Notes on coming of age as a Nigerian in a globalising world
Story: Jola Ayeye
Words: Jola Ayeye
Design and Art: ARTISH
Creative Direction: ARTISH
Producer: Toye Sokunbi
1.
No matter where you are in the world, there are subtle ways you’re reminded of your Nigerianess. My first literal experience of this came at 16, when my parents shipped me off to Queenswood, an expensive boarding school just outside of London. I had always been a good student before that but the stakes were so high. The pressure to excel at Queenswood came from the mental image of what I imagine would have been my parents’ disappointment had I failed.
Queenswood was also supposed to line me up for university options ahead of the following year. So one day, when I found myself in panic-tears because I couldn’t solve a math problem, I was pleasantly surprised that Mrs Starling, my math teacher, wanted to help me work it out. She also asked me to suggest ways our communication around school work could improve. Coming from five years of a Nigerian secondary school education where teachers force-fed students with rigid curriculums they barely understood themselves, I was astounded. Not just because Queenswood tutors used a flexible communication and teaching style, but because they also took student feedback and opinions and thoughts seriously enough to influence our interactions.
In english-lit, we studied Sylvia Plath’s “Bell Jar”. My teacher, Ms. Nolan, a punk-ish twenty-something year old woman who had studied at Oxford, urged us to openly share our thoughts on the plot, themes and character motivations. In Ms. Nolans’s classes, there were no wrong or right answers, only solid arguments and poorly formed conclusions.
They did not use to do like that in my former school. Literary appreciation from my secondary school in Nigeria was let's say Mr Jones coming to class with prepared notes. All we had to do was cram them and reproduce during tests and exams. Queenswood wanted students to think for themselves. It marvelled my teenage mind that older didn’t always mean smarter, authority didn’t mean right, or that sometimes instead of trying harder, what’s really needed is a different approach entirely.
2.
Until I moved back to Nigeria permanently in 2016, there are questions I’d never really asked myself while growing up. Not because I was not a ‘deep thinker’, but because I just never had to think about stuff like, who am I? How did I end up here? Or what is a baby girl to do when I find answers for the first two questions, with my whole life still ahead of me?
Maybe as an outspoken teenager I would’ve had more confident and concise answers, but chances are I would have also been talking out of my ass. Because, even as an adult who turned 28 years, less than four months ago, I am not entirely sure I have the right answers to these questions. Who am I? Jola Ayeye, a Nigerian woman, media executive (In Jesus name) and writer. And how did I end up at this point in my life?
Okay, so this is where I may need to slightly adjust specifics.
First, let’s scratch that bit about being Nigerian, because I have another passport (shout out to mummy). Both my parents are Nigerian though, and I’ve lived in Nigeria for most of my life. School was Little Saints, a Montessori school in Ilupeju Lagos, then Green Springs School, Lagos, before a brief stint at Queenswood led up to my first degree at The University of Durham, England. Through those years I knew in my heart there was only one thing I wanted to do for the rest of my life: make movies and TV shows. But I wasn’t brave enough to ask my parents to pay for film school, talkless of money to buy equipment to pursue my dreams. In fact, the closest I ever got to making a case with my parents, for filmmaking came after I completed my degree at Durham. I had weakly told my dad of my interest in making movies. Maybe he didn’t hear me properly but that conversation ended with me registering for Chartered Institute of Management Accounting (CIMA) exams.
My dad is an accountant himself. He’s one of weird types too, who actually loves his job, and would evangelise to anyone who cared to listen, about how he’s greatly benefited from a long-term career of adding up numbers. I knew he meant well by wanting me to expand my possibilities for employment by following in his footsteps, but I only got through the first stage of the CIMA before realising numbers made me queasy. I was going to make a terrible accountant, and worse a terrible employee in a traditional 9-5 setting.
On the eve of returning to Nigeria, I took on a content writing job at Zikoko, a new media platform based in Lagos, and that was the start of my media career. My parents have struggled to accept and understand my decision to work in Nigeria’s starkly unregulated creative arts sector. I had graduated from Durham, with a political science and philosophy degree, earlier that summer, but I have never had a use for it. But I've enjoyed every waking minute of my creative life. Gaining insight from hustle, the satisfaction of executing projects, the diverse mix of characters and personalities I get to interact with daily; hook it all in my veins.
But every once in a while, I get with childhood friends, who work in more conventional careers, make more money than I do, or have better job security with added benefits and I feel like an oddity. These are people who like me, grew up in the comfort of an upper middle class or wealth class bubble. We had access to the same resources, the same network and social capital, yet they seemed to have better lives than I did. A classic example is how my friends reacted with concern when I told them I often had to hop danfo buses to get to work, during my Zikoko years. They were all amused. Because I make films and podcasts, they expect that I'll be living large, won't need to save up for travel, or live anywhere that is not Ikeja or Ikoyi. Because God forbid asking someone, who rarely leaves their Lekki or Ikoyi comfort bubble, to come for a sleepover in Iyana-Ipaja or anywhere after VGC.
I'm not ashamed about still running from pillar to post looking for funding, braintrust or other forms of support to bring my dreams to life. My cop-out, if i need one, is that media careers anywhere in the world take time to build before sizable returns can be recouped. But I also thread carefully along those lines of thinking, because a tinge of guilt also often sets in, afterall I am still a lot more privileged than most.
I have spent enough time around the average Nigeran "media” person to know not every aspiring filmmaker has the same level of access to ‘power rooms’ that are sometimes just a phone call away to me. In the larger Nigerian society, not every adult in their twenties benefits from a lifestyle subsidised by their parents. In fact, not every young Nigerian enjoys living rent and responsibility free in the comfort of their parents' homes while they figure out how to be their own person in the world. That I do not have to pay ‘black tax’ to help out my parents or any extended relatives, is a significant difference from a reality many young Nigerians know all too well.
3.
There’s a kind of perspective shrinkage that can only happen to you when you live in Nigeria, a poor country where social mobility is very hard. The economies of scale here are warped in that, less is rarely believed to be more, and as a result, excess and exuberance is the most effective way to let people know you or something, is a ‘big deal’.
I work in the media, so the days of my life are often coloured with awkward encounters. To give you a mental picture, I co-host one of the biggest podcasts in Nigeria. Every new episode either tops or lands a second place slot on the charts, preceded or trailed by the religiously followed sermons of big pentecostal preachers, think Joel Osteen or T.D Jakes. Anywhere else in the world, this kind of media reach and influence would be huge, but in Nigeria, where many people struggle to eat on a daily basis, mobile data is considered a luxury. Investors are often also discouraged from helping podcasts scale, because advertisers and corporations undermine it as an 'online’ or 'social media' thing.
This reductive mentality is a wide net often cast across Nigeria’s creative arts and culture industry. Numbers, charts and statistics may look good on paper as a measure of hardwork and slow-trickle growth, but if you’re not Davido or Wizkid, nobody cares. Typically, the question you’re prodded after introducing yourself and to a room full of Nigerians is: “So what are you going to do with this one in Nigeria?”. Funnily, the same captilalist system that forces Nigerian creators to lean towards more mass market content, allows marketing and pr agencies inflate advertising campaign budgets, so where does all that money go?
I had a taste of this Nigerian perception problem, (un)ironically, while I was in the south of France last year, seated in the Nollywood corner at MIPTV. My other hustle, a film production company I co-own called Salt and Truth, had been selected from a pool of thousands of other studios and film companies from around the world. We were there to pitch a documentary at MIPDoc, an international showcase for documentary screenings, hosted at Cannes. We were the only African film company that made it to the final 5, we were also the youngest team on the shortlist. But scaling those odds to present our work at the largest content trade fair in the world, was not enough to impress our Nollywood brethren. It didn’t matter that our documentary pitch was to highlight the problem of widespread underaged child labour in Nigeria through film. As far as people in the Nollywood corner were concerned, ‘nobody go watch this kain tin’
I’m big on adaptability, and not all of those whispers to create more widely-accessible content have fallen on deaf ears. I have written a few shows for Africa’s biggest cable network DStv, and I’m currently slugging it out for the man in a Netflix writer’s room for another recently announced series.
My segue into traditional Nigerian TV content has been my career bridge between what I feel is good work and what I can do to make money, at the risk of becoming a nuisance in my parent’s house. But whenever I am at these media mixers, with foreign filmmakers and journalists and free food, appreciation for my work often makes me aware this sacrifice of artistic value for the sake of the artist’s survival is a direct consequence of being Nigerian.
Whether in Lagos, London or Cannes, non-Nigerians always seem to have more genuine interest in my work regardless of its commercial value or potential to break box office charts. These people didn't need to know me or where I came from or who my parents are, they cared about my work because it was good.
By the end of such mixers, in addition to feeling light-headed from throwing back free bottomless mimosas, I also feel my mind opening up to the same limitless possibilities from my teenage mind at Queenswood. The mental cage of self doubt, shuttered perception, and decision-making provoked by economic uncertainty, pried apart by an accurate view of who I am; a global citizen of a much bigger world that exists outside of Nigeria. And my God, the only other thing I can liken that kind of clarity with, is having an out of body experience.
4.
In all my 20-something years on earth, I have never, by choice, woken up thinking, "I want to fight for Nigeria today", but let me tell you something, e fit be you.
Last month, Nigerian activist Yele Sowore, started making news headlines, after the former presidential aspirant began calling for an Independence day protest. Ten months ago, local and international media covered Sowore’s series of recurring arrests by Nigeria’s special ops covert agency, D.S.S. He’d first been arrested from his hotel on 3rd of August 2019, while he was planning for an announced protest. His arrest was the start of a five month long detention that became the stuff of nervous anxiety for Nigerians who had long-feared the presidency of Muhammadu Buhari, a former military general, would lead to gross abuses of human rights and crackdowns on freedom of speech. Those fears were further exacerbated when Sowore was suddenly rearrested on the court grounds where his release had just been ordered on Dec 6th of 2019.
5000 miles away, his wife Opeyemi Sowore, began to garner support from the Haworth community where she lived with Yele and their two children, Ayo and Komi in New Jersey, USA. Ruth Maclean of The New York Times reported that at first, Opeyemi had been about the reason for her husband’s long absence for many months while he was locked up in Nigeria. But she eventually spilled the beans while texting another mother whose kids attended the same school as hers. Soon, the news of Sowore’s activism spread like wildfire across Haworth. Within weeks, the news had reached human rights activist Amal Clooney and six United States congressmen, who all reached out to Nigeria’s highest court demanding Sowore’s release.
The moral lesson of this story is two-pronged: The first is to get you a Nigerian woman, today. The second is the importance of having options, as a Nigerian in a globalising world. For dreamers and changemakers who stare down the insurmountable task of going against any Nigerian government or authority, there is no greater security than having the option to not be Nigerian at all. The Sowores typify this epitome of Nigerian privilege in 2020; a middle class American family with strong socio-political ties to Nigeria. With Yele Sowore on the frontlines in Nigeria and Opeyemi Sowore holding base in America, together they form a formidable tag-team with influence stretching across the Atlantic from Lagos to New York. That is the empowerment that having options provides.
I am generally ambivalent about Sowore’s misadventures, but I respect his bravery because I know every generation has an inevitable battle. What I never anticipated was being at the centre of this watershed moment in Nigerian history for civic engagement. But like I said earlier, e fit be you.
Earlier this October, a series of reports related to the alleged shooting of a man in Ughelli, Delta state, initially started out as an online campaign demanding accountability from Nigerian security agencies. #EndSARS, the protest hashtag has been floating around the Nigerian webosphere in response to reports of police brutality, for nearly three years. Despite government claims to dissolve the unit, Nigerians still experience severe extremes of abuse, torture, extortion and murder, in the hands of the Nigerian police till today.
In the days that followed the Ughelli shooting, agitations from Nigerians and its diaspora intensified the demands for real change to occur. On Friday, 8th of October, the first wave of #EndSARS protests in Lagos organised by RunTown and Falz began gaining momentum. That evening, my podcast co-host Feyikemi Abudu, set up fundraising towards supporting protests in Alausa, Ikeja. I have been a member of Feminist Coalition, a women-focused group started by by Damiola Odufuwa and Odun Eweniyi since it's inception back in July. I pulled Feyikemi in too, and a few million nairas raised later, Feminist Coalition went from joining the fight to becoming a central figure in conversations about #EndSARS in the local and international news media.
That should have been enough. It should have been enough that the protests remained peaceful. It should have been enough that we provided sensitisation, feeding, logistics for legal work, medical ambulances and private security to ease government concerns of violent escalations. It should have been enough because nobody, not even Feminist Coalition, was elected into office or given the right tools to do any of these things on a whim in the first place.
Yet, my country tried to silence us. In any other country, the government would be grateful if private citizens behind a group like FeministCo was taking the job of mass political sensitisation and social engineering out of the federal government hands. But instead my country sent men of the Nigerian Army to open fire on peaceful protesters, and traumatised an entire generation.
5.
At about 8 years old, I began living with my dad’s parents in Oshodi. My mum was away in England with my brother. I had an off and on nanny who sometimes took care of me but she also took ill for a long time. One weekend that year, my Dad decided to take me to his parents’ while waiting for my nanny to get better. But after just two days of pampering at my Grandma’s, I actually didn’t want to go back home.
My paternal grandparents were amongst the first settlers on the street they lived. When they took me in, there were only three houses on their street in Mafoluku. This was back in the early late 90s to early 2000s. That whole area is barely recognisable these days. It started with a wave of commercialisation that caused textile shops to spill over from Oshodi market into residential streets. Nigeria became a democracy at the start of the millennium, and many degree holders were opting out of white collar jobs, to take advantage of the liberalised economy. Lagos, West Africa’s commercial spine, was awash with new money and rapid urbanisation, and it hasn’t stopped transforming ever since. Lagos State government is currently constructing a massive $70 million transport interchange plaza that promises to transform the face of Oshodi once again - if and when they finish it.
As expected when urban centres are rapidly developed, the effect is the displacement of original settlers which leads to homelessness and subsequently rising insecurity. When I lived in Oshodi, it was the start of Lagos’ gated streets revolution, resulting from a spate of robbery attacks on suburban neighbourhoods. In Oshodi today, a frantic anxiety still hangs in the air. On some blocks and street corners, you have to constantly look over your shoulders, lest you could be pick-pocketed or have your handbag snatched.
One memory from attending All Saints Anglican, the church I attended with my GrandMa in Mafoluku, has stayed with me the longest. During my first few weeks at All Saints, I struggled to fit in with the other kids at Sunday school. When you speak, look or dress a certain way that was unusual to other children, you tend to stick out. It also didn’t help that I had just begun schooling at Green Springs, Gbagada where the teachers followed a American-style curriculum. Most of the kids at my Grandma’s church seemed to have been taught the multiplication tables with melodic songs and I didn’t know any of their songs. I would have actually been fine with not fitting in, if it meant being left alone, but because I was different, they routinely picked on me.
One sunday, I got sick and tired of turning the other cheek so I told my Grandma what had been happening. “If somebody is rude to you, be rude to them back”, she’d gently said to me on our way home from church that afternoon. Her response took me by surprise. I’d half-expected her to ask for the names of my tormentors so she could bring up the issue with their parents. But the moment she spoke, I also got an immediate sense of what I had to do.
The next sunday, I didn’t return to church to pick a fight, I went back with a strategy. The first step was to identify the queen of the clique that bullied me. After I figured out who the leader was, I befriended her second-in-command, a meek cute girl, whose friendship earned me the trust of the rest of the pack, and I ended up with a new set of church friends. We all became very good friends, including the bully-in-chief who had been initially sworn to my persecution, but I learnt a valuable life lesson from that experience: that half the work of getting the things we want in life, is showing up. And look, in light of the #EndSARS 2020, It cannot be overstated that Nigerians need to show up.
Back at Queenswood, the level of trust adults—parents and administrators alike—put in my teenage classmates was another source of befuddlement. Because unlike my peers, I still had to seek permission from my parents in Nigeria to stay out late, visit friends or attend parties with curfew restrictions communicated over the phone. Back then, I didn’t think having parents that were that involved in my everyday life across time zones was extreme. It took moving back to Nigeria as a twenty-something year old woman with a 10PM curfew, to realise they were never going to let up that control. One particular December changed everything. My younger brothers went for a Migos concert that ran all night. Unlike me, who still had to give hourly check-ins, even though I often made it back home before curfew, these boys did not only get the express approval of my Dad to stay out all night, he’d also gingerly gone to open the gate for them, when they made it back home at 4AM! I was infuriated. So I started staying out late too, knowing all I had to do was apologise if I got home past my curfew. After it happened enough times, eventually, we all stopped bringing up the curfew matter all together.
This, I’ve come to realise, is the Nigerian way; to act first, then apologise after; to commit a crime and have a good defense; to take chances that feel like leaping off a plane without a parachute, then figure out how not to crash-land mid-fall. Nigeria is the last Wild West, a lawless gold mine, where you can get in a lot of trouble for breaking rules, but may also end up redressing the terms of engagement entirely, and quite often the latter possibility is the more productive and solution-driven option.
Anyone who has seen Nigerian newspaper headlines from the last sixty years, in a snapshot can tell you for free that nothing has really changed. The rich are still getting richer while the poor get screwed. I am a little bit hopeful and excited for the results we have achieved with #EndSARS. But I want the momentum to be sustained because I don't want people to feel hopeless again.
This fight must continue, because we shouldn't be negotiating basic freedoms with political hacks who aren't very smart, empathetic or conscientious. Take Aso Rock presidential villa as a metophorical case study. In the UK, Downing street, where the British parliament is located, is an accessible road to all British people. The same applies for America's White House, on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington DC. But Aso Rock is a literal house on a rock, far away from whoever the president in office was elected to rule. By design and location, it's more styled towards a military head of state that wants to hide and avoid revolutions and coups, than a capable leader who is in touch with his people.
It's also comparison frameworks like the architecture of Aso Rock presidential villa, that social media provides, because Nigerians are able to see the basics of civic life, that people in other countries enjoy without putting their lives in danger. Screen-access to global culture in real-time may also explain why Nigeria's old-head government has been so skeptical about social media. Lekki Masscare was such a clusterfuck move by the Nigerian Army, because the whole world watched. And what they saw, was a government launching an artillery strike on citizens demanding an end to state-sanctioned abuse. That's like bringing a gun to a boxing match.
6.
A revolution is needed. But it is not so much just marching in the streets, but subtle lifestyle adjustments that begin with us as individuals. Nigerians are thought to always be happy because we have a spirited tendency to be loud, intrusive and obvious, without forgetting to be kind. This fuels the belief that socio-economic class divisions shouldn’t create gaps between communities and peoples, a value that has held many friends and extended families together till date. Even if you add the wave of modernity that began in 119 years since Nigeria was declared a British protectorate in 1901, with over 3500 years of history since the existence of the earliest dated Nigerian Nok art sculptures from 500 B.C, you may find these community values haven’t really changed much.
Both my parents became born again christians while they studied in university. My father at the University Of Nigeria, Nsukka and my mother at Obafemi Awolowo University, Ife. In those years, Nigerian universities had a strong Christian association network known as the Scripture Union (SU). In addition to being a christian fellowship, the SU also ensured that christian brothers and sisters weren't struggling financially, academically, or in any other way. For many years after graduation, my parents also networked through Scripture Union (SU) communities across the country. Sometimes, a brother needed a place to stay while settling into a new role in a new city, or it could be a sister who needs her C.V to reach the table of an important decision-maker — the Scripture Union network helped those in need connect with other brothers and sisters who could immediately be of assistance. This is the power of communities driven by shared values and positive common goals. Kind of like our social media today.
Nigerian history is not a subject taught in secondary schools today, but we the young and scholarly have always been told stories of our heroes. We have heard these stories, in text books, on currency notes, in movies and the list goes on. From mythological god-heroes like Sango, to the Tafa Balewa(s) and Obafemi Awolowo(s) who fought for Nigeria to be independent, to people like Ken Saro-Wiwa who defended our democracy in times of uncertainty, and intellectuals who innovated solutions that changed Nigeria and got the world to pay attention. Stories about these "heroes" are great for bedtime tales and creative-writing term papers, but if you ask me, that should also be the extent to how these narratives surface in any young Nigerian's life.
Now don't get me wrong, I am very aware of the importance of storytelling in nation and character building, especially for young and growing children. What I have learnt from happening upon this historical moment in Nigerian politics, however, is that careful curation of the stories we tell tomorrow's leaders is a bigger priority than just keeping them "informed". Nigerians have gotten so used to the idea that solving problems can only be done by a few chosen class of "heroes" who do the right thing against odds of hardship and suffering. Because of that, we're not only docile in demanding accountability from our elected officials, private citizens also have limited interest in public affairs because they think it takes a supernormal level of courage to be a dependable politician.
Being involved with the #EndSARS protests has showed me that when we Nigerians come together, a lot of good will come of it. That when there's increased political engagement, the people and government alike are immediately forced to confront the sheer scale and vastness of Nigeria's problems. But overall that, you don't need to be educated, rich, charming, or be a politician to inspire change, all you need is to show up.
To be an activist is to simply care about something enough to share your views with the world. If you give a shit about Nigeria, then talk about it. You also don't have to be a special kind of altruistic human being to do what is necessary for your community. You don't have to wait for spokespersons, celebrities or 'feminists' before you, write those petitions, lead those protests, or crowdfund those community solutions. What nobody tells you about intimidation and political suppression is that, the real gimmick of the oppressor is for the citizenry to be so scared of repercussion that we don't even make an attempt for change.
Coming of age as a Nigerian in a world increasingly melting into one global culture, has been a rude awakening, but I know I am not powerless. I once read somewhere that danger is very real, but fear is quite often a choice. Anybody who was willing to give Nigerian government a benefit of the doubt, saw the massacre. This is also not the era of celebrities who took government money and turned a blind eye to discussing real social problems in their art. It's 2020 and Nigerians of any tribe should not get drawn into conversations about why we’re asking the police not to kill us or why we want basic amenities and better redistribution of wealth. We must bully government officials into doing the right thing. Because creating an environment where they can't be challenged is a waste of Nigeria's resources.
With the #EndSARS protests leaving the streets, whoever is still counting on stopping this ideological revolution, should be very afraid. At least when people were marching in the streets, you could round them up and send uniformed men after them. As we all look to 2023 to be a deciding election year for the future of Nigeria, I look forward to seeing how Nigerians will continue to resist despotism at all levels of society. In the news, I see authorities playing pass the potato with the Lekki Massacre postscripts because they're also starting to realise this is not 1984 anymore. A crime against humanity in Nigeria, is a crime against humanity all over the world.