On: The Lost Song(s) of Bongolipso

This article is best enjoyed while listening to any song that helps you bring back memories.

In the morning’s early hours, a fragment of an old song's lyrics played in my head. The melody felt so vivid and clear that I could almost picture the music video that accompanied it. I could remember the singer dancing with what seemed like a trench coat, in the middle of a mildly busy street, with a few passersby stopping to watch him as he sang to the camera these words in Yoruba: 

orì lómò lólà, orì lómò là…bóyá ma a di olólà lólà, orì lómò

orì mí tètè gbe iri pàdé mí lonà o, bóyá ma a di olólà lólà, orì lómò

This was a song I remember listening to, and after seeing the music video on the TV channel, AIT, in the year 2006 or 2007, I got so emotional that I cried without understanding a single word of the Yoruba language. I remember feeling a sense of overwhelming calm as I watched the singer regale my eardrums with his voice —a vibrant yet cool tone. He had a perm. He was light-skinned and throughout the video, he wore a kind smile on his face. 

But like most things, time happened. The song and the smile were soon buried underneath a pile of memories, only to be unearthed by an idle mind at 5:30 am in the year 2022. Eager to relive that moment, I embarked on a search for the song, hopeful that the magic of the internet would heed my incantations. The internet was not so kind. However, it did give me a consolation prize: it found me a name.

Introducing: Pius “Bongolipso” Amolo

There was very little I was able to find about the veteran stage and screen actor, singer, and dancer, Pius Amolo. Besides being a veteran in the Nigerian Theatre Arts world, he was also described by one of his colleagues as a “quintessential performer”. In addition, he was often referred to by his musical stage name “Bongolipso”, which it turns out was not just a stage name, but describes his brand of music.

Also, despite being a screen actor, he was more drawn to the seductions of the stage. He loved the theatre and was well sought after for his ability to “interpret his characters with depth”, says another colleague. He was also said to be a very kind man. Always ready to offer a helping hand. And all of these kind words and adulation poured in only after his tragic death on the 25th of April 2018 from complications due to a gas explosion at his home. He was 55. 

On reading about his death, however, I was struck by how there was very little information about his life and works. All I could find were a few online publications reporting his demise. Not one had a link to his works: films, music, et cetera, or anything relating to the art form that he had dedicated his life to. It broke my heart not because this meant that the song I sought was seemingly lost forever, but rather the realization that sometimes, even memories are not enough to immortalize those we truly care about. 

Down The Rabbit Hole

In my dive down the rabbit hole of Google pages, I noticed that with every new page I opened without finding any viable results, my hope died a little. The more I searched, the more I hummed the tune, scared that if I didn’t, it might soon be lost in the depths of my subconscious as it did before. I didn’t want to have to wait another 15 years or more to recall the song, knowing that if I ever did lose it again, it might take even longer to find it. 

My searches did not yield any viable results except for two similar queries. The first was a question by someone on a Nairaland thread. He got his answer just like I did, and like me, he was disappointed he couldn’t find the song anywhere on the internet. The second was a reply to a deleted tweet. It had a portion of the lyrics in Yoruba and the author had also been on a search for the song as well. He too, like us, had been dealt the cold punch of disappointment. The song was lost. 

Memories Are Not Enough

I usually am the type to encourage people to live their best lives without having to pick up a camera to take a picture or record a video because it has always felt performative to me. But after myriads of searches online for this particular song, I found myself realizing that maybe, just maybe there is something to be gained from having the best moments of our lives saved and stored for posterity's sake.

The human brain is an incredible resource and yet it is also quite limiting in how it can absorb so much and return so little in retrospection. I have always believed myself to be someone who was able to remember a lot of details about my past, especially some of the more mundane moments. To some, it would almost seem eidetic but it really isn’t. It’s more reconstructive. I remember bits and pieces and then perform a sort of creative reconstructive surgery that bears a semblance to the truth. 

However, as surreal as it often feels when we remember moments that may have seemed lost, there is still a trudging feeling of incompleteness that lingers in the corner of our minds. We contend with the truth of how profound memories are yet unreliable and fleeting. Memory fades, we realize this, just as the essence of who we are fades as we age as well. Whenever we remember the past —good or bad— there is a sense that we only remember a fraction of the truth of those moments. 

And often it’s just our version of the truth. Our perception of time, space, and the relativity of everything as it pertains to certain memories can feel so overwhelmingly true that we don’t doubt any part of it. As such, I imagine that if I were to have found the video or the song —at the very least— I may have been transported back in time to relive that very moment in its wholesomeness.

Capture The Moments

In trying to find the elusive song, I understood just why the phrase “capture the moment” ought to feel a lot less metaphorical. “Capture the moment” should be literal as well. Indeed, ensure you take your chances at life, the opportunities and moments as they come. Don’t let it slip, as my favourite rapper Eminem would say. But, I daresay that you should also find ways to capture the moments —at least the most profound of them— in some memorabilia-esque form. 

I believe this is the underlying beauty of being in the social media age. As a generation, we have the tools at our disposal to be more than just adulations and haphazard announcements on any publication when we die. We have the tools to capture moments that can live on after us, without making the act seem overly performative.

Often we can be so caught in the importance of living in the moment, that we fail to realize that reliving moments are just as important. 

That being said, personally, I’ll keep searching for Pius Amolo’s song(s) for as long as the tune doesn’t fade to the depths of my subconscious. I figured I might have to go outside the comfort of the internet to find something tangible regarding this. For the fact that there was very little about his life documented on the internet, I am hoping this newsletter edition serves in some way to capture the moment and keep his memory alive and burning. 

I also hope I find the song too. As I write this, I still hum it silently. But more importantly, I hope I can take this as a lesson to live more today and capture more moments despite how dreary everything else might seem. If not in pictures or videos, then at least in words. As the lyrics to the song say, bóyá ma a di olólà lólà, orì lómò, which translated to English means:

Maybe I’ll be rich tomorrow only my destiny knows