ABSTRACT
In a private response to an essay I published in a Nigerian daily on the music and life of renowned Nigerian folk and pop musician Bongos Ikwue, a leading Nigerian journalist and scholar commended my exploration of the philosophical insights of Ikwue’s Idoma language compositions. He approved of my treatment of Ikwue’s musical offerings as a window into Idoma mores. But he also had this to say on the essay: “The texture is certainly too dense for home people. Are you a postmodernist?” I was taken aback by this question, since I had not self-consciously deployed any postmodernist modes of reflection in reading Ikwue’s artistic productions and their relationship to his Idoma natal world.
