When his longtime associate and composer, Akanni Fatai (alias B’olodeoku), died in the late 1970s, the Apala music emperor, Ayinla Omowura, captured the shock in a tear-jerking elegy. He described the news of Fatai’s passage as “agbo-ju-’gba-nu” –news so rudely shocking that, upon hearing it, you instinctively throw away the calabash bowl in your hand.
The news of the death of my friend, Dotun Oladipo, reached me in the quiet of an early morning. Opening my phone to check the world’s daily anxieties on social media, I was struck by that same Ayinla’sagbo-ju-’gba-nu impulse, momentarily casting my device away like a leprous chattel.
Oladipo passed on Tuesday, August 25, 2026, at the age of 56. Only three weeksor so earlier, we had met at a gathering in Lagos. With the painful clarity of hindsight, how was I to know that as he walked up to exchange a warm, long-overdue pleasantry, Dotun was actually bidding me farewell?
Ever since the reality of his passage sank in, I have searched philosophical texts for explanation. I wanted something beyond run-of-the-mill theological interpretations–something activist, probing, and unconventional.
I first turned to the British sociologist Geoffrey Gorer. In his 1955 study, The Pornography of Death, Gorer argued that because modern society hides death from public view, our fascination with mortality manifests through “reprehensibly graphic and violent representations.” Yet, Gorer’s thesis offered no solace; it left me more bewildered than before.
Next, I sought refuge in Epicurus, who counseled against mourning because death, as the complete cessation of sensory consciousness, is “nothing to us.” Epicurus argued that while we exist, death is absent, and when death arrives, we no longer exist to feel it. Therefore, dreading a state which we cannot fathom or suffer is irrational.
Socrates took a similar view. Hemaintained that death is not to be feared. It arrives either as a peaceful, dreamless sleep or as a migration of the soul to another realm where one joins the great minds of history. His disciple, Plato, carried the thought further: the body is merely a prison for the immortal soul, and true philosophy is the lifelong practice of freeing that soul to contemplate eternal truths which death reveals.
For the Stoics — chief among them Seneca and Marcus Aurelius — a constant awareness of mortality was necessary to strip away life’s trivialities. The existentialist Martin Heidegger echoed this: knowing that life is finite and time bound should compel us to live authentically.
African cosmology, however, offers a fundamentally different perspective of death. It is never a terminal end. The deceased transitions into the realm of the “living-dead,” acquiring the status of ancestors who maintain an active, powerful relationship with the world they left behind.
In Yoruba thought, the physical (Ayé) and spiritual (Òrun) worlds are interconnected mirrors. To earn passage to the afterlife as a respected ancestor, one must hold a passport stamped by a life lived in service to others. Across the border in Benin Republic, death is seen as a loop where man sheds the garment of mortality to don the apparel of immortality, returning as the Egungun to bless the living.
Similarly, in Igbo cosmology, the lands of the living and the dead are Siamese twins; a righteous earthly existence is the prerequisite for ancestorhood. Among the Ga of Ghana, the BaManianga, a subgroup of the Kongo (Bakongo) ethnic group who primarily live in the southwestern part of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), the Tshivenda, a distinct Bantu ethnic group living primarily in the northernmost Limpopo province of South Africa, near the border with Zimbabwe, Zulu of South Africa, as well as the Gikuyu and Nandi of Kenya, death is universally understood as a transition rather than an erasure.
Yet, despite this vast repository of philosophical and ancestral wisdom, none of these theories offers comfort or clarity for Dotun’s sudden exit. The question that continues to torment me remains simple and unanswered: why do good men die?
I met Dotun during his days at The Punch newspaper. A gentleman to the hilt, he possessed the rare selflessness of a man always ready to shoulder another person’s burden alongside his own.
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To contemplate that the earth will open its audacious mouth to swallow such a good man is the ultimate testament to death’s cruel daring. I closed all textbooks, allowing the presence of a trickling tear violate the borders of my roving thoughts. Then, I tuned my device to listen to a sermon from the Apala music lord at the passage of Yusuff Olatunji . It sieved into my ears… “Gbere o, arin’ako, o d’oju ala o, eni g’esin o le e ba…” he sang — Never to be seen again, except a chance encounter with someone of similar bodily features, or in the dream; even a rider on a horse back cannot track him down!
Rest on, my good friend.
