Niyi Osundare, top, and Jimi Solanke

(Maestro with a Thousand Masks)

By Niyi Osundare  

                                    I

The last time we met

 Our laughter rang through the concert hall

The evening was young, with you readying up

     For a long expected show

Your crowd was large and young and old

     But their ageless longing

Rode the crest of the wind as you

     Swung and swayed in your purple moments

You sighted me from a distance

     Ploughed through the fold

To meet me in the threshold of

     Of a wide and busy door.

A warm embrace, then our customary question:

     “When shall we have the collabo?”*

A cryptic code over thirty years old

     Born when Songs of the Season

Made its first few outings

     On the tabloid platform

“A-niyee, those are good poems-

     We must aid their spread

With collaborative performance”. . . .

     The Generals’ iron grip undid our plan

But “collabo” survived with its conspiratorial abbreviation

     Now, alas, my Collabo Maestro has taken his last bow

                II

The Total Artist that you were/are

    That voice and the divinity of its honey

Its surprise-studded soprano

     Its clear command of reverence

The supple fluidity of your body

     When talkative drums sent

Your legs on errands and your hands

     Ruffled the rafters in their tender places

The smoothness of your motion

     The magic of your movement

When your maestro wonder burst the chart

     And Onilegogoro** roared into the clouds

That was when Highlife was high life

    And all Stars knew their niche

In the galaxy of celestial Lights

     Before the blinding blackout by Eating Chiefs

Then stage-centre

     In the measured melody of The Chattering

And the Song; Ovoramwe, regal victim

     Of imperial hubris; Elesin’s boundless bravura

And the deadly twilight of Kurumi’s*** uncanny courage….

     Light on, fade out, and black out

Your masks were many, the stage was your home

     The cyclorama loomed large behind your shadows

III            

Music and purposive mischief

     Talent and its tempting torture

That impatience with settled laws

     Which painted Liberty in lurid letters

You argued with the clock

     Queried old songs with new stanzas

Tutored ancient drums with daring steps

     As if your leg was the chosen stick

On their patient membrane.

     You chanted folklore into folklaw

Pressed idle Memory into busy banter

     Converted sleepy legends into urgent summons

Your eyes always on the young

     Who pampered ignorance into trendy fancy

Torturing native names into meaningless appellations

     Swearing in the temples of foreign gods

Songtime

     Storyland

How so valiant your striving to mend the leak

     To call on our Past to address our Future

Farewell, Olujimi Omo Solanke

     Tell the Langbodo forebears**** over there

Our feet are set on the increasingly steep climb

     Our eyes on the prize still beyond our gaze

—————-

* Three times Jimi and I tried to meet and plan the collaboration, but our effort was thwarted each time by disruptions caused by the military juntas that had Nigeria in their stranglehold in that period.

** A chartbuster highlife record by Roy Chicago in the sixties. Jimi Solanke was reputed to have authored  the lyrics.

***  Reference to four important plays that had Jimi Solanke as main feature: The Chattering and the Song, a stupendously lyrical play by Femi Osofian; Ovoramwen Nogbaisi and Kurumi  by Ola Rotimi; Death and the King’s Horseman by Wole Soyinka.

**** Langbodo forebears: the late D.O. Fagunwa and Wale Ogunyemi:  the former’s fiction  gave us Oke Langbodo, while the latter used it as both trope and title for a pan-Nigerian, pan-African epic drama.