The Huffington Post
Nigeria, Africa - Re-Percussions: Our African Odyssey, award-winning Trinidadian film-maker Kim Johnson’s contribution to this year’s Caribbean Tales International Film Festival in Toronto, is a documentary masterpiece focused on Nigerian Chief Bowie Sonnie Bowei’s journey to introduce and popularize steel drum, the musical instrument known as Pan, throughout his native Nigeria and across the African continent.
....“I feel destined to carry out the Pan movement in Africa, not just Nigeria,” he declares.
Bowei’s introduction to Pan had more a prosaic origin: as a young soldier in the Nigerian Army’s steel band, which played old-style tunes on unimproved old pans. “Soldiers follow orders, and that’s how we played in the Nigerian Army Steel Band,” he explains. From 1977 to 2001, the Nigerian Army Steel Band was also Nigeria’s only one, with stale musical offerings that inspired no one.
For Bowei, however, the story does not end there. By following Pan to Trinidad, he sees at firsthand the enormous possibilities, beginning with bands of 120 panists who produced music of a grandeur and intensity entirely lacking in Nigeria’s nine-man outfit.
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