Here comes the African giant

On Sunday, African Giant, Burna Boy won his first Grammy for Best Global Music, and Wizkid’s collaboration with Beyonce (and her nine-year-old daughter) won Best Music Video. Nigerians were ecstatic.  A people already yearning for good news got reasons in excess to celebrate. Even Tiwa Savage and the two Kuti brothers, Femi and Made, whose collaboration with Coldplay would have won them certificates (rather than Grammy statuettes) had it won (which it didn’t) were being congratulated on Twitter by Naijans for winning. All win na win abeg. And I am not being facetious. Far from it.

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It is easy for us, now, to take the fact of Nigerian music going global for granted. However, those of us who were born in the 70’s and came of age in the 90’s know exactly how big a deal it is that Nigerian music is dominating even our own local stations. At all of the birthday parties my parents hosted or I went to as a child, I do not think that anyone would have played any music by a Nigerian artiste. Split clearly into the ‘serious’ (highlife, Afro-Juju, Afrobeat) and the ‘frivolous’ (pop, mostly heavy imitations of western pop), Nigerian music was for weddings and naming ceremonies and  for our parents.

Sometimes, TV stations gave it airtime. Yet I remember that there were some really good singers. Onyeka Onwenu for starters.  Yet, hardly any of the nightclubs which had become popular in Enugu in the 90s would have played music by Nigerian singers. Nobody went to a club in the 90s in Nigeria and expected to hear local  music  played. When the popular BBP- a group of four Engineering student-performers  at UNN- performed, they danced to American pop and hip-hop.

These days, however, a lot has changed. Clubs in Nigeria are  more prone than not to play Nigerian artistes. And outside of Nigeria, our music is taking over too. Since the early 2000s, a quiet revolution has been stirring on the music scene. Last year, I was talking to a French teenager in Morocco who loved music but said he knew nothing about Nigerian music. Yet, every recommendation I gave him for a Nigerian artiste, he already had on Spotify. He shouted, “He’s Nigerian?” each time I gave him another name/song. The way I was nodding and smiling proudly, you’d have thought I birthed all those singers.

I went to a party at the home of a Trinidadian writer in Port of Spain in 2012(?)  and the local DJ knew as much about contemporary Nigerian music scene as  I did. When he played D’Banj’s Oliver Twist, the floor was packed with everyone chanting the lyrics. On a recent episode of the BBC’s long running soap, Eastenders, Simi Gold’s poster was   plastered very conspicuously on a wall. The last time I was in Johannesburg, a trader on hearing I was Nigerian, started humming Tekno’s Pana. When my teenage son shakes the house with his music  on Saturday mornings, he is as likely to be playing Rema’s Dumebi as he is to be playing whichever non-Nigerian/African artiste  he is into at the moment. When I go to the salon to have my locs maintained, the music from the boombox is as likely to be by a Nigerian artiste as it is to be by one of their American favourites. In fact, the last time I was at the salon, two of the hairdressers were wondering aloud where the artiste whose music they were blasting was from (Nigeria) and what the language was that he was mixing his English with (Yoruba). They knew it was African but had no idea where nor did it matter.

While Naija has a lot of ground to make up in the global technological and economic race, it is  thrilling  to witness how we are gradually becoming a super power in culture. Entertainment,  music, especially,  is becoming one of our major soft power assets. All these collaborations left, right and centre with global mega superstars like Beyonce and Ed Sheeran, all the performances on the global stage, the inundation of Nigerian musicians on radio stations across the world, no be agidi.

Years ago in Norway, someone told me of how their Nigerian organisation had tried to invite P Square to perform for them, but the group had many “unreasonable demands” and so they hadn’t gone through with the invitation.  This was at the time when they were thought of as ‘local stars’ and Naija musicians  could only hope to play at events organised by town union associations or at some ‘Third World Music’ festivals. That a band, a Nigerian one, whose air fare was already being paid for would dare to ask for more seemed preposterous. It occurs to me now, with the benefit of hindsight, that P Square’s demands were not unreasonable, any more than Burna Boy’s  insistence that he be treated with as much respect as the other stars he considered himself their equal at the Coachella Festival  in 2019. They were already in the future we could not see, already seeing the Nigerian wave, already riding it.

The present is bright and we expect the future to be brighter still. So, wherever you are, raise a glass to our Naija creatives.