Onyeka Onwenu’s music will endure; we know this, and this is why we make this record for the affirmation of the future.
By Chimezie Chika
Endless Ballads of Love
Celebration. Romance. Light-hearted exchanges. Christianity. The themes go on and on. And in the music they emanate from, there is inescapable the aura of a fete, as if each song has been fashioned out of the heat of the moment to celebrate life—the soft and the cool life.
Onyeka Onwenu’s ballads draw lines of cheer and pleasure around society. There is hardly a note of sadness; the mood that surrounds the sometimes mid-tempo, sometimes calm Highlife beats, or the gentle love ditties and disses, is that of dance. As a result, listening to Onwenu’s songs, an overwhelming feeling of joy never seems to quite leave you, circling back ever-so-often to love, whatever the topic of the music might be. It is remarkable when music can evoke this power.
The widely popular 1984 record, “Iyogogo”, from the album, Onyeka!, is one of Onwenu’s quintessential ballads, spliced with the lyric patterns and prosodies of traditional African music, especially Igbo folk music. The song tells many seemingly unconnected micro-stories within its chorus of Kai jee na nke Bishop na five akuola/ Let us go to the Bishop’s house because it is five o’clock.
This is how the song begins and it goes on like this for a while, as if each line is unconnected to the next. But what we understand eventually as the song gets into its rhythm by the middle is this is a love ballad. In its joyous cadences, listeners find its phrases and repetitions able to replicate the exciting world of romance.
“Ekwe”, from the same album, stretches its folk roots in Igbo music to the limits. Anybody who had grown up in rural Igboland would easily understand where that song came from. It is a song whose style, rhythm, and lyrics were spun off Igbo folk songs, typically recited by young girls, during moonlight play, for their wooers or potential wooers.
Here again, we find lineated micro folk stories bracketed by Onyeka Onwenu’s larger meaning in a song that is more or less a lovers’ quarrel—a diss song, so to speak. The storytelling aspect makes it supple enough to fit into any occasion. This is why her music has endured as songs for celebratory events.
Onwenu’s music has evolved over time. She had begun her career as a pop singer. Her second album, Endless Life (1982)—a classic admixture of pop, soul, and reggae/funk—is an inimitable testament to her vocal powers and musical versatility. Not a lot of musicians enjoy the gifts of Onwenu’s range in music and musical genres. From the pop rhythms of “Endless Life”, the folk ballads that marked much of her music to her gospel songs, Onwenu possessed a peculiar talent in which she seemed able to do anything she wanted; she was not limited to genre; her music bestrode different genres with the same ease and grace.
In the 1980’s and 1990’s, her music was extremely popular and she enjoyed the adoration of celebrity life that few in those years of military rule could boast. Her music though maintained that sensations of love (remember, “Wait for Me”, her classic duet with King Sunny Ade)—an endless message of love that seems to enjoin people to love without reserve and to inure one’s self completely into the wiles and bumps of what it means to love humans, God, and life.
Onyeka Onwenu, Entertaining Life
The life Onyeka Onwenu lived was marked by a multiplicity of interests. Emerging from the protection of an upper-middle-class upbringing and higher education in the United States, she slotted in immediately into Nigerian public affairs through her musical and modelling career, her work as a broadcaster, and her foray into politics, serving on different occasions as director of the National Center for Women Development and the chairperson of the Imo State Council of Arts and Culture. Her precedence in public affairs seems to come from her politician father, who died when she was just four.
Onwenu’s popularity in the 1980s and 1990s seems to not just be a result of her productive musical endeavours; as with all celebrities, there is a lot of cult following and idolising that attended her physical appearance. Her beauty was courted publicly by the high-ranking members of the ruling junta. She seemed to have exuded a Marilynn Monroe-like persona in that sense.
But Onwenu was a woman who entertained love not just in music but also in her life. She talked a lot about it publicly and her presence, the very air around her, seemed primed to exude love for life easily. Her 1991 song, “Dancing in the Sun” precipitates these personalities, or, in a way, is her manifesto to having embraced the contradiction that comes with being a public figure.
Perhaps, this is why she became an actress, to give free rein to the many personalities she could inhabit. Her performance in the film, Half of a Yellow Sun (2013), an adaptation of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novel of the same name, remains one the most memorable performances of her acting career.
Elegant Stallion
Often called “elegant stallion” for her beauty and talent, Onyeka Onwenu made music that resonated with the society she lived in. She inimitably incorporated Igbo idioms and folklore into the secular soul and highlife. Her fame was made from the ballads that have become a common feature of parties and society events. It seems to be a lesson in artistic endurance for the musicians of the future. The peculiar quality that her music possessed was a certain combination of light-heartedness and profundity.
The music still plays on. The end of a life is not the end of the music. The music accompanies the dead as well as the living. Ekwe is among the instruments. There are guitars and pianos too. It could be anywhere too: moonlight play in a rural town in Imo or a wedding in Lagos. Onyeka Onwenu’s music will endure; we know this, and this is why we make this record for the affirmation of the future.
Chimezie Chika’s short stories and essays have appeared in or forthcoming from, amongst other places, The Republic, The Shallow Tales Review, Terrain.org, Iskanchi Mag, Isele Magazine, Lolwe, Fahmidan Journal, Efiko Magazine, Dappled Things, and Afrocritik. He is the fiction editor of Ngiga Review. His interests range from culture, history, to art, literature, and the environment. You can find him on Twitter @chimeziechika1.