OBIORA NDUBUISI EZEUGWU

Highlife guitarist and bandleader who kept Enugu dancing for half a century

The first sound at any Obi Ezeugwu show was never a guitar. It was a shout, 'Enugu, are you ready?', and the answer from the dance floor could be heard two streets away.

Born in the hills of Udi in 1942, Obiora learned his first chords on a borrowed guitar with five strings. He finished secondary school at Christ the King College in Onitsha, took a clerk's job at the Nigerian Coal Corporation in Enugu, and played every night in the compounds of the miners' camps. In 1966, just before the war scattered Enugu's musicians, he formed the Coal City Rhythm Kings, a band that would outlast the war, the clerkship and two generations of drummers.

His style was unhurried and joyful, a mix of palm-wine guitar, brass lines and Igbo proverbs set to dance rhythms. He played weddings, naming ceremonies, burials and, once memorably, a goat-roasting competition that ran until Tuesday. He never became a famous recording star, but across the South-East every woman over fifty seemed to remember a night when Obi Guitar made her dance.

For forty years he also directed the choir at the Holy Ghost Cathedral in Enugu, insisting that a Kyrie could swing if you were gentle with it. He loved pounded yam with egusi, his wife Ngozi's laugh, and the cool of early morning on his veranda with a radio turned low.

Obi Ezeugwu died at home in October 2021, after a short illness, with his guitar leaning against the wall beside him. He leaves his wife of fifty-three years, a son, a daughter and nine grandchildren. His music, mostly recorded on reel-to-reel in friends' sitting rooms, is now being carefully digitised by his family.

“If your feet are not moving, you are not listening properly.”