Song Review

Song: Shafa Mata Nonuwa

Artist: Soja Boy

Title: Shafa Mata Nonuwa

Soja Boy. Source: Soja Boy's Instagram Photos

Soja Boy is a music artist from Sokoto State, a distant desert corner of northwestern Nigeria. His song Shafa Mata Nonuwa (feel her breasts) is out.

 

The song, like most of his songs, comes with a typical northern pop feel, albeit with a smear of Afrobeats. The song video features men and women dancers in mixed attires, some traditional northern attire, others mundane and revealing. It is considered obnoxious by northern standards. In the video, a lady has her butts wedged against the private regions of Soja Boy with him pushing hard and rolling his waist in response. A Hisba (Islamic police) agent comes around and gets them arrested. He takes them to a Hisba court for trial and sentence. The judge requests that the music be played in court as he cannot sentence without evidence. When the music begins to play, the judge and everyone else start dancing. It gets messier, as the women are now dressed in underpants such that huge bare butts are revealed, something that is sure to get the majority of northerners grimacing.

 

Soja Boy’s video is, however, a deliberate response to northern critics who have come hard against the style of his videos, accusing him of perverting northern children by the very colouration of his videos. At the climax of the criticism against Soja Boy, the Kano Hisba boss, Aminu Daurawa, was said to have advised authorities in Sokoto to get Soja Boy arrested and tried. Soja Boy, in a video, reiterated his right to earn a living by doing exactly what other Nigerian musicians do. Soja added that no Islamic police from the north has the right to arrest him because the videos weren’t shot in territories of Nigeria where Islamic law is practised.

Strict Islamic religious practice has chained northern people and deepened stagnation and poverty by the characterization of many activities, be they in sports, music, movies or other callings as sins. Northern-educated contemporaries like Soja Boy, Ali Nuhu, Nafisatu Abdullahi, Tagaree Da Badee and many others, however, feel otherwise. They have chosen to remain unbowed, preferring to follow the dictates of their global exposure.

 

The music of Soja Boy, as is often the case with music, has helped open the eyes of many, enabling them to see a portion of Sokoto State that has been eclipsed by its huge veil of religion.