Encounter with The Beautiful Nubia

By ABDULWAREES SOLANKE

The Beautiful Nubia, Segun Akinlolu shares month of birth, November, with a number of members iof House of AALDAUS, the heritage I proudly claim.

In 2001, I had a chance encounter with the popular musician, an encounter that changed my perception that all musicians are hooked performance enhancing substances.

As News Editor and Editorial Board member at the defunct *National Guide* it was my mandate to interview late Chief Bola Ige* then the Justice minister under President Olusegun Obasanjo. Uncle Bola Ige, later mysteriously murdered in his Bodija Ibadan home.

Few months before his murder in Ibadan, he was in Ikoyi Lagos as a special guest at a musical show at Alliance Francaise where the Beautiful Nubia was on stage.

With Segun’s mother on seat to watch the brilliance of her veterinary surgeon son turned musician, the Beautiful Nubia put up a spectacular but deeply traditional musical performance rooted in Yoruba folklore and mores that held the entire audience at the French Cultural Centre spell bound. He took all to the roots on that rainy, cold night at Ikoyi.

Chief Ige in his lavish appraisal of Akinlolu’s brand of music extolled his perfection and originality as he noted that the difference between something that is good and something that is excellent is attention to details.

In this pungently positive verdict on The Beautiful Nubia creative excellence, I took a lesson in personal development: that the difference between what’s good and what’s excellent is attention to details.

Chief Ige predicted that Segun would go far in his music career. The veterinary doctor, Akinlolu, has indeed taken his music to the entire world as a Yoruba cultural icon, and Nigerian, nay African musical ambassador dominating the airwaves in the west when originality of African music is being sought or referenced.

Later that night at Late Chief Ige’s House, on Kingsway Road Ikoyi where I was to interview him after the show, Akinlolu also showed up to meet the political legend. We both waited in an ante-room where I had a chance to chat with the dreadlocked musician on his passion, his style and what fires or gives him energy and turns him almost a maniac on stage. I had a feeling that perhaps he courts the hard bottle, and that like Fela, Marley or Majek, he is hooked on ganja, or that he lives on stuffs like cracks, Chinese capsule or LSDs, pumping himself with some cocktails like, like Jackson or Houston, to shoot his adrenalin up.

He confessed there was none of that but rather he was a deeply spiritual person, so none of such pushers is in his bloodstream to drive his stage performance or give him inspiration.

Now nearing 55, the Beautiful Nubia has grown to become a master of his Art, a musical icon flying the Nigerian flag brightly and proudly across the world.

Born in Ibadan in 1968, Segun started writing songs at a very young age. He drew his early influence from the traditional culture which was prevalent in the form of oral poetry, theatre, music and folklore. In 1997, he established EniObanke, a music production and marketing company, under which his first album was released in 1997. All subsequent recordings have been released on this label and, in 2010, the company commenced the first-ever folk and roots music festival in Nigeria, the annual EniObanke Music Festival (EMUfest). In 1998, the artist invited several young musicians in Lagos to form a backing band to which he gave the name The Roots Renaissance Band.

Throughout the years, Beautiful Nubia has remained the songwriter, music composer, arranger and bandleader – contributing acoustic/rhythm guitar, lead and backing vocals and percussion.

*Solanke, a deputy director with Voice of Nigeria, wrote from Abuja.