AYINLA: THE MAN WHO BECAME A FILM

Photo: Tunde Kelani with Ayinla’s picture frame

It was in one of our nocturnal phone calls, the united meetings of owls, that Tunde Kelani (TK) of Mainframe Production, a larger-than-life film director, told me that his next movie would be on Ayinla Omowura. He had previously shot down my idea of a movie on Isaac Delano’s Aiye Daiye Oyinbo, saying that it could only work as a series. As he was talking, I started to play one of Omowura’s Apala’s songs for him. Two spirits became connected.

I grew up with Ayinla’s music in the early 1970s. It was not the songs that my school mates would listen to. Far from it! It was not the one we used in college parties. Never. It was the music in local bars, the street music, the favorite of the lumpen proletariat. Thank God, oil money was already spreading, and Ayinla benefited from it, as did his contemporaries. He did not need us, and our campuses were useless to him.

The conversation with Segun Odegbami would not have been possible without Ayinla. Neither would have been the movie. His music life was impactful, his career was robust. His ending, stabbed to death with a beer bottle, was tragic. Years later, I was to speak with the heroic nurse who attempted in vain to save his life. Blood loss was in volume. Broken veins were rivulets.

Who was he? Arguably one of the most prolific Yoruba indigenous musicians that ever lived is Ayinla Omowura. Born in 1933, when the colonial architecture was reaching its peak, Ayinla was groomed in an environment where the Yoruba people’s cultural framework faced torrential challenges coming from the waves of colonialism. The formative years of the man were spent learning the rudimentary world of his people, the beauty of the culture, and their language’s fecundity. Omowura, as popularly called, was internalizing the rubrics of the colonial institutions and how the Europeans had colored the Yoruba world by their systematically defined institutions. However, Ayinla would demonstrate that he understood the politics of representing cultural identity through his continuous delivery of breathtaking cultural episteme in his Yoruba songs. 

His greatness and artistry in the indigenous musical engagement are underscored by the audience he commanded and was still able to sustain even after four decades of bidding the world goodbye. There have been successions of indigenous musicians in Yoruba history, each of them coming and dying like a candlelight in a hurricane, but none of them has been able to build the cultural awareness whose foundation has been set up by the ingenuous Ayinla. 

Perhaps, the posthumous recognition accorded to the man is partly because of his musical dexterity; it is not contentious, however, that his vocalist competence and industry are the two qualities that keep him in the people’s memory. Ayinla Omowura’s youthful age was characterized by various social experiences, all of which shaped his perception and resolution in life. He grew up in a heavily competitive environment where the struggle for survival was considered the gateway to relevance. Without personally making extensive and extraneous efforts for one’s life, it was difficult to change one’s social status in Nigeria. Omowura was notably successful so much that the aura of his success was felt across the coastline of West African countries, especially in places where Yoruba was their linguistic heritage. His life became exemplary because it was full of intrigues and intricacies. His success story was not one without considerable challenges. He learned very fast and could develop a wide range of ideas from the activities of his environment. Because of these characteristics, he became the people’s choice as Ayinla could easily collapse social and political issues in his music to educate the public about their political direction. He was feared by some and also admired by many. Those who considered him a threat found his fame intimidating and realized he could achieve whatever he embarked on. 

Many successful persons across human history have had to encounter some challenges that became their major impediment at a point in time. The greatness in them usually does not also make them see the challenges as barricades; they consider them the necessary steps to climb in their growth course. Omowura belonged to this class of people. His youthful age was full of suspense as he was embroiled in the activities that made adulthood a worthwhile embarkation. Many people who do not go through the phase of heated competition and strive usually do not have portions of their existence to inspire suspense when their stories are rendered. Omowura experienced this.