It is probably no longer news that the mercurial legend, Bongos Ikwue, is returning to musical creativity, after more than 20 years of 'stepping aside' in favour of the life of architectural artistry. He has, according to newspaper reports, held a come-back celebration night at Otukpo in Benue State.

This is, indeed, a very exciting news from that corner of Nigeria although Bongos cannot be appropriated by Idomaland or any ethno-racial or religious group because, as a creative artist, he is the property of the world.

However, this does not destroy the cultural factor or the fact of the Idoma universe in his creativity. Interestingly, Bongos has demonstrated his sense of 'Idomaness' and this is manifest in his Idoma musical numbers and titles like "Otachikpokpo", "Eche Une", "Ella Kunogo", "Owuno", "Ihotu", etc.

If the Idoma were a majority ethnic group, these numbers would have been appreciated more than the ones rendered in English such as "Still Searching", "Cockcrow at Dawn", "What's Gonna be Gonna be", "Amen", etc which are not as deeply philosophical as the ones rendered in Idoma. Unfortunately, Idoma is not a majority cultural or language group.

With a total population hovering at only about two million in a nation of ethnic nationalities like the Hausa, the Fulani (there is nothing like Hausa-Fulani), the Igbo, Yoruba, Ijaw, Tiv and their respective Diaspora, the minority status of the Idoma is beyond argument. As with all groups perceiving themselves to be minorities, the Idoma feel weak, marginalised and dominated. So, they keep devising and demanding guarantees such as the creation of Apa State, an ancestral name taken from its base in the extinct Kwararafa Confederacy.

Apa State or not, the point is that the Bongos Ikwues of this world are, today, strategically located in relation to both Idoma cultural essentialism and to its Dialogue of Civilisations. In Bongos's case, this flows from his mastery of Idoma cosmography and the creative utilisation of same in both English and the Idoma language, thereby becoming the only communicator of cultural authenticity alive whose message cuts across class, gender, generational, linguistic and geo-political diversities in Idomaland.

In the age of the CNN and home videos when our own children cannot speak their mother tongue, it means Bongos Ikwue, via his musical numbers rendered in Idoma language, is the only source of inspiration in the language itself. This is particularly so as there are no Idoma language newspapers, no essentially or predominantly Idoma language radio or television stations. Even the Idoma translation of the news on Radio Benue is so incoherent and almost incomprehensible if you did not listen to the English version previously.

Meanwhile, television has killed the culture of "tales by moonlight" by which young people are inducted into communal consciousness. This is the case in the urban centres while "albanti" (free sex) has taken care of that in the case of the villages where television is not the dominant culprit. In a way, scholar activist James Petras must be right when he claimed that "In the contemporary world, Hollywood, CNN, and Disneyland are more influential than the Vatican, the Bible or the public relations rhetoric of political figures".

I rely on the authority of my lecturer in Language and Conflict at the University of Ibadan, Professor Iwara, to assert that any child who cannot think in his mother tongue cannot think properly. Yet, the reality is that most mother tongues in Africa are dying.

This is a terrible certainty in the age in which it is claimed specifically by Samuel Huntington, the American scholar of civilisational determinism who died recently, that, "The most important distinctions among people are not ideological, political or economic. They are cultural. People and nations are attempting to answer the most basic questions humans can face: who are we? And they are answering that question in the traditional way human beings have answered it, by reference to the things that mean most to them. People define themselves in terms of ancestry, religion, language, history, values, customs and institutions. They identify with cultural groups: tribes, ethnic groups, religious communities, nations and, at the broadest level, civilisations. People use politics not just to advance their interests but also to define their identity. We know who we are only when we know who we are not and often only when we know whom we are against".

Without agreeing with Huntington's seeming rationalisation of cultural essentialism, the question is still that of how do we know who we are as a pre-condition for relating with who we are not within the context of peaceful co-existence. This is where artists who have the mother language power like Bongos Ikwue come in, whose creative competitiveness in the invocation of the idiom, icons, totems, rites, pathos and similar existential vistas of the Idoma world and fitting them into timeless themes of love, survival, death, mourning/dirges recreates the 'paradise lost' and, therefore, civilisational continuity. This is the strength and sobriety of his music in Idoma language.

That is also why Bongos is the inheritor of the musical tradition in Idomaland pioneered by such people as Barrister Joe Omakwu who sang the classic, "Achenche". He, along with others like Joe Akatu, Ada Atama (aka Joe Onyela), Igbe, Ichicha, Peter Otulu, Oleje Oona and the masculinist Oglinya dancers from my own native Edumoga constitute the referents in cultural creativity in spite of differences in genres and creative impulse between them. Idomaland is now worse that almost all of them are gone by way of death or their exclusion from the stage by a more muscular modernity.

The late Joe Akatu, for example, had a wonderful repertoire of Idoma proverbs which he wove either in making a hero of or ridiculing anyone or any action from the point of view of the moral categories of good versus bad. Above all, he could mimic his fellow musicians in Tiv, that being how I came to know that there was a Tiv soloist famous for saying that "the dead does not weep at his own funeral". The late Akatu's musical praxis is, therefore, a refutation of the impression of hostility between ordinary Idoma and Tiv people. That certainly came with us, the elite and our manipulation of cultural differences so as to gain political power.

The Idoma have been most unfair to this artistic representative of that nationality. This is because it is doubtful if there are many Idoma people today who have preserved much of Akatu's musical numbers. At Otukpo, where his music is sold, it is by an Igboman who, obviously, does not understand the language and is, therefore, incapable of knowing when one track has ended and another has started. Buying Akatu's records from him is, most times, buying mumbo jumbo. But even then, he deserves an Idoma national award for doing what an Idoma man should have taken up. This is more so that Radio Benue's collection of Joe Akatu's records is miserable, reflecting our general lack of preservation and documentation of records in Nigeria. I have no idea of what it could be like in Joy FM at Otukpo which is a rather recent creation whose acquisition may not extend beyond its year of birth.

We need these culture bearers because even as dynamic as culture is, the cultural ingredients do not perish. We remain prisoners of lived experiences, especially the experiences of the earliest years and their lessons on the big question of what is right and what is wrong. The media, peer group and religion may influence the cultural comprehension and praxis of this question later in life but they rarely add or subtract much from it or we wouldn't have to contend with the reality of the haunting bodyguard of conscience.

The reference to the bodyguard of conscience is not to endorse the excessive stress on empathy and over consideration for the other person that defines the typical Idoma man, these being qualities which the world today is too pragmatic to appreciate. I do appreciate how difficult it would be for the typical Idoma man to get out of that obsession with his self-image because it is an age-old problem. Someone once told me that a colonial officer once exempted an Idoma personal staff from a 'trial' a priori on the ground that an Idoma man is incapable of stealing. Although corruption and rascality have gone nuclear in Idoma land today, there is still a nugget of truth in that colonial ethnic profiling of the Idoma. Even the way Bongos Ikwue executes his contracts proves the point substantially in that he does not collect money until he has a finished product and the taste must be upper scale.

The idea that the cultural ingredients do not perish explains the tragedy I discovered on a recent visit home: right now in my mother's village, the last of the elders who can recite the final burial chant has been converted to the church. He is automatically barred from carrying out any such exercise anymore. More than that, he has no audience anymore because the burial rites as we knew them while growing up some 40 years ago have simply withered away in the face of aggressive Christianity in the area. Is Christianity still inherently conflictual with local cultures in Africa in the age of identity? What happened to African Christianity with particular reference to cultural narratives that carry genealogies and information like that, such as the funeral chant I am talking about?

Let me quickly correct the impression that Idomaland might have been swamped irreversibly by the counter-cultural momentum. I learnt from Professor Elaigwu recently that around Otukpo, the young men have a mastery of such things as oral traditions of origin and the meaning of ancestral signifiers. I would be surprised if this is common in many parts of Idomaland.

The other such good news is the Idoma bibliography Professor Idris Amali gave me. Published in 1992 by the National Council for Arts and Council, the bibliography. It shows that Idoma Nationality has been well studied and also well documented, from its cosmology to its literature to its culture, politics, economy and inter-state relations.

It is from the amplification of the accumulated knowledge in the bibliography that the Bongos Ikwues would emerge as the iconic referent. This is in terms of his cultural repertoire and linguistic competence in communicating the self-apprehension that would define Idoma negotiation and engagement with the radius of multi-culturalism which the Americans have inaugurated by electing Barack Obama, thereby sending an identity management message to the world.

It is a message embodied and already echoed in Bongos's symbolism of "Cock Crow at Dawn". The cock that crows at dawn may belong to a household but when it crows, the entire community hears it.

And, in African history, cock crow at dawn is the signal that terminates the bliss of the early morning sleep and signals the commencement of another day of nightmares and hassles.

With the "Cock Crow at Dawn symbolism", Bongos has been drawing attention to the insecurity attendant on misery in Africa and its implications for the management of global diversity.

Finally, Bongos instructively preceded his return to music with building his own material capacity so as to be in a position to think and move into action corresponding to the 'crazy' ways of an artist, unencumbered by deprivation. Therefore, Bongos, like Obama, is a practitioner of "yes, we can". That is the philosophy of the disadvantaged on how to reach the top through competitiveness and personal excellence instead of quackery, rascality or waiting on uninspiring godfathers. That is Bongos Ikwue, the portrait of the artist as a bundle of symbolic messages to each and every one of us.

Adagbo Onoja sent this piece from Government House, Dutse, Jigawa State