Okosuns, Sonny

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Sonny Okosuns

1947-2008

Musician, minister

Nigerian singer-songwriter Sonny Okosuns was a pioneer of African liberation music, the songs of social protest that gave voice to native political movements on the continent. His work influenced a generation of musicians, both in Africa and around the world. Douglas Martin described Okosuns's style in the New York Times as "a catchy, rock-inflected cocktail of funk, reggae, Afrobeat and more…. The result was a zestful, funky strand in what has come to be called world music." At the time of his death in 2008 Okosuns was working on material for what would have been his fortieth album.

Okosuns's family name was originally "Okosun"—he later added the "s" himself. He was born on the first day of 1947 in Benin City, Nigeria, into a family of Esan ethnicity. The Esan, sometimes referred to as "Ishan" in the West, were one of the larger groups in Edo State, in which Benin City served as the provincial capital. Okosuns childhood was a time of extreme poverty, he told the writer Ogbonna Amadi in an Africa News Service interview. "We ate rice four times a year. Whenever my father collected his salary and he is not owing anybody, we ate rice. At Christmas, we ate rice and the final rice we'd eat will be in the new year."

Okosuns's parents belonged to a Pentecostal Christian sect called the Eternal Sacred Order of the Cherubim and Seraphim Church, which had been founded during the 1920s by Moses Orimolade Tunolase, later called Baba Aladura. Okosuns's family later moved to Enugu, also known as Coal City because it was the center of Nigeria's coal-mining industry, and his formal schooling ended after just a few years. A fan of Western rock music, he taught himself to play the guitar and learned the songs of Elvis Presley and the Beatles. In 1965, at age eighteen, Okosuns joined the Eastern Nigerian Theatre, a drama troupe that was invited to perform at the Commonwealth Arts Festival in London in the summer of 1965. Back in Nigeria, he formed a cover band called the Postmen, and after 1969 performed regularly with Victor Uwaifo, a popular Nigerian singer-songwriter a few years his senior. Uwaifo was a pioneer in a style of music known by the interchangeable terms "highlife" or joromi and described in the Guardian by Graeme Ewens as a "hugely popular form of west African dance music characterised by blazing horns and complex, interweaving guitar melodies."

Okosuns's second band, founded in 1972, was originally called Paperback Ltd. but he soon changed the name to Ozziddi, which meant "message" in the Igbo language. Ozziddi's exuberant highlife sounds were bolstered by infusions of reggae, the West Indian music that was also a form of social protest. Okosuns sang in Esan, Igbo, Hausa, and Yoruba. He recorded most of his thirty-nine albums in Nigeria, which had a thriving musical scene during the 1960s before a devastating civil war and series of military coups. He attained immense fame, and "Ozzidism, as it came to be known, evolved into a personal pan-African philosophy of liberation," wrote Ewens. In 1981 he gave a concert in London—where his 1977 LP, Ozziddi for Sale, had been recorded the famed Abbey Road studios of the EMI label—and among the attendees was Sally Mugabe, wife of Zimbabwean leader Robert Mugabe. As a result, Okosuns was invited to perform at Zimbabwe's first anniversary independence celebrations in Harare, the capital of what had until recently been the white-controlled enclave called Rhodesia.

Liberation music—and Okosuns's—was already focused on South Africa, the remaining holdout of white power on the African continent. His 1977 song "Fire in Soweto" was a blistering attack on apartheid, South Africa's system of segregation, and though it was banned by the government there it nevertheless became a massive underground hit in black townships. Another track from that same year, "Papa's Land," also reflected the dire situation for blacks in South Africa. Other songs he recorded paid homage to Nelson Mandela, the jailed South African leader of African National Congress.

Holy Wars, released in 1978, featured protest songs from Okosuns that reflected the wider struggle for independence across all of southern Africa, including Mozambique. In 1985 he took part in a benefit record along with several well-known musical stars in the West—among them Run-D.M.C., Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, and Miles Davis—under the collective name Artists United Against Apartheid. The song, "Sun City," referred to an infamous luxury resort that catered to white South Africans but was located in a nominally independent black homeland.

With the end of apartheid in the early 1990s, liberation music's popularity died out, and Okosuns's record sales—which rarely reflected his success anyway, because pirated music was so rampant across Africa at the time—began to flag. He turned to Christianity in 1993, billing himself anew as "Evangelist Sunny Okosuns," and began releasing gospel albums. Songs of Praise, from 1994, reportedly sold 500,000 copies in Nigeria and other countries. In 1998 he founded his own church, the House of Prayer Ministries, out of his home in Lagos, Nigeria's largest city. He had several wives and many more children, and some of the young people who came to stay at his home legally took his surname. One of his legitimate daughters graduated from Pace University in the New York City area in May of 2008, and Okosuns traveled there for the commencement ceremony. Already ill from colon cancer, his health took a turn for the worse, and he died on May 24, 2008, at Howard University Hospital in Washington, DC. He was eulogized in both the Western media and back in Nigeria. Nseobong Okon-Ekong of the Africa News Service wrote of the worldwide appeal of Okosuns and his music, noting that "to his people in Edo State, he was a worthy son who unashamedly borrowed from the common local culture, propagating their folk tales and proverbs to a wider audience. To Nigerians, he tried to cut the image of an all-Nigerian personality who cared for the greater good."

At a Glance …

Born Francis Sonny Okosun, on January 1, 1947, in Benin City, Nigeria; died on May 24, 2008, in Washington, DC; married several times; children: Sydney, Michael, Ebony, Adesuwa, and others. Religion: Evangelical Christian.

Career: Actor and performer with the Eastern Nigerian Theatre after 1965; formed first band, the Postmen, 1966; after 1969 performed with Victor Uwaifo; formed the band Paperback Ltd., 1972, and later renamed it Ozziddi; recorded gospel albums in the 1990s under the name "Evangelist Sunny Okosuns"; founded the House of Prayer Ministries, 1998.