Feminine Soul of Afrobeat

In Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord identifies the extension of the commodity-form into “the entire life of societies”, as a modern precondition of the reign of capitalist production. In Western consumer capitalism, this “announces itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles” into which “everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation” [(1967/2014), Society of the Spectacle, Trans. Knabb, K., Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets, p. 2]. Detached from the longue durée of collective social solidarities, these fragmenting images depicting in granular exactitude the medium of their representation coalesce into live streams of reformulated pseudo-worlds that are accessed via escalating commercial exchange. Accepting this, one might plausibly advance the proposition that these features of Western capitalist spectacle making are also evident in public sector and government-funded broadcast media. In January 2023 the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) newscasts its File on 4 documentary entitled Catastrophe at the Academy. This chapter is entitled “Feminine Soul of Afrobeat”. It formulates a post-colonial conception of astonishing spectacular news broadcasting in respect to a way of seeing the BBC Radio 4 programme’s depiction of the 15th December 2022 crowd crush tragedy at the Asake Nigerian Afrobeat concert at the O2 Academy Brixton London, in which mother-of-two, 33-year-old Rebecca Ikumelo and security guard, 23-year-old, Gaby Hutchinson lost their lives.