You could never really know William Onyeabor. The Nigerian former record label owner and electro-funk musician lived a life shrouded in storybook-like mystery, with some of the only verified information about him traceable to the nine albums he self-released on his Wilfilms label between 1977 and 1985. Once you divert from the music that drew in fans from around the world beyond Onyeabor's hometown of Enugu, details start to fade.
Rumors about him touched on everything, from opening a flour mill in Nigeria once he retired from music to studying film in the Soviet Union. Or maybe it was England? Perhaps France. "To his great amusement (and to ours for that matter), this mythic image was at times so deeply ingrained, that we often encountered people who were convinced that he didn't actually exist," wrote Eric Welles, Paul Diddy, and Yale Evelev of David Byrne's record label Luaka Bop, announcing the news of Onyeabor's death on Facebook on Wednesday morning. "Whenever we shared this with him, or would ask him a question about his past, he would just smile and say, 'I only want to speak about God.'"
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