Ogundare Foyanmu evokes memories of his immense contributions to traditional poetry. He owned the Anvil.
He is a Big, tall and fearfully dark ijala singer.Language was the first space he appropriated: the text of his creation, his creativity.
He had this physical space- a sort of loft really, linked to the main upstairs residential stretch by two flights of stairs. Children and women called this place ‘Abata’- a court, literally; his friends, the other poets in his Amunludun group, who were usually older than him, called it the studio.
Sparsely furnished for a man of his reputation – but then space was the most important demand in his professional and social life, as there was no way children and observers of mock or serious performances in this hall would be denied their leg-room because of appurtenances.
His art was his gift- to the world and to his community; and when it was sought or discovered by his audience as his gift to them, the world became better for all concerned. The gift of language conjoined with the great gift of ethical perception in him, and wisdom ensued.
He was always bare-chest on his verandah where he held court when he was not rehearsing with his group, a wrapper covering his torso. It was an ombudsman of sorts, with people all over the place bringing domestic upheavals for easy resolution, with words. He owned the language to persuade and to rebuff; to lampoon or to rhapsodise.
Oriki was his forte, so was public discourse. In fact, he was known as an inveterate public commentator- a practice that would deal the first devastating blow on his life and art, from which he never quite recovered.
He had dared raise a reprimanding comment on his king and greatest patron- Soun of Ogbomoso- who usually invited him to entertain his publics and visitors and, who then was involved in a war of attrition with some of his high-chiefs, over paramountcy. As if that was not bad enough, he had to do it in the presence of a visiting military governor, who could determine the eventuality of the ruler-ship tussle.
He was banned from performing in public and by the time the ban was lifted, Fuji and Juju had upstaged the allure of more traditional performances in public taste.
Ogundare Foyanmu hails from Ogbomoso and He was born in a Sango worshiping family, in fact, in the household of a renowned Sango priest.
He was named Sangodare at birth. He trained as a barber- Onigbajamo, before he was a farmer. He ended up becoming the greatest ‘modern’ performer of Ijala-poetry of the hunters’ guild, Ogun’s art- and one of the more known exemplars of Yoruba culture.
On Saturday 13th October 2012, Ogundare Foyanmun, one of the most gifted Yoruba verbal artistes departed this world at the age of eighty.
And today, We remembered the only poet that we know, in the long and fecund history of Yoruba word-smithy, who had transgressed certain borders of defined teleologies, to appropriate a rarefied art- one not of his fathers’- without training or initiation, and gone ahead to recast and repurpose it, and in the process, came through a most peculiar and unprecedented identity reconstruction in Yoruba traditional lore.
He came through the borders of creativity with neither ‘systematic and prescribed sequence’ of training nor technical corpus of the initiated, but with a mysterious and astonishing genius.
It was rumoured he came to Ijala knowledge through a long and troubling sequence of dreams he had when he was a boy. But what was not in doubt is his deep knowledge of Yoruba language, genealogies and histories dating back to pre Yoruba formations – a set of skills that would take an average verbal artiste almost an entire half of life time to learn.
Foyanmu possessed a prodigious memory, a quick wit and a mellifluous voice, three important attributes of a successful verbal artiste, according to Oludare Olajubu, the oral traditions scholar. Yet nobody knew how he came by these.
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