Samuel Ekpe Akpabot, Influential Nigerian Composer Born Oct. 3, 1932

[Samuel Akpabot : The Odyssey of a Nigerian Composer-Ethnomusicologist (Paperback) by Godwin Sadoh]

Samuel Ekpe Akpabot (1932-2000) was a Nigerian composer, professor and author. He was born in Uyo, Akwa Ibom State. The composer wrote primarily for orchestra. His page at AfriClassical.com features an audio sample from his composition Three Nigerian Dances. Earlier this year, the webmaster was contacted by Emilia Jones, a daughter of the composer. She is now living in the Washington, D.C. area. She inquired about the possibility of meeting Cynthia Boudreau.

In the year before Pres. Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Samuel Ekpe Akpabot and Cynthia Boudreau, the 16-year-old White woman with whom he was sitting, were denied service at the restaurant of the Conrad Hilton Hotel in Pittsburgh, on the basis of his race. The young woman expressed her outrage and fled the scene in tears. The incident was not an uncommon occurrence in the U.S. at the time, and would in most cases have passed unnoticed by the rest of the world. The composer resolved on the spot, however, to memorialize it, and later did so in a tone poem which came to be called Cynthia's Lament.

One of the principal documentary sources on the composer's life and career is Nigerian Art Music, a book written by Bode Omojola, Ph.D. and published in 1995 by the Institute of African Studies at Ibadan University in Nigeria. Dr. Omojola says of the composer's youth: “At the age of eleven he came to Lagos for his education at King's College, a school often referred to as the 'Eton of Nigeria' and where European music was taught. It was, however, in the Church that Samuel Akpabot received the most significant introduction to European music. He was a chorister at Christ Church Cathedral, Lagos, under Phillips.”

A scholarship enabled Akpabot to travel to England in 1954 and enroll in the Royal College of Music in London. There he studied organ and trumpet. Akpabot subsequently left to study music at Trinity College. In 1959 Akpabot returned to Nigeria and became a broadcaster with the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation. At the same time he produced his earliest compositions, which were influenced by his country's Highlife idiom. Omojola continues: “His first work, Nigeriana, for orchestra (1959) was originally written as an exercise for his composition teacher, John Addison. After minor revisions it was later renamed Overture for a Nigerian Ballet. Conceived along the tradition of the nineteenth century European concert overture, the work is characterised by literal and allusive quotations of Highlife tunes strung together in a rhapsodic manner.”

Akpabot left his position in broadcasting in 1962 to join the fledgling music faculty of the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. Omojola describes the environment as favorable for composing: “Between 1962 and 1967, Akpabot wrote four works which clearly reflected the prevailing nationalist euphoria of that time. The works are Scenes from Nigeria, for orchestra (1962); Three Nigerian Dances, for string orchestra and percussion (1962); Ofala, a tone poem for wind orchestra and five African instruments (1963); and Cynthia's Lament, tone poem for soloist, wind orchestra and six African instruments (1965).” The CBMR Digest reported in Vol. 14, No. 1, Spring 2001: “Samuel Ekpe Akpabot, renowned musicologist and composer, died in his hometown of Uyo, Nigeria, on August 7, 2000. He was 67 years old and until his death had been serving as a lecturer at the Institute of Cultural Studies, University of Uyo.”