If you go on the internet you’ll find that the phrase “Men are Scum” which caught steam in 2015 and continues to inform conversations today polarises Nigerians only into different and very opposing camps. The most interesting of these camps are the denialists, who lament that when women complain that men profit off the patriarchy and use its privileges to harass, harm and demean women especially in sexual situations, is a fabrication of disgruntled millennial Nigerian women, influenced as they say, by the very same internet these men use to further their denialist theories.

It’s a good thing that the internet also means information about the precolonial and early post colonial Nigeria keeps popping up to prove that many of the things that Nigerians swear is not part of our ‘culture’ is very much part of our culture and has simply been whitewashed or silenced to promote the patriarchal status quo.

Critic Molara Wood shared this very interesting video of a pre-colonial musician couple Juju singer; Julius Araba and his wife (who unsurprisingly isn’t named in this video) and their very differing opinions on the place of a woman and the duties of a man in a relationships, and to the surprise of no one but patriarchal denialists, is eerily similar to the greviances Millennial women have today.

Juju maestro Julius Araba and his professional musician wife.

Take a listen to Mrs Araba at the end. #OroPesiJe pic.twitter.com/1qG5C9ubDj

— Molara Wood (@molarawood) May 31, 2017

It seems some things change, but some things stay exactly the same.

Editor