Ajegunle music: how AJ City shaped Nigerian reggae and Afrobeats

Long before Lagos pop was a global export, a crowded port neighbourhood on the mainland was making a sound of its own. Ajegunle, AJ City, took reggae and ragga records from Jamaica, mixed them with percussion its migrants had brought from home, sang over them in Pidgin and turned the result into dances the whole country copied. People call it AJ music, and some call it Awala. This is a short history of where it came from, who made it and why it still matters.

If you are new to the neighbourhood itself, start with our guide to Ajegunle, Lagos.

Why Ajegunle?

Ajegunle grew up beside the Apapa and Tin Can Island ports, and people came to work there from every part of Nigeria. That mix matters for the music. A neighbourhood where families from dozens of ethnic groups live wall to wall needs a shared language, and in AJ that language was Pidgin. A sound sung in Pidgin, over a beat that borrowed from everywhere, belonged to nobody in particular, so it could belong to everybody.

And in a place with plenty of young people, few jobs and a lot to say about both, the rebel music coming out of Jamaica made obvious sense.

Mighty Mouse and the Jahoha studio

If one person is credited with shaping the AJ sound, it is the producer John Oboh, known as Mighty Mouse. Born in Lagos in 1967 to a family from Esan in Edo State, he is credited with creating the Ajegunle beat in the 1990s, blending an older Esan samba rhythm and other African percussion with reggae and jazz. His studio, Jahoha, was set up in 1991 with help from his sister Mabel Oboh, and it became where AJ’s singers went to record. Daddy Showkey and Daddy Fresh worked with him, and Baba Fryo, African China and Oritse Femi are all linked to the studio.

Mighty Mouse died in Lagos in September 2023, after an illness. Musicians from the community gathered afterwards to honour the man many of them called the father of AJ music.

Galala: the dance that went national

The sound needed a dance, and AJ supplied one. Galala, a loose, bouncing street dance, came out of the Ajegunle ghetto in the 1990s and became the move every Nigerian party knew. Accounts differ on who invented it; Baba Fryo, Daddy Showkey and Daddy Fresh are all credited with creating or spreading it, and the honest answer is probably that the street made it and the stars made it famous.

• Daddy Showkey (John Odafe Asiemo) was born in Ajegunle and had worked as a ticket collector at a motor park before music. His songs include “Fire Fire” (1991), “Diana” (1996) and “The Name” (2000), and by the late 1990s he was galala’s best-known face.
• Daddy Fresh (Innocent Michael Onyebuchi) was honoured in the late 1990s as the “King of the Ajegunle Musicians”. His hits reportedly sold more than 300,000 legitimate copies in Lagos alone, and pirates are said to have sold over a million more.
• Baba Fryo (Friday Igwe) gave the era one of its most quoted songs, “Dem Go Dey Pose”, in the late 1990s.

The 2000s: Danfo Drivers and a second wave

The next generation kept AJ’s humour and turned up the speed. The duo Danfo Drivers, Mad Melon and Mountain Black, were brought up in Ajegunle and broke through nationally in 2003 under a name borrowed from the yellow danfo minibuses of Lagos. Mad Melon died in September 2019, and crowds turned out in Ajegunle as his body was taken to the mortuary.

A writer for The Native, looking back in 2022, described a split in AJ music: a colourful, preachy style that ruled the late 1990s and 2000s, and a younger, faster sound from the early 2010s. That later wave produced artists like Kosere Master, whose “Kwete Dance” started a craze in the area, and DJs such as Solo B, DJ Webo and DJ C3 who acted, in that writer’s words, as the scene’s creative directors. Oritse Femi’s “Double Wahala” became a hit far beyond AJ.

The echo in Afrobeats

AJ music rarely gets credit in the global story of Afrobeats, but you can hear it if you listen. When Tekno released “Jogodo” in 2018, Danfo Drivers said he had used elements of their song “Kpolongo” without asking, a dispute later settled amicably. The Native has pointed out that Ruger’s eyepatch recalls Baba Fryo’s. And Patoranking, who grew up in Ebute Metta, not far across the mainland, first heard galala there as a young man, before he became one of Nigeria’s best-known Afro-dancehall stars.

The same 2022 essay warned that AJ’s scene was becoming “a static footnote”, with fewer new stars breaking out of it. Whether or not that is fair, the vocabulary of street Lagos pop, the Pidgin hooks, the dance crazes and the jokes, owes a lot to what was made in a few studios in Ajegunle.

Where to listen

Search the names above on your usual streaming or video service. Start with Daddy Showkey’s 1990s run, Baba Fryo’s “Dem Go Dey Pose” and any Danfo Drivers album, and you will hear where a lot of modern Lagos street music came from.

Music in AJ Cities

AJ Cities is a free browser game set on the edge of Ajegunle, and none of the real artists in this article appears in it. The game has one radio station: every radio in the estate plays the same track at the same moment for every player, so the whole street hears the same song. The resident on the street most likely to sing is Kingston, an invented Rasta preacher who sings his own songs about Jah, justice and the poor on the beach at dusk. You can hear the estate radio for yourself, or read about the real Ajegunle behind the game.

What is AJ music?

AJ music, sometimes called Awala, is the street sound that came out of Ajegunle, Lagos, from the 1990s: reggae and ragga mixed with local percussion, sung mostly in Pidgin.

Who started galala?

Accounts differ. Galala came out of the Ajegunle ghetto in the 1990s, and Daddy Showkey, Baba Fryo and Daddy Fresh are all credited with creating or popularising it.

Who was Mighty Mouse?

John Oboh, known as Mighty Mouse, was a Lagos producer credited with creating the Ajegunle beat in the 1990s at his Jahoha studio. He died in September 2023.

Are any of these musicians in AJ Cities?

No. The game’s characters are invented, and no real artist in this article appears in it.