With The Fuji Documentary, award-winning academic Saheed Aderinto has produced one of the most comprehensive bio-docs on Yoruba fuji icon, Sikiru Ayinde Barrister. Barry Wonder, as Barrister was fondly known, died in December 2010, and this film comes just under fifteen years after his passing. As a historical artifact, the film’s intervention appears well-timed, no less because Barry Wonder’s artistic legacy gradually recedes into the past as a new generation in Nigeria comes of age. In a world where local apathy toward formal history-documentation often exists, in a world where an inordinate—but understandable—amount of space and time are dedicated to contemporary Afrobeats artists with global appeal, Nigeria’s pre-2000 musicscape can often appear invisible. Yet, Afrobeats itself has a history, and this documentary lights up the historical path that brings Afrobeats in contact with its multi-genre roots.
A self-taught documentary filmmaker, Aderinto crafts an interesting, mode-transgressing documentary that details the life and music of Barry Wonder. In the spirit of fuji, the documentary adopts a grassroot, street, and vernacular tenor that many audiences will find authentic to the theme. The filmmaker leads the film with talking-head accounts of people in Barry Wonder’s orbit in a way that lands effectively, partly because the documentary evokes some notable contemporaries of Barry Wonder. These are faces that may have since receded from our screens, but now invoke some nostalgia about Nigeria’s musicscape in the 1980s and 90s. Afterall, what is not to like about seeing Kollington Ayinla, one of Barrister’s seeming arch-rivals, testifying to Barrister’s giftedness and perseverance! Or, Easy Sawaba’s praise of Barrister’s genius! What fan of these artists will not be thrilled with seeing Queen Salawa Abeni, the Waka Queen, once again on our screens, and reflecting on Barrister’s artistry! Bringing these personalities together as contributors to the collage of Barrister’s history whips up a tapestry which is as much about Barrister as it constantly (re)acquaints its audience to the popular Yoruba music culture Barry Wonder thrived in.
Mainly shot in English and Yoruba languages, the unfolding narrative is richly peppered with accounts of travails, challenges, and triumphs that we have come to expect from a biographical documentary. And if you had general knowledge of Barry Wonder’s story, this documentary certainly adds detail and timbre to that knowledge.
If you are interested in documentaries and their film modes and styles, there are some formal and visual engagements in this piece that provoke curiosity. Perhaps one of its most salient strengths is in its invitation to those decolonial discussions that continue to weave their way through film studies. In what seems a historian’s indifference to some of those constricting theoretical documentary categorizations, such as the expository, observation, and participatory modes, Aderinto ignores these distinctions, and constantly blends the authoritative narrator voice with another that is investigative, as though uncertain of its study’s outcome. In the latter, as an audience, we travel through the documentary alongside Aderinto, increasingly getting to know who Barry Wonder was. In the former, we can presume the narrator has been to the end of his research, and, after the fact, intersperses the documentary with the very familiar Voice-of-God narration that is a staple of documentary filmmaking. At times, as the interviewer, the narrator embeds himself within the documentary’s film world; other times, his questions echo from within the off-screen space, and without a microphone, prompting a recognition of the constructedness of the documentary. These stylistic choices deserve attention, and whether wittingly or otherwise, they point to a decolonial transgressive approach to documentary filmmaking that questions the conventions of its very own film tradition.
Overall, one is not surprised that this is a work from a historian, what with Aderinto’s emphatic supply of inserts of him navigating archives, and media storages. If some of its content are not necessarily revelatory, since the subject of the film was a public figure whose story has not quite receded, even if receding, this is hardly a detriment. And it is also evident this is not quite the film’s mission. Functionally, the film presents itself more as a bringing together—in one place—of connected but dispersed insights on Barrister’s life. These stories have continued to float about and exist in all sorts of forms, formal and informal, and Aderinto appears to believe it is time to pull them together. As a goal, Aderinto’s primary intent seems to be to formally document Barry Wonder’s story for the sake of posterity. To take it a little further, one also has the suspicion that this is a pet-project for the filmmaker, whose familiarity with the subject matter means that the general themes are already known to him, and if there are discoveries, most of them are for the audience.
The documentary has no pretensions of cinematic grandeur. Rather, its formal qualities are a means to an end; that is, a history needs telling, and film gets Aderinto and the audience there. In this sense, it succeeds in keeping with fuji’s rootedness in the vernacular and the everyday. I would imagine a film like this one may connect less if it potentially sacrificed the essence of its theme for a more uppity and aestheticized look. The Fuji Documentary is worth seeing for anyone interested in the Barry Wonder story, or those seeking to understand more contemporary Nigerian music forms through the study of their progenitors.
