Why Go To War
Artist: William Onyeabor
Country: Nigeria 1979
Album: Tomorrow
A reaction by Rachel, Kate, Simon and Alex.
All of these statements are true reactions to Why Go To War by people who don’t consider themselves to be professional musicians or ethnomusicologists.
William Onyeabor is a Nigerian Funk musician born in March, 1946. Onyeabor was born into a poor family in Enugu, a city located in the South East of Nigeria and spent all of his childhood there. As his music grew more popular, Onyeabor became financially stable enough to travel to Europe to study record manufacturing but he returned to Nigeria in the 1970s to set up his own music label as well as a recording and production studio. His success made him incredibly popular in Enugu and he was crowned a high chief due to his successful business mentality. Although incredibly successful in all of 8 self-released albums he created between 1977 and 1985, Onyeabor remained an introverted man, who refused to speak about his music making only one broadcast in his career in 2014. In this interview he stated that he didn’t intend to release any more music and he kept to this promise because in early 2017, William Onyeabor passed away at the age of 70. There is very little on Onyeabor as a person or in regards to his music and thus his motivations to write the music he did are relatively unknown but, his politically driven voice lives on is his songs.
Why Go to War is the 2nd song on William Onyeabor’s 1979 album Tomorrow. A song which questions the very choices that both the government and society make – he addresses ‘leaders, all nations, super powers’ and asks them ‘why go to war, why not find peace?’. Very little is known about this song, as Onyeabor never explained his motives behind such, but its generic nature, referring to ‘all blacks and whites all over the world’, suggests he is questioning all of society.
A Preface to these interviews: I chose to show a remastered version of Why Go To War which was accompanied by a video and opening composition which wasn’t part of the original release. I informed the participants of this previous to listening to the song and the interview.