Documenting Women, Women Documenting...

On Memory, Erasure, and the Films of Aderinto and Korty

Sometime around 1980, March was adopted as Women’s History Month in the United States. This followed the earlier recognition of March 8 as International Women’s Day. At their core, both moments are about confronting systemic erasure and re-inscribing women into history with intention. In March 2026, two cultural works echoed that responsibility in the Nigerian music landscape: Saheed Aderinto’s The Women of Fuji and Korty EO’s documentary on Asake’s homecoming.

In a cultural ecosystem as vibrant and fast-moving as Nigeria’s music industry, documentation is often treated as an afterthought. The urgency of creation frequently eclipses the discipline of preservation. Yet without documentation, memory becomes selective, histories become distorted, and entire contributions risk erasure. It is this erasure that Aderinto’s documentary directly confronts, undoing the long-standing invisibility of women within Fuji music, a genre deeply embedded in Yoruba cultural life. Korty EO’s film, in its own quieter way, reminds us that women are not only subjects of documentation but also powerful authors of it. Together, both works insist that Nigerian music culture must be recorded with care, intention, and inclusion.

The second episode of Professor Saheed Aderinto’s Fuji documentary, The Women of Fuji, is a deliberate act of recovery. Fuji music has long been narrated through the lens of its male figures, its dominant voices, its visible icons. The documentary disrupts this singular narrative by foregrounding the women who have always existed within the ecosystem but have rarely been acknowledged in its formal histories. In doing so, it reinforces a crucial truth: absence in documentation is not absence in participation.

The film expands the idea of who counts as a cultural actor. Women are presented not only as performers but as patrons, organisers, memory-keepers, and enablers of the Fuji economy. Their labour, often informal and uncredited, is revealed as foundational. Figures such as Alake Alasela, Karimotu Aduke, Asisatu Amope, Mutiat Amope, and Fausat Makeba emerge not as peripheral presences but as central actors, shaping both the sound and the social life of Fuji. By documenting these roles, Aderinto does more than tell a story. He corrects a structural omission. The documentary becomes a counter-archive, resisting the tendency of history to privilege visibility over contribution.

This emphasis on documenting women is particularly important within Nigerian cultural production, where patriarchal norms have historically shaped both participation and recognition. Without intentional documentation, women’s roles are easily relegated to the margins, remembered only in fragments or not at all. The Women of Fuji challenges this by insisting on presence, by naming, by putting faces and voices to names, by placing women at the centre of a narrative that has long excluded them.

Stylistically, the documentary reflects the academic rigour required to achieve its purpose. The depth of research stands out as one of its defining strengths. Beyond its production quality, the film builds its argument through accumulation, drawing connections between music, society, and the peculiarities of gender within cultural systems.

While Aderinto’s documentary is concerned with recovering what has been overlooked, Korty EO’s work on Asake engages with documentation in the present tense. It captures a moment in the life of an artist at the height of global visibility, offering a portrait that is both intimate and reflective. Where The Women of Fuji builds an archive of the past, Korty’s Flow series constructs a record of the now.

Korty’s approach is rooted in proximity. The film resists the polished distance of traditional music documentaries, instead opting for a style that feels conversational and unguarded. Through interactions with family, collaborators, and familiar spaces, Asake is presented not as a distant figure but as a person shaped by relationships and environments. This is documentation as immediacy, an attempt to capture the fleeting textures of a moment before they harden into myth. After all, time flies.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5nH9HlCLEfI

The importance of this approach lies in its timing. By documenting Asake during a brief homecoming, Korty preserves a version of the artist before narrative consolidation takes over. The film captures contradictions, vulnerabilities, and the grey areas of identity that are often lost in retrospective storytelling.

Where Aderinto’s work challenges a system that has historically marginalised women, Korty’s work quietly demonstrates what becomes possible when women occupy the position of storyteller. Placed alongside each other, these two films illuminate the broader stakes of documentation in Nigerian music culture. The task ahead lies in doing both: looking backwards to recover what has been erased and staying present enough to document what is still unfolding.

Ultimately, both works remind us of a simple but urgent truth: culture does not remember by accident, and unless we document women intentionally, the record remains incomplete.