When we began researching for the Roots Vol. 1: Rock, War and Funk exhibition, we did so with the worry that while we might find some material about the history of Nigerian music in the 60’s and 70’s we wouldn’t find anyone who had done the work of parsing the music and the events that inspired it. We shouldn’t have worried. Uchenna Ikonne, a Nigerian music head and authority on vintage Nigerian music had paved the path for us and created a trove of information that has become a primer for many looking into Nigerian music.
Our exhibition wouldn’t have been complete without his insight, and he was gracious enough to talk to us about his inspirations, the music and the path ahead. He is a fascinating read.
NATIVE: When we began research on the history of Nigerian music before the 80’s, we found that much of the comprehensive research done on the subject was attributed to you. The sheer scale of the work you have done is impressive. How did you become so involved in the scene and how did you get started?
U. Ikonne: Thanks so much for noticing! This work is not easy and more often than not it feels incredibly thankless. Most of the time I think I’m breaking my back to do this stuff that absolutely nobody cares about except me. So it means a lot when somebody tells me that they appreciate it, and it gives me that much more motivation to keep trucking!
You know how they say “Write the book you want to read?” That’s literally what it was for me. I was trying to do some research on Nigerian music of the seventies and eighties for a film project I was working on about ten years ago, and there were absolutely no resources available. So I had no choice but to create those resources for myself. And then much to my surprise, other people seemed to be interested in it too… and the rest, history. But I can tell you: If I had been able to walk into the library and find two or three decent books on Nigerian music on the shelves, I probably would have never done any of this.
It was a while before I started to take it seriously, though… before I realized the gravity of the responsibility that comes with documenting and chronicling all this stuff. That was when I found I was able to write “Historian” on my CV without feeling stupid and pretentious.
NATIVE: A few days ago, tweets about contemporary artists being the first to export Nigerian music started a conversation about the erasure of the successes of artists from the ’60s and ’70s. Have you experienced that kind of erasure in the course of your work and how do you think it affects the growth of the Nigerian music industry?
U. Ikonne: Nigerian popular culture is in a perpetual state of erasure. In many ways, we’re like the character in the movie “Memento”; due to anterograde amnesia, he can’t create new memories. His brain essentially reboots every five minutes, so he lives in the neverending present. In Nigeria, our collective cultural memory rarely goes back further than a decade or so at any given moment and everything before that is lost. I mean, think about the nineties Nigerian music scene… who remembers that.
But that’s a big problem. Progress is not necessarily just about making new achievements; it’s about being able to sustain them and continue to build upon them. Yeah, you created a successful business, good for you. But can you keep it going long enough to pass it on to your kids so they can expand the business and pass it on to their kids so that they can expand it more and pass it on to their kids? That’s something you don’t see a lot of in Nigeria: that transgenerational progress. That’s how you climb from 1 to 2, pass the baton to the next person who goes from 2 to 3, the next jumps from 3 to 4, and so on. For us, the first person goes from 1 to 2. And then the next person starts from 1 again and gets to 2. And then the next person might hustle hard and get from 1 to 2 to 3 and even hit 4 all on their own sweat. But then the next person after them? 1 to 2… into infinity. And that affects the music business because we’re constantly starting over from scratch and feeling happy when we get to 2.
NATIVE: I know this is a little tangential, but how do you think your own personal experiences as a researcher and documentarian affect your work?
U. Ikonne: Oh yes. My personal experience–especially as I get older–has radically shifted the way I think about concepts like time, memory, history, antiquity and storytelling. And that affects the way I work. And then the work, in turn, shapes the way I view life in general.
NATIVE: While there hasn’t been a proper Afro-rock scene in Nigeria since the ’80s, traditional rock music has thrived here, with communities and scene rising out of Lagos, Kaduna, Abuja, and Jos. Why do you think this schism happened, and in what ways do you think the rockers of today can connect with Nigeria’s afro-rock history?
U. Ikonne: Well, I guess one of the things that happened to afro-rock in Nigeria was Fela sort of displaced it. Fela was actually quite inspired by the afro-rock scene in the early days and regarded the rock bands as fellow travelers who shared his mission to shake up the Nigerian music scene and raise it to international standards. But the thing about the afro-rock groups is that they were originally inspired by American and British rock, and to an extent, they really based their image on that kind of countercultural rebel posturing. But Fela was not just posturing; he was living that rebel life IRL. He was trading blows with the police and the army, getting thrown in jail, then coming out and making a record about the whole thing. Somehow it just made him seem more “real” in that way, and he soon ate up a large portion of the afro-rock audience.
What remaining market share afro-rock had was eaten by juju, which had previously been an old-fashioned kind of music–men wearing ‘filas’ and sitting on stools while they played the accordion. Then you got a new generation of young juju players: King Sunny Ade, Ebenezer Obey, Dele Abiodun, Prince Adekunle who started appropriating the imagery and apparatus of afro-rock. They dressed like rockers and used rock instruments like the electric guitar, bass, and keyboards, drum sets. By combining the modern presentation of rock with the juju foundation that the audience already knew and loved, they sort of rendered afro-rock obsolete by the mid-seventies. That is, in the southwest anyway. Bands in the east kept on rocking before they finally ran out of gas in the eighties
I’ve long wanted to see a return of rock in Nigeria. There have been various groups that have tried over the years but I just haven’t been feeling most of them. I’ve always felt one of the problems is that they just have bad role models because even in the west, rock has been dying a slow death for the last two decades. The afro-rockers of the seventies were inspired by Cream, Hendrix, Santana, Deep Purple… real balls-out hardcore shit. But what do the guys coming up in the 2000s have to look up to? Coldplay? Imagine Dragons? Nothing against those bands, of course, but… come on.
I’ve been encouraged, though: some of these recent Nigerian bands at least are starting showing the potential to rock hard, and I’ve been thinking about maybe trying to produce some of them. How can they connect with the afro-rock legacy? Well… we just have to expose them to it. I think The Native is in a position to be a great portal for that because you guys have the ear of the youth in a way not many others do.
NATIVE: Why do you think there has been so few attempts to catalog and document the history of Nigerian music from the Independence era forward?
U. Ikonne: Nobody cares, mostly. Or maybe I should say nobody cares enough. You always hear people say “We don’t have a maintenance culture in Nigeria.” And it’s true, but it doesn’t pertain only to buildings and roads and such. We don’t have it culturally either. People are fixated with the present moment but that’s just because they don’t realize that contemplating the past and the future are necessary to fully appreciate the full picture of our experience.
Think about how we listen to music: When you listen to a simple melody, you are only hearing one note at a time. And each individual note has no implicit melodic quality, right? It’s just a sound… a noise. But when notes are heard in sequence, as we hear each new note we process it in relation to the note we heard before it and the note we are anticipating to hear after it. We’re constantly interleaving the sound we hear in the present with the sound we heard in the past, and that we will hear in the future. And that’s how a bunch of individual notes become music. And that’s the way it is with culture–or at least how it should be. Without the past and the future, the present has no real meaning, no real resonance. Did I answer the question? Why are people not documenting and cataloging? I don’t know…. I guess maybe because there’s no money to be made doing it? lol.
NATIVE: What were the biggest challenges you experienced during your years of researching Nigeria’s first ‘golden’ age?
U. Ikonne: Without a doubt, the biggest challenge is even gaining access to music. As we’ve already established, we don’t have maintenance culture. Which means we don’t have a preservation culture either. There’s no library you can go to and find the entire history of Nigerian music neatly stacked and cataloged on the shelves. Most of the record labels that produced the music are gone, and even for the ones that still exist in some form, they don’t have the music. They didn’t keep the master tapes. EMI, which was probably the most prolific of music labels in the seventies and eighties, in the nineties they actually hired a dump truck to cart away their entire library of tapes and incinerate them. Decca, the second biggest label of that era, they dubbed over their tapes. We’re talking about erasure? They literally erased thirty years of music, just like that! So that’s the toughest thing, actually finding the music because so much of it has been lost or deliberately destroyed.
Thank God for vinyl, though. Most of the records still survive because there’s got to be at least a handful of manufactured vinyl copies still out there. Finding them and acquiring them takes a tremendous investment of time, energy and money, but you always hold out hope that the records are still somewhere out there and you’ll find them eventually, even if it means digging through a landfill where they were dumped thirty years ago. But that’s the beauty of vinyl as a medium; it has durability and permanence. As a result, it’s actually easier to research music made in the vinyl era–roughly 1960 to 1993–than it is for music made before or after.
Prior to vinyl, we used records made of shellac and they were extremely fragile. Vinyl is tough. When they first introduced vinyl records in Nigeria, to convince people to make the change (and invest in buying new record players) the head of EMI would drive his car over a vinyl record to demonstrate the resilience of the format. Shellac records? They shattered into pieces if you looked at them too hard. And that’s why so much pre-1960 music is lost to us forever–all the copies of the records broke, and the record companies didn’t keep the tapes.
Music from the nineties is just as lost because the primary format was cassette tape, and people dubbed over the tapes. The compact disc was not much better. I think we’re in even more danger to lose music today now that we’re dealing almost exclusively with digital: A lot of popular music doesn’t even exist in any physical context! People listen to music on their phones, and eventually, everybody deletes it for hard drive space, if they ever actually saved it at all. All the blog links expire. The “master tape” is a wav file on somebody’s laptop, and what happens when that laptop gets stolen or crashes? A lot of music from this era is going be completely gone in a few years.
NATIVE: In what ways do you think music from this era has influenced contemporary music?
U. Ikonne: I don’t think there’s been that much direct influence on contemporary music because there hasn’t been much dialogue between the generations in that way. Sure, you get someone like Flavour who frequently resuscitates classic song forms or that collaboration 2Baba did with Victor Olaiya a few years ago. But even then, I feel those examples are a bit too superficial, a bit too over-reverent. Almost like a kind of musical virtue-signaling: “Look at me, I’m paying tribute to my elders! Aren’t I a good boy? Not like these other disrespectful youths!” The goal of those records is not to create a hot track, but to pay obeisance. Which is not a bad thing, I guess… but not particularly helpful when you want to facilitate a dynamic musical conversation.
I’ve seen people do a lot of mental gymnastics to create those bridges of influence, though. Like all the work some critics were doing to coronate WIzkid as the heir to the afrobeat legacy. I’m not hearing it. “Listen to ‘Ojuelegba’! That is the continuation of afrobeat!” I’m like, “Is it? I don’t hear it, bro.” But mind you, there’s no reason why contemporary artists have to take inspiration from the past. Obviously they are doing quite well without it. But it would be nice if they did. It might make the texture of their work all the richer.
But the first step is to make people in this generation aware of the music of the past to begin with. Yeah, people know all the big, mainstream names like Fela, KSA, Obey, Christy Essien-Igbokwe, Shina Peters, Osadebe etc. But there was so, so, so, so, SO much more going on back then beyond just that.
NATIVE: Do you see any parallels between the music being created by this generation of artists and artists of the ’60s and ‘7os?
U. Ikonne: To some degree, yeah. There’s a similarity in terms of the swagger, the celebration of youth, sex, style, glamour, and the disregard for the concerns of their elders. That’s the thing a lot of people don’t realize about the music of our parents (and grandparents): We’re so used to viewing them as these hoary, forbidding and conservative authority figures that it’s hard to imagine that they weren’t born with grey hair, that they were once young and rebellious themselves.
And it doesn’t help that most Nigerian parents tend to be reluctant to have honest conversations with their kids about their own life experiences. It’s even a challenge when I try to interview old musicians about their younger days because they edit their histories to match their current values: “Oh, we were very responsible boys. We did not smoke, we did not drink, we did not do drugs or chase girls. We just played our songs and then we went to bed by 9 pm. And then we got up the next morning and went to church.” Come on, man! I’ve seen the pics of what you guys were up to then! I know you were balling out of control!
That’s the reason I don’t really like when people use terms like “golden oldies” to describe vintage music. Because it evokes the image that it’s music made by and for old people. Nah, man… the music maybe be old now but it was made by kids. Kids with lives and thoughts and feelings that were not too different from those of kids today.
NATIVE: NativeMag, the organization I work with is one of a handful of West African media companies that have risen out of the need to document the ‘alte’ movement; in what ways do you think these new gen curators can better document the current movement and preserve it for future generations?
U. Ikonne: Focus on developing, acquiring and archiving audiovisual materials. That’s the fatal flaw I’ve encountered when it comes to curating music of past generations. When I first got into this, I originally wanted to make a documentary about the pop music of the seventies but I ended up having to abandon the project because it was impossible to obtain the archival video. I had interviewed a lot of survivors of the scene but I didn’t want it to one of those docs that are composed entirely of talking head shots of old people reminiscing about their youth. I wanted to be able to cut away to a period film showing them in their prime, really communicating that in-the-moment fire and funk and fun… I can talk all day about those bands, I can write a whole book about them, even play you the music. But in terms of conveying their full impact, none of that compares to being able to show you an eight-minute video clip of them actually playing. But it’s not possible because most of their performances were not filmed.
A lot of bands did perform on tv quite a bit but the tv stations eventually dubbed over the tapes or burned them. Or in some cases, they just resisted being documented. There’s a story about how some indie filmmaker traveled from America to try to make a documentary about Fela and Fela demanded something like $100,000 for the rights to film him. This was back in the eighties when a hundred stacks was a lot of money for an indie filmmaker, and he didn’t have it, of course… so the doc never happened. Osadebe had similar demands, and as a result, there is very little extant video evidence of his performance. Some artists, we don’t even have photos of them.
That doesn’t seem like a huge problem in this modern-day smartphone ecosystem where everybody’s constantly snapping and videoing everything with their mobiles. But people are constantly deleting stuff too. You need to hold on to that material. Back it up and back up the backups. And I don’t mean just candid shots and videos… invest in more high-quality, stylized and structured photoshoots and documentaries. It seems to me that many artists in the movement like Odunsi and Santi are very consciously paying attention to their visual iconography anyway, and that’s really a good thing.
But just save everything, really. Voice notes, demos, photo outtakes, invoices, concert tickets an programs, artist merchandise, magazines, archive web pages. Download videos from YouTube and save them. You’re trying to preserve a 360-degree picture of the culture and all the people who participate in it. And history starts today.
NATIVE: In what ways do you think the industry will evolve now that current interest in Nigerian music is bringing back all the international music labels that funded the primary wave of post-independence music?
U. Ikonne: That’s hard to say. It completely depends on the parties involved. While I think it’s fantastic that the wider world is showing interest in contemporary Nigerian pop, I don’t have a ton of faith in the international corporations’ ability to market it properly. They already effectively botched the efforts to sell Wizkid and Davido to the world and really… that entire industry is crumbling day by day as is.
It’s important to remember that the global preponderance of Nigerian music happened not because of the international labels but in spite of them. They never had any interest in us before but thanks to the internet we got the music out there. It was all because of the internet that you were able to go to YouTube and see video after video of Filipino teenagers singing and dancing to 2Face’s “African Queen” or girls in Trinidad winning to D’Banj. The industry didn’t make that happen. The internet has given us an avenue to disseminate our music on our own terms, and we should concentrate on that. Of course, one advantage the traditional music labels still hold is their deep purses, and we could definitely benefit from the promotional dollars. But there’s got to be a way to arrive at an arrangement where they provide the finance and let us retain control of the product presentation.
NATIVE: Who is Uchenna Ikonne, outside of music history?
U. Ikonne: Just a regular guy trying his best to be an honest man and a good writer. Or a good man and an honest writer. Either one will do.
The question now—not just in Benue, but in Plateau, Kaduna, Nasarawa, Zamfara, and Borno—is what are...
Carl Terver Reflects On Benue, the Yelewata Killings, and the Politics Of Naming In An Earnest...
Carl Terver Reflects On Benue, the Yelewata Killings, and the Politics Of Naming In An Earnest Op-Ed.
1.
These days, I hardly remember I am a poet. Only in momentary phases do I recall I am one. My thoughts constantly betray me, taking the form of essays. These phases, when I recall I am a poet, come because of the emotions of love or of war. When I speak of war, there are the wars every man faces within himself. And then there is the war Nigeria brings to your doorstep: the kind that inspires sad, grief-laden poems or such that, through the numbness of it, makes you find ways to understand what is going on in your country. It is this second war that inspired me to write, in 2019, in a poem titled “This Blood,” that “My country has an alternative Stock Exchange / that counts dead bodies, / the more the bodies / the shares bought, / that raised Patience’s Cry: / This blood we are sharing!”It was a response, months later, to the killings of 73 persons in Benue on the New Year’s Eve of 2018, whose victims were interred in a state-organised mass burial that came to be known as Black Thursday.
2.
In 2015, I wrote my first short story, which, after several re-titling (and editing), would become “Once Upon A Time in Jato-Aka,” now published in The Stockholm Review of Literature. It was inspired by a beautiful experience of my visit that year to Jato-Aka, a town in Kwande LGA, Benue, which borders Cameroon in the Mandara Mountain range. Jato-Aka is a small, sleepy agrarian town, and the road that leads into it suddenly stops in the town square.
With an artistic eye, I imagined the arrival of something extraordinary to spice up the people’s lives, or the town itself, and the idea of a retired general came to mind. I drafted this into the story and painted the picture of what such slow, border towns looked like, having once lived the life of a farm boy in the countryside myself, depicting the sedentary, the communal, the calm, and the peacefulness. Then I ended the story with a cliffhanger that even I didn’t know was an apt example of the artistic unconscious at work: “Then one day, it happened again, the pestilence of locusts that struck every year, unexpectedly. In the time the old General was back, it had not happened. The Fulanis came.”
3.
For years, I was disturbed by this ending. It felt incomplete. It felt prejudiced. It felt phobic and eager to misrepresent and profile the entire Fulani ethnic group as a plague, as aggressors, when I was supposed to believe in the pluralistic multi-ethnicity of the so-called Nigerian project. Not only that, I judged that being Nigerian means living among other ethnicities and respecting them. But I was also aware of the fact that I have friends; I know and have met a good number who are as human as I am, with the daily worries of life, as feeding their children, paying school fees, and affording transportation.
I struggled with whatever justification I could contrive to make the story work, to make it not look like, “Oh, here is a Tiv writer who has written to paint the Fulanis bad.” Eventually, I let go, refusing to be held back by what, in retrospect, I feel was simply too much correctness in the face of confronting a real problem that was not simply a short story. And I used a character in it to ask a question which remains baffling: “Why should one man have more right to kill another?” In an earlier version of the story, the question was, “Why should a group of Nigerians have more right to kill other Nigerians?”
4.
The question now, away from fiction, but to the crisis of what is now becoming the daily barbaric killings of Nigerians—not just in Benue, but in Plateau, Kaduna, Nasarawa, Zamfara, Borno, and wherever pleases the homicidal urges of these terrorists—is what are these killings for? But it is another question rendered meaningless by the indifferent climate that has become Nigeria for more than a decade now. Because the government has refused to fight insecurity, creating a loophole for further insecurity, which now appears glaringly to us (not that we never suspected it) to be a deliberate ploy to cause confusion and artificial helplessness. To solve a security crisis of this nature, the state has to identify it, classify it for what it is, before setting the right apparatus to combat it. This has not been done, and in the years these killings have continued, it has been misidentified as herdsmen-farmers clashes. News outlets, without on-the-ground investigations, have peddled this narrative whenever there’s another case of killings where, often, the victims are unarmed Nigerians, sometimes killed in their beds.
The mistake so far, I believe, was the Benue state government’s tolerance in not naming the problem until past governor Samuel Ortom’s accusations of a Fulani expansionist threat in the state, which led him in 2017 to enact an anti-open grazing legislation known as the Open Grazing Prohibition and Ranches Establishment Law. But to some of us, even if this addressed the problem at some scale, it was merely reactionary; a band-aid to what we think is a larger conundrum. It was like sending rice—the typical Nigerian politician’s answer to a crisis.
The attacks never stopped. Not only so, they began to assume a recognisable M.O. of displacing and occupying, as people flee and abandon their indigenous homes. Even more, there appears to be a desire to instill terror and intent to harm: on 8 April 2023, as the country waited to inaugurate Bola Tinubu as president, after what seemed to have been a sham election, Channels TV reported: “Many feared killed as suspected herdsmen attack Benue IDPs.”
These were people who had fled homes where their farms were. What was such an attack for? What farmlands of these displaced persons were the attackers after? Or in recent Yelwata, on 14 June 2025, where a hecatomb of deaths was orchestrated in a very cold and methodical execution? The police station had been attacked first, to cripple any armed resistance, the villagers report, before a door-to-door, family-by-family execution began, going on for three unholy hours, in a community less than an hour’s drive from the state capital, Makurdi; with another attack orchestrated a few hours apart at the other exit of the capital, in Mbaivur, near the Air Force Base in Makurdi.
Sending the herdsmen away, which Benue citizens have cried for in the past, it seems, doesn’t end the problem. And if there have been fears this is beyond conflicts about grazing, these scenarios only intensify, if not to confirm them.
5.
The first time I drank kindirmo, fresh cow milk hawked in colourful calabashes by Fulani women, was in my secondary school, perhaps in 2003 or 2004. I remember it was after closing, and the sun was high. My female classmate who made me try it said the women had tied ice blocks in a nylon and placed them in the calabash to chill the milk. Thirst had driven me, rather than curiosity. But it tasted wonderful, so that after that day I always looked forward to it whenever I had small change to spare.
This was deep in Ukum LGA. On the way to the farm with my grandma, or returning, we’d sometimes meet Fulanis on the road walking together in a group, men (who looked more like boys, too young), women, and children. They were nomadic Fulanis, who often, to us, appeared to come out of nowhere as they lived in very interior settlements, and sometimes went to the local markets to buy goods and trade.
I do not recall any bad blood existing between them and us, or maybe I was too innocent to notice. They simply existed as a curious exotic to us: their slim men carrying staffs and looking like women, sometimes wearing make-up. Unimaginably, there was such understanding that they would often have an agreement with farmers to bring their cattle after a harvest to graze the pasture from stalks of maize and other harvested plants.
I am not being romantic about such a past, nor do I wish to patronise anyone. Because once in a while, we heard of cattle destroying farms. But I can tell you that Nigeria was once like this. That Benue was once like this. There was no need for fighting because the herder Fulanis were under the protection of the communities they lived in, and mutual understanding was established. So what happened? Why did herdsmen start using machetes on people? And when did guns come? Why are so-called herdsmen, who do not have cattle—because you need a herd of livestock to be a herdsman—but instead ride on motorcycles, invading and attacking villages with assault rifles?
It is not just Benue under attack by such barbarians, but Nigeria. It is not just about usurping authority anywhere they can, stoking tensions, or causing confusion and political instability. It is the fact that children are burned alive by criminals who will never meet justice, or worse, who know no one is going after them, and that they will emerge again to continue their terror. And that we are caught in a trap where the Nigerian government, with the strongest military force in West Africa, pretends to be helpless.
6.
What we are dealing with, not only in Benue, but nationwide, is a successful plan of confusion sown by a group with their plans. Surely, these killers take orders from someone. Possessing arms is strictly regulated in Nigeria, but these killers have no problem accessing not mere guns but assault rifles. In Yelwata, the killings were executed like an operation. Two days after this attack, a list of the families killed was published in Daily Post (courtesy of a Franc Utoo, a lawyer and native of Yelewata “who lost over 33 members of his extended family”). There were the Adam family, Ajah family, Akpen family, Amaki family, Anya family, Aondona family, Aondovihi family, Asom family, and so on, numbering up to 47 families, like a roster. What is to say that one day it won’t become more targeted, as genocidal killings are often planned to take out specific persons?
Finally, perhaps, the misinformation about this simply being herdsmen attacks or internal clashes, as the news ignorantly reports, is now evident. And this was why the Tor Tiv, Professor James Ayatse, the number one Tiv citizen and perhaps an authority on Tiv matters, at the president’s visit to Benue state on June 18, unequivocally stated, that:
“We do have grave concerns about the misinformation and misrepresentation of the security crisis in Benue State. It’s not herders-farmers clashes. It’s not communal clashes. It’s not reprisal attacks or skirmishes. It is this misinformation that has led to suggestions such as ‘remain tolerant, negotiate for peace, learn to live with your neighbours’. What we are dealing with in Benue is a calculated, well-planned, full-scale genocidal invasion and land-grabbing campaign by herder terrorists and bandits, which has been going on for decades and is worsening every year. Wrong diagnosis will always lead to wrong treatment. So, we are dealing with something far more sinister than we think about. It’s not learning to live with your neighbours; it is dealing with war.”
For many who do not know, historically, this is not the first time foreigners (whom the Tivs call “Uke”) have attempted to suppress the Tiv people, such that there’s even a song about this. The “Myam ciem er uke hide” song, translated as “I had a nightmare that the foreigner has returned.” Centuries later, the song remains true. The history of the Benue Valley during the 1700s through the 1800s is mired in conflicts over land among the different groups that had migrated and come to settle in the region. But the Tiv ancestors fought with their lives to defend the home they’d made for themselves in this valley.
It was because of this consciousness to defend themselves that subjugation by the British colonial forces in the early 1900s didn’t happen so easily for the latter. It is on record that the Tivs were the last ethnic nation in colonial Nigeria to be penetrated by the British, who afterwards ignorantly tried to govern them indirectly through proxies under their colonial government—a situation that was exploited by the Caliphate in northern Nigeria at the time to exert dominance southwards.
It is a known history that has been amply written about, with one of the more insightful works being Moses E. Ochonu’s ‘Colonialism by Proxy: Hausa Imperial Agents and Middle Belt Consciousness in Nigeria.’ There were pushbacks and unrelenting resistance, of course, by the Tiv nation. It is the history of this conflict that eventually led to the creation of Benue State. I am not a historian; I have only brought this up because history is all too familiar whenever it rears its head again. Many theories, histories, or causes of the terrorism going on in Benue will be spread. And sadly, the truth is we can’t say what it is; we are not security experts and have no concrete intel, so we talk about what we see: that we are being attacked by terrorists who come for our heads, and our land. And whoever they are, they are enemies of Nigeria.
When the musician 2Baba Idibia made a video responding to the Yelwata killings, his words were “I don’t even know what to say.” Truly, there aren’t any words for such madness other than Yelwata was indeed one of the darkest days for many of us. But for how long must this go on?
“I know how to speak to women and I know what they care
For many viewers, Amazon Prime’s After 30 will register as the latest sexy Lagos-based romance to hit...
For many viewers, Amazon Prime’s After 30 will register as the latest sexy Lagos-based romance to hit streaming services, and one that gives a fresh voice (and look) to that beloved four-girls-just-trying-to-survive-in-a-big-city motif. But for the film’s director, Momo Spaine, and the legions of fans who have been clamoring for a follow-up to the original series that the film is based on, this project has been a long time coming.
Spaine first cut her teeth in filmmaking on After 30’s predecessor, Before 30. Released in 2016, Before 30 was a series that followed the love lives of four young women navigating the well-known, uniquely Nigerian pressures to settle down and get married before they hit 30. Now, armed with nearly a decade’s worth of experience and a sweet Amazon production budget, Spaine has brought the four women’s stories to the big screen, picking up eight years after viewers last saw them. And while there’s no shortage of stories about women navigating love and career life in Nigeria — think hit series like Unmarried, Smart Money Woman and Skinny girl in transit — Spaine brings an attention to detail that radiates as you watch its four lead actresses, Dami Adegbite, Beverly Naya, Ane Ocha and Meg Otanwa, reprise their starring roles.
From carefully curated color palettes to meticulous costume design to hair and makeup, the pages of sketches and decks that Spaine shows me on our late-May Zoom call are nothing short of a creative shrine to a very personal story. “I had hours of conversations with my [director of photography] and with our makeup artist, Lillian,” she says. “Talking about [things like] light reflecting makeup, what kind of underpainting we’re doing under the foundation so that when the light hits their skin it just glows and pops.”
Spaine’s filmmaking journey began when she was attending university in South Africa in the early 2010s. Back then, she’d assist her close family friend and veteran rapper, Sasha P, whenever she came to South Africa to shoot music videos. “That was like my first proper exposure to filmmaking, and I just fell in love,” Spaine recalls.
It was toward the end of her time in South Africa that Spaine received a script for the pilot episode of what would become Before 30. Soon after, she started an internship with the show’s producers, Nemsia Productions, who produced After 30, as well as other projects like Soft Love andthe AMVCA-award-winning Breath of Life. Spaine worked with Nemsia over the roughly four years it took to make Before 30, and helped build the story and the audience that helped make its follow-up, After 30, possible.
”People loved the characters, they loved that the story was relatable,” she said of the positive response to the show. “It felt different. It felt like something that was slightly more elevated in terms of the storytelling, [and] the character development.”
Spaine also attributes the show’s success to the fact that it took risks with the kinds of stories it told. “Back then, you were talking about a Muslim couple bringing women into their marriage for sex, about a sexually free character in Nkem. We’re also talking about a born-again virgin who wanted to use spirituality to reverse her past sexual relations. So it was a lot of edge for that time as well, that I think we got feedback on being very successful.”
Before 30 was re-released on Netflix in 2019, and then saw a resurgence during the COVID-19-necessitated lockdowns in 2020 that brought a broader audience. After two years on Netflix, Amazon commissioned After 30 to continue the women’s story with a look at where they are now. Spaine spoke to us about how her personal experiences helped shape the film, how she’s continuing to push the envelope in terms of what kinds of Nigerian stories are being told, and what she hopes
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
I’m assuming there are parts of you that are in this movie. Can you tell me about that?
I struggle to think of a part of the film that does not have a piece of me in it. But starting with the characters, I’ve always had my favorites. I fancy myself a [Temi] in some ways, which is the lead character. I love fashion, I have that legal background, and I have almost the same relationship with my mom. But Nkem (played by Beverly Naya) is who I would like to be: that level of confidence, sexiness, just being this powerful woman that does what she wants and is unapologetic about it, but is still soft and honest at heart. Ama, for me, is an expression of who I think we should all aspire to be. The kind of good, pure-hearted, well-intentioned person, — that youthful, naive energy. And then for Aisha, it’s just that strength; she already has the security, but you also kind of have to show that being married does not mean all your problems are solved.
All these years after making the original show, how do you think the ways that you have grown as a person show up in the way that these characters have changed?
For [Temi], I don’t know, [Temi] pisses me off. She’s very confused. I don’t agree with how she runs her dating life. Like, I could not stand Carrie Bradshaw, and I love Sex and the City, but all she does is make bad decisions. And that’s kind of what makes a complex and dynamic character. With [Ama], I wanted to do a storyline where a character had to contend with their sexual identity, but from a very respectful place, from a true place that was not going to make fun of or minimize that experience. And for Aisha, the biggest thing with her is the conflicts that she has with Nkem. In the last eight to 10 years of my life, I’ve fallen out with friends that I thought we would die together. That kind of devastating friendship fight where you don’t think you can come back from.
Talk to me about the music for the show, Before 30. How did you put that together, and what decisions went into that process?
The music on this show makes me so proud. I was not as involved in the music of season one. We had no budget for music, so all we could do was approach people. After begging and pleading, maybe two people collected money; the other people just gave us permission. Bez, I think, just gave us permission because he was close with someone on the team at the time.I begged TeeZee for “Toyin” – we were just going around asking family members who had made music. But then there are ones that were chosen because they were so perfect, like Temi Dollface and Blackmagic. So half of it was just using our community, music from our existing community. And the other half of it was just begging, and everybody was upcoming at that time. Everyone was so willing back then to do things as a favor or to do things because they liked the idea.
What was it like securing music this time around for the film?
I’m really happy that the industry has boomed now, but even with what we thought was a comfortable budget, we could not get all the artists [we wanted] for the film.
Kaline [our music supervisor and the composer on the film], did a good job of going back to the drawing board like we did in season one, and just using our community. So, Kaline was able to pull together a bunch of songs from artists [who were willing to work with our budgets]. Everybody got paid, but it wasn’t a massive life-changing amount. They just did it because they believed in the story, and they wanted their music to be attached to the film.
What was your favourite part of making Before 30?
My favorite part was just getting to direct. Honestly, I spent seven years of my life producing thinking, “Okay, this is what I’m good at,” and I feel like I have a natural flair for producing, but I wouldn’t say I ever enjoyed it. It’s just something I knew I could do. Directing makes me so happy. I’m just like, “Why have I been wasting my life producing?” Every time I’m directing, I’m at my best professionally. I get to be creative, I get to tell people what to do because that is my favorite thing in life. So, just getting to direct in itself was a blessing and a journey of self-discovery. I realized: this is what I’m supposed to be doing with my life, this is what makes me happy.
This film was produced by Nemsia, but you have your own production company called Blush and Slate. Can you tell us about that?
Now that Before 30 is out in the ether, I am just excited to continue building a company that centers stories about women, because I really think those are the stories that I am best placed to tell. I know how to speak to women, and I know what they care about. I care that they come off looking the way that they want to look. Whether it’s commercial, reality, documentary, or scripted [stuff], I gravitate towards content that either centers women or is targeting female audiences. So, just continuing to be able to build my own style, my own company, and my repertoire of films with Blush and State is what I am most excited about. Blush and Slate is a vehicle that allows me to express myself fully creatively,
For people who have a story and don’t know where to start, what is your advice?
First of all, call Blush and Slate. If you don’t know where to start, hire a production company or a producer who sees your vision and believes in it and is willing to help you move it to the end. If you are that person and you have the time and resources, and energy to produce it yourself, then just get started. If it’s a documentary, book your first interview.
You don’t have to film the interview. Just figure out who the first person you want to talk to in your documentary is. Call them and have a conversation with them. Ask them if they would even be interested in featuring in a documentary. You just have to start. If it’s a scripted thing, write the first page of the script. You don’t have to write the whole script. Just write the first thing. For people who want to produce things, it’s very overwhelming because there are 2000 things that you need to do at the same time to really kick off a production. But there’s only one way to eat an elephant, and that’s bite by bite. So you still have to do the first thing that you can do and then build the momentum from there. Ideas in your head don’t do anyone any good.
Over the next year, the studio plans to develop up to 100 emerging digital storytellers and position them for...
Africa’s creative and digital economy is growing rapidly. With over 570 million internet users across the...
Africa’s creative and digital economy is growing rapidly. With over 570 million internet users across the continent and social media penetration increasing by the year, opportunities for content-led careers have never been greater. Popular content creator and skitmaker, Gilmore, knows about the opportunities that abound on the internet after rising to fame thanks to his comedic skits that reflect the lived experience of millions of Nigerians.
Since he rose to fame during the COVID-19 pandemic, Gilmore has risen to fame with over 100,000 YouTube subscribers and millions of views. Still, in many ways, his success story is an outlier with many talented African content creators lacking access to the structure, resources, and training needed to scale their influence globally. To solve those issues, Gilmore has launched VELUM Studio, an innovative content creation studio built to empower Africa’s emerging talent. Founded by the viral sensation in conjunction with music label executives Godfrey and Giovanni, VELUM Studios is designed to redefine the creative journey for digital creators, bridging the gap between local creativity and global recognition.
“Our goal is simple,” Gilmore says, “to show creators you don’t need limitless resources to succeed. You need an idea, the courage to execute it, and the right support system. At VELUM Studios, we provide exactly that.”
Over the next year, the studio plans to sign and develop up to 100 emerging digital storytellers, drive hundreds of millions of views across digital platforms, and position its talent to access international grants and funding opportunities. To achieve these goals, VELUM Studios is building an in-house team of seasoned media professionals—including videographers, photographers, publicists, and marketing strategists—who will play a direct role in amplifying the work of selected creators.
In many ways, VELUM Studios is the first initiative of its kind on the continent—built to not only spotlight emerging talent but also structure their growth within the global digital economy.
For further details and information, visit the website.