She's big in Nigeria too

Country music is very popular in Nigeria. Lemmy Ijioma, the leader of the Nigerian team, told me on his visit to the US that he hosted a country music radio show and that he was looking for an album of Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers duets. And yet I wasn’t prepared for just how many folks listen to it here. On our fourth day in Nigeria as we drove out to visit a school for deaf and blind students, the Reverend Father who was driving us threw in a Dolly Parton cd into his stereo with a huge grin on his face. At first, I thought he was doing this for our benefit, but I’m now convinced it was for his own enjoyment. It was a bit surreal, driving past yam hills, mud brick and thatch huts, and roaming goats to the sound of Dolly Parton singing about her Tennessee mountain home—just over the hill from my western NC home.

And then there was the visit to the Ahmadu Bello house. Bello was a traditional leader in the northern part of Nigeria who had become very active in post-independence Nigerian politics, only to be killed in the first coup attempt in 1966. The museum built to honor his life is built in front of a mosque and holds a hallowed mystique to it. As we made our way into the museum, out blared Waylon Jennings’ ‘Living on Tulsa Time.’

Stranger still was the drive from Gombe to Kano when our host pulled out a decades old bootleg copy of Dolly Parton’s Greatest Hits, which had spent most of its life exposed to the desert heat. It looped in the tape deck for three of the four hour drive, punctuating the scenery outside as the savannah gave way to the desert, farmers tilled the dry ground with bullocks, and Fulani boys tended their herds of cattle. The defining moment, however, might be when we were pulled over at a military check-point. Outside stood a Nigerian soldier armed with an AK-47 while inside Dolly Parton sang on ‘just like a butterfly.’