A Slum Rich in Performance

“To dance is to be out of yourself. Larger, more beautiful, more powerful. This is a power, it is glory on earth and it is yours for the taking”- Agnes de Mille

?I was recovering from a bad cough and still groggy from the holidays. It was the first weekend in 2022. We had been to Igando, which was pretty much an excursion to me given that I had never been to that part of Lagos City in the twenty years of living in the city. With that trip I knew that the activation for the SPMC One Year Sanitary Pad Scholarship would catapult me out of my comfort zone. There would be no place for settling.

I knew the hardest person to lead was one’s self, so I literally pushed me. Once I did that, I pushed us all. So that Saturday morning, all four of us got into my car, to keep an appointment at the Kings & Queen Academy of the Nbari Nbayo Arts Centre in Bariga, one of the slums of Lagos.

?It is notorious for violent clashes between rival cult groups and many other vices. It brims with spontaneous violence and talents, the unemployed and idle young, male and female. There are at least ten dangerous spots in Bariga that the lily livered should be wary of visiting, for various reasons. Although dangerous, Bariga fits the profile of a low income area I felt drawn to.??

Nigeria has 10.5 million out-of-school children, the world's highest number according to UNICEF, sixty percent of those children are girls. UNICEF said the key reasons for this were the low perception of the value of education for girls and early marriages. Not much value is placed on education for girls beyond the basics in the neighbourhood.

?My dream is for these girls to remain in school. I want them, baring menstrual pain, to go to school during their periods. I want them to choose to beat the odds and be educated so that they can be empowered to fend for themselves, in life.

?We enrolled school-aged girls in this underserved community as beneficiaries of our Sanitary Pad Scholarship. But we didn’t just pick, we did it in partnership with the Nbari Nbayo Arts Centre which runs the Kings and Queens Dance Academy. I had learnt of Ayodeji Adewale’s work in Bariga. Fondly called 'Yaro', he was with the popular Crown Troupe before starting his own troupe in 2013. His vision is to use arts as a tool to take kids off the street in Bariga. I am told that since its inception, the Arts Centre, has helped tens of street children and embraced them as part of its cultural community through training in cultural dance, folk music, drumming, and more.

?I had worked with street children, all boys, on a project in the course of my career as a broadcaster. I taught them how to produce a radio programme and produced a 13-week series about their lifestyle which aired on the Network service of Radio Nigeria. These, in Bariga, however were not street girls.

These girls and boys gathered, not inside a building but at the backyard of multiple buildings, beside a white garment church, with voices of quarrelling parishioners, devoid of niceties, for our beneficiary event. We were welcomed with an all-girls performance, the drummers and dancers. I watched with pride as these young girls displayed their skills, one performance after the other, deliberate yet uninhibited, unforced, without intent to overly impress us.

?As the girls danced on bare earth, shoeless, the dust underneath them rose. My hope of making a difference in their lives with the pad scholarship rose with it. These were choreographed dance performances, their movements were fluid, a slip here and there by the really young and new amongst them, yet an enjoyable spectacle.

?Dance was an elective in my teacher training days at Adeyemi College of Education, Ondo in Nigeria, now a federal university of education. I struggled with it as an introverted young lady. I was shy at the beginning, once I loosened up, I felt free. I learnt about movement, flexibility, but dance teaches range of motion, coordination and muscle strength. Above all, dance teaches team work and confidence, and those girls at the Dance Academy radiated that ‘can do’ mien effortlessly. Inside of me, I leapt with joy, many times, outwardly I clapped.

?Academic competence is not all there is to life, life skills are also essential. These skills such as dancing are lacking in the general curriculum of public schools in Nigeria. I was happy that these girls find release, and meaning in the dance at the academy. I was glad that they can make money with the dance skills they are learning at the academy, presently and in the future. I dreamt that future up for them and spoke to it.

The girls were unsurprisingly confident. We had a robust engagement with the girls, in the presence of the boys, during our interactive session on menstrual hygiene and engaged the girls more intimately during the questionnaire session. Thanks to our donors, these girls won't have to worry about their sanitary needs for the next twelve months.

With the brilliant dance skills by the teenage girls, we adopted the troupe as the official dance troupe of the Sanitary Pad Media Campaign. As Sesede Simeon, our volunteer, who had been on a writing residency with the centre puts it on the SPMC Facebook page, “we are glad we can put a smile on the faces of these girls and also encourage them to keep on using their arts as a tool to change their community”.

The boys were given free sample pads to give to their sisters and friends courtesy of support from Molped Sanitary Pads.

The SPMC's vision is to eradicate period poverty one girl at a time, one underserved community at a time and one public school at a time. Support us in activating another neighbourhood of twenty girls for one year with two hundred thousand naira. Make your donation to Zenith Bank, Illuminate Nigeria, 1017179136.

Anike- ade Funke Treasure is a senior broadcast journalist, author and social entrepreneur. She is the Convener, Sanitary Pad Media Campaign, which gives one-year Sanitary Pad Scholarships to school aged girls in Nigeria. She can be reached on her social media platforms on Linkedin, Facebook and Instagram.

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