(Published by the Sunday Tribune, November 1, 2026)
My eyes are misty as I write this. I have spent the better part of the morning listening repeatedly to one of the tracks of that gifted Yoruba gospel musician, Olayemi Bayonile Bolaji, known on stage as Toluwanisings. The 34-year-old was nature’s human carving of an Àwòko for the listening pleasure of humanity. Toluwanisings was the nightingale, the mockingbird of sacred song. The nightingale holds a sacred placement in Yoruba avian symbolism. Àwòko is the peerless soloist of the forest, gifted with an unmatchable range of sweet cadence.
This human nightingale hailed from Ikirun, Osun State, the ancient town that houses Akinorun Grammar School, where I spent a memorable chapter of my secondary school education. Toluwanisings passed away suddenly a few weeks ago, on October 14, 2026, after collapsing on the staircase of his Ibadan, Oyo State residence. He had just returned from an exhilarating worship concert titled In His Presence.
The palaver generated by his sudden departure is immense, disturbing, and deeply instructive. It calls to mind that timeless Swahili proverb which says, on the day a monkey is destined to be killed by a prowling wild cat, every tree it clings to becomes slippery. How does a man who sang so confidently about conquering postpartum human mockery and the conceit of hypocrites suddenly, barely a month after departing this mortal space, become the chief victim of these very wicked forces?
In that particular track that drew hot tears down my cheeks, he sang with prophetic defiance: “The machinations of the enemy will not triumph over me/Satan will never rejoice over my life/Heavens will not regret lifting me high/My sunlight will not be eclipsed by darkness/I saw Satan fall like lightning/The dragon was conquered by the power of our testimony/Satan will not celebrate the fall of a mighty man/My giant will not become a pygmy, as the Lord lives.”
I translated the above searing, tear-jerking lyrics from his verbatim Yoruba rendering that goes thus: “Ero ọta ko ni ṣe lẹ mi l’ori/Inu Satani ko ni dun l’ori aye mi…/Ọrun o ni k’abamọ p’ohun gbe mi ga…/Imọlẹ mi ko ni wọ l’okunkun…/Emi ri Satani to ṣubụ bi mọnamọna/A ṣegun Dragoni nipa ọrọ ẹri ẹnu wa/Satani ko ni s’ajọyọ p’alagbara ṣubu/Omiran mi o ni d’arara b’Oluwa ti ń bẹ.”
Posthumously, however, it would appear that the very machinations Toluwanisings prayed against have encircled him like the enveloping grips of a boa constrictor. The invisible demons of this world seem to be celebrating his passage, while those who should have protected his memory – including members of his immediate and extended family – have perfected plans to reduce this musical giant into a pygmy in the court of public opinion. On the day Toluwanisings passed, every road led to the imagined blood the prowling cat spilled out of the Swahili monkey. All the monkey’s renowned tree-climbing theatrical skills became effete in an instant. The most knowledgeable became the most foolish, and the most celebrated became the most vulnerable.
Toluwanisings’ death and the social media conceit that followed confirm the age-long wisdom of our forebears: if the well-known acrobatic tree-to-tree escape from its foes meets the monkey on plain, treeless ground, the creature becomes as helpless and vulnerable as any ordinary mammal. Ancient Yoruba wisdom packages this as: “Bi igi o ba sunmọ igi, ọmọ ẹdun a d’ope” – when trees fail to stand close to one another, the young monkey loses its agility and becomes a big-time fool.
Before we even examine Toluwanisings’ tragic post-death drama, we must confront the horrifying circumstances surrounding his final hours. It was a familiar Nigerian tragedy that unfolded: the gospel musician slumped in his home; medical attention was fatally delayed and ultimately denied, and Àwòko flew away with his melodious voice.
For decades, Nigeria has grappled with the twin evils of hospital emergency management – systemic negligence and outright rejection – which have consumed some of the finest minds and sweetest voices of our country. Added to these is the third evil: the notorious refusal by hospitals to treat emergency and gunshot victims without police reports. Added together, they constitute an unfeeling bureaucratic cruelty that continues to send citizens to early graves.
Reports indicate that as Toluwanisings fought for breath upon slumping, he was rushed to approximately seven to eight different hospitals across the city of Ibadan, including the apex federal tertiary institution, the University College Hospital (UCH). Each institution either rejected him outright or presented one administrative excuse after another. They passed the dying artist around in a macabre game of medical hot potato, until the Owner of the leash on the goat’s neck finally pulled it into eternity.
Predictably, social media collapsed under the weight of anger and unfeeling cross-examinations. Àwòko’s sudden, needlessly avoidable silence provoked widespread outrage online, as netizens poured bile on Nigeria’s broken health infrastructure. They then resurrected that haunting, tragic national shibboleth: May Nigeria never happen to us.
Unfortunately, the moment Toluwanisings’ eyes closed to open in eternity, the conversation shifted from the systemic failure that killed him to a toxic, voyeuristic dissection of his personal life. The posthumous uproar and needless media harangue attending Toluwanisings’ passing and burial sound so absurd. They bear a striking resemblance to the dark spectacle that followed the death of Ilerioluwa Oladimeji Aloba, widely known as Mohbad, in 2023.
Mohbad was just 27 years old when he died on September 12 of that year. A talented singer and songwriter too, his death detonated a complex web of controversy, ranging from allegations of Lagos music underworld bullying and assault to disputes over the paternity of his infant son, coroner’s inquests, and disgraceful family squabbles over his estate. For years, that young boy’s corpse remained trapped inside the dark coldness of the morgue, suffering endless postponements while living relatives traded insults on social media.
The Mohbad spectacle reminded me of the decades it took for the secrets of Asipa Oyo, Amuda Olorunosebi, to be covered by Ilẹ Ọgẹrẹ Afọkọyeri – the earth’s crust. Gruesomely murdered on his Oyo Alaafin farm on November 26, 1992, with acid poured on his body by his assailants, he remained unburied for seven years, until November 26, 1999. Ilẹ Ọgẹrẹ Afọkọyeriis not a mere descriptive phrase; it is a sacred metaphysical name the Yoruba gave to the earth and soil. To our ancestors, the earth is not a passive, inanimate natural resource or mere dirt under our feet; it is a living, conscious, spiritual entity possessing an interconnected affinity with the divine. The earth-crust is venerated as the ultimate, considerate concealer of the human creature’s secrets when life is done.
Instead of allowing Ilẹ Ọgẹrẹ to grant Toluwanisings that sacred cover immediately after he breathed his last, his family members from Ikirun began to heap mounds of hot ash on his memory. For weeks, public attempts were made to paint him as an ungrateful child who abandoned his father, lavished his fortune on his wife’s family, and lived a hypocritical life of a wolf in a sheep’s clothing.
In the heat of this online trial, the question of where his body should be interred morphed into a bitter public war. While his widow favours a quiet, dignified burial in a modern cemetery, his father and patriarchal relatives insist on burying him either inside his newly completed Ibadan residence or beside his late mother’s grave in Ikirun – warning that otherwise, Irẹlẹ, Ikirun’s deeply venerated ancestral guardian deity and mythical god, would unleash its mortal strike. There is nil consideration for Toluwanisings’ young wife and two little girls, except their patriarchal ego and inflated manhood. The contestations has become messy, laughable, and – pardon the word – utterly idiotic. A man who spent his life crafting melodies to heal broken hearts became, in death, a piece of bone fought over by dogs.
If we take a step back from our local grief, however, we will realize that this posthumous hubris is not unique to contemporary Nigeria. Throughout music history, the corpses and legacies of legendary artists have passed through remarkably similar, sordid corridors of greed, hypocrisy and family warfare.
Take the case of my revered musical totem, Winston McIntosh, known to the world as Peter Tosh. By the way, I ported from his friend and arch-rival, Bob Marley, to Tosh when I discovered Tosh’s boundless depth, poetry and philosophywere way out of Bob’s. Sorry, I digressed. Peter was the uncompromising co-founder of The Wailers whose posthumous Grammy recognition celebrated his genius. Shot in the head during a violent home robbery on September 11, 1987, Tosh’s death immediately triggered a chaotic funeral planning process marred by a thick confetti of familial, religious, and political conflicts.
As Tosh’s body was being prepared for interment, two different men suddenly surfaced claiming to be his biological father. One was Alfred McIntosh, backed aggressively by Tosh’s common-law wife, Marlene Brown; the other was James McIntosh, who was eventually confirmed by Tosh’s grieving mother, Alvera Coke, as his father. A fierce feud erupted over his burial site between Marlene Brown and his mother. While Brown insisted on her legal right to manage the funeral, his mother demanded that her only child be brought back to her home parish of Westmoreland. Because the Jamaican state did not legally recognize common-law marriage, the government handed the body to Tosh’s mother.
Tosh’s funeral descended into utter madness. As a devout Rastafarian who spent his life denouncing the hypocrisy of state institutions, the attempt by the Jamaican government to dominate Tosh’s official state funeral sparked protests. How could the same “Babylon” that hunted Tosh to death – whose polais-mon(police) cracked his skull for smoking ganja – be same mourner shedding crocodile tears at his funeral? His Rastafarian brethren thus turned the funeral into a raucous, chaotic demonstration. To compound the surreal drama, a self-proclaimed prophet marched up to the casket, unlidded it in front of the congregation and fruitlessly chanted commands for Tosh to “rise from the dead!”
Similarly, the tragic end of Apala music legend, Ayinla Omowura, in May 1980 saw a battle over the soul and body of the man who prided himself as the nightingale – a bird the Yoruba also call the Olóbùró. Culturally, the Yoruba appellation for this ancient bird is that it has 200 voices (ẹyẹ olóbùró ní ohùn igba), with its famed beautiful, endless repertoire of songs that come in loud, bold vocal variety. Apologies: I digressed again. Stabbed in the head with a heavy beer glass during a barroom brawl in Ago-Ika, Abeokuta, Omowura died of cranium damage. Though born a Muslim, he was notorious for ignoring daily Islamic prayer rituals. His Itoko home was a haven for traditionalists and fiery masquerades, most notably his personal masquerade. His open indulgence in cannabis and violence was also legendary.
Upon Omowura’s killing, the conservative Islamic clerics of his Itoko neighbourhood staunchly refused to administer the Salat al-Janazah (Islamic funeral prayer) on his body, declaring his lifestyle un-Islamic. It was only after community elders reminded the clerics of Omowura’s massive, anonymous financial contributions to their local mosque that the religious leaders reluctantly assented to perform the rites.
The Western world offers equally bizarre examples of squabbles over artists’ corpses. Elvis Presley and James Brown followed that trajectory, with their passages shrouded in ruckuses. When Presley, the “King of Rock and Roll,” died of cardiac arrest on August 16, 1977, he was buried in a mausoleum at Forest Hill Cemetery in Memphis. Shortly after, police arrested four men who had broken into the vault attempting to steal his corpse in order to extort millions of dollars in ransom from his estate. His body had to be exhumed and reburied in a heavily guarded, fortified garden at Graceland.
Similarly, when James Brown, the “Godfather of Soul,” died on Christmas Day in 2006, his body remained unburied for months in a temperature-controlled room while his children and his partner, Tomi Rae Hynie, waged a vicious legal battle over the validity of their marriage, control of his multi-million dollar estate, and the choice of his final sepulchre.
Perhaps the most bizarre posthumous spectacle occurred following the 1973 drug overdose death of country rock pioneer Gram Parsons. Prior to his death, Parsons and his road manager, Phil Kaufman, had made a secret pact: whichever of them died first would be cremated by the other in the high desert of Joshua Tree National Park. Thus, when Parsons died, his stepfather, Robert Parsons, attempted to hijack his body for a private burial in Louisiana to secure control over the musician’s estate. Kaufman responded by posing as a mortuary driver at Los Angeles International Airport and stole the coffin from the hangar. He then drove it out to the Joshua Tree desert, poured five gallons of petrol over the corpse, and set it ablaze. Kaufman was later arrested; however, the charge of cadaver theft against him in court couldn’t stand because it wasn’t explicitly classified as a crime under California law at the time. Kaufman was merely fined $300 for the theft of the wooden casket!
What these global cases reveal is a disturbing, universal human impulse: society is deeply, structurally unfair in its posthumous assessment and handling of artists.
When a musician is alive, we consume their talent, exploit their vulnerabilities, and demand that they serve as vessels for our inspiration, our worship, or our entertainment. But the moment breath leaves their lungs, we strip them of their human dignity. The living descend, like vultures, upon their corpses – relatives fight over property, fans trade salacious rumours, religious institutions pass sanctimonious judgments and the public turns their personal tragedy into cheap online entertainment.
Toluwanisings spent his short life crafting songs that offered solace to thousands. He sang of triumphing over mockery, of light piercing through darkness, and of giants refusing to become pygmies. Yet in death, he became temporarily trapped in the very noise, malice, and belittlement he spent his career singing against.
These are my questions for Toluwanisings’ sabre-rattling uncle, who has become the mythological social media dragon breathing out fire and brimstone over the preferred site of his burial: Does he know that, upon cessation of breath from the nostrils, the living body has no more worth than a log of wood? Why prioritize a log of wood’s welfare over that of the living?
Whether Toluwanisings is buried in the finest sepulchre on earth like Michael Jackson (whose crypt burial site at the Great Mausoleum–Holly Terrace in Forest Lawn Memorial Park cost $590,000 for the crypt title alone, out of a total private funeral cost of more than $1 million) or the modest cemetery replica of where President Umaru Yar’Adua was interred, like every man, maggots will feast on the body a few days post-interment.
Why compound the pain of a widowed young woman who would have to daily agonize as she wakes to see a cryptic grave that was once her ebullient husband? If there is a need to sell Toluwanisings’ new house, especially to finance his young kids’ education, does this uncle realize that a home used as a burial site could bring down its value? The obvious reality is that Toluwanisings’ paternal family is locked up in the ancient patriarchal view of a woman as chattel and unworthy of inheritance, especially since it is obvious that she might remarry.
Society must learn to give the departed their peace. The dead cannot defend themselves, nor can they respond to allegations whipped up by living relatives or social media prosecutors. It is time we let Ilẹ Ọgẹrẹ Afọkọyeri do its sacred work of covering the secrets, the flaws, as well as the bones of the departed, in a modest time frame – human foibles which all the online prosecutors also possess. By doing so, we would allow the art of the dead and not their human limitations, echo into eternity.
