Sonny Okosun and the Paradox of Nigerian Greatness
Sonny Okosun was one of the most beloved artists of his time. However, the singer’s gentle perspective has not always favoured his legacy, hinting at a deeper cultural and societal disconnect.
Editor’s note: This essay is available in our print issue, Demas Nwoko’s Natural Synthesis and the Rise of African Architecture. Buy the issue here.
When Charles Okosun shared lore about his famous elder brother, he knew exactly the risk of erasure. In 2023, Sonny Okosun was dead for 14 years, and the interviewer wanted to know where it all began. In his purple outfit, sleek hat and black sunshades, Charles looked nothing like the storytellers of old, who gathered curious listeners under the moonlight. His modernity—or the insistence on it—was glaring, but the narrative rendered mostly in Nigerian Pidgin, was riveting even if pained. According to him, the story of Sonny Okosun began like so many others: with a dream bobbing across time and space.
It was a period when everything could touch everyone. The expression of rockstar individuality was in its nascent stages. In the 1950s, Elvis Presley and The Beatles represented the glitz of pop music, drawing on forms that went past whiteness and its musical traditions. Although Presley was often criticized by Black people for cultural appropriation, his distinct energy and genius artistry made him one of the enduring figures of the time. It was Presley whom Sonny Okosun saw and thought: I really want to do that. So, he learnt to play the guitar from a friend when he was supposed to be working as a mechanic apprentice.
A TV host, Mariam Okagbue, saw Sonny Okosun playing the guitar in front of their family residence in Enugu. Amazed by his talent, she invited him to feature on the eastern regional television station where she worked. After introducing him as the city’s own Presley, she gave him the air to perform. There is something about the performance that carries the weight of flight—the very act of playing an instrument holds a frightful and promising prospect, as though the immense future is blurred into that present. For Sonny Okosun, a teenager at the time, it surely did. He became highly demanded by the television viewers, much to the disappointment of his father.
By then, the popular perception of musicians was as rascals, and the patriarch Sonny Okosun did not want that for his first son. Coupled with the fact that Sonny had failed college entrance exams, the youngster seemed to be heading towards a life of doom. Drugs, sex, and stark debauchery easily offered themselves to the musician, but Sonny Okosun was quite disciplined. He played music when he was called to do so, and when he was not playing music, he was writing songs and mastering the guitar—the instrument of his feverish hands. Yet, it was acting that led to Sonny Okosun’s first breakthrough, which came in the early 1960s when he started attending drama school in Lagos. During that period, he went past Nigeria’s shores as part of a troupe to London, where he showcased musical skill and even recorded a few songs. Upon his return to Enugu, he was given a hero’s welcome when his parents saw that he was not just gallivanting about the city as earlier thought and that he had indeed been to London.
Proof of Sonny Okosun’s new status was the purchase of a recording player which his father gleefully carried about, one which Charles reckoned as the first in Enugu. Approaching the 1970s, Sonny Okosun was gearing towards a career in music, increasingly working to master the guitar. In 1965, he joined The Postmen, an Enugu band that covered British songs. When the Nigeria-Biafra war broke out and Ojukwu declared that all non-Igbo people should return to their regions, Sonny Okosun’s parents moved to Lagos. It was there, in 1969, when he joined The Maestros, a band led by Victor Uwaifo. He could not have known it then, but this was the conclusion of his first arc as a musician...
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