Twenty years ago the man who recorded one of the most successful songs of all time was thrown off a motorbike by a car in Calabar, Nigeria. He hit his head on the road and was rushed to the hospital, where he lay for two weeks, in and out of consciousness, but deteriorating all the time. On June 24, 1997, Prince Nico Mbarga was pronounced dead.<\/p>\n
\u201cSweet Mother,\u201d his 1976 one-hit wonder, had sold at least 13 million copies across the African continent \u2013 more than The Beatles\u2019 bestseller \u201cI Want to Hold Your Hand.\u201d But no global media outlet thought to cover the life and death of the artist behind Africa\u2019s most popular song.<\/p>\n
Today, the only internet accounts of his life reach around four paragraphs and bookend Mbarga\u2019s career with two big political events of the time: the Biafran War in 1967 that saw him, at 17, flee across the border to Cameroon, where he mastered the guitar; and the expulsion of undocumented migrants from Nigeria in 1983, with his band\u2019s Cameroonian members among the two million West Africans forced to leave the country.<\/p>\n
Politics, however, rarely frames lives quite so neatly.<\/p>\n
Over the last few months, I have tried to piece together a more textured story: traveling to Mbarga\u2019s hometown to talk to his childhood friend, his wife and his mistress; tracking down his former band members from Cameroon to France to the US; prodding the memory of his octogenarian producer; and reading rare transcripts of his interviews.<\/p>\n
Twenty years after his death, this is the obituary that never was.<\/p>\n
The first place Mbarga knew, the town of Ikom was the last stop on my journey. In a modest bungalow there I met Esame, his widow, and Ojong, his best friend, on a warm evening on the cusp of the wet season. On plastic chairs in the shadow of his mausoleum, they told me about Nico Mbarga and the place he called home.<\/p>\n The son of a Cameroonian father and a Nigerian mother, Nico Mbarga was born in nearby Abakaliki on April 8, 1950, but grew up in Ikom. In the 1950s it was little more than a series of administrative buildings, houses and farms clumped around Cross River, surrounded by tropical rainforest, right on Nigeria\u2019s eastern border with Cameroon. Ojong remembers early mornings with young Nico on the river, fishing for tilapia and catfish, and days spent in the shade of the forests, setting traps for birds. Today Ikom is still fairly remote \u2013 the tarmac roads coming in and out quickly crumble into dirt \u2013 but back then it was positively isolated. The only way goods such as bicycles and sewing machines made their way to the village was by lighters on the river from Calabar, more than 100 miles to the south. But even in rural Ikom, all the flux of being in a British colony in Africa in the mid-twentieth century \u2013 and the trappings of modernity it entailed \u2013 had its effect.<\/p>\n Nico\u2019s father drew a salary sawing timber, so Nico himself was able to go to primary school (perhaps fewer than one in five children did at the time). More exciting for Nico though, his music-loving father bought a Phillips radio. For if anything was to capture the mood of the new country emerging in Nigeria\u2019s faraway and growing cities, it was the highlife music he could now hear from home.<\/p>\n From Bobby Benson\u2019s \u201cTaxi Driver,\u201d to EC Arinze\u2019s \u201cSaturday Night,\u201d to Rex Lawson\u2019s \u201cYellow Sisi,\u201d highlife was a music of young men in big towns, marveling at cars, dancing at nightclubs, chasing single women. There was something, a new confidence, beyond the lyrics too. From miners\u2019 football clubs in the Zambian Copperbelt to the newspapers of the intelligentsia on Ghana\u2019s coast, Africans were making colonial tools their own.<\/p>\n Highlife took western instruments \u2013 the trumpets and saxophones of big jazz bands \u2013 and set them to local, offbeat rhythms. It was a genre well-suited to a country preparing for independence, and its optimistic sound was to suffuse all the music young Nico would go on to create. (Even his later song \u201cOh Death,\u201d with the opening line \u201cOh death, everybody hates you,\u201d is impossibly cheery.)<\/p>\n His father, from a long line of xylophone players, taught him the instrument, a handheld version with metal tines plucked by the thumbs. But Nico wanted to make a sound more like the western instruments of highlife, so he built his own xylophone from dried-out plantain skins and scooped bark. \u201cIt was completely something that he innovated,\u201d Ojong recalls.<\/p>\n Despite the celebratory mood of the country, however, Nico\u2019s childhood was not easy. His father died of a sudden illness, and the family he left behind \u2013 his wife, three sons and a daughter \u2013 became reliant on Nico\u2019s mother, a peasant farmer. They downsized, becoming tenants in a compound in the middle of the village, and though Ojong remembers a mother dearly trying her best \u2013 caregiver with one hand, breadwinner the other \u2013 things were difficult. As a teenager, Nico tried to do his bit, playing sets in nearby small villages, but there was little money in it.<\/p>\n Thus when the Biafran War broke out in 1967, Nico Mbarga wasn\u2019t so much fleeing for his safety \u2013 the rest of his family stayed in Ikom \u2013 as pursuing his ambitions in music. The civil war put a sharp stop to eastern Nigeria\u2019s vibrant music scene, but the hotel gig economy was still running over the border.<\/p>\n In Mamfe, Cameroon, he met Lucy, who today lives in a half-built mansion ringed by palm trees on the outskirts of Ikom. I had been slightly nervous about meeting Lucy myself, remembering my first call back in London with Esame, Mbarga\u2019s wife: \u201cAnd I\u2019ve been told about someone called Lucy as well, who is that?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cOh that is his concubine,\u201d she responded matter-of-factly, \u201cI will take you to her.\u201d My worries were eased by their laughing and hugging as they greeted each other. Then a smiling Lucy recounted the moment 50 years ago when she met Nico Mbarga: a charming, handsome, if slightly short and dirt-poor 17-year-old. \u201cAs I first see him, I love him, eh? Even my mother did no gree, she said, \u2018He\u2019s a small boy, he don\u2019t have money,\u2019 but I said, \u2018No, that boy is my choice.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Indeed, despite the objections of her parents, and their own struggles to buy even \u201ca money for pot\u201d to boil water, she would soon have the first of her two children with Mbarga.<\/p>\n Working as a \u201cband boy\u201d for a Congolese cover group in Mamfe, carrying instruments for concerts at hotels in nearby towns, Mbarga came to learn and love Congolese rumba. With its staccato guitar, spontaneous spoken asides and high-pitched harmonies, it had the whole continent dancing the\u00a0soukous\u00a0<\/em>and the\u00a0kara-kara.<\/em>\u00a0Mbarga, always dedicated, taught himself the conga, the drums, the bass and, most importantly, the finger-picking style of Congolese electric guitar.<\/p>\n When the three hard years of the Biafran War came to an end, he looked to launch his career back in Nigeria. After one failed border-crossing by road, in which Lucy and Mbarga were arrested by officials and sent to prison for three days for not having passports, they successfully made it across a second time, going \u201cthe bush way\u201d in 1970. They came to Onitsha, a trading town on the banks of the Niger River, with at its center one of the largest markets on the continent. And while the money this brought has always attracted writers and musicians \u2013 today there are shops stacked high with thousands of albums in paper covers, posters for studio rentals everywhere, and music filling the air \u2013 the 1970s was Onitsha\u2019s heyday, fuelled by Nigeria\u2019s petrol boom and the good mood of people just relieved to get on with their lives again. It was, as Chinua Achebe wrote, \u201cthe esoteric region from which creativity sallies forth at will to manifest itself,\u201d and the home of some of Nigeria\u2019s great highlife musicians.<\/p>\n \u201cWe loved the place,\u201d Lucy almost shouts. \u201cFrom there, God blessed him.\u201d<\/p>\n Mbarga thrived. He formed his group, Rocafil Jazz, signed a contract to play every Sunday at Onitsha\u2019s Plaza Hotel, and began to mix with stars like Stephen Osadebe and Bobby Benson. Then, in 1973 he was picked up by EMI and recorded his first hit \u201cI No Go Marry My Papa,\u201d about a daughter disagreeing with her parents over the choice of her husband, surely inspired by Mbarga\u2019s brush with Lucy\u2019s parents. It sold reasonably well \u2013 \u201cI did not know that I would make such an amount in my life,\u201d Mbarga said of the modest success \u2013 and in it you can hear the beginnings of something, a mix of influences, that would come to define his music.<\/p>\n Odion Iruoje, then a producer at EMI, recalls working with a 23-year-old Mbarga \u201cwho knew what he wanted,\u201d very able at \u201cdirecting his boys.\u201d By all accounts the non-smoking, non-drinking Mbarga, who studied law on the side in Onitsha, was a man of real self-possession.<\/p>\n He was not to be deterred, therefore, by the stalling of his career after his first single. Mbarga was dropped by EMI for failing to create any other commercial hits. Instead, around 1974, tired of \u201cI love you, you love me, my baby,\u201d he wrote \u201cSweet Mother.\u201d<\/p>\n It was a love song from a son to a mother that, in its old-fashioned way, never actually once says \u201cI love you.\u201d Instead, it\u2019s a grateful son praising what his mother did for him as a child: drying his tears, putting him to bed, feeding him, praying when he\u2019s ill:<\/p>\n When I dey hungry my mother go run up and down \/ she dey find me something when I go chop oh! \/ Sweet Mother a-aah \/ Sweet Mother oh-e-oh!<\/em><\/p>\n And if \u201cSweet Mother\u201d was dedicated to all mothers and the things they do for children, it was inspired by the loving sacrifices Mbarga saw his own mother, a widowed farmer, make after his father died. The lyrics began, \u201cSweet Mother, I no go forget you, for dey suffer wey you suffer for me.\u201d<\/p>\n Mbarga sent a tape to Odion Iruoje at EMI, who remembers hearing the song for the first time and knowing that \u201cit was the magic.\u201d On the agreed date for recording, however, Odion had to fly to London to record at Abbey Road, and some other EMI officials told Mbarga that the song was \u201ctoo childish\u201d for them to record. Affronted, Mbarga did not come back. So it was only two years later when the small, Onitsha-based producer Rogers All Stars heard \u201cSweet Mother\u201d at the Plaza Hotel, that the song found a label to release it.<\/p>\n Rogers All Stars is now in his 80s, slightly frail and very soft-spoken, still working in his Onitsha studio with which he now shares his name. And though his memories sometimes come to him in a slight haze, he still clearly recalls the day Nico Mbarga came to the producer\u2019s house uninvited early one morning to introduce himself. They bonded over Rogers\u2019s collection of Congolese records, and Mbarga invited the older man to come see him one day at the hotel. \u201cI could see he was a star,\u201d Rogers says.<\/p>\n For six months Mbarga \u2013 now calling himself Prince Nico Mbarga \u2013 Rocafil and Rogers All Stars worked on \u201cSweet Mother,\u201d rehearsing daily from seven in the morning until one in the afternoon. It was, says Rocafil rhythm guitarist, Cameroonian Jean Duclair, \u201creal every day work,\u201d as they made change after change, turning it from a gentle \u201ccha cha cha\u201d to a more upbeat highlife sound, adding little dance breaks, and crafting a song marked more and more by the drive of Mbarga\u2019s Congolese-style finger-picking lead guitar.<\/p>\n Finally satisfied, the band travelled across the country to record, and after a heavy night in a Lagos hotel, with all but Mbarga drinking and smoking, recorded it live at Decca Studios \u2013 hung over for sure, but they had practiced so much it hardly mattered.<\/p>\n It took a few months to really take off. Nigerian radio host Benson Idonije rates the fact that it eventually did as one of his finest achievements. At the time, he explains from his house in Lagos, he had just launched\u00a0Radio Nigeria Two<\/em>, the country\u2019s FM station. After shows he would often drop into bars to wind down the night. On one of these evenings in late \u201977, he remembers, there was a song released by an obscure label from Onitsha, that got everyone up to dance. With an inkling that his audience might like the song\u2019s message, he found it, undiscovered, in Radio Nigeria\u2019s gramophone library, and played it that evening. \u201cI started getting calls from everywhere,\u201d he says. From then on, for months nearly every request\u00a0Radio Nigeria<\/em>\u00a0received was for \u201cSweet Mother.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cYou have hit jackpot,\u201d Jean Duclair remembers being told by their producer, with the record suddenly selling out in the shops. On a 20-seater Mercedes bus bought by Rogers, Mbarga and his band toured the country, up north during the wet season, down south when the rains stopped. And though culturally Nigeria can be a divided place, Jean remembers Nigerians everywhere demanding \u201cSweet Mother\u201d \u2013 \u201cit was like a national anthem.\u201d<\/p>\n Soon they were touring all across West Africa \u2013 Togo, Cameroon, Cote D\u2019Ivoire, Ghana, Benin and Burkina Faso \u2013 and even as far east as Kenya. As Jean Duclair recalls, the band members were scared to leave the plane when they saw the crowds waiting for them at airports, wearing Rocafil Jazz t-shirts, screaming Mbarga\u2019s name.<\/p>\n And what was the reason for its success? Certainly, with its Congolese guitar-picking, its West African highlife beat and its pidgin lyrics, \u201cSweet Mother\u201d had something for people all over.<\/p>\n Yet even beyond that, perhaps what it really caught was differing shades of Africa at the time. For, by the 1970s, these were societies that \u2013 after the profound changes wrought first by colonialism, then by the liberation movements that challenged it, and finally by the mixed records of those same movements once in power \u2013 had reason to feel both excited and uneasy at the new continent these encounters had created. It was a creative tension at the heart of \u201cSweet Mother.\u201d In its style, with its hybrid English and its electric guitars calling its listeners to dance, it was unquestionably modern; but in its content, with its heartfelt praise for the nurturing role of mothers, \u201cSweet Mother\u201d nodded to a more traditional life. It was a contradiction that Mbarga embodied himself. He was a man who would later, in \u201cGreen Revolution,\u201d bemoan the flight of the sons and daughters of the land for the lure of the city \u2013 singing, \u201clet\u2019s go farming, and be self-sufficient!\u201d \u2013 while he himself performed on stage in Nigeria\u2019s biggest towns in his famous three-inch platform shoes. As his best friend Ojong would say, \u201cHe\u2019s a blender.\u201d<\/p>\n Or perhaps it was just a great tune.<\/p>\n Regardless, Mbarga and Rocafil Jazz were completely unprepared for the popularity of \u201cSweet Mother.\u201d While numerous online reports of Mbarga\u2019s career have Rocafil Jazz falling apart when, in 1983, Nigeria\u2019s President Shagari ordered the country\u2019s two million undocumented migrants to leave \u2013 amongst them Rocafil\u2019s Cameroonian musicians \u2013 no former band member I spoke with recognized that story. Instead, it was something much more mundane: money. On its release, they were a local band that practiced in a small compound in Onitsha, playing Sunday gigs at the Plaza Hotel with instruments that Rogers All Stars himself had bought for them, and with no contracts in place. It was always an issue with the potential to cause problems. After a loss-making and slightly demoralizing tour to London in \u201979 \u2013 playing at venues like St. Pancras Town Hall and the African Centre to half-empty European crowds \u2013 the members of Rocafil Jazz complained to Mbarga that they were underpaid.<\/p>\n Mbarga was, according to Jean Duclair, unwilling to give an inch, and the mood soured. Before a scheduled trip to Japan, unable to agree on their percentages, Rocafil disbanded. Though they later re-formed, changed members, re-formed and disbanded again, the band never quite gained the same momentum \u2013 there was even an actual physical altercation, broken up by the police, after a New Year\u2019s Eve hotel show in 1980. Meanwhile, convinced that Rogers All Stars hadn\u2019t given him his share of the royalties, Mbarga unsuccessfully took his producer to court. (Everyone did eventually reconcile \u2013 Rogers refers to Mbarga as \u201clike a son.\u201d)<\/p>\n In the end, not much of the money made from \u201cSweet Mother\u201d ever made it back to any of them. Royalty payments were limited by the hundreds of pirate recordings of the song, as economies across the continent began to suffer and record stores started to make their money by dubbing cassettes.<\/p>\n No one involved with \u201cSweet Mother\u201d is now living a life that would suggest they were behind one of the top twenty bestselling songs in history. Mbarga\u2019s family live in a pleasant but modest bungalow in Ikom; his former band members like Jean Duclair still struggle to raise funds for their musical projects; and his old producer, Rogers All Stars, though he owns a four-story building in Onitsha, admitted to many mistakes in trying to protect \u201cSweet Mother\u201d from piracy. \u201cYou can see,\u201d he says in his dusty office, exaggerating slightly in a room that still dwarfs his fragile frame, \u201cyou can see how poor we are.\u201d<\/p>\n With the money he did receive from \u201cSweet Mother,\u201d Mbarga moved back to Ikom, built and managed the Sweet Mother Hotel \u2013 where he would perform every Sunday \u2013 and married a local girl, Esame, the daughter of the owner of the only petrol station in town. He also built the house where she still lives today.<\/p>\n Lucy and their two children also moved to Ikom. Indeed, while Mbarga eulogized about mothers on stage, he did not quite show so much respect to the mothers of his own children. \u201cHis only weakness was temptation,\u201d says Rogers. For alongside Esame, his wife, and Lucy, his first love, he had numerous other lovers. Even a track on his first album, And if Mbarga disappeared from the music scene, it was not through lack of trying. Esame recalls that he would sing, play air guitar and compose songs even when they were eating. He would go on to produce 17 albums and records after \u201cSweet Mother,\u201d all with the same highlife beat and Congolese style guitar. In fact, he didn\u2019t even rate \u201cSweet Mother\u201d as one of his best songs, preferring \u201cSimplicity\u201d instead.<\/p>\n But while the lives of some artists darken as the fame fades, there is no such twist here. Mbarga lived a satisfied life, caring for his own mother, supporting his two \u201cwives\u201d and spoiling his children with gifts. He was, on the accounts of both Lucy and Esame, a loving father, \u201ctoo sweet\u201d to punish his kids, always willing to dance with them. \u201cHe lived a happy life,\u201d Esame says.<\/p>\n It was Mbarga\u2019s desire to carry on his music that saw his end in Calabar 20 years ago. If his childhood witnessed the enthusiasm of early independence, his death seemed a cruel symbol of what the impoverished Nigeria of the 1990s had become. After a ten-year hiatus, the original band was back together for a 50-state tour of the U.S. and Mbarga was on his way to pick up visas. His car ran out of fuel \u2013 a scandalously common occurrence in one of the world\u2019s largest oil exporters \u2013 so he hopped on an\u00a0okada<\/em>\u00a0(motorbike taxi) to complete the journey and, once in Calabar, was thrown off by a car. In the hospital for two weeks, visited by his band members, his friends, his children and his first love Lucy \u2013 who held his hand as he drifted in and out of consciousness \u2013 he died with Esame at his side. Back home in Ikom, his elderly mother fell down when she heard the news, and did not get back up. She died too shortly afterwards.<\/p>\n It was a fitting end for the two of them. Mbarga never forgot all that his mother did for him when he was a boy \u2013 leaving their home every day before dawn to work on a rented plot, growing bananas and yams, trying to raise four children \u2013 and he spent his life paying her back for it. She was, by all accounts, delighted with \u201cSweet Mother,\u201d his timeless dedication to her. When Rocafil Jazz were in Onitsha, she would come down every month to watch them practice, dancing with a broom in her hand, and inviting them all back to Ikom so she could feed them up. As she aged, he took care of her, as Lucy remembers, refusing to eat until she had, and talking to her morning and night. After all, he did say in his bestseller, \u201cIf you forget your mother, you\u2019ve lost your life.\u201d<\/p>\n As I traveled throughout Nigeria, I noticed Nico Mbarga moving from a human being who had lived here on earth to, on a small scale, an icon in the making. The things he touched and made in life were slowly fading away: the Ikom compound where he grew up with his mother had been knocked down, leaving just an empty plot; the multitrack records of his \u201cSweet Mother\u201d studio session in Lagos had long been thrown away; his Sweet Mother hotel, under different ownership now, was completely rundown.<\/p>\n In their place, in Ikom, Mbarga is newly remembered by a statue erected early this year. It\u2019s a golden Mbarga in his platform shoes, standing his guitar on a plinth, looking out over the traffic of \u201cMbarga Junction.\u201d Nearby, shaded by Ikom\u2019s many red-blossomed African tulip trees, is Sweet Mother Road. And if it is sad in a sense \u2013 Lucy cried the day the statue was put up, as if it were final confirmation of his death \u2013 it does at least constitute a well-earned recognition for Mbarga at last.<\/p>\n Which leaves just one final question: Why have Mbarga and \u201cSweet Mother\u201d been so ignored elsewhere? While the continent\u2019s cultural contributions are generally marginalized, some African music\u00a0does<\/em>\u00a0make it outside, from Fela Kuti\u2019s afrobeats, to Ali Farka Toure\u2019s Malian blues, to Ethiopia\u2019s otherworldly-sounding jazz. The music that makes it to western ears is usually tough and cool, if not explicitly political, reflective of what many perceive must be a dark political mood.<\/p>\n Yet none of this music, brilliant and rich as it is, has proved as popular with Africans themselves as Prince Nico Mbarga and Rocafil Jazz\u2019s ten-minute ode to mothers. It is played at weddings, as newlywed brides about to leave their homes for the first time dance with their mums to say thank you, at birthday parties celebrating the long lives of family grandmothers, and at Mother\u2019s Day church services, the only secular song amongst the hymns, with worshippers swinging in the aisles adding their own \u201challelujah!\u201d to Mbarga\u2019s lyrics. The \u201cSweet Mother\u201d ideal, the all-consuming mother, not eating until her children are fed, not sleeping until they sleep, crying when they are sick, might be a little conservative, but it has deep cultural roots.<\/p>\n The Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe wrote that discovering the jubilance of Congolese rumba in the 1980s \u2013 a time of impoverishment, of brutal wars, of cruel leaders \u2013 taught him to look beyond the mere facts of political life. In Africa, he argued, \u201cmusic has always been a celebration of the ineradicability of life.\u201d More than anything, it was the genre that articulated \u201cthe practice of joy before death.\u201d In the west perhaps, we have only wanted to hear music from the continent about the facts; in its joyful way, \u201cSweet Mother\u201d captured something else: the suffering, the love, the human relationships between those facts.<\/p>\n Maybe we should listen harder.<\/p>\n DISCLAIMER: <\/strong>The Views, Comments, Opinions, Contributions and Statements made by Readers and Contributors on this platform do not necessarily represent the views or policy of Multimedia Group Limited.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Twenty years ago the man who recorded one of the most successful songs of all time was thrown off a motorbike by a car in Calabar, Nigeria. He hit his head on the road and was rushed to the hospital, where he lay for two weeks, in and out of consciousness, but deteriorating all the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":55173,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-55172","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment"],"yoast_head":"\n![\"'Sweet](\"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/04\/WhatsApp-Image-2023-04-06-at-10.35.55.jpeg\" "\\"'Sweet")
<\/figure>\n![\"'Sweet](\"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/04\/PrinceNico-2.jpg\" "\\"'Sweet")
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![\"'Sweet](\"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/04\/PrinceNico-3.jpg\" "\\"'Sweet")
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\u201cChristiana,\u201d two songs after \u201cSweet Mother,\u201d is about a girl he was courting in Onitsha. It was an attitude he alluded to in \u201cSweet Mother\u201d itself, asking before one of its many instrumental breaks: \u201cYou fit get another wife \/ you fit get another husband \/ but you fit get another mother? No!\u201d Not that, when pressed on it all these years later, neither Lucy nor Esame seem to mind that much.<\/p>\n<\/figure>\n