Salawa Abeni’s Personal Challenges Amid Career Success

In the early 1980s, a long quarrel with fuji star Kollington Ayinla produced a succession of attacks and counter-attacks, in which Abeni lampooned Kollington, his parents and his relatives, along with his physical attributes, unpleasant lips, eyes like a prawn, a tendency to run away with married women.

A child prodigy of Nigeria’s Yoruba people, Salawa Abeni has, since the late 70s, been the acknowledged modernizer and leader of the women’s vocal style known as waka, a close relative of the male-dominated juju, apala and fuji music. Her professional career began at the age of 10, when she walked into the Lagos office of the local leader recording label and asked to be allowed to play a demo tape.

Treating the young girl’s request as something of a joke, the owner promised to listen to the tape later, put it away in his desk and promptly forgot about it. A few months later, visiting the nearby town of Epe, the local recording leader saw hundreds of people lining up for admission to a society function where a 10-year-old girl was singing. Curious, he went along, to find Abeni, the girl who had visited him in his office, singing in a compelling and precociously mature voice.

With her parents’ permission, he took her into the studios to record her debut, late Murtala Muhammed, a tribute to the then assassinated head of state, which became one of the bestselling Nigerian releases of 1976. In 1977, Abeni formed her own group, the Waka Modernizers, and by 1980, was one of the most successful artists in Nigeria.

Prior to the attacks, they were great lovers. But the love broke down in a manner that cannot be easily explained. The virulence of the exchanges allayed any suspicion that the whole affair was a mutually beneficial publicity stunt, but the origins of the acrimony remains obscure. According to Abiyamo, a Nigerian blogger, the fights were not physical, they used the same tools that launched them into stardom and set their parts together. Such thinly veiled fights between music stars were not rare but what made this particular case more dramatic was the fact that both were lovers before their relationship ended in a dramatic manner.

So, in 1981 and 1982, both parties released a series of mutually abusive records. Trouble intensified after Salawa left Kollington to marry a Lagos business man, an unhappy Kollington raised alarm that he was the authentic father of Salawa’s first child. He was so pissed off that he released a song to attack Salawa’s feminity. On her part, Abeni responded with a hit to hurt him. She lambasted him to the extent of calling him “illiterate good-for-nothing.” She thereafter heaped praises on Kollington’s competitors so as to make it more painful to him.

While the game was going on between the two, Nigerians were getting entertained form their grievances. Every single aspect of their lives was being examined and brought to public glare on the pages of newspapers. Salawa was seen as the vulnerable member in the war of musicians. And it was no surprise when her husband and a music record owner, Alhaji Lateef Adepoju, stepped in to defend his wife. In defending his wife, Adepoju gathered a team of lawyers to drag Kollington to court.

But while working to defend his wife, both of them fell apart in 1986. She later opened up and said Adepoju took advantage of her innocence, used her and dumped her. Surprisingly, Salawa returned to Kolllington with whom she had exchanged banters through music. The bitterness was buried in 1985, when Abeni recorded a tribute album to the recently deceased apala star Haruna Ishola, her bestselling release of the decade. She has subsequently recorded for the Kollington and Alagbada labels, and remains one of Nigeria’s leading live attractions. Both of them finally got married but it was unfortunate that the marriage collapsed in 1994. Salawa said she made attempts to get remarried and get more children but it did not work out.

Six years later in January 2000, Adepoju had lost everything. In 1999, he was ejected from his office in Shomolu, Lagos. To worsen matters for him, his first son, Ahmed, disappeared with N1.2milion to establish another record label in Lagos. By October 1999, Alhaji Adepoju fell sick and two of his three cars were involved in autocrash. Eventually, Adepoju died in penury after an ailment that eventually claimed his life. In an interview granted to Pulse online, it was unfortunate for her that on July 15, 2015, mother of Salawa, Madam Memunotu Ashabi Alidu Ojomo, died at the age of 89.

She passed away in the arms of her daughter. In her own words: "I was there with her. She died in my arms, in her room in her house at Itoikin. We were all with her, my other two sisters were in the house with me for a few days before she died, she was just lying down, eyes closed and was breathing.

“We all kept hoping she would come around again and we kept hoping. At a point my sisters left to go and talk outside the room, but I stayed back to play with her, to see if she will come around. I will call her name, sing for her, just hoping.

“She will do as if she's responding she will then sleep back again. At some point, she responded again, breathe deep and went silent. And she passed on. She gave up right in front of me.” Madam Memunotu Ashabi Alidu Ojomo was buried the following day. In the interview Queen Salawa Abeni said she was close to her mum, and was the one who resembled her the most.

But reports revealed that Kollington Ayinla did not attend the burial ceremony of her late mother. In defending that, Kollington told Punch that he had already played his role as a husband to her and father to his children by going to console her on her mother’s demise but his presence at the wedding was not compulsory because his children were there to represent him. The singer stated that he and Salawa are both old and does not have to come to his house to cook before people get to know that they are still in love.

The fuji singer said: “When Salawa Abeni’s mother died, I went to her house to visit her and I played my role as a father to my children and as a husband to Salawa Abeni. I comforted her like any husband would do. It is true that I was not at the burial ceremony of her mother. “It was not compulsory for me to be at the burial.

As long as my children were there, it means I was also there. They represented me. “We are both old and our children are grown. She does not have to live with me before people recognise that she is still my wife. She does not need to come to my house to perform the role of a wife because I have a cook and another wife that lives with me.”