Sonny Okosun

Sonny Okosun was born on the first of January 1947 at the village of Enugu in the Eastern Region of Nigeria, the son of Theophilus Okosun — an Edo civil servant and Anglican lay reader — and a homemaker mother whose name does not appear in the surviving family record. The family moved to Benin City when he was an infant. He attended the St. Patrick's Primary School at Benin City through his eleventh year and the Saint Michael's Secondary School through fourth form. He left the secondary school in 1962 to apprentice at the Premier Productions photography studios of the Benin City entertainer Olu Okosun, no relation.

He joined the Roy Williams' Beats of Benin band as a guitarist in 1965 and the Sahara Beats of Lagos in 1966. He emigrated to London in 1968 at twenty-one to study at the London Drama School. He worked across the following two years in the London amateur theatre and as the rhythm guitarist of the Beatles' minor Liverpool contemporaries the Black Velvet. He returned to Nigeria in 1971 to join the Sir Victor Uwaifo Sound Makers of Benin City.

He founded in 1972 the Paperback Ozzidi Band at Benin City. The synthesis he developed across the following decade — between the Edo highlife base of the Benin City music economy, the Caribbean reggae rhythm structure of the early 1970s Bob Marley (placed in this archive) recordings, and the political-protest lyric tradition of the post-civil-war Nigerian student left — became the genre he called ozzidi. The 1977 album Papa's Land and the 1978 album Fire in Soweto established him as the principal Afro-pop political-protest voice of late-1970s West Africa.

The 1978 single Fire in Soweto — released in response to the June 1976 Soweto Uprising and the death of the student-organiser Hector Pieterson (placed in this archive) — became one of the principal anti-apartheid anthems of the late 1970s. The album sold over two million copies across Nigeria, Britain and the United States.

He converted to evangelical Christianity in 1991 and produced across the following decade exclusively gospel recordings.

He died of colon cancer at Washington on the twenty-fourth of May 2008, at sixty-one.

He is honored here as the architect of ozzidi.