MASTER DRUMMER OF AFROBEAT - Duke University Press

like a native violin. I myself used to play the agidigbo as a child, too. One
of our neighbors used to love it when we boys would gather ourselves
together at night and do our apala thing with agidigbo, bottle, maybe
some tin cans, and we would sing too. In fact, she liked it so much that
she even gave us money to buy our own agidigbo. When you’re talking
about apala, Haruna Ishola was really the master, man. It’s like classical
music for us. The lyrics of this guy are incredible. If you could only
understand what that guy was singing about, man—too many things!
Things about life, like proverbs. Apart from the singing, when you check
the way this guy composes the rhythmical language, it’s flowing because
the instruments are not all playing the same thing there. It’s a kind of
interwoven language, so it’s very interesting. It’s like a conversation. But
when we were doing those things, I never thought in my life that I would
turn out to be a musician. I didn’t want to be one of these agidigbo guys,
playing apala and all that. It was just a question of having kicks imitating
those guys and trying to sing like them. But I did really love drumming.
At home, I used to set chairs up and play on them, just kind of amusing
myself. And from my elementary school days at St. Paul’s, I used to play
snare drum in the school marching band. I held onto that for as long I was
in elementary school. But I finished primary school when I was twelve,
and then I forgot about music completely. That was around 1953.
After that, I went to secondary school to study. But by my third year,
it was too tough for me. To be honest, I wasn’t ready for it. I was tired
of learning all these things that didn’t seem relevant. I couldn’t see what
I was going to do with Latin and all those things. And the teacher was
really becoming a pain in the neck, man. That’s the way I was looking at
it at that time. In fact, I went to my father one day and said, “I am going
to beat up the teacher.” And my father said, “No, you cannot do that!” So
I went back, but one day I just said, “No more.” That was in 1957. Then
my father asked me, “What is it that you want to do now?” I told him I
wanted to be an automobile mechanic. I wanted to be under the cars,
working with the engines. That’s what my father did, and that’s what I
wanted to do. But he told me, “You—no, never!” He didn’t think I was
built to deal with those heavy engines. He thought I would have been a
painter, like an artist, because I used to draw a lot in my spare time. He
thought I would be doing that. I didn’t want to go that direction, but I
thought, maybe I’ll be an architectural draftsman, like Araba. So my parents
sent me to school with a private teacher who had eight students.
I had been going to this school for about six months, and I was pro-
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