Abstract
The postmodern exchanges enabled through the traffic of information, identities and subjectives in Computer Mediated Communication (CMC) have forged a ‘pact’ with Nigerian hip hop to produce a youth cultural reality that is both transitional and transgressive. This development, which tends to re-negotiate the identity of youth in the conventional distribution of power, privilege and participation in the dominant ‘adult ordering’ of society and sociality, inscribes a statement of generational difference most emphatically represented in a probing visual culture and the linguistic sign. The creative and combative bending of English and the indigenous languages, coupled with characteristic visual (video) illustrations, map a discourse of cultural and linguistic borderlesssness and reconstructions that often translate into ‘moral panic’ in the adult-controlled media. While this conventional social reaction has formed the theme of most critical views, most have failed to discern the transitional implications of these practices in relation to the polity, ethnicity, nation, nationality, gender and the re-shaping of subjectivities, which this chapter addresses. Crucial to this chapter is therefore the exploration of the manipulation of CMC and the language as counter-discursive narratives of youth identity and visibility through the trajectory of hip hop in Nigeria. It argues the ‘postponement’ of traditional and national fixities for multicultural and postmodern expressions, pointing to a state of the African youth’s interrogation of their postcoloniality. By identifying gaps in Nigerian youth management which often arouse concerns of ‘youth panic’ the chapter suggests ways in which stakeholders in the Nigerian youth world may forge a new era of national cohesion through insights from the hip hop culture.
Key Words: GLOBAL HIP HOP NATION (GHHN), Nigerian Hip hop Nation (NHHN). The Nigerian Nation-state. The Nigerian Youth, CMC, Language, Transethnic(ity), Discursive Visuality, Cultural Transition, Cultural Transgression.
Introduction: The Nigerian Youth and the Hegemony of Othering
To contemplate or discuss the Nigerian youth as a sensitive category of the ever gestating but forever postponed ideal of the African postcolonial state is to reinforce a polemical discourse whose concerned protagonists represent a sense of a hopeful future, but who, in real terms, exist in an agonistic relation with the socio-political status quo which makes the inadvertently other. This state of generational anomy, ensured by such arguable discriminatory machineries as policy making, the legislative set—up, the constitution, the educational system, religion, traditional customs and ethics and a number of other Manichaean procedures and measures, inscribe the youth as an implied social text of predetermined exclusion. Donal B. Cruise O’Brien laments, along this line, the African youth’s existential powerlessness in asserting any significant political presence since they are trapped in the gulf of their largely despised age-bracket (adult children/ immature adults) and weakened by their inability to negotiate permanent change since they are ‘easily manipulated by their elders.’1 Thus to him, ‘[t]o study youth politics is to study politics ‘from below.’2 Pat Utomi echoes that the state in postcolonial Africa has proved a disappointment as an agent of development.’3 And in an enquiry that wonders at the ironies of an independence that flaunts the reward of political decolonization at the expense of bureaucratic responsibility, Wole Soyinka, the Nigerian Nobel laureate of literature, concludes that ‘[t]he theme of power is one that remains all too pertinent to a continent which, having freed itself from colonial tyranny, still finds itself obliged to contend with a renewed colonization, this time from within.’4
The Nigerian experience in this postcolonial contraption exhibits discernible traits of modernist disillusionment characterized by a seeming institutionalized template for ‘progress,’ which brings with it the confused and enduring mark of what David Clippinger describes as the ‘continuous blurring of an either/or.’5 By extension, despite the accolade of its status as ‘the giant of Africa, ‘Nigeria, in its unstable designs of socio-political sovereignty mapped by discordant lines of political, economic, infrastructural, educational and human-development representations, slips within an abyss of regression, paradoxes and dystopia, especially in relation to its youth world. ‘The conduct of state affairs,’ pursues A.O.K. Noah, ‘and the gamut of political, fiscal and mental illiterates simply mandate the youths to search for emancipation elsewhere,’6 This desperate escape route is often realized in armed robbery, militancy, cultism, prostitution, internet scams and an obsessive drive to migrate to Europe and America due to harsh economic and social conditions. Biodun Jeyifo provocatively captures this in the following:
The very title of this address – ‘Unfortunate Children of Fortunate Parents’ – is a reflection of this grim historic fact that young people in general, but especially those in our tertiary institutions, and with regard to virtually all aspects of life chances, face daunting odds; they face material, psychological and spiritual disabilities that were simply unimaginable in my youth, in my years as an undergraduate and a postgraduate student. Any talk of inter-generational dialogue between respective generational cohorts that ignores these crucial factors is doomed to be stillborn.7
This chapter explores a site of youth ‘escape’ located in the hyperreality of the Nigerian hip hop culture. It contends that in this postmodern space, language and discursive visuality/imaging/image-making become creative arsenals by which the youth inscribe their difference as well as contest the master narrative of the Nigerian postcolony. Along this line, it foregrounds the transethnic, postnational, gender and class re-negotiations of hip hop, recognizing the intervention of Computer Mediated Communication (henceforth referred to as CMC) as crucial to its discourse. In this, it reinforces Jean Baudrillard’s observation that in hyperreality is a type of lived space that exists in simulation, ‘the generation by models of a real without origin or reality.’9 This chapter concludes by identifying ways by which stakeholders in the Nigerian youth world may forge a new era of national cohesion through insights from the hip hop culture.
Hip Hop and the Postmodern Imperative
Hip hop may be described as a counter-hegemonic youth cultural; explosion that originated in the harsh racial, socio-cultural and economic experiences of blacks in the United States of the 1960s and early 1970s. introduced by the imaginative altitude of a Jamaican immigrant, Clive Campbell (otherwise known as DJ Kool Herc), hip hop became an outlet by which the marginalized black youth sought to inscribe their presence through an alternative medium of protest that was basically artistic, corroborating the civil disobedience of the Black Power Movement of the 1960s. Its structural anchors were founded on rap, emceeing (deejaying), break dancing and graffiti. Contemporary inputs include the elements of freestyling and overstanding.10 Henry Louis Gates and Kwame Anthony Appiah observe that hip hop ‘emerged as a new, creative, and flexible value system in a landscape stripped of value. Although neighborhoods were ugly and neglected, fashion and art could embody pride, beauty, and self-respect.’11
The phrase ‘hip hop’, according to Adebayo Omisore, came into being in the 1970s through Lovesbug Starski who, while emceeing a party, would repeatedly utter, ‘welcome to the hip hop beeny bop.’12 This youth culture-musical development was eventually so named by Afrika Bambaataa, one of its foundational pillars. Omisore pursues that
As at the time Bam named the genre, he was a newly converted Muslim who had previously been a gang member. In Hiphop he found a more positive avenue to channel his energy. He birthed the Universal Zulu Nation in 1973 and its members, former gang members like him, were introduced to the component parts of the culture as an alternative to their old ways. 13
From the foregoing, the beginnings of hip hop may be seen as responding, not only to a people’s history of otherness, but also to the modernist tendency of framing diverse groups and cultural identities, albeit unequally, under the discursive umbrella of the ‘nation-state’ and the ambivalent construction of ‘legal citizenship’. Which Aihwa Ong posits as a ‘dual process of self-making and being-made within webs of power linked to the nation state and civil society. 14 The contemporary reality of the transitional/transcultural landscape of global hip hop assumes a postmodern and borderless re-negotiation of the concept of ‘nation-state’, citizenship and belonging. H.Samy Alim, for instance, argues that the universe of hip hop consists of ‘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 geographical givens of the present, ’15 The postmodern project of subverting ‘nationality’ , ‘citizenship’ and ‘belonging’ , with reference to Alim’s elucidation of the GHHN, aims at rupturing all forms of metanarratives, discursive designs in which ‘truths’ or ‘givens’ are framed and circulated as enduring signposts or phenomena of lived presence. This (postmodern) intervention thus privileges multiple centres of world-view, subjectivity, hybridity and low cultural tastes which are intricately plugged within the mainstream of late capitalism and its consumerist tendencies. Linda Hutcheon captures the deconstructive tendency of postmodernism in the following:
Postmodern culture… has a contradictory relationship to what we usually label our dominant, liberal humanist culture. It does not deny it, as some have asserted…Instead, it contests it from within its own assumptions. Modernists like Eliot and Joyce have usually been seen as profoundly humanistic…in their paradoxical desire for stable aesthetic and moral values, even in the face of the realization of the inevitable absence of such universals. Postmodernism differs from this, not in its humanistic contradictions, but in the provisionality of its response to them: it refuses to posit any structure or, what Lyotard…calls, master narrative…which, for such modernists, would have been consolatory. It argues that such systems are indeed attractive, perhaps even necessary; but this does not make them any the less illusory.16
Thus hip hop today, as projected in the GHHN, bridges races, ethnicities, classes and cultures in a youth utopia of space and identity (re)formulation. This unique socio-cultural and transitional/transracial picture of the GHHN remarkably challenges ideas of multiculturalism, but rather projects of the ideals of what Robin Kelley identifies as ployculturalism.17
Multiculturalism is a political concept that aims at accommodating the diversity of cultures within national spaces in ways that rather ‘insulate’ their differences from one another than negotiate mutual correspondences and inter-penetrations among them. This point of its weakness reveals itself in how it has continually constructed the binary opposites of ‘self’ and ‘other’ in liberal Western democrats where increasingly restrictive policies erected around citizenship tend to exclude migrants. Polyculturalism, on the other hand, acknowledges the diversity of cultures as a reality that frames cultural hybridities, correspondences and consensual accommodations of difference. Wendy Smith’s essay on Mariano Fortuny’s eclectic clothing designs in this volume illustrates this. This cultural orientation coheres with the GHHN and its postmodern ideal of transactional community in very sophisticated ways. As Vijay Prashad notes,
Multiculturalism tends towards a static view of history, with cultures already forged and with people enjoined to respect and tolerate each cultural world. Polyculturalism, on the other hand, offers a dynamic view of history, mainly because it argues for cultural complexity, and it suggests that our communities move between the dialectic of cultural presence and antiracism, between the demand for acknowledgement and for an obliteration of hierarchy … Polyculturalism accepts the existence of differences in cultural practice, but it forbids us to see culture as static and antiracist critique as impossible.18
The plural, fluid and engaging nature of the hip hop culture and its malleability bto reflect any personal or social theme logically informed its explosion as a signal consumer commodity. In America, Jemes E. Brunson 111 points out,
The commercial exploitation of hip-hop culture has transformed its various elements into a global force and a multi-billion-dollar industry. In 2001, Ebony magazine reported that hip-hop represented a ten-billion dollar business…Fascination with hip-hop extends to visual objects and images…As the hip-hop economy has continued to grow, the popularity of its objects and images as forms of visual culture has intensified.19
The Nigerian moment of this cultural and late arrowhead arguably announced the arrival of the other in the construction of cultural transition and transgression(s). The Nigerian Hip Hop Nation (NHHN) projects a very crucial voice of youth agency and difference in the global hip hop world and in the Nigerian society.
Nigerian (Naija) Hip Hop and Negotiations of presence
Arguably originating in the 1970s when a group of Secondary (High) School boys from Saint Gregory’s College, Lagos, Known as Ofege, waxed an album that significantly mimicked American-style hip hop, the NHHN presents a semi sphere of youth activism that emphasizes artful transgression(s) and ideological interrogations. Accommodating a range of complex and artistically provocative use of language, visual culture and the dominant intervention of CMC, Nigerian hip hop produces a combination of ideo-aesthetic newness, appropriations and deviance that compel an arresting followership among the youth. This development had been much fertilized by the commercial initiative of one of the pillars of the Nigerian entertainment industry, Don Murray Bruce, who brought several hip hop stars from the United States to perform before live audiences of their teeming Nigerian fans at the National Arts Theatre, Lagos, in early 1980s. this period witnessed an almost tranquilising air of expectancy and celebration among the youth as groups such as Shalamr, Kool and the Gang, Dynasty, cameo, The Whispers, One way, Sisters Sledge and earth, Wind and Fire came in serial succession to ‘light up’ the stage. The crystallisation of the passion for hip hop was to be firmly emphasized in the second half of the 80s when an American rapper in exile in Nigeria, Ibrahim Salim Omari, released the first Nigerian rap album entitled ‘I am African.’20 It is worth nothing that Omari himself belonged to a chapter of hip hop’s history since he was one of the four members of The sugar Hill Gang, the group that released the first rap album entitled ‘Rappers Delight.’21
With its green moments commencing in the 1990s and the early 21st century through indigenous groups/stars such as The remedies, Plantation Boyz and Faze, Nigerian hip hop began to inscribe its own unique signature within the GHHN. It presently commands its presence as a popular commodity of youth assertion, entertainment, linguistic experiments, advertising, propaganda, communication and self-imaging. Its cross-genre musical expressions, performance ethics and the insertion of traditional folkloric elements such as story-telling, myth, poetry, proverbs and pithy sayings privilege a postmodern appetite for parody, irony, paradoxes, mass cultural exchanges and a production of multiple spaces of subjectivity.
One basic trajectory by which Nigerian hip hop inscribes its discourse of cultural transition and transgression(s) is through the linguistic sign. Language is a semiotic template by which the Nigerian hip hop artiste projects a cultural gaze that makes him/her a Nigerian citizen with a post national/trans ethnic character. And this becomes a sharing that circulates within the Nigerian youth world. A very ready site of this is in (re)naming. (Re)naming is held as a ritual of inscribing oneself or ones discourse as subject, repudiating the political and socio-cultural alterities on the youth. Thus, names of artistes like Tuface (at times spelt 2Face), 2Shortz, 9ice, Bouqui (a plausible re-writing of the Yoruba name Buki, itself a shortened form of Bukola), P-Square, Weied MC, DBanj, MI, Ice Prince, Davido and Jesse Jagz are postmodern signifiers of difference, fluid global identity and the transgression of socio-cultural borders. In another context (with regard to the female artiste ), it contests the female body being rendered as a helpless object of the arbitrary naming patriarchy of what feminist psychoanalysts would identify as ‘The Law of the Father.’ However, to a great extent, the Nigerian hip hop (re)naming practice bears a cultural reproduction of the naming signpost within the GHHN, which has a significant American input.
I will be quick to stress here that while the patterns of (re)naming above seem to suggest on overriding African American cultural imperialism in the NHHN, the latter’s (re)naming practice parades what may be conveniently described as a ‘canon of choices’, since the examples above do not necessarily translate to the norm. The (re)naming observances include the accommodation of indigenous lexemes standing on their own or mixed with foreign ones. Thus, the NHHN features or once featured celebrity artistes such as Sound Sultan, Lord of Ajasa, Jazzman Olofin, Bembe Aladisa, Asa, Ara and Dekunle Fuji. On another plane, some artistes chose to maintain their forenames as their stage names. These are however significantly few, and their choices seem to be unusual within the culture.
A great linguistic hallmark in the NHHN is the profuse and seminal use of code-mixing and code-switching. In many cases, there are interactions between English, Pidgin and indigenous languages, the choices of use being determined by the artiste. Some artistes, like Darey Art Alade and TY Bello, perform predominantly in English; however, the statement linguistic trajectory of Nigerian hip hop is the pidgin, code mixed/switched with English and indigenous languages. This, ideologically, indicates non-allegiance to any traditional ethnic boundary, or to a sense of essentialist national identity. Pidgin is dominant sine it’s not only a Nigerian Creole, but also a code that may be rightly described as a mass language.
However, one may advance that Yoruba forges the indigenous language base of the culture, since Lagos, the performance and commercial centre of Nigerian hip hop, is predominantely Yoruba, and a great number of the stars were either born and bred or settled there. This is not to insinuate the seminal linguistic renderings do not occur in the environment of other indigenous Nigerian languages like Igbo, Hausa, Efik and Ibibio. And this is also not to suggest that Yoruba artistes do not at times employ non-Yoruba words and expresions in some code mixing instances. The point however made is that Yoruba seems to have assumed a de-ethnicised facility. Words like fii le, omo, gba o, baba, oga, omoge are often shared as idiosyncratic group utterances within the culture. Non-Yoruba stars like Ruggedman, DJ Zeez, P-square, Terry G and many others are known to code mix/switch Yoruba with English and pidgin in the global reflection of Nigerian hip hop. Ruggedman’s ‘Baraje,’ whose lead stanza follows, is a ready example:
Shake your body make you shake that thing wey you get
Let the music enter your head
Dansia Baraje
Omoge bend your waist go down22
In the above, there is a trilingual level of code mixing with an imaginative coinage of neologism that revolves around a female persona lustfully longed after by the male songster. The English elements are ‘shake your body’ (line 1) and ‘Let the music enter your head’ (line 2). The remaining part of line 1 (‘make you shake … ‘) and the whole of the last line are in pidgin, though the latter code mixes with ‘Omoge’ (lady), which is Yoruba. ‘Dansia’ (line 3) is a neologism that corrupts and collapses the English words, ‘dance’ and ‘here,’ into a Yorubanised word used in ghetto settings and which bears a very seductive connotation. ‘Baraje’ in lateral Yoruba suggests a situation in which a person expresses deep sorrow hysterically. In Ruggedman, ‘baraje’ translates into a very sexually suggestive physical dance desired of the lady by the songster.
The above marks an instance of the alarming sexual explicitness often associated with Nigerian hip hop lyrics. Among other things, this represents a site for ‘moral panic’ within the conventional codes of sexuality in Nigeria and the adult-controlled media. ‘hip hop in Nigeria,’ observes Nnamdi Lionel, ‘has come to be known as popular, seen as foreign, lewd music filled with violence and immorality.’23 but perhaps this example more profitably maps the voyeuristic and transgressive inclinations of the predominant male hip hop stars who view language as a site of adult-oriented social control and the necessary space for its resistance.
It is to be also noted that references to female sexuality by Nigerian female hip hop artistes as a way of signifying female presence in gendered power relations obfuscate claims about the ‘misogynisstic’ orientation of Nigerian hip hop. These artistes tend to subvert conventional imaginaries of woman as ‘docile’, ‘virtuos’ and ‘expendable’. A number of Tiwa Savage’s sexually’ suggestive hip hop hits are cases in point and Juliana’s seductively unpretentious video track, Omo gba gbe, is another. What becomes obvious in this development is that the NHHN projects a postmodern turn in which maleness and femaleness dissolve into recycled socio-cultural constructs that disturb normative ethical and moral expectations.
Another brilliant instance of code mixing and switching is seen in Tony Tetuila’s appropriation of the Yoruba folksong, Omode Meta n Sere. In this, the atiste re-orchestrates the linguistic and traditional cultural mode of the song in such a way that permits a code switched/mixed rap initiative that deconstructs the song’s original traditional essence. Tetuila does this to expand the entertainment and didactic location of its traditional habitat. In its re-packaged form, the song embraces a globalised outlook in which the chorus is dominantly realised in Yoruba but the main rap in English. For the Yoruba youth familiar with the traditional version of the song, the re-packaged mode experimented by Tetuila launches them into a discourse of polyculturalism that helps them memorise their Yorubaness within a global youth cultural belonging. On the other hand, it deethicises Yoruba and makes it a shared cultural commodity among non-Yoruba youth of Nigerian and non-Nigerian extraction. This type of experimentation is not restricted to the interaction between English and Yoruba in the NHHN. It exists in any polycultural situation involving English and indigenous languages.
It is instructive to note that use of English of any Metropolitan Western community. On the contrary, as Akinmade Akande has convincingly shown, English in the NHHN is heterogenous, accommodating both standards and non-standard varieties, especially African American vernacular words such as ‘gonna’, ‘wanna’, ‘babe’, ‘dough’, ‘yeah’, and Jamaican patois signifiers such as ‘batty’, ‘rudeboy’ and ‘I and I’ within the articulation of Standard English in the NHHN further inscribe the deconstructive linguistic project of this polyculture. In mapping the geography of English in the latter, Akande advances that English may be adopted as an umbrella term to cover Standard Englishes, which are often accorded overt prestige, and all varieties of non-standard Englishes, which do not have high prestige. This definition obviously covers African American Vernacular English (AAVE) and…JC/Patois, which –as a historically creolized variety-could of course be considered a language in its own right in spite of its lexical associations with English…Use of AAVE and JC is a good way for local performers to enhance their international credibility…Nigerian rappers are authentic in their use of AAVE and JC, as these two languages are often dexterously mixed with Nigerian languages in their music.24
The discursive coupling of visuality and language in global hip hop marks the difference of its narrative. Within CMC, visuality aids language at semiotic levels of inscribing youth agency. Brunson posits that hip hop images ‘reside within media the way organisms reside in a habitat.25 In the Nigerian hip hop culture, websites, multi-function cell-phones, the DVD, on-line hip hop magazines/Journals, on-line videos/YouTube facilities, Facebook, Skype and several other CMC devices construct a space of globalised youth exchanges where subjectivities are sanctified, shared, made art and commodified. This also creates a sense of youth cultural contact and seeming omiprescence since the communication base of traditional media such as the TV and radio is overtaking by a multi-space of individualized communication. A dominant section of Visual Culture critics’ privilege visuality over language as a communicative tool in the conviction that ‘objects are endowed with a life of their own –that they possess an existential status endowed with agency.’26
Eedris Adbulkareem’s ‘Nigeria Jagajaga’ (Nigeria is confused) and Olu Maintain’s ‘Yahooze’ (Internet Scam) are brilliant examples of Nigerian hip hop in ligo-visual deviance. In Abdulkareem, Nigeria is depicted as a postcolonial joke riddled with corruption, bad leadership and lack of focus. Code mixed in pidgin and Yoruba, this track’s blunt social criticism reinforced by visual commentaries of betrayal, crisis and regret stung the Nigerian political establishment that the president of the federation made a rejoinder that alarmed the country and that was much publicized in the media.
In Olu Maintain’s ‘Yahooze,’ the traditional Yoruba concept of ori is deconstructed to make a case for the ‘morality’ of internet scams operated by a number of indigent Nigerian youth in the face of irresponsible governance, economic hardships and institutional decay. Among the Yoruba, ori denotes the physical head of any creature, but at a connotative level, it stands for the divine essence of an individual. It is believed that one’s ori determines his/her personality, fortunes and destiny: what one becomes a divinely negotiated. But a socially acceptable character has the potency of maintaining ori ire (auspicious destiny), while deviance attracts ori buruku (a terrible destiny).
In Olu Maintain, ori ire is acknowledged, but its terms of relevance become re-ordered by an emphasis on material rather than moral or metaphysical capital. In a song complemented by video images of youth celebrating agency through money earned from dubious online activities, ‘Yahooze’ wonders if the defence of a Nigerian postcolony is called for.
In the song, Olu Maintain pursues 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, yahooooooze
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, yahoooooze27
As a biting piece of social criticism, Olu Maintain argues in this track that constructions of legal citizenship , national belonging and demands for responsible citizenship are organized in ways in which the masses are routinely indoctrinated by the Nigerian nation-state to fit into modes of governmentality that continually undermine them. The youth in particular experience psychic, material and spiritual brutalization and need to, in this state of generational anomy, upturn ‘false’ templates of social ethics and morality. In this track, new modes of belonging defying the divisiveness of implied ‘class citizenship’ of the Nigerian nation-state are advocated. He tends to echo Renato Renaldo’s opinion 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 subtle and more familiar. People often speak of citizenship, not as an either/or matter, but along a continuum from full citizenship (emphasis in the original) 28
Perhaps the most arresting hip hop release of Nigerian extraction that expresses huge pessimism about the youth’s identity and belonging in relation to the Nigerian state is Bembe Aladisa’s Eyin Oyinbo, E wa fun mi li Visa. Realised predominantly in the Egba dialect, this track deploys an artistry blending code mixing/switching with the speech and beat percussions of predominant American rap and Latin American music. These foreign elements come in as a type of segmentation demarcating the first rap stanza from the next. The compelling audio-visual rendition reveals the artiste’s desperation to seek a ‘saving’ visa from the Western (white) world from the political and socio-economic hardships unleashed on him in Nigeria. This critically comments on what the artiste sees as the smokescreen of political independence, corruption, avarice, poverty, nepotism and general bureaucratic irresponsibilities in the Nigerian nation-state. Amplified by visual scenes corroborating 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 visa29
The CMC negotiated language and visual project of Nigerian hip hop also charts, not only a new era of cultural understanding, but also forms of female visibility. The point has already been made about new forms of heterosexual relationships in which the female body tends the construct equal social significance with the male through largely unconventional approaches. It is however worth noting that female-artiste intervention in the NHHN is a developing feature gravitating towards re-mapping the space of its male dominanace. With inputs of artistes like Weird MC, Sasha, Bouqui, Tiwa savage, Asa, and Niyola, female lead-acts tend to inject themes and awareness that basically narrate the subjective plurality of woman. In the NHHN female scene, woman is maternal, romantic, an entrepreneur, an activist, a lover and a rebel. However, compared to their male counterparts, the NHHN female artistes tend to concentrate more on love, relationship and celebration themes. The NHHN male scene seems to overtly interrogate the socio-political cartography of the Nigerian nation-state and fixate on voyeuristic concerns.
New forms of advertisement and business are also being popularized in the NHHN. Commercial initiatives often populate NHHN web sites, and YouTube hosting serve the dual purpose of advertising new hip hop hits and popularise artistes. New forms of orthography (especially in text-messaging, on line chats and Facebook) and information/feedback exchanges through blogs and twitters are youth devises corresponding in the culture. Blogs such as www.notjustok.com and www.bellanaija.com challenge conventional forms of journalism in the Nigerian society since they are youth oriented, personalised and hugely dealing with NHHN related matters.30 Re-worked relationships with the adult-world also exist, in which hip hop artistes are employed in promoting new business products, community ideas or political images.
Discursive Gaps
Despite the imaginative statements of the Nigerian hip hop world, certain discursive gaps are noticeable. One obvious gap, despite the rationalism of the gender question, is the commodification of the female body. In many cases, the presence of women in hip hop videos/performances by male artistes is basically for erotic depiction and choric effects. This seems to be the case in some products of female artistes as well. Also, the consumerist orientation of the NHHN, though negotiating a measure of youth agency, has been painstakingly accused for the fallen standard of education in the Nigerian youth world. Niyi Osundare, for instance, refers to the menace of ‘a hip hop hysteria in the present atmosphere’31 in condemning the perceived illiteracies and unprofessionalties in the contemporary generation of Nigerian writing. While Osundare’s opinion exhibits a disturbing air of generalization that unfortunately excludes institutional breakdowns in the educational plight of the youth and assumes that hip hop is intrinsically unacademic, this opinion gains an almost widespread support in the Nigerian academy. Also, the naked display of perceived Americanisms in dress codes and speech making when Standard English usage is involved seems to install a new regime of cultural colonialism. But perhaps the greatest challenge of all is the tendency for a number of hip hop audio-visuals to encourage rape and unethical relational conducts.
Conclusion
This chapter proposes a systematic reordering of policy initiatives and executions in Nigeria, especially with regard to youth agency, social integration and public education. Along this line, a certain percentage of youth participation is required. And in the spirit of global social belonging, a concerted international forum demanding the visibility of youth welfare from African governments at the levels of public education, health and employment should be set in motion. Hard diplomatic sanctions may be considered in dealing with erring governments in this regard. The Nigerian youth/hip hop world stands to benefit from these, especially from a re-conceptualised Ministry of Youth, Sport and Culture headed by youth technocrats and cultivated by informed national programmes of cultural, economic and administrative re-orientations.
Notes
1 Donal Cruise O’Brien, ‘A Lost Generation? Youth Identity and State Decay in West Africa’, Postcolonial Identities in Africa, ed. Richard Werbner and Terrence Ranger, (London and New Jersey: Zed Books Ltd., 1996), 55-74.
2Ibid.
3Cited in A.O.K. Noah, ‘Ideology and Youth Re-Socialization in Nigeria’, Youth Management in Nigeria, eds. A.O.K. Noah and Ayo Ayodele (Lagos: Central Educational Service, 2002), 74-85.
4Wole Soyinka, Of Power (Ibadan: BOOKCRAFT, 2007), 3.
5David Clippinger, ‘Modernism’, Encyclopedia of postmodernism, eds. Victor E. Taylor and Charles E. Winquist (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), 251-252.
6Noah, ‘Ideology and Youth,’81.
7Biodun Jeyifo, ‘Unfortunate Children of Fortunate Parents’, After the Nobel: Reflections on Literature, Governance and Development, eds. Gbemisola Adeoti and Mabel Evwierhoma (Lagos: Association of Nigerian Authors, 2006), 21-37.
8Jean Baudrillard, Simulations, Trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton, Philip beitchman (Semiotext[e], USA, 1983), 2.
9Ibid.
10Tope Omoniyi, ‘So I Choose to Do Am Naija Style, Global Linguistic Flows: Hip Hop Cultures, Youth Identities and the Politics of Language, eds. H. Samy Alim, Awad Ibrahim and Alastair Pennycook (New York and London: Routledge, 2009), 113-135
11 Kwame Appiah and Henry Louis Gates, ‘Yoruba’, Encyclopedia of African and African American Experience, eds. Kwame Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates (Pennsylvania: Running Press Book Publishers, 2003), 1029-1031.
12 Adebayo Omisore, ‘Hip Hop: The Big Misrepresentation’, Hip Hop World: The Voice of a Generation, Rebirth 04, 2004, 19.
13 Omisore, ‘Hip Hop’, 19.
14 Aihwa Ong, ‘Cultural Citizenship and Subject Making: Immigrants Negotiate Racial and Cultural Boundaries in the United States’, Current Anthropology 37.5 (1996): 737-762.
15 Samy Alim, Roc the Mic Right: The Language of Hip Hop Culture (New York: Routledge, 2006), 3.
16 Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (New York and London: Routledge, (1988) 2000), 4.
17 Robin Kelley, ‘People in Me’, Color Lines 1.3 (Winter 1999): 5-7
18 Vijay Prashad, ‘Bruce Lee and Anti-Imperialism of Kung Fu: A polycultural Adventure’, Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 11.1 (Spring 2003)
19 James Brunson 111, ‘Showing Seeing: Hip Hop, Visual Culture, and the show-and-Tell Performance’. Black History Bulletin 74.1 (Winter/Spring 2011), 6-12
20 Salim Ibrahim Omari, ‘Personal Interview’, Sunday Sun, 18 July, 2004, 23
21 Omari, ‘Personal Interview’, 23.
22 Ruggedman, ‘Baraje’, Thy Album Come (Lagos: Rugged Records/Blue Pie Productions, 2004), DVD.
23 Nnamdi Lionel, ‘Opinion: The Mis-education of Hip Hop’, viewed 13 June 2012, http//thenetng.com/2011/12/12/opinion-the-miseducation-of-hip-hop.
24 Akinmade Akande, ‘The Appropriation of African American Vernacular English and Jamaican Patois by Nigerian Hip Hop Artists’, ZAA 60.3 (2012): 237-254
25 Brunson, ‘Showing, Seeing’, 7.
26 Keith Moxey, ‘Visual Studies and the Iconic Turn’, Journal of Visual Culture 7.2 (2008): 131-146
27 Olu Maintain, ‘Yahooze’, Maintain Reloaded (Lagos: Afrobest Production Ltd, 2006), DVD.
28 Renato Rosaldo, ‘Cultural Citizenship and Educational Democracy’, Cultural Anthropology 9.3 (1994):: 402-411.
29 Bembe Aladisa, ‘Eyin Oyinbo, Ewa fun mi li Visa’, Eyin Oyinbo, E wa fun mi li Visa (Lagos: Afrobest Production Ltd, 2008), DVD.
30 ‘Blogs of Note’, Bubbles 30 (August 2013): 24.
31 Niyi Osundare, ‘Soyinka and the Generation After’, The Guardian, 06 August 2004, 31.
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Yomi Olusegun-Joseph teaches Literature in the Department of English, Obafemi Awolowo University, Nigeria. His research interests are in Literacy Theory, Postcolonial Discourse, African Literature and Cultural Studies, with a special leaning to Youth and Minority Studies.