By Reuben Abati

I consider it a great privilege to count Shina Peters, the Afro-Juju maestro, who turns 60 this week, as one of my friends and brothers. Dele Momodu has already penned a short tribute in his honour and a committee of friends is planning a day of tributes to coincide with his birthday on May 30. Shina Peters deserves to be celebrated, honoured and serenaded for his contribution to the arts, his place in Nigerian music, his originality and his humanism. I met Shina Peters in those early days of becoming.

I was a graduate student at the University of Ibadan and sitting through classes in musicology taught by Esi Kinni Olusayin, one of our teachers in the team-teaching component of Theatre Arts Theory and Criticism, I had begun to take a special interest in that aspect of criticism and the ethnographic accent that Nigerian-American Ms Olusayin placed on it. Now, ethno-musicology is not a joke, but what is relevant in this piece is how I developed interest in the study and the critical analysis of music. And it just happened that I wrote in those days very actively for the Nigerian press – Daily Sketch – where I did book reviews, almost weekly, Nigerian Tribune where I also wrote reviews and essays, The Times Literary Supplement anchored first by Afam Akeh and later Dapo Adeniyi, and of course the seminal Guardian Literary Series anchored by Ben Tomoloju where literature was promoted and rigorous intellection was allowed, and The Guardian opinion pages where the most serious debates in the country were conducted in a very serious manner by the country’s best and brightest.

http://www.theguildng.com/shina-peters-music-career-defined-by-album-ace/