I have not written a word about his death until now. Not a post, not a comment, not even a prayer under a stranger’s tribute. Silence was the only response that felt honest. I am Yoruba, and we were raised with a rule that nobody needed to write down. You do not trample on the death of the young. When an elder dies, we drum, we dance, we recite oriki and we eat.
When someone dies in the morning of life, the compound goes quiet. People lower their voices, because a sentence was cut off before its last word. Thirty-four is not an age at which anyone should become a trending topic.
On the night of 14 October, Olayemi Bayonile Bolaji, whom the world knew as Toluwanisings, came home from a worship concert in Ibadan, still carrying the warmth of a night spent singing to God. He then collapsed the following morning on the staircase of his newly-built Ibadan residence. What followed, according to the accounts I have read, was the most Nigerian of tragedies. He was carried from hospital to hospital, seven or eight of them by some reports, including the University College Hospital. Each one turned him away while he was dying under paperwork and excuses. I cannot verify every detail, and I will not pretend to. But I know this country well enough to recognise the shape of the story.
A man who spent his life giving comfort through songs died while the institutions built for comfort looked elsewhere. I think about those hours more than I would like to admit, the stairs, the car, the doors that did not open, the voice that had calmed so many people finally going quiet.
Then came the second death, the one that happens in public. It was the argument over where to put him. His widow, by every account, wants him laid in a cemetery. His father, his grandmother and an uncle who styles himself head of the family insist he must be buried at the new house he built in Ibadan. What that insistence means, only they can explain.
Tradition is invoked, but I have never heard of a Yoruba custom that makes a young man’s new house his grave, and the reports say that in life he and these relatives were distant, with no warmth between them. A family that was absent from his table has suddenly appeared at his grave with strong opinions.
And then the internet did what it always does. Strangers began to call the widow names for refusing to bury her husband at home, hinting that she must be planning to sell the house one day. Think about that. A woman who has just lost her husband, who must also explain to young children why their father is not coming up the stairs, is being tried by people who have never met her, on charges invented for the occasion. She is accused of greed for wanting a quiet cemetery where she may visit him without living beside his grave. It would be funny if it were not so sad. Grown men and women, with their phones and their certainty, are debating the real estate of a dead man’s widow, and each side shouts louder than the last. The contest has become messy and laughable, a tragedy dressed as a comedy, and the only one who has said nothing is the man who is meant to be at the centre of it.
Toluwanisings sang of light that darkness could not swallow and of a giant who would not be shrunk. Now the living, some of them bound to him by blood, seem ready to do the shrinking themselves, while strangers hold court over his private life as if grief were a spectator sport.
The philosophers have wrestled with whether any of this can really harm him. Epicurus said death is nothing to us, since when we are, death is not, and when death is, we are not. If that is right, the dead cannot be wronged, and my sadness is only about the living. But I have never been able to believe it.
Aristotle, in the Nicomachean Ethics, asked whether the fortunes of the living can touch the happiness of the dead, and he admitted the thought was troubling. Thomas Nagel argued that death harms us by depriving us of the goods life would have held, and the harm does not need us to be present to feel it.
Joel Feinberg went further and said a person has interests that outlast the body, such as their reputation and the promises made to them, and those interests can be betrayed after we are gone. Reading them, I side with Feinberg. A man’s name is the one thing he leaves behind that can still be injured, and we handle it so carelessly.
I find I am not alone in thinking this, even beyond Africa. Consider Amy Winehouse, dead at twenty-seven in 2011, a voice the world could not stop playing and could not stop devouring. For years the tabloids followed her stumbles with the patience of hunters. Her pain was sold as a weekly serial, and audiences laughed at her on late-night television while she was still alive to hear it. When she died, the grief was loud for a moment, and then the appetite returned. Jokes were made, her body became a lesson in cautionary tales, and her flaws were dissected as though they explained her genius away. Years later, a documentary about her life forced many people to ask whether they had been the audience at a slow public killing, and whether the people closest to her had protected her or profited from her.
What strikes me is how little the continents matter here. Lagos and London run on the same machinery. We love the singer for what he gives us and we resent him for being more than that, a person with a family, a temper, a body that can break. The voice is public property, we feel, and so the life behind it must be too. Winehouse could not escape that logic, and neither can Toluwanisings. The dead are the one group who cannot hit back, and so they take every blow.
The robust Yoruba understanding of death is the opposite of this appetite. Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman, whatever else it is, insists that the passage of the dead is a sacred work and that the living have obligations that are not optional.
Robert Pogue Harrison, in The Dominion of the Dead, argues that civilisation itself rests on how we treat our dead, that the way a society buries and remembers says what it believes about the human being. By that measure, I am afraid we are being judged right now.
I am still sad. I may be for a long time. But I would rather carry that sadness quietly than add one more voice to the noise. Let the widow breathe. Let the children grow up with a father remembered as music rather than as a headline. Let the earth do its quiet work, as it has done for everyone who ever sang, failed, or was loved too late.
Oluwafemi Popoola is a Nigerian journalist, media strategist, and columnist. He can be reached via bromeo2013@gmail.com
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