Our cultural descent

Our politicians and policymakers need to pay more attention to our popular culture. If for nothing else, the citizens, that is, the people whom politicians and policymakers seek to govern, follow popular culture much more than they follow politics. Moreover, the culture is also political, since whatever we do in the cultural realm reverberates in politics and policy too. In fact, the political and economic fortunes of a country are often directly correlated with, or tied to, its global cultural clout. So our culture matters.  

When we hosted the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture (FESTAC) in 1977, the intent was clear: to declare to ourselves and the world that we had a culture we could be proud of and that we were in fact proud of it. No doubt, FESTAC ‘77 was all part of the cultural decolonisation movement that swept across Africa in the immediate aftermath of political independence. And by most accounts, the festival was deemed a huge success and the message emphatically delivered, even if, it would later be said, quite extravagantly so.

But where does Nigeria stand culturally today? A side story associated with the ongoing sixth season of the Big Brother Naija (BBN) might help us answer this all-important question. As reported in The Punch newspaper last Wednesday, 4th August, a certain housemate in the show, Angel, had worn a see-through dress for an in-house event without any underwear. But while tongues were wagging disapprovingly on social media for her dressing sense, her own father, who in fact presently manages her Instagram account, hailed his daughter’s outfit as evidence of ‘body positivity’.

It is bad enough for a 21-year old Nigerian girl to present herself literally naked in public and on TV. It is something else when her own father is not only happy with it but is in fact hailing it as something others should copy. But it is also a small but important detail that indicates how far we have travelled culturally in the nearly 45 years since FESTAC ‘77. We can be confident that even 30 years ago in 1991, or indeed in 2001, you would struggle to find a single parent anywhere in Nigeria who would approve of his own daughter dressing in such a manner in public, let alone to praise and celebrate it on social media.

Nigeria has always been a deeply divided society in many respects, there was a firm consensus everywhere across the country about things like that in the cultural realm. So can we say Angel’s outfit, her father’s praises for it and more importantly, the cultural moment which permits it now are all signs of progress for Nigeria culturally or otherwise? My answer is a definitive no. As not all motion is movement, so not all movement is evidence of progress.

But Angel and her father are no more than mere examples of a phenomenon we might call cultural self-recolonisation in Nigeria, if for want of a better term. By that I mean behaviours that have become quite commonplace but which really have no meaning whatsoever anywhere in this country, except perhaps the underlying assumption that someone somewhere outside of Nigeria would approve of them, or that these behaviours are the right way to do things, in someone else’s view.

Evidence of this cultural recolonisation abounds everywhere in Nigeria today. Take a look at our broadcast media culture. In the past, including not too long ago, the general tendency among broadcasters, on radio or television, was to dress Nigerian and to speak English with a local Nigerian accent. Now, however, radio and television broadcasters speak English with any number of twisted foreign accents, some of them worse than noise. It has no cultural resonance of any kind anywhere in the country and adds no value whatsoever to broadcasting and certainly not to the English language itself.

Yet it persists probably because people just have a feeling that it is the best way to speak, even if, as is the case most of the time, people are saying nothing. It is what my friend and cultural critic, Dr Garhe Osiebe, would call “pro-colonialism”, that is, the contemporary tendency among Africans to behave in ways that suggest they would favour being recolonised by Europeans, only this time, it is the colony forcing itself on the coloniser, not the other way around as was the case in the 19th century.

But this tendency to look without, rather than within, for cultural guidance is also commonplace in northern Nigeria, the supposed culturally conservative part of Nigeria. Only a few months ago, there was a sort of ‘craze’ across the north, and perhaps even beyond it, about the long female dress called abaya. Everyone in northern Nigerian knows this dress and is likely to have known them for a long time. Yet, many of us were forced to learn it anew, perhaps because it is now something associated with ‘Dubai’, that is, ‘foreignness’.

More disturbing still is that what we call ‘music’ in northern Nigeria today is almost entirely Hindi, in every way other than in language. Young northerners who are 30 years or under probably now understand the Hindi-inflected songs they consume are the standard of their culture and many in fact, may know very little about Hausa musicians like Mamman Shata or Dan Maraya Jos, let alone to appreciate their music. It is the same with the musicians of old in other minority cultures in the north such as Kanuri, Nupe and so on.

This situation is also true of the rest of Nigeria, where the massive development of Nigerian music, though positive, has gone hand in hand with a worship of the foreign.  The average Nigerian music video is shot outside of the country, predominantly in some nondescript European city, as if nowhere in Nigeria is simply good enough a place for shooting videos to be consumed by Nigerians.

My real point should be clear by now. Everywhere you turn, from Lagos to Maiduguri and from Sokoto to Calabar, our culture is obsessed with the foreign. From fake foreign accents to foreign settings for local videos, we seem to want the non-Nigerian than the Nigerian and in the process, we become un-Nigerian, or worse, anti-Nigerian. This has both direct and indirect political and economic consequences. For example, it explains why you find endless queues around Domino’s and KFC stores and Chinese bakeries in our major cities, but you will not find the same kind of queues in local food chains like Tantalizers in the same cities.

It is also why Nigerian newspapers and so-called civil society organisations tend to respect foreign diplomats more than their own leaders, even where the grounds for such does not exist. We might all do well to change because once we lose confidence in ourselves, in our own people, and in our own institutions, no one else will have confidence in us, let alone invest in our society. Development begins with the mind, but only the independent mind.