Dancing Without Fathers
How Afrobeats mirrors the collapse of masculinity and institutional guidance in Nigeria.
Afrobeats has a masculinity problem. The umbrella genre has been accused of being obsessed with money and sex, and of paying little attention to conscious or introspective music, especially after 2010.
Critics have missed the deeper issue despite their correct observation. These young men do not strut around town with stacks of American dollars in their pockets, sticks of marijuana in between their fingers and buxom women in their luxurious cars because they are one-dimensional human beings. They are not immoral agents.
The problem is that masculinity in the world of Afrobeats has been untethered from institutions that shape and restrain male desire. These institutions also gave consequences to this carnal appetite. As civic structures have eroded, Afrobeats culture has filled the void, offering pleasure as a substitute.
These societal institutions are: the state, the economy, the family (especially fatherhood), religion, education and communal authority. Without these institutions, masculinity does not emerge fully formed in adulthood.
Rap legend Nas coined the term ‘second childhood’, the title of his track off the 5-mics rated Stillmatic (2001). On the DJ Premier–produced track, Nas sketches vivid vignettes of men who slip back into childhood when adulthood fails to arrive. Nas’s poetic phrasing relates to a psychoanalytic theory known as Regression, which is a “defence mechanism involving the reversion of the ego to an earlier stage of psychosexual development, as a reaction to an overwhelming external problem or internal conflict.”
One of the roles of the state is to promote and promise dignity through hard work and labour. The former national anthem promised that “the labour of our heroes past shall never be in vain.” This framed labour as a tube of dignity. However, when the state fails to honour this promise, through corruption, inequality, or weak institutions, the value of work collapses. This leaves citizens to seek validation outside civic structures.
“Nigeria has long teetered on the precipice of failure,” argued Robert Rotberg and John Campbell in their essay for Foreign Policy in May 2012. “Unable to keep its citizens safe and secure, Nigeria has become a fully failed state of critical geopolitical concern.” With the absence of a functional state, young men seek financial reward outside the concept of dignified hard work.
Ideally, a country’s economy offers delayed reward to its citizens in exchange for discipline. Nigeria’s domestic economy is projected to expand by 4.49 per cent in 2026. History suggests this growth will be little more than a drop in an ocean, while millions of Nigerians continue to drown in abject poverty. Those with street smarts navigate outside the dwindling economy to survive.
The family is the smallest and most important unit of society, where fathers transmit emotional strength and moral boundaries to their sons. The family unit in Nigeria is broken. Parents encourage their sons to commit fraud.
According to a PM News article written by Ayorinde Oluokun on September 15, 2024, “The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, EFCC, said its investigation has revealed that most of the parents of suspects arrested for involvement in cybercrimes, otherwise known as Yahoo, Yahoo, are aware of their wards’ involvement in the crime.”
On November 1, 2019, according to an article by Odita Sunday for the Guardian, the acting Chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, Ibrahim Magu, claimed “that mothers of cyber fraudsters, popularly known as Yahoo boys, are now organising themselves into an association.”
Nigeria is a profoundly religious country, with roughly equal populations of Christians and Muslims. With corruption embedded in every strata of Nigerian life, the impact of religion, which should provide ways for boys to mature as men through restraint, service and rebirth, is not deeper than a temporary tattoo.
“The current state of education in Nigeria, in general, and university education in particular, is very bad. We have had this sad situation of under-investment in our educational institutions for nearly 40 years now, based on the development index of countries that are at par with us as far as development is concerned,” said Prof Yakubu Ochefu, the Secretary-General of the Committee of Vice Chancellors in Nigeria, in an interview with ThisDay.
Dilapidated funding, poor infrastructure, and frequent strikes in Nigeria’s education sector drive many boys to drop out of school in search of money.
Moreover, with the collapse of communal authority and its replacement by egbon adugbos, jobless street figures or self‑proclaimed hood OGs who claim authority without real achievement, these institutions have failed to guide boys into manhood.
The concept of civic duty is long forgotten. The Nigerian economy should be rechristened hustlenomics, which favours loudness and visibility over proficiency. The Nigerian family, especially the father figure, has been cut down by poverty, leaving no time to be of guidance. Religion is focused on fundraising and being in bed with the political class rather than raising boys.
The erosion of these structures re-routes masculinity into sex and money, which become societal proofs of manhood. Sexual conquest offers instant validation, and wealth (irrespective of its source) becomes a pillar of authority.
Afrobeats amplifies this value system and also serves as a shadow institution, teaching young boys that, to be a man in Nigeria today, one must adhere to these expectations.
The Afrobeats male protagonist owes no allegiance to community, is never accountable to history, and pays no mind to the future. He is possessed by the present moment and the pleasure it promises. He is a slave to fleeting desires. Excess is not a sin.
The protagonist is stuck in a loop of second childhood, where he has to endlessly prove his masculinity with the same boasts and sexual metaphors. It has an insistent declaration of his virility. To pause would be to confront the terrifying question: Who am I when desire fades? Hence, this is why our pop music does not evolve beyond pleasure, materialism, excess and sexual conquests. There is no space for the music to hold deeper thought or existential musings.
Unfortunately, women in this frame are not partners but notches on a belt.
Masculinity in this environment is loud and emotionally silent. This is an environment that produces this type of masculinity, when it is successful, and punishes it when it becomes scandalous. No institution shows how desire and power can be controlled. Men in their second childhood now swing between indulgence and hypocrisy.
It would be a knee-jerk reaction to say Afrobeats is in a moral decline. It is a mirror that shows a generation of men dancing without fathers to their base desires. Masculinity is stalled, never fully deployed and stuck in youth because youth does not require institutional legitimacy.
I foresee an existential reckoning for Afrobeats, already foreshadowed by Omah Lay’s fantastic debut, Boy Alone (2022) and Llona’s splendid LP, Homeless (2024). Afrobeats will soon be forced to deal with masculinity identity when libido dies, money evaporates and when the applause dies.
Perhaps a new masculine language will emerge, moving beyond the brashness of its predecessor, or the music will remain trapped in the same loop until it becomes unbearable. (Hip-hop is already here.)
It will be interesting to know when pleasure is no longer enough for a man.