Fire and Blood and Kendrick Lamar in Jos

I grappled with the intimacy I felt with Kendrick Lamar’s song ‘XXX’. Every day, for weeks in 2022 and 2023, as I walked the gravel road from the doctors’ quarters to the hospital, I plugged my ear pods shutting out recollections of the pathologies that plagued the patients under my care. My playlist in alphabetical order, from Aurora’s ‘Runaway’, B.O.C’s Hausa raps, Cyhi The Prince, Doug Kaze’s folk songs, Damian Marley, and Kendrick Lamar. Lamar’s ‘XXX’ contains well-layered verses depicting violence in the United States. Why did it resonate with me, a Nigerian who has never been to the United States? For days I became more introspective, trying to understand how every damn line was a foreign tongue singing the unsung stories of a familiar landscape.

In Jos, the capital of Plateau State in north-central Nigeria, Christianity and Islam are always warring. Since 2001, recurring interreligious fights have continually splintered the peaceful existence between the two faiths as they have deformed into deadly oppositions, like rival cult gangs. Children who were unborn at the time of the first recorded clash in 2001, inherit rivalry and are indoctrinated into hostility towards the other religion. In the obscure manner of the origin stories of certain crises, like the one we have seen in this city, there are two known common tales: One is that a Christian lady crossed a barricaded mosque during prayer against the instructions of the worshippers, prompting a physical attack. The other version is that a Muslim politician, Alhaji Muktar Mohammed, received a federal appointment as local coordinator of the Federal Poverty Alleviation Programme in the predominately Christian Jos area.

Listening to Lamar’s 2017 song, ‘XXX’, about gang clashes and their cyclicality in American streets thrust me into excavating the enduring Jos crisis, exploring how violence fiddles with our psyche.