By Folorunso Fatai Adisa
Back in the days of Apala music, the stage was not only a place of entertainment but an arena of intellect and pride. The musicians were performers; they were also philosophers, poets and social commentators, all rolled into one. Each sought to outshine the other through rhythm, melody, sophistication and the artful display of learning. The one who could sing in English, even briefly, earned a badge of honour, a small declaration of worldliness that elevated his craft and expanded his following.
Haruna Ishola, the maestro of melody, once sang of a journey to London, weaving a line of English into his Yoruba to signal that he had seen the wider world and returned unscathed. Ayinla Omowura, ever the bolder and fierier counterpart, matched him in flair and wit. In his song “25×40,” he taunted rival musicians for reaching too eagerly for the coloniser’s tongue, before delivering, in his own broken English, the line that has outlived him: “When there is life, there is hope.”
He meant it exactly as it sounds, and the imperfection of his English did nothing to weaken the force of what he was saying. Beneath the humour of his phrasing lay the gravity of resilience. It was not merely a line of consolation. It was a philosophy of endurance, delivered through the raw poetry of the everyday man, a man who had never sat in a colonial classroom and did not need to.
There is something worth sitting with in the fact that Ayinla reached for English at the very moment he was mocking others for reaching for it. He understood, perhaps better than his rivals, that English in that era was not simply a colonial import to be used or ignored. It was social currency. A man who could produce even a fragment of it, however mangled, was announcing that he had touched the wider world, that his horizons extended beyond the market square and the palm-wine bar. This was not vanity alone. It was a response to a hierarchy the musicians themselves had not built. Colonial administration and, later, the postcolonial state had already decided that fluency in English marked a man as educated, exposed and worth listening to in the rooms where decisions were made. The Apala men were not creating that hierarchy. They were performing within it, and performing it back to the very audiences it excluded.
That is the irony worth naming. The wisdom Ayinla offered his listeners, the idea that life itself is grounds enough for hope, required no English at all. It was already whole in Yoruba, already carried by proverb and by the long oral tradition his own art descended from. He did not need “when there is life, there is hope” to make the thought true. He needed it, or believed he needed it, to make the thought carry the weight of the wider world’s approval. The deepest truths in his catalogue arrived in Yoruba. The badge of honour arrived in English. That two things could be true at once, that a man’s own language already contained everything he needed to say, while a foreign tongue still conferred the prestige to say it publicly, tells you something enduring about the Nigerian relationship with English that has never fully resolved itself.
It has not resolved itself today either, only changed its stage. Listen to how a Nigerian newsreader’s accent shifts the moment the camera is on. Watch how a Nollywood script reaches for English dialogue at its most dramatic moments, as though grief or fury said in English carries more weight than the same words said in Igbo or Yoruba or Hausa. Notice how a politician code-switches mid-speech at a market rally, dropping into English for the line he most wants quoted in the next day’s papers. The mechanism Ayinla and Ishola were working within a half-century ago is still the mechanism running underneath much of Nigerian public performance: the vernacular carries the truth, and English carries the credibility. We have simply moved the stage from the Apala arena to the television studio and the campaign platform.
This should trouble us a little, not because English has no place in Nigerian life, but because the hierarchy itself was never ours. We inherited a language ranking system built by people who needed a way to sort the colonised into administrators and labourers, and we have spent a century treating that ranking as though it described something true about intelligence or sophistication rather than something imposed by conquest and consolidated by the schoolroom. Ayinla Omowura, singing to market women and lorry drivers who had never left Abeokuta, already knew things about endurance that no English education could have taught him. He reached for English anyway, because the world he lived in had already told him that his own tongue, however wise, was not quite enough on its own.
The generous reading is that the Apala men were doing something more interesting than just genuflecting to prestige. They were using English as an instrument in the same way they used a talking drum or an agidigbo, borrowing a foreign sound to extend the range of an art form that remained, at its core, unmistakably Yoruba. Ishola’s brief line about London does not make his music English. It makes his music worldly on his own terms, a Yoruba man declaring that the wider world was his to visit and comment on, not merely to be summoned by. Read that way, the reach for English becomes less a surrender to colonial hierarchy and more an act of appropriation, taking the coloniser’s badge and wearing it as an ornament on a garment that remained entirely one’s own.
Both readings can be true simultaneously, and Nigerian public life has never fully decided between them. We still have not settled whether English fluency marks genuine cosmopolitanism or inherited insecurity, whether the newsreader’s shifted accent is professionalism or self-erasure, whether the politician’s mid-speech pivot to English is strategy or shame. Ayinla Omowura, without ever framing it as an argument, left us the clearest possible example of the tension: a man secure enough in his own tongue to mock his rivals for chasing English, and yet not quite secure enough to resist reaching for it himself, in the very same breath, for the line he most wanted remembered.
Perhaps that is the more honest inheritance. Not the comfortable claim that our languages need no foreign validation, which the musicians’ own behaviour contradicts, but the harder admission that even our proudest cultural voices have carried, for a century now, two competing instincts at once: the confidence to know their own wisdom is complete, and the residual anxiety that tells them to say it once more, badly, in someone else’s language, just to be sure it was heard.
Happy Sunday to you all.
