TRIBUTE: In defence of St Janet—and the freedom to create, By Babafemi Ojudu

I listened to St Janet just as I listened to Fela’s Na Poi. I have always loved creativity in all its forms, just as I cherish freedom. My instinct is to let people create, speak, sing and imagine as they wish, provided they do no harm to others. I have always been an admirer of the free spirit. Civilisation advances not merely through conformity but through those willing to push boundaries.

St Janet’s passing has provoked intense debate. The moralists never accepted her. Many religious people could not stand her. Yet she commanded an enormous following among ordinary people, while many who publicly claimed refined tastes quietly listened to and enjoyed her music in private.

That contradiction is as old as society itself.

Had she been a conventional musician, she might have lived and died unnoticed in some obscure corner of Agege. Instead, by refusing to conform, she compelled society to confront questions of taste, morality, class and artistic freedom. Whether one admired or disliked her, she became impossible to ignore. I would not be surprised if, in years to come, scholars write dissertations on her music, her language, her audience and what she represented in the evolution of Nigerian popular culture.

Even within Yoruba musical tradition, there has always been a distinction between the philosophical and elevated on the one hand and the purely entertaining, playful and ribald on the other. Hence the genres known as efe and sàje—performances in which almost nothing is off limits. They exist to make people laugh, forget their troubles and momentarily suspend the restraints of polite society. It is in such performances that society often reveals itself in its most candid, imaginative and unguarded form.

Popular music has always drawn upon themes that polite society pretends to reject but often consumes with enthusiasm—sex, desire, humour, irreverence and rebellion. Society has never consisted solely of the solemn and the respectable. There is also the marketplace, the street, the beer parlour and the motor park—the equivalents of what American sociologists once described as Skid Row. Each possesses its own language, humour, codes and aesthetics. Serious scholarship has long recognised that these worlds deserve to be studied rather than dismissed.

As an editor, I constantly encouraged my reporters to venture into territories respectable society considered off limits. Some of the finest stories we published emerged from subjects others regarded as too vulgar or too ordinary to deserve attention.

Waziri Adio, then one of my reporters and today an accomplished journalist and public servant, wrote a remarkable feature on life in the houses built on stilts over the Lagos lagoon. I commissioned many other stories on the culture, habits and peccadilloes of the residents of Maroko, then Lagos’s most notorious slum. Those stories were not written to glorify poverty or vice. They were written because journalism, at its best, seeks first to understand before it passes judgment.

I also remember assigning the brilliant Prof. Ebenezer Obadare—today a distinguished scholar in the United States, but then a young reporter—to investigate the cultural phenomenon surrounding the brassiere. The inspiration came from Koste, one of Obesere’s famously provocative songs. What many dismissed as crude became the foundation of an insightful and memorable piece of cultural journalism. Good journalism, like good scholarship, often begins where conventional wisdom says, “Do not go there.”

That was why, as an editor, I often took my reporters on what social scientists call participant observation. We spent evenings at places like Tarmac, Lascofils and other lively drinking spots in Lagos. Although I did not drink, I sat with them, watching lives unfold, listening to conversations, absorbing the slang and trying to understand the hopes, frustrations and humour of ordinary people. One of those excursions gave me one of the most enduring friendships of my life—with an itinerant reggae musician known simply as Ras. Decades later, we remain friends.

Indeed, scholars across the world have devoted entire careers to studying the lives, tastes and cultures of the underclass—not because they necessarily celebrate them, but because they seek to understand them. They study the music people dance to, the language they speak, the jokes they tell, even the drugs they consume. Understanding is not endorsement. To understand a society, one must understand not only its saints but also its sinners; not only its cathedrals but also its street corners.

The debate over what people ought to read, watch or listen to is centuries old, and no generation has ever settled it conclusively. What is considered offensive in one age often becomes acceptable—even celebrated—in another.

History repeatedly teaches this lesson.

In eighteenth-century England, John Cleland’s Fanny Hill was prosecuted for obscenity. In the twentieth century, D. H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow was banned and thousands of copies destroyed because its frank treatment of sexuality offended public morality. His Lady Chatterley’s Lover remained prohibited in Britain until the famous 1960 obscenity trial, when Penguin Books successfully defended its publication. Today, these works are studied in universities across the world.

James Joyce’s Ulysses was banned in both the United States and Britain. Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer was prohibited for decades. Gustave Flaubert stood trial in France over Madame Bovary. Charles Baudelaire was prosecuted for Les Fleurs du mal. Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita was once considered beyond the pale. Today, each occupies an honoured place in literary history.

The same pattern exists in music.

Jazz was denounced as immoral. Rock and roll was condemned as corrupting the young. Elvis Presley scandalised respectable America to the extent that television cameras were instructed not to show his hips. The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Madonna, 2 Live Crew, N.W.A. and many others became the subjects of moral panic before eventually being recognised as significant cultural forces.

Closer home, Fela Anikulapo-Kuti was dismissed by many as vulgar, irresponsible and dangerously subversive. Today he is celebrated globally as one of Africa’s greatest musical innovators and one of its most penetrating social critics.

None of this is to suggest that every controversial work is a masterpiece or that every challenge to accepted morality deserves applause. Far from it. Much controversial art will rightly fade into obscurity. But history warns against allowing governments, religious authorities or self-appointed guardians of morality to legislate creativity.

Art should be criticised. It should be debated. It should even be ridiculed when necessary. But it should rarely be prohibited.

Freedom includes the freedom to offend, just as it includes the freedom to ignore what offends us.

History counsels humility. Again and again, it has shown that today’s obscenity can become tomorrow’s classic, today’s scandal tomorrow’s subject of academic inquiry, and today’s condemned artist tomorrow’s cultural icon.

Perhaps that is the most enduring lesson of St Janet’s life. Whether one liked her music or not is ultimately beside the point. She reminds us that creativity cannot flourish under the weight of moral legislation. A free society is one confident enough to allow art to breathe, trusting that time—not censorship—is the most reliable judge of artistic worth.

In the end, the question is not whether we like St Janet’s music. Taste is personal and morality is often shaped by its age. The real question is whether creativity should be policed by the moral fashions of the moment or allowed to stand the test of time. Art should be criticised, debated, even mocked—but rarely legislated. Creativity flourishes where freedom exists. The moment society begins to legislate imagination, it begins, however unintentionally, to impoverish itself.