7. HOW CAN AFFECTION BE ACCIDENT?

In the Autumn of 2017, I was in a car with the busiest man in literature, Kwame Dawes. We were heading to Amherst College for a seminar on digital literary magazines. The night before, I had gifted him (bless him, he insisted on paying) a copy of my second book of poems, A Woman’s Body is a Country.

On that journey, as American vegetation sped past, I said something about not having another book of poems in me. Kwame could hardly contain his anger. I still remember the avuncular manner he scolded me. He said I was chatting utter rubbish.

Indeed, I was chatting utter rubbish. Fast forward to 2019. Everything around me unhinging, uncoupling, un-fucking-doing! It is impossible to relive all that happened in a newsletter and what would be the point? I wrote the book already. It is called Affection & Other Accidents. It is my third volume of poems. And Kwame Dawes was right; I had another book of poems in me after all.

A recurring motif in Affection & Other Accidents is transition, a state of flux typified by a moving train, countryside racing past, my favourite songs drumming in my ears reassuringly. A good number of the poems in this book were written in transit, or while sitting at a train station waiting for the next train. Indeed, the major event that provoked this book occurred in a train coach.

A writer friend, having read this book, wrote, “Beautiful! Reminds me of Ted Hughes’s Birthday Letters. Explicit, evocative, gut wrenching. Hmmmm. This is vulnerability writ large, in elevated language too.”

Order, here. And that is an order.

Is Ambrose Campbell Juju’s Best Kept Secret?

Before Sunny Ade was crowned king, he was a minion in the annals of juju music. Of course, he had forebears and he is always quick to pay obeisance. Ade’s first band was named Green Spots, a tribute to IK Dairo, that Ijesha man and key figure in modern juju music whose band called Blue Spots.

Naysayers may ask, how can juju be modern? Before juju affirmed itself as a genre, it was called juju roots, that variant of palmwine music deployed for evening relaxation by the working class men. In 1939 at the burial of a prominent Lagosian, Dr Sapara, Tunde King, another key figure in the juju roots pantheon, would perform—perhaps this is the first instance of juju’s entry into elite circles.

Interestingly, Ernest Tunde Nightingale, a contemporary of IK Dairo, would be the better known ‘Tunde’, who introduced the phrase, Owambe. This phrase was clinched by Yoruba elites to describe their vibrant parties which have now moved from open-air to air-conditioned halls.  Sunny Ade in his legendary live performances would occasionally switch into a medley of Nightingale songs, fired by delirious guitar solos and responses. Ade may have lost the nasal quality to his voice, but Nightingale’s influence in his 70s oeuvre is unmistakable.

Enter Ambrose Campbell. According to Ade’s contemporary, Idowu Animashaun (better known as Apola King) Campbell emigrated to England as a stowaway in the late 40s (his short biography littering the internet  remember his sojourn differently however).

According to Wikipedia, he formed the first Black band with Hughes Brewster called West African Rhythm Brothers in the late 40s and were the resident band at Abalabi Club in Soho's Berwick Street. Although his story was loosely fictionalised in Colin MacInnes’ City of Spades, Campbell inspired a cohort of  younger juju musicians in the 60s. Animashaun confirmed that himself, Chief Commander Ebenezer Obey and King Sunny Ade all sampled Campbell’s records for some of their classic tunes.

Sunny Ade’s 1974 LP E Kilo F’Omode portrays a young artist’s existential angst but it was also a homage to an unsung master, Ambrose Campbell. Ebenezer Obey’s philosophical ditty Eni Ri Kan He has its foundation in Campbell’s rocksteady rendition.

Christopher Alan Waterman’s  seminal book Juju: A Social History and Ethnography of an African Popular Music does not mention Ambrose Campbell perhaps because he resided in England till the early 70s when he moved to America. Campbell (born 1919) alongside his younger contemporaries Tunde Nightingale (born 1922) and IK Dairo (born 1930) are the modern juju troika who inspired those who took juju to its highest point.

The fall of juju is another kettle of fish.