By Yomi Olusegun-Joseph
INTRODUCTION: THE YORUBA, CULTURAL TRANSACTIONS AND THE MODERNIST IDEA
To contend that the highway of spirited cultural dialogue and exchange in the contemporary Yoruba world owes its existence entirely to the historic construction of an epistemological signpost pointing to the insights of European (or Western) modernism is to deviate into a colonialist reading that considers the Yoruba as products of the colonial master’s ‘humanizing’ mission. If modernity is considered a necessary condition of cultural transition involving the ingredients of ‘progress’, ‘newness’, the erection of high cultural sites seeking and affirming universal appeal and a deliberate rejection of the rustic for the urban, then it could be argued that the Yoruba world has throughout history inscribed a narrative of modernist self presence. The efflorescence of the Oyo Empire, which spread its administrative tentacles across Yoruba land and reached as far as Dahomey in the present-day Republic of Benin between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, is a case in point. A cultural translation of this hegemonic reality was the modernist presence of the Yoruba language as the lingua franca of the Aja and Ewe people in the early seventeenth century and the fact that it still continues to be one of Republic of Benin’s linguistic legacies.1 Crucibles of communal and artistic patterns recalling the experience of this hegemonic contact still endure. Furthermore, research has proven that the majority of religious beliefs in this non-Yoruba world were derived from the Yoruba, for this formed part of the latter’s modernizing investments in the former.2 Kwame Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates note, linking modern attainments with urbanization: ‘For centuries before British colonization, most Yoruba speakers inhabited a complex, urbanized society organized around powerful city-states.’3 Evidences of centripetal modernist influences of foreign cultures, but of non-Western origins, also persist in the historical memory of the Yoruba. The contact of the Yoruba with the Islamic world in the midseventeenth century had a signal impact on the evolution of what I call ‘the second phase of the Yoruba modern experience’. It is on record, for instance, that the ‘Arabic script was used in northern Yoruba land to write the Yoruba language, and texts in Arabic and Hausa’.4 The increased penetration of Islam in Yoruba land produced a cream of scholars and scholarship, and a cultural hybridity of progressive knowledge and cultural production. Trade contacts with the Islamized Hausa introduced or modernized some artisan practices. Tunde Akinwunmi suggests that:
The knowledge of production of anaphe-derived silk, known as Sanyan in Yoruba, may … have been transmitted to the Yoruba from their northern neighbors. This is because Sanyan is derived from Tsamiya, the Hausa word for the tamarind tree on which the moth feeds.
5 And in addition to this Hausa contribution, it is acknowledged, some much-circulated Yoruba words originated in Arab–Hausa contacts. Such words include Anfani, Jisoro, Alafia, Asiki, Maleika, Bilisi, Abere, Jimo, Alubarika and Alubosa. The development of third-phase modernity in the Yoruba world, that of Western architecture, may at best be seen as a continuum in the civilizational process that had always been in place in the Yoruba world; it was not the civilizing agent. It is in the nature of the Yoruba to accommodate non-ethnic world views for the furtherance of their still-evolving social discourse. Thus, Western modernism, in this regard, has only produced the tertiary narrative on the palimpsest of Yoruba modernity. It bears asserting that even in this third phase the Yoruba have always negotiated a stance of their modernist discourse as different from that of the West, for it does not announce a moment of severance from tradition or the past, but has always maintained a synthetic relationship with it. The Yoruba saying ‘Tiwa n tiwa’ (‘Ours is ours’) most aptly reinforces this fact. The Indian critic Partha Chatterjee offers the view that:
… true modernity consists in determining the particular forms of modernity that are suitable in particular circumstances; that is, applying the methods of reason to identify or invent the specific technologies of modernity that are appropriate for our purposes.
6 I engage, in this paper, a ‘deviant’ form of modernity emphasizing low-cultural/subjectivist tastes (otherwise known as postmodernism), embraced remarkably by a dominant section of contemporary urban Yoruba youth in Nigeria through the vehicle of hip hop. I examine the discourse of transcultural/transethnic negotiations cultivated in this process and its impact on the Nigerian youth’s sense of citizenship, culture, gender and power. I consequently interrogate and reconcile the implications of this generational development on the image of the Yoruba within the Nigerian and global landscape.
POSTMODERNISM AND THE LOGIC OF NIGERIAN HIP HOP
Perhaps one may hazard that in the set of processes involving the cultural metamorphosis of the Yoruba, none has proven as challenging in probing the very epistemological foundations of the Yoruba world view as the present postmodern variant mobilized by contemporary urban youth. Though a number of critics are divided as to whether postmodernism is an offshoot of modernism or a reflection of its counter-discourse, one general appraisal of this epistemic strand and cultural practice is that it tends to announce the ‘end of history’, having a scepticism against notions of ‘norm’, ‘order’, ‘hegemony’, ‘hierarchy’, ‘progress’, ‘the reign of the canon’ as controlling mechanisms of society, concepts on which modernism is adjudged, within certain intellectual circles, to be erected. Postmodernism’s stance thus clearly aims at subverting the latter, just as much as it is complicit in charting a new narrative of ‘progress’. However, it champions the dissembling of what Jean-Francois Lyotard calls ‘grand narratives’, discursive mechanisms by which formats of ‘truth’ are arrived at, legitimized and circulated. Beatrice Skordili suggests that a grand narrative ‘provides coherence by covering up the various conflicts, the differends … that arise in the history of a society’.7 Instead of the grand narrative, which is obvious in Western modernism (and all forms of modernism), Lyotard proposes the dawn of ‘petit narratives’ in which centres become multiple and thus open only to hybridist collaborations, not hegemonic superimpositions. Postmodernism projects itself in the enthronement or celebration of the traditionally unacceptable, tabooed and/or strange. It also reveals a preference for the low in place of high culture, the adoration of the subjective rather than the objective, and the dominance of the particular over the universal. Thus, in its representation in art forms, it pursues a contention of ‘history’s end’ through recourse to such deployments as irony, paradox, pastiche, bricolage, mixed genres, subcultural/populist themes and parody. It energizes globalization through its doctrines of de-centring and ‘borderlessness’, which facilitate the transnational collapsing and crystallizing of capital and culture into mass commodity. This informs a dimension that encourages transcultural identities and a fluid flow along the communication highway, which, in the case of the urban Yoruba or Nigerian youth, has caused a significant interrogation of ethnic and national belonging. The repeated failure of the political class, the predominance of poverty, the high incidence of corruption and nepotism, the near voicelessness of minority groups, the imposition of self-seeking leaders through the manipulation of the electoral process and the continued denial of youth visibility in the socio-political system have, to a great extent, resulted in the rupture and commodification of traditional Yoruba cultural values and national signposts in Nigerian hip hop. And since postmodernism is, in itself, a late capitalist phenomenon largely commodifying epistemic and cultural wares, it finds itself replicated in Nigerian hip hop, a popular youth trajectory interrogating the calculus of power, the myth of the ‘norm’ and the grand narratives of ethnic and national identities (or imprisonments?) while also doing the business of translating its craft of entertainment into financial access.
Though controversies endure concerning its origin, hip hop may be described as a cultural practice that evolved in the South Bronx area of the United States of America in the early 1970s as a black youth reaction to white racial and class oppression. It continued a tradition installed since the days of slavery, of interrogating the myths of black otherness and enabling constructions of counter-discourses challenging white racial supremacy, predominantly through music. Music, according to Paul Gilroy, channelled a resistance to black silence during the days of slavery that was ‘vital at the point at which linguistic and semantic indeterminacy/polyphony arise amidst the protracted battle between masters, mistresses and slaves’.8 Hip hop may thus be said to be the contemporary outgrowth of this culturo-racial response, which incidentally had the fortune of projecting the articulations of the Black Power movement of the 1960s. Today hip hop has a global appeal with a transnational/transcultural reach encompassing African, Western, Oriental, black and white participation, and collaborates in building a bridge so that ‘cultural contact does not require physical travel, but instead relies on the movement of information across technological networks such as the internet, electronic mail and fax machines’.9 Nigerian hip hop, in this development, ingeniously orbits a universe of several linguistic and performance possibilities that redefine the image of the Nigerian youth within the Nigerian nation-state. Their experimental postmodern engagements, encouraged by commercial prospects, set them within the space of what Jean Baudrillard calls the hyperreal. For Baudrillard:
The hyperreal transcends representation … only because it is entirely in simulation. The tourniquet of representation tightens madly, but of an implosive madness, that, far from eccentric (marginal) inclines towards the center to its own infinite repetition. Analogous to the distancing characteristic of the dream, that makes us say we are only dreaming; but this is only the game of censure and of perpetuation of the dream.10
It is instructive that in this imaginative cast the Nigerian hip hop world discursively interrogates the notions of citizenship and ethnic belonging that, to a great extent, inscribe them as being socio-politically absent.
HYPHENATED YOUTH IDENTITIES, THE NIGERIAN HIP HOP NATION AND (RE)NEGOTIATED BELONGING
A number of scholars are united in the conviction that African youth exist on the margins of the socio-economic and political actualities of their nation-states. Although there are official documents such as the constitution, bureaucratic institutions and myths of collective national belonging that suggest social integration and common identity (as encoded in the national anthem and flag), African youth are discursively mapped within a social category of otherness. Donal Cruise O’Brien observes, for instance, that although African youth are ‘a natural opposition’ that could engage the divisive oppressions of the adult-run African postcolony, they are often powerless to make any meaningful ‘counter-hegemonic’ impact because of a class emasculation that demeans them to below the status of ‘a counter-elite’.11 A O K Noah adds: ‘The conduct of state 520 8. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1993, p 74 9. Hannah Appel, ‘Dancehall, Hip-Hop and Musical Cross-Currents’, Glendora Review: African Quarterly on the Arts, vol 3, no 3/4, 2004, pp 71–79, p 74 10. Jean Baudrillard, Simulations, Paul Foss, Paul Patton and Phillip Beitchman, trans, Semiotext[e], New York, 1983, p 147 11. D B C O’Brien, ‘A Lost Generation? Youth Identity and State Decay in West Africa’, in Richard Werbner and Terence Ranger, eds, Postcolonial Identities in Africa, Zed, London and New Jersey, 1996 Downloaded by [Yomi Olusegun-Joseph] at 06:10 18 December 2014 affairs and the gamut of political, fiscal and mental illiterates simply mandate the youths to search for emancipation elsewhere.’12 Such a desperate search for emancipation could be seen in the harrowing experiences faced by some ex-youth combatants of the Liberian civil war of the 1990s, who had to make do with running shops in which alcohol and hard drugs were consumed, creating new problems of social insecurity.13 In the Nigerian experience, challenges of youth unemployment and poverty, a largely pedestrian education, enduring irresponsible governance and poor social welfare result in problems of armed robbery, violence, militancy, cultism and cyber-crimes. However, the existence of youth NGOs, small-scale business initiatives and cultural channels such as hip hop produce contexts of youth counter-hegemonic reactions that tend to question/problematize uncritical notions of (Nigerian) citizenship and the unevenness of power relations. A very conspicuous development on the Nigerian hip hop scene is the (re)negotiation of the terms of citizenship as it affects young people. Though acknowledging their legal rights as Nigerians as defined by the 1999 constitution, largely by virtue of birth and Nigerian parentage, Nigerian youth interrogate their ‘class of citizenship’, which is fundamental to their appraisal of national belonging. Contemporary theories of citizenship tend to articulate ‘class syndrome’ as a decisive index of inclusion or exclusion in relation to citizenship.14 Class, as I use the term, is not necessarily (always) signified in material terms, but in complex discursive rhetorics including gender, ethnic culture, age and social status that assign selfhood and otherness. The Nigerian hip hop world, constituting a generational group whose politics must be studied as politics ‘from below’,15 presents a case in which young people (re)negotiate citizenship and national belonging. Occupying an imaginary ‘political’ space with a sense of ‘transnational sovereignty’ and characteristic socio-cultural traits, the Nigerian hip hop world inhabits a fluid, transterritorial universe of global youth identity and solidarity. H Samy Alim notes that hip hop group identities
… comprise the ‘imagined community’ … known as the ‘Global Hip Hop Nation (GHHN)’, a multilingual, multiethnic ‘nation’ with an international outreach, a fluid capacity to cross borders, and a reluctance to adhere to the geopolitical givens of the present.1
The Nigerian hip hop world, which constitutes the Nigerian Hip Hop Nation (NHHN), engages in actual and symbolic struggles of alternative/revised citizenship for youth within the marginalizing context of Nigerian class citizenship. Its weaponry, lodged in music, language, visual projections, a growing commercial industry and transethnic exchanges, erects an imaginary ‘national’ space with new transactions of community, sociality and power relations. This coheres with Aihwa Ong’s reading of cultural citizenship as entailing a process of ‘selfmaking and being made by power relations that produce consent through schemes of surveillance, discipline, control, and administration’.17 In the NHHN context, the scramble for cultural citizenship involves youths with hyphenated national and cultural identities reworking their citizenship and ethnic affiliations from the point of view of the other. Renato Rosaldo reminds us that:
The term citizenship includes the legal definition where one either is or is not a citizen and where all citizens should receive equal treatment and enjoy equal opportunity. Yet the term moves a step further to embrace a notion that is at once more subtle and more familiar. People often speak of citizenship, not as an either/or matter, but along a continuum from full citizenship to second-class citizenship.18
It is pertinent to note that in articulating a postmodern cultural posture of difference through its group outlook, the NHHN contests the sociopolitical elements that facilitate ‘privileged’ citizenship in the Nigerian nation-state by seeking to replace the dominant hierarchical structure of power relations in society with the horizontal, postmodern alternative of the rhizome structure. The idea of the rhizome, conceived from botany, was conceptualized by Gilles Deleuze and Fe´lix Guattari to mark a difference from hierarchical/vertical structures of power relations that construct boundaries and binary opposites. Timothy Murphy asserts that:
A rhizome like crabgrass grows horizontally by sending out runners that establish new plants which then send out their own runners … eventually forming a discontinuous surface without depth (and thus without a controlling subject) or center (and thus free of a limiting structure).19
The NHHN’s rhizomic initiatives in re-mapping power relations are felt in multiethnic strategies of language deployment, transcultural exchanges, the heterogeneity of musical choices, the deconstruction of geography through the deployment of computer-mediated spaces, and the fluidity of discursive concerns. These tend to de-centre cultural and national boundaries of compulsive belonging. In this domain, the Yoruba world inscribes itself as signal.
YORUBA YOUTH AND HIP HOP
The engagement of Yoruba youth in Nigerian hip hop (also known as Naija hip hop or gbedu) may be seen as deconstructive, interrogating the normative drawing of sociality and citizenry in the adult-Nigerian space. But this deconstructive engagement also incorporates the primary desire of every hip hop artist to construct individual ‘respect’ and relevance in the area of imaginative experimentations and entertainment, and ultimately to attain stardom. This factor emphasizes a major difference between the ideological origins of hip hop in the United States and Nigeria, for while it commenced as a channel of social criticism with a racial bent in the United States, it took off primarily as an entertainment outlet in Nigeria. It later became a youth channel of social criticism and transcultural group expression. Thus, the Yoruba contributions to Nigerian hip hop necessarily embraced the marriage of local and Western imaginative resources to breed what often alarms the adult world as Kayeefı`: a bewildering mystery.20 This notionally becomes the case because traditional culture and its pillars are reduced to recycled commodities in which the sacrosanct becomes tabooed, the communal becomes eroded, the ethical becomes outlawed and the ethnic becomes ‘postponed’. Being Nigerian, in this regard, becomes an identity that shifts towards a feeling of being global and being a citizen, since the postmodern cultural mediation of the NHHN introduces new socio-cultural values that imaginatively ‘free’ youth from the limiting socio-political boundaries of the Nigerian nation-state and mono-ethnicity. In this manifestation, the Yoruba intervention in Nigerian hip hop becomes an exercise in artful transgression. One of the ways in which this exercise is carried out is through the relocation of familiar native folksongs, pithy sayings and proverbs from their customary habitats of ethnic veneration to a playful, postmodern arena of identity in which the customary is artistically and ethically ruptured. An example is Tony Tetuila’s re-singing of the Yoruba folksong Omode Meta n sere, in which he alters its traditional imaginative rendering to the advantage of his postmodern artistic intention. The song assembles rap (in English) and the choric voice (in Yoruba) to create a transcultural display in which the Yoruba is apparent but deconstructed. This opens this song up to a global audience fascinated by its entertainment value rather than to an indigenous moral sermonizing. The elements of code-switching and code-mixing in this song (also common to songs by a number of Yoruba lead artists such as 9ice, D Banj, Olu Maintain, Lord of Ajasa, Weird MC, Sound Sultan, Jazzman Olofin, (the late) Dagrin, Olamide, eLDee, Davido, Bouqui, Sasha, Ara and Tiwa Savage) are statements of postcolonial ambivalence, a site which memorizes the past but insists on a transcultural identity in order to subvert the twin grand narratives of nativism and postcolonial national affiliation. A noteworthy example in which the traditional Yoruba penchant for ethical conduct is ‘laughed at’, re-constructed and re-channelled is in Olu Maintain’s ‘Yahoozee’, a song which borrows from the traditional Yoruba concept of orı´ to propose an epistemic slant totally at odds with traditional Yoruba morality. Among the Yoruba, orı´ literally denotes the physical human head, but at a connotative level, it stands for the individual’s essence or divinely appointed personality. Thus, orı´ (otherwise known as orı´ inu, ‘the internal head’) is perceived as the controller of the individual’s destiny. At creation, orı´ is believed to kneel before the creator to collect its ipin, its portion. According to Emmanuel Yoloye:
The portion is determined in three ways: partly by a free choice of orı´ (akunleyan); partly by a free gift of the creator (akunlegba); and partly by affixation (ayanmo). The Yoruba are of course aware of the biological process of conception and birth. Nevertheless they believe that the process of creation and the choice of portions takes place for each conception.21
The Yoruba’s adoration of the power of orı´ in the individual’s life often leads them to worship it as a type of guardian angel, so that they are not derailed from their destinies. In referring to the role of orı´ therefore, there is often an association with its power to chart a positive destiny for the individual, and this is purportedly recognized in the individual’s attainment of socially sanctioned traits of character and honour. Thus whatever career, position or status the individual projects, it must be in the mould of character identifiable with an omoluabi, a well-bred personality. By extension, though there is a fatalistic ring around an individual’s destiny within the concept of orı´, there is always a consciousness that an acceptable individual in society bears an orı´ that has been divinely aided in character and in the choice of livelihood (not necessarily in association with material attainment). This becomes all the more important in the assumption that another person’s orı´ may be invoked to aid an individual: a parent’s for a child, for instance. In this vein, the Yoruba identify an olori ire (a possessor of an enviable or accordant orı´) and an olori buruku (a possessor of an evil or malignant orı´). In Olu Maintain’s ‘Yahooze’, orı´ is still acknowledged as the essence of an individual’s destiny as maintained in traditional belief, but is playfully reconstructed as ‘a game of chance’ in which the individual may, in the current consumerist social dispensation, exploit it to justify utterly selfish, avaricious and dubious tendencies. This twist is exploited through an emphasis on the individual’s indebtedness to akunleyan, here seen as a divinely sanctioned endowment by which humans may chart their independence, even from the divine, in making personal choices. This is part of the backdrop to the failures of the government and the normative social order to build a society that is corruption-free, welfaristic and truly representative of the populace, especially often-marginalized youth. The song, thus, rather than condemning the internet scams common among the younger generation (known as ‘Yahoo Yahoo’ or ‘Yahooze’), openly celebrates them as antidotes to government-impelled poverty, unemployment, pedestrian education for the poor, youth frustrations and alienation in the Nigerian nation-state. The song rebelliously severs the connection between orı´ and akunlegba or ayanmo, seen as constraining divine contents which make the individual necessarily obliged to the conventional moral/spiritual pretensions of the society. Accommodating lyrics saturated with bawdry, code-mixing/ switching, neologisms, mainstream Lagos-Yoruba and the spicing of Oyo dialect, the music interlaces Western/indigenous rhythms within the recurring background of a siren-like emission on a highway. In the song, Olu Maintain maintains that:
Awon kan waiye wa sise
Awon kan waiye wa jaiye
Awon kan waiye wa gbowo
Awon kan waiye wa saye
Awon kan waiye wa sayo o
Awon kan waiye wa sayo oh, yahooooze
Translation:
Some have come to the world to work
Some have come to the world to have some fun
Some have come to the world to make money
Some have come to the world to party
Some have come to the world to get drunk
Some have come to the world to get drunk, yahooooze.22
To be ‘drunk’ in the deeper context of the lyrics is to be delivered from restraints found in the socializing tendencies of, in Freudian terms, the super-ego, which restrains the affinities of the individual to the id: the primordial, ‘unschooled’ nature of humans. By extension, the song privileges the reign of the id as an expression of postcolonial youth disillusionment. But perhaps the most socio-politically potent hip hop release of Yoruba extraction is Bembe Aladisa’s track, Eyin Oyinbo, E wa fun mi li Visa. Sung predominantly in the Egba dialect, this track demonstrates an artistry involving code mixing/switching with the speech and beat percussions of predominant American rap and Latin American music (in the interludes between stanzas). The lyrics reveal the artist’s desperation to seek a ‘saving’ visa from the white world for his survival. This tellingly comments on the fac¸ade of political independence that betrays corruption, avarice, poverty, nepotism and general bureaucratic irresponsibilities in the Nigerian postcolony. Expressed in visual scenes foregrounding the critical burden of the song, the recurring chorus and artistic statement goes thus:
Eyin Oyinbo, e wa fun mi li visa
Eyin Oyinbo, e wa fun mi li visa
Ilu yi su mi, e wa fun mi li visa
Ebi yi po ju, e wa fun mi li visa
E si future, e wa fun mi li visa
E si security, e wa fun mi li visa
Kin ma ku o, e wa fun mi li visa
Kin ma ku o, e wa fun mi li visa.
Translation:
O white people, come give me a visa
O white people, come give me a visa
I’m fed up of this land, come give me a visa
This hunger is killing, come give me a visa
There is no future, come give me a visa
There is no security, come give me a visa
Don’t let me die, come give me a visa
Don’t let me die, come give me a visa.23
It is instructive to note that the aesthetic and discursive experimentations of the Yoruba intervention in Nigerian hip hop and the concentration of this activity in Lagos, the former capital city of Nigeria and Nigeria’s most cosmopolitan city, has evoked a youth culture with an amazing hybrid character. This hybridity negotiates a globalized reinvention of the Yoruba language and culture usable even by nonYoruba hip hop stars. It must be noted that the mainstream language of Nigerian hip hop is the Nigerian pidgin.24 However, since the Yoruba language enjoys the reputation of being largely de-ethnicized through an array of creative experimentations and transcultural social contraptions, Yoruba may well be seen as the indigenous-tongue ‘lingua franca’ of Nigerian hip hop. This, however, does not mean that remarkable innovations do not occur in languages such as Igbo, Hausa, Efik, Idoma, and so on. Neither does it mean that Yoruba youths do not consume songs that are code-mixed and/or code-switched in English and non-Yoruba indigenous languages. The fact, however, that most hip hop activities and stars are based in Lagos has informed a development in which Yoruba enjoys the status of being the next most widespread and available language, coming close to Nigerian pidgin and English. This naturally opens it up to a globalized imaginative stream of usages, which also cements youth solidarity within the Nigerian hip hop cultural experience. Some notable non-Yoruba stars who have been known to use Yoruba in one creative form or the other include Ruggedman, Tuface, P Square, DJ Zeez, Terry G and Jesse Jagz. In Baraje, a nakedly unpre-tentious track about his sexual craving for a lady, Ruggedman evinces a genius for neologism, semantic relocation and cultural subversion involving the Yoruba language. The following excerpt bears ready evidence:
Shake your body make you shake that thing wey you get
Let the music enter your head
Dansia baraje
Omoge bend your waist go down.25
In the above, one notices the interaction between Yoruba and English (involving pidgin as well), emphasizing the dissolution of any sense of the linguistic hegemony of a particular culture. The neologism dansia is a corruption of the English words ‘dance’ and ‘here’, evoking the street dance atmosphere of the rather licentious and ghetto-suffused realities of the Mushin, Isale-Eko and Oshodi areas of Lagos. A case of semantic relocation of Yoruba words also occurs here. In literal Yoruba, the word baraje refers to a state in which an individual shuns emotional control over calamity, in most cases over the loss of a beloved one, becoming almost uncontrollably hysterical. The association of the body, ara, with this state of hysteria depicts the magnitude of sorrow expressed in physical terms. In Ruggedman, ‘baraje’ becomes transposed from its original meaning to an unguarded physical display of seductive dancing. Computer-mediated communication (CMC) has been crucial in circulating the Naija hip hop message, and in deconstructing the equation between physical geography and ethnic/national identity in the NHHN. The often personalized nature of social media and the heterogeneous opportunities it presents in the dissemination of information, branding, communication and new forms of relationship have actualized the NHHN as a formidable subculture in Nigeria. Yoruba-oriented hip hop has been much glocalized through DVDs, smartphones, websites, blogs, Twitter accounts and YouTube videos, making this cultural phenomenon a popular counter-hegemonic commodity of global consumption. That ‘gbedu’ (a Yoruba word) is one of the two most popular synonyms of Nigerian hip hop bears further witness to Yoruba-oriented hip hop’s integrating lingo-visual synergy in the NHHN. Thematically, Yoruba-oriented hip hop casts itself within a geography of illimitable possibilities, ranging from the personal to the communal, from the private to the public, from the ethnic to the (inter)national, from the religious to the secular, from the subjective to the objective. Aesthetically, it explores arresting avenues of language use, proposes a synthetic relation with non-Yoruba cultures, epistemic temperaments, world views. It accommodates non-Yoruba participants within an arguable commonwealth of linguistic, folkloric and philosophical hemisphere. It also (re)assembles and recycles other musical genres and styles within and without the Yoruba cultural memory (the inclusion of fujı`, highlife, gospel motifs and funk testify to this). While it goes without saying that this is perhaps the most prominent depiction of youth visibility in the Nigerian state, it is also a major transethnic and postmodern articulation of a generational group that (re)negotiates its national belonging through its larger GHHN frame of discursive citizenship.
RECONSTRUCTING GENDER ROLES?
Constructions of gender roles in the NHHN in relation to the Nigerian public space are discursively complex. In line with its anti-establishment socio-cultural orientation, the NHHN produces a site in which the female body is remarkably visible and crucial. Woman is sensuous and outspoken; and she is a collaborator with her male counterparts in the business of deviating from expected ethics/morals of adult-run social standards. It could be argued that hip hop video outputs of Nigerian extraction showcase sexually provocative female dance-steps/moves, with the song as added spice! This camaraderie between male and female individuals in the NHHN produces a type of level playing ground in which male sexism seems doctrinally rejected, in contrast to sectors of Nigerian society in which it is rampant, such as finance, education and politics. In this development, the NHHN, with an immense youth following comprising students and young working-class adults, has considerably challenged the sexist geography of power relations that privileges the dominant male in the Nigerian public sphere. Moreover, the visibility of female artists in Nigerian hip hop is increasing, re-defining the space of its male dominance. With the inputs of Yoruba artists like Weird MC, Sasha, Bouqui, Asa, T Y Bello and Tiwa Savage, female lead-presence tends to inject themes that basically narrate the subjective plurality of the female person (in line perhaps with Luce Irigaray’s manifesto) as against a tendency to homogenize her.26 Weird MC’s Ijo ya (It’s time to dance), Asa’s Why can’t we be and Tiwa Savage’s Olorun mi (My God) present an array of thematic concerns ranging from social festivity and challenged heterosexual relationship(s) to political frustrations. Despite the positive readings that could be made of gender-balancing initiatives in the NHHN, a fact that cannot be ignored is the male engineering and ‘authorization’ of Nigerian hip hop. In the main, the major music companies and personalities that people the hip hop cosmos are male, including Kenny’s Music, Mo Hits, Trybes Records and Chocolate City. A by-product of this is the arguable commodification of woman as a pedestrian sex article. Though there are women such as Weird MC, Sasha, Asa, Bouqui, TY Bello and Tiwa Savage who contest the male dominance on the Yoruba and Nigerian hip hop scene, this youth cultural gaze is predominantly phallic. Thus, a gamut of obscene lyrics (originating from male artists) configures the female body as an object of male pleasure, both in language and in the ironical consent of woman as performer in the latter’s near-parasitic discourse. The Yoruba world is palpably represented in this phenomenon because it is the most widely used indigenous language in Nigerian hip hop, encouraged even by non-Yoruba male artists like Ruggedman, Tuface, Jesse Jagz and a number of others. This fact is arguably a cultural marker in the NHHN. As I have remarked elsewhere, in almost every male hip hop enactment, female presence ‘is for choric effect or a stereotypical and often lewd dance atmosphere at the visual level’.27
CONCLUSION
I propose, in this article, a radical re-engineering of the Nigerian nationstate in relation to responsible governance in general and the plight of young people in particular. Though hip hop in Nigeria and the Yoruba experience within it reveal an array of engaging youth talent, it paradoxically betrays the depths of administrative irresponsibility, systemic dysfunction and visionary myopia in the Nigerian postcolony. Youth becomes, in this dismal calculus of power, a lamentable other. And what may re-orientate young people, education, is almost always a national embarrassment. The failure to humanize primary education, apathy towards properly funding public secondary schooling and chaos in the tertiary arm have fed into illiteracy among Nigeria’s children and young people. With an urgent national call to redeem the education sector from its fallen state, coupled with a careful cultural programme that could critique and appropriate the current global transcultural traffic to the mass benefit of Nigerians, the Nigerian nation-state as a whole could not only make a great leap forward but could also harness the ingenious possibilities of its budding next generation.
1. I Akinjogbin, ‘Dahomey and Yoruba in the Nineteenth Century’, in Joseph C Anene and Godfrey Brown, eds, Africa in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Ibadan University Press and Nelson, Ibadan, 1978, p 255 2. Ibid, 256
3. Kwame Appiah and Henry Louis Gates, ‘Yoruba’, in Kwame Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates, eds, The Encyclopedia of African and African American Experience, Running Press, Pennsylvania, 2003, p 1029
4. Toyin Falola, ‘Earliest Yoruba Writers’, in Yemi Ogunbiyi, ed, Perspectives on Nigerian Literature: 1700 to the Present, Guardian Books Nigeria, Lagos, 1988, p 22
5. Tunde Akinwunmi, ‘Trade Secrets and their Gradual Erosion in the Yoruba Textile Craft Industry’, Journal of Cultural Studies, vol 5, no 1, 2003, pp 87–103
6. Partha Chaterjee, Our Modernity, SEPHIS, Dakar, 1997, pp 8–9
7. Beatrice Skordili, ‘Grand Narratives’, in Victor E Taylor and Charles E Winquist, eds, Encyclopedia of Postmodernism, Routledge, London and New York, 2001, p 165
8. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1993, p 74
9. Hannah Appel, ‘Dancehall, Hip-Hop and Musical Cross-Currents’, Glendora Review: African Quarterly on the Arts, vol 3, no 3/4, 2004, pp 71–79, p 74
10. Jean Baudrillard, Simulations, Paul Foss, Paul Patton and Phillip Beitchman, trans, Semiotext[e], New York, 1983, p 147
11. D B C O’Brien, ‘A Lost Generation? Youth Identity and State Decay in West Africa’, in Richard Werbner and Terence Ranger, eds, Postcolonial Identities in Africa, Zed, London and New Jersey, 1996
12. A O K Noah, ‘Ideology and Youth Re-Socialization in Nigeria’, in Noah and Ayo Ayodele, eds, Youth Management in Nigeria, Central Education Service, Lagos, 2002, p 75
13. Mats Utas, ‘Building a Future? The Reintegration and Remarginalisation of Youth in Liberia’, in Paul Richard, ed, No Peace, No War: Anthropology of Contemporary Armed Conflicts, James Currey and Ohio University Press, Athens and Oxford, 2005, pp 137–154
14. Ranging from T H Marshall’s ‘Citizenship and Social Class’, in Jeff Manza and Michael Sauder, eds, Inequality and Society (1949), W W Norton, New York, 2009, pp 148– 154; to more globalized reflections in Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference, Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey, 1990; Renato Rosaldo, ‘Cultural Citizenship and Educational Democracy’, Cultural Anthropology, vol 9, no 3, 1994, pp 402–411; and Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1995.
15. O’Brian, ‘A Lost Generation’, op cit, p 55
16. H Samy Alim, Roc the Mic Right: The Language of Hip Hop Culture, Routledge, New York, 2006, p 3
17. Aihwa Ong, ‘Cultural Citizenship and SubjectMaking: Immigrants Negotiate Racial and Cultural Boundaries in the United States’, Current Anthropology, vol 37, no 5, December 1996, pp 737–762
18. Renato Rosaldo, ‘Cultural Citizenship and Educational Democracy’, Cultural Anthropology, vol 9, no 3, 1994, pp 402–411, emphasis in the original
19. Timothy Murphy, ‘Rhizome’, in Victor E Taylor and Charles E Winquist, eds, Encyclopedia of Postmodernism, Routledge, London and New York, 2001, p 345, emphasis in the original
20. ‘Kayeefi’ is an exclamation uttered by a Yoruba person when he/she feels at an absolute loss in trying to make sense of an occurrence or a development. In traditional society, this would equate to a mystery.
21. Emmanuel Ayotunde Yoloye, ‘The Philosophy of the Nigerian Education System and Relevance to the Concept of the Yoruba Omoluabi’, in Adedotun Ogundeji and Adeniyi Akangbe, eds, Omoluabi: Its Concepts and Education in Yoruba Land, Ibadan Cultural Studies Group, Ibadan, 2009, p 32
22. Olu Maintain, ‘Yahooze’, Maintain Reloaded, Afrobest Production, Lagos, 2006
23. Bembe Aladisa, ‘Eyin Oyinbo, E wa fun mi li Visa’, Eyin Oyinbo, E wa Fun Mi Ni Visa, Lagos, 2003
24. Tope Omoniyi, ‘So I Choose to Do Am Naija Style’, in H Samy Alim, Awad Ibrahim and Alastair Pennycook, eds, Global Linguistic Flows: Hip Hop Cultures, Youth Identities and the Politics of Language, Routledge, New York and London, 2009, pp 113–135; Akinmade Akande, ‘CodeSwitching in Nigerian Hip Hop Lyrics’, Language Matters, vol 44, no 1, 2013, pp 39–57
25. Ruggedman, ‘Baraje’, Thy Album Come, Rugged Records/Blue Pie Productions, Lagos, 2004
26. Luce Irigaray, ‘This Sex Which is Not One’, in Robyn R Warhol and Diane Price Herndl, eds, Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism, Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, New Jersey, 1997, pp 363–369
27. Yomi Olusegun-Joseph, ‘Indigenous Languages and the Postmodern Turn: Rap as a Generational Statement of Dissidence’, in Francis Egbokhare and Clement Kolawole, eds, Globalization and the Future of African Languages, Ibadan Cultural Studies Group, Ibadan, 2006, p 265