Nigeria, Sept. 29 -- Last Thursday, the managers of the pop rave of the early 2000s, Danfo Drivers, announced that Mad Melon (Oghenemaro Emeofa), one half of the duo from Ajegunle, a suburb of Lagos famous for churching out sports and entertainment stars, died after a battle with an ailment suspected to be tuberculosis.

Mad Melon's death is a big dent on Nigeria's pop culture history. The nurseries that nurtured Nigeria's burgeoning pop culture that has become ubiquitous in entertainment scenes around the world was dug up and manured in the late 1990s and the early 2000s.

While Ajegunle was the pop culture Mecca of the era, the entire area around Apapa - a once upper-middle-class neighbourhood that stares at the Atlantic - was an incuba...