…A tribute, as the maestro is laid to rest

By Barnabas Inumidun Akindele

Today, Friday, 11 September 2026, Pa John Aina was wheeled in, and wheeled out of the tabernacle he loved so much, for the last time. He had been gone since 1 May, but it took the church, the family and a grieving musical community more than four months to gather the world he built well enough to say a proper farewell to the man who built it.

The organ was played. The instruments echoed. Voices sang, the way they had sung under his hand for close to fifty years, and the sound that filled the tabernacle was not mourning alone. It was tribute, the very tribute he had spent his life teaching others to give.

“If he sat by the organ, he made you vibrate. If he stood in front of the Choir to conduct, you would be thrilled by his melodic gestures.”

That is how one admirer once described him, and it is the sentence that kept returning to mind today, because for the first time in living memory, it was another hand, not his, that answered the call of the instrument. For close to fifty years, from the day in 1959 he was made official organist of the Apostolic Faith Church, Ibadan, to his retirement in 2011 at the age of seventy-three, Baba John was the one constant behind almost every note the Apostolic Faith Church in Africa ever sang. He trained the flutists. He coached the violinists. He conducted a choir and orchestra that grew, under his hand, from eight founding members in 1952 to over 3,000 today. He gave Africa’s largest church orchestra its shape, its discipline and, in a very real sense, its soul.

He did not consider himself a composer of songs in the conventional sense. He preferred, by his own account, to think of his fifty years of work as reformation rather than composition, five patient decades spent on arrangement, adaptation, medley, conducting and the organ itself. But ask any of the thousands who passed through the Apostolic Faith Music School under his watch, and they will tell you he composed something larger than songs. He composed musicians. He composed a movement.

His style on the rostrum was so distinctive, so physically total (his shoulders, his eyes, even his legs conducting alongside his hands) that those who tried to imitate it gave it a name of its own: John Ainaism. There is, as far as anyone can tell, no academy that teaches it. There was only Baba John, standing in front of an orchestra three times a year at the Africa Headquarters, drawing performances out of ordinary people that visiting professors compared, without embarrassment, to Bernstein and von Karajan.

And that is the uncomfortable question that hung over the church today, underneath every tribute and every hymn: when a man builds an entire tradition around his own two hands, what happens to the tradition when the hands are folded for the last time?

When the organ sounds stop, will there be another John Aina?

There will not be another John Aina, not literally. There was only one boy who taught himself to play an organ in secret, one twenty-year-old who wept his way into a lifelong calling after a disappointing exam result, one Africa Music Director who sat in on London Symphony Orchestra rehearsals so a Lagos congregation could have an orchestra worthy of the name. He was, as one of his own protegees put it years ago, “retired, but not tired”, a man who kept boarding flights to train choirs in the Democratic Republic of Congo well into his eighties, kept correcting organists mid-concert, kept telling grown men half his age, “you don’t know where you are going to be tomorrow.”

But the truth is, we do not need to wait and see whether another John Aina will rise. We are already looking at the answer, and it is yes, everywhere, just not in the shape of one man. What he built will outlive him. His fruit is visible all over: in every organist he coached free of charge because no one had coached him, in every flutist trained by teachers he personally recruited, in the over 3,000-strong choir and orchestra that started with eight, in every branch of the Music School still running its rudiment classes across Africa today. None of them is John Aina. All of them are John Aina, multiplied.

The organ he built his life around was played today , by someone else’s hands, in a church he so dedicated his life to. It will not sound exactly the same. It never could. But it will sound, carried forward by the very people he poured himself into, and that is not a question left hanging over a graveside. It is his answer. Baba John is buried. What he built is not.

(Rev. John Adelaja Olugbenga Aina 14 October 1938 to 1 May 2026)

Barnabas Inumidun Akindele is a public relations and corporate communications practitioner and an Associate Member of the Nigerian Institute of Public Relations (NIPR).