By Ron Mgbatogu
I WAS a teenager when I first saw him. Met isn’t an appropriate word at all in that opening statement, for I hardly exchanged one word with him. That was in 1966.
He was almost always a member of the cast in the weekly 30-minute Igbo Drama on Radio Nigeria, Enugu. The producer was the avuncular Mr. Chijioke Abagwe, the prolific writer of most of those entertaining plays. The entire bunch was way above my league, in age and status. So I just saw and admired them from a safe distance but enjoyed their dramatic outputs. Some were folkloric, replete with the cunning antics of the tortoise and his fellow members of the animal kingdom. A good number were parodies of the politics of the day with the perfidious twists and turns you’ll associate with the dramatis personae of those in that trade.
Chief Mike Ejeagha was, if I remember aright, a prominent member of that troupe. He had a genial disposition. Almost always with his acoustic guitar because he was already a known recording artiste even if he could not be described as a popular musician. His forte was the ability to put Igbo stories into music. That made the stories a lot more interesting and memorable to both the young and old. And over the decades his popularity grew.
However, what recently happened, about a year ago, was entirely phenomenal. I still do not know how and why a famous skit maker Brain Jotter exhumed just one song from the large repertoire of this minstrel – for that’s how I’d have described Mr. Mike Ejeagha in 1966 – from the grave of forgotten ditties. Brain Jotter hoisted – I can’t find a better word – the song on the internet. He clad the song in a bewilderingly large assortment of improbable situational skits, complete with such a challenging jaunty and almost drunken dance move to fit the memorable guitar riffs of Gentleman Mike Ejeagha. Boom! Gwo gwo gwo ngwo was trending in the first quarter of the 21st Century!
If you didn’t know the power of the internet, now you have a living proof of it in 3D! I’m probably one of the tiny few that didn’t record their dance moves to the beautiful tale he told in that song he first recorded in the fourth quarter of the last century. Quite swiftly, fresh recognition came to the old man from a variety of unlikely places. Fame and its attendant good companions found him. All in the grey days of his life for he’d had a good innings.
So when I heard that Chief Mike Ejeagha passed on Friday night at the jaw-dropping age of 95 years I remembered the saying – It ain’t over until it is over. It’s now over for him. He ended well, I’ll say, for he was lucky to exemplify the meaning of another of his songs – Uwa mgbede ka mma – eventide life is much sweeter! And, he left us a good song with which to remember him, by courtesy of the genius of Brain Jotter.
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