The Black Atlantic, Diddy's Baby oil, and Nigerian sexual anxieties.
Weeks ago, the media reported that the raid of the home of American rapper Sean "Diddy" Combs led to the discovery of 1000 baby oils and lubricants. The interpretative leap, given rumors and alleged victim accounts, was that this oil was used by the accused for sexual activities. As soon as this report proliferated across the media, specific individuals associated with the rapper, past and present, came under scrutiny as a possible accomplice in Diddy's act—most especially, upwardly mobile males in the United States.
In Nigeria, the trial of Diddy has reverberated in many forms in the Nigerian celebrity and music scene, not just in accusations and counter-accusations of non-normative sexuality that have seen celebrities intensify accountability and transparency for their heterosexual identity but also raised curiosity about the source of international notoriety for Nigerian musical artists and claims that their nomination for specific global awards was due to sexual favor. Similarly, Diddy's trial arguably evoked a recent list from a popular Nigeria gossip blog alleging that many male public figures in Nigeria engage in non-normative sex for fame and fortune.
For decades, scholars have examined the different ebb and flow of exchange and echoes within the geographically unbounded Black Atlantic. Paul Gilroy's book, The Black Atlantic, centers on some of these transnational and cultural flows of culture, people, ideas, migration, and travel across the Atlantic. In addition, various scholars have expanded Gilroy's idea in many ways to explore how African-American iconography of culture, fashion, style, and music is broadly appropriated in Africa. Specifically, some scholars have examined how Nigerian hip-hop artists and youths use black cultural aesthetics and language in music and self-fashioning. The same way African American artists have done with African cultural aesthetics and sensibility.
When we consider the ripple effect of Diddy's case in Nigeria, it prompts us to ask if the intricate web of sexuality and the emergence of non-normative sexual anxieties are a new form of echo between the diaspora and the Continent. Why has Diddy, a figure from the American music scene, become synonymous in Nigeria's popular imagination with homosexuality and sexual favor as prerequisites for male artists' social and economic mobility? Following his feud with Burnaboy, Speed Darlington released a song titled "Baby Oil," which is an inference to Diddy's case.
Could the domino effect of events in the diaspora triggering similar and different issues on the Continent be a reminder that years of middle passage, slavery, and colonialism have not neutered connections and maybe beliefs and approaches to non-normative sexuality between the Continent and diaspora? While some may argue that it is because of the global connectivity of cultures, media, practice, audiences, and fandom, I think there could be more. What is the implication of these for pan-African solidarity? What are the tension and overlap between African American Celebrity culture and Nigerian Popular and Celebrity culture?
These are just questions dancing in my mind as a scholar specializing in race, gender, and sexuality in Africa and the Diaspora.
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