Energetic Daddy Showkey

Daddy Showkey is an interesting character, as anyone who has met with him will agree. Our paths crossed again last Monday at the
dinner President Goodluck Jonathan had with the Arts industry. I like Showkey for his openness and frankness, although he could be a pain in the neck at times. I took interest in his music when I first listened to his track "If you see my mama, hosanna. Tell am say o, Hosanna. I 'dey' for Lagos, Hosanna. I no get problem, Hosanna." As always, I was not let down by his performance on Monday.

There was no air of formality around him as he performed. He moved freely on stage and at times off stage to send out his message through his song. He first performed his song titled: 'Somebody Call My Name.'
'Somebody call my name,' he sang.
"Showkey!" his backup singers chorused.
"People dey call my name."
"Showkey!"
At the last count, he moved swiftly to the far end of the stage and pointed at the backdrop as he continued to sing. He was not satisfied as his backup singers did not key into his 'malicious' intent. He was bent on poking fun at Goodluck's name. He moved towards the backdrop which had Goodluck's picture and name written on it. "Somebody call my name," he sang while pointing at the president's name on the banner.
"Goodluck!" chorused his backup singers when they finally cued in.
As if that was not enough, he went down to pull Kanu Nwankwo to the stage as he changed his song to another interesting one, 'If You See My Mama', the most popular of his tracks.
"Oya stand, well, well," he instructed Kanu as he brought the microphone close to the latter's mouth for his response.
"Hosanna" Kanu responded.
"You tall pass me," he said again.
"Hosanna," replied Kanu.

"But I strong pass you," Showkey said, while flexing his muscles as a show of strength. The audience could not help but laugh at the difference between Kanu's tall frail frame and Showkey's sturdy body.
"Hosanna," Kanu responded in spite of the mockery.
"Kanu bend down low," Showkey continued.
"Hosanna," Kanu replied again, at least to save himself from Showkey's antics.
"O ya bend down low."
"Dem tink say I be armed robber for Ajegunle but today I dey sing for president. Kanu, your life na testimony."
"Hosanna."
"Shame to bad people!"
Perhaps there is a similarity between Showkey and Kanu as Showkey rightly observed in his song. Showkey once said in an interview that he failed his secondary school certificate exams. He was not a brilliant student, but led his school at a singing and dancing competition at Agboju.
Despite his fame, Showkey still lives in Ajegunle where he was discovered some years ago. Many stars of his standing would have abandoned their neighbourhood to seek a new life, but Showkey has never done that. He believes such stars have no idea about where they are coming from, allowing their dreams to overshadow them.
"As for me," he said, "I was sleeping in Ajegunle and dreaming to become somebody in life. I sleep with these people and my prayer is that God should not take me away from this neighbourhood."
Even in the face of difficult growing-up years, Showkey was determined to succeed. Like he said in his song, "today I 'dey' sing before president." I admire his courage and the fluidity of his lyrics.

Sadly, no uhuru for the foot soldiers

I had to catch up with some friends on Kimath Avenue last Saturday when I was in Kenya. Prior to my trip, we had exchanged messages via Facebook and phone calls and they looked forward to welcoming me to Kenya since we last met a few years ago. The Nation Media group, where they work, is situated on the avenue which has a resemblance with our own Broad Street in Lagos.

The trip from the Safari Hotel where I was lodged to the city centre was quite a distance. The taxi took me through the heart of Nairobi where the lower class resides. Along the road is an open market where ‘bend down’ boutiques abound. It is a version of our Yaba market in Lagos. The slow moving traffic afforded me the opportunity to see young men, women, girls and boys ‘select and pay’ for shirts, dresses, jackets and so on. Some of them, dressed in ill-fitting clothes, were obviously shopping for replacements. They are the unfortunate ones who dwell at the bottom of the economic ladder.

As I watched them, I could recall some of the pre-independence, independence and post- independence literary issues treated in my literature class while in school, in particular, protest literature. Colonial Kenya had a very influential white settler community which eroded everything Kenyans could call their own, especially their culture. Kenya's liberation required an armed struggle. The Mau Mau movement was indeed a liberation army that resorted, from time to time, to what, today, would be classified as ‘terrorist’ methods. The Mau Mau fought the British on African soil. They fought to get back their land from the British who they accused of giving them the Bible in exchange for their land. That is why today, the largest chunk of the land in Kenya - including the one on which the hotel I stayed in is built - is owned by whites.
Years after independence, Kenyans are still suffering. Many of them cannot get the colonial mentality out of their system. Even the very poor ones on the streets are seen in dirty looking suits and those who cannot afford suits wear weather beaten jackets. “I don’t think these people have traditional dresses anymore,” observed Tope Ajayi, a Nigerian friend and brother who was in the taxi with me. His observation stemming from what we had seen on the streets. Almost everyone is in one form of suit or another.
“They don’t,” I replied.

“You won’t find this kind of situation in West Africa. In Nigeria, we have the iro and buba, adire and so on, which can be sewn into beautiful styles; even in Ghana, they have traditional dresses. It’s sad then, if Kenyans don’t have.”
“I bet what is left of their traditional wear can be found among the Masai who are rarely seen in town,” I said.

The metaphor for development in the postcolonial era throughout Kenya has been well documented in the novels of Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, Meja Mwangi, among others. Through the characters they portray in their novels, they have shown how some Kenyans have been motivated largely by a desire to escape the pervasive malaise that has afflicted Kenya after Uhuru (independence). Each of the characters illustrates different strategies for coping in the oppressive conditions of the new black-run country. It is for this reason that in his novels, Wa Thiong’o condemns Kenyan ruling elites who exploit the country's workers and peasants. He vigorously criticises neo-colonialist institutions like Christianity, politicians, schools, businesses, banks, landlords including the highways.

I must say that in reality, Kenyans are yet to get over the oppressive conditions. As I watched some of them walking on the sidewalks around the symbolic Independence Avenue, I could tell they were battling with some internal struggles. The class divide is so wide. The rich are getting richer while the poor are getting poorer. The mentality of an average Kenyan is that of fear, oppression and deprivation.

Customer service par excellence

A change in marital status has a way of throwing new things your way. First, you may have to deal with change of name, which usually leaves you wondering why you have to give up your maiden name for someone else’s. Men don’t have to do that at all, and some French women still answer their maiden names long after they get married. That notwithstanding, the name just has to change in our own part of the world.


Next is change of residence. As a sign that a woman has been duly sent off, she has to move to her new home! It could be real fun doing this, you know - when you have to decide, for instance, the colours that will grace the walls of your living room and bedroom, the kind of drape that meets your taste and the fabric you want your settee made of. Getting the kitchen fully equipped is in a class of its own.


Yes, that reminds me of an experience I had late last year with a new set of kitchen utensils I bought at Shoprite. I’m a lover of well-designed cooking ware with glass lids and the Kinox brand and one other brand whose name I can’t remember very well now. One of those November evenings, I was at The Palms shopping mall to buy some stuff for the month, and while looking through the racks at Shoprite, I could not find my choice brand; hence, I opted for a Tower set of cooking pots - three pots and a medium-sized frying pan. Tower is a quality brand and I had no idea I needed to consider its durability, so I paid for it.


I liked the burnt orange colour of the pots and of course, the glass lids, so I dashed home, cleaned one of them and cooked the evening meal in it. But to my greatest surprise, by the following morning the coating in the pot was already peeling off, forming tiny lumps that were already mixing up with the content in it. I was sad and angry. “I paid nearly N10, 000 for a set of non-stick pot, only for the coating to go bad the day after?” I said to myself.


Immediately, I removed the content, washed the pot and returned it to the point of purchase. Luckily, the lady at the Customer Care Unit was patient enough to listen to my complaint. I was surprised that Shoprite could boast of such staff since many of them were very rude in the past. “Hold on, madam, while I call the trainee manager for you,” she said. In less than two minutes, the man was with me. I lodged my complaint which he promised to look into, asking that I should give him my cell phone number so he could easily get back to me.


To make a long story short, he did get back to me and I got a refund. The fact that I could get that for the bad product I bought was surprising in a country where goods sold cannot be returned in most cases.


Most stores do not build a good rapport with the clients they service. They rarely demonstrate courteous interactions with customers during and after sales, but the new Shoprite seems to have charted a new and much better course as far as customer service is concerned!

What’s in a name?

There was a time in the distant past when I moved with some friends who felt their real names did not suit their status at the time. Hence, they went in search of nicknames. One of them, Seyi, came up with a name after combining her Zodiac sign, Leo, with Spark (which I can’t remember how it came about) to form the nickname SparkerLeo.


Then, answering to an English name was the fad and most girls and boys were not proud of their native names like Deji, Adeola, Aduke, among others. Names like Ricardo, Robert, and Anne were more or less the fad.


At the time, I just could not understand why my name should be a problem. Funke sounded funky to me, so I saw no reason to ‘funkify’ or replace it with a nickname. “You are an Old Skool,” Seyi once told me. “You have to move with the times, girl. You have to change your name, get a nickname or spell your ‘Funke’ differently. If you were in my school, my classmates would have made jest of you. You better wake up, girl.”


This incident reminds me of Basketmouth’s (the comedian) comment when he had his first child. He had to give the boy an English name so that “the boy will be proud of his name.” He also had to adopt an English name while growing up because he considered his native name too local. Until he shared his experience, I never knew I was not the only one caught in the web of inferiority complex with names. Many years after his experience, though, I do not understand why Basketmouth is still ruled by that complex such that he will pre-empt his son’s feeling about names even before the latter comes of age.

Today, the complex about naming is growing among the youth, and you need to be on Facebook to understand this trend. On someone’s page for instance, he spelt his name as: Haryour Changecentric Crown Prince. Note that Ayo is now spelt ‘Haryour.’


Another friend on Facebook also changed her name from Lola Kudi-Martins to Alolie Lucious Cuddy-Martins; while someone else spelt Azeez as ‘Harzyz.’ Blessing also took a new form in Blesyn, while Damilola is: ‘Darmylolar’. Ladi is now Ladehl and Gboyega has become a funkified Gboegha.


Some people have even changed their names completely. Hence, you have Olarenwaju Olakunle as Horlanrewaju Olahkunle and Timilehin Oluwatomilayo as Timmylehin Holuwartomilaryor. Some people prefer to just add a nick name to their original names and so there are names like: Marie Sugargurl, Weakywoody Adebayo, Yemi Thelengendary, Demmie Cutebear, to mention a few.


I have always thought that in Africa, especially in Nigeria, we attach great importance to what a child is called. Often, the circumstances surrounding a child’s birth usually inform his/her name. But today, there is a great movement among ‘young’ people to recreate or reinvent their names and who they are. It’s a kind of creativity, you’d agree, a fusion of Yoruba and English spelling of names. But it’s a creativity I am not totally comfortable with. I believe boldly saying my name is Funke shows the kind of person I am, how much I am are proud of my name, and the kind of confidence I exude.


I can recall that in one of my literature classes as an undergraduate, my lecturer, Wale Oyedele of blessed memory, recounted his experience while in the United States. A ‘white man’ could not pronounce his name correctly, so he had to take his time to teach the man that his name has just two syllables, /wa/, /le/; hence, their should be no difficulty pronouncing it properly. That, however, is no longer the case as more and more people feel comfortable ‘Englishnising’ their names.

Watch out for that death hole

My car landed in the pothole with a great thud and I could feel my head hitting the roof when it did. "Ouch!" I screamed. No one was beside me to say sorry, so I rubbed my head with one hand while I controlled the steering with the other.


But just before I could travel a few more metres, the car encountered another pothole. I thought I could dodge it, but while trying to achieve that, yet another reared its ugly head. The road I was journeying on was not on the Mainland which is notorious for pothole-riddled roads. It was at Ikoyi, our very own highbrow Ikoyi.



When I was a little girl, living at Ikoyi was like some sort of Eldorado. I can recall living with my family in Gbagada at the time, when going to the Ikoyi Club every weekend was the norm. And so, on one of such visits to the club, I made a new friend while practising how to swim with my instructor in the pool.

"I can swim faster than you now," Nkechi told me.

"I can see that," I said, laughing at her poor attempt at swimming.

"Will you be here next weekend?" she asked me in a bid to change the conversation.

"Yes," I replied.

"Where do you live?" she asked.

"Gbagada."

"Oh, I thought you live at Dolphin Estate like me."


"No, I don't." She went on to explain how Ikoyi especially Dolphin Estate, were hubs for the rich due to its well-tarred roads, flowers on the sidewalk, among others. Today, however, the story is not the same. Ikoyi has become a shadow of its old self.


A friend who loves the good life got herself a nice 2006 Passat car. It is a beautiful car by all standards, sweet to drive and sweet to be seen in. It is a powerful vehicle but deceptively slow. Because it is a big car and well balanced, when you drive it, you often don't realise you are flying instead of driving. That's to tell you how sleek the car is. However, one day, my friend found herself caught in one of the mega potholes on Ikoyi Road. She had firsthand experience of the disadvantages that come with driving on Nigerian roads which she never had while residing in the US. Driving on Nigerian roads, she learnt, is the art of dodging pot holes and you have to be very good at it.


In most cases, as a driver, you have no choice in the matter; you just have to deep your car into the pot holes, especially when you are driving on the inner roads. Interestingly, some interior parts of the Mainland are not spared from the jump-driving experience.


Perhaps the mistake my friend made was buying a car as low as a Passat which is not made for pothole-riddled roads. Often, she complains about how she had to crawl from one hole to another while her speedometer which loves to see red becomes a useless tool that stands at the bottom of the meter. Her shock absorber is another part of the car she fears will go bad soon.


She once drew my attention to how deceptive Nigerian roads could be since she often got carried away after driving on a smooth road for about six minutes, without knowing a pothole could be up ahead. Hence, by the time she applied her break, she would have fallen into the hole. I have had a similar experience too many times so I have learnt to be more cautious when driving since potholes have become speed breakers of sorts.

The Wazobia storyteller

I once took part in an informal competition on story telling, but it was a poor outing for me because I didn’t have that ‘sweet mouth’ – the sort of ‘sweetness’ that comes with storytelling which can hold the audience spellbound for hours, perhaps days. That day, I actually enjoyed the presentations of two friends blessed with the power of oratory.


You see, traditionally in Africa, storytellers are revered and so are good stories. Although old writing traditions do exist on the continent, most people today, as in the past, are primarily oral people and their art forms are oral rather than literary.


Oral literature or Orature, to use the term of Ngugi wa Thiong’o, the Kenyan writer, is orally composed and transmitted, verbally created and performed with dance and music. This art is rich and varied and the composer or storyteller must be skilled in the art. His facial gestures, voice and ability to play the roles of different characters are integral parts of the storytelling.


Language is also a vital tool because with it, he could create a vivid picture of the scenes in the minds of his audience. This brings to mind the man I have tagged ‘Wazobia storyteller’. I am an ardent listener of Wazobia FM and enjoy all their programmes. Perhaps the aspect I enjoy the most every morning is the News belt anchored by Nedu. For me, his style of news reading is different. Often, he gives me the impression that I am listening to some tales which he creates himself, yet they are actually real news served in a style different from the regular ones.


His style is really engaging and instantly commands my attention any time the news bulleting is on. Perhaps the language he employs, pidgin, also allows him to employ the freestyle of news casting. His mannerisms while reading the news create that live picture in the mind of the listener such that most times, I cannot help but imagine how the item on the news bulleting happened. One instance was the news story on complaints about the failure of the fingerprint machines to capture some people’s fingerprints. Nedu was at it again with his verve. The ‘sweetness’ in his mouth was played up as he passed across INEC’s advice on how to overcome that nightmare. “Make sure you clean ya hand well, well so that the machine no go select ya hand,” he said.


There was yet another story on the Somalia Pirates. Hear Nedu’s explanation on who pirates are: “The Somalia Pirates dem be people wey dey colobi pesin on top of water.” There was another story on women who were raped in Britain, and without sounding vulgar, Nedu used this phrase to drive home his message: “Torchlight the website of 50 women.”


Of course, there are those who write and edit news script, but the taste of the pudding for the listener is in the delivery. That is the ability of the newscaster to deliver the news the way it should be. Nedu, for me, has been able to do that brilliantly using pidgin. His mouth dey sweet for news casting no be small!


I am sure he must have been one of those who listened to those village storytellers who were experts at telling stories about secular tricksters like the Tortoise who often project the kinds of evil forces and bad behaviours against which the human community must contend to survive. He must have acquired that ‘sweet mouth’ from them