Stardom comes with enticing bait. So, it is safe to say that being a star, in most cases, is not really as demanding as even maintaining stardom. Some people seem to be humble when they’re in obscurity, but once they are tipped for stardom or have even achieved almost instant stardom, they become irritatingly arrogant and cheeky in their day-to-day social intercourse. At times, it’s the intoxicating hand of stardom that causes that, but in another case, it is their own moral laxity that always leads to the manifestation of such shameful moral dereliction.
Ajanigo Simeon, a Kogi-born Nollywood actress, who is also Igala by tribe from Dekina Local Government Area (my LGA), has gone mad again! In a video that has been going viral since yesterday, she maliciously vilified the entire Igala ethnic group because, according to her, some Igala people condemned her manner of dressing as ‘indecent dressing’. While I don’t support those religio-traditional zealots that condemned her dressing, I detest her generalised vulgarity on Igala as a tribe and people in general. Actually, no one needs to dress naked before she can be classic and chic, but if she thinks revealing her bootylicious, busty boobs and swinging buttocks is what works for her, so be it. After all, it’s a free country!
However, by exposing the Igala ethnic group to public ridicule, it shows that she is a patent unscrupulous knucklehead whose meteoric rise to stardom has beclouded her sense of reasoning. What is the purpose of her education and exposure if she is still a pig-headed buffoon? She wanted to denigrate the entire Igala, but she ended up disgracing herself through her phonetic infelicities and grammatical boo-boos! The video is irritating! How on earth can a sane person even make a cruel caricature of his/her tribe? Can’t Ajanigo address the issue and those that condemned her dressing alone without having to resort to such inflammatory verbal abrasiveness on the entire Igala people? A rude, cheeky and lousy lass!
If non-Igala people decide to deride us tomorrow because of Ajanigo’s sweeping generalisation about the entire Igala people on social media, we’ll not have any moral right to stop them, because we have aired/washed our dirty laundry/linen in public. And then, as the English would say, we have been hoist/hoisted by/with our own petard! Some non-Igala people have made Igala as a tribe their butt of very unkind jokes already, and it’s really saddening to see your tribe being needlessly degraded.
Ajanigo’s vicious vituperation is untenable, and since she could allow her lunacy to play out with such fierce ferocity in the public domain, she has indirectly exposed the porosity of her education and exposure in the Nigerian film industry, known as Nollywood. Her crude behaviour neither portrays the ethics of the most revered Nollywood nor the ethos of the Igala tribe where she hails from. Some people try to call her a cantankerous goon, but I think she must a sociopathic reprobate for doing that. Whichever way people try to describe her, their description will never be equal to the missiles she has hurled at the Igala people. That’s the sad truth.
Ajanigo, the Igala tragic heroine, has fallen from the grace of many people because of her careless rhetorical vulgarity. Many illustrious sons and daughters of the Igala ethnic extraction have withdrawn their love and support for her. Her outburst of generalised anger is objectionable, and I think she should tender a sincere apology to all the Igala people she icily maligned.
A tragic hero/heroine is a stubbornly pompous literary character with a fatal moral or personal flaw that ultimately leads to their downfall. And as it is characteristic of all tragic heroes and heroines, hubris(excessive pride), as it is called in Literature, is their major tragic flaw in all literary tragedies. Their pride has always catapulted them into a catastrophic defeat. Need I add that in that same literary tragedy, before their hubris leads them to their lamentable downfall, they’ll inescapably have to undergo ‘Aristotelian peripeteia’? Peripeteia is the climactic change/reversal of fortune in the life of the tragic hero/heroine – from admirable grace to pitiable grass. And downfall becomes the denouement of their career!
Hello, Ajanigo. Are you there?
– Sule Abubakar Lucky Mark,
Writer and Sociologist.
Federal University Lokoja.
Email: suleabubakarmark2020@gmail.com
