Tunji Oyelana

Tunji Oyelana is a Nigerian musician, actor, folk singer, composer and once a lecturer at the University of Ibadan, Nigeria. Tunji Oyelana is of the Yoruba ethnic group and is a native of Nigeria. Most of Tunji Oyelana's songs are in Yoruba. In the early 1980s, he teamed up with Nigeria's first and only winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Wole Soyinka, to record a musical album that satirized the corruption of the Nigerian political elite. He was the musician for Stéphane Breton's 1994 film Un dieu au bord de la route. Oyelana is credited with having sold the most albums by a Nigerian High Life musicians. In 2012 he released A Nigerian Retrospective 1966-79, an album from Soundway Records. Apart from Fela Kuti and King Sunny Ade, Oyelana is regarded as one of the most played Yoruba musicians. He and Soyinka composed I Love My Country and, in 1996, were both charged with treason and forced into exile by Sani Abacha while touring internationally with Soyinka's play The Beatification of Area Boy. Oyelana, the leader of The Benders currently lives in the United Kingdom.