Nigeria’s Hip-Hop Problem

As military rule in Nigeria came to an end, a new generation of singers, heavily influenced by the ‘golden age of American hip-hop’ was born.

Written by Carl Terver

Jun 8, 2020

Rappers [L-R]: AQ, Loose Kaynon, MI Abaga and Blaqbonez. TWITTER.

In ‘A Million’, a bonus track off his 2012 mixtape, Occupy The Throne, rapper, Modenine’s excitement verges on the explosive. Delivered with characteristic élan, the track is a quickfire memoir of a trip to Johannesburg. In it, Modenine recounts, among other experiences, a performance at which he is surrounded by ‘real heads’—a reference to an audience schooled in hip-hop—who ‘got up as he spat.’ Modenine is in his element as he fashions his travel memoir, a transgression into a narrative practice that is usually the preserve of Fuji artistes returning from trips abroad. But masked behind this joie de vivre—‘O what a feeling/hip-hop is life’—is a longing for the acceptance of hip-hop, which, back home, remains an aspiration.

The Dawn of Nigerian Hip-Hop

For much of the 1990s, Nigeria’s popular music scene was saturated with highlife, local reggae and Fuji. As the country’s long night of military dictatorship wound down, a new generation of singers arose, heavily influenced by American hip-hop of the mid-1980s to mid-1990s, the so-called ‘golden age of hip-hop’ that threw up The Fugees, Naughty By Nature, Notorious B.I.G., Tupac Shakur, Nas, and Jay Z.

In Nigeria, the new generation of singers fully imbibed the hip-hop zeitgeist. These pioneers wore the baggy pants and large FUBU shirts of the Bronx. Tony Tetuila of The Remedies, perhaps the most popular group of these early years, wore a singlet and dyed his hair blonde like Sisqo. Eedris Abdulkareem, easily the group’s most prominent member, imitated American-style rapping, doing tongue twisters and dropping bars like Busta Rhymes. Wale Thompson, a juju artiste, featured The Remedies in ‘Lalale Friday’ (2000); and Maintain, a different group, evolved a unique sound by sprinkling humour over a blend of hip-hop and Fuji, signalling possible futures for hip-hop. ArtQuake’s ‘Abule Lawa’ (1999), one of the most memorable hip-hop songs of that era, sampled Lauryn Hill’s ‘Doo Wop’ (1998). ArtQuake’s video featured Plantashun Boiz and The Remedies, the flagbearers of a new dawn in Nigerian music. Hip-hop culture, for these pioneers, was a welcome relief from the dreariness that had come before.

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About the Author

Carl Terver

has a BA in English from Benue State University, Makurdi. He was longlisted for the 2024 Commonwealth Short Story Prize. He has been published in The Stockholm Review, Goethe-Institut Nigeria, and Afapinen, and he is the author of the photobook, Glory to the Sky. Terver writes about film, literature, photography, and music.

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Nigeria’s Hip-Hop Problem

The Dawn of Nigerian Hip-Hop