African Youths Love Their Roots and Culture

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Watch and get entertained

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A young lady entertains folks at a post wedding party. Her elder brother a medical doctor had his wedding the previous day in the commercial capital of Nigeria, Lagos. Relations of both bride and bridegroom travelled all the way from the eastern part of the country to witness the great occasion. On the morning after the wedding, they gathered for breakfast at the home of the newly wedded, and the party continued. A lot of young Africans still appreciate and participate in their cultural arts even though a steady erosion of African cultural heritage is still going on. The condemnation, degradation and destruction of African ways of life by European missionaries and colonialists in the past, and overzealous African religious extremists of the present is still having advert negative effects on African culture. Many great African dance performances, theatricals, music, folk tales, rituals and festivals are today extinct. Also innumerable quantities of priceless artefacts has been destroyed, and are still being destroyed by ignorant religious extremists. All these notwithstanding, seeing young people like the girl in this video digging this particular dance style of the (Waawa) Igbo of Enugu state of Nigeria gives the joyous impression that after all, all is not lost.
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Inine is an Igbo folk song that tells about a young motherless girl who was being maltreated by her step mother. She was practically turned into a housemaid. She did all the house chores while her siblings do nothing. One night, her little half-sister was thirsty and asked for some water which she gave to her. But her stepmother was infuriated by this just because she fetched the water herself from far away 'Ogba springs. It was past midnight and she sent her out to get back that cup of water from 'Ogba'. The way to the spring is far from the village and is known to be prowled by wild animals and spirits at night.The poor girl had no option than to carry out her wicked stepmother's foreboding. As she walked through the forest path she ran into all kinds of spirits, both good and bad ones, and she sang to them this lamentation.


The song is the musical part of an Igbo/Nigerian folk story rendition. Among Africans, story telling is a complete theatre performance where the master story teller mimics all the characters in his story. He or she uses all elements of theatre to create effect and drive home the massages in the story. There is often musical part in the stories such as this one. In the African theatrical set-up, there is no hard line separating the performer and his or her audience. For this reason the songs in the stories are often in a call response arrangement, giving the listening audience the chance to participate by singing the response part of the songs.

Inine is interpreted here By Ike Chime, renown broadcaster/artiste, and backed by the GoodPeople band of Finland. The song can be found on the cd 'Rainbow Dreams' on Naxos World lable.



Ike Chime