Many didn’t know that Afrojuju maestro Sir Shina Peters squatted with a prostitute in a motel room in Oshodi, Lagos before his rise to stardom as one of Nigeria’s entertainment legends.
His hit albums Ace in 1989 and Shinamania in 1990 easily won the hearts of many, but it wasn’t an easy ride for SSP. This informed his reason for saying “I don’t know who can survive what I have been through in life” in a 2018 interview in celebration of his 60th birthday.
He revealed in 2018 that as a young boy he left his parents’ ‘face-me-I-face-you’ one-room apartment on 6, McCarthy Lane, located in the ever-busy Oshodi market in Lagos, he had nowhere to go and had to squat with a prostitute in a motel.
His reason for leaving home was his parents’ refusal to allow him to dump school to become a musician. For them, only a wayward child would abandon school for music. He later proved them wrong.
He said:
“I woke up at 2 a.m one day and I told them (my parents) I was not going to school; that all I wanted to do was play music. But because of my decision not to go to school, my parents woke up everybody in the house that night including the landlord. The landlord then said, ‘If you are not going to school, that means you have been cursed from outside and we wouldn’t want you to influence the other children’.
He added:
“When I left home, I went to Temiogbe Motel, Oshodi. I can remember, a prostitute then called me and I was living with her. She would lay her wrapper on the floor for me to sleep on. For weeks, I was with her. So, it happened that the woman kept her money under the pillow but she forgot it was under the pillow and she now said I took the money.”
Peters would later become a house boy to legendary singer turned pastor, Chief Ebenezer Obey.
“I also served as a house boy to Ebenezer Obey. Things changed for the better for me when I met Ebenezer Obey. I used to go to his place to clean his clothes and shoes. Whenever he was not at home, I would play his guitar,”
he said.
He thereafter joined the band of another singer General Prince Adekunle where he became more active, from there he formed a partnership with Segun Adewale (another singer who left his parents’ home in Osogbo, Osun State for Lagos because his parents didn’t want him to become a musician). The duo formed Shina Adewale and the Superstars International. They eventually went solo in 1980 to set up their separate bands. Following their separation, Peters created a brand of music he called Afro juju.
Like the words of Tai Solarin in his January 1, 1964 article, the road was very rough for SSP, but through steadfastness and dedication to his dream, Peters became a global brand and ruled Nigeria’s entertainment world for close to two decades through his new brand of music he dubbed Afrojuju, a fusion of Juju and Afrobeat.
His Afrojuju brand is premised on fast percussion beat with the use of electric keyboard, saxophone and guitar. Afrojuju has taken him to several countries across the world and won him multiple awards.