When Women Sang and Men Listened. Greater than Fela and Wizkid

I knew better than to avoid them when I sighted them from afar. All humans have nursed at the breasts of these women; they are the women who owned the sound. They sang your praise until you emptied your pocket and stirred your anger until you avenged them of their detractors. They were the originators of talk therapy. These women sang to men and women, armies of kingdoms, until they were drunk with the blood of their adversaries as with wine. Kings, queens, royalty, and aristocracies have been trained to listen and seek their counsel.

These women I sighted afar off, I knew in one way or another. In the past when I have walked into their midst, I have done what the social etiquette of our encounter required. I walked into them this time, and I refused to play according to social and cultural codes, which was to pay them in return for their cultural labor and performance. So they invented insults by alleging, “Fawo-raja ni won ni le won.” Nothing is as blasphemous as this. In my home and lineage, women and men beg us to marry them, and when we refuse, they will say, “If we can’t marry you, can we at least be your concubine/sidemen?" Even though I was anatomically female, I was still a husband. Something that the Western obsession with "body reasoning," as Oyeronke Oyewunmi argues, can’t understand.

As they continued with their invented insult, I called someone to withdraw money for me from the ATM not far from my ancestral home, and I gave them cash, and then they turned to put the history of my lineage to music. They reminded me that I originate from "odo oro,” translated as the source and river/ocean of wealth. Maternal and paternal generations before me were recognized as wealthy men and women. They added that in my lineage, we not only flaunt ourselves in the presence of the indolent, but we also uplift them (ta wa ba daso fun ole apa laro). As they sang, I continued to make it rain until I remembered that this was December, and January is 365, not 31 days. These women were Iyawo Ile.

When I read across literature that the presence of women on the social scene, particularly in music as performing artists, negates the politics of respectability, I wondered why and how these tenants (men) took these women's crafts until music and men became synonymous. When I think of these women and my life, I ask, "How did Lyric become male?"

My second PhD dissertation attends to this. Why have more studies been done on Fela than on women who were as impactful as he was? Would there have been Fela without his mother and the AWU women whose songs influenced him? Would there have been Fela without Sandra Iszidore? How do women fight invisibility? There is a scene in the Women of Fuji documentary where a mother tutors her young son in lyrics and proverbs; this visual echo of history can be the subject of a monograph.

Today I honor leading women everywhere and, in particular, one woman on the margins whose song deserves as much attention as several others.

Happy International Women's Day!