18 Jun 2009 |
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Bongos Ikwe and Idoma Cultural Cosmopolitanism Moses Ebe Ochonu  Recently, I had the distinct privilege of meeting a musical idol of mine, the irrepressible Bongos Ikwue. I sat in on his rehearsal for a concert he gave in Abuja last month. I was a first row witness to a reenactment of the legend’s signature songs, which were interspersed with sumptuous new compositions that are coalescing into an album to be released soon. After the rehearsal, Bongos gave me an exclusive taste of some of the songs in his evolving album. I also met his backups—his two talented daughters, who, like their father, have taken to music as a calming, refreshing sideshow to their professional and educational engagements. It was the highpoint of my visit to Otukpo, our common ancestral urban center. Bongos Ikwue has come full circle. After taking a detour from his musical habitat to fulfill his professional calling as an engineer, he is back to the turf on which he amassed his overpowering—and enduring—cultural capital. He is back to composing and performing. That should hearten a generation of Nigerians who were culturally nurtured by the literary and pedagogical pleasures of his timeless musical compositions. There are two audiences for Bongos’ musical genre, a unique alchemy of folk, country, and jazzy sounds, smoothly integrated to offer inspiring songs that soothe as they morally instruct. He courts and satisfies both audiences, transitioning dexterously between satisfying two fairly diverse appetites for the philosophical treasures he communicates through music. In a sense he has had to translate his own musical products and the philosophical nuggets encased in them to and from two different linguistic formations: Idoma and English. He has been his own literary translator, which is an uncommon feat in the arts. It is a mark of his cosmopolitan literary sensibilities that he has navigated this tension without losing much in translation and without displacing his two loyal groups of artistic interlocutors. On one side, there are the connoisseurs of locally produced Afro-Nigerian sounds who have celebrated and lapped up Bongos’ English language offerings. “What’s gonna be is gonna be,” “Amen,” and the iconic television soundtrack, “Cock Crow at Dawn,” were staples that lubricated the moods of Bongos’ pan-Nigerian, cosmopolitan followers.  Then there are Bongos’ Idoma kinsfolk, for whom his Idoma language musical renderings offer an experience deeper than an ephemeral musical pleasure. To the Idoma, Bongos was at once a griot in the most pristine tradition of African cultural repositories and a philosopher offering intimate communions with the rhythms and dramas of the Idoma world. For those of us who by choice or parental compulsion or suasion were culturally nurtured on Bongos’ stream of musical wisdoms, listening to his Idoma language songs transported one to a symbolic world that was pure and ennobling, distant yet realizable. Bongos was a philosopher, our philosopher, a gift to us from our ancestors and a gift from us to the world. He interpreted our world and gave substance and stability to the shifty concepts of home, ancestry, and community. In those days, the lyrics of Bongos’ Idoma folk songs and his own Idoma compositions filled the gap created by the dizzying modernist transformations of the urban setting, which undermined the consistency and efficacy of parental moral instructions. Our musical encounters with values and moral systems that draw on lived Idoma experiences and are etched in their material and symbolic universes was a reaffirming cultural immersion. It made one more surefooted, more certain in one’s identity and in the cultural verities that produced what one might, casting aside all postmodern anxieties, call the Idoma essence. Bongos has been concerned with interpreting the world of the Idoma to its non-comprehending exterior while recalibrating familiar universal values to fit with the milieu of the Idoma. He inserts the instrumental truths of universal philosophies into the lived virtues of the Idoma world and vice versa, merging, in the process, the global and the local, the cosmopolitan and the parochial. Bongos’ main musical medium for conveying this “glocal” vision is the instructive proverb, on which many African artistic genres thrive. Besides preaching instrumental staples like altruism, humility, industry, hard work, unity, love, and communal cohesion, Bongos’ music has an organizing undertone that anticipated and challenged the smug universalism inherent Eurocentric cultural triumphalism. His musical worldview also disrupts the anti-essentialism of the postmodernist consensus, which brooks no localized idioms of understanding and living. He sees no abiding friction between the universal and the local. His musical facility in the language of the “outside” (English) and that of the primordial “inside” (Idoma) has enabled him to transcend the chic but simplistic dichotomies that assume a paradigmatic universal that is independent of localized experiences. His entire musical philosophy has been one of bridging the artificial, facile chasm between the Idoma world and the universal abstractions that it contributes to and is enriched by.  The philosophical implication of Bongos’ music is that universal values are not independent of their constitutive elements. They are empowered and substantiated by the material and abstract worlds of disparate people living in localized, sometimes remote, worlds in different corners of the world. Idomaland is one such constituent of the universal spirit. The quotidian realities, cosmological landscape, and incantatory messages of the Idoma mirror and feed into the universal axioms that we take for granted in speech, and which some of us instrumentalize as moral instructions. Not only are universal concepts minted in European linguistic systems analogous to similar concepts in the worlds of the Idoma and other non-hegemonic cultural formations; they sometimes derive their credibility and persuasive appeal from the fact that they are ultimately rooted in the material and symbolic inventions and adaptations of peoples—like the Idoma—who are theorized into the peripheral nodes of the world. Bongos has resolved this universal-local conundrum in his musical productions; from his earliest musical adventures, he saw no debilitating tension between the essentialist notions that glue the Idoma to their lived truths and values and the indeterminacy and perpetual shiftiness of the world encapsulated in so-called universal philosophies. A universal truism, which is a sum of its parts, cannot claim superiority over the provincial parts that constitute it. Keenly sensitized to this, Bongos’ music has appealed to eclectic palates and relied on a variety of techniques and instruments that defy the binaries that seek to untangle the modern from the traditional, the universal from the local. Yet Bongos has always recognized the limits of the Idoma literary and symbolic world that has provided him with an infinitely fertile arena for musical creativity, and of which he has been a foremost ambassador. He has never stepped on the slippery slope of reductive and stifling nativism. For Bongos, the universal wisdoms expressed through the medium of the European language is not a self-sustaining truth but a hegemonic congealing—and manifestation—of parallel truths lived, sung, performed, and recited for centuries by Africa’s wise peoples, of which the Idoma are one. The convergence of the universal and the local in Bongos’ musical system is borne out by several of his songs.  What’s gonna be is gonna be What goes up must come down These are the opening lines of his English language hit What’s gonna be is gonna be. These lines are familiar, elemental universal truths. Beyond expressing the physical and metaphysical logics of gravity, they convey the fundamental instability that underpins both the world and the human endeavors that propel it. They also express, for the religious and superstitious, a certain non-fatalistic wisdom in yielding to the inexorable, sometimes predetermined, march of life.  Let us now step into an analogous axiomatic construction in the Idoma value system and examine the apparent appropriation of an Idoma social Let us now step into an analogous axiomatic construction in the Idoma value system and examine the apparent appropriation of an Idoma social idiom by Bongos to speak to a recognizable, even commonsensical, universal truth. In his song Eche Une (The world is a swing), Bongos presents the Idoma analogue to the English language “what’s gonna be is gonna be.” The allegorical invocation of the up-down motion of the swing is a synthesis of the instability of the human condition and the brittle deterministic control that humans have over their destinies and trajectories. In these two analogous songs, Bongos is able to bring into dialogue the philosophical treasures of the Idoma spoken word and the rational/scientific and metaphysical/religious foundations of universal thought. This is just one example of the productive and edifying interface between the “local” world of the Idoma and the outside world with which it is in continuous symbiotic communion. The Idoma folk song genre, owned, perfected, and universalized by Bongos, did not speak solely to the world that produced it. No. It also spoke to the world “outside”—the world seeking an authentic Idoma input into its own regeneration and evolution. For the Idoma who belonged in both worlds, the lyrics of Bongos’ songs spoke with a peculiar potency. This is why Bongos’ music was instrumental, especially for the Idoma who grew up outside the homeland, in shaping the evolution of youthful consciousness and in helping to inspire cultural nostalgias and emotions of identity. Bongos’ Idoma language compositions were, to paraphrase Barack Obama, the soundtracks of my youthful cultural discoveries and quests. Adagbo Onoja, a compelling voice of Idoma cultural narration in his own right, is spot on in describing Bongos as a pioneering translator of Idoma culture. Bongos’ cultural relevance to the Idoma, his primary artistic constituency, reaches even deeper. He has also made universal modes of understanding and contemplation intelligible to the Idoma. Now that he has returned to that primal cultural task, we hope that he will hasten to cover the ground lost in the cultural conversation between the Idoma and the larger world during his long hiatus away from music. The author can be reached at meochonu@gmail.com. All pictures were taken by the author at Bongos' researsal with his band in Double K Resort, Otukpo, Benue State, Nigeria.
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