I Love Bad Girls
I am here to convince you and not confuse you that in Nigeria, being a bad girl is where it’s at.
“I love bad girls.”
Ozzy Etomi said something to this effect on an episode of I Said What I Said, a podcast hosted by Jola Ayeye and Feyikemi Abudu, two hilarious women I believe should be the pinnacles of comedy in Nigeria, not men who started by making rape jokes in their secondary school classes and can’t spell “funny” if it doesn’t involve tying their mother’s George wrapper and mimicking the women in their lives.
Before I define who “bad girls” are, I suppose I should introduce you to a Good Nigerian Girl.
This is a girl who is probably named something calm and angelic like Ada or Ify. Her parents raised her to be a model citizen; she works at Zenith Bank, or maybe the United Nations, and they brag about it to their enemies in the village. They dream of her marrying a man from the same tribe, who she will cook fresh food for every day and have three or four robust babies with. When she was a teenager, she was meek and “respectful”, never questioning adults, saying her prayers always and boys? My dear, when boys were walking on one side of the road, she crossed to the other.
Ozzy was speaking of those who live in direct contrast to this, girls on the margins. Girls who speak up when they are disrespected, regardless of the age of the person poke nosing; girls who do not run away from their sexuality, girls who are able to say, “Thank you xyz for these words of wisdom, but can you please shift so I can assess the situation and attempt to think for myself?” Their living in direct contrast does not mean they are uninterested in marriage and children or that they enjoy having to say a few words to aunty Dupe who cannot mind her business. It means they are focused on living on their own terms. After all, we all came into this world alone and we will leave alone.
She also raised a very good point: Girls with “bad” traits are often girls who had little parental supervision or grew up with a lot of exposure. What does this say about growing up in a traditional Nigerian household? Young girls are able to take more steps towards self-discovery with each mile they put between themselves and their homes. Why is that?
Of course, you don’t need me to tell you the culprit is the patriarchy. Society needs women to follow neat guidelines otherwise they are unsure how to handle us. I think the rarity of bad girls is why clips of old Nollywood movies where the girl is wearing miniskirts and telling her parents to just chill as they rage about her dressing like a whore are so interesting to us. The concept is so foreign, so scandalous. I find myself being taken off guard here in the U.S when an older person acknowledges my autonomy. Like really, you care what I have to say? You respect who I say I am?
I don’t place all the blame on the older generation because their own socialization and a variety of other factors are at play. I understand the fear and hesitation with letting children behave in ways contradictory to what they know, but I think these excuses can only go so far. We can lead our parents to the streams of “progressive” ideas — I say progressive this way because I don’t see them as incredibly new and exciting liberal concepts, only as what make sense — but they have to at least be willing to crack open their mouths, and there is this doggedness with which many of them refuse.
I thought about this issue again in the context of Toyin Salau, the young Nigerian-American girl who was murdered as she sought refuge in the house of a Black man who had posed as a man of God. To be quite frank with you, her death has haunted me.
I think of her sweating and shouting passionately into a megaphone, reminding people that Black lives are not disposable, and should not be destined to tragedy by whiteness. Only for the protest to be over and for everyone to go home and relax, while she is killed by male violence.
Toyin was my age-mate, a girl, Nigerian and gay. All these qualities are not lost on me. She needed housing because her home situation was not conducive for her and seeing how vocal she was at the protests, she probably had things to say at home which were not well received.
Her death makes me think of how many times young Nigerian girls feel muffled because they have opinions that are not in tune with their parents’ expectations. Meanwhile, young Nigerian boys are allowed to put their feet up while their mothers tsk about how wild they are but not to worry, they will soon calm down. They are only being boys.
Toyin deserved to feel safe at home. Dare I say, she had a right to feel safe at home. It is likely that her refusal to submit to conservative and dangerous ideals denied her of that.
Maybe at times I am too harsh in my critique of parents and the society, but tradition and archaic cultures in Nigerian households are literally killing young girls. Our commitment to respectability — “Oh but what will people say?” — is literally killing young girls. The matter is too urgent for me to be concerned with semantics right now. Aunty, if you are reading this, biko ewela iwe, don’t be angry. The issue is bigger than you.
I love bad girls because they are brave enough to be themselves.
It might not even be braveness really; sometimes bad girls are so because they have no other option. If people have already cemented their assumptions of you, it makes sense to carry on as you are. But it shouldn’t be a radical act to see yourself as the center of your own life, and not as peripheral to society’s mandates.
As for me, I don’t think I am quite there yet as I still have my own back-and-forths with respectability politics. But I definitely perspire to aspire to acquire the bad girl status. It would mean I am doing everything right.
