By BAMIDELE JOHNSON
These days, twins barely cause a ripple. Once upon a time, they were such a big deal they had an entire soundtrack. People in my part of the country had songs venerating them. Big-time musicians made twins-centric tracks. Those songs often mentioned palm oil and beans. I don’t know why.
The songs also celebrated the wildly generous myth that giving birth to twins instantly transformed a struggling household into wealth. That illusion eventually died a slow, undignified death, I think, with the rise of e ke’beji women.
E ke’beji is the depressing practice of women using their twins as portable crowdfunding devices. The women would carry their twins around like sacred merchandise, chanting for alms as if the twins were spiritual stock options.
But the true high priests of twin exploitation were a pair of actual twins, who were a media staple in the 90s through to the early noughties. They had a foundation dedicated to twins and roped in older and famous twins as patrons or maybe just nameplates. They went round media houses with the fervour of a political campaign.
Every time I saw them in mine or at public functions (they were ever-present), I developed symptoms like red eyes, rising temperature, inexplicable irritation. It did not matter if you treated them with the warmth of a fridge. They would still flash their smiles, bob their heads, and genuflect. The goal was always free publicity.
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What baffled me most was the media gave a shit about them. Mary Slessor stopped the killing of twins in the 1800s, so I wondered what crusade they were on.
But credit where due. They rode the twin train to minor celebrity status until the media (and possibly donors) became fatigued. And just like that, the era of twin glory died and got buried beneath a pile of old newspaper clippings and exhausted goodwill.
These days, even real twins (not the synthetic clowns calling themselves twinnies) would waste their time on twin-themed stories. Not when Tems’ thunder thighs and peasant hips, Ayra Starr’s hip-snapping acrobatics and Tiwa Savage’s premium dirty dancing are stealing all oxygen. Twins báwo? Please shift.
