Adam Mayer

Recent military coups in West Africa have put the continent’s democratisation itself into question. In some places, for the moment, these coups appear to have popular backing. Nigeria, where radicalism is firmly rooted in democratic values and a human-rights framework, the radical grassroots opposition to the Buhari government’s creeping authoritarianism lies drenched in blood. The roots of this development go back to the history of Nigeria’s radicalism in the twentieth century. Much has appeared on the global 1968 recently, including that of Africa. 1970s/1980s-style radicalism is reappearing today with Omoyele Sowore’s 2018 presidential candidacy, with the African Action Congress party, the #EndSARS protests and the tragic Lekki Toll Gate massacre (2020) in Nigeria. The shift towards radicalism is palpable with protest music such as Falz’s This is Nigeria, and Burna Boy’s Monsters you Made, both explicitly targeting neocolonialism and police brutality. Contrary to Achille Mbembe’s sweeping dismissal of African radicalism, the movement with very deep roots under study is meaningful once again, and is gathering momentum in West Africa’s giant polity. This article applies Walter Benjamin’s and also Nigerian radical thinkers’ conceptualisation of political, social and artistic radicalism, while it frames the Nigerian version via the movement’s history, in which marxisant theory and praxis, feminism, human rights and pro-democracy movements interact with emancipatory strands of Islam, Christianity, Igbo Judaism, and animism. In the context of Nigerian radicalism, even expressly pro-capitalist art theory performs a radical social function by stressing the African’s right to make universal statements (Olu Oguibe) in its de facto defiance of the neo-colony. As these different strands of protest meet, ethnic uprisings (amongst them IPOB) find ways to establish common cause with social radicalism, posing a composite threat to the prebendalist oligarchy that rules and oppresses the country via a militarised neoliberalism.

Prior studies provide consistent evidence of deficits for psychopaths in processing verbal emotional material but are inconsistent regarding nonverbal emotional material. To examine whether psychopaths exhibit general versus specific deficits in nonverbal emotional processing, 34 psychopaths and 33 nonpsychopaths identified with Hare's (R. D. Hare, 1991) Psychopathy Checklist-Revised were asked to complete a facial affect recognition test. Slides of prototypic facial expressions were presented. Three hypotheses regarding hemispheric lateralization anomalies in psychopaths were also tested (right-hemisphere dysfunction, reduced lateralization, and reversed lateralization). Psychopaths were less accurate than nonpsychopaths at classifying facial affect under conditions promoting reliance on right-hemisphere resources and displayed a specific deficit in classifying disgust. These findings demonstrate that psychopaths exhibit specific deficits in nonverbal emotional processing.

As calcium plays an important role in regulating a great variety of neuronal processes, there is a strong interest to generate gadolinium complexes which can act as calcium-sensors in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Here we report a new series of potential CAs based on DO3A, having alkylaminobis(methylenephosphonate) side chains (propyl L1, butyl L2, pentyl L3 or hexyl L4). The high complexation efficiency towards the biologically important metal ions of the aminopolyphosphonic acids could be used for the sensing of the extracellular calcium in the brain. On the other hand the introduction of negatively charged phosphonate groups into common Gd3+-based CAs increases their r1 which is important to improve the MR signal especially in high field magnets. The paramagnetic response of the complexes GdL1-GdL4 to Ca2+ was studied by means of relaxometric titrations. The initial relaxivities of the complexes found to be higher than usually reported for the DO3A type ligands at high field magnets (9.4T). r1 values of 6.92, 7.43, 6.70 and 5.76 mM-1s-1 were determined for GdL1, GdL2, GdL3, and GdL4 respectively. Interestingly complexes exhibit unusual properties in the presence of Ca2+. In contrast to previously reported probes the longitudinal relaxivities decrease upon addition of Ca2+. This is favourable for novel fMRI techniques as it could allow transforming the real in vivo decrease in Ca2+ concentration into a positive contrast during physiological processes. The sensitivity of the complexes towards Ca2+ increases with the extension of the aliphatic side chain. No changes in r1 of GdL1 were found over the whole span of Ca2+ concentration. In the case of GdL2, a moderate decrease of r1 was observed on addition of Ca2+, whereas the r1 of the GdL3 and GdL4 solutions showed a strong dependency on the calcium concentration resulting in the decrease to 66% and 61% of the initial r1 values, respectively.