Segun Akano arrived in Ireland from Nigeria, aged 17, alone, knowing no one and virtually nothing about the country. Many adventures and challenges later, “ultimately through the help of a lot of people”, he has made a life: married with three children, having built a dual career as musician and software engineer.
Akano has lived here longer than he did in Nigeria, but the music of his native country has been central to his life. He is a multi-instrumentalist, playing in bands and curating events. He is the musical director and leader of the 13-member Yankari Afrobeat Collective, which performs on January 24th at the Button Factory, as part of TradFest.
He met his wife, an Irish make-up artist who did set design, in about 2009 when they worked on a show in Dublin’s Project Arts Centre. He shares his musical traditions with their three children, aged eight to 13, in “a subtle way”; he jokes that growing up in Nigeria, “the way my mom introduced me to music was a bit more aggressive! You had no choice.” He says: “We weren’t really privileged to a lot of things or financially. I didn’t come from a very well-to-do [family].”
When things became particularly difficult for the family, an uncle helped “facilitate me, to be able to move”. This meant leaving Nigeria alone, hoping to help the others. It sounds like a lot on 17-year-old shoulders. “This is life. We just have to face the next day and push ahead and improve and learn.”
Initially he was in London for a few months. Through a series of chance connections he moved on to Ireland. “When I arrived, I didn’t know anybody. It was a very, very terrifying time for me.” He was single-minded. “I just wanted to go to school.”
He applied for asylum, and lived in the Old Schoolhouse hostel on Eblana Avenue in Dún Laoghaire for more than three years, while he did his Leaving Cert in St Laurence College, Loughlinstown, and then studied engineering at IT Tallaght, while working petrol station night-shifts. All the while he trekked to Naas on Sundays to play music for Pentecostalist church services and vigils.
It was challenging “trying to navigate through daily life as an asylum seeker”. He mentions Mary King and Rita Canavan of Dún Laoghaire Refugee Project, who “kept us engaged”. He was interested in theatre and music and performed with Bisi Adigun of Arambe Productions. Such activities allow refugees to “really contribute, be more positive, proud”.
He was not successful in his asylum application, but got leave to remain in 2008 on humanitarian grounds.
He feels it was fate that brought him to Ireland. He recalls as a child meeting an Irish priest. “It was a very strange interaction. The first white person I met. I was very young, and we were rushing for the bus one night in Lagos. On the bus sitting beside me was this white man.” Akano chuckles. “We started talking, and he told me [he] was from Ireland. That was the first time I heard of Ireland. For me, I feel it is destiny.”
At first, “I thought Ireland was part of UK. I didn’t really understand the history. I learned more, through the help of people like David [Hicks, who ran the hostel] and the great community in the hostel. People from all over Africa, from Ghana, Ethiopia, Sudan, Cameroon. I still have friends I made then. I was able to go to school. They became my support system, the people that helped me, to guide in a way, when I didn’t really know what was going on. All I knew was I wanted to play music, as a form of communication to the world.”
He also credits Ed and Doriel Molloy, who helped him when he was at college, and whom he met through Allen Taylor, who also played music at church. His church community was also “very, very helpful”.
Akano mainly plays percussion: bongos, djembe, wood-blocks, talking drum (gangan), omele, shakers, also keyboard, “a little bit of bass”, and he writes songs with the band. He’s a founding member of Yankari Afrobeat Collective, Dublin Afrobeat Ensemble and Selu and the Living Things, blending afrobeat, jazz, and electronic music.
“I’m a musician at heart but I’m also an engineer,” he says. “Mathematics means the same thing to me” as music. He has worked for years as a software test engineer and in telecommunications, along with playing music. Only recently he quit the day job, setting up Orogun Media (meaning “rival” in Yoruba) with friends. The idea is to provide business services for artists, to “empower them in making returns from their investments, which is their content”.
He says “one of the most generous nations in the world is Ireland, and my experiences have been good. However, there’s been times that things have been tricky.” He recalls at the petrol station, some people telling him to “go back” but feeling “they’re not saying it from a really bad place, they’re saying it from an uneducated place. Even right now, it feels worrying to be a migrant”, but then, “we are all migrants, aren’t we? We just need to think back a little few years. People move from one place to another for one reason or the other, which they can’t control most of the time, and also because of things that happened in the past. I always have that in my mind. But this is the world we live in, and sometimes reverse logic is what seems to prevail.”
Irish music is obviously different from Nigerian music, but “for me, drumming is very primal, the first thing that connects us as humans. Before any other thing it’s just music and drumming and rhythm. African tribes, Irish tribes. During old times, when the people wanted to enjoy themselves or relax, they dance around a fire with some rhythm going on. And that’s it.”
Akano’s father has died, and his mother and sister are still in Nigeria; their life has improved, he says. “Thankfully they are much more comfortable now. I think I’ve been able to assist them. I’m happy about that.”
He has had educational and career opportunities here that would have been impossible (“maybe one in a million chance”) in Nigeria.
He became an Irish citizen in 2013. “The future is the future. What’s important is right now.” Going back to Nigeria is “just fantasy. What I know right now is my home is in Ireland, as much as in Nigeria. That heritage, I still have connections, people there. I am from there. But here established me. This is who I am today.” While nationality is an identity, “at the end of the day, we are all just humans on a spinning rock”.
