The old regime...
The Fool's Cap (Foolscap) came to power in 1994 as Africaman, with a mandate from our patrons to laugh oppressive regimes and dictators to scorn.

As Africaman magazine, we made tactical use of our arsenal of guarded missiles, earning in the process the reputation of being "Africa's best shelling humour magazine." But our resources could not match those of General Abacha of Nigeria.

The dictator used his ARSEnal of arse-licking informers, sycophants and security agents (whom he lavished with slush funds, the size of five independent African states' economy put together) to infiltrate and destabilise the magazine. All our known associates and patrons in Nigeria were visited and subjected to untold harassment.
The magazine, Africaman, was well and truly intimidated -100 coups in all!

...the new regime With the recent restoration of democracy in Nigeria, Africaman resurfaced in 1999, but was swiftly toppled in a coup (no.101). The news of the coup first hit our office on the eve of our going online, in the form of a terse communiqué. It advised us to keep calm and stand by for further instructions.
Later, it emerged this one was a palace coup; mischievously hatched out by our patrons who thought our name Africaman was sexist and dated. They proscribed the name and replaced it with The Fool's Cap or Foolscap - a much more clownish, foolish name to describe what we do. And to "cap" it all, they re-installed our erstwhile doorstop - a worthless figurine of a dopey horseman, Eshu - as our Head, sorry, our mascot. In case you don't know, Eshu is a Yoruba deity of the devilish kind, patron saint of fools and jesters, reputed to be an unpredictable mischief-maker, a tempter and a bringer of confusion to peoples' lives. Himself a dictator, he takes dislike to dictators, bureaucrats and humourless people.
Well, as we all know, the devil looks after his own, so we are bankingon Eshu to mislead us!

Foolscap Online

Foolscap online is a pan-African part serious, part satirical magazine published by Foolscap Media limited.

We are totally independent and non-partisan. We don’t like that bit very much because that means we’ve lost all our rights to brown envelopes, special treatment and freebies from government officials and politicians, which our colleagues are accustomed to!

In the classic Foolscap we went to great lengths to explaining that Genetically Modified (GM) news is using current African political, economic and social news, gossip and disclosures as raw materials for satire, parody, biting cartoon comments and witty short paragraphs. We said, instead of breaking the news, we’re knocking the living daylights out of them. And we also explained that Organic news are those stranger than fiction, funny, wacky news stories which our equally funny and wacky reporters file in. We even took the trouble to list out which stories are GM, Organic or Neither here nor there.

But in the current dispensation, we’re not going to bother! We have just lumped everything together. Tough luck if you can’t figure out which is which.

Environmental information: Your environmentally friendly Foolscap has been formulated and produced using GM and recycled news, disclosures and topical current affairs materials. This care is shown in our rigorous selection procedure and of course extensive checking of our bank account balance before going to press.

Biodegradable: The inflammatory materials in the Non-GM news are broken down into harmless materials by natural processes - i.e. they are biodegradable. They are digestible, thus no harm will be done if you were to swallow them (minus your monitor, you fool!)

The Genuine article: The African Board of Magazine Censors (ABMC) which ritually passes our final copy (submitted on CD) before going online has carefully examined, not the CD itself, but the content of the large, sealed brown envelope which accompanied it. As a result of the notes (or bills) they found in the envelope, they have declared the content of the CD to be morally, spiritually and politically correct and not a threat to national and continental security. What you are reading therefore is uncensored.

Remember the notice in the column on the right? Well, your prayers have been answered. You don’t have to continue to read our old stories over and over again. If you noticed, sometime last week, our homepage and this page shrank to a dot (and don’t worry, if you didn’t witness the phenomenon, as the whole process lasted only a few seconds). It even caught us ourselves by surprise! One Million Visitors To our chagrin, our site clocked the 1,000,000 mark last week! But, how? We know that our website, for some fluky reasons, is very high up in Google’s listings and very prominent in Yahoo and many other search engines. We also know that 80% of all searches online, accounting for 200 million searches every day are made through Google. But it is beyond our wildest imagination that so many prying visitors will stumble onto our site in so short a time. We recommend that first time visitors, or those for whom satire is a maze should take time to read this page to find out what gave us the nerve to take on the likes of dictators, big guns and their gun dogs. Please note that this page will either shrink to a dot or self- destruct, the moment it clocks it one millionth visitor.So hurry up Why? Because the last time we checked the hits counter, about five weeks ago, it was reading only 892,702 visitors. Thinking that we’ve got some time to kill (give or take three months) before clocking the 1,000,000 mark, we promptly went back to sleep. But last week, some silly reader (we don’t know what they wanted to prove) got us out of our slumber, by registering as the one-millionth visitor to this site. And because the pages were set up to trip off automatically, the shrinkage took place before we could concoct new stuff to slap on the pages. Now we’ve managed to not only replace the pages but also revamp the entire site. It is the least we can do to thank you for your patience. In addition, we will have a weekly update on news and features. Editorial cartoons by Bisi Ogunbadejo will come as fresh as they appear in the Guardian and New Age newspapers, Nigeria. But for those of you with nostalgia for out of date stuff, you can still keep a date with the old site at Classic Foolscap