In the pantheon of Yoruba popular culture, few acts of tribute carry the weight of a Sikiru Ayinde Barrister name-drop. The Fuji creator, who released over 127 albums in his lifetime and transformed a Ramadan wake-up call into a global genre, understood something fundamental about the architecture of memory. A people are not immortalized by monuments of stone, but by the voices that refuse to stop speaking their names. For three men from Iseyin—Professor Moshood Abiola Peller (1941–1997), Ahuja Bello (Ismaila Dele Bello, 1942–2025), and Professor Yekini Kolawole Ajao (1954–2026)—Barrister became that voice, weaving their exploits into the fabric of Fuji music until their stories became inseparable from the soundtrack of Yoruba modernity.
This is the story of how one small Oyo State town produced three titans of Nigerian entertainment, and how the man who reinvented Yoruba music ensured their names would never fade.
Professor Moshood Abiola Peller (1941–1997): The Magician Who Made Reality Disappear
Long before David Blaine walked on water or Dynamo made skyscrapers vanish, a red-haired boy from Iseyin was already bending the laws of perception. Moshood Folorunsho Abiola—known to his classmates as "Olori Pupa," the redheaded one—was born in Iseyin in 1941. His path might have been unremarkable: Muslim School, Native Authority Primary School, then the uncertain hustle of post-colonial Nigeria. But in 1954, something shifted. The boy began performing illusion tricks, traveling to Ibadan, Lagos, and Oyo to dazzle crowds with his growing repertoire.
What followed was an odyssey that would define Nigerian entertainment for three decades. In 1964, he enrolled in a school of magical arts in India, spending eighteen months mastering the craft that would earn him the moniker "Professor." When he returned, he did not merely perform; he transformed. His first post-training show at the Federal Palace Hotel, Lagos, in 1966 announced the arrival of a new kind of African spectacle—one that combined the wonder of global magic with the showmanship of Yoruba performance tradition.
Professor Peller's act was the stuff of legend precisely because it flirted with the impossible. He sawed his wife, Lady Peller, in half and put her back together without a drop of blood. He escaped from chained boxes. He produced white pigeons from a wave of his handkerchief and made flowers bloom from undoing his cufflinks. In one of his most famous illusions, he shut a woman inside a chained cupboard, only for her to reappear in the audience moments later. His performances drew presidents—Mathieu Kerekou of Benin, Gnassingbe Eyadema of Togo, Samuel Kanyon Doe of Liberia—and filled stadiums with people who left questioning what they had just witnessed.
When Professor Peller was assassinated on August 2, 1997, Nigerian magic did not merely lose its greatest practitioner; it lost its gravitational center. For years afterward, the art form languished, as if the nation could not conceive of magic without the man who had made it a household name. His son, Shina Peller, would later carry the family name into Nigerian entertainment and politics, but the original magic died with the Professor.
Ahuja Bello (Ismaila Dele Bello, 1942–2025): The Golden Eagle of Juju
If Professor Peller commanded the stage through illusion, Ismaila Dele Bello—known to the world as Ahuja Bello—captured hearts through rhythm. Born in Iseyin on August 24, 1942, Bello's first calling was not music but electronics. He trained as an electronic technician, a profession that might have consigned him to a quiet life of repairing radios and televisions. But the pull of juju music proved irresistible.
In 1976, Bello formed Ahuja Bello and His Golden Eagles Band, and within a few years, he had carved a distinctive space in the competitive Lagos juju scene. His hits—"Awa ti Danfo" and "Ariya ti de"—were not merely songs; they were invitations to celebration, built on the propulsive rhythms and intricate guitar work that defined juju at its peak. In 1979, he traveled to London to record "Ahuja in London," an experience that brought him into the orbit of none other than Bob Marley. The reggae legend and the juju guitarist became friends—a testament to Bello's magnetism and the cross-cultural possibilities of African music.
Then, on July 24, 1982, tragedy struck. A serious accident, just a month before his fortieth birthday, cut short a career that was still ascending. Ahuja Bello would live another forty-three years, passing away on August 25, 2025, just one day after his 83rd birthday. But the accident of 1982 marked a kind of death—the death of what might have been. His influence endured, but the Golden Eagles never soared quite as high again.
Professor Yekini Kolawole Ajao (1954–2026): The Professor of Juju Makosa
Yekini Kolawole Ajao's story begins, like the others, in Iseyin—but his path to prominence was the most unlikely of the three. Born in 1954, Ajao began playing music at the age of nine, inspired by listening to the legendary I.K. Dairo. Before committing fully to music, he trained as a fashion designer under Josy Ade and as a nurse under Gbolahan, both in Iseyin. These were respectable professions, paths to stability in a Nigeria where artistic ambition was often a gamble.
Ajao gambled anyway. He moved to Lagos in 1971, joined a band led by Captain R. Ade, and in December 1973, formed his own group: Y.K. Ajao and His Professional Brothers Band. His early albums attracted modest attention, but it was the "Makosa Series" that catapulted him to national fame. By blending traditional juju rhythms with makossa influences—a sound he called Juju Makosa—Ajao created something that felt both rooted and modern.
His rise was not without struggle. In the early 1980s, a recession devastated his career. "There was no invitation, no patronage and no single show for me to perform," he later recalled. "Everything I had crumbled." In that moment of despair, he turned to Sikiru Ayinde Barrister, who gave him not only financial support but musical equipment and counsel. The two men—one Fuji, one Juju—shared a bond that transcended genre.
Ajao's comeback was triumphant. "Makosa Series 2," "Vigilante," "Akoni Mamu Gege," and "Oro NEPA" solidified his reputation as one of juju's most innovative voices. King Sunny Ade himself honored Ajao with a ceremonial title at the peak of juju's popularity. When Ajao died on April 17, 2026, at the age of 72, after multiple surgeries in India, the tributes poured in from across Nigeria's musical landscape—from Governor Ademola Adeleke to Sir Shina Peters, who called him "my brother."
Sikiru Ayinde Barrister: The Chronicler Who Refused to Let Them Go
Sikiru Ayinde Barrister did not merely praise people in his music; he practiced a form of sonic journalism. Scholars have analyzed his albums as "news commentary," "editorial," and "sports reportage," noting that he approached topical issues with the rigor of a newspaper columnist. When he sang about an event or a person, he provided context, history, and background—what researchers describe as "temporal dimension" that allowed listeners to trace the full arc of the story.
His 1979 album "Aye" exemplified this journalistic approach. In the track "Disney World," Barrister narrated his journey to Orlando with Alhaji Buhari Oloto, describing the submarine, the sharks, the "heaven on earth" that was the Magic Kingdom. Thousands of elite Nigerians eventually traveled to the United States to verify what Barrister had sung about. His music was not entertainment alone; it was information, and people trusted it enough to act on it.
This same impulse—to document, to praise, to preserve—extended to his treatment of individuals. Barrister's albums were populated with real people: politicians, socialites, fellow musicians, and yes, the accomplished sons of Iseyin. In praising Professor Moshood Abiola Peller (1941–1997), Ahuja Bello (Ismaila Dele Bello, 1942–2025), and Professor Yekini Kolawole Ajao (1954–2026), Barrister was doing what Yoruba oral tradition had always done: ensuring that the worthy would not be forgotten. He understood that a name spoken repeatedly becomes a name remembered, and a name remembered becomes a legacy.
Iseyin: The Town That Made Them
Iseyin is not Lagos. It is not Ibadan. It is a town in Oyo State, known historically for its weaving and its strategic position in Yoruba trade networks. Yet in the mid-twentieth century, it produced three men who would each, in their own way, reshape Nigerian popular culture. The coincidence is not merely statistical; it speaks to something in Iseyin's soil, or its social fabric, or its willingness to let its sons dream beyond the horizon.
Professor Peller (1941–1997) left for India and returned with a profession that barely existed in Nigeria. Ahuja Bello (1942–2025) left for London and came back with Bob Marley's friendship. Professor Y.K. Ajao (1954–2026) left for Lagos and came back with a new genre. Iseyin gave them their foundation—the confidence, the ambition, the sense that the world was larger than the town's boundaries—and they carried it with them wherever they went.
The Immortality of the Spoken Name
Sikiru Ayinde Barrister died in 2010, thirteen years after Professor Peller (1941–1997), fifteen years before Ahuja Bello (1942–2025), and sixteen years before Professor Y.K. Ajao (1954–2026). He did not live to see all three of his subjects pass into memory. But his music lived on, and in that music, so did they.
There is a particular kind of immortality that Fuji and Juju music confer. It is not the immortality of statues or street names—though those have their place. It is the immortality of the chorus, the repeated name, the praise that becomes part of the listener's consciousness. When Barrister praised the sons of Iseyin, he was not merely flattering them; he was inducting them into a tradition of remembrance that predates colonialism, predates the nation-state, predates even the genres he and they practiced.
The three men—Professor Moshood Abiola Peller (1941–1997), the magician; Ahuja Bello (Ismaila Dele Bello, 1942–2025), the musician; and Professor Yekini Kolawole Ajao (1954–2026), the innovator—have now all passed from the stage. But the music remains. And in the music, they are still alive: Peller making pigeons appear, Ahuja Bello strumming his guitar in London, Y.K. Ajao building a new sound from the old. They are immortalized not because they were perfect, but because they were remembered. And they are remembered because one man, Sikiru Ayinde Barrister, from Lagos by way of Ibadan, understood that the highest calling of an artist is to ensure that the worthy are not forgotten.
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