Afrobeat-Finland: A Date with Nigerian-American Iconic Photographer, Chi Modu in Kallio Helsinki

Chi Modu with Ike Chime

I got a text message from my good friend Matti Hiikari a.k.a.
Paleface, renowned Finnish rapper cum activist and it read
“Ike I got a friend visiting from New York, he is a photographer, Ibo born in Nigeria during the Biafran war. I want to introduce you two.”

I noticed there was no name on it, just a photographer.

Knowing Paleface for who he is, both as an individual, and as an artist/activist, I was convinced that there was more to this than just an invitation to meet an Igbo-Nigerian brother photographer from NYC.

I wrote back telling him it will be a great idea, and that he should just let me know when and where.

A few day later I got another text from him which went like “When are you available today? Chi Modu will hold a little event in Kallio at Rupla at 7pm. Can you make it?”

Chi Modu in a reflective mood

Typical Paleface, a man of the moment.

Chi Modu? That must be the photographer’s name I thought, and as much as I tried, the name did not connect so I dived into the cyber world and lo, so much information jumped upon my face that made me wow!

Arriving at the Rupla at about 2 mins after 7pm, the house was almost full and by the nature of activities going on around the place, it was clear to me that the event was just at the nick of taking off. I found a space on the second row in the front and sat down. In a couple of minutes a side door opened and I saw my Paleface step out, followed by a black guy with dreadlocks dressed in working mans khaki outfit, pants and tops, the same face I saw online. With a big smile, Paleface greeted me and quickly turned to Chi and introduced me, we shook hands briefly and he said to me that Paleface told him a lot about me.

We smiled at each other as there was no time for pleasantries, the show must start, and I couldn’t wait to hear this brother tell hi/story verbally, and photographically.

When Chi Modu started addressing the audience after a very wonderful introduction by Paleface, he held everyone in a spell right from his first word and through the almost two hours session, or more as I lost sense of time sitting there. I immediately saw the Igbo/Nigerian in him. In the Nigerian lingo, there is what we call ‘Jisting’ and a good ‘Jistter’ will simply take you by hand and lead you through his story every inch at a time. Chi got that Jistter instinct in him.

It was like a roller coaster ride back in time. The late 1980s through the 1990s were rolled out on our faces as he crisscrossed the states, New York City, LA, NJ, indeed all the key states and cities connected to the activities of the early hip hop, rap music era. With his camera crew he flew across states doing what he knew best, making photo documentaries.

Chi was born in Nigeria, and around the time the defunct nation of Biafra tried to secede from Nigeria in the 60s, leading to a civil war, the Biafra war. At this time, his father was a mathematics doctorate student in the US. He somehow managed to facilitate airlifting his family to safety in the United States. This was how three years old Chi Modu found himself in America.

Chi book signing at the Helsinki event

Born in Nigeria, raised in the USA, New Jersey to be precise, Chi’s parents returned back to Nigeria but he chose as a youngster to stay back, enrolled into a boarding school, the Lawrenceville boarding school, a prestigious boarding school attended by the likes of Michael Eisner, and Malcolm Forbes.

Being alone in the US helped him to develop a strong independent streak which later will manifest itself in his work.

For his university education, Chi attended Rutgers University, and that was where he picked up a camera for the first time.

He was later to improve his skills at the International Centre of Photography, and after which he landed a job with ‘The Source’ which was to become the definitive magazine of hip hop culture. It was during his days with The Source that he developed a relationship with the artists who were later to become the biggest icons of the hip hop movement.

Now back to the event at the Rupla. I must confess that my knowledge of the Hip Hop world is borderline. I have an idea of some of the big names but have not followed the developmental history of the genre. During my broadcasting years with the legendary Radio City Helsinki in the 90s, when hip hop was surging, I was more immersed in the world music genre as my mission was to give more exposure to life outside Finland, especially life in Africa through music to my Finnish audience. In so doing, I did not focus much on Hip-Hop during its early years. Listening to a person that lived through it in the person of Chi Modu kind of gave me an in-depth knowledge of the formative years of the early big names of the genre. Amazingly it took just some hours of narration by Chi to achieve this, well, in the words of George Kannan, “History is not what happened; History is what it felt like to be there when it happened”

Paleface with Chi during the event

Chi Modu told us about his personal encounter with some youths who were to later rule the world through Hip-Hop music. The long list included Tupac Shakur, Notorious B.I.G., Snoop, Easy E, Method Man, Ghetto Boys, Q-Tip, Dr Dre, Ice Cube Mary B Blige, and L-L Cool J.

One thing that was significant in those early days according to Chi was that these youths involved in hip hop were also involved in gangster activities, and this made it a tough job for someone like him who did not grow up in the hood to mingle and do business with them. Hear him ---

“I will be frank with you all, I didn’t grow up in the hood, I grew up fairly comfortable, you know, but the beauty of how I grew up is that it taught me how to stay involved without upsetting people so I was comfortable moving around in the hood because the rules ain’t that different if you respect people, they will respect you back"

Chi Modu at a point in his career as the photo editor of The Source had to also operate in the West Coast at a time when there were a lot of guns, a lot of tension, a lot of aggression building between New York and the West coast, he explained how it felt thus -

“Well, the way I explain it to people is that, not unlike rock n roll, right, like where drugs were taking these guys out at a very young stage of their lives, alright, but with rappers, it was a bit of violence but it was really reckless living that consumes the youth, and once you move out of those years, you start becoming a little more careful, you know , you wanna live, so when you see the chaos in teenagers, it is always teenagers of twenty-something years old, you hardly see chaos in thirty-something or forty something-year-old's, so what you hope for is for the person to grow up to cherish his life and the life of others”.

There is this shot where Snoop was pointing a gun at Chi which he took in 1993 long before, Chi ended up shooting the cover picture for Snoop’s first album Doggy Style.

How did Chi react to that?

“If there is a gun on my set, I make sure to take it, clean it myself, and pluck the trigger and hand it over to them, and a lot of times doing that, I did it to make sure there were no accidents. You cannot tell him not to have the guns because in the streets of LA he’ll need it. I know it is a wired thing for people to understand but, the streets were really very dangerous....I was pretty fortunate that in chaos I can be really calm...”

In addition to his impressive collection of hip hop photos, Chi traveled far and wide shooting images of the lifestyle of people of various cultures be it kids is a church in Nigeria, fishermen in Morocco, market women in Myanmar, or swimmers in Lombok, Indonesia. Apart from this event in Helsinki, there has been an exhibition of Chim Modu’s work in 2014 at the Pori Arts Museum.

Some of Chi Modu's exhibited at the Pori Museum of Arts under the title 'UNCATEGORIZED'