© Numero Unoma
Does jazz really work? I mean, if it was so powerful, why don’t those who do juju, just use it to improve their own wretched lives? Like, why does it only work to do harm and evil? What sort of yeye magic is that, anyway? What would happen if we all went to our local babalawo, dibia or boka, and did a jazz for all those bringing down the country? Maybe we could save ourselves from climate change by turning them all into trees so that they should stand and watch as we build up the nation again, hoping, and praying silently and impotently, not to be cut down. Or maybe we could just turn them into fellow sufferers and smilers, to give them a taste of their own medicine. Pun totally intended.
I had a friend who like me, after many years abroad in the financial world, decided it was time to take back home what we’d learned ‘in the abroad’ and contribute to building our own country. She held a senior position at First Bank, and for a while bravely endured all manner of corporate politics and sexism, staying strong, focussed and productive. And even positive, against the odds. It was the morning that she went to work and found ‘juju-like’ objects on her desk that she made up her mind to pack her bags and move back to New York. Nigeria’s loss, not hers. She has never looked back.
There are stories all over the internet about the Nigerian preoccupation with fetish, from Bayelsa women using charms to stop road construction, to a slay queen who sells “do as I say” juju padlocks, and even an old caucasian man telling yahoo boys in a video that their juju is not working on him. Apparently, Nigerian author, Reno Omokri has on Twitter blamed Nigeria’s movie industry, Nollywood, for causing the world to see Nigerians as fetish people. There was also a well known story in Ibeju-Lekki about the real-life shrine that took on the Dangote fertiliser factory site, causing the contractors loss of equipment, time and money, as well as loss of staff to death.
But really though, who jazz epp? What have we come to, that more than two decades into the 21st century, these things still define our narratives to such a great extent? It really depresses me, it totally makes me sad. What is equally sad is that what Reno Omokri did not mention is the fact that many of the nations he claims are frightened of the supernatural powers employed by Nigerians, equally visit their own versions of witch-doctors. Juju has indeed endured and withstood hundreds of years of cultural and sociological erosion, and urban legend has it that ‘obeah’ is used by some 21st century politicians in the Caribbean to win elections.
Can you tell? I’m feeling kinda blue today. I am bruised with the heartache of happenings in Nigeria, in Africa, and a lack of progress among Black people in general. Today’s youth are still listening to songs of emancipation sung by greats like Miriam Makeba, Fela and Bob Marley, reading books written by Maya Angelou, Frantz Fanon and Ngugi Wa’Thiongo, and enjoying the art of Elizabeth Catlett, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Gordon Parks, and a personal favourite of mine, Aaron Douglas. All those people’s work was born of the struggle, and yet the struggle is still just as real today as it was before today’s youth had been conceived in their parents’ heads, let alone their mothers’ wombs. The blues still stalk us, persecute us, break us. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Some of us oldies, when we feel blue, we listen to Miles Davis. Just a minute, you young people, before you mentally shut down and stop reading, let me tell you something: this music was also old for even me as a young person. It was my late father who introduced me to classical jazz.
Davis’ studio album titled ‘Kind of Blue” was recorded and released years before I was born, in fact even before Nigeria’s independence, but to this day it retains a timeless soothing quality that stimulates introspection and intellectual expansion. You should try it, if you don’t already know it. Just put it on in the background when you’re in a subdued or pensive mood, the kind when you can’t face loud and fast music.
“The blues may be the life you’ve led Or midnight hours in an empty bed But persecuting blues I’ve known Could stalk like tigers, and break like bone” ~Maya Angelou (keep scrolling) >>>>
August 1 was Emancipation Day, a public holiday in many Black nations, celebrating the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 which came into force the following year, on 1 August 1834. My first experience of celebrating this day was back in the 1990s in Barbados. Early that morning we gathered on the beach, all dressed in white clothes and ethno-African jewellery. It was a solemn, yet at the same time weightless spirit that united us in that ceremony by the water, on the same shore that millions of slaves first set foot in their new home and prison. Thanks and prayers were offered for liberation, liberty and life, and libations were poured, as respects were paid to those who had lost their their lives crossing the ocean, as well as the many lives brutally lost on the plantations. We sung Negro Spirituals, and finally, we cast white petals upon the waters, to celebrate the peace of the ancestors and of anguished stories that needed to be put to rest. I was the only African there that day, and never once was I made to feel culpable.
Unfortunately, I have not had the same experience in other Caribbean island nations, where I was sometimes made to feel like a scape goat. There I found myself being resentfully and bitterly accused that it was us Igbos who had sold them into slavery, and then I heard myself coming up with an absurd defence. I originate from Nri, the liberal kingdom who took in and gave succour to many outliers from other societies, including slaves who ran to the Nri Kingdom because there they would be freed. It was the Aro Igbos who were the slave traders, I told my accusers. I tried to explain to them that most Africans had lived in fear of being taken into slavery for hundreds of years, and that anyway none of us alive today, not even the direct descendants of slave raiders and traders, can be found guilty of that crime against our brothers and sisters.
All this baggage that we Black people have yet to unpack stands in the way of us uniting in such a manner as to use the power of group economies to take back the agency that is required to defeat racism and white supremacy.
Should we count ourselves lucky that we belonged to those who got away, or did we really get away? I mean look at the state of Africa. The rest of the world has been growing rich from taking our resources for centuries now, and are still doing so to this day. Might there be some truth in some people’s theory that Africa was cursed so many times by those Africans sold into slavery that it is still bound by that curse now? Maybe those who have been stripped of tribalism, and who now live in managably-sized nations, with natural borders are the ones who got away.
So many of our parents and grandparents have been educated, and have theorised over the decades about what it would take to redeem Africa, so why are we so poor at translating the theory and the words, indeed the beliefs into action. Because more than we believe in our own greatness as black people, we believe in the greatness of caucasians. If it makes you angry just to read those words then I invite you to join me in proving that WRONG!
The colonialists’ juju is the real jazz. The real juju is the mental slavery that we seem perennially unable to free ourselves from, despite excelling at many of the world’s most prestigious institutions. Or maybe precisely BECAUSE of it. Maybe we have been insidiously and subliminally ‘white-washed’. It makes me deeply sad, and I find it painful to watch Black on Black hatred. I hear too many Africans speak of African Americans and the people of the Caribbean in disparaging terms. Sometimes they call them slave babies, in Nigeria it is Jamo and Akata. They (we?) speak of them having no culture, without even stopping to think of the centuries of trauma suffered by our stolen people, who were taken away from their culture, and then stripped of it too.
Language, customs, spirituality, nearly everything. Food was one thing that was not taken because the slaves had to be strong enough to work hard for free.
Right now, for me, blue is the new Black, and jazz is the new juju. Especially when it is not bluesy, but wild like in “Airegin”, a piece written by Sonny Rollins, and first recorded in Miles Davis’ studio in 1954. He named it by spelling Nigeria backwards, after seeing a photograph in a magazine, of Nigerian dancers. It became an instant jazz standard.
Maybe jazz works after all?