Yorùbá Erotica —
The Video Essay

Market woman interview (celebratory, explicit) → Podcast laughing at woman who moaned in Yorùbá → WhatsApp voice note (intimate, unbothered) → Fuji artist singing desire → TikTok woman on colonial programming of desire. The sequence creates a contrast arc: celebration → mockery → celebration again, closing on the TikTok woman who hands the question to the essay proper.

The audience already knows from the title what this is. The audio of each clip carries its own argument — the richness is in the sound. The podcast clip laughing at the woman who moaned in Yorùbá does the most work: it shows the discomfort and othering the essay will spend two hours examining.

Yorùbá culture is part of the inner life — attire, music, film, church. But the language was locked out of inner thought, intimacy, and high registers. The culture and the language got separated somewhere. That separation is the wound this essay examines.

Tomide Marv’s piece on decolonising dirty talk — specifically the line “there’s no better language to voice your deepest feelings than your mother tongue” — sparked immediate disagreement. A Twitter conversation about moaning in mother tongues prompted the sharper observation that launched the research: people cannot think or pray in Yorùbá, so how would they moan?

There is no longer a teacher to punish vernacular, no parent enforcing English. But self-policing continues even in complete privacy. The colonial programme completed itself. The language is reserved for the mother, the market, negotiating food prices. Never for inner life. Never for intimacy — and this is true even when completely alone.

Colonial education created a dual personality: the social self (mother, market, village) and the intellectual self (European construct). This generation inherited completed alienation — Yorùbá was already compartmentalised before they learned to speak. Their parents felt two worlds pulling. This generation has only one.

The distance is intergenerational. Things grandmothers knew about desire, intimacy, and how Yorùbá culture understands connection are held in a language that now feels foreign. The knowledge stays with them. The memory bank stays locked. Tape II’s inside jokes and erotic metaphors confirm it.

English-language Nollywood (Domitila, Glamour Girls, Cossy Orjiakor) had erotic content from the mid-1990s. Yorùbá cinema of the same era was clean. There was nothing to gatekeep — because Yorùbá erotica in film simply did not exist. Desire in your language was therefore something you developed no relationship to.

Liberation always came with a moral price onscreen: shrine thieves die, sex workers meet inglorious ends, sexy women steal souls (Sakobi, Samsara). The films gave audiences transgression but always ensured transgression had a price — and this is how erotica, as close to our indigenous culture as possible, was prepared for us.

The first to bring erotica into Yorùbá cinema — consciously modelling his work on American hip-hop video erotica (50 Cent, Snoop Dogg, Luke). Even then, erotica was never allowed to stand alone: always cushioned by humour, voodoo plots, or assault. The Baba Suwe archetype — the jester delivering verbal erotica through double entendre — became the safe container for explicit language in Yorùbá cultural production.

Linguistic capital explains the hierarchy. French accrued desirability through colonial positioning, Paris branding, and Hollywood repetition. The sophistication is partially real — but the hierarchy that makes it better than Yorùbá aesthetics is programming, not quality. The same sophistication exists in aso-oke weaving, the talking drum, the poetry of Yorùbá proverbs.

Reaching for Black American identity is not code-switching (which is survival) — it is identity performance. The distinction: using British expressions because you live there is organic. Performing Blackness from America because Yorùbá-ness feels inadequate is not.

Tape I is the most usable — and the tape with the least amount of Yorùbá in it. We consider it most usable precisely because it is most sanitised of the language. The tape reflects the curator’s own conditioning back at her.

Sensual, celebratory, non-degrading. Centres the female erotic voice (Niniola, Teni, Tiwa Savage). But it cannot access feralness — the unrestrained sexual energy Tape II and III carry. The women try; you can feel it. It never arrives with the same authority.

Fuji beats — particularly post-Saje — emphasise a kind of prowess that goes beyond dancing. Paired with explicit lyrics, the music communicates: this is not for lazy people. In contrast to Tape I’s lethargic sensuality, Tape II has urgency. Possibly the more authentic expression of intimacy in Yorùbá aesthetics — nothing shy or subtle about it.

Fuji originated from wéré — Islamic music used to wake Muslims for pre-dawn meals during Ramadan. Then Saje subgenre (Lateef Ilori, the king of Saje): more provocative, for the youth. Then Obesere: Saje + street slang + video erotica = the most explicit, most contested, most significant entry point into Yorùbá erotica on record.

Tape II culture exists across music, Bayowa Films, live performances. What is on Spotify is too thin. Songs run 20 minutes. The erotica sits beside praise of big men, beside God. Not extractable as a playlist — it is a whole cultural world.

Tape III is the creative expression of unrestricted Yorùbá male sexuality — arrogant, explicit, not restricted by respectability. The arrogance and objectification are present throughout, but three songs are genuinely harmful. The rest contributes to objectification culture primarily through music videos — women as props, bodies without interiority.

Maps rape culture directly. Key lyric: “bo ba n dun e, ko faramo”. A 2025 tweet defending the song received over 9,000 likes — proof the harm goes unsanctioned. Two audiences: those without the framework to recognise coercion, and those who know and are reassured by the 9,000 likes. Both are consequences of the same culture.

Nothing heard in Fuji research is actively harmful. All fingers point to hip-hop influence. Joan Morgan: misogyny in hip-hop is “like a guitar solo in rock music — accepted as part of the fabric of the genre.” Tape III artists reference hip-hop visually and lyrically. The visual objectification in Fuji videos was itself copied from American hip-hop by Bayowa Films. Lyrics and visuals learned misogyny from the same source via different channels.

The video vixen had agency and choices to make, and her choices have consequences, but that’s a story for a different moon.

Women praising husbands in oríkì-style poetry, combined with the submission expected from Yorùbá women, loosely maps onto what the West calls praise kinks and D/s power dynamics. But in Yorùbá culture it is unremarkable, expected, not taboo. The West built a subculture to access something Yorùbá domestic life always contained. Roles are fixed though — no space for dominant women, no submissive men.

Niniola, Teni, Tiwa Savage, St. Janet, Yaboskan, Celeste Ojatula, GoodGirl LA — mostly express themselves in submissive registers. Only Yaboskan claims a kind of sexual prowess (Ridinmo dada), Teni demands things on her own terms in Askamanya (Lori lori standing, funmi leyokan si). On Tape III, women are absent entirely as voices. It seems women cannot be respectable and sexually liberated simultaneously in this archive.

The official music video for Tesojue takes a song that sounds “too Yorùbá” and gives it a serious, aesthetic erotic visual language most people still don’t know what to do with. And it works. A successful, largely unrecognised example of Yorùbá erotica in contemporary Nigerian visual media.

Not a clean thesis. Yorùbá now slips into monologues. Fuji is now loved. Better questions have been formed about the problematic songs. Exposure definitely caused this.