Inside Bongos Ikwue’s Musical Kingdom

By Adagbo Onoja

IT IS possible to have sat in conversation with Bongos Ikwue several times previously but to find him a different person in a more recent encounter. But that is not because he is slippery. It is simply the creativity in him, the certain elusive quality that gives him the Bongoseque-ness.

Now, he is more melted than ever but he is no less critical of the rest of us from his artistic lens. One hopes the legend would not get to read this. He is not in the mood for any publicity right now. His mind is on bigger projects he is labouring to get going. But it would be criminal to visit him, converse with him and not write anything.

There are simply too many themes embodied in the Bongos person which a troubled society like Nigeria and Nigerians could benefit from.

The mid-morning that a senior citizen and I went to see him in his musical kingdom in Makurdi Benue State, he and his workers were cracking out a track titled ‘Your God is My God/My God is Your God’. It is in furtherance of his paradigm that religion and God are two different things as for religion to be not a problem for peaceful co-existence at all. Sadly, it is and the track is his own attack on the reality. And when he sat down to talk to Intervention, one of his questions is whether God is a Christian, Buddhist or a Muslim.

Of course, Intervention failed the question because that sort of question has never been part of common engagement. God, he says, had no beginning but we all know when each of the religions came into being. So, religion is only what man created as a way of serving God and should not be a site of conflict.

As far as Bongos is concerned, anyone promoting conflict around religion is not doing God’s work but embarrassing God in posing as a fighter as a fighter for his or her religion. His ground is that God is above religion. So, he restates his idea of being anti-religion but pro-God.

His visitor was particularly interested in the argument, partly because it coincides with the position of two of Europe’s most brilliant philosophers. Marx said religion is the opium of the folks. Jacques Derrida says he fears religion because, amongst others, religion invokes God even though the two things do not mean the same thing.

So, in Bongos Ikwue, we find that our own native philosophers whom we do not reference only because we do not study them.

Probing Bongos’ ontological depth can be such a productive engagement, given the insights into the force of ideas and practices that animates his being, especially when related to the possibility of locating the overarching African metaphysics.

His track, ‘Ella Agunaga’, which he sang in Idoma language is one such ontological site. There are about four key features hidden in the track. One is Ella Agunaga as a mad man. This madman lived in a market with his “wife”. Everyone called Eiminu Ella – the mad woman – as Ella’s wife. Number two is that Ella was never hostile to anyone. In fact, children followed him. Three, Ella was gifted in drawing sharp inferences. The one that enthralled Bongos is Ella’s contrast of suffering with enjoyment/fulfilment. Bongos quotes him as saying how far more difficult it is to lift a small load of hardship than a big load of joy/fulfilment. Fourth and last is Ella as a prolific inventor of linguistic coordinates, many of which most Idoma people do not know the meaning. Among them are Idogo, Ikongo, Idilli, Agunaga.

In the end, the track appears to be Bongos’s interrogation of the notion of madness. He could be read as asking the rest of society: Is it Ella Agunaga who is mad or the rest of us? What sort of mad man could be married, live in a market that has been named after him, draw sharp inferences, troubles no one and, above all, has capacity for linguistic improvisation?

Again, Ella Agunaga forces a cross referencing of Bongos to the European or Western philosophers we study. The questions that Bongos’s artistry in Ella Agunaga raises are the same questions French thinker, Michel Foucault raised in his study of sexuality, madness and difference. For Foucault just as Bongos, the more correct thing to say would have been that Ella Agunaga was different but not mad. He was mad only because society is hostile to difference and isolates or punish those who are different – madmen, strangers, prisoners, sexual perverts, and other marginals in the society.

So, Bongos would belong to the category of thinkers who anticipated today’s problem of so-called illegal migrants to the point of painting them as vectors of diseases, as harbingers of terrorism, of every imaginable risk in the age in which free movement of capital is such a powerful article of faith.

Teachers of culture, politics, International Relations, Psychology and so on who do not use people like Bongos Ikwue to domesticate philosophical inferences that originate elsewhere are those who will be guilty of Prof Egite Oyovbaire’s charge of conceptual import – substitution.

Over eighty years old, Bongos is certainly not as he was a decade ago. Ageing has taken a toll. When he sits down in one place for long, he has to do warming up to get going. But he is physically intact, moving about at his own pace unaided beyond a walking stick. His brain is not just intact, it is getting into a much more involving thinking. In fact, he is pushing a theoretical line that could stretch if not counter Einstein farther. And this is not a joke.

With that kind of brain, he can assert himself in standpoint terms. For him, for example, it is useless to over prize physical attributes. “If you are beautiful or handsome or pretty, did you make yourself? If you think someone is ugly, you have failed. You have failed because you don’t know what is ugly”. If that is directed at individuals, he has doses for the society too for what he calls collective stupidity. His classic example is this: the roads are not worthy but we insist that our vehicles must be road worthy”. He thinks the illogicality in this should in itself compel the enforcers to start with the roads. The fact that such is not the case indicates to him that the society is very much lost.

These notwithstanding, it is difficult to classify Bongos Ikwue. Self-assured and stubborn but he doesn’t sound like he ever thought of being a rebel or a revolutionary at any time before. There is an element of cautiousness in and about him. The hint about this comes from a narrative he unfolds. The lion, the tiger and the elephant had a fight. Of course, the elephant won but, just at the point of victory, an ube (Idoma for the smallest specie of rat) entered the elephant’s ear. Upon all the elephant’s size and power, it cannot survive ube in its ear. It died, meaning a kind of tragedy in victory.

The logic of the narrative in Bongos’own words is: the only fight you ever win is a fight not started at all. And that is because there is no way of knowing what variables can enter into what one would have thought is a straightforward encounter.

Nature is so balanced that, in Bongos’s view, human beings should emulate it and refrain from the need to over-assert themselves into violence and all that. If, for any reasons, human beings were to destroy the stock of bees available, the rest of the human race will last no more than a few years after that. This is because nature brought the bees to balance the make-up of the earth. When the bees are not there, the system will collapse.

Here, Bongos sounds like the theorists of posthumanism who are arguing for agency for non-human components of the earth. It is either he is reading voraciously or he is naturally talented in theoretical thinking. It is not clear how many PhD students in normative political theory, cultural studies, Anthropology, critical IRs or literature in Benue State University, UNIJOS, ABU, Zaria or UI are studying one puzzle or the other in Ikwue’s artistic exploits. It would not be surprising if there is none. Too bad a signal of a society that has lost its way when we stop problematising the Achebes, Soyinkas, Tutolas, Bongos Ikwues and the whole lot of them.

For now, Bongos luxuriates in a musical kingdom he has created. It is an amazing world in spatial as well as artistic terms. On a huge, elevated space in North Bank in the Benue State capital sits the Bongos Ikwue empire. It wouldn’t be a bad idea to call it a musical empire because music is what is at stake there. With a few fellow travelers, he is at work in musical terms. The voice is even more powerfully booming. The message remains thematically involving.

It is reported offside reference that when the late Chief Awolowo visited the late Mallam Aminu Kano, he quipped how Nigeria had cheated the Kano sage. He was referring to the material bareness of Mallam Aminu Kano’s living house. Bongos Ikwue or anybody who puts up that edifice is not materially deprived but what of the resources to sustain his vast creative entanglement.

In every society, artists, like intellectuals, must be funded; irrespective of the direction and content of artistry since no one can say what the outcome of a particular intellectual production is. Bongos Ikwue is a particularly fascinating candidate for such investment. Aside from the nationalism of his artistry he remains the artiste’s artiste, an artist with great depth. The question is who will bell the cat to enhance Bongos’ artistic productivity? Is this what Governor Hyacinth Alia of Benue State will lead the rest, given the primacy of music in his clerical populism?

The Bongos Ikwue story cannot be told in one short piece.

Culled from Intervention