The Endless Life of Onyeka Onwenu
Nigerian pop icon Onyeka Onwenu died earlier this year. With an iridescent career spanning decades, Onwenu’s knowledge of Nigeria’s failings ran as deep as her capacity to imagine and believe in a better Nigeria.
Editor’s note: This essay is available in our print issue, Reimagining Nigerian Heritage. Buy the issue here.
The phenom of the Nigerian female pop icon is almost impossible to call up in the public imagination before Onyeka Onwenu. This is, of course, an illusion of history. The Lijadu Sisters exist. Alongside Onwenu, Christy Essien-Igbokwe, Evi Edna Ogholi, and Tyna Onwudiwe made music. And in their waka genre, Batile Alake first, then Salewa Abeni. But it was Onwenu’s embodiment of this idea of the pop icon, in its unwieldy mix, that set her apart. If there had been an existing archetype for what she came to represent, it does not quite prefigure Onwenu. She had a singular aura and way of moving between modes and genres—soul, folk or pop.
Central to the image Onwenu cultivated early in her career was that close-cropped hair and its middle patch of grey which filled out as she aged. By her fifties, this was just how she looked—grand; as much a national symbol as Ladi Kwali on Kwali’s immortalizing currency, the 20 naira note. Approximating something of the regional allure of Cape Verde’s Cesáire Évora, the familial advocations of South Africa’s Miriam Makeba, and the appeal of, say, America’s Tina Turner doing the ‘What’s Love Gotta Do With It’ strut, Onwenu marshalled these disparate qualities into something that metaphorically amounted to the grace of a stallion. From the moment she debuted to the very last moments of her life—she died just after her final performance in July 2024—she inhabited stardom with this grace. A knowledge that her chosen audience would wait for her to arrive at a sound or an idea...
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