‘When you go to India and to the interior of Africa you will hear Il Trovatore’, Giuseppe Verdi playfully boasted in May 1862 (quoted in Budden 1978: 112). Would the maestro then be disappointed to learn that ‘to a child reared […] in western Nigeria in the 1930's and 40’s, the name Verdi or Puccini probably meant no more than some exotic candy or a new brand of tinned pilchards in the local expatriate shops’? Wole Soyinka (1999), to whom we owe this mischievous recollection of the genre's ‘Otherness’, does not hesitate however to describe ‘the European operatic form’ as the ‘most accessible vehicle even for the most distinctive African themes from antiquity and mythology’:

In spite of opera's recent discovery as ‘an unlikely space for voicing black experiences’, as Naomi André proposes in her study on Black Opera (2018: 28), this newly found enthusiasm is hardly reflected in the available research literature. Other than in the settler colony of South Africa, there has never been a considerable institutional representation of European opera on the west coast of the continent; and, unlike the eagerly embraced novel or drama, the genre held little attraction for a new generation of musicians. The staging of Gilbert and Sullivan operettas in Victorian Lagos or at the elite boarding schools of Umuahia, Ibadan or Achimota probably formed the closest point of contact, while the cultural policy of the missions and the colonial school system kept the achievements of extended tonality at bay.