General Ayinla Kollington is a Fuji musician from Ilota, a village on the outskirt of Ilorin, Kwara State, Nigeria. He is also called Baba Alatika, Kebe-n-Kwara, Baba Alagbado. Kollington Ayinla ranks alongside his friend and competitor Ayinde Barrister as the two most important artists to dominate Fuji music from its inception in the 1970s through to the 1990s by which time it had grown to become one of the most popular dance genres in Nigeria. b. Anyila Kollington, 1952, Ibadan, Nigeria. Between the mid-70s and late 80s, Kollington ranked with Barrister as the leading star of Nigerian fuji music - like apala and waka, a Muslim-dominated relation of juju, retaining that style’s vocal and percussion ingredients but abandoning its use of electric guitars in order to obtain a more traditional, roots-based sound. He began recording for Nigerian EMI in 1974, and in 1978 achieved a pronounced, but temporary, lead over Barrister when his introduction of the powerful bata drum caught the imagination of record buyers. In 1982, when fuji was beginning to seriously rival juju as Nigeria’s most popular contemporary roots music, he set up his own label, Kollington Records, through which he released no less than 30 albums over the next five years. As the popularity of fuji grew, and the market became big enough to support both artists, Kollington and Barrister’s enmity diminished. By 1983, both men were able to stand side by side as mourners at the funeral of apala star Haruna Ishola. A new and equally public rivalry emerged in the mid-80s, this time with waka star Queen Salawah Abeni, who exchanged bitter personal insults with Kollington over a series of album releases and counter-releases. Sadly, for non-Yoruba speakers, the verbal fisticuffs remain unintelligible, though the drum-heavy, hypnotic music was universal in its appeal. At the start of the 1980s Ayinla started his own record company, Kollington Records, to release his music and remains to this day an extremely prolific artist, having recorded over 50 albums, most of which have never been released outside of Nigeria.
