Onwenu’s public and private life did not mix, except perhaps in her music. One involved a career in which she introduced herself to the public as a singer, broadcaster, actress, an advocate for regulation in the music industry, and a beleaguered, if well-meaning, political figure. The press, without access to her private life, made up bits of her romantic history, some of which she refuted, wry and dignified. Onwenu did not have a love child with the juju singer, King Sunny Adé; but it is easy to see why a story like this exists. In her 1989 duet with King Sunny Adé— ‘Wait for Me’—they are perfect next to each other and at the height of their prowess. Sunny Adé, significantly more accomplished at the time, had asked Onwenu to write duets with him, on commission by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Johns Hopkins Population Communication Services (PCS) project. The two first met when their parts crossed at a Performing Musicians Association of Nigeria (PMAN) event.

Onwenu admitted in a 2016 Pulse TV interview to being star-struck by Sunny Adé. But performing together, they gave each other the regard of equals. This is perhaps what made them seem romantically linked. To imagine them through a Millennial or Gen Z lens, Sunny Adé would be an ally of sorts, and he and Onwenu would be meeting aura for aura. Even the peerless Fela was compelled by Onwenu. His 20-something wives notwithstanding, Onwenu claims that he asked her at one point to become his wife. This gesture came after she wrote an article in solidarity with him, during one of his many run-ins with the Nigerian government. In the impolitic sexism of Fela, one could imagine that this marriage proposal was meant to function as high approval, possibly some kind of imprimatur of her politics and her artistry. Onwenu did not know what to make of it, she admitted in an interview decades later. In recounting it, she found it amusing. She also dismissed the rumours that she had secretly married a former president.

In reality, Onwenu had two sons and a marriage, the details of which remained largely unknown until she published her memoir, My Father’s Daughter, in 2020. She identified most proudly as a daddy’s girl—and in her realpolitik, there was a correlation between this and her feminism. Onwenu also identified as a woman from Imo State’s Arondizuogu, but she was quintessentially Lagosian. She was a product of the city she made her home. But more than that, Onwenu was the kind of Nigerian whose knowledge of its failings ran as deep as her capacity to imagine and believe in its better version. In this way, she lived and died in service of a Nigerian ideal, unafraid to look at it for what it was. In her 1984 documentary, Nigeria: A Squandering of Riches—a kind of artist’s manifesto and portrait of a flailing young nation—Onwenu’s view is clear-eyed, and her verdict of the country is damning, then wistful in parts. It was released just in the wake of another corrective coup that put General Muhammadu Buhari in office; although the subject of the documentary was his predecessor, Shehu Shagari’s civilian government, and its misuse of Nigeria’s newfound oil wealth.

In the documentary, Onwenu becomes visibly irritated when stopped by customs officials for a search and questioning on a bridge from the airport. ‘We just don’t seem to be coping with modernity,’ she declares. At one point, Onwenu observes a blind street singer surrounded by a drifting audience. His job at his spot on a busy street, where she watches his performance, is singing about the hardness of the city, the moral decline of the city dweller, and urban decay in general. Onwenu comes out of that experience—still in her early thirties—seeking refuge. She does not find it in a fantasy of the city’s purification, moral and otherwise, but in a renewal of her faith in the essence of the Nigerian character—a hope shared by several of her documentary subjects, particularly the lawyer and industrialist Chief Chris Ogunbanjo. To this effect, Onwenu notes that the Nigeria plagued by moral failings ‘is no reflection of traditional Nigeria’, adding, ‘after all, it is not as if we are a people without aesthetic values.’