Hilda Dokubo made my friend cry.
And she made us see who we truly are
People say …
Nollywood can’t act sh*t. Real Nigerian music is boring.
Hm.
We don’t prefer native food. We don’t rock traditional attire.1 We don’t …
You know, it sucks to dislike your own culture.
And it sucks even more to try to beg you to like your own stuff. Like, to like being who you really are as an African.
I am not even saying to be proud of it because we are a long way off.
Before we go any further, I want to be clear that I am not writing this to rant on some psychological after-effect of colonialism.
People like to blame the wrong on things that are out of their control and that’s the exact reason we are stuck.
We are our problem,
Point black.2
This proud, swaggering but crippling low self-esteem.
That’s our problem.
We run our lives like: everything foreign = better. It’s horrible. And we have to consciously root out this false thinking.
Or we are f*cked.
Listening to an oracle ...
My friend Gabriel and I, attended TEDxDiobu3 and the last of the speakers was the beautiful and award-winning Rivers-born actress, author and activist, Hilda Dokubo,
To say her speech was electrifying is to say the sun is hot. Doesn’t do justice at all. And I lack words.
She turned the TED speaking model on its head:
Sang cultural songs in her dialect, spoke in palm-oil flourish4, and preached using call-and-response like how instruction was done in the ancient African setting.
She flaunted the native wear she was decked in, as her voice rose and fell to the tides of the creeks where she was born and raised.
It was an art piece. We were spellbound.
And then she mourned the speeding death of our cultural values.
As she moved on that stage, it seemed like she had become the mouthpiece, the very oracle of our mother African goddess:
Arms outstretched, reaching out to her children.
Pleading with us not to forget her. Weeping.
She made goosebumps sprout on my neck.
My heart was thumping.
My friend was crying.
There and then felt like the culmination of years of upbringing, fewer years of lengthy discussions with my friend and a month or two of certain uncertainty in my identity.
I felt clarity:
I am an African.
Do we think we are not good enough or wha-?
As if by the fate of the gods, Smino’s 90 Proof (with J. Cole) is playing as I write this line. And the sampled Yoruba music is unmistakable. And beautiful.
But why do we have to wait for them to appreciate our culture before we do?
At that event, Madam Hilda played one of the songs in the original score of the Black Panther (2018) movie from the stage speakers.
My ears were pricked. My blood rose.
My entire being was magnetically pulled into Baaba Maal’s majestically African voice. It was like a secret language. The room, and me would never be the same again.
She asked why we had to wait for Americans to make such a movie.
Why didn’t we do it? Do something …?
Why?
I asked myself for the 1498th time:
Why don’t we don’t have a good movie adaptation of Things Fall Apart or a biopic of the great Fela Kuti?
It was concerning when I used to discuss this with my friend. And that day, it felt concerning and sickening.
We have always had great belief that we could do something about it.
We love Things Fall Apart, and we are obsessed with Fela Kuti.
Doing something like that was only a worthy tribute to the shining pearl of African literature on one hand, and an act of service to the greatest African musician and artist of all time, on the other.
That day, that changed.
Making a Fela Kuti or a Things Fall Apart movie is not a “cultural tribute.”
It is our duty. Our responsibility. If we felt this way before, it was a thousand times stronger.
It was a torch that was strapped to our hands. Whether we liked Achebe or Afrobeat or not.
I like the copycats …
The thing is, whenever they do this, like Louis Vuitton making fabric inspired by African cultural print, or Hollywood making Black Panther,
We wail that they are stealing our culture.
Stealing your culture?
It has been with you for countless ages, man. What did you ever do with it?
If you had been pushing it in their faces and flaunting it as your own, would they have had an effortless heist?
The world needs art like it needs water. The world keeps searching for it, creating it, showcasing it and worshipping it.
And because true art has to be true to the artist; authentic, sincere,
We cannot create any better art than from the deep, richly black stories of this continent and culture:
The legends of how our villages were founded, the great men of old and of now, our struggles, our joys.
We’ll fail at telling their stories. And on the flipside, no one can tell our stories better than we can.
Because our ‘African POV’ is priceless.
So what do we do now?
Afrobeats5 and Amapiano are some of Africa’s biggest exports for a reason:
Years of hard work, millions of talent and resources and manhours geared towards being creative and showcasing it.
How can we replicate the global acceptability of this African music genre?
Write compelling African characters.
Shoot movies with authentically African storylines.
Photograph African scenery and culture and people.
Weave African iconography into your graphic design and your UI design and your fashion design.
Research and share little-known pieces of African culture.
Buy and promote African creativity
The future is ours if we stand up.
You are African. Flaunt it.
PS: I don’t know how to thank Madam Hilda and I won’t forgive it if the full clip of her speech is not posted on YouTube before the end of this month.
That video needs to go viral.
Period.
And if you’re reading this (because I am praying you do), we love you ma!
With love & ink,
Emmanuel
OK, we wear traditional wear to traditional events like funerals and traditional weddings, duh.
Pun not intended.
TEDxDiobu is an independently organized TED event hosted by Nigerian comedian and event host, Johnson Jornsen (popularly known as KO Baba, the Mayor of Pitakwa). Gabriel and I attended the maiden edition on June 22, 2024.
See more: https://www.ted.com/tedx/events/57545
World-renowned African novelist, Chinua Achebe in his Things Fall Apart, described parables as “the palm oil with which words are eaten”.
I’d rather call it Afropop but let’s save this for another issue here or on my Medium.