Moses Adeolu Akisanya a.k.a ‘Baba Eto’, Director of Socials, was born on the 18th February 1928 into the family of Akisanya in Totoro-Owu in Abeokuta. He had his primary education at St. Paul, U.N.A School, Lapeleke, Abeokuta. After completing his primary school, he proceeded to Lagos where he continued his educational career at St. Judes School, Ebute-Metta.
Adeolu Akisanya worked at Idumota as a Clerk with Motor Spare Parts Dealers. He later worked as a Typist with a foreign company called Gottshalk and Co. Limited and later resumed as a signal Clerk at Mobil Petroleum and then West African Airways Corporation.
Without training in Carpentry, he built a box guitar with some strings on it and this was how Moses Adeolu Akisanya invented Agidigbo.Adeolu formed a band called ‘Rancho Boys Orchestra” which was disbanded in 1952. He organised another band in 1953 and named it “Rio Lindo Orchestra” which was strictly an Agidigbo band. He later formed the Western Toppers band stationed in Western Hotel, Idi Oro, Mushin, Lagos.
Adeolu to his contemporaries and fans on the music scene was seen as the chief moral crusader of his time.
A talented composer and satirist, Akisanya in some of his popular numbers lambasted the fairer sex for her materialistic tendencies and unabated love for worthless fad. Some of his sarcastic compositions, which later became hit numbers, include Bonfo, Acada (on arrogant educated men), Awon Aboju Bora.
An unrepentant social critic and commentator till the end Akisanya once summed up his philosophy of life thus “when I criticise women in my compositions, I don’t aim at them, but rather, I condemn some unruly behaviour displayed by some of them, like the idea of wig is dirty, unnatural and anti social. I am a moralist and I will criticise anything even if not women.”
The Master composer and philosopher died on the 2nd November, 1987.
Courtesy NIGERIAN EVERGREEN MUSIC.
