For all my scepticism about the position of Onyeabor’s mythos, which is centrally located in Europe, it is worth recognizing that his genius might never have reached the same level of renown without the sustained interest of international lovers, especially the Luaka Bop record label, which was founded in 1988 by the musician David Byrne. Its colourful website describes the organization as ‘a sweet Polynesian delicacy with aphrodisiac properties’; an eccentric outlook it has earned through its important work digging through the crater of what is summarily described in the West as ‘world music.’ Uchenna Ikonne, a renowned music historian, has been an important consultant for them, and it was he who brought the music of Onyeabor to Luaka Bop’s attention.

In a 2017 interview with NPR, Ikonne offered his own theory as to why Onyeabor stopped making music. ‘The popular mythology right now is that he stopped because he was a born-again Christian. I don’t think that’s correct,’ Ikonne told the host, Kelly McEvers, adding:

The music industry started to decline halfway through the 1980s. And since Onyeabor was strictly a businessman, I don’t think he really wanted to involve himself in something that was not profitable for him. But the bigger issue is that he got involved in politics, and being a pop star didn’t really jive well with being a politician.

Of Onyeabor’s involvement in politics, not much has been said or written. It was one of the many things about him that stayed obscured behind the blinding light of his mysticism. But given his affinity for the Christian God, it’s a wild guess as to how he was able to juggle his moral philosophies with the supercharged field of national politics in the 1980s. Unlike the immediate post-independence hostilities, during this period ethnicity increasingly took a backseat in favour of supposedly shared ambition, but that only meant people were careful to look over their shoulders at every turn.

The last six years of Onyeabor’s musical career were unarguably his most localized in terms of song writing and not so much of sound. His funk was as assured as ever, but unlike his previous explorations into the universal themes of love and its devastating twirls, 1980’s Body & Soul started with the haunting admission, ‘No one knows tomorrow.’ It’s a sentiment deeply embedded into the Igbo philosophy, with its original phrasing being: ‘Onye ma kwa echi?’—a question that unfurls the unpredictability of the next day, a sort of dogged optimism against the trials of one’s present moment.

Steeped into the practical world, brought out of the shell that necessitated his inventive use of technological devices at a time when bands were the thing, Onyeabor’s last movement as a musician was pessimistic in scope. He would later run a flour mill, and was named the West African Industrialist of the Year in 1987. These were markedly different from his early artistic endeavours but they also tell us something about the man—music wasn’t the sum of his experience. Perhaps that was why he said so little in his songs; elsewhere, he was exhausted by the frivolity of words, and when he came to music it was an essential purging of emotions that would otherwise have been unexpressed.

Between 1981 and 1985, Onyeabor released three great albums: Great Lover (1981), Hypertension (1982) and Anything You Sow (1985). In-between was Good Name (1983), whose titular record is quite popular, but the album did not contribute anything novel to Onyeabor’s vision. From Great Lover, Onyeabor began to experiment with incorporating reggae into funk. He achieved this through bassy progressions and the vocal inflections weren’t unlike the reggae songs that would become popular later that decade, wielded as a tool against the oppressive military regimes.

All these show that Onyeabor had his ears to the ground. He might not have said much but his music carried the insistent throb of community. ‘Great Lover’ and ‘Love Is Blind’ were dedicated to his electronic sound, but the Great Lover album opener, ‘Tell Me What You Want’, signified that subtle shift in sonics. ‘The Moon And The Sun’ continued Onyeabor’s tendency to embed the first songs on his projects with sprawling quality. Hypertension also had the highlife-patented ‘Papa Na Mama’, whose Pidgin-English title revealed an intent to move closer to cosmopolitan tastes. It was also one of the few songs where Onyeabor sang in Igbo, asking in the language, ‘Have we seen that having a father and mother in this life is important?’ He offers prayers to his parents and thereby brings, for the first time, external characters into his work. He was 36 at the time and was likely becoming more intimate with the selfless requirements of being a parent.

Onyeabor couldn’t resist bowing out with mysticism, however. If his previous albums were conceptually familiar, then Anything You Sow was a haunting return to those moralistic and fatalistic themes his early music demonstrated. The two songs in the middle of the four-track album were featured in the compilation video directed by Nwosu, but it is the opening record—‘When The Going Is Smooth & Good’—that marks his most popular moment among Nigerians. It is his biggest record, and perhaps the most revealing of his artistic ethos. For an artist who constantly considered the forces of good and evil, it was a shimmering display of how humanity played into those notions, and the characters whose stories he faintly evokes are obviously Nigerians.

Abba T Makama’s 2019 film, The Lost Okoroshi, used ‘The Going’ as a recurring soundtrack. Imbibing a similarly didactic narrative, it’s a haunting picture that concerns itself with the clash between the traditional and the modern lifestyles, seen through the enigmatic life of a security officer who wakes up every morning from nightmares of being chased by ominous and colourful masquerades. Told to surrender by an older friend, as ‘they are our ancestors [who] must have something good they want to tell you,’ the protagonist does so, at least in the spiritual realm. But then he wakes up physically as the Okoroshi masquerade. What happens from there is darkly comic, but there’s also, again, the aesthetic of dance as expression, such as when the Okoroshi is drawn to perform in a market, much to the excitement of the traders and passers-by.

Darkly comic is a most fitting description of what the Nigerian landscape, as we know it today, holds. Never in our collective history has pleasure been so intricately intertwined with pain as now; and with the interior demands of finding oneself amid urgent socio-political concerns, our music carries very complex requirements. To dance or to contemplate? Fortunately, there’s the discography of Onyeabor to help us through this psychological task. Even though he found succour in the divine, the process by which he reached that was, by virtue of his towering personality, inherently physical. It was like boxing with the strong hands of reality. And to do that, sometimes, one has to be unseen by the opponent; one has to become a mystery man⎈