Onyeka Onwenu, the singer, actor, broadcaster and activist whose love ballads and songs about women’s rights were a soothing balm during Nigeria’s rocky 1980s and earned her the nickname “Elegant Stallion”, has died at 72.
She had just finished a performance at a private party on Tuesday night in Lagos when the singer became ill. Hours later, she died at a nearby hospital, having suffered a heart attack, according to local reports.
The Nigerian president, Bola Tinubu, was among those paying tribute to Onwenu and said she “lives on in her immortal masterpieces”.
The singer is best known for the disco anthem One Love (1986). Another of her hits, You and I, was repurposed for the 1999 movie, Conspiracy – which she also starred in – and is widely regarded as one of the most iconic soundtracks of Nollywood, the world’s second-largest film-production industry.
She was born in Obosi, Anambra, in January 1952 to Dickson Onwenu, a politician in pre-independence Nigeria, and Hope Onwenu, who was also a singer, and raised in Port Harcourt, Rivers state. She completed her education in the US – at Wellesley College, Massachusetts, and the New School, New York.
Upon her return to Nigeria, she launched her pop career while simultaneously working as a broadcaster at the state-run Nigerian Television Authority (NTA). While there, she wrote and narrated Nigeria: A Squandering of Riches, a 1984 collaborative documentary between the BBC and NTA, about corruption in the oil-rich country.
A contemporary of the jùjú maestro King Sunny Adé, they recorded the popular 1989 duet Choices, about consent and birth control, a stunningly bold move in a country that remains largely conservative decades later.
Another of her peers was the radical musician-activist Fela Aníkúlápó Kútì, who married 27 women in a 1978 ceremony. When he was arrested six years later by the military government of the day, Onwenu pushed for his release. In My Father’s Daughter, her 2021 memoir, she revealed that after his release he asked her to marry him, a request she emphatically turned down, although with good humour.
“I told him that I was a jealous lover and would not be able to cope as an appendage to his harem,” she wrote.
Onwenu released four albums before switching to become a gospel singer in the 1990s and was awarded national honours by Nigeria in 2003 and 2011.
Her self-assuredness as a confident woman was routinely misinterpreted as arrogance.
Ed Keazor, a historian and lawyer who knew Onwenu for more than two decades and represented her in the mid-1990s, said: “People often described her as being something of a tough nut. I’ll say this: she was even harder on herself. She pushed herself hard and expected the same from others.
“She was more than a client,” he said. “She was my big sister and heroine.”
Onwenu kept a very private personal life but is survived by two sons from a marriage in 1984, which she said she left because she was constantly depressed. “I raised my children [alone], from kindergarten to master’s degree,” she once told the press.
The best-known example of her tenacity was a three-day hunger strike at the premises of her former employer, the NTA, in July 2000. According to the BBC, she was protesting at being barred after complaining that the national channel was playing her music but not paying thousands of dollars in royalties it owed to her.
In her later years, she became a politician, and had a three-year stint as the head of the National Centre for Women Development, before focusing on the arts again.
The British-Nigerian film-maker Biyi Bandele cast her as mother to Odenigbo, husband of Olanna, in the 2013 film adaptation of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novel Half of a Yellow Sun. Five years later, she also starred in Lionheart, Nigeria’s first Netflix original, alongside Nkem Owoh, her co-star in Conspiracy.
This article was amended on 1 August 2024. An earlier version said that Onyeka Onwenu was cast as grandmother to the twins Olanna and Kainene in the film Half of a Yellow Sun. In fact she played the mother of Odenigbo, husband of Olanna.
