‘Wetin dey happen?’: Wazobia, popular arts, and nationhood

Abstract

Emerging mass culture in the popular arts, signposting Nigeria's entry into the postcolonial phase, has helped in creating a site of linguistic identity at variance from the one imposed by British rule. Such a reconstitution of the colonial/indigenous subject/psyche via the ‘vernacular’ medium of popular arts, which Karin Barber views as a hybridized cultural domain, is sometimes an unconscious, often a decanonical and, to follow Victor Turner, liminal phenomenon that displaces English as the language of ‘high’ culture and civilization, providing in the alternative a metissage of languages including English, Nigerian Pidgin English, and the so-called vernaculars whose ultimate outcome could be positive for the overall development of society. Framed within cultural studies and postcolonial theory, this article explores the nexus between nationhood and national identity implicit in the efflorescence of indigenous languages and dialects in contemporary popular music in Nigeria.

Nigerian Pidgin

Di new things people dey do with our art and culture dey show say our people no dey copy oyinbo style and language again. Na true say no be everybody sabi wetin dey happen when dem use wazobia¹ do di things wey dem dey do for our new art and entertainment culture, di culture wey Karin Barber say na mixture of oyinbo and our local style and Victor Turner say make us be like person wey confuse; but di way people dey take yanga blow our local language dem and pidgin English for our art and entertainment culture, so tay dem no dey blow oyinbo grammar like before fit come take style-style do our society better. Di thing I do here na to use cultural studies and postcolonial theory explain di link wey dey between a country and di people way of life, and how our people dey blow our local language (wazobia) for music for Nigeria dis days.

Keywords:

• Wazobia
• wazobia music
• wazobia and nationhood
• identity

Keywords:

• Wazobia
• wazobia music
• wazobia and nationhood
• identity

Introduction

English was not just a means of communication between the colonialists and the various peoples that would become part of an amalgamated Nigeria in 1914, it was also a sign, more appropriately, a social semiosis of both acceptance into the dominant world of British rule and all it promised, as well as a mark of superiority over the indigenous population. The English language was in this sense part of the technology of colonial domination, a social practice that was employed as a means either of inclusion or exclusion depending on the colonial's competence or lack of competence in the language. The central role being played by the English language in Nigeria, as the primary means of official communication, has many times come with damaging consequences for the peoples and languages of Nigeria as well as for the languages of many other parts of the world where British rule became dominant at the turn of the last century. The adverse consequence of the imposition of English in Nigeria was, above its political and cultural manifestations, deeply psychological, as it meant a loss of psychic prestige for users of the indigenous languages, thenceforth called vernaculars. The corollary of this was the pervasive lack of confidence in many things indigenous to the Nigerian nation-space. This has continued into the period of ‘flag’ independence when Nigeria, like other former British colonies, gained political independence without commensurate economic and cultural independence. Thus one of the more obvious implications of the imposition of English outside its use in official government circles and the educational system is its dominant use in the mass media, particularly print and broadcast journalism, in addition to its use in other aspects of mass culture including popular music (hip-hop, rap, and gospel), both foreign or indigenous, advertisements, graffiti art, fashion, cartoons, and new age Pentecostalism.

The use of English in official and formal communication, and thus its deployment in the mass media, has led to a bifurcation of cultural behaviour into ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture where English represents high culture and the indigenous languages low culture. In Nigeria where ethnic rivalry among the various ethnic groups has thwarted any attempts to make any of the indigenous languages the country's lingua franca, the situation was further compounded such that English has assumed a significance that is inversely proportional to the significance of the indigenous languages in the everyday activities of the people. After a long period of subjection to English the indigenous languages are, in the last few years, gaining cultural relevance and are being re-inscribed into mainstream social practice. This has created a state and space reminiscent of what Victor Turner called liminality in his 1966 book The Ritual Process Structure and Anti-Structure, with all its attributes of ambiguity, slippages, and confusion that are inscribed in an emergent border zone of linguistic creativity in which English, English-based pidgin (henceforth referred to as Nigerian Pidgin), and the indigenous languages compete for cultural space and relevance. Much of the confidence that led to the acceptance/resurgence of the indigenous languages among Nigerians and the challenges this poses to English as the dominant language of mass communication, particularly popular arts which Barber (1987, 1997) views as a hybridized cultural domain, is due to the prominence accorded local music practitioners, especially hip-hop musicians and other categories of oral artists and verbal entrepreneurs, by the mass media. The valorization of the entrepreneurial spirit within the context of neoliberalism created a discursive space for reassessing the role of the indigenous languages in the emergent market economy that values individual initiative. This brings to mind the situation described by Shipley (2009) in which charismatic pastors and comedians were key actors in provoking the moral discourse that centred on the evaluation of sincerity and fakeness in performance in Ghana. These spheres of ‘moral deliberation’ in which, according to Shipley (2009: 524), the general public played an interventionist role in the exchange and circulation of discourse was greatly aided by new communication technologies, especially among the youth demographic: veritable ‘threshold people’ or ‘liminal personae’, to borrow Turner's (1966, 95) memorable phrase. All of this has been central to the way popular creativities have impinged on social structure which has in turn shaped popular creative products and their reception. This article is therefore an exploration of this phenomenon, detailing the rise of English in Nigeria, the simultaneous relegation of the indigenous languages, and the transgressive role of hip-hop in the discursive practice of oppositionality that the vernacular languages now pose to English.

Historical overview of the English language in Nigeria

With an estimated figure of between 400 and 600 languages, Nigeria is the most linguistically diverse country in the world (Iwara 2008). The country's highly complex linguistic situation places it in political terms in a Babel-like state of confusion that made it amenable to the manipulation of colonial language planners who found it an easy candidate for the imposition of English. The development of English (initially in its pidgin form) as the dominant language of communication in Nigeria preceded the formal imposition of British rule by a couple of centuries. While full British rule would not begin until the start of the twentieth century, specifically 1900, English had been used in its pidgin form for mercantile purposes along the coastal parts of what would later be constituted by imperial design as Nigeria from the beginning of the seventeenth century (Elugbe and Omamor 1991).

The development and spread of English in the second half of the nineteenth century, preceding the formal constitution of Nigeria as a British colony, was largely a task undertaken by missionaries who needed native converts with a sound knowledge of the Bible and who could also serve as interpreters. At this time, the indigenous languages flourished without hindrance while English was taught through dictation, reading, writing, grammar, and composition. The first act of violence against the indigenous languages would, however, come by way of an Ordinance enacted in 1882 which made English, to the complete exclusion of the indigenous languages, the language of instruction in schools, thereby inaugurating a condition of linguistic alterity, one of binary categories in which English assumed a position of superiority to the indigenous languages. The colonial administration tied funding in schools to the use of English as the medium of instruction. Anti-colonial agitations would in the following years force some concession out of the British, starting with the 1887 Ordinance that gave leg room to the indigenous languages and thereby cleared space for them to be used alongside English as means of instruction in schools. Proficiency in English was de rigueur both for colonial education and diverse categories of clerical jobs which were the only kind of positions open to natives in the colonial civil service. This increased the social and political relevance of English vis-à-vis the indigenous languages. In spite of nationalist agitations for the promotion of indigenous languages, English would assume what seemed like an irreversible position and would continue to rise in significance as the dominant language of communication until it eventually gained constitutional backing, respectively in the 1979 and 1999 constitutions, as one of Nigeria's official languages alongside Hausa, Igbo, and Yoruba, the three largest indigenous languages in the country which were first adopted for political reasons in the National Education Policy of 1977 (revised in 1981) (Awonusi 2004a, 2004b; Omoniyi 2004).

The adoption of English, a second language, as one of Nigeria's official languages and its use, ipso facto, in official, public domains as opposed to the restricted use of the indigenous languages in mainly cultural and private domains would make English the preferred language of both social prestige and official recognition (Bamgbose 2004). The colonial authorities however did not achieve total suppression of the ‘vernaculars', if that was their intention. What seemed apparent on their part was an ambivalent attitude that played out in the creation of a hierarchized language structure in which English occupied the apex position. Thus contrary to the postulate of a silenced subaltern (Spivak 1995, 28), the Nigerian colonial was not totally gagged and, truly, did and does speak (Nnodim 2005, 248–249). But in the absence of a lingua franca based on any of the country's indigenous languages, English would assume a pervasive role in virtually every aspect of interpersonal communication in Nigeria. The vernacular languages, in a zero-sum position with English, would lose their prestige and relevance in the very domains in which English was dominant, including, sometimes, those cultural domains that were hitherto their locus of operation.

This situation has remained the case until the last few years when, in a space-clearing, postmodernist temper, various categories of verbal artists, especially hip-hop musicians, began the equally transgressive process of employing the indigenous languages, including the fast creolizing Nigerian Pidgin, in their art and praxes even when these forms, as examples of popular arts, lacked official patronage and/or recognition (Barber 1987, 1). Although a widespread development, the use of Nigerian Pidgin as a national language is more pronounced in the southern parts of Nigeria than in the north where it is more readily spoken in military and paramilitary barracks and non-indigene quarters (Sabon Geri). In addition to Nigerian Pidgin, Pidginized Hausa called barikanci is also spoken in European barracks in the north (Elugbe and Omamor 1991, 17–18). Hip-hop music is more prominently practiced and consumed in southern Nigeria than in the north. The few prominent female performers are for the most part to be found in the less conservative southern states which are culturally unlike the north where religious and/or cultural restrictions on women limit their involvement in much western-style contemporary popular culture. However, the phenomenal rise of hip-hop and the use of Nigerian Pidgin and the indigenous languages, indexing the transition from what might be called a post-Nigerian to a pan-Naija phase, and achieved through the instrumentality of broadcast and new media, was tremendously enhanced with the liberalization policy of the departing military dictatorship of General Ibrahim Babangida that allowed for the privatization of the mass media in the mid-1990s. Many of these media houses prided themselves on the American-influenced hip-hop (the most dominant musical form in Nigeria in the last two decades) and the Western-oriented musical contents of their programmes.

It is, perhaps, both apt and ironic that the reconstitution of national identity should come via the appropriative vehicle of hip-hop culture, a counter-hegemonic discourse and social practice embracing (rap) music, graffiti art, fashion, and break dancing that started in the Bronx among mainly black inner-city youths in America (Appiah and Gates 1999). The status of hip-hop as the means for the recuperation of indigenous Nigerian culture is apt for reasons of its long history as both a counter-culture and a hitherto marginal form, even in its native America. But it is nevertheless an imported form that is foreign to Nigeria, which explains the irony of its position.

The Nigerian hip-hop musicians of the 1990s and the 2000s, like their counterparts elsewhere, had their forerunners in local musicians who performed in local languages and dialects. The most notable of these forerunners in the case of Nigeria was Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, the creator of Afrobeat music. His centrality to the art of contemporary hip-hop musicians, influencing their use and promotion of indigenous languages and Nigerian Pidgin, deserves a close look.

From Fela to hip-hop: re-inscribing the indigenous languages

The indigenization or domestication of the linguistic space in Nigeria did not begin with Fela. There were the initial efforts of such Western-trained indigenous music practitioners as Mojola Agbebi, Fela Sowande, and Akin Euba among others (Olorunyomi 2005, 8; Collins and Richards 1989, 122) who made conscious attempts to ‘nativise’ Nigerian musicology. Aside from purely musical considerations, language was a factor in this battle. While some artists achieved widespread national popularity even while performing mainly in the indigenous languages, their fame was, except in a few cases, limited to speakers of their languages. English was still, in these early years of post-independence, the language of prestige, interpersonal relations, and mainstream culture. Although the distinction between high and low (mass) culture in music as in other aspects of the performative and plastic arts, can in Africa be regarded as non-existent, an invention predominant in domains with a large body of Western-trained artists (Appiah 2007, 660), there was/is a sense in which English, even in its largely instrumental role, can be regarded as the language of high culture, at least as a social attitude in colonial and/or post-independence Nigeria.

Fela, the Afrobeat icon, whose music would in later years become the anthem of political opposition in Nigeria, indeed, started out in the early 1960s like most of his Western-trained contemporaries singing in Yoruba as well as English. Fela's linguistic predilection, according to Olorunyomi (2005, 68) went through three discrete stages: an initial period of overt Western, modernist influence during which he sang in English; followed by a ‘reactive ethno-nationalist stage’ marked by his use of Yoruba, and an ideologically inflected Pan-Africanist stage which saw him singing in Nigerian pidgin or broken as it is otherwise called. This is a clear misreading and flawed interpretation of Fela's linguistic development. Such discrete taxonomization as Olorunyomi offers is misleading in terms of Fela's discography, even as provided by Olorunyomi. The important point to note here is that Fela started out singing in Yoruba. His earliest documented recording, ‘Onifere/Bonfo’ was produced on his personal label between 1958 and 1963 during his student days at the Trinity College of Music in London. ‘Aigana’ (1960), ‘Yeshe Yeshe’ (1966–1967), and ‘Mr. Who Are You?’ (1966–1967) followed. It was not until 1969 during his Koola Lobitos years, nearly a clear decade after his first releases in Yoruba, that he would release what may be called his first song in English, ‘Keep Nigeria One’ (a patriotic song whose title is a clone of the Federalist slogan To keep Nigeria one is a task that must be done, obviously composed to support the Federalist effort during the Nigerian Civil War), to be followed by other songs like ‘Everyday I Got My Blues’ and ‘Great Kids’.

All through the period he made these English recordings, his linguistic preference could still be largely described as bilingual as he simultaneously sang in Yoruba; in fact, he sang mainly in Yoruba. It should also be noted that Fela at this time engaged in what might at best be described as a promotional strategy, a branding style device, common today among indigenous music performers, especially juju and fuji musicians. This was the preference for English titles to songs performed in the indigenous languages. Thus, although several of the songs Fela composed in the early part of his career bore English titles, they were in fact performed in Yoruba, as is the case with the popular song, ‘Monday Morning in Lagos’. Indeed, his first major releases in Nigerian pidgin would come only after his ideologically transformative trip to the United States (US) in 1969. As Fela himself states, ‘My American tour was a turning point in my way of thinking, and my approach to life’ (Mabinuori 1986, 36). It was after this trip, from 1970 onwards after his band had been renamed ‘The Nigeria 70’, that the world would have the pleasure of such path-breaking songs as ‘Jeun K'oku’ (Chop & Quench) (1971), ‘Na Fight o’ (1971) and ‘Why Black Man Dey Suffer’ (1971), among others. In the period predating his US trip, however, Fela's use of Yoruba, then at once a subaltern and subjected code, was a natural outcome of his background rather than a conscious ideological project. In a television interview, he explained the rationale for his use of Nigerian pidgin, and by extension Yoruba, in the following terms:

Everything was European background. The upbringing, the teaching, the school. My father was a pastor and everything had to be English. We were not even allowed to speak our country's language in school. They called our languages vernacular … I was thinking to myself that if I want these Africans to hear (sic) me well, I can't speak in this language because they won't understand. So I have to speak in the language that they all understand and that is the broken English.²

Fela did not stop with himself; he went on to speculate in the same interview on the possible reasons Africans prefer the indigenous languages to English, which he saw as divisive and therefore harmful to African unity:

When the English language came, the Africans subconsciously felt the language was too stiff. Africans have very virile language models. That is why in Africa there are over two thousand languages. So they have to find the language that could make them feel that they still wanted to be together and not allow this English to divide them among themselves.

The need for social identification, informal bonding, and solidarity has been given as one reason Nigerians, even the highly educated, speak English-based pidgin in domains where Standard English would have been the normal language of communication (Adetugbo 1992; Adegbija 2004). Fela went beyond this. Linguistic solidarity translatable into political unity is the other reason he gave for his choice of Nigerian pidgin over English. His music became highly political, critical of and opposed to the country's leadership from about 1970 onwards, and he needed a means of communicating his political concerns to the majority of the Nigerian people who spoke the indigenous languages but were not proficient in English. Nigerian Pidgin became the vehicle for this. Thus followed a convergence of theme and language. But contrary to the common perception, including that of Fela scholars like Olorunyomi, Fela's linguistic trajectory followed a pattern of Yoruba-English/Yoruba-Pidgin/Yoruba. Which is to say that he started singing in Yoruba not for any nationalist and political reasons but as a matter of linguistic habit and upbringing, a consequence of his being Yoruba; he then moved on to the use of English under the Anglo-European influence of the period, and returned to Yoruba as an adjunct to Nigerian pidgin, thereafter his major code of artistic expression, for ideological reasons. Olaniyan (2009, 6) would appear to share this view in his identification of three distinct stages at the level of both style and ideology in Fela's creative development. He is careful to state that these stages are not without their blurry edges, with one stage meshing into another. Nevertheless, he identifies what he respectively calls ‘the apolitical hustler’, ‘the Afrobeat Moralist’, and ‘The Political Afrobeat’.

During the first stage, which spanned the period of the late 1950s through his return from studies abroad to the late 1960s, Fela was a happy-go-lucky youth, content to play the prevailing music of his time. He had no overt interest in politics and played what he called ‘Highlife Jazz’ as many of the songs released during this period will show: ‘Ololufe’, ‘Mi o fe’, ‘Obinrin’, ‘Fine Fine Boy’, ‘Araba's Delight’, ‘Bonfo’, ‘Onidodo’, ‘Wa Dele’ ‘Highlife Time’ ‘Omutiti de’, ‘Mo ti Gborokan’, ‘Laise Lairo’, ‘Everyday I Got My Blues’, ‘Waka waka’ and ‘Home Cooking’. Between 1970 and 1975, which was the period of the second stage, during which Fela released no less than 50 songs which he classifies into metro songs, racial/cultural nationalist songs, and appropriated folksongs, Fela sang mostly in Yoruba or Nigerian Pidgin with a gradual tilt towards more Nigerian Pidgin than Yoruba as he reached out to more audiences. This reaching out for a wider audience would be reflected in the change in the name of his band from ‘Nigeria 70’ to ‘Africa 70’ or ‘Afrika 70’. He developed new themes and devised new modes of presentation which were theatrical and full of sarcastic humour, even as his music assumed a class-partisan character and became more revolutionary. Some of the songs from this prolific period include the highly popular ‘Jeun Ko Ku’ and ‘Monday Morning in Lagos’. Others are ‘Trouble Sleep Yanga Wake Am’, ‘Na Poi’, and ‘Shakara’. The third stage in this period of creative development started from 1976 onwards. Here the status of the musician as a full-grown pop-culture figure and counter-cultural icon had been established as he had gained full artistic and ideological maturation. Although ‘Alagbon Close’, his first anti-state composition according to Olaniyan (2009, 77), had been released in 1974, it was not until 1976 that Fela's music would take on the overt political colour that has defined it ever since.

In addition to Nigerian Pidgin and Yoruba, Fela made occasional forays into languages from other parts of Nigeria and Africa. In a rather unconscious way that a retrospective reading makes obvious, Nigerian Pidgin attained more prestige as a mainstream language of the arts apace with Fela's increasingly legendary status. Thus in the immediate aftermath of his death and since, arguably more musicians would either claim to or actually follow his exemplary use of Nigerian Pidgin, indigenous languages, and politics than when he was alive. These followers cut across such sonic genres as Afrobeat, highlife, reggae, and above all, hip-hop artists, in whose works he is increasingly referenced many years after his passing on 2 August 1997. There is perhaps no section of contemporary Nigerian music where the use of the indigenous languages has had a more salutary effect than among practitioners of indigenous music such as fuji and juju, particularly the former who were formerly seen as mostly illiterate practitioners of a marginal art form that appeals to mainly fringe groups of traders, butchers, and artisanal types. Fuji is a secularized, ajisaari Islamic music, now a neo-traditional form that was originally performed in the very early hours of the morning during the Ramadan fast by amateur youth groups who sang from house to house (Waterman 1990a, 1990b). Juju, also a neo-traditional form, is best typified by the music of Sunny Ade and Ebenezer Obey, its two best-known exponents. Practitioners of these genres have become mainstream artists whose works are appreciated beyond their immediate linguistic base and have been adopted by corporate organizations and multinational companies for reasons of brand extension and other forms of promotional services. This has had confidence-boosting effects, such that it is no longer an embarrassing thing to sing in the indigenous languages.

As his first son, a highly successful Afrobeat musician in his own right and four-time Grammy nominee, Femi Kuti, maintains in an interview with Afropop's Banning-Eyre (2009, 56–57), published in the Nigerian Guardian,

 … most of these (sic) hiphop boys of today are trying to be very much like [my] father. They try and be a bit direct, but not in a very subtle way. If you understand the language, you will know they are trying to be a bit critical of the government or the environment.

Hip-hop, vernacular languages and twenty-first century Nigerian music

Nigerian Pidgin lacks the prestige accorded English. It is also not treated as a language by policy-makers. It is nonetheless Nigeria's unofficial lingua franca having attained the status of a Creole in certain parts of the country, particularly the south-south where it is the first language of many (Elugbe and Omamor 1991, 48–51). It is widely spoken in other parts of the south, especially among urbanites. In the north where it is less widely spoken, it is the major code of communication among non-natives who speak neither Hausa nor Fulani. Even here speakers of Hausa or Fulani wishing to reach beyond the confines of their indigenous languages resort to the use of Nigerian Pidgin. Considering therefore its socially marginal status vis-à-vis English, the adoption of Pidgin by the emergent youth culture of hip-hop is both a transgressive and decanonical act. It is increasingly an act of willpower and exclusion, a deliberate rupturing of the master narrative that English represents, and an attempt at re-representation and meaning-making that reflects agency within a local economy of signs. The vernacularization of English, which Wilson (2010) calls indigeneity or as Awonusi (2004a, 2004b) calls it in a different but related context ‘text multilingualism’, through the mixing and switching of codes, encompassing the use of Nigerian Pidgin and the indigenous languages by Nigerian hip-hop performers, is a symbolic marker of the first stage of ‘transition’, which according to Turner (1966) precedes the liminal phase. It is in the context of popular performance in Nigeria as part of the national rite of passage that signals the move from a colonial to a postcolonial state. It erases the hierarchical dichotomies of local and global indexicalities, low and high culture, even while it is employed as a mark of authentication for a local music industry that is determined to chart a course different from that hitherto considered prestigious.

Nigerian pidgin and its users

Daniel Egbe (2004) identifies three domains of Pidgin English use in Nigeria, namely, a situation where the speakers' interlocutors can neither speak nor understand Standard English; when either the speakers or their interlocutors do not have a common indigenous language and where the speakers themselves cannot speak Standard English. Irrespective of the reasons Nigerians resort to the use of Pidgin English, what should be noted is that their choice of English is more than a chance occurrence. It is a deliberate choice that is informed by no less a reason than the closeness of Pidgin English to the indigenous languages which are the first languages of most Nigerians, except for the very young from middle-class backgrounds whose increasingly early exposure to Western education simultaneously leads to their acquisition of English, which is the language of formal instruction in schools and Nigeria's lingua franca. Put differently, the Pidgin English in Nigeria, as is the case with other languages that came out of contact situations, is oriented to the indigenous languages.

This accords with the linguistic view that language is characterized more by its inner structures and grammar than by its lexicon, which is subject to both change and accretion (Adetugbo 2001, 31). To this end, Nigerian Pidgin English, like other pidgins and creoles, is oriented to its substratum languages with which it shares structural patterns as opposed to its lexifying superstrate (Banjo 1996, 6). This point, it will be restated, makes Nigerian Pidgin the favourite means of communication among Nigerians, including hip-hop musicians. The meshing of Nigerian Pidgin with the indigenous languages as a manifestation of local–global tensions creates a metissage of languages, a dialogically constituted border zone and cultural in-between or ‘third space’, as Bhabha (1994) and Bhatt (2008, 178) have put it, that is neither local nor foreign. This corresponds to Turner's understanding of a liminal state, which is the situation of Nigerian hip-hop artists who in spite of their attempts at so-called nativization of hip-hop are, nevertheless, assessed in terms of their postmodernist tendencies. These tendencies are read through the refracted lenses of the commodification of musical content, blind and confused apery of Western or, more appropriately, American pop culture with its slang expressions, thick neck chains (bling-bling), trouser sagging, adoption of stage names, or corruption of indigenous words and names. These ‘style markers', to quote Krystal Strong and Ossei-Owusu (2014), are increasingly viewed as factors in the diminution of musicianship among contemporary Nigerian performers with little or no formal musical education or training in instrumentation.

‘No more no vernacular’: Hip-hop and Nigerian languages

Linguistic resources are in the context of Nigerian hip-hop thus employed to present a social identity, set boundaries linguistically, and resist the forces of conquest (Gumperz 1982; Blot 2003). Rather than being a sign of deviance as it was heretofore viewed, it is those who use English that are increasingly getting socially alienated while the use of Nigerian Pidgin and the indigenous languages of Nigeria represents an acceptance of position, a demonstration of choice, and a construction of social and ideological identity by their users (Gargesh 2006; Tawake 2006). The bottom-up circulation of Nigerian pidgin and the increasing use of indigenous languages has been aided to a great degree by the readiness of its mostly youthful users to embrace new ways of life, media, and technology, made possible by the relatively higher level of education of their users, many of who are not only proficient in English but either dropped out of university or are in fact university graduates who chose to be musicians rather than pursue other professional callings. As 9ice (2008), one of the foremost proponents of this new counter-discourse and now an aspiring politician, avers in a verse of ‘Street Credibility’, a song in his chart-bursting, eponymously titled work,

Originality work for me/Why I no go show/Asawa, edewa/Kosohun to da to (Originality works for me/Why won't I be proud of it/Our culture, our language/There could be nothing better than them).

Commenting further on his preference for the indigenous languages, particularly Yoruba and Nigerian Pidgin over and above English in his music, 9ice (pronounced naiz) has this to say in two different interviews,

What I do is that I try to go back to the good old days and weave my lyrics around the beauty of the language … I don't have to sing in English before people listen or like my song, if it was that way, then a person like Youssou N'Dour would not have won a Grammy (Adesina, n.d).

In similar vein he says, ‘I feel like there is no way we can use English Language to sing better than those who own the language. I know that by using our indigenous language, we will be able to express ourselves better.’

Another singer, Ruggedman (2007) in Ruggedy Baba, a song featuring 9ice that can be considered as an encapsulation of the new hip-hop credo, proclaims his task in the following words,

Atewo la bala/A o meni to o koo/We spit (sic) in Pidgin, our mother tongue/You better show where you belong … (We were born with the lines on our palms[i.e. ignorant]/We do not know who wrote them/We spit (read speak) in Pidgin our mother tongue/You better show where you belong … 

Showing where you belong or where you come from is now both a fad and an artistic shibboleth for authenticating the local and indigenous in a music industry once dominated by James Brown, Michael Jackson, Tina Turner, The Beatles, Kurtis Blow, and MC Hammer imitators/wannabes. This has resulted in the phenomenal growth of the indigenous music industry, complemented by even more phenomenal growth in the Nollywood filmic/home video industry. One remarkable outcome of this growth is captured in the fact that it is now possible to attend a party or listen to the radio or watch television in which the music content is almost, if not completely, of Nigerian origin. This would be a confirmation of Colin Patridge's (1982) observation that ‘the final stage in establishing a new culture, which often coincides with the shaping of home-made legends, is acceptance of – and pride in – the resources of local language.’ But more than just being a reproduction of dialect or display of archaic vocabulary, such a process of mother tongue reclamation is in the words of Eloise Briere (1996) an ‘allegory of national rebirth’ and means of fashioning congruence between language, geographic space, and time.

Time and again therefore, Nigerian hip-hop performers in their art and praxes explain their vernacularization of English or resort to indigenous languages, or both, in terms of the imperative of connecting with their audience. Asked what he thought could be done to raise the standard of the Nigerian music industry to a level comparable to foreign ones, Nyanya Mbuk, winner of the 2009 MTN-sponsored Project Fame and one of the current leading lights of hip-hop, says music should be a universal language that should be understandable to all irrespective of their country of origin. But, he goes on to say,

You have to show where you come from (my emphasis) and I don't have anything against anybody who sings in their local dialect. The basic thing is that you have to be able to connect with your audience … I have to make sure that I connect with my people, even if it means playing a ‘Galala’ (a local musical style/dance) track just to please my audience (Akingbade 2009, 9).

This same point is echoed in a verse of ‘Naija Hip-hop Part 1’, a song on the same Ruggedy Baba (2007) CD by Rugged man referred to above. Singing of what he calls the ‘Ten Commandments’ of a good hip-hop song, Rugged man lists the need to sing in the mother tongue as the eighth commandment. As he puts it, ‘Add your mother tongue to represent where you are from’. In ‘Naija Hip-hop Part 2’ on the same CD, he states the point in almost identical words: ‘Add your mother tongue to tell them where you are from … You can't do rap the American way better than Americans … That's the way to tell the world straight where we are from’ (Rugged man 2007).

In closing this section, I provide by way of illustration analyses of the texts of two busting songs, ‘Street Credibility’ and ‘Ifunanya’ (see links to songs in the appendix) respectively by 9ice (2008) and the twin pair, P Square (2007), three of the most successful stars to brighten the Nigerian hip-hop firmament. Both songs address themes typical of the creative repertoires of many hip-hop performers whose rise to prominence from relatively poor backgrounds is often cause for celebration. While ‘‘Street Credibility’’ is the usual, chest-thumping, self-aggrandizing and, sometimes, (auto)biographical song that hip-hop artists compose to clear space and validate their position and creative outputs in the aggressively competitive musical culturescape, ‘Ifunanya’ focuses on the perennial subject of love and is directed at the singers' shared love interest – Ifunanya (the beloved one).

The prestige of hip-hop artists rests on the popular acclaim that comes from their possession of a wide fan base, usually among the teeming mass of urban, inner city youths that constitute the hip-hop demographics. This, then, is the credibility referred to in ‘Street Credibility’, which borrows freely from Yoruba oral resources and genres such as proverbs, wise sayings, folk knowledge, and, above all, the pervasive oriki, praise poetry or the panegyric form that is central to Yoruba oral performance. Indeed, 9ice's musical practice is, above its obvious Euro-American pretensions, distinguished by its grounding in the performance style of the akewi – Yoruba traditional or neo-traditional poets. The affirmative self-naming and profuse use of eulogistic nominal, a framing device by which Yoruba oral poets celebrate their achievements and dexterity as performers of high repute (Fasan 2011, 32–34), is evident in the song. This conforms with a pattern earlier identified by Olatunji (1984, 87) as characteristic of Yoruba oral performance as a whole.

‘Street Credibility’ is a collaboration between 9ice and Tuface Idibia, another of the most successful of this generation of performers, and employs at least five linguistic codes, namely, Nigerian Pidgin, Standard English, and Arabic, alongside Yoruba and Idoma, which are the respective first languages of 9ice and Tuface. Typical of bilingual speech, the general pattern of performance for these singers/performers, either code switching or code mixing, is to use Nigerian Pidgin or their L1 as matrix language while the L2 (Standard English) functions as embedded language.

Structurally, ‘Street Credibility’ has three verses which are rendered in a mix of Nigerian Pidgin and Yoruba (for 9ice who performed the first and third verses) and Nigerian Pidgin, Yoruba, and Idoma (for the second verse that is performed by Tuface). The chorus is a mix of Nigerian Pidgin and Yoruba with an Arabic word, ‘walahi’ (I swear by Allah), thrown in to underscore the truth of his claim of being the best performer among his peers. Calling himself ‘oba ara (Yoruba for wonder man who spins musical magic) of Naijaland (Naija being a populist corruption of Nigeria)’, the singer claims he is the best, ‘the most incredible’ performer ever to emerge from Nigeria. He warns his rivals/detractors, ‘haters' in hip-hop lingo, who he calls ‘amebo’ (rumour-mongering busybodies) to respect his foremost position as the best composer/performer around as each day finds him dictating the pace of things, ‘Ojumo kan, imo kan, ere kan, ara kan, asa kan’ – initiating new musical trends, fashion, culture, and composing new songs with the same frequency as the chameleon changes its skin colour. He concludes this verse with the declaration that there can only be one king at a time (implying that to be himself), not two, in a palace. His claim that he is the best performer around is essentially repeated and reinforced in the second verse by Tuface, only this time Tuface ascribes the superior position to both of them, as they sing in the following lines of the chorus, ‘We're the most incredible out of Naija/Straight from Naija … ’ Given their huge fan base, they boast of their ‘credibility’ on the street, saying this is no lie (No be lie) and dare their detractors to prove them wrong if they could.

In the third verse, 9ice continues with his chest-thumping, saying he is the best both mentally and physically. He vows to one day bring home the Grammy Award as he is ‘Incredible, remarkable, unbeatable, palatable, reliable.’ With such nominalization elements such as ‘Gudugudu, akinkanju, arakangudu, okunrin ogun’ (all-powerful, mighty man of valour), 9ice proclaims himself the king of all hip-hop singers in much the same way as the lion is king of all animals (‘kinihun l'oba eran’).

‘Ifunanya’ is a sentimental love ballad in five simple verses. The entire message of this song, asking for the hand of the loved one (Nyelum Aka) in marriage (or for a relationship), is conveyed in the first verse which is repeated whole or in part in varied words all through the other verses. In the opening verse, the singer wants to know from Ifunanya why people fall in love – for pleasure or lust? – and wonders if he and his love interest could turn this around? Both his happiness and the chance of their love surviving, he believes, depend on his loved one whom he fondly calls his mother (Nne-nne) acceding to his request. He implores her (biko-biko) to stay and not leave. He is making his plea, the chorus says, because of ‘Ifunanya’, the one person constantly on his mind (‘Onye m'bu n'obi’). He does not want to wait outside in the rain, too long or in vain, for Ifunanya's love, he says. The two last chorus-verses are rendered fully in Igbo with the constant refrain ‘Onye m'bu n'obi’ (The one constantly on my mind) closing them.

Conclusion

This article examined the transgressive use of English-based Nigerian pidgin and indigenous Nigerian languages, so-called vernaculars, in the carving of a national/linguistic identity among Nigerian youths. While mapping the rise of English as an official language in Nigeria, the article highlighted the input of the cultural/musical icon, Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, in the quiet transformation that was boosted by the emergent culture of hip-hop music among other oral genres – a transformation that has led to the use of relatively marginal languages in mainstream social practices. In its prospective and retrospective examination of the place of English among other less prestigious codes, the article further made the point that a careful and well-considered appropriation of the counter-culture represented by the ‘vernaculars’ is a morale booster that could be of positive value for overall societal development.

Acknowledgements

I wish to express my profound gratitude to the following persons/organizations that either read early drafts of this article and made insightful suggestions for its improvement, or facilitated opportunities for me to present the article. Professor Olukoya Ogen's encouraging words persuaded me to submit the article for the ASAUK writing workshop in Osogbo, Osun State, Nigeria in 2011. Professor Karin Baber's probing and helpful comments when she reviewed the article at the Osogbo workshop delayed any hasty attempt to publish the article before now, even if I cannot claim to have faithfully executed her suggestions or those of others towards improving the article. My attendance at the 13th General Assembly of CODESRIA in Rabat, Morocco, in December 2011 where I presented this article was facilitated by the council. Also, Grace Musila and Louise Green facilitated a travel grant that made possible my presentation at the English Department seminar at Stellenbosch University, South Africa, in August 2013. Sara Marzagora not only invited me to submit an article for this special edition of JACS, she read the article, made valuable suggestions, and her unfailing enthusiasm kept me focussed on finishing it when other commitments threatened to stand in the way. Both Sara and Rebecca Jones have been very wonderful collaborators all through the time I revised the article and after. Lastly, my special gratitude goes to Carli Coetzee, Editor of JACS, for her unflagging interest, countless support in the completion of this article and her kind mentoring on this and other projects.

Notes

1. Wazobia is made up of three words, each of which means ‘come’ in Yoruba (wa), Hausa (zo) and Igbo (bia), Nigeria's three largest linguistics groups. It is a popular pidginized reference to Nigeria's indigenous languages, clothing, foods, and culture in general, viewed as one indivisible whole. A popular television programme of the 1970s that focussed on different aspects of Nigerian culture was called wazobia, as are several indigenous/pidgin language radio stations. The N50 Nigerian currency note, a legal tender, with its image of three human figures depicting persons from the three major ethnic groups is popularly called wazobia.

2. I have not been able to trace the date/title of this interview which is widely available in pirated form in Nigeria.

Appendix

Below are links to the songs used in the analysis:

P Square. 2007. ‘Ifunanya’: http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/psquare/ifunanya.html

9ice. 2008. ‘Street Credibility’: http://www.naijapals.com/music/9ice_Street_credibility_ft_tuface_idibia_9ice-1100