For Femi Esho and Oba Femi Ogunleye
Last week, Nigeria lost two of its most illustrious sons ever. First to depart for higher glory was Femi Esho, aka Esh Baba, musician, raconteur and indefatigable cultural entrepreneur who together with a few die-hard aficionados pioneered the revival of Highlife music as a national brand and the signature tune of Nigeria’s sophisticated, upwardly mobile post-independence middle class. Following quickly on his heels was Oba Femi Ogunleye, former PR impresario and frontline journalist, who made a seamless transition to revered royalty as the Towulade of Akinale in Ogun State.
It was said that his royal eminence joined his ancestors in faraway London. Among the Yoruba people, retribution for the breach of traditional protocol particularly where the rites and right of passage of a notable ruler are concerned can be very severe indeed. Not knowing how to handle an unfolding royal transition without inviting heavy traditional reprisals, yours sincerely can only wish the late Oba a happy ascent to the royal continuum at this point in time.
By a strange coincidence, the last time this columnist met Oba Ogunleye was also at a funeral some years back at the Orile Wasinmi ancestral homestead of the Odegbami clan. As we committed the remains of Dele Odegbami, aka Bad Meat, Segun Odegbami’s older brother, to mother earth, the late Oba suddenly materialized from an adjoining bush path: no car, no convoy, no horse-drawn carriage, no appurtenances of royalty, only a solitary companion and a heavy hint of Yoruba supersonic sorcery. The mist and mystery partially lifted when the Oba explained that his domain was actually next door and he just decided to take a walk to be with us.
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Meanwhile, the grim reaper continues its relentless devastations among a particular generation of Nigerians who can be said to have seen it all. It is harsh and unsparing, recognizing neither past achievements nor current distinctions. Our old teacher at the then University of Ife, Lasisi Olusola Soile, put it with haunting lucidity: “At least the Roman Empire lasted a thousand years. But in my lifetime I have witnessed the rise and fall of Nigeria”.
That was in 1984, exactly forty years ago during General Buhari’s first coming. Soile, a first class brain and a finer gentleman with the milk of human kindness flowing through him, had trudged into the office we both briefly shared completely deflated after fruitlessly hunting for what was then known as essential commodities. It was a novel humiliation of the Nigerian middle class, particularly its salaried professoriate.
Soile passed on a few years after. If he were to be alive, what would he be thinking of the current circumstance of the nation, poignantly presaged by the second coming of the selfsame General Buhari now that the real thing seems to have arrived? Or could it be we still haven’t seen nothing yet? The limits we always thought was the ultimate limit often turn out not to be the limit at all but remarkable milestones in the saga of human endurance.
But while the tragic turns and twists continue, the clock of history also ticks away with cruel and merciless precision, like the ornate contraption in Gregor Samsa’s morbidly tidy bedroom. Just because a person has woken up to discover that he has been transformed into a giant beetle doesn’t mean that the clock must stop, or that life must not continue. The evening of life must come. Night hovers like an unrelenting vulture circling its prey and waiting for the appointed hour to pounce. This is the fate that has overtaken the two illustrious Nigerians, cultural entrepreneur and respected Yoruba royalty.
The news of Femi Esho’s death was broken to me by another Femi, this time Olufemi Macaulay, a versatile columnist on the daily edition of this newspaper and former student of yours sincerely at the old University of Ife in the early eighties. As readers of this column would have gleaned on one or two occasions, Femi is the archetypal former student from hell. Totally irreverent, he would sometimes barge into the office of his former teacher cracking outlandish jokes.
An earlier obsession was his insistence that there were more than enough similarities of facial features between the columnist and Kylian Mbappe to suggest a furtive sowing of wild oats, despite the fact that it is well-known that the outstanding footballer is the product of a union between a Cameroonian father and a mother of Algerian extraction. Luckily, it has so far escaped Macaulay that there is a young Black player in the current Spanish squad at the European Cup who goes by the same surname as the writer with the tag junior ominously appended.
Yours sincerely had introduced Femi Esho and Femi Macaulay to each other and one was soon left completely out of the equation. Both are free spirits and can be regarded as artists without border. There was a sublime disdain for arid conventionality and robotic regulation about the two of them which made them sworn enemies of formal sartorial compliance and the hankering after bourgeois respectability so beloved of Nigeria’s educated classes. As sworn enemies of uniformity each went ahead to create his own peculiar and unique uniform.
In the case of Esho, it was a free-flowing often snow white garment which looked like a cross between the Senagalese dungaree and the Islamic jalamia. He often donned this while performing on stage his endless repertoire of ancient highlife tunes with relish and boyish enthusiasm. With his lavish, luxuriant white beard giving him a unique persona, Esh Baba was indeed an enigmatic wonder, a saxophone-blowing highlife guru.
Ijesha-born, Samuel Babafemi Esho, despite his modish distaste for convention, was a quintessential gentleman and an omoluwabi to boot in the Yoruba sense of that word. Courteous, unflappable, unfailingly polite to both young and old, he was also generous to a fault and with a deep streak of humanity which made him compulsively solicitous of other people’s wellbeing ahead of his own paltry needs and meager requirements. In his later years, the only luxury he permitted himself was an endless supply of groundnut and the occasional bottle of Stout.
It was many years ago on a pleasant Muslim holiday that Femi Macaulay and spouse dropped by the house only to meet Esho and one of his aides already ensconced. As usual, the grandfather of highlife revival in Nigeria was dishing out anecdotes after anecdotes about Nigeria’s musical history and behind the scene subterfuges. My favourite was when Baba Esh once went on air to enumerate the influence and indeed the origin of Nigerian highlife in the Ghanaian medley of the same name.
Esho thought he was doing a yeoman’s job clarifying musical history for posterity. He did not reckon with an old hero of highlife music in Nigeria and one of its most adulated and garlanded icons who had been testily listening in on the programme. When his patience was exhausted by the iconoclast, the old man charged furiously at both producer and guest berating Esho for trying to disrobe a sacred and bi-centennial egungun. Esho duly apologized but not out of conviction.
That was Femi Esho, the pacifist who could not hurt a fly and was always ready to let go in the interest of peace even when he was in the right. He was as sweet-tempered and as amiable as they come which made him such an excellent company. One now remembers that as the morning of that Muslim holiday glided into afternoon with Fela’s classic humming in the background and after freezing bottles of Stout had dissolved the customary reserve and polite reticence, the whole place erupted into much dancing and revelry which suggested protracted immersions at the old Shrine. The Macaulay spouse was quite a revelation.
Anybody familiar with Esho’s musical gallery first when it was located in Somolu and later at the tail end of Adeniran Ogunsanya in Surulere would have witnessed the same scene. They were both Meccas of musical wayfarers, brimming with ancient tapes, arcane gramophones and rare archival musical renditions often captured on strange gadgets and superannuated equipment with Esho himself darting from one room to the other like a moving museum.
Esho was an encyclopedia of Africa music. No notable musical career escaped his keen attention. It was from him that one learnt that Theophilus Iwalokun,aka Theo Baba, the late much beloved Ilaje crooner, was actually a fisherman who spent his spare time entertaining friends with a box guitar and his sonorous voice until he was persuaded to go professional. If you also want to know what became of who or what happened to who in the fractious and ever combustible Nigeria’s entertainment industry, Esho was the go to person. To the best of our knowledge, nobody has ever contradicted his postulations.
The late entrepreneur was an important bridge in the technological transformation of the Nigerian musical scene from the age of cassettes and spooling tapes to the age of chips and microchips that could deliver music for hours on end without any cumbersome gadgets or ponderous contraptions. Towards the end, these disruptive innovations almost proved fatal to Esho rendering his modest empire very vulnerable to the ferocious backlash of advances in the field. Despite the obvious setback and the reality of failing health combining with advancing years, the great man remained his cheery and polite self.
Music was Babafemi Esho’s first love and lasting obsession. This must not be forgotten because Esho had ample opportunities to pursue other interests. Not many people would believe that he was a principal private secretary to the first military governor of Lagos State, Brigadier Mobolaji Johnson. But he chose music above everything else. It was as if he was being guided by a divine path seeker. His invaluable contributions to the industry will not be forgotten. May his noble soul rest in peace.
