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?”
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| 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.
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| 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”
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| 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'
