For years, Nigerian female artists have returned to love songs to talk about everything from respect and heartbreak to sex, self-worth and freedom.

There are some things Nigerian female artists simply cannot resist. A good ad-lib, a dramatic key change and a song on love. It doesn’t matter the genre: highlife, juju, Afropop, R&B or Alternative. At some point, everybody catches feelings.

Love has always been one of the biggest themes in Nigerian music, but these songs have never been just about romance. Across genres and generations, female artists have used love to talk about respect, marriage, sex, heartbreak, dignity, freedom and, more recently, emotional boundaries.  These songs do more than soundtrack our relationships; they capture the cultural mood of their time, revealing what women were expected to want, what they actually longed for and, increasingly, what they refused to settle for. 

It’s easy to assume Nigerian women’s love songs followed a neat trajectory, from waiting to be chosen to choosing themselves. But that story leaves out too much. Female artists have always had a voice, and they’ve long used it to explore every shade of love. Rather than replacing one another, each generation has simply expanded the conversation.

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Christy Essien-Igbokwe, Nelly Uchendu and Onyeka Onwenu: love, with your eyes wide open

We often talk about older love songs as though they all ask women to wait patiently for Prince Charming. They didn’t. Take Christy Essien-Igbokwe, one of her most memorable songs, “You Can’t Change a Man,” doesn’t tell women to hold out for perfection. Quite the opposite. It encourages women to see men for who they are instead of trying to mould them into someone else.

It’s a fascinating perspective because the song refuses the fantasy of the ideal partner. Instead, it asks whether loving someone also means accepting their imperfections. Depending on who you ask, that’s either emotional wisdom or a woman giving a man far more grace than he deserves. That’s exactly why the song still sparks conversation decades later.

Nelly Uchendu, affectionately known as the “Lady with the Golden Voice,” approached love from an entirely different angle. Her 1976 classic, “Love Nwantiti,” which translates to “little love” in Igbo, celebrates affection in its simplest form. There are no sweeping declarations or elaborate metaphors. Instead, the song finds beauty in love’s quieter moments, reminding listeners that romance doesn’t always have to arrive with fireworks to feel meaningful.

The late Onyeka Onwenu picked up a similar thread, but gave it more weight. Although she’s best known for “Wait for Me,” her wider catalogue consistently framed love as a partnership built on equality, mutual respect and shared purpose. That philosophy carried beyond her music and into her public life, where she championed women’s rights and social justice. Looking back, it’s difficult to separate the artist from the advocate because, for Onyeka, both seemed to be asking the same question: what does it really mean to build a better society, and what role should love play in it?

St. Janet: love unfiltered 

If the women before her broadened the emotional language of love, St. Janet challenged the idea that women had to be discreet about desire.

At a time when most mainstream female artists kept expressions of desire relatively restrained, St. Janet was pushing the boundaries of Yoruba juju with unapologetically explicit songs about sex and female pleasure. In an interview with This Day, she called it her own version of a feminist argument, pushing back on a scene where men could sing graphically about sex while women were mostly just the video vixens getting sung about. 

Listening to a St. Janet record for the first time can be surprisingly disorienting. Many of her songs begin with gospel choruses and music that sound almost devotional, creating the impression that you’re about to hear a deeply spiritual record. Then the song takes an unexpected turn, moving into vivid accounts of intimacy and sexual escapades with confidence that would catch first-time listeners completely off guard.

She was underground, unpolished, and arguably more sexually direct than any woman topping the charts today. Sit with that for a second, the most explicit expression of Nigerian women’s desire didn’t happen recently. It happened over a decade ago, without an audience big enough to give her credit for it.

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Tiwa Savage, Niniola and Yemi Alade: desire, but make it marketable

By the 2010s, the conversation around love had shifted again. Female artists were still singing about love and desire, but they were also becoming much more comfortable admitting that attraction could begin with us.

Tiwa’s “Wanted” may have dominated headlines because of its visuals, but it also centred a woman who was unapologetic about her own desire. She carried that same confidence into songs like “Sugarcane” and “Ma Lo,” where attraction was entirely hers to express. Looking back, it’s easy to forget how much of a conversation these songs sparked at the time. Yemi Alade approached love with a different energy. Whether she was chasing an emotionally unavailable man in “Johnny,” making her intentions clear in Ferrari or flirting through Tomato, the women in her songs didn’t anchor on the “hard to get” playbook.

Niniola, however, occupied a different lane where she never cared for subtlety. She leaned into Yoruba to explore sex and female pleasure with remarkable directness. Her songs, “Maradona,” “Magun,” and “Bana,” leave very little to the imagination, especially if you understand the language. She has built a catalogue where sex isn’t hidden behind metaphors or nervous euphemisms. It’s right there in the lyrics, delivered with the confidence of someone who knows she’s saying what plenty of women are thinking. In doing so, Niniola expanded the conversation once again, showing there was still room in Nigerian music for women to speak even more frankly about intimacy on their own terms.

This is the era that gets credited with starting female sexual agency in Nigerian pop, when really it was just the first version polished enough to be marketable and go global.

Ayra Starr, Fave, Tems and Qing Madi: love, but don’t lose yourself

A newer generation of artists approach love from a different place. Tems, Ayra Starr, Fave and Qing Madi still sang about romance, but they seemed just as interested in the women experiencing it.

Tems has built much of her catalogue around emotional honesty, and sometimes that honesty isn’t particularly romantic. With songs like “Damages” and “Burning,” she refuses to romanticise relationships that leave women depleted. 

Ayra Starr writes from a similarly self-assured place, but with a little more playfulness. In “Lagos Love Story” and “All the Love,” her music rarely suggests that a relationship should come at the expense of her dreams. You get the sense that if love works, great. If it doesn’t, life goes on.

Fave has always sounded like someone thinking out loud. Songs like “Beautifully” and “Mr Man” embrace uncertainty instead of rushing towards conclusions. She makes room for disappointment, longing and the emotional grey areas that often define modern dating.

Qing Madi brings that same emotional openness to a younger generation. Across songs like “Vision” and “Why,” she shows the excitement, confusion and occasional heartbreak that come with figuring love out in real time. 

None of these women is arguing that love doesn’t matter. If anything, they’re proving that it does. They simply write as though a romantic relationship is one part of a woman’s life rather than the centre of it, and that shift says a lot about the generation they’re speaking to.

The love song was never just a love song

Spend enough time listening to Nigerian female artists sing love songs and you’ll realise they’ve been saying the same things. Which is why a timeline like waiting to be chosen, then choosing yourself, wouldn’t work. These conversations have been running side by side for decades. Each generation just added another layer instead of erasing the one before it.

Maybe that’s because love was never only about romance to begin with. It’s always been a way to talk about respect, desire, identity, compromise, and freedom. So yes, one thing about Nigerian female artists stays true: they will sing about love. The melody changes, and the language may also switch, but the conversation just keeps getting richer.

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The post One thing about Nigerian female artists is that they’ll sing about love — here’s how they’ve expressed it through the decades appeared first on Marie Claire Nigeria.