We live with small-time legends, and know nothing of it until they pass on. Get me right. The passing of Inowei Dede exemplifies the truth of that statement. I did not know Inowei beyond the fact that we grew up in good old Nembe. I was even his senior in college. Long after I became an old boy of Nenagram, Dede recognised me as his senior and accorded me that respect.
We met on the streets of Port Harcourt. We met on the streets of Yenagoa. We met in the alleys of Nembe, on both sides of the solid unity bridge, and he would greet me respectfully. But, in all that time, even Dede did not know that I was one of his greatest fans. Take it from me. I speak from experience.
When my father, Joseph Aye Owei-Ilagha left Lagos, and the family tagged along with him to Port Harcourt, and then with our mother to Fantuo, my younger brother and I did not hesitate to join the cultural dance ensemble known as Sekiapu. We were boys with an adventurous spirit. We had seen Lagos for all its garish cosmopolitan variety, and we found the novelty of village life titillating.
We could not pretend that we did not hear that nearby throbbing in the air when the drum sticks hit the surface of the animal skin held tight over the stem of polished wood, the hollow end open like a funnel in the ears of the world. We could not but respond to the wild cheer of our age mates, our playmates, our friends.
We sought to prove to them that we knew what it meant to dance to the drum signals of the shark, the crocodile, and the monkey masquerades because our father had demonstrated the steps all too often in our seating room in Lagos at such moments when he missed his boyhood and broke into dance steps that we came to know by heart, step by step.
Even till date, anyone who knows anything about the shark masquerade squad in Fantuo would tell you that my younger brother, Fakuma, played the crab with the dexterity of a marine creature blessed with many hands, clapperboard and all. I played the shiny nose masquerade, the physical replica of the irate shark, only that I was on the cool, youngish and modest side.
I was more playful, and the beauticians of the day always took more time to dress me up with the most expensive cloth from the deepest end of my grandmother’s portmanteaux. Mirrors were stuck all around me, so that wherever I turned, whenever I turned, you were bound to see a reflection of yourself on my body. In short, I commanded a colourful peacock presence whenever I appeared on stage.
For some reason, I never joined the Sekiapu outside Fantuo, and neither did my younger brother. We could easily have stepped into the square, staff in hand, and out-step the dancers at Owusegi Polotiri in Obolomabiri, or Mein-Polotiri in Bassambiri, for that matter. We grew up on both sides of the River Thames, so to speak, but we never joined the dance club in Nembe until we became adults and went our separate professional ways.
On my part, I never failed to attend any full-scale display of Sekiapu in Nembe, so long as I was within hearing distance of the talkative drums, and I had sufficient freedom to stroll around the famous square. I could not get enough of the mystery of the drum spelling out sundry titles and sobriquets, every decibel of sound virtually tracing the genealogy of the dancer in the pitch of play.
I was witness to so many young boys my age who did their best to stand out, on both sides of the proverbial bridge, in the sheer elegance of their dance steps, to say nothing of their instinctive interpretation of the undulating tonalities of the village drum. Out of the lot, Inowei Dede impressed me more than others. He virtually personified everything I would do if I were in the long queue of Sekiapu dancers.
Nembe lost a noble son, a skilful dance artiste, one who would have qualified to be called a reservoir of everything that Nembe culture represents, one who would have relived the throbbing excitement of his youth in a carnival of dance and drama, if ever the Nembe people could put together such a spectacle for the bemused world to record with their modern day technological gadgets, in this age of the tripod, the ipad and the ipod.
At the height of the Isongu-Furo and Agbara-Furo crisis in Nembe, I began to see Dede more often, on exile in Yenagoa. I heard unbelievable things that Inowei had done in the heat of the crisis, at the height of his popularity, and I shudder to repeat them here for want of proof. But I do know for sure that he did not kill anyone. He was simply lavish in his display of wealth at a time when he could be described as rich.
According to the gossip of two birds by my window sill, there was indeed a time when Dede had stood like a godfather in front of the jetty at Dispensary Waterside, broken the seal on naira notes in their bundles, and spilled the entire flakes of minted cash into the waters, as if to say he had too much of this money that was so hard to find.
It is still told in the popular lore of Nembe how so many people dived into the water, some nearly drowning in the bid to grab as much currency as they could, while Inowei stood above the commotion of swimmers, laughing his heart out like an overly tipsy lord of the manor overcome by his vain excesses. But that is not the fellow I want to remember.
Dede would have excelled, if only he were to demonstrate the dance steps of every masquerade he knew in the ancient maritime mythology of the Nembe people, if only a movie camera were placed in front of him, and he were at liberty to adorn himself with the wide range of ceremonial regalia befitting of the characters he had to represent in his absorbing performance, his personal interpretation of Nembe dance heritage.
Alas, we woke up one morning to hear that Dede was no more. He had gone the way of all mortals. Nothing will be remembered of his personal foibles, and all his human errors may be recalled only with fondness. His story will unfold from time to time, in snippets around the corner, long after he is gone the way of all flesh.
His passion for everything Nembe will be missed. Even now, I foresee an outlandish festival of masquerades taking the stage in Nembe as a lasting memorial to some of its most ardent acolytes, and I would like to play the shiny nose masquerade as in the days of my youth, before the tell-tale cameras of the world. In all that display of colour, verve and vigour, the fabulous and theatrical dance steps of Inowei Dede will be missed.
