetters, Michael Heims's (1994: 133) rather optimistic assessment of virtuality would therefore seem meaningful: “A virtual world needs to be not-quite-real or it will lessen the pull on imagination. Something-less-than-real evokes our power of imaging and visualization.”

The verdict is still out on how this “something-less-than real” nationalist space will eventually serve its creators; whether they will tire of nation-as-spectacle and try to put some of their more practical notions into place, or whether the nation-as-spectacle will begin to take on a reality that supersedes Nigeria proper in their imagination and will become an end completely to itself. Kroker and Weinstein (1994: 28) postulate something like this latter case for us all as we face the consequences of our flirtation with virtuality: “The next millennium spreads out before us like a fatal scene where things disappear only to the extent that they are more (virtually) present than ever before.” Some clues have surfaced, however, in the years since 1995 that are suggestive of the turn Naijanetters will take.

One positive development of Nigerian immigrant political writing in electronic fora like Naijanet—which remain, by and large, inaccessible to the majority of even the literate population within Nigeria proper—has been a crossover into local Nigerian print media. Some Naijanetters, even during the worse moments of the Abacha regime, were sending their written thoughts about the state of the Nigerian state to be published in magazines or newspapers in their home country. A minority of those on the net also became passionate and productive international activists, using their positions in western academia and business to arrange conferences, disseminate information on internal Nigerian issues and talk about the nation with potential investors. However, many of these activists found, as they became more engaged in the world of global political economy, environmental and human rights work, they had less time for net “chat.” The majority of those who remained on Naijanet or who moved on to develop the more sophisticated graphics and text content of Nigerian webpages continue to debate important issues for the future of the country inside the electronic enclave. Here, although its security and secrecy may have been compromised in the Abacha years by government surveillance, Naija continues to grow in directions that Nigeria proper may well not be able to follow. Indeed, Naija may grow in directions that are antithetical to the material conditions of Nigerian existence; this is still to be determined.

What should be interesting to follow as this research progresses is how the nature of the medium, the internet and its offshoots, makes an impact upon the parameters of community. For example: What is the average life-cycle of a virtual community? In the space of a little more than four years, Naijanet divided at least six times, and its population by 1997 contained very few of the original “community” founders. Does the speed inherent to the medium effect its ability to sustain relations between people? People on Naijanet in the 1990s often complained that their fellow posters did not reflect on what they had to say; that they simply reacted, and often reacted foolishly. The reactive nature of much of western media does tend to give a feeling of immediacy to the electronic mediated experience, but it may also make this ultimately an experience of alienation. It is certainly possible that the constant loss of “regulars” like Erisa and even the old list administrator ekundayo comes from reaction fatigue, a sense that they have begun (too quickly) to repeat themselves and that each new “generation” of list subscribers must reinvent the wheel. This is a sense that surely comes from the rapidity of net discourse, as well as from the net's frontier tendencies, that virtually require a constant exploration and desire for moving along. ¹⁷

Nonetheless, Howard Rheingold's (1993) account of the San Francisco-based WELL's lengthy existence and proliferation may suggest otherwise, that a virtual community can be constructed and maintained productively over time and across virtual space. But the WELL is a community based securely within global structures of power: overwhelmingly white, upper middle class, and technocratic. Naijanet exists at the sufferance of MIT or other educational networks, and its membership is mobile and part of a racial subgroup that has not, historically, been the most successful in the west. These differences may not matter as much on a medium that gives priority to literacy—and even hypertextuality—over body type (whether interpreted racially, by sexuality, or by morphology). What will be more important, it seems to me, is how future access to the “information superhighway” is maintained, and what will happen when (or if) marginalized communities come more firmly under the domination of the “owners” of gigabits of memory, satellite telecommunications, and undersea fiber optics cables strung around whole continents. ¹⁸

Meanwhile, Naijanet continues to recruit netizens from Nigeria or with strong ties to the country. Some of its subsidiary nets, notably Igbo—net and soc.culture.nigeria, are thriving, and websites with Nigeria content have proliferated, many of which were created by Nigerian immigrants who first saw the possibility of “Naijaspace” on the listserv created in the early years of the 1990s by “Baba” Ekajeh, Patrick Nta and ekundayo in Massachusetts. The wiring of Nigeria itself is probably inevitable, especially under the climate of political transparency developing in the new Nigerian republic, and is awaited with great impatience by Nigerian academics and businesspeople alike. At the moment when virtual Nigeria becomes open to real Nigeria, there is the possibility of a new synthesis, a drawing closer of the electronic world of the brain drain diaspora and the real worlds of both material diasporic experience and Nigerian quotidian life.

Acknowledgements

First I would like to express gratitude to all the changing membership of Naijanet and its subsidiary nets over the years. Nothing could have been more informative or entertaining for an ethnographer than my time on the lists, even if I sometimes felt like I had set up shop in the village square and was forced to listen to every conversation in the town simultaneously. Because I value their privacy, I will not name the Nigerians who have personally mailed and discussed Naijanet politics and social life with me over the years, but each such mail has been important and much appreciated. I am also grateful for comments on this project made by a number of my academic colleagues during the decade, most notably Mark Auslander, Karin Barber, Adeline Masquelier, Stephanie Newell, Rosalind Shaw, and Brad Weiss. Finally, Teju Olaniyan's editorial and substantive comments on the last draft of this article were crucial for its most recent transformation.

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West Africa Review (1999)

ISSN: 1525-4488

Nationalism in a Virtual Space:
Immigrant Nigerians on the Internet

Introduction: New Immigrations, Nigerian Immigrants

Naijanet: A Brief History

A Beginning Ethnography of Naijanet

Conclusions

Acknowledgements

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