Evi-Edna Ogholi’s story of her parting from Emma Ogosi her erstwhile manager, producer and husband is very different from the one he has told. She says it is because he turned her to a punching bag and he, in a 2007 interview, said she could not take the new status of their dwindling fortunes.
Whatever the case may have been, what is incontrovertible is that she left and has never looked back. Her journey took her to Paris, France where she has made a home these past couple of years. But she has been missing in Nigeria where her music ruled the airwaves and almost every party in the 1980s and 1990s. Quoted to have said that she misses home, the mother of two may have been performing all across Europe and the West African coast, but has not released an album in a while.
There was recent talk of a reggae/jazz combo, but it would seem that is one project still in the works. Many continue to miss her songs, most of them rendered in vernacular with a rhythm uniquely Evi Edna Ogholi.
Added to her performances is the voluntary work that she has been doing for the United Nations Children’s Educational Fund (UNICEF), for which she has said the French she now speaks has been beneficial.
She released her debut album My Kind of Music in 1987, which established her as Nigeria’s first real female reggae artiste. The albums On the Move, Happy Birthday and Step by Step were to follow all of them selling tremendously. The song, ‘Happy Birthday’ still plays regularly against the backdrop of clinking glasses of wine and the feasts at birthday parties but few remember the then young lady, whose voice rocks them to gaiety.
Take a lsiten to Happy Birthday.
