Why I Carried Babalawo to My Friend’s Wedding - Pretty Mike

Nigerian socialite, businessman, and provocateur Pretty Mike is one man that has been in the news a lot of times for his various antics. He famously took a bunch of pregnant women with him to an event, and now recently he took a babalawo to his friends' wedding - a move that caused quite a stir in person and on social media.

Now, in a new interview with BBC News Pidgin, Pretty Mike sat down to talk about his antics and the reasoning behind why he does the things he does. He was especially asked about the pregnant women incident and this babalawo incident, and Pretty Mike explained the reason why he pulled both news-worthy stunts.

Here's everything Pretty Mike told the BBC about his antics.

**Before reading on, please make sure to like and follow my Facebook page (Jide Okonjo) so you don't miss out on any new and interesting lists, articles, and stories that I post every single day. I have a really fun page. If you like my page, you will have fun too. So what's stopping you? Like my page and let's have fun together!

Speaking to BBC Pidgin, Jim Iyke spoke entirely in pidgin so for clarity sake, I have transcribed his answer to normal English. The original video with the pidgin English is below so if you want to see that instead, simply scroll down. Speaking about the antics, Pretty Mike said:

As I took Babalawo to my friends Steve and Sandra’s wedding, the people there who knew me appreciated me. Everybody started bringing out camera to do videos and take pictures. But even at that, there were still those people who were shouting ‘Blood of Jesus’, some started praying immediately thinking that they had sent somebody to come and scatter the marriage or scatter the wedding. There was one woman who really carried the thing on her head that day. Honestly if that woman had holy water that day, she would have begun sprinkling it on me because she thought the devil’s child had landed.

Most of my concepts have meaning behind them – for example, when I came with pregnant women, people interpreted it in their own way but me I was trying to send a message that in this our society, people discriminate against pregnant women. Automatically if a woman gets pregnant, even if she’s qualified, once you see her stomach is big, you won’t want to answer her.

Now this one with what people are calling Babalawo, me I call him a spiritualist. People feel like when they see something that looks like or resembles Babalawo, they believe it is a wicked thing, an evil thing. A lot of people now discriminate what we see in African movies. So why is it that now if you’re going to an event, you can carry your pastor or your Imam there, but once you carry your Babalawo there, everybody will begin to run. A lot of people when they think of me, a lot of people think ‘Ah this Mike guy no well o!’, some people look at me like I’m weird. Meanwhile, I’m looking at you like you, you’re weird maybe based on the fact that you don’t do things like I do things.

What do you think about what Pretty Mike said about his reasoning behind his actions? I'm not going to lie, personally I think he raised a good question about why our own traditional spiritualists (babalawos) are feared and scorned at - I think it's an interesting conversation to have. I don't know though if bringing it to a person's wedding is the way to go about starting that conversation because it takes the attention away in a lot of ways from his friends' wedding as a lot of people would start talking about the babalawo or leaving the ceremony because of it. The wedding day should be for the couple not this - that's my own major criticism about what he did.

How about you, what do you think about what Pretty Mike did and his explanation? Let me know your thoughts by leaving a comment on my Facebook post, I can't wait to hear what you think.

That's All.

I hope you’ve had fun. Don’t forget to like my page (Jide Okonjo) if you don’t already for more stories like this, the fun never ends!

To catch up on other content you might have missed, click here.

Until next time, have a wonderful rest of your day.