Nigerian Icons The Lijadu Sisters Speak to a New Generation

While speaking, she would often generously reach in her memory bag to offer tender and almost always didactic stories of growing up with Kehinde Lijadu, her late sister, and second half of the group, during the early days of post-colonialism. There was the advice her mother gave her and her sister when they began making music—the socio-political awakening they received from her and its immense impact on their musical career. “When someone asks me, I tell them I went to the university of my mother,” she says, adding, “Our mum had always told us ‘Te ba fe ko orin, e ma ko orin isin (if you want to sing, sing songs of the times),’ there’s nothing in it (music). Leave it for two or 10 years and it will die down. But put out a story of what is going on.”

Their socio-cultural awakening helped craft the language and sensibility that made and still makes their work a striking and pointed response to the vast cultural erosion they were experiencing at a time when English superseded local languages, when corruption in governance ran rampant, and dysfunction ruled the day. It was also a time when traditional religious practices were ditched for colonialist faiths and the crooked sentimentality of Western superiority was administered from generation to generation — a fact Yeye Lijadu believes still hasn’t changed.

“We’re still selling ourselves short,” she tells me. “We are handing over our lives, our own lives and lungs to foreigners. Our youths can't speak their language. A lot of our youths, from even the time we were growing up, could not speak their languages and they had not stepped out of Africa. They lived in homes where their parents spoke the same language. So it's been like this since we were growing up. You've seen all of this, including violence, including outright law-breaking, and injustices. These are the things that our songs are based upon. Also, we sing about love. People love. People need love. Where there's no love in a family, don't have a family.”

With this in mind, and a new partnership with The Numero Group, Yeye Lijadu is more than ready to reach out to and speak to the current generation.

Lending a voice to the times

Earlier in July, Numero Group announced a new partnership that will see various works from The Lijadu Sisters reissued — with their landmark 1979 album notable for tracks like “Orere-Elejigbo,” “Erora,” and mega-hit “Come On Home” getting a “remastered, restored and revelatory edition” release come September 20.

With a generation more politically involved than ever, the reissue of The Lijadu Sisters catalog not only ensures that years of misdeed and label mishandling that saw them go without pay after recording and releasing culture-shifting music are addressed, but also could lend a voice to the rise in social-consciousness prevalent amongst younger Africans. With protests breaking out across the continent and a rise in decolonisation and anti-imperialist practices, The Lijadu Sisters continue to capture the angst and unease of the times.

The Lijadu Sisters "Come on Home" (Horizon Unlimited, 1979)

“Life brought everything about. That’s where all these songs came from. If you asked me all of those experiences with each album, it would have to do with people around us, the circumstances of those times,” she says.

The new reissue will also be fixing years of copyright infringement the women have faced even as their music has inspired or has been sampled by stars like Ayra Starr, Amaarae, Nas and Paramore’s Hayley Williams. The expansive legacy of The Lijadu Sisters will now yield gains for them.

Despite her misgivings about the state of imperialism and continued Western control, Yeye Lijadu is optimistic about the young people who will now immerse themselves in their works. “They have been woken up,” she says of young people. “They aren’t weak. [And] you can’t push anything under the carpet right in front of their faces again. [And] that's why they call them radicals. They're not radicals. They are people who need to be independent to decide how they want to live and choose to live their lives within their geographical perimeters.”

But all things considered, Yeye Lijadu admits, “We serve everybody. That's why everybody is able to relate.”