I learned of the death of Saint Janet, the Yoruba juju musician, on Sunday, August 2, 2026. I had been absentmindedly scrolling through X, as I often do on weekend mornings, when I came across a post that casually announced that she had died. My first instinct was disbelief, and I immediately searched her name on Google, which was unhelpful at the time. The only links that came up all pointed back to Facebook posts.
By Sunday afternoon in the US, the news had become a major talking point on Nigerian social media. TikTok, more than any other platform these days, often captures the mood of the Nigerian internet. Expectedly, on that platform, some people had already begun turning the news into content. Even with the deluge of contents online, as of my writing this post, there has been little to nothing written about Saint Janet’s life, her music, or the circumstances of her death. Here, I will note Dami Ajayi’s thoughtful post on X, which tries to capture what her music meant to a generation of listeners.
I also do not know much about her life, hence why I have been Googling her name every now and then since the news of her demise hoping to finally catch a befitting obituary.
I must have first listened to Saint Janet (real name, Janet Iyun Ajilore) sometime around 2010. I was in the final year of secondary school. After classes, instead of going straight home, a group of us would head to a football field near one of our classmates’ houses. We’d play for hours, sometimes betting money on which team would win. Between matches, someone would bring out a phone. While phones were technically banned in school, students usually hid them until the closing hours, and we’d play music on the phone while playing football.
One day, one of the boys insisted we listen to a particular song, but that we should turn the volume down. It was a woman’s voice, but what she was singing caught all of us off guard. Up until then, the closest thing I had heard to that kind of raw, sexually explicit music was Abbas Obesere. As teenagers, we knew Obesere was “not for children.” But Obesere’s music, at least to my ears then, always felt loud, confrontational, almost as if he was daring listeners to accept him on his own terms.
What struck me about Saint Janet, by my first encounter, was that her style was cohesive, melodious and easy to get into. There was nothing about her style that felt harsh, which made her songs easy to enjoy, even when what she was singing about offended many older, more puritan listeners. I really cannot remember the title of that particular first song of hers that I listened to, but what it did was to make me an obsessive devotee to her music for the next few years.
Looking back now, I think her songs did something tremendous for boys my age. We were entering adulthood and curious about everything adults refused to talk about openly: sex and alcohol; desire and pleasure. Saint Janet, or Mama Yabis as she was fondly called, sang about all of them with a confidence that was almost unbelievable at the time. She made those subjects sound ordinary and funny in a society where they were often wrapped in silence or moral panic.
I did not grow up in what Nigerians would call a spiri-coco (overtly religious) home, but the wave of Pentecostalism that swept through Nigeria in the 2000s certainly shaped the atmosphere around us. I remember Juju and Fuji cassettes my father had fanatically listened and danced to in the 80s gathering dust in his shelf like relics of certain age. While he did not take fancy towards mainstream Christian musicians of the 90s and early 2000s, he would reach for a compromise in Yinka Ayefele whose style balances Juju rhythm with some watered-down Christian vibes.
However, Saint Janet went in the opposite direction to Ayefele. What I found fascinating then was how she borrowed the tune and lyrics of Yoruba Christian praise songs before gradually steering them somewhere completely different. She would begin almost like a worship leader, then slowly ease into songs about sex, drinking and gossip. She had a distinctive timbre, and she knew how to pull listeners in before veering into her titillating subjects. She undoubtedly shepherded the flock of her Saint Bottles Cathedral, also known as Sinners’ Chapel, with her irreverent yabis masterfully.
By my early 20s at the university, I had somehow stopped paying as much attention to Saint Janet as I did in my mid to late teens. Every now and then, news about her would filter into my social media feeds, but I would simply read it and move on. Recently, though, TikTok drew me back to her. As it often does, the algorithm kept serving me video-contents that used snippets of her songs. Before long, I would find myself on a nostalgic scroll, trying to remember songs I had not listened to in well over a decade. That is perhaps one of TikTok’s more interesting contributions to music culture. It has revived interest in songs many of us thought had long disappeared.
And that was exactly how I re-encountered Saint Janet few months before her death. More than a decade after I had stopped listening to her regularly, I found myself returning to her songs, partly to relive those secondary school years. Unfortunately, like many Nigerian artists of her generation, her music is still poorly archived online. Her songs are scattered across YouTube and other platforms, uploaded by different people, many of whom probably have no connection to her. And this is a sad testament to the poor documentation and the exploitative management/promoter systems that defined the pre-streaming era of Nigerian music.
As I have thought about Saint Janet’s death these past few days, I keep coming to how artistes like her become touchstones in the lives of their listeners. Long after you have stopped listening to them regularly, they remain tied to a particular period of your life. You remember them, and in remembering them, you remember a part of yourself too. I suppose that is one of the greatest powers an artiste can have. Rest in peace, Saint Janet.
Tobi Idowu 