Ayinla omowura biography of christopher

This book is a narrative of the life and times of one of the most profound and unarguably, one of the most original Yoruba musicians of post-colonial Nigeria. Murdered in a barroom brawl in Abeokuta, Ogun State in 1980, Ayinla Omowura, forty years after his untimely passage, has refused to die, both in the consciousness of the people of southwest Nigeria, even elsewhere, as well as in the hearts and on the lips of the people.

The book plots the graph of Omowura’s youth, his musicality, family, the fatality of his early departure, and events that led to his death. From the lens of family, friends, his songs, and relics of people who interfaced with him while alive, a narrative is constructed here about the short life of music and society that Ayinla lived. He was a lay scholar, an ombudsman, autodidact, and carrier of the cultural burden of his Yoruba people. Having tasted life in pre and post-colony, the latter being a time when there was beginning to appear noticeable conflicts between traditional life and modernity, Ayinla taught with his music that the latter could only exist if the values of the former are embedded into it.

Having lived a rough life at youth and now, thrust to the top of society by fame and cash in his later life, Ayinla never recovered from the conflict this posed. He didn’t really realize the enormous roles expected of his catapult to the top of high society. This, in part, was responsible for his early tragic exit.

Festus Adedayo

Eyin eyan yi, ti nba ti wa ku nko? (You these people, what if I had died?).” That was how celebrated drummer, Alhaji Rahman Adewole, aka Oniluola – one who drums self into wealth – welcomed my crew and me to his house on May 24, 2019. In Oniluola’s home that midday, I didn’t see wealth at all. I met him poor, very poor.

Oniluola’s death on Tuesday marked an almost total closure of the legends behind the genre of traditional Yoruba African music called Apala, popularised by late Ayinla Omowura. Oniluola was the lead drummer of that leading Yoruba musician. Killed on May 6, 1980 in a barroom squabble.

Omowura and Adewole were the musical twin who popularised that genre. While Omowura passed on at the age of 47, Oniluola died last week at 97.

In writing the book, Ayinla Omowura: Life And Times of An Apala Legend (2020), authored by me, it was almost inconceivable that a biography of the musical legend, Omowura, could be written without Oniluola’s voice. In the bid to get to him, my crew (consisting of Waheed Ganiyu and Idris Oderinde) and me booked several appointments that spanned almost a year, which failed to materialise due to our inability to get to Abeokuta, Ogun State, where he lived. To be specific, I was the author of that failure due to my busy schedule. The nonagenarian and I spoke on phone about twice before our eventual meeting and he always underscored how time was of the essence, saying that having advanced in age, the Creator could call him to eternity anytime.

Though we had booked an appointment for that day, it was apparent that the aged drummer didn’t believe us, having serially failed to honour previous ones. And off to the Kesi area of Abeokuta, Isale Itoko we went. We had an anchor, a drummer as well, who was our link to him, who led us to what eventually looked like a shack that served as the drummer’s home.

Baba Adewole’s house was inaccessible to vehicles, so we had to park our car at a distance to where he

A Book Review of Festus Adedayo’s Ayinla Omowura: Life and Times of an Apala Legend

I.

Alhaji Ayinla Omowura was killed in a beer parlour brawl on May 6, 1980 in Ago Ika, Abeokuta.

Aged 47 at time of death, he was an apala musician at the height of his powers. He had waxed about 20 albums for EMI records to both critical and commercial acclaim. He had also acquired wealth from his concerts and so owned houses and luxury cars, married wives, sired children and was effectively, an accomplished man.

So how did he end up in a brawl and why did he meet such a violent death? This is the concern of this 537 page book, a communal biography, if you like, of one of Apala’s most successful practitioners.

The book’s premise is reminiscent of a historical crime thriller and the scintillating minutiae of the late crooner’s life fills this book. It takes the amorphous mould of a retrospective inquiry sometimes, an ethnomusicological survey at other times, but there is, always, an anthropological post-colonial outlook of the working class of the ancient city of Abeokuta.

Told entirely through interviews of different sources clustered around similar themes, it is the duty of the reader to piece together all the granular and sometimes contradictory details to make a sense of what those who knew the man, Ayinla Omowura, thought he really was.

His wives, children, band members, associates, siblings, contemporaries, friends, admirers and even detractors all offer their refrains to the chorus: who was Ayinla Omowura? And as expected, their stories are varied, hyperbolic, self-serving but always coalescing towards the undisputable details regarding his life and times.

II.

Apala music is a variant of traditional Yoruba music popular in the colonial and immediate post-colonial period. Its exact origin remains debatable but there is a consensus around its shared origin with were, sakara and fuji as Islamic music that developed from “a mu