MASTER DRUMMER OF AFROBEAT - Duke University Press

the night and he had to face his own family that were asking him, “What
the fuck have you done!?” My father understood what was going on. He
was not a wicked guy, he was a very nice guy. He would never think to
beat us unless our mother reported us to him.
My mother was Catholic and very, very religious. When I was very
young she sent me to a Catholic school called St. Paul’s, in Ebute- Metta.
I was serving on the altar with the reverend fathers every Sunday, and
it seemed like I was bowing to everything. But as soon as I left school,
that was it. I seldom go to church as an adult, and if I do decide to go, I
might fall asleep in the middle of the mass, because I probably will have
just finished playing in a club on Saturday night and gone to church directly
from there. It’s not that I don’t believe in God. I believe in God, but
I rarely go to church.
So I must be a bit like my father. He was a Protestant, but this is a guy
that I never saw put his feet in the church. My mother was the only one
going to church. I remember that when I was six, the reverend fathers
and reverend sisters came to our house to preach to my father. Even if he
wouldn’t convert, they were preaching to him that he should come and
marry my mother in the Catholic church. It took some time, but later
he agreed to do it. That was the only day I ever saw his feet in a church.
But he was a guy who prayed every day. He had a Bible and he used to
wake us up to pray the Psalms every morning before he went to work. It
was just that he didn’t want to deal with all the politics of the church. If
you’re not attending church regularly and you die, they won’t bury you,
but he used to say he didn’t give a shit about that. He always told us that
when he died, we should just throw his body onto the street because we
would just be dealing with the body, not the real him! That was always
his joke. And years later, when he died, we did have to go and wrestle
with the church and pay a certain amount for all his back dues so that he
could get a proper burial.
My mother didn’t play any instruments, but my father played guitar and mandolin as a hobby,
so we had instruments at home when I was growing up. My father never
played professionally, but he had friends who were musicians, and he
kept those guitars so he could play with them. In the evening when he
wanted to entertain us, he gave his friends the guitars and he picked up
the mandolin so they could play as a trio. At that time, the juju music was
starting to develop among the Christian Yorubas. What my father was
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