In the last decade, since the Plantation Boys and Remedies
before them began a revival of Nigerian music’s fortunes, Naija music has
eclipsed Africa and is presently showing the world that Africa has got some
groove. With YouTube views in the millions, brands such as P square, D’banj and
Flavour have become household names and veritable representatives of Nigerian
popular culture.
If music is the expression of a nation’s popular culture,
whether adopted or not, one would expect the visuals that go with it to reflect
that culture as well as the people that embody it, however, in Nigeria, this
expectation doesn’t hold.
Close your eyes and call to mind popular Nigerian music videos of the moment. If you were true to yourself, you’d admit that these videos are very unfair to the Nigerian woman. Video after video, American copycat artiste name after another, all we see is the depiction of women as playthings, playthings that come with the money, the cars, the dope houses and the choice wines—a property that success acquires.
This disrespect of women jars the nerves and grates like
mad. More so because most of the so called Nigerian feminists, ever ready to
cuss a Nigerian man out on social media, pretend not to notice this constant
demeaning of the sex they purport to represent—I don’t want to believe they are
okay with this.
