Eyin'juOdu

WordSlam... explosion of live poetry in Lagos

2011-09-30T08:26:00.001+01:00

WordSlam... explosion of live poetry in Lagos
• Tomoloju headlines the explosion

(THE GUARDIAN, FRIDAY, 30 SEPTEMBER 2011)

BY ANOTE AJELUOROU FEATURES

It was by every measure a weekend the power of the spoken word took centre-stage and audience that had gathered savoured every bit of it.

But by far, the most humbling was when playwright, actor, singer and culture journalist and advocate, Ben Tomoloju, stepped up to the microphone and took the audience into the intricate resources of the rich Yoruba oral literary performances laced by his musical compositions. It all happened at Freedom Park, Lagos Island last Saturday. The theme was: Homage to the Environment

Although it had been long he performed in public, Tomoloju left no one in doubt that he is indeed a master of the performance craft. Also pairing affably with another exceptional performer, Yemi Oyewo, Tomoloju showed that he is in a class of his own both in verbal dexterity and musical gift.

For the benefit of the mixed audience, including both non-Yoruba speakers and foreigners, Tomoloju caused Oyewo to do an encore of an Ijala or hunter’s chant while he interpreted. His seamless interpretation while Oyewo chanted was a real fascination and could only have come from a master craftsman like Tomoloju.

Indeed, as Honoured Guest Poet at WordSlam V, the poetry, spoken word, rap and music event put together by Culture Advocates Caucus (CAC) with the support of the German culture centre, Goethe Institut, Tomoloju showed he is a deeply experienced and skilled performer. Digging deeply into his Ilaje-Ese Odo oral roots, his versatility took his audience to the heights of oral performance and he capped it up with a musical rendition with reggae accompaniment from the Naijazz band led by Oyin Ogungbade.

At the end of his act, a standing ovation greeted the rare performance from a multi-talented artiste. Indeed, many young artistes wondered how lucky they were to have been part of the spoken word mini-festival. Younger ones would certainly take a cue from the master craftsman and learn a trick or two to better their craft.

While Tomoloju’s performance clearly turned out the climax of a glorious evening, other younger performers showed promise as usual as those certainly coming into the ripeness of time in poetic and performance art. Culture journalist and actress, Evelyn Osagie also took a cue from her Edo, Benin roots, to give the audience something to chew about in her piece, Nature’s Song. A love poem to Mother Nature, it calls attention to the environment and how positive action needs to be taken to preserve nature from the harmful practices of man that degrade it.

On another level and taking the earth goddess as her guide, Osagie raked up her Edo cultural riches in her soul-lifting verbal narration of the maternal relation between the earth goddess and her children, man; and how she is the mentor of lovers, who need her guidance to succeed, especially as Osamudiamwen was to find in his love quest for his heartthrob.

Not least to thrill the audience was revolutionary reggae artist, Cornerstone (Simon Eyanam Dose). With Rope of Freedom, Cornerstone showed what a musical force his soul-stirring voice could be. Indeed, it would seem that Cornerstone has remained on the fringe for far too long. With a little help, perhaps, Cornerstone could well be the next reggae revolution the world would see. His lyrics is steeped in revolutionary idioms as he speaks with such force that could shake an inert, docile citizenry like Nigeria’s into some form of positive action so the commonwealth could be redeemed from its current socio-political malaise.

Another culture journalist, Chuka Nnabuife, drew attention to the environmental degradation ravaging the South-Eastern parts of the country. Taking a little excerpt from his on-going project, Mbize… Landslide Down the Eastern, Nnabuife is insistent that the time to act is now to avoid a catastrophe waiting to happen, and that it would be easier to stem it now than respond to it later.

Other entertainers included Ikuo Eke, doing her I set sail, set in her Ibibio native root; Amos Onileagbon, with his rap-textured Walking by the precipice; Uche Uwadinachi with his Tell me why, which is steeped in rap and hip-hop musicality that showcased a multi-talented artiste.

WordSlam... explosion of live poetry in Lagos
There were also the flutist, Awoko who also lamented the fate of the environment in his emotionally-charged rendition. He was followed by AJ Dagga Tolar, a poet cast in the mold of slam masters like Mutabaruka and Yasus Afari. The event ended with Edaoto’s rooted Afrobeat performance which drew the enthralled to the dance floor.

To cap a memorable evening, spoken word war was organised for young performers in the Open Mic & Mind segment; they were juried by a combination of the general audience and two selected judges, Chuka Nnabuife and Victor Okhai, both poets, culture activists and journalists. In the end, Oluwakemi Islamiyat from AJ House of Poetry emerged winner; clinching N15, 000 prize courtesy Director of Goethe Institut, Marc-Andre Schchmatel.

Like Wordslam, like Book’n’ Gauge

BUT before WordSlam V, Pulpfaction Club had its monthly Book’n’Guage reading and signing event at Debonair Bookshop at Sabo, Yaba, Lagos. But rather than the books, it was also the spectacularly spoken word poetry of Efe Paul Azino that caused a huge stir amongst the lean audience. His highly inflaming revolutionary poetry, Not a political poem, delivered with such perfect aplomb took the audience through the slums of suffering Nigerians have been helplessly thrown into, and then up to grimy, corrupt thrones and palaces of those who now hold them hostage in a land that should have nothing to do with poverty and suffering in the first place.

And like Cornerstone, the persona in Azino’s poem is shocked at how easily the masses have settled themselves into the mental slavery trap, with the shackles cast around their necks and arms and how they have lost the voice to protest the brutish lives they now lived. Indeed, if poetry casts stones, the masses got stoned first from Azino’s poetic jibes for being irredeemably mute in the face of suffering, and having to accept it as their common lot in life. His second poem simply titled, Words, speaks about the sheer magic of words and why he is so enamoured by them as they give his fertile mind the freedom to range wide to capture phenomena.

Four authors, Imasuen Eghosa (author of To Saint Patrick and the forthcoming Fine Boys), Charles Ayo Dada (author of Ghost of Zina), Samuel Kolawole (author of The Book of M), and Chimeka Garricks (author of Tomorrow Died Yesterday) read excerpts from their works. They also gave backgrounds and inspirations to their writings. Music interludes, too, by two guitarists, punctuated the afternoon readings.

FOR one weekend, therefore, Lagos erupted with a feast of words from some of the finest wordsmiths and voices emerging from the underground. This cultural bloom for the word, whether spoken or written as the two events showed, is part of the literary revival taking place all over the country.

With the support of such institutions like Goethe Institut, it is hoped that other bodies will respond to cries for support from culture entrepreneurs so as to light up the different art scenes.

The WordSlam V was as much a cultural diplomacy as the two events were avenues to create moments of expression for a number of young people and thus engage them creatively for positive activities.

---EniOlorutidak'oseFarawek'oseF'enutembelek'oseBinuk'oseNa'kaiwosisiWiwol'aawo

Scenes from the WORDSLAM 5 on Sat. Sept 25, Freedom Park, Broad street, Lagos 3

2011-09-26T00:45:00.001+01:00

PHOTOS BY EUGENE OHU netorb Media

---EniOlorutidak'oseFarawek'oseF'enutembelek'oseBinuk'oseNa'kaiwosisiWiwol'aawo

Scenes from the WORDSLAM 5 on Sat. Sept 25, Freedom Park, Broad street, Lagos 2

2011-09-26T00:37:00.002+01:00

PHOTOS BY EUGENE OHU netorb Media

---EniOlorutidak'oseFarawek'oseF'enutembelek'oseBinuk'oseNa'kaiwosisiWiwol'aawo

Scenes from the WORDSLAM 5 on Sat. Sept 25, Freedom Park, Broad street, Lagos

2011-09-26T00:29:00.004+01:00

PHOTOS BY EUGENE OHU netorb Media

---EniOlorutidak'oseFarawek'oseF'enutembelek'oseBinuk'oseNa'kaiwosisiWiwol'aawo

iREP- GOETHE COLLABORATION TAKES OFF SEPT 17, WITH SCREENING OF VIVA RIVA

2011-09-14T20:07:00.003+01:00

On Saturday September 17, the iREPRESENT Documentary Film Forum (iREP) and the Goethe Institut Lagos will formally begin a comprehensive relationship that will see the two organisations collaborating on a number of projects in the area of films. The projects will include a Monthly Film Screening session; Training and Capacity Building programmes; Festivals and others.

The core objective of the collaboration is to facilitate relationship between the German and the Nigerian film Industries through sharing of ideas and products; networking of personnel as well as exposure to the intricacies of each of the film cultures. The overall objective of the collaboration, however, is to help quicken the development of the nascent Nigerian film industry.

MONTHLY FILM SCREENING
In particular, the Monthly Screening and Discussion session is conceptualized to facilitate elevation of film language and understanding of the artistic narratives of cinema in a way that empowers storytellers to explore more their intrinsic artistic voices. The screenings are being curated to push the boundaries of the Nigeria film industry’s appreciation for narratives that underscore the interconnectivity of the human experience even in a globalised culture. The film screening which will consist of short and long films will be introduced by experts and the public will get the chance to discuss with film professionals after each session.
The session will encourage a discussion on the film screened between professionals and the public. The choice film for the September 17 edition, is ‘VIVA RIVA!’, (98 min, DR Congo), directed by Djo Munga, with Patsha Bay, Manie Malone. It tells the story of Riva, an operator, a man with charm and ambition in equal measure who resides in Kinshasa. With petrol in short supply in DRC's capital, Riva and his sidekick pursue a plot to get hold of a secret cache — barrels of fuel they can sell for a huge profit. Of course they're not the only ones who want the stuff…
Screening starts at 3pm, and will be followed by Discussions among fil experts and the general audience. There will also be refreshment and light entertainment.

OCTOBER: The monthly screening continues on the theme of Music and Freedom in the spirit of the yearly FELABRATION, designed to celebrate the life and times of Fela Anikulapo-Kuti. It will hold on October 15 as part of the finale of In-Short, the international Short Film Festival of the Goethe Institut with the International Film and Broadcast Academy, Lagos. Venue remains the old Film Unit, NFC office, ikoyi, Lagos.

NOVEMBER: The film ADOPTED will be feature, but screening and discussion session will have an international dimension with the possible presence of the filmmaker. This edition is designed to coincide with the 2011 Lagos Book and Art Festival (LABAF) November 17th-20th, the yearly art feast organized by the Committee for Relevant Art, CORA. Venue remains the Old Film Unit.

DECEMBER: The collaboration takes up an even keener ambition with the scheduled African premiere of the award winning film PINA, directed by renowned German film maker, Wim Wenders. The venue for this event is proposed to be one of the Cinema houses in Lagos. There is also plan to make provision for a 3D viewing of the film by the audience. ·

Also in December the iREP and the GOETHE will be collaborating to participate in the British Council’s Creativity Fair, scheduled for the theme art centre, Freedom Park, on Broad Street, Lagos.

JANUARY: The 2nd iREP International Documentary Film Festival begins with a Pre-Festival Conference on January 17 – 18 on the theme: Is Nollywood Documentary? The Keynote is proposed to be delivered by Dorothee Wenner, producer of Peace Mission, the famed documentary on the fortunes and fate of the Nigeria film industry. The session will also have a panel of eminent Producers, Actors, Directors and Critics as discussants. Venue is Terra Kulture, Tiamiyu Savage Street, VI Lagos.

FEBRUARY: Monthly Film screening and Discussion continues at the NFC Lagos office, Old Film Unit, Ikoyi Lagos. MARCH: The second edition of the yearly iREP International Documentary Film Festival, holds March 21-24 with possible collaboration with MOKOLO, the film platform developed by Goethe and international partners. There is also plan to bring home Nigerian filmmakers working in Germany such as Bramwen Okpako and Adama Ulrich; and with popular German filmmaker, Marie-Hélène Gutberlet to be facilitated by Goethe Institut.

Jahman Anikulapo For iREP (08099400182)

--EniOlorutidak'oseFarawek'oseF'enutembelek'oseBinuk'oseNa'kaiwosisiWiwol'aawo

Sam Loco Efe... Theatre King Of All Time

2011-08-15T15:41:00.001+01:00

As had been stated elsewhere, only the Drama king himself could have pulled off the wild, morbid drama that attended the announcement of his own passing last week. Confusion reigned for nearly the whole week about the true state of affairs concerning the status of the evergreen master of the stage and screen; and not even the various clarifications by members of his family and his younger colleagues with whom he had been working when death called, could douse the terrible mix-up about the true state of his passing.

Well, Sam Loco Efe, a grandmaster of the Acting vocation, transited to greater service last Sunday.

Yet another confusion: someone had widely circulated the information that he was 66 when he died. Sam was indeed in his 70s; 73 more believably. Were he to wake up today, Uncle Sam, as his protege (I inclusive) call him -- would have turned this confusion over his age to a masterful drama skit... can’t imagine the fate of his listening audience at such a session...

In 1990, when Sam Loco Efe clocked 50, we had sat through nearly four hours of drinking and 'shacking' — somewhere in Festac Town, Lagos. Of course, it was in a beer joint, where else? The chat turned out to be one of his most comprehensive interviews in the media to date. A request to have an update of the interview on occasion of his 60th birthday a decade ago, was humorously rejected by the humour merchant... “...you never even finis paying for the carton of beer wey you promise me for the last one.. na cold, ice, beer tutu i want o”. And he broke into that famous michevious laughter. The matter ended there.

Last year, however, when the management of the Nigeria Liquefied Natural Gas, NLNG, as had been traditional with them, decided to honour Sam Loco as the Special Guest of Honour at the glamorous gala night that usually wrap up the yearly Nigeria Prize for Literature, NPL competition, the reporter reached out to Unce Sam again for the possibility of an interview; he declared: ‘I go do am, but this time around, i go send your bank account into the red’ (this was a throwback to an old banter in the 80s, when as a Theatre Arts student at the University of Ibadan, i had approached Uncle Sam to star in a play -- an audacious move indeed for a student, for by then Uncle Sam was already a legend in the Ibadan theatre circuit... ‘I go send ya papa’s account into the red sea’, stated the older folk in the presence of his best friend, Joe Emordi, Oga Joe (late) -- both of whom had played great altrusic role in my student directing career and engagements. Before that encounter, the two elderly fellows had collected enough beer, kolanut and cigarette egunjes from the poor student with the promise of appearing in his play, Trial of Dedan Kimathi. The dream never was.
That promised interview never held.

Two weeks ago, when I called Uncle Sam for yet a request, he apologised that he had been busy helping to set up some Acting Schools in Uganda, and The Gambia. That was probably his last major assignment aside his numerous acting engagements on the screen.

The 1990 interview is hereby reproduced as part of the long-owed debt to a great man with the heart of gold. Simple to say... but for the generous love of Uncle Sam and Oga Joe, and some in their age and professional brackets, one’s directing (indeed university education) career could have remained hung like the ‘strange fruit’ on the tree of unfulfilment.
— JAHMAN ANIKULAPO

AFTER about five decades of sojourn on the earth, three of which has been entirely spent in the thespian trade, the present socio-economic status of Samuel Efeimwonkiyeke a.k.a Sam Loco Efe, is the composite story of the Nigerian Theatre. Over 1,000 theatre appearances on stage and on the screen with innumerable shots on the air waves, the saddening aura of the theatre trade comes forth overwhelmingly, when one encounters Sam.

So much of hardwork, high level of commitment, an eccentric lifestyle that almost qualifies him as a social derelict, yet the artist toils and toils but reaps no commensurate returns. Added to his burden, he is forever strewn in the web of short-sighted cultural administrators and insensitive cultural policies and even his own self-persecutory perception of his trade and of himself. His solace often is laboriously hinged on his frightening disillusionment with his society, which has made him embrace a reckless living culture — of booze, of non-conforming ideological stand and at times, of drug addiction. More interestingly, he squares up to his tragedy through self consolation.
Yet, like Sam Loco Efe, the master humorist and accomplished actor reasoned, there is no gnashing the teeth. In fact, “time will vindicate the artistes”.

To Sam, who won the accolade of Locomotive (Loco) as a budding footballer in his elementary school days, the tragedy of the Nigerian theatre is a reflection of the tragic wind in the national psyche.

“The wrong people are always put in control of right places; irrelevant people are always put in control of right places”.
Coming down to the specific, Sam, the only son of Mr. And Mrs. Arase Efeimwonkiyeke (wealth has no time limit) of Ogboka, Benin City, noted that theatre administration is often given out as a “settlement for the boys”; querying: “When has any practising artist been made the head of the theatre administration?” In fact, he identifies orchestrated attempts “by design or by stupidity to muzzle the artist.”
Sanitising the theatre business would involve several seemingly irrational yet credible moves. For instance, Sam Loco would, if he has his ways, close down the National Theatre and NTA for several months and then call for fresh recruitment. As he pointed out, “there are too many cultural officers at the National Theatre doing nothing.”

More importantly, however, the versatile artiste warns that there is an urgent need by the artistes to awaken the theatre from its ìdead houseî status, otherwise, “it might be extinct.” To achieve this, the artistes would not only require their collective wits but fight individually to defeat the divide and rule strategy with which the government has been handling them. In his words, “several attempts have been made for several decades to unite the artistes but they have refused to be united and the government is happy about it. It’s sickening”.

Sam, who should have celebrated his 30th anniversary of stage artisanship in October 1990, having debuted in October 1960, sounded unbelievable — when he reckoned that there are not more than 20 credible English medium theatre artistes in Nigeria. Says he:“A lot of the artistes at the National Theatre and the NTA are mere pretenders to the throne”.

He lamented the topsy-turvy state of Nigerian theatre, in which case, an artiste’s professional career starts from the screen and graduates to the stage instead of the normal course of arrangement. Perhaps that is why he confesses, rather soberly, that each time he reflects on Nigerian theatre scene, he weeps. Wails Sam: “Itís getting so bad in all ramification. The NTA can feed you with shits. The audience too is still educationally backward to ask questions, so they consume whatever shit they are fed with.”

The Sam Loco story is a novel experience, packed with bluesy news and colourful crafts. In 1960, during those days of euphoric independence celebration, Sam debuted with an excerpt from Shakespeare’s Julius Ceasar where he played Ceasar. He recaptures the period; “we were living very close to Afrikpo, near Umuahia, now Imo State”.

However, before the 1960s, Sam, having tapped inspiration from a popular radio compere, Ukonu, had already been thrilling the Eastern Nigeria as master of ceremony at gatherings. This was where he was persuaded to join the drama club of Government College, Afikpo. His local influence was just beginning to blossom in the late 50s when his father was transferred to Abakaliki, now in Enugu State. The move brought a new fate to his romance with theatre.

According to him, “I took a bold step, called primary school boys together and then tried staging Julius Ceasar — in the Western Cowboy format.î Sam relishes the fun of the experience, because even a ‘fighting Julius Ceasar’ was more of an abnormality.

Nevertheless, the experience paid off when Sam entered his production for the Independence Anniversary Drama presentation as the only primary school participant among a list of Secondary Schools. “I emerged the best overall actor even among the lump of college boys that participatedî. With the feat came the first official acknowledgement. The district officer then, whose name he remembers as Mr.White, rewarded him by depositing his tuition fees for the next five years at St. Patrick’s Primary School. This helped in offsetting the financial blues he was encountering in his whopping 13 years of sojourn in primary schools!

Before the largesse, he recalled, “I was hawking Akara at every other year, to make money to pay for the school fees of my sisters and myself. I sell Akara this session to pay for next session. So, I spent 13 years in about six schools.”

In 1960, while a student of Presbyterian College, Afrikpo, Sam recorded what he considered a breakthrough. He produced and played the lead role in Doctor in spite of Himself. His exploit continued and resulted in his 1961 staging of Vendetta, a play he wrote, directed, produced as well as played lead role, Reverend Bush. That play, he said, underwent a process of growth up till the time he entered Form 5 and it was presented as a Benin City entry for a festival.

Now there was a clog in Sam Loco’s theatre exploit then: “I was more science inclined in school; so my principal thought I should concentrate on playing football (a business, he had become well known for), since he thought that was more science inclined,” Sam said, following the pressure from the principal, he resorted to practising his theatre during holidays when he was able to travel extensively to the suburbs, to spread the gospel of theatre.

Sam.. the Locomotive Soccer Wizard

BEFORE the outbreak of the civil war, Sam Loco’s popularity grew in two-prongs: he was winning laurels both in football and theatre. In fact, while the name Locomotive came to represent his popularity in the game of football, the town of Aba was bubbling with the Loco theatre road show.
“During the war, I served my nation in two capacities”, recalled Sam, reflecting that he was one of the young acculturated non-Igbo boys who responded to the Biafran leader, Odumegwu Ojukwu’s call for support, in his secession bid.

Sam spent five months on the ëpolice actioní case at Onitsha, Enugu, Asaba and later at Benin — as he suspected — “because I know the geography of the area very well.”

Between late 1967 and early 1968, Sam in course of the civic war, drifted to the Midwest, where he set up the Ovonramwen Theatre Group recruiting artistes from the community of young but talented enthusiasts. The OTG, which debuted with Ogierhiakhi’s Obaiwape, was later, as Sam claimed, to dust the giant actors in the ‘old-breed’ Midwest Playhouse, who had been dominating the scene then. The force of the ‘new breed’ group, according to Sam, was to reach out and accommodate the lot of young artists who were not able to join the Midwest Playhouse then because of the domineering status of the elderly actors.

“We became the ‘Maradonas’ that conveniently replaced the Peles from raw experiences. Even technically, we flogged the Midwest group, which was riding high then following a great outing with a play in 1968.”

In 1969, the OTG dabbled into a competition, staging Wale Ogunyemi’s Night of Oro Call, which became the toast of the locality. The feat earned the troupe warning letter from Chief Bola Ige’s Chamber querrying their right to stage the play without the author’s permission. Sam recalls, “we all ran back to village and so did go for the competition”. However, the incident was then to become the attracting force of Sam Loco to Chief Chief Ige and even Wale Ogunyemi later in his theatre career at Ibadan.

In 1970, Sam Loco crossed to Lagos, now fully engrossed in footballing, he played for ECN club and Leventis Football Club known as the ‘Iddo Tigers’. However, Sam quit the team after a stint because “the salary was not regular and there was this strong competitor who was always taking my place. Since we were being paid per march, I was not earning much since I could only play when the bagga was off duty.”

...The Road to Stardom

Sam, born December 25, got admission to read political science at the University of Ibadan in 1971, but could not honour it since, he was shortlisted for employment from 6,000 applicants at Michelin tyres. He was earning £60 as a sales representative. The salary, says he, was so enormous that it even trippled the earnings of university graduates then. That was why, as he joked, “my in-law got excited that he advised me to forego school and face the job.”

He served Michelin for two years and got sacked for reckless driving, having bashed his official car at Abeokuta. He hopped over to Dunlop in 1973 and served as Senior Sales Representatives, Tyres and Allied products, on a salary of £80 per month. He was transferred to Benin in 1974 and was still there in 1976, when Dunlop, not being able to cope with his increased involvement in Drama, got him sacked. The company was particularly irked by his involvement as a pioneering cast member of Hotel de Jordan. In his reflection: “I tried to explain to them my passion for drama but I roped myself in the more because they discovered I had actually been abandoning my duty post to attend the recordings of the programme.”

While still with Dunlop in 1976, he mounted Ola Rotimi’s The Gods Are Not To Blame, where he played King Odewale. It was the production that eventually sealed his fate with the nostalgic FESTAC ‘77 presentation of Langbodo, which has become his landmark achievement in theatre till date. While staging the play, a student from the University of Ibadan, who was impressed with his effort, hinted him about the impending audition for Langbodo at Unibadan.. “He told me a lot of money and fame would be involved”.
Prof. Dapo Adelugba of Unibadan, who was then recruiting cast for the Nigerian troupe to present the play for FESTAC had written to all the Arts Council in the states requesting them to forward the list of their best artistes. When Sam Loco’s was included in the Midwest State’sentry, some officials whom he believed had grown wary of his one-man hit shows that had at various times exposed the inadequacy of the council’s works, sought to remove his name from the list.

He recalls: “My name was juggled several times, but one, Mr. I.G. Umoru decided to use his power to include me because he knew that the politics that attended the juggling of my name had a mischievious undertone.”

Umoru’s, as it turned out, became prophetic, Sam Loco topped the list of the people Adelugba selected from the Midwest.
Yet another battle at Ibadan, during the preparation for the play.

Sam had a trouble over a list of big time actors already assembled. Says he, “There were the Jimi Solankes, the Akin Sofoluwes and even the younger ones such as Segun Bankoles”.

In his account, his battle for assertion in this pool of stars was movielike. He auditioned for the role, Obong of Calabar, he won; then for Ostrich, which he lost to a younger boy from Benin. Eventually, he had no role and was advised to join the technical crew and the crowd or teach the Edo songs in the play.

For these roles, he was placed on Level 04, salarywise. “One day, Jimi Solanke was late for rehearsals, I was asked to read the role. Immediately, Adelugba promoted me to Akaraogun understudy 5 and moved me to level 6. Later, he catapulted me from 5th Akaraogun to 2nd, understudying Solanke on level 10. From there I won the 1st Akaraogun topedoeing all the others”.

Sam Loco put in his best — using all the tools and even bringing new songs into the play. However, the morning Langbodo was to open for FESTAC at the National Theatre, Sam Loco was struck by a strange illness — had an overbloated leg, which people put as the handwork of his competitors.

Nevertheless, he played the role and even won, as he said, “apologies from the people who caused my strange illness.”

Confronted with the evergreen suggestion that the Federal Government ensemble which featured at the FESTAC should have formed the nucleus of the National Troupe which would have been a solid force by now, Sam looked into the circumstance under which the troupe was disbanded then, and lamented its demise.

In his reflection, “when General Olusegun Obasanjo, then Nigerian Head of State, was going round the camp of participating nations, he was received and treated like a king. But when he got to the Nigerian camp, he was shockingly booed by some team members, especially those seconded from the ministries, who had been placed on an allowance scale of N2 a day while their colleagues, such as myself, picked from outside, were on salary scale. The disenchanted members sort of insulted his person. He got wild, and disturbed, “I mean, being booed by his own camp!”

The incident, he noted sunk the idea of a Nation Troupe emerging from the FESTAC ensemble.

“The one big family relationship we had developed was bungled. We were thrown out of camp.”

Even though he sounded lamentative of the incident, Sam pinned the blame at the doorpost of both the Government and the artistes. In his opinion, Obasanjo behaved too irrationally for a head of state and the artistes too were too careless in their choice of words and action.
Nevertheless, the Theatre exploit of Sam never abated. Like others in the camp, he went back “with tears” to his itinerant theatre world. Two weeks after the presentation of Langbodo, which he said, Obasanjo was too annoyed to watch, he paired with Ben Okegbuale, who was Kako in Langbodo, to mount Sizwe Bansi is dead — the play was well received, having gained from the enormous press coverage enjoyed by Langbodo, coupled with the screening of the same on the Network Television slot.

...A break for survival

Late 1977, Sam Loco became a sales manager with Karo Pharmaceutical and left after the first month salary following a quarrel he had with a colleague, who had boasted that, he was a graduate and so, would not be controlled by “a semi-illiterate”. Naturally, the insult made Sam decide he was going to enter the University of Ibadan for the diploma certificate.

Thus, he went to Ibadan and found himself joining the Unibadan Masque, with a projection of enrolling at the Theatre Arts department. He participated in the company’s nationwide tour, in the course of which he wrote his diploma certificate examination in Kaduna. Before the company returned, he had already been admitted.

Stated Sam, “by right, I wanted to be an artiste, but I found I became an artiste by accident”. He butttresed this thus: “It was that simple insultive word by an idiot at Kano, that made me decide to read theatre arts as a course”

Recalling his diploma studies days, Sam averred: “It ís like walking through a beer parlour, because I had learnt almost enough before I joined the department”. However, he reckoned the period was exciting yet extremely busy. In his words, “I was a rich student — the only one allowed to enjoy his artistic freedom outside. My scripts were all over the Television stations — Ibadan, Ilorin etc. I was in fact, financing two of my kids through nursery school”.

To Ibadan, Sam Loco gave a deserving tribute. Hear him: “Though there is money in the Lagos theatre scene, Ibadan is the home. It is like the factory, Lagos is the market”.

In 1979, Sam founded the Sam Loco Production Company, which he deserted for two months when “I was lured to NTA”.

However, in same 1979, Sam was persuaded by Bayo Oduneye and Jide Malomo, both then of the defunct Unibadan Performing Company. A year later, 1980, he rose to the post of Head of Drama department.

Three and a half years of service, Sam in 1984 was given options of either to resign or be sacked as a result of, he claims, his several P.P. (private practice) on NTA. “I chose the latter, got sacked and went full blast into my exploits on the then Television Service of Oyo State, TSOS.

Around this time, he created the Two Just Men, a popular screen comedy around Oyo State then. In fact, he had three TV programmes running then; Fun Time, which he claimed the Federal Government stole and converted to WAI — since the two were actually focusing on same objective; Two Just Men and then a one hour programme.

The tense political period of 1983 in Oyo State had a crush on Sam Loco’s dream and he seems still embittered about the incident. According to him, Governor Olunloyo had become Oyo State governor on the ticket of defunct National Party of Nigeria (NPN) was so irritated by Sam’s “operation clean Oyo State” through his TV slot, Fun Times. “He thought I was being paid by the Unity Party of Nigeria to condemn the activities of his administration. Also, he thought I was a staffer of the Television Service of Oyo State, so he called for the stoppage of the programme and my arrest.

Sam said he heard the governor’s order and bolted out of Ibadan to Awe, a village near Oyo town. “I was in exile. Mobile policemen visited my house more than 30 times harassing villagers. They could not see me, but they succeeded in killing the programme.”

Where the pain bugs Sam most is the fact that the haunted programme, Fun Times, was then just being considered for sponsorship by a government agency and the makers of Club lager beer.

He however states that he might still sue the management of TSOS, whom he said destroyed his outstanding vouchers worth over N27,000.

Search for Greater Theatre glory
After his forced exit from the UPC in 1983, Sam went back to his Sam Loco Productions but was later invited to Enugu to take part in the Television Series of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. The project took him to early 1984. Later the same year, he started planning for secondary school theatre competition to push the case for the inclusion of Theatre studies in school’s syllabus. The project never saw the light of the day.

Chief Odumegwu Ojukwu sent words to him in 1986 to take part in the premier show of KAPO Productions, a new outfit formed by Kunle Adeyemo and Akpor Otebele but financed by Ojukwu. The play was Obi Egbuna’s Winds versus Polygamy staged in 1986. Same year, he did a play on Immunisation for UNICEF and even anchored the show. He was so excited at earning N1,500 for such a simple show that he was convinced Lagos holds the monetary ace. As he said, “man quickly grabbed some money so, naim I say ehn-enh, na so Lagos be. Na im I still den Lagos so o”.

Still in 1986, his resolve to return to Ibadan was shelved when the National Theatre management asked him to direct an in-house production Omezue.

Later, he was contracted by an English woman to direct, Victoria Island, a presentation that was rejected by the National Theatre, because in his words. “it attacked the Umaru Dikkos and their mates in the corruption of the Second Republic. The play was eventually staged under the Sam Loco Productions.

Several plays followed thereafter; Out From The River by Neville Ukoli, then editor of The Mail; Herold John's Moon on a Rainbow shull, done with his National Directorate for employment (Sam was actually a trainer with the NDE in 1987). Around same time he was operating a theatre school at MAPOL Guest House, Ebute Metta. Some of his students from the NDE and his theatre school are now practicing with the Nigerian Television Authority.

30 Years of Stage mastering... 1990

From 1987 till date (1990), “a lot of water”, as he joked, “has passed under my theatre the bridge”. Sam Loco said he’s been involved in one production or the other since then, building up a record stage appearance that, conservatively put, has exceeded 300. He has starred in five films till date; Moyo Ogundipe’s Songbird, Wale Adenuga’s Papa Ajasco, Ladi Ladebo’s The Vendor, A’ Production’s Vigilante and the screen adaptation of Things Fall Apart.

There is, indeed no stopping Sam Loco, even at 50. As at the time of this interview, Sam Loco, the joke machine, was involved in the Fezi Production’s presentation of Femi Osofisan’s Midnight Hotel, featuring as part of the Ahmadu Bello Universtiy Alumni’s Cultural Week (October 30th to November 2nd, 1990). In addition he should this week (of the interview), be at shooting location for the A’ Productions’ forthcoming movie, Ose Sango; which he describes as his most exciting film where “for the first time. I go knack Yoruba shatter all the big Grammar other go knack for the film”.

Sam Loco, who recently joined the cast of TV soap opera, Ripples, informs, “I have being having a baby in the womb for four years now. I want it delivered either this year or next year. Itís going to be a classical example in Nigerian comedy. That’s why I have being shying away from too much appearance on the screen”.

Perhaps no body could sing a better song of celebration but Sam himself as he tunes, “I have spent three consistent decades in the theatre and there is no month I was not involved in one theatre work or the other”.
Yet Sam Loco Efe rolls on into more decades of the span shots.

And the Music Stopped:
(21 years after this 1990 interview)

The Theatre locomotive that Sam Loco Efe almost monopolised for near six decades finally stopped last Sunday when the man with the evergreen talent, tested skill, irrepressible professionalism, robust discipline and verve stepped on to another realm. Inspite of the morbid drama -— seemingly orchestrated by some mischevious or overzealous fellows — that attended the announcement of his passing last week, Sam Loco Efe deserves the huge mountain of tributes and praises that have trailed his memory. The biggest tribute is, however, yet to be paid: the Federal government and administrators of his native Edo State have to go beyond mere ‘letter of condolence’ to his beloeved family, they have to honour Sam Loco Efe. If they failed to do that much, they would have dishonoured not only Sam Loco, but the hundreds of young artistes to whom Sam Loco was a mentor and inspiration, many of whom currently fulfil their life mission on stage and on the screen. The Nigerian government — in failing to honour Sam Loco Efe — would have killed HUMOUR!

---EniOlorutidak'oseFarawek'oseF'enutembelek'oseBinuk'oseNa'kaiwosisiWiwol'aawo

Agbeyegbe Sheer Madness Made Me Sustain Ajofest Theatre Series

2011-07-24T10:06:00.000+01:00

The Guardian on Sunday, 24 July 2011

BY ANOTE AJELUOROU

.Mr. Fred Agbeyegbe, also fondly called ‘Uncel Fred’ in theatre cirlces, is a powerful voice in the Nigerian theatre. Although trained as a lawyer, his fame in the theatre far exceeds his involvement in the legal profession. Agbeyegbe turned 76 last Friday and had a big celebratory event in his honour yesterday at the National Theatre, where he was given the Grand Living Legend of the NigerianTheatre award, the first of its kind. His play BUDISO also enjoyed a command performance. Early in the week, ANOTE AJELUOROU sought him out on a revelatory journey into his first involvement in the theatre and how he was able to sustain it close to two decades with such impact. Excerpts:

What special feeling comes with attaining 76 years, sir?

Well, it’s been a long way coming. I thank God for everything; for being born, and for making us to realise that life is about doing it the way God wants it done. I have the good lord to thank for the way I am; that’s part of the gratitude I mentioned. In fact, people say I look well for my age, although people flatter a lot.

You actually studied law but your involvement in the theatre tends to have over-shadowed that. What informed the direction, or co-directions, in fact?

Within the Nigerian context, my fame, as it is, may have come from theatre because that is the place you easily get public applause. But I don’t think I have been any less a lawyer in the sense that I have practised law without any break. In terms of number of years, I’ve been in more legal situations than I’ve been in theatrical projects. That might be difficult to believe.

But, of course, one, I mean the theatre, is more attractive of popular acclaim than the other. The other is done within the sacrosanct walls of a court. I was brought up as a lawyer not to advertise. I think I’ve stepped within those bounds. A good number of people perhaps don’t know that I read law. They are more likely to describe me first as a writer or journalist, which I’m not, although I write. I think you need a number of attributes to be called a journalist. In spite of my having had columns in the papers, I still don’t regard myself as a journalist.

Your writing career is adjudged impressive. How did it come into you? It wasn’t happenstance, was it?

It can’t be called happenstance because of the length of time I’ve been involved in it. But it has been the joy of my life; I’ve gone after it deliberately. But one can trace its origin to youthful exuberance, especially in those days when upbringing dictates that you must show commitment, usefulness. Even as young persons, you must be a role model; and I think it’s the absence of consistent role modeling on the part of today’s leaders that has brought Nigeria to where it is today.

When I was young, it was almost compulsory to show that you have God-given gifts, that you have talents and you’re prepared to use them for the benefit of society. We were made to write a play, which I did at the age of 14. A welfare lady, who was in charge of my area in Warri, my hometown, set us to it. She was very creative, and she wanted us to be creative as well. She encouraged us to do things; to be proactive and to be ready to be useful members of society, as it were.

The belief was not anything less at the time that the youths of today are the leaders of tomorrow. Today, they say it more flippantly than they said it then; but it meant a lot and we imbibed it. So, I wrote a play at 14; it wasn’t happenstance. It was an annual activity for the youth club.

Could that be the play, The King Must Dance Naked ?

The one I wrote at 14 was not published. But it attracted its own level of interest, which it generated all over the place. We were British subjects at the time and the subject matter was to do, funnily enough, with what effectively was the burial ground of the English royal family — Westminster Abbey. I got there eventually at my adult age; but at the time, I knew nothing about it other than what I saw on an almanac on the wall.

Subsequent plays before The King Must Dance Naked were many: The Reincarnating Lovers, which was broadcast on the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), The Will, Competition Forever — all came before it. The King Must Dance Naked was my debutant play in Nigeria, and because of the time and what was happening in the theatre world, it gave it some impetus in that for some of those who were here before I got back from the U.K., theatre was dead. There was this big edifice, the National Theatre, in which next to nothing was happening. I remember, in fact, Dr. Ola Balogun was incensed at the then director of the National Theatre for participating in the plays of Ajo Productions, Jide Ogungbade and my humble self at the time following the success of The King Must Dance Naked.

Incensed? To what effect?

He actually wrote an article on it, his review of the play. But he didn’t confine it to the play, saying the play was fantastic play, that it was good for English theatre and drama; but he went on a barrage against the National Theatre director — I can’t remember his name now — saying all he used the theatre for was for American films; that he didn’t give theatre practitioners opportunity to use the place to do the sort of thing that Ajo Productions and Fred Agbeyegbe had just done. How dare he come to participate in the glory of something that was good for the theatre. It was really incredible.

But that was the trend of the comment at the time, actually. That was why everybody believed that Ajo Productions, The King Must Dance Naked and Fred Agbeyegbe, the three of them, all came to enliven the National Theatre. And thereafter, we never looked back until many years ago when the Federal Government tried to sell it off.

There was the Ajo Productions play series that spanned many years. How did you sustain the festival for so long?

It was sheer madness (laughs). I remember Prof. Femi Osofisan came to one of our events in Abuja, when the head of Department of Theatre Arts, Ibadan, came to review my book, a play, Woe unto Death at the National University Commission Conference Centre, and we put up the play as well. Coincidently, Osofisan was in town; so, he came to see the play. It was the beginning of my escapade in trying to make Abuja not to be a weekend ghost town. It was where they do their business, do their politics, but by Thursday everybody is rushing out. That is why I call it madness.

But I said that wasn’t good enough. This is meant to be the capital of Nigeria with all the diplomatic community, who find themselves left alone in someone else’s town or capital every weekend. And, since they seem to understand and enjoy theatre more than the average Nigerian, we thought that we could get something like that going, that it would interest them; that it would bring about some change and make Abuja more lively.

So, we set a theatre club called Ajo-Lamb, a fusion with a young man who had a theatre group called Lamb in 2002. Osofisan wrote an article, in which he said it was a demonstration of commitment, love for the country, theatre art and all that but that it takes a different kind of Nigerian to do a things like that, where there was no recompense at all. That was it.

In 1983, we did The King Must Dance Naked; in 1984, we did Woe unto Death; in 1985, we did The Last Omen; in 1986, we did BUDISO; and repeated all four at this festival in 1986. So it was a play a year and, of course, it was also the discovery of new talents every year. Something at which, Ogungbade, then director of Ajo Production, my theatre group, was very good at.

The Clarion Chukwuras, the Richard Mofe-Damijos, the Antar Laniyans, the Tunji Sotimiris, the Lara Akinsolas and so on and so on; they were all Ogungbade’s protégé. There was that enthusiasm for the arts; it was like there was this longing but they didn’t have any opportunity to showcase it.

How did you fund these productions?

It’s part of my madness! I had a furniture company; it was supposed to be the best around at the time in which I did all the designs myself; it was called Plush Furniture. In fact, it was because of Plush Furniture that I got into the theatre, ironically. A director with the Nigerian Television Authority (NTA), one Ogbemi, who wanted to put up a play had approached me to supply furniture for her set.

I was asking her questions that baffled her; she couldn’t understand why a lawyer, who is doing furniture, would be asking her ‘what type of play do you want it for’, so as to know what exactly to provide. She, too, started asking me questions in return. She wanted to know why it mattered to me the type of furniture to make. I said since I’m going to get credit (she wasn’t hiring or paying me for it), and my name was going to be there, I wouldn’t want to supply something that is shoddy and that bore no relevance to the type of play she had.

It occurred to her that I knew about plays; I told her I had a rough idea. I opened a drawer and brought out scripts. She said I must meet somebody, who could make sure that I got on stage properly. That was how I met Jide Ogungbade. She was the one who knew Jide Ogungbade, and it became the two of us after that.

And it was this play, The Rock Has Moved; that is the name I gave to the play, when I wrote it. The King Must Dance Naked was just a line in the play. Each time they consulted the oracle, all he said was The King Must Dance Naked! It baffled everybody; Jide spotted that and pulled it out as title and changed the name from The Rock Has Moved. There is a rock that moved in the play. Of course, it is the most significant event in the play. You can imagine a rock moving — the awe and everything about it. Jide saw it and said, Uncle, let’s use it.

BUDISO appears to be the most political of your plays. And then it was written and performed during the military era. How did you manage to get away with it?

Well, I didn’t use to be just mad; I used to be very stubborn as well. And, if I believe in anything, I didn’t care provided I didn’t steal. A number of things led to BUDISO. I had been writing articles in the papers condemning military intervention into politics and governance. As a member of the Lagos branch of the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA), it was one of the very critical one, I was member of the executive. At that time when Buhari and Idiagbon were in power, there was also Sowemimo as the Chief Justice of the federation. I was one of those who could not stomach what was happening to Nigerians’ fundamental human rights; they were really battered and bastardised by, as far as I’m concerned, the three of them. What the courts were doing was just giving in to whatever the military wanted. Yes, it’s natural that when there is a military regime, all three organs of state become agglomerated into one. But I’ve always hoped that the judiciary will do something, at least, to ameliorate the harshness of what the military was doing. But at time, there didn’t seem to be any difference anymore even though they didn’t abolish the courts.

Yes, they did some retroactive legislation; they made a number of things injusticeable, in terms of, ‘you cannot take them to court’ and all that. But a lawyer like us (and I used to say, a lawyer like me), expect that in spite of all that, the judiciary would stand by the citizens and protect them to the last. This was not happening. So, I read it to mean that Sowemimo had given in and there was no need for the courts. So, there was nothing the courts were doing in the face of Buhari and Idiagbon. So, when we went to the Nigerian Bar Association conference (coincidentally, Sowemimo was on his way out), I moved a motion that he should not be honoured with a Valedictory Session, which was a normal thing to do for judges then when they were going. I think until date, Sowemimo stands as the one Chief Judge, who never got an exit court sitting.

And then again, this was before 1986, when the legal profession was 100 years old in Nigeria. So, the NBA commissioned me to write a play as part of the celebration or commemoration of 100 years of legal practice in Nigeria. And, I came up with a play called BUDISO. BU stands for Buhari; DI stands for Idiagbon, and SO stands for Sowemimo. And again, coincidentally, when put literally together in Yoruba, budiso means ‘grab your arse’! That’s why in the play, when you hear BUDISO, people grab their arse. It depicts the unacceptability of the mangling of laws by the courts, albeit under the military regime. BUDISO is a farce but it reflects an era in the Nigeria bench/bar relationship.

In speaking to some of those who acted in your plays, allusion was made to a strong of sense of Itsekiri history in them. Was that a conscious undertaking?

Well, that’s part of what’s going on in this country. I was an Itsekiri man before I became a Nigerian. In fact, I was naturally an Itsekiri man; I became a Nigerian by accident. And, after seeing the way it has gone, I regretted being a Nigerian, detests being a Nigerian, because of what I have been put through. But that bit about being Itsekiri, I didn’t have a choice; that’s how the good lord made me and put me in Itsekiri land. So, my custom, my traditions, my comings and goings, the things that I knew as I grew up, the first language I spoke in my life is Itsekiri.

Then you have this imposition. Here I am; the Constitution of the country I belong to says, in effect, there are four languages as lingua franca: English, but you can use Igbo, Hausa, and Yoruba. None of those four languages is my language.

Although it has been said, and I believe it is so, that my plays are universally applicable, either in their nuances or in the ways of life. I can only better relate to those things in life when I want to put them across to other people the best way I understand them. So, in the plays, the names are largely Itsekiri names; the costumes are largely Itsekiri costumes; the traditions are largely Itsekiri traditions.

For instance, in a scene where a king dies and another is going to be put on the throne, I can’t put what they do in Sokoto or Owerri; it’s what they do in Warri, what they do in Itsekiri land. Where I come from featured.

As I always say, if Moses wrote the bible in Warri, Itsekiri, Urhobo and Ijaw will be in it but he did not (laughs). The bible carries the language of the person who put it down. Everything after that is interpretation but those interpretations are linguistic interpretations. You could not interpret Galili by writing Liverpool there; so Galili is Galili and it remains so in the bible. Jordan is Jordan as it is written down even when you and I read it in the English language.

So, that is what Itsekiri traditions, history and language are all doing in my plays.

And, then you chose to live on the outskirts of Lagos. Why did you decide to do so?

Quite frankly, I thought I’d had enough of this country, and I was on my way out…

...to Itsekiri land?

No, not necessarily; the way it is now, that Itsekiri land is part of this madness called Nigeria. Never mind that they are the ones being oppressed or part of those that are being oppressed. It’s part of the nightmare called Nigeria because I don’t dictate what I do in Itsekiri land. That’s the bit that pains, when somebody sits down in Abuja and insists that the burst pipe in my backyard in Koko or Ekurede can only be fixed when he comes. Why? Is it because I am inept or because I don’t know what I’m doing? It doesn’t make sense. So, being an Itsekiri man, being in Itsekiri land, as it is now, is part of being a slave; because that’s what it’s all about: a situation that exposes everything of mine; my person, my resources, my thinking to the control of people I don’t even know.

So, I wasn’t going back to Itsekiri land; I was just leaving the hectic life of Lagos behind. At my age, I was thinking I was going to retire but I had an unfortunate incident of robbery. But I’ve always had that place on the outskirts of town. It’s a place, in fact, where we do all our rehearsals; we camp there. Like when I was taking artists to Ghana to represent Nigeria at Panafest. That is why I’m there.

---EniOlorutidak'oseFarawek'oseF'enutembelek'oseBinuk'oseNa'kaiwosisiWiwol'aawo

Between ‘Realism’ And Phantasmogoria: The Artistic Ideology Of Fred Agbeyegbe

2011-07-24T09:57:00.000+01:00

(The Guardian on Sunday, 24 July 2011 00:00 Jide Ogungbade Sunday Magazine - Arts )

.Lawyer, poet an playwright, Fred Agbeyegbe was 76 on Friday. The Lagos chapter of the National Association of Nigerian Theatre Arts Practitioners, NANTAP, set up a party in his honour with the staging of one of his plays, BUDISO, which he wrote and produced in 1986 to mark 100 years of the legal profession in Nigeria. The celebration billed for next weekend, ought to have happened last year to commemorate his 75th birthday anniverssary but had to be postponed till this year. In this piece, poet, theatre director and broadcaster, Jide Ogungbade, who directed Agbeyegbe’s plays in the 80s under Ajo Productions Company, examines the essences of Agbeyegbe’s plays.?The essay was originaly written for inclusion in the book of tributes, The Playwright and His Ideology: A Celebration of Fred Agbeyegbe, which will also be launched next week as part of the birthday commemoration.

The artistic ideology of any writer can be formally gleaned from the force of vision of society and individuals that is represented as the final positioning of the characters’ vision in subsequent and recurrent creative exercises (plays, novels, poems).

It is the intangible but stormy repetitions of the writer’s conclusions on conflicts as championed by characters who deepen or resolve such conflicts to emphasise their individual character reactions to other characters in the play and to the world around them.

It is the aggregate positioning of the writer’s vision, which we can deduce from his handling of social realities, events and history in continuing revelations through creative exercises (plays, poems, novels). An observation of a writer’s artistic ideology cut across aesthetic world of each play or work to show strains of vision despite the different thematic and internal aesthetic logic of each work of the writer.

It is the hammer and anvil of the writer’s workshop with which he shapes and casts his messages to us, the audience. Such mould may come to us in the pervading temperament of each work — in tragic, comic, serious and serio-comic (a combination of both serious and comic) or farcical modes of enunciation.

Fred Agbeyegbe comes to us through his work as a sphinx who glides from tragic through to comic and sometimes farcical modes in a single play. A fact more pronounced in his satiric piece, The King Must Dance Naked. He is essentially a writer who writes in the “serio-comic” dramaturgical tradition. This is the emotional fibre that affects most of his works — he makes you cry even as he makes you laugh. He is a serious analyst who enjoys “living” in the theatre of ideas like the world of Bernard Shaw’s characters. He is an expressionistic writer, whose major terrain is social realism by way of form, following the western example of Ibsen and the post modern typology of caustic and ‘hurting’ realism, which we find in the works of a Femi Osofisan, despite differences in visions of the writers.

Agbeyegbe’s realism dissects the society at the significant arteries of the common man on the street, his pains, woes, love, death and pressures around him that keeps him where he is: In the puddle of self-realisable but sometimes unfulfilled dreams. The vision of common man in characters who bear their worldviews to us as they see it and not as we see it, is the epicentre of expressionistic dramaturgy wherein Fred’s workshop situate.

It is not enough to call him a realist for he compliments his realism with transmogrification of human debates into the realm of man versus the superhuman or supernatural. So important is the idea peddling in Fred’s plays that he sometimes creates characters who are neither man nor god. “Nondescript” sub-lunary elements given the voice of the author.

Visionary Strains:

It is dangerous to read Fred Agbeyegbe’s plays which are set in the background clothing of traditional African period experiences without an armour to ward-off conflicts of contemporary social realities of the period of his writing. Perhaps, it is in this milieu that we can posit his major artistic ideological concern in interpreting man in his ontological and existential being as well as in his bid to transcend strictures imposed upon him by society, tradition and taboos, as he apprehends new challenges of an ever-changing world: A world of million answers looking hard at their questions in the restrictive barbed-wires of supernatural impositions, imperial hubris and contemporary tyrants.

The King Must Dance Naked, Woe Unto Death; The Last Omen, My grandfather’s ghost — all these plays testify to the active ingredients of challenges and forces of restriction which impede on the positive movement of the individual and society towards liberation, equity, justice and fair play.

In the afore-mentioned plays, there is no outright rejection of tradition and the existence of supernatural forces in the affairs of men, what we find is a rejection of sit-tight-rulers and public opinion moulders who are opportunists.

The King... as evidenced in Mejebi’s final show-down with royal lies to cover imperial hubris. Similarly, Woe Unto Death probes through human interactions into supernatural suppositions and phenomena to expose the big fight between man and his existential problems. Common-Cold, Death, Old Age become metaphors of states of man’s psychological restrictions as he battles to reach destined goals, and master the problems of his environment. Egwuaruna in Woe... epitomises the undying spirit of man to challenge and if possible transcend the forces that nail him to pre-destined destruction.

In no play of Agbeyegbe is the quest for post-mordernism in confrontation with apriori laws of human existence in traditions and imperial successions — more pronounced than The Last Omen.” Here, in this play, the last bastion of restrictive traditional oligarchies is broken by the undying spirit of Demeyin’s philosophical and scientific superiority: says, the people “we want a republic of ideas of resolution”. We are in confrontation, once more, in another play, with man, fighting the forces of destiny imposed on him as is evidenced in Demeyin’s rising from the coffin and declaring in a revolutionary spirit that “I won”!

In Human Cargo, the archetype of man’s inhumanity to man and brother-on-brother violence is visited in a very incredible flashback which links this lust for cannibalism in man from slavery through to post-modern times. Here, the freedom that the writer champions is that of the down-trodden man, trying to eke out a living, trying out his hands with little wherewithal and largely misused and misunderstood by society.

No doubt, the indomitable essence of destiny is an ever present reality in Agbeyegbe’s plays. However, it is his treatment of destiny factors that attracts attention. There is a penchant for refusal of destined fate by his characters but which often ends in self assertion (Mejebi in King) or re-instatement of the sanctity of tradition before the pollution of ethics, mores and continuity by self seeking aristocratic opinion moulders as we find in My Grandfather’s Ghost.

This play is a re-validation of Agbeyegbe’s strong conviction about the need for the future to redeem itself with the virtues inherent in tradition and move on to higher planes of contemporary significance in love, brotherhood, sacrifice, equality and justice: “I bequeath you this kingdom, its wealth and domain..... What I have done is not only my wish but also ... re-enactment of God’s will hitherto bastardised by human folly” . Alas for a profound aggressor of the frontiers of the gods in thematic concerns, the writer betrays a visionary feeling towards the existence of a supreme deity whose ways to man is just, despite man’s manipulation of his purposes — a visionary statement on artistic ideology no doubt.

It can be assumed that Agbeyegbe’s canvas of creative engagement in socially relevant stories cut across the backdrop of analysis in form of royal or regal characterisation of traditional mien, straight into extended satiric statements of the contemporary world outside the play. The history of post-independent Nigeria and military hegemonists’ hold on the polity between seventies and eighties is not a myth in the sit-tight-and-quit-by-the-barrel-syndrome of rulers. So is the apathy of the people in traumatised social climate of this period. Evidences of the concern for this period shore up in the writer’s engagement of a play like The King... wherein the narrator legislates his story’s canvas, naming it “Once upon a remote and present time”.

The audience is immediately intimated about an emergency aesthetic landing at strange ports which the play is filled with. Myth, history and contemporary realities in extracted quantities become the instruments with which Agbeyegbe delineates his characters. These characters break the bound of period costumes and traditionally upheld diplomacy to address us and hurt our wounds where it pains most with extended satire.

Listen to Ogodobiri, the prime-minister in The King...: “How does a man rule a people who never come to complain about their problems or when they do, complain about unreal problems like food, clothing and white collar jobs.” The apathy of the people as observed tongue-in-cheek by Ogodobiri is a reflection of the 80s coming from bites of neo-colonialism into bad leadership and consequently coasting home on military dictatorship reduced the people’s zest for group survival, while increasing the quantum of risks individuals were ready to take to insure self-survival. On the social plane, apathy ruled as we had two governments: one for the people, however apathetic and one for the government, however coercive.

Omajuwa in the height of tyranny claims “when trees fall upon trees, we simply carve out another route.” This selfish end to leadership and lack of concern for the good and well being of the polity is the major exploratory canvas of The King... cutting across traditional, myth-history realities into contemporary life in deliberate multi-dimensional characterisation.

There is a contemporary side to Omajuwa and Ogodobiri’s characterisation, rich as both characters are made as epic or mythical characters. Omajuwa says, “Where are the chiefs gone? Far into the naira market, leaving the palace empty. Now there is no rain and they yap! yap!! yap!!!” This statement is an extended satire on contemporary law and opinion moulders in their get-rich-quick-mania of the first and second Republic of Nigeria’s post independent polity, a situation which bred financially rich social “monsters” who fed on the purse of the people while stowing money away in foreign banks, leaving the business of real governance to wayfarers. With the characterisation of Atseburuku in his pedigree role of traitor as claimed by Omajuwa, we have an insight into the activities of greedy politicians who fuelled the slave trade and continue in post independent Nigeria to engage in illegal exchanges which impoverish the polity.

Ogodobiri (P.II). captures the picture of a polity kept at zero movement towards progress in his statement “It is all a useless rat race”.

The character Omajuwa as a king champions contemporary African leaders who do not believe in the myth of patrimony or ethos of group-survival, but who sit tight and fuel loyalty among the people to stay in power.

The bulk of The King Must Dance Naked addresses the sit-tight-syndrome of African leaders who are jittery of loosing power. Omajuwa gives Ogodobiri, the prime minister the power to go into public and build an undeserving image of a god for her to showcase good leadership so as to stay longer in illegitimate power holding.

Suffice it is to say that the writer straddles over time and myths and contemporary realities to create characters who can carry in their dialogue and conflicts, the great debate about traditional continuities in the evident face of inevitable changes and contemporary observations of the need or malformations of such changes in the life of the people.

Dramaturgical tradition:

Taking a hindsight at the history of forms in modern theatre literature, we can position social realism as a movement inaugurated by Ibsen, continued by Chekov, Strindberg and Shaw in historical gestation. Central to this artistic ideology is the nature of the dialogue of the characters.

The dialogue is often realistic. The characters’ emotional problems, means of livelihood and behaviour are often typically realistic strains of drama. The pursuit of the success of the individual in society had been the thematic concern of Ibsen (noted as the father of realism). Arthur Miller as exemplified by his “Death of a salesman”.

Strains of realism breaks easily through works of African writers of the dramatic genre in plays that seek to intervene into the anguish of the common-man-on-the-street.

Femi Osofisan’s works are rich in strains of reality which takes along with it the re-interpretation of the world around the character, from the character’s point of view. Such views may not be ours but they open Pandora boxes of the writer’s visionary intentions.

There is a great deal of expressionism in Agbeyegbe’s plays. Expressionistic writers attempt the dramatisation of a subjective picture of reality as is believed and enunciated by the individual character’s consciousness. In this case, the way the character interprets the reality of our mutually lived experiences.

From the epicentre of Agbeyegbe’s aesthetic world, repetitive writing of certain character strains in their unusual perception of the world around them is a structural indication of the writer’s vision of the society. A dose of the character Mejebi (The King...), a tempest-laden whiff of Odosun in (The King...) and Egwuaruna in Woe, a loquacious and unrelenting fighting spirit of Demeyin in The Last Omen are all pointers to the vision of Agbeyegbe.

These characters are very unusual in their revolutionary spirits and they all dare destiny. They reject traditional structures and insist on new ways of doing things. Agbeyegbe’s vision no doubt reflects the anguish and conflicts of the individual with society and the same anguish (internal conflict) within each character as they rationalise their states of being through unusual reactions to publicly accepted stereo-type opinions about issues, events, people and tradition.

Fred Agbeyegbe is a writer who apprehends social conflicts through a deep concern for the anguish of the individuals who are trapped in the pit-holes dug by tradition and wide public acceptances on the one hand. He also signifies individuals whose fate happens to be the result of their psychological make-up or internal conflicts. The character of Lucille “Michael/Randy” in her frustrated consciousness and walking-stick choice of prostitution conjures another strain of Agbeyegbe’s characters in their heroic confrontation with unyielding forces.

Form application in Theatre:

Fred Agbeyegbe’s can be situated in the experimental Theatre tradition. His legacy spans from western traditional forms into the folk theatre and epic constants of African origin. His poetic consciousness in versified liturgies, however hidden, is a pointer to an African worldview approach to the use of conceits in parables, allegories and myths.

His borrowing of the Greeko-Roman classical tradition of aesthetics in the presentation of the chorus in The King... reminds of The Bacchae of Euripides in the use of chorus as participating commentators in the cosmic fate of the people in a troubled state.

He employs metaphoric, symbolic and archetypal characters whose relevance in the conflict of the plays draws attention not only to their positions vis-a-vis other characters in conflict. We are also drawn towards these characters as human capsules and commentators on the world history of power drunkenness, accountability and sheer penchant of man towards inhumanity to fellow men.

From farce as in the action of soldiers who goes with force to abduct a baby in The King... through comic elaborations in the thick of endemic tragic situations, Fred’s serio-comic stance in apprehending social problems as it affects the downtrodden in society is poignant.

Aesthetic Vision:

In The King..., Woe... and The Last Omen, the battle for succession to the throne is signified. A grand canvas of power wrestling become the aesthetic concern of these plays. This battle is often pronged in the insistence of strictures created by traditional observances and sustained by the horde of traditional opinion moulders and kings and priest who deny meaningful change in society. They deny revolutionary change which in all three plays are needed for meaningful social development, equity, justice and equalitarian realities.

In all these plays, the playwright throws his weight behind the seeds of change in characters who despite all odds fight the pollution endemic in the aristocratic cartels of kings who entrench their rights of continuity in the age long reliance of the traditional populace on the supernatural and the a-priori laws that must govern human existence.

The characters of Mejebi in The King..., Demeyin in The Last ..., Egwuaruna in Woe... and to a large extent Eyinsan in My Grandfathers Ghost: these are carriers of the writer’s vision of continuing attempt at wrestling power out of the strangle hold of perverted traditional oligarchies. The actions of these characters are pointers to the restoration of peace, progress and purity to traditional and neo-traditional existences.

The summation of these characters’ intervention are pointers to the most dominant aesthetic ideology of the writer.

It is towards this liberation of the individual essence within reasonable respect or disrespect for restrictionist forces that theatrical forms like music, scene within scenes, metaphorical symbolisms, distended satires, epic jump in time, are deployed to make statements on stage. For this reason, you find the canvas of Woe.. shifting from the domain of mankind to the numinous milky-ways of the supernatural’s, where age long ideas and phenomena become personified for debate to be possible. The debate in this play is between man (Egwaruna) and the couriers of man’s existential anguish in Death Old Age and Common Cold Personified.

In the presentation and resolution of the conflict of traditional oligarchies versus post modern ways of change, Agbeyegbe comes clean to us as a writer who respects tradition but abhors those nuances of tradition that merely keep the cycles of oppression rolling while the psyche and progress of the people is threatened and jittered.

Conclusion

While the skeletal plot of most of Agbeyegbe’s plays start with social realism, the flip from the realistic to the fabular (mythologems) through to the supernatural makes his creative ambience very wide. Alongside with the phantasma of myth and supernatural suppositions is the dogged approach through psychology of post modern realities towards the contemporary man’s need for updating his concept of good life and progress. His concern with destiny as an impenetrable reality is suspect as many of his heroes dare destiny.

His literary influence exists in a wide ambience of western and traditional African dramatic conventions. The traditional African story telling theatrical spectacle is metamorphosed into post modern form of performance with strains of epic tradition of telling in The King.... This dual heritage of western and African origins in Agbeyegbe’s works may deceive any literary wayfarer into believing that the Agbeyegbe’s vision does not exist in unique isolation. It does: In the signification and individuation of characters’ internal conflict with themselves e.g. Omajuwa in The King... on the one hand and characters conflict with a-priori or culturally given but often unrealistic laws of traditional extrapolations.

This concern often leads to tragic conclusions as in The King... of farcical elaborations as in “The last Omen”.

Suffice it is to say that Agbeyegbe’s aesthetic ideology reveal the mind of an incurable iconoclast, a fence sitting neo-nihilist who does not proclaim atheism but wonders what man make of their pantheon of gods and destiny. Fred, after all is a stickler for tradition and continuity of respect for the virtues in African culture.

Fred Agbeyegbe is a writer whose artistic ideology revolves around signifying suffering humanity through unusual debates in his theatre of ideas.

---EniOlorutidak'oseFarawek'oseF'enutembelek'oseBinuk'oseNa'kaiwosisiWiwol'aawo

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2011-07-05T17:21:00.000+01:00

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At Mandela House in Soweto...

Who Is A Culture Minister?

2011-06-19T11:56:00.001+01:00

Who Is A Culture Minister?

By Segun Ojewuyi

TRUST me, the premise is simple. Artists are fueled by a burning passion to create art — expressive and qualitative art that conveys the ennobling power of deep thought and penetrating insight, balanced with beauty. Artists — Nigerian artists not excempted — also want to make a dignified living, the kind that respects and provides the sanctity necessary for creativity to flourish. Where there is talent, good training and tenacity of purpose, such a combination of critical artistic and commercial success, should not be hard to find. Often the artist just wants to be able to keep the creative work unhindered, maintain a responsible family life and foster good citizenship.

Opulence is not a requirement, but also not anathema. The artistic life is a cause not a curse, it is one of service not servitude, nobility not futility. It is a life that is just as worthy of every breath, every second and minutia of creativity and labour that the artist puts in, as well as every accolade and Naira that the recipient cohesive civic community invests. There are models of such partnerships and success stories in the developed world. Making art is and must be vital to the well-being of society, community and country, just as the sustenance of the artist is and must be embraced as a necessity for societal identity, prosperity and health.

We are a very unhealthy society. Our common treasures and processes of human creative activity and imagination, have been worn down by attrition through many years of unimaginable physical and emotional violence. We cover the full range - terrorist crimes, pogroms, kidnappings, robberies, contract assassinations, high brow stealing from the people’s coffers, political muggings, religious brigandry etc.

Our country is in one of the worst throes of psychological maladjustments in our history. Swarms of our humanity are deeply wounded and the blood clots are just beginning to show.

Imagine what the landscape will be in five years, if we do not make a change. Now more than ever, we need immediate intervention and rehabilitation — physical and emotional. Some would argue that we need seven Halleluyah’s with multiple baths in the baptismal and all-year-round ramadans. I say goodluck to them.

While we are focused on building new infrastructure for steady power supply and rebuilding our economy, while government continues to wrestle with transparency, we must remember that central among the remedies for that necessary collective societal rehabilitation, we need the arts, we need a renewal of our artistic and cultural imagination to fuel new growth, a new egalitarian Nigeria. Art is how we explore the difficult terrains of our national character.

Culture is how we stabilize our individual and collective morality. And without character, without integrity, our growth experiments will fail and we will merely continue to drift into darker depths of horror and disintegration.

In a democracy, government must be a dependable provider of service for the people and the corporate community must be a model of responsible citizenry, with long-ranging and clear sighted participation in the creation of the ennobling environment for the development of the arts and the artist. This should not be hard to embrace and nurture, if we are truly intent on building a rich and healthy nation.

Deficient infrastructure

It is time to revisit the infrastructure of artistic and cultural production as we now have it. Our cultural production and artistic expression at the grassroots in our villages seem to be holding well, even if not all healthy. Nigerian artists are not insular and they have responded with imagination to the vagaries of our postcolonial intersections with the world. This courageous productivity has, however, been shortchanged by an infrastructure that should be supportive but instead is more destructive. As at this juncture, government and corporate partnered intervention in the development of the arts and artists in Nigeria, will rank a miserable 2 on a scale of 10.

Garba Ashiwaju (late) and Aig Imokhuede deserve some credit as Federal Directors of Culture who midwifed a number of parastatals, ideas and policies into Government’s participation in our national cultural and artistic agenda. We have a few motivated and productive executives running a number of those parastatals, vigorously exploring the ideational frontiers for our national cultural growth. The Center for Black Arts and African Civilization, National Institute for Cultural Orientation and in fits of seasonal brilliance the National Commission for Museums and Monuments are some of the most progressive of these parastatals. We have a cultural policy that is functional, if not totally adequate, and we have an arts community that is vocal even if not well organized.

The appointments of the Federal Ministers of culture have become the pawn of political gifts by a succession of short-sighted Nigerian administrations. The Ministry of Culture unlike all the other ministries, seem to have become a hibernating station for neophytes and political office seekers who use the ministry to appropriate huge funds for future political campaigns and entertainment expenditure for their extra-curricular.

President Goodluck Jonathan’s promised transformative agenda for Nigeria will only be fully realised, when he genuinely commits to a deep and radical campaign for the health of Nigeria’s artistic community and production. Jonathan must move away from the traditional process of political gifting and party quotas, to find an active leader from the artistic community — particularly in the portfolio for a Culture and Orientation Minister.

So perhaps we should seriously revisit the definition of not just what a ministry of culture stands for, but most pertinent, what makes a Minister of Culture, Tourism and National Orientation? We should also interrogate what responsible corporate citizenship means for the arts and how the minister’s role should be seen in that picture. For the most part, we should be reminded that we are in the 21st century with its multiplicity of variables and our 20th century models may not be adequate anymore.

I suggest that we interrogate the commission of our nationally appointed cultural agents and agencies, particularly in the face of their collective colossal failure to affirm for our local citizenry, the proven direct correlation of art and culture to societal health and development. It is time to howl up the utter dereliction of purpose by our Ministers of culture in projecting what is good about us, about our people, about our Nigerian humanity with our arts and cultural expressions.

When our languages, dances, writers, poets, musicians, actors, directors, sculptors play second fiddle to foreign imports, our humanity is subjugated to second class humanity. It should be disturbing enough, that our Ministry of culture and our embassies abroad have become mere clearing centers for same old festivals and ‘diplomat - ease’ of the last quarter century, instead of being the hotbed of new ideas and cultural trends that cast Nigeria as a healthy nation of bold, innovative and highly productive people.

Our angst should be roused when our Minister of Culture and National orientation is a mute bystander in the national discourse for a culturally viable and democratic Nigeria. We should now boldly ask those who nominate and appoint our minister in culture and orientation, what they look for, what questions they ask, what skills they demand of a nominee to be appointed.

Is he one who spends an entire tenure sitting over the funneling of contracts for T-shirts and things of such petty ilk? Is a Minister of culture synonymous with the master of ceremony for government’s hedonistic adventures and self-glorification? Are we against the grain to advocate that such a man or woman be a known and passionate advocate for the ethical subtext of our constitution and a provocateur in the corridors of ideas and national discourse — deploying art and its beautiful agency for growth and national well-being? Rather than a central humongous national legislative office holder, not unlike the fat-bellied and sycophantic agent of a Politburo, shouldn’t the minister be one who is committed to serving the arts community, an active fund-raiser for the artistic and cultural expressions of our artists outside of government? Should he/she not be versed in the whims of international cultural diplomacy and public affairs — an erudite thinker, speaker and a deep well of innovative ideas?

As he, Mr. President, considers the zoned list of nominees for the culture ministry, we urge that he shares with us his criteria for that man or woman in whose hands we submit our well being and growth, for the next four years or so.

Prof, Ojewuyi is a professor of Theatre arts at the Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, Illinois, USA. He wrote this article under his Column ARTEFACTS, which made its debut today in The Guardian, Lagos

---EniOlorutidak'oseFarawek'oseF'enutembelek'oseBinuk'oseNa'kaiwosisiWiwol'aawo

Wonderful Figure 7: Tribute to Twins 77

2011-06-19T10:31:00.001+01:00

(By Chief Muraina Oyelami)

Seven stars or Seven-Seven, seven seems to be magical. Even in Yoruba believe, seven is a special number. The grand-finale or shall I say the most important day of most of our traditional festivals has always being the seventh day.

My colleague, Oseni was firstly to be known as Seven-Stars. He was an entertainer right from his youthful days. I knew him as a dancer and acrobat helping an Osogbo local medicine vendors known as Ore-Meji (two friends that owned the business) in the late part of 1963. In 1964, a Briton scholar Mr Michael Crowder who was a close friend of Ulli Beier was leaving Nigeria for Fourabay College in Sierra Leone and a dinner party was arranged in his honour at Mbari-Mbayo Artists and Writers Club Osogbo. The time came when the guest was to take the floor and dance, suddenly, without knowing that Twins was among the on-lookers. Twins started to dance and every one was ‘captured’ by his show. A show that was so original in style and so captivating.

Ulli who was amazed seeing this enchanting performance by someone he’s never seen or met decided Twin must be encouraged to further develop his talent as a performing artist. I was in the Duro Ladipo as at the time and we were preparing a trip to Berlin to perform Oba Koso at the ‘Oktober Fest’ and Ulli was to lead us there. In order that Twins may not leave the Club’s premises before our return, Ulli bought him drums like Acuba, Bongos, Bells and an acoustic guitar (even when he hasn’t learned how to play). All these time he was known as Seven-Stars. The appliquéd inscription was clearly visible on the back of his shirt. But during this period, there was a magician whose name was Seven-Seven, this could be coincidental or a ‘name-sake’ but it seemed more like the people could not distinguish between Seven Stars and Seven-Seven or the Seven –sets-of-twins who was to be known as Twins Seven-Seven.

No doubt, the entire black race will miss him, but his works live on. Sun ‘re O. Ibeji Meje-Meje

(Oyelami, a personal friend and colleague of the late Twins 77, is Founder/Director of Obatala Creative Centre, Iragbiji)

---EniOlorutidak'oseFarawek'oseF'enutembelek'oseBinuk'oseNa'kaiwosisiWiwol'aawo

‘What We Would Miss About Osuntoki’

2011-06-19T09:54:00.004+01:00

By Bridget Onoche-Chiedu, Abuja

THE art community in Abuja has described the death of Prince Taiwo Olaniyi Osuntoki, popularly known as Twins Seven-Seven, as another heavy blow on the Osogbo Art School.

Those, who spoke to The Guardian, said the 68-year old Osuntoki would be remembered for his doggedness and pessimism towards life’s challenges, which culminated into UNESCO’s recognition as the Artist for Peace in 2005.

One of his friends and staff of the Ministry of Tourism, Culture and National Orietnation, Mr. Augustine B Ajibola, in his tribute, said that Prince 77 was one of such artists, whose names are indelible in the hearts of those people that have come in contact with them. He further described him as a man of engaging personality and one, whose sense of humour defied the physical challenge he suffered in the early 70s, when he was involved in an auto accident.

“He was one of those personalities that their names just etch in your psyche. Prince Seven-Seven being one of the Osogbo Art School stars was mentored by Professor Ulli Beier, who just passed away. Some said he was definitely the most colourful artist in terms of his engaging personality, his trademark dreadlocks and his ability to laugh at himself by mimicking his many wives mockery of his inability, which was as a result of an accident he had in the early 70s.”

Ajibola, whose first personal encounter with the artist was in 2005, believed that Osuntoki’s works, which dwelt on Yoruba cosmology, best defined his ingenuity.

“This is accentuated by abstract images that give his work an eclectic bent; his attempt at music was at best tentative. My first personal encounter with him was in Paris in 2005, when he was made UNESCO’s Ambassador of Peace by the then Director General, Mr. Kiochiro Matsuura

Also speaking was the Director General, National Gallery of Art (NGA), Abdullahi Muku, who first expressed shock at the news of the artist’s death said the art community has lost in quick succession, key personalities of the great Osogbo Art School. This development, he noted, may likely have ripple effects on the development of the art sector.

He described Osuntoki as a great sculptor and musician, who has used his art to promote the course of peace both at home and in the Diaspora. “This is a great loss, not only to the family and the Osogbo Art School but the entire art community. He was undoubtedly one of the most talented artists of the school. The Nigerian art industry will greatly miss him.”

Commiserating with the family on behalf of the management and staff of NGA, Muku said a delegation would be sent on a condolence visit to his family while the Agency will also participate in the burial ceremony if notified by the family.

---EniOlorutidak'oseFarawek'oseF'enutembelek'oseBinuk'oseNa'kaiwosisiWiwol'aawo

‘They Came With Brushes In One Hand And A Bag Of Knowledge In The Other’

2011-06-19T09:20:00.002+01:00

‘They Came With Brushes In One Hand And A Bag Of Knowledge In The Other’

‘They Came With Brushes In One Hand And A Bag Of Knowledge In The Other’
SUNDAY, 19 JUNE 2011 00:00 GABI DUIGU SUNDAY MAGAZINE - ARTS

Chief Taiwo Olaniyi (aka Twins 77), the world renowned artist and UNESCO Ambassador for the Arts, who passed on at age 67 on Thursday after weeks of illness at the UCH Ibadan was one of the pioneers of the famous Osogbo Art Movement, having participated in the 1960s workshop that led to the emergence of the movement. In this narration excerpted from the book, Thirty Years of Osogbo Art (Iwalewa Haus, 1991), edited by the man who (with his wife, Georgina) inspired and coordinated the workshop, the German scholar and culture worker, Uli Beier (also late), Olaniyi explains how he came into the world of the art. The interview was based on an interview with Gabi Duigu in Sydney, 1984.

THE first time I saw Ulli was towards September 1963. Then I was still working with the medicine sellers, and I never knew I was going to come to them. But I just like him as a person, I don’t know why, but I just like him. He was driving his French car. This strange orange car: more like a tin box.

People called him an idol worshipper, but I felt attracted to him, maybe because he was wearing Nigerian dress always; or maybe because – spiritually – something inside me told me that things were going to happen to me through them in my life. The first time I ever talked to Ulli and Georgina was in 1964, when I gatecrashed a party at Mbari. I just forced myself in, because there was music, and I love dancing, and in those days I don’t know any other thing than dancing. Everything I do is dancing, everyday, and day in and day out!

There were a lot of people there, ambassadors and intellectuals; it was a very big party, and they all notice my dancing. After the party Ulli asked me whether I want to work for him.

I say: to do what? He says: I don’t know, I just want you to stay with us at Mbari. I told him I have to think about it; but at that time the medicine sellers were treating me very badly, and I would have gone to Ulli, even if he had asked me to clean his kitchen.

Georgina – I don’t know – I like Georgina a lot. When I say like, I am not referring to the likeness between man and woman: but she had the kind of personality around her that make people feel like working with her.

Ulli was more like a father to us; we have to respect him because of his age and because he was a chief. Georgina was more like one of us. Anytime we need something from Ulli we would go and talk to her first.

Ullli had to settle a lot of quarrels between us at Mbari. It was his plan to let me join Duro Ladipo’s Theatre Company, but Duro never liked me. When the company was invited to go to Germany he refused to take me. I was very upset, but Ulli could not persuade Duro. So before they left for Berlin, he bought me a guitar. I don’t know why he did so. Maybe he wanted to make me happy. Maybe it was his foresight, because he saw my love for music. So he gave me the guitar and he said: this will keep you busy. But up till today, I don’t know how to play guitar! But the guitar helped me to get a lot of boys around me who wanted to join me and form a musical group!

The band became very popular; and when Duro and Ulli and Georgina came back from Berlin I threw a welcoming party for them. All my musical friends came and there were hundreds of people who wanted to hear my music, because some of my songs were very popular at that time:

“The wise man uses his beans to make cake

Let me tell you what the world is like.

Two friends live together in one room:

The one has a talent for spending

The other has talent for saving.

The first spends all

The second save all

The foolish man will perish in the ocean

The wise man’s bean makes cake.”

But Duro wasn’t happy when he saw me so popular, because it was as if the whole Mbari Club has been created only for me, and he must have been thinking that I was taking over his father’s premises!

So a few days later, he drove me out of Mbari, saying he did not need my assistance any more. Fortunately, by that time, my artistic talent had already been discovered by Georgina; because about a month before they left for Germany she had been conducting her art workshop. She had left me lots of pen and ink and paper, and before she returned I had done a lot of black and white drawings. Georgina was happy with the work I had done and immediately I told her I had been driven out of Mbari, she decided I should come and work in the house every day. I could tell from her smiling that she thought I was more talented than others. I think she like my work, because it was different from anybody else. The others were all doing what I might term “mural paintings”. They were all working with thick brushes, drawing in heavy black line. My own work was something completely new. When I make my shapes, I never look at any book, and I was never moved by anybody elses painting, I don’t even know where they are coming from.

My method of working was also different from others: others drew sketches; then they developed their paintings from that. I never drew sketches. I hated drawing sketches; in fact even when I draw a sketch, I find I can never copy it again when I work on the painting: because when I work, I close my eyes and I put my hand there and I draw things. That’s how I work.

When I came to Georgina’s house to work she had brought an etching press and she taught me how to draw on a zinc plate, how to etch the plate and how to use the press. Ulli had given me a book by Amos Tutuola to read: My life in the Bush of Ghosts. He said that my titles reminded him of Tutuolas stories. Now that book gave me very good ideas for giving more titles to my works.

When I had made about twenty plates, we started printing them. That was a very good time in my life with Georgina: because we would work all night; we would print and print and print. And any time there were some small smudges on the margin, she would say: this is not good enough and throw it out and make me start all over again.

I learned many technical tricks from her. When I first put the gouache colours on my paintings, I found that they would submerge my pen and ink lines. She then taught me how to apply the colour with a sponge; then she bought some yachting varnish, and she showed me how to varnish the paintings I had painted on brown paper. The varnish made the black line come through again from underneath the colour. And it also helped to preserve the paper. Some of my pictures, which I painted on paper twenty years ago, are still in very good condition.

The most important thing I learned from her was energy: Because Georgina was very hard working. You will find her making a mosaic on her kitchen wall; she would make backdrops for Duro’s Theatre; she would paint murals in the palace of Ido Oshun; she would do a lot of sewing, she would be designing furniture; she would run to the palace where Bisi and Muraina were working, she would run back again to the house where I was working on prints. We always called her a witch, because she never get tired; but we don’t mean a negative witch, we mean she was a woman who had a lot of power.

Maybe that’s why I like working with her, because I also like to be very active. And before I was having this big accident, I will be dancing, I will be singing, I will be painting, I will be travelling; I will be doing a lot of things at the same time. I learned energy from her. Maybe I also learn smoking from her, because at that time she would be smoking five or six cigarettes while she was working; she was smoking those French cigarettes, very black tobacco in a blue packet.

Georgina also taught us to look at work critically. Before an exhibition she taught us how to look carefully and pick the best works; she never wanted us to exhibit any second rate pictures; and I know she used to destroy many of her own works, when she wasn’t satisfied with them. Many paintings she would just paint over them again. But unfortunately, since I have become so popular, the collectors cannot allow me to wait. They just jump in and by the time you know it, they will say: I am going home with this! Because they want to go away with your work. And there is nothing you can do. But nowadays, I stop people form buying, because I just put a very high price on my work... to scare people away. But – some people still buy. I remember one painting – I put $50,000 on it because I love it and I don’t want to sell it. But somebody still bought it in Spain. But one good thing about having high prices is that you don’t have to paint as much; you can afford to spend more time on a painting. One good thing about working with Ulli and Georgina in those early days was that they gave you time to work without having to sell. They gave you money for food and they bought your materials. So we had about two and half years to develop, before having to fight for existence. Working in Georgina’s house was like going to school: I would start work early in the morning by seven o’clock and I would not finish until six in the evening. I learned how to have patience then. But many of the younger artists, who are imitating us now, they feel that immediately they do something, they should sell it. They call themselves “Oshogbo artists” but they don’t know the experiences we went through. They have nothing in common with us; they merely copy us, but they don’t have the same energy. I don’t blame them too much, because they see us building houses and they see us riding some of the best cars in town.

But when we started, we didn’t know that our work would ever be worth anything; we did it because we loved doing it! Perhaps the most important thing I got from the workshop was that it taught me how to stand on my own feet. It enabled me to discover myself as an artist; it enabled me to sit down and work for hours without getting tired; it made me understand that concentration is one of the most important things an artist needs in life.

Nowadays we see many artists trained in the universities. But I think they are more imitating other people’s work; I don’t think they have all we have; because what is the point of a teacher teaching you, and he makes you look at Picasso’s work. I don’t think that’s the way it should be. An artist should be given the freedom to work. I was never able to accept instructions form anybody in my life; that’s why I dropped out of school, because I could not tolerate the headmaster ordering me to dig out big iroko trees from the school compound as a punishment. That’s why I refused a scholarship I was offered in Theatre Arts at the University of Ife.

But Georgina would never try to give us instructions, but she might say things like: why don’t you try this. Many people in Oshogbo did not understand Ulli and Georgina at the time. They called them pagans and idol worshippers and they said to us: these people want to turn you into olorishas. But I didn’t care about that. I told them: as for me, I have already got orisha in my family, both my father’s family and my mother’s family. My father’s compound in Ibadan is called Oloshun, which means that we have always been worshipping Oshun; and my grandmother in Ogidi was a very powerful woman in the Imole cult. So it is not surprising that 90% of my work has to do with Yoruba religion and orisha. Ulli never talked to me about religion, but you could see in his face that he had this interest and you could see him going to many orisha ceremonies and you could see that many Shango priests were his friends and they came to his house a lot. He wanted us to respect our traditions, and I think his interest had a lot to do with the content of Duro’s plays as well. But in those early days we got a lot of abuse from people; some people didn’t even want to sit next to us in a taxi, because we all started to imitate Ulli and Georgina and we wear adire and handwoven Yoruba cloth. So the people said we were backward; but later they got to know we were more civilised than they.

These things never bothered me. In fact I loved it. Because it makes you more powerful. People didn’t dare to touch you, and some people were afraid of Ulli because they said, he must have strong medicine to turn us all into orisha worshippers. These people themselves were going to see the orisha priest at night, but they wont show themselves in the afternoon. In the daytime they pretend to be Muslims, but they were not really Muslims, in their heart they weren’t Muslims, but because you may not get any business unless you call yourself an Alhaji, or because you cannot marry the Alhaji’s daughter, unless you pretend to be a Muslim – that’s why these people accuse us of doing the same thing that they themselves will be doing at night.

Some people were jealous of Ulli and Georgina. In later years, when I became very successful myself, I discovered that the more successful you are, the more jealousy you are going to meet and people are trying this and the other to harm you. Well, there were some intellectuals, who told us that we were being exploited and that these people were gong to make millions out of us. There was a special meeting we were called to for that – and up to now I haven’t even told Ulli about it. And I said to them: well, as far as I am concerned, I lost my father when I was seven and none of you – so called intellectuals – ever dreamed of looking for me, or of finding out who I am. You were laughing at me, calling me a crazy boy, because from birth I was having dreadlocks, which I was not allowed to cut and I was dancing in the streets. I wouldn’t even care if these people make a million on me – because if I leave them, which of you will give me a job? I don’t want to be an armed robber, and I don’t want to roam about the street without a job. I have no paper qualification, so what am I going to do? You want me to start hating Ulli and Georgina: then how much is your salary? I am feeding more than twenty people – because I have always attracted a lot of young people. If you come to my house you will find it full of people, who either come to seek my help or who just want to be around me. Who is going to take care of this responsibility? If I am what I am today, it is not because of you, but because Ulli and Georgina believed in my talents, when you would not even talk to me.

Then some of them even said: these people may carry the Oshun from the sacred grove and carry her to Europe. And I said to them: what have you people done for Oshun? If not for Susanne and Ulli – would the Oshun grove even be there today? And who amongst you has built a museum for your town, as Ulli and Georgina have done?

Well, they said a lot of things in those days: but now they know and now they even apologise to us.

But I never listened to anybody; because where would I go and where would I be given the same opportunities? Where else could I find out who I am and bring out all the things that were in me?

Ulli and Georgina were unique. The uniqueness of it was that they came from another culture and they made us more aware of our own culture. They revealed our creativity to the world and to ourselves. That’s what I see in them. They were a kind of missionary; but they were not like those Christian missionaries, who came with the Bible in one hand and with the sword in the other. They came with brushes in one hand and with a bag of knowledge in the other.

AND WHAT ULI BEIER SAID ABOUT TWINS 77
(excerpted from Thirty Years of Osogbon Art, (Iwalewa Haus, 1991)

1967 – A Year in the Live of an Artist, By Beier
SUNDAY, 19 JUNE 2011 00:00 BY ULI BEIER SUNDAY MAGAZINE - ARTS
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1967 was the most crucial year in the life of the Oshogbo artists. Shortly before Christmas 1966 Georgina and I left Nigeria. For three and a half years the “Oshogbo Artists” had worked in Georgina’s studio. They had been able to devote their energy and imagination to their artistic work, without hassling for their daily bread. Their art materials were supplied and they received enough money to subsist without selling their work. Several exhibitions had been arranged for them abroad (Naprstek Muzeum in Prague, Neue Munchner Galerie in Munich) and their career had reached a first climax in Nigeria with a major Oshogbo exhibition, which opened at the Goethe Institute in Lagos on December, 14th, 1966.

Now, for the first time, the artists had to fend for themselves and many critics predicted that they would not survive without this special patronage. For some the transition was made easier, because they were able to find jobs to sustain them: Muraina Oyelami and Bisi Fabunmi were caretakers of the Oshogbo Museum; Jacob Afolabi looked after the Mbari Mbayo Club and its little gallery; Jimoh Buraimoh was the electrician of the Duro Ladipo Theatre and Samuel Ojo was a tailor by profession.

Twin Seven-Seven was one of the few who had to live off his paintings alone. As he was the only one of the artists to keep diary, we are able to reconstruct this turbulent year in the life of one of the major Oshogbo artists.

Though he was still in his early twenties and at the very start of his career, he had already burdened himself with heavy social commitments: his first wife Bintu had given birth to a baby daughter; he still owed the bride price for his second wife, Iyabo, but she too gave birth to a daughter. He was courting a third girl, Risi, but had difficulties in obtaining the parents consent.

With his first earning he began to build a house for his mother in his home town Ogidi. This is a way of showing reverence to his mother, and at the same time acquiring new status and prestige by being the first person to build an “upstair” house in Ogidi. At the same time he works hard to re-establish his rights in his father’s compound in Ibadan, trying to move himself into line for his eventual succession to the family title of Olosun. He is surrounded by a gang of young admirers and followers, who have grouped themselves into a band. While Twins is more anxious to succeed as a band leader than as a painter, he is obliged – more often than not – to subsidise his band from the earnings of his art. Perhaps the single most important event in this year is his visit to London, where he participates in an exhibition of modern African Art at Institute of Contemporary Art, together with Ibrahim el Salahi, Malangatana, Asiru and Jimoh Akolo. His brief comment on the opening reads:

‘’We met a lot of friends and reporters came; we made a lot of jokes, we have fun and a good time.”

In London he cuts a spectacular figure in the streets with his gold-embroidered Yoruba cap and a Victorian policeman’s cape that is lined with purple silk. Children follow him into the house to watch him paint, much to the chagrin of their racialist parents. He likes to go shopping with Georgina and spends all his money on present to take back to Nigeria. He is picked up by a Vogue photographer, who makes him model capes, sitting on a white horse in front of the Victoria and Albert Memorial. He is busy framing his pictures for an exhibition at the University of Sussex and relaxes to the music of Ambrose Campbell in London’s famous Abalabi club. The most lasting impression of his London visit is the old gorilla “Guy” in London zoo:

March 23th: On this day I fell in love with a gorilla named Guy. He is standing there in that tiny space; I felt he was supposed to have freedom and I felt sad for him. His image stays in my mind...”

The moving pen and ink drawing Twins made of Guy must be considered one of his major works. Back in Nigeria the hassle for daily existence began again. The very day after his arrival in Oshogbo he travels to Ibadan to sell some paintings and to see his family. The amount of travelling Twins does during this year is quite incredible. He has made a name for himself in Lagos at an exhibition of prints that took place in Tayo Aiyegbusi’s Mbari Mbayo Gallery. There is an increasing stream of visitors to Oshogbo, who come to look at his paintings and who also use him as a guide to other artist studios and to the Oshun shrine. Twins records twenty-two visits, mostly by Americans during this year: on one occasion thirty Peace Corps workers arrive; on another day a group of American and European visitors arrive on Oshogbo airport in a chartered plane.

In spite of this, he has to make twenty trips to Lagos and sixteen to Ibadan in pursuit of sales. In Lagos the Wolfords keep an open house every Thursday for the display of Oshogbo art: they also introduce Twins to many other expatriates. The Argentinian and the Venezuelan ambassadors become friends and begin to collect his paintings. Another American, Mr. Springwater, arranges an exhibition of Twins etchings at the Wesleyan University of Connecticut. Although these are in fact the prints that Georgina has sorted out as rejects. Twins earns about £5000 during that year. Twins is often hard up, because his social commitments are so great. Numerous diary entries read:

“A penniless day. No visitor, no friend, no helper. I pray for energy and creativity”. Or again.

“Another penniless day. People think I have money and I am hiding it. But I try to explain to them that I depend on my luck”.

In spite of his considerable income, Twins is forced to borrow money continuously; from the bank manager, from fellow artists, from his food seller. Three days after receiving about £1000 from America, he records borrowing £10 from Susanne Wenger. His money is spent on building his mother’s house at Ogidi, on his band boys and on socialising. After his return from London he notes:

“A very busy week when I spend about £40 both in celebrating my return from Europe and for making other friends happy, who complain that I don’t bring anything back from Europe for them”.

Whenever he has a windfall of money, he pays his debts, buys food, clothes for his family and band and building materials and throws parties. On his daughter’s first birthday, he spends no less than £432 – an enormous sum at the time. If he has no money and unexpected visitors arrive, he borrows money from the bank to entertain them. Much of his money goes on his motor cycle – understandable, because without mobility he can’s exist. In 1967 he goes through three machines: one Honda and two Yamahas. He has four road accidents, seriously hurts his knee in one of them, but escapes without a scratch in the others. On November 13th, his Yamahas catches fire in the house, perhaps from a cigarette that was carelessly thrown away:

“A bad day in y life. I am ruined by an unseen power. My motor cycle caught fire”.

People sympathise with him:

“Mr. Jimoh Buraimoh came to my house to give me hope”.

On November 15th, he records:

“Early in the morning I woke up. I go here and there looking for cash to buy a new motor cycle”.

The Yamaha is his lifeline. He needs it, not only to sell his work in Ibadan and Lagos but also to keep his links with his mother’s relatives and his old school mates in Kabba province. He has a strong emotional attachment to that part of the country, where his real roots are. He makes eight trips to Kabba province during that year. Each visit lasts four or five days, during which he rushes restlessly from village to village. On May 24th, he travels from:

“Oshogbo to Ikare, from Ikare to Ishe, Ishe to Ishua, Ishua to Epinmi”.

On the following day he travels:

“First to Ishua, then back to Epinmi, to Ukpe and back to Ishe. All is well. A short visit to Ogidi”.

May 26th:

“Left Ogidi in the night for Ishe, Life in Ishe. On a short visit to Ikare in the morning. Two times trip to Ishua. Another rush to Ikare. Visit Dupe and Karimu at Highlife bar”.

May 27th:

“Life in Ishe on the market day. Plan a rush visit to Ogidi. Took Dele with me to Ogidi and later travel all the way to Iyara, to see the burial ground of my father and m other’s mother. Slept at Ogidi”.

While he is strengthening his links with his mother’s people, he is also trying to put down new roots in Ibadan. After the early death of his father, his mother’s people had kept him away from Ibadan, because it was said by an oracle priest that the child’s life was in danger there. Now he gets to know his father’s relatives in the Olosun Compound of Ibadan. He learns the family history and discovers that from 1895 to 1897, one of his ancestors was the Olubadan (ruler) of Ibadan:

“I went back to Oshogbo late in the night and I was sad to know that I am a prince and to know that Christian influence has really relegated our family to the background”.

He decides that one day he will become the Olubadan of Ibadan to restore the lost dignity of his family. After a while he accepts the fact that he may not realise this ambition for a while, the effort needed in time and energy and money is too great at the present moment. With all these hectic activities he has little peace at home. Bintu, his wife, feels neglected; she suspects him of having other women and resents the fact that he spends so much time and money on friends and hangers-on. He records seventeen quarrels with Bintu.

“A very slow Sunday. I expected big cash, but none came. I work harder. A little fight between me and my wife Bintu, because she thought that every time I went out to play and came back in the night, that I must have been with some other women: forgetting that music is not something you play and rush back home. You have to shake hands with friends and have drinks with them”.

Some of the quarrels become serious. Twice Bintu runs away to her mother in Ede, leaving the baby behind. Both Bintu’s and Twin’s mother repeatedly get involved in the quarrel.

Things are not going smoothly with the band either; there are constant demands for more money, but there is also disagreement on the type of music to be played. But in these disagreements Twins always comes out on top; the band stays together and they give at least 30 performances during that year, usually with great success. He is immensely popular as a musician.

During this year the Oshogbo artists remain a cohesive group. Twins participated actively in the foundation of the Oshogbo Artists Association, of which Asiru became the President. An All-Oshogbo exhibition was staged at Mbari Oshogbe. Twins assists Tijani Mayakiri to become a member, but resents the fact that new artists are now calling themselves “Oshogbo” artists, even when they have no connection with the group. He has a public row with Z.K. Oloruntoba about this at Ibadan. Twins sees much of the original Oshogbo artist group, in particular Muraina, Bisi Fabunmi, Jimoh Buraimoh and of course Samuel Ojo, who is also a member of his band. They visit each other’s houses, lend each other money, attend each other’s family ceremonies and go out drinking together.

Occasionally Twins goes to church; regularly he consults his ‘readers’, traditional oracle priests as well as Muslim fortune tellers and Christian ‘prophets’ from the Apostolic Church. He performs several traditional rituals and regularly visits the Oshun shrine in Oshogbo. He washes his new born baby with the sacred water of the river Oshun and gives the Oshun priests money for a sacrifice after he has escaped from a motor cycle accident.

He has several major exhibitions during that year: at the University of Sussex, the Travers Gallery in Edinburgh, the Wesleyan University in the U.S., at Mbari Ibadan and at the Goethe Institute in Lagos. He finds time to produce all his works, by applying himself with relentless energy. This entry for July, 19th, is typical for many others:

“A very busy day. I don’t want to see anybody. I am thinking and planning of how to create new work, to beat some of the Oshogbo artists, who have already copied my work”.

Twins emerges from his diary as a man of restless energy, a man generous to a fault, an ingenious survivor, a philosopher who takes life as it comes and makes the best of it; a man with an unshakeable belief in his talent and his destiny, an ambitious man but one whose repeated prayer is for ‘energy and creativity’.

New Trends In Nigeria's NOLLYWOOD Movie Industry

2011-05-31T17:35:00.001+01:00

The contemporary Nigerian movie culture, Nollywood, experienced a lull in Production and Marketing activities in the last three years. This state of inactivity is largely the result of several factors including:
a) the proliferation of movies with sub-standard production quality
b) poor marketing and distribution infrastructure
c) lack of professionalism in acting and directing
d) piracy
New trends in the industry, however, suggest fewer productions with improved quality, drastic changes in narrative structure, and a more effective marketing/distribution system.
This presentation will examine how the lull in Nollywood has compelled a new direction in production and marketing/distribution approaches.

Note: I served as a Research Consultant to the GMRC's initial Nollywood project in 2006.

PRESENTATION AT GLOBAL MEDIA RESEARCH CENTRE.
SOUTHERN ILLINOIS UNIVERSITY, CARBONDALE, ILLINOIS
APRIL 2011

NOLLYWOOD: From The Low to Rising…
PREAMBLE:
The last two to three years have witnessed a major leap in the industry in terms of deepening the brand called Nollywood. Apart from gaining international recognition, our films have come of standard. Before now, the kind of films that were churned out of the industry were criticised by the people. But last year recorded a paradigm shift, in terms of quality of the films that were produced from Nollywood… We have realised that it is high time we started doing films the way it should be done.
“Before now, the strategy had always been; shoot your films within two or three weeks, do your post-production in another week and thereafter, your film is ready to hit the market on VHF and VCD. These were the days of boom of Nollywood, and that practice absolutely killed the big screen (cinema culture). Nobody was shooting for the cinema as the producers were only interested in shooting their films and getting them released into the market without paying any attention to the technical aspect of the production. The film makers were more driven by the commercial aspect of the showbiz. But last year proved to be different after the lull that was recorded in the industry between 2008 and 2009.
“Then, production dropped drastically as activities were paralyzed occasioned by the sub-standard quality of the films. In 2010, the bar was raised, and films like Figurine, Ije, Through the Glass, Home in Exile, Anchor Baby, Kajola and host of others acted as catalyst to this paradigm shift. Some people had argued that some of these films were 70 per cent done by tasted hands from Hollywood. Be that as it may, the most important thing here is that these films were directed and produced by Nigerians with technical supports by Hollywood practitioners.”
---- President of the Association of Nollywood Core Producers (ANCOP)

******
CASE STUDIES OF SOME NEW FILMS
FIGURINES by Kunle Afolayan
Produced and directed by New York Academy-trained Kunle Afolayan; Figurines recorded success at the box office, and opened the door to cinema screening as a viable option of exhibiting the film rather than the direct to CD/DVD that was the norms. It reportedly grossed over N30 million ($200,000) in its first and second runs of screening which lasted about three months. By the third month, the producer declared that he had recouped his investment; and that he was “already debt-free and even made profit”. He has concentrated on cinema release but he is working on distribution by DVD, while also frequenting festivals mostly on invitation. He has a cable station --HITV – that is interested in streaming it. The cable station had in fact bought the right to distribute the encrypted copies of the DVD.

Production strategies: It was shot on HD by an entire Nigerian crew, but part of the post-production (final sound mix) was done outside -- in the UK. Equipment were sourced from the Nigeria Film Corporation, NFC. The HD shots were enhanced through lens accessories to project on 35mm.
Budget: Over N50m ($335,000). Finance was raised through bank facilities, corporate organizations and product endorsements e.g GSK makers of Lucozade and the gold resort in ADA (accommodation facilities), and the NFC (equipment) .
Time of shooting: “ It took 3 months to shoot -- one month in Lagos, one month in Osun State and the other month was scattered around the other locations we shot the film in. It took longer than expected due to some financial obstacles but we pulled through”.
Marketing and Distribution: “We have been (screened) to a lot of festivals including the London African Film Festival; New York African Film Festival; Tokyo African Film Festival; Rotterdam International Film Festival; Pan African Film Festival Los Angeles, Tarifa International Film Festival and FESPACO in Ougadougou. And this year (2011), Figurines will be screened in many centres in Europe, America, Asia and around Africa. “We did a lot of promotion and marketing through social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. While the film was in production, we would post up photographs of scenes and the locations on the group page set up for the Figurine, and the responses were huge”.
FIGURINES http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uPa9aRwdzKs&feature=related

TANGO WITH ME, Mahmood Ali-Balogun
TANGO WITHME, produced and directed by Mahmood Ali-Balogun is shot on 35mm and has just been released by the Brickwall Film and Communications Company. It is a project that has excited the local film industry because of its sheer ambition, and the elaborate preparation that heralded its birth.
Stated the producer, Ali-Balogun: “I intended it to be a long step away from Nollywood. ‘Tango With Me’ desires to change the direction of Nollywood, raise the bar and return us to the pre-Nollywood days when we could hold our heads as a film producing nation. My targets are the international film festival circuits; and cinema exhibition”.

Budget: “I know I’ve gone beyond the N70m ($467, 000) mark. It’s far above the Nollywood mark in terms of budget.” Much of the financing raised through personal resources of the filmmaker. He also got support from family and friends with no institutional support; though he received some discount from Kodak for film stock and post production.

Production: He shot on Arri 535 which he got from The Camera House in L.A. But the production is essentially Nollywood in strategy. Did not overstep its reach through ambitious deployment of facilities such as building its own set. It used existing properties for instance.

Time: Tango was in production for about three years, but much of it was shot in between late 2009 and first quarter of 2010, while post production took the rest of 2010 and early 2011.

Distribution & Exhibition: It was released only last week to strategically coincide with the Easter break, when most Nigerians devote time to leisure activities. It is currently screening in at least 12 of the 24 screening rooms that currently exist in the country and already has invitations to grace some film festivals around the globe.

Marketing: He deployed essentially the social media facilities to bring the film to attention of the general public, as well as massive promotion on the TV and Radio, especially as he targets screening the film during public holidays and important dates in the country, when the people usually throng leisure centres.

http://www.tangowithmefilm.com; http://www.tangowithmefilm.com/trailer.php;

IJE, produced by Chinaza Anyaene
IJE (THE JOURNEY) was the final year MA project of an ambitious young Nigerian girl at the New York Academy. Said Ms Anyaene, a theatre arts graduate: “This film is actually my Thesis in school and it’s the first feature coming out of my school. People (past students of the academy) don’t like to go into it because they say it’s expensive, and shooting in Hollywood is difficult because you can’t cut corners. You just have to play by the rules and all the process this film had to go through also influenced the title Ije (The journey).
Production: The finance, producer and even content are Nigerian. It is a story about two sisters – one in Nigeria and the other in the USA; so it connects two continents and cultures. “We shot in Nigeria and Los Angeles... I didn’t have to hire any foreign crew to shoot in Nigeria. My producer went to the Nigerian Film Corporation and was amazed at what they had. They had the camera, lighting and everything”.

Budget: “It is a high budget Nollywood film. It cost about $1.9 million to produce. My finance actually came from Stella Maris Private school, which funded the film completely and it’s owned by Mrs. Uche Anyaene, my mother”. She, however, got technical support from her school and partner who has links to some Hollywood studios.
Time: “It took 18 months. This is the first Nigerian film to pass the Hollywood standard and that is why it took us 18 months”.
Marketing & Distribution: From its serial premieres (Nigeria and Hollywood) and intensely successful screenings in Nigeria, it had grossed well over N30 million ($200,000) in earning before tax in the first few weeks of showing mid last year. It made an additional N10 million($66,000) during her second showing in December. Distribution is still at the stage of cinema showing.
“It’s a Nollywood project, though it’s international… It’s international because the cast came from different parts of the world… we have Latin American, African American and others in the film… and this makes it easy for us to sell out different rights to different markets…. We’re currently on sales around the world. We have sales agents in America trying to sell it into foreign markets. We intend to go worldwide. We’re currently doing eight festivals in the world. We have the African territory marked out, Europe, Africa, America, Latin America. “In Nigeria, we’re doing cinema rounds before we go to DVDs. The marketers can decide what they want to do later”.
** Ije had a Hollywood premiere facilitated by Warner Brothers.
IJE: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZqNpVGTJdUE&feature=related

Black Gold, directed by Jeta Amata
BLACK GOLD, is yet to be released but it is a project that is generating a lot of buzz already first because of its choice of subject -- the insurgence in the oil-producing Niger Delta area of the country, which had preoccupied the entire nation in the past decade. It is a very sensitive subject that many filmmakers would rather not touch. It is about the first major collaboration with an outside studio or production outfit. It is co-produced by Suzzanee De Laurentiss, who runs a US and France-based production outfit, De Laurentiss Productions.

Again, Amata, who had broken a Nigerian film industry jinx by directing and co-producing the first celluloid film 16mm in about 20 years, Amazing Grace, exploited a strategy that had worked well for him in Amazing Grace and which has since become the practice – assembling a cast and crew that has been described as ‘Nollywood meets Hollywood’ phenomenon. In this film for instance are: Tom Sizemore (Saving Private Ryan, Black Hawk Down, Heat), Vivica A. Fox (Independence Day, Kill Bill), Michael Madsen (Reservoir Dogs, Donnie Brasco, Kill Bill), Eric Roberts (The Dark Knight, The Expendables), Billy Zane (Titanic), Sarah Wayne Callies (Prison Break), Hakeem Kae-Kazim (Pirates of the Carribean, Hotel Rwanda), Razaaq Adoti (Black Hawk Down, Resident Evil: Apocalypse); these are then supported by local actors with huge followings among the populace including Mbong Amata (Inale, Amazing Grace).
Black Gold is currently in post production. Said the producers: “this movie is especially significant and will be of great interest as it is the first time a production of this calibre has ever been attempted in Africa. Usually, in movies like Hotel Rwanda and Blood Diamond, Hollywood comes in to tell the story, but in this case, the story of the Niger Delta is being told and produced for the screen by a group of film makers from the Niger Delta. There is no better time to showcase this project, as it deals with all the pertinent issues being faced in the region like oil spills, kidnappings and corruption”.

Other Titles:
ANCHOR BABY: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Yx_kiBOZDA

INALE: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YDe3-jWgZEQ
AMAZING GRACE: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJs-h1YKdlw&feature=related
CHAMPIONS OF OUR TIME: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAsKl0MXDGs

Through the Glass Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYhXngxcIrU
The Bent Arrow: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vdJH_CnCOM

---EniOlorutidak'oseFarawek'oseF'enutembelek'oseBinuk'oseNa'kaiwosisiWiwol'aawo

Nollywood... The shape of things to come

2011-05-26T08:14:00.001+01:00

Nollywood... The shape of things to come

Efforts to reposition and move the nation’s film industry forward so that it could be attractive to investors and project the country and the African continent to the world better, telling Nigerian stories and for Nollywood to serve as a money-spinning industry after the oil sector may well have started with a recent arts stampede on new trends in the industry

IT was the initiative of Committee for Relevant Art (CORA), which held last Sunday, through its quarterly art stampede that brought together filmmakers, actors, marketers, film critics, art journalists and other stakeholders to share information on how to move the industry forward.

Hinging its position on the fact that the movie industry is the off-shoot of the nation’s TV drama, which started from the conventional stage plays and the moving theatres of the pre-independence era, CORA in its drive chose as topic: The New Trend in Nollywood — a look at the recent works that are redefining Nollywood.

With a panel made up of the nation’s leading movie practitioners, which included Mahmoud Ali-Balogun (producer of Tango With Me); Kunle Afolayan, (The Figurine); Stephanie Okerereke (Through the Glass); Chidi Nwokobia (Champions Of Our Time); Emem Isong (Reloaded); Lilian Amah-Aluko (Jungle Ride); Vivian Ejike (Private Storm); and Kelechi Ikata, who represented Chineze Anyaene (producer of Ije) with Steve Ayorinde, editor of The National Mirror Newspaper moderating, the group critically examined some of the latest movies to have come from the industry.

Kicking off the discuss, Ali-Balogun identified scripting as one of the areas to look into and called on practitioners to have the audience at the back of their minds when writing their scripts. He further noted that not knowing this, has contributed to most movie scripts appearing in the format of tele-drama scripts. He noted that there are different script formats for the TV, stage plays and the cinema. Apart from that, he frowned at most movies for not allowing the pictures to doing the talking, adding that “for our films to actually be accorded their desired place and viewing at the international scene, producers should make actors talk with their bodies, gestures and the scene as against the soap opera-format currently in place”.

Ali-Balogun also emphasised on sound as one of the elements that can help to tell a story better.

On the other hand, Afolayan called on practitioners to identify their genre of movie — historical, cultural, romance, comedy and others — as well as carrying out research to backup whatever information they want to pass on to the audience. He added that his award-winning movie Figurine underwent a four-year research to be what it is. Apart from this, he advised that filmmakers should always make their movies to be arty in nature and entertaining, so, as to have commercial value.

For Okereke, whose quest for something new and different led to the production of Through the Glass, said there was a dearth of the right people in the distribution and marketing chain, which are essential for the growth and development of the industry. She also noted that this obvious lack had made pirates to reap where they did not sow. She called for partnership with corporate bodies to build more cinemas, funding and to expand distribution network for movies.

Nwokobia and Emem Isong reiterating the views of other panelists called for continuous training and retraining of practitioners as well as exposing them to the latest trends in the industry.

In his contribution Richard Mofe-Damijo, the former Delta State Culture and Tourism Commissioner, said, “There are diverse ways to reposition Nollywood. Though some believe the problem is distribution; for me, one thing that is uppermost, is engaging the private sector with a view to moving the industry into the main financial stream. Assess to fund will only come when people who are in charge of fund distribution pick interest in the industry. If they say Nollywood is the place to invest in the next five years, you would see everybody move into it.

“Practitioners and other stakeholders should be actively involved in eliciting interest in the industry for private investors to come into it. If we do that, it will open a new vista and people will not cry for fund the way they are now crying. Fagbola did it so many years ago, though an experiment, and the scheme was over subscribed. I believe we are at that point now; we need to link up with the financial sector with a view to recommending it to their clients to invest in.”

Using his experience in government, he said he engaged the private sector in his directorate and succeeded in bringing in the people that helped build the tourism sector in Delta State.

He added, “Government is basically to create the enabling environment for private practice to strive and once that is done, so long there is security, the money will come. Government has no business with funding; what it creates is, maybe, endowment. Waiting for government to fund the commercial viability of our films will never happen for the next hundred years. Government is to create institutions that can drive the process of bringing investors.”

“Whether or not cultural policy is implemented today, if the other elements that make for a successful cultural policy are not in place, it will still not work; it’s all about implementation. The story of Nigeria is one good intention that has never been fully implemented. Government has always have good intentions, it’s the pursuits and the doggedness of people who drive those policies that have always been the issue, as they are often not seriously committed to the frame work,” he said.

President, National Association of Movie Producers (AMP) Paul Obazele, while commending CORA for its initiative informed that his members were going back to the cinema to distribute their movies.

He opined, “We are a cinema-going people until the military government (of Abacha) made the country unsafe for most people in the country with sporadic bombings and killings. Lagos State and other states in the country encourage the culture of cinema. We are discussing with Lagos State Government to build neighbourhood cinemas, which allow for different films to be shown simultaneously in different areas of the hall. It allows for small audience of 50 to 100 at a time. If done, it will help bring back the cinema and contribute to the social integration of the community. Whether we like it or not, film is a very strong tool for social integration, teaching morals and building family values.”

On access to the two hundred million dollars ($200 million) intervention fund for the entertainment industry from President Goodluck Jonathan, Obazele said the first batch of the money would be released in June to producers who have met the necessary requirements. He added that the loan, which will be repaid with a single digit interest rate of five per cent, is to serve as a palliative measure for filmmakers in the country that have the necessary structures on ground.

What came out of the cross fertilization of ideas from stakeholders in attendance was that Nollywood has what it takes to achieve the best result and, for it to effectively and efficiently play its roles of providing employment, promoting culture through telling of national stories and attracting foreign investors, there is the need for sustainable funding, viable and trustworthy distribution and marketing network, inclusion of the private sectors, training and retraining of practitioners, quality production, unity of purpose and co-production treaty with other established film industries such as Hollywood and Bollywood.

---EniOlorutidak'oseFarawek'oseF'enutembelek'oseBinuk'oseNa'kaiwosisiWiwol'aawo

ART STAMPEDE for NEW TRENDS IN NOLLYWOOD

2011-05-20T16:17:00.000+01:00

The Committee For Relevant Art, CORA, in collaboration with the iREP Documentary Film Forum invites you to the ART STAMPEDE on the theme NEW TRENDS IN NOLLYWOOD.

Scheduled for 3pm on Sunday May 22, 2011 at the Freedom Park, Broad Street, Lagos, the Stampede is to interrogate the new Nollywood through an interactive public forum involving the producers and directors of what is certainly the new narrative in Nollywood.

The forum will assemble producers/directors of such new narratives as Figurine, Through the Glass, Reloaded, Tango With Me, Ije, Inale, Tenant, Bent Arrows, Champion of our Times, Bursting Loose, Holding Hope, Private Storm, Jungle Ride, In America, Anchor Baby, Mirror Boy, Alero's Symphony,Lilies of the Ghetto, The Child, and others. Many of these producers have affirmed the readiness to participate in this all-important discussion designed to examine the current challenges and prospects of the Nollywood industry, and pointing the way to a brighter and even more promising future.

The Forum has the backing of key Writers on Nollywood including Mr STEVE AYORINDE (Film Critic, and Editor and Managing Editor of National Mirror, who is Moderating; and Mr. Shaibu Husseini (Film Writer, The Guardian, author of Moviedom: Clips on Pioneers of the Nollywood Industry) coordinating with officials of CORA and iREP.

“These are obviously works have helped to shape and redefine movie making in Nollywood”, says CORA’s spokesman Ayo Arigbabu. “ We intend to engage those behind these works in an intellectually engaging and stimulating dialogue that will help us appreciate the new bend that Nollywood is negotiating”.

CORA is a 20-year old culture advocacy group specialising in stimulating debates around Nigerian and African Cultural sectors.

iREP is the pivot of the West African Documentary Forum, and organisers of the yearly iREPRESENT Documentary Film Festival, which made its debut in January this year.

Toyin Akinosho
Secretary-General, CORA
africaoilgasreport@yahoo.co.uk

Femi Odugbemi
Executive Director, iREP
femiodugbemi@gmail.com

---EniOlorutidak'oseFarawek'oseF'enutembelek'oseBinuk'oseNa'kaiwosisiWiwol'aawo

Celebrating Yeni Kuti @ 50

2011-05-20T15:09:00.004+01:00

The Committee for Relevant Art, CORA, and Friends of the Arts (FOA) presents the ARTHOUSE FORUM in celebration of YENI ANIKULAPO-KUTI @ 50. Ms Yeni Kuti,choreographer of the Positive Band and Manager of the New African Shrine will be 50 on May 24. The Arthouse is only a prelude to the birthday celebration.

Theme:
FROM BODY GYRATION TO CHOREOGRAPHIC ART: EVOLUTION OF AFROBEAT & MUSIC BAND DANCE.
The objective is to examine how the intervention of Yeni Kuti in Afrobeat Dance changed the dynamics and culture of Music Band dance in the last two decades.

Date: Sunday May 22, 2011

Time: 12 noon

Venue: Freedom Park, Broad Street, Lagos.

Speakers are:
* Dr Sola Olorunyomi (Author: Fela and the Imagined Continent); Lecturer at University of Ibadan, Lead Speaker
* Mr Benson Idonije, Broadcaster, Music writer and first manager of Fela's Koola Lobitos band
* Dr Eesuola, Lecturer on Polical Behaviour, University of Lagos, and scholar on Fela's politics
* Latoya Julius-Ekemode ( Culture activist and Choreographer of Orlando Julius Band)
* Segun Adefila -- Artistic Director, Crown Troupe of Nigeria
* Arnold Udoka, National Choreographer, Director of Dance, National Troupe of Nigeria (Moderator)

Performances:
Crown Troupe of Africa
Adunni and Nefertiti

The ARTHOUSE FORUM is a social gathering with generous dose of discussion in honour of an art personality who has contributed immensely to the flowering of a vital aspect of our Cultural Industry.

Signed:
TOYIN AKINOSHO (CORA)
FEMI ODUGBEMI (FOA)

Arthouse Forum for Yeni Kuti at 50
BY CHUKS NWANNE
As a prelude to the 50th birthday of choreographer/dancer, Yeni Anikulapo-Kuti, the Committee for Relevant Art (CORA) in collaboration with Friends of the Arts (FOA), will on Sunday, May 22 stage the Arthouse Forum in celebration of Yeni, choreographer of the Positive Band and manager of the New African Shrine, for her contribution to dance in Nigeria.
Holding at the Freedom Park, Broad Street, Lagos, by 12pm, with the theme, From body gyration to choreographic art: Evolution of afrobeat & music band dance, the objective of the programme is to examine how the intervention of Yeni Kuti in Afrobeat dance changed the dynamics and culture of music band dance in the last two decades.
The lead speaker at the forum is Dr Sola Olorunyomi (author of Fela and the Imagined Continent), a lecturer at the University of Ibadan. He will be joined by Benson Idonije, Broadcaster, music writer and first manager of Fela's Koola Lobitos band; Dr Eesuola, Lecturer on Political Behaviour, University of Lagos; Latoya Julius-Ekemode (culture activist and choreographer of Orlando Julius Band); Segun Adefila, artistic director, Crown Troupe of Africa and Arnold Udoka, National Choreographer, Director of Dance, National Troupe of Nigeria as moderator.
According to the Secretary General of CORA, Toyin Akinosho, “the Arthouse Forum is a social gathering with generous dose of discussion in honour of an art personality, who has contributed immensely to the flowering of a vital aspect of our cultural industry.”
The event is expected to attract artistes and stakeholders in the industry and will also feature performances by the Crown Troupe of Africa and Nefertiti led by Adunni.
Unlike his siblings Femi and Seun, who toed their father’s part, Yeni, the eldest daughter of the late music legend, Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, gained her popularity in dance, which she started at a very tender age.
“I’ve always loved dancing; I stated dancing at a very tender age; about three years old. When I was in secondary school, I joined all the cultural dance groups in my school. Before then, when my father was practicing with his dancer, Dele, I always join her; she used to teach me how to dance Afrobeat,” she said in a previous interview.
Unlike many, who see dance as a hobby, Yeni had always wanted to be a professional dancer.
“I wanted to dance professionally. When I left secondary school, instead of going to journalism school, I wanted to go to a dancing school abroad but my father couldn’t afford it. That was why I could not attend a dancing school but it was still a passion.”
As the first daughter of Fela, it was natural for Yeni to play in the art sector, but she insists her father’s music wasn’t really the attraction.
“It wasn’t really my father because he was a musician not a dancer; it was in my blood. People, who knew us in those days, they used to see my sister and I get into the stage with my father’s dancers. Though I never danced with my father’s band, we used to join them during rehearsals.”
Unlike most parents, who wouldn’t want a dancer daughter, the Anikulapo-Kutis embraced the idea and even provided support to Yeni’s passion.
“My mother was always very supportive and my brother Femi was about starting his band then. So, my sister and I told him, ‘we are going to choreograph for the dancers, in fact, we are going to dance.’ And my mother, she’s used to supporting her children in anything that we were doing. And my father will not say, ‘don’t dance; shebi my father was a musician. So, there was no dissenting voice really,” she said.
Even the many discouraging comments from her peers, most of who were dreaming of becoming lawyers and doctors, did not change anything.
“I didn’t hear them; they must have been talking to themselves, not me. I mean, you get the odd ones saying, ‘ah, Yeni, don’t dance oh! In secondary school, most of my friends knew that I loved dance and they always tried to discourage me. I remember when we were going to do our O Level–– I was the student still dancing–– all the other once had given up; they were studying their books. So, I used to hear my friends say, ‘oh, don’t dance, face your books and I will say to them, ‘all right, I’m coming, I’ coming.”

As a student, combining academics and dance was a difficult task for Yeni, but like she puts it, “I did the proffered; dance.”
Though she never enrolled in any dancing class, her talent, which she described as natural, did the magic for Yeni.
“I was just natural to me; by the time they had burnt down my father’s house, he couldn’t afford to send me to school I wanted to go. I first went to school of journalism, then to secretarial school as well, so, I did things that didn’t involve dancing at all; I just followed the trend–– going to school and getting qualifications.”
The coming of Femi Kuti and the Positive Force could be described as the lifeline for Yeni’s dancing career.
“I was just doing what I was supposed to do; working in offices. Until one day my brother (Femi) said he was starting his band; I abandoned everything to face dancing.”
Dancing for the Positive Force remained one of Yeni’s cherished moments in her career.
“I’ve loved every second, every minute of the dancing; I don’t regret it for a second. I’ve danced all over the world; the only places I haven’t been are India and Australia. I’ve been to America, China, Japan, England, Canada, Brazil, France… I’ve been everywhere, just dancing. I was in Croatia, Slovenia, South Africa, West Africa… in fact, I can’t even remember all of them,” she enthused.
Having excelled in her chosen field, topmost in Yeni’s agenda is to set up her own dance troupe and touring around the world.
“I will love to have a dance troupe, but right now, work doesn’t permit me to do that. But for sure, I will definitely have a dance troupe. It has not been easy running the Shrine but it’s enjoyable; it’s actually a par of our dream of maintaining Fela’s legacy. He was such a great man and I’m very proud that we are in the position to maintain his legacy and even do our best to carry it to greater heights.”

---EniOlorutidak'oseFarawek'oseF'enutembelek'oseBinuk'oseNa'kaiwosisiWiwol'aawo

Arthouse Forum for Yeni Kuti at 50

2011-05-18T13:59:00.000+01:00

S a prelude to the 50th birthday of choreographer/dancer, Yeni Anikulapo-Kuti, the Committee for Relevant Art (CORA) in collaboration with Friends of the Arts (FOA), will on Sunday, May 22 stage the Arthouse Forum in celebration of Yeni, choreographer of the Positive Band and manager of the New African Shrine, for her contribution to dance in Nigeria.

Holding at the Freedom Park, Broad Street, Lagos, by 12pm, with the theme, From body gyration to choreographic art: Evolution of afrobeat & music band dance, the objective of the programme is to examine how the intervention of Yeni Kuti in Afrobeat dance changed the dynamics and culture of music band dance in the last two decades.

The lead speaker at the forum is Dr Sola Olorunyomi (author of Fela and the Imagined Continent), a lecturer at the University of Ibadan. He will be joined by Benson Idonije, broadcaster, music writer and first manager of Fela’s Koola Lobitos band; Dr Eesuola, lecturer on Political Behaviour, University of Lagos; Latoya Julius-Ekemode (culture activist and choreographer of Orlando Julius Band); Segun Adefila, artistic director, Crown Troupe of Africa and Arnold Udoka, National Choreographer, Director of Dance, National Troupe of Nigeria as moderator.

According to the Secretary General of CORA, Toyin Akinosho, “the Arthouse Forum is a social gathering with generous dose of discussion in honour of an art personality, who has contributed immensely to the flowering of a vital aspect of our cultural industry.”

The event is expected to attract artistes and stakeholders in the industry and will also feature performances by the Crown Troupe of Africa and Nefertiti led by Adunni.

Unlike his siblings Femi and Seun, who toed their father’s part, Yeni, the eldest daughter of the late music legend, Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, gained her popularity in dance, which she started at a very tender age.

“I’ve always loved dancing; I stated dancing at a very tender age; about three years old. When I was in secondary school, I joined all the cultural dance groups in my school. Before then, when my father was practicing with his dancer, Dele, I always joined her; she used to teach me how to dance Afrobeat,” she said in a previous interview.

Unlike many, who see dance as a hobby, Yeni had always wanted to be a professional dancer.

“I wanted to dance professionally. When I left secondary school, instead of going to journalism school, I wanted to go to a dancing school abroad but my father couldn’t afford it. That was why I could not attend a dancing school but it was still a passion.”

As the first daughter of Fela, it was natural for Yeni to play in the art sector, but she insists her father’s music wasn’t really the attraction.

“It wasn’t really my father because he was a musician not a dancer; it was in my blood. People, who knew us in those days, they used to see my sister and I get into the stage with my father’s dancers. Though I never danced with my father’s band, we used to join them during rehearsals.”

Unlike most parents, who wouldn’t want a dancer daughter, the Anikulapo-Kutis embraced the idea and even provided support to Yeni’s passion.

“My mother was always very supportive and my brother Femi was about starting his band then. So, my sister and I told him, ‘we are going to choreograph for the dancers, in fact, we are going to dance.’ And my mother, she’s used to supporting her children in all anything that we were doing. And my father will not say, ‘don’t dance; shebi my father was a musician. So, there was no dissenting voice really,” she said.

Even the many discouraging comments from her peers, most of who were dreaming of becoming lawyers and doctors, did not change anything.

“I didn’t hear them; they must have been talking to themselves, not me. I mean, you get the odd ones saying, ‘ah, Yeni, don’t dance oh! In secondary school, most of my friends knew that I loved dance and they always tried to discourage me. I remember when we were going to do out O Level–– I was the student still dancing–– all the other once had given up; they were studying their books. So, I used to hear my friends say, ‘oh, don’t dance, face your books and I will say to them, ‘all right, I’m coming, I’ coming.”

As a student, combining academics and dance was a difficult task for Yeni, but like she puts it, “I did the proffered; dance.”

Though she never enrolled in any dancing class, her talent, which she described as natural, did the magic for Yeni.

“I was just natural to me; by the time they had burnt down my father’s house, he couldn’t afford to send me to school I wanted to go. I first went to school of journalism, then to secretarial school as well, so, I did things that didn’t involve dancing at all; I just followed the trend–– going to school and getting qualifications.”

The coming of Femi Kuti and the Positive Force could be described as the lifeline for Yeni’s dancing career.

“I was just doing what I was supposed to do; working in offices. Until one day my brother (Femi) said he was starting his band; I abandoned everything to face dancing.”

Dancing for the Positive Force remained one of Yeni’s cherished moments in her career.

“I’ve loved every second, every minute of the dancing; I don’t regret it for a second. I’ve danced all over the world; the only places I haven’t been are India and Australia. I’ve been to America, China, Japan, England, Canada, Brazil, France… I’ve been everywhere, just dancing. I was in Croatia, Slovenia, South Africa, West Africa… in fact, I can’t even remember all of them,” she enthused.

Having excelled in her chosen field, topmost in Yeni’s agenda is to set up her own dance troupe and touring around the world.

“I will love to have a dance troupe, but right now, work doesn’t permit me to do that. But for sure, I will definitely have a dance troupe. It has not been easy running the Shrine but it’s enjoyable; it’s actually a par of our dream of maintaining Fela’s legacy. He was such a great man and I’m very proud that we are in the position to maintain his legacy and even do our best to carry it to greater heights.”

Arthouse Forum for Yeni Kuti at 50

---EniOlorutidak'oseFarawek'oseF'enutembelek'oseBinuk'oseNa'kaiwosisiWiwol'aawo

CARBONDALE 7

2011-05-01T06:35:00.000+01:00

---EniOlorutidak'oseFarawek'oseF'enutembelek'oseBinuk'oseNa'kaiwosisiWiwol'aawo

Afropop Worldwide

2011-04-28T23:07:00.001+01:00

Amina Claudine Myers

Interviewer: Simon Rentner

Simon Rentner: This is Simon Rentner with Afropop Worldwide with George Collinet. I'm here sitting with Amina Claudine Myers, the famous genre-defying pianist, who has played with so many luminaries in the industry. It’s just a pleasure to be here with you and talk about some of your life experiences.

Amina Claudine Myers: Thank you. It's a pleasure. My pleasure.

Afropop Worldwide

S.R: So, I guess first of all, when did you, on an individual level, decide that you were going to be a musician?

A.C.M: That's a very good question. Well, I was a musician before I decided I was going to be one. It started when I was about 11, playing for the church. Those things were just automatic. But when I really realized that I was supposed to be a musician was in the '70s. Even though I was in the AACM – well no, no, before then, because I was in the AACM. But when I really knew who I was I would say was in the '70s.

S.R: Interesting. That's fascinating. So, you were the director of your choir at a very young age.

A.C.M: Yes, that was one of the things. I organized a quartet in the '50s. In the early '60s I directed several choirs when I was going to school at Philander Smith College in Little Rock, Arkansas. It's a small Methodist school. During the summer I would go stay with my mother in Louisville, Kentucky and I started directing choirs during that time.

S.R: What was the period during which you lived in Little Rock?

A.C.M: From '59 to '63.

S.R: From '59 to '63. Okay. Because from the bio on [2:30] the AACM website it says that you were born and raised there. It sort of implies that. But that's not the case.

A.C.M: No, I was born in a small community, a little village on the highway called Blackwell, Arkansas, which is around 50 miles from Little Rock, northwest, going toward Oklahoma, Kansas City.

S.R: Oh, I see. So it's still sort of within that area.

A.C.M: Yes.

S.R: I know this is a very personal question. When did you realize that you were an African-American musician and dealing with everything before you? Do you know what I mean? Was there a moment where you were like, "Okay, I want to be a musician and it's difficult being an African-American." Did you even have a moment like that?

A.C.M: No, no. I never had a moment that it was going to be difficult because I was doing it. I started classical piano when I was six years old so I thought I was going to be a concert pianist. So I studied piano all the way up through college. I was doing gospel music and doing rhythm and blues in high school – gospel and rhythm and blues – even before high school. I was playing for the church. We moved to Dallas, Texas in the late '40s. My great aunt – I was living with her. There were some ladies at the Baptist Church there. We were Methodist but the Baptist Church always had activities like plays. They put me in plays. They organized this women's group. I was one of the main pianists and leaders. There were about seven of us but the core group was five singers most of the time. So that's how I started singing in a group and co-leading and teaching songs. So I didn't think in terms of being a black musician because we were just doing it. Then when I went to college I majored in music and I became interested in classical music – Mozart's Requiem and the pipe organ and things like that. A young lady – I've told this story so many times. We called her the black Elizabeth Taylor. Her name was Gloria Salter. [5:00] She got me a job working in a nightclub. I told her I didn't know anything about working in a nightclub. She said, "Yes you can. It pays five dollars a night." That's how I started playing jazz, so called jazz. But before then, the Professor, our music director in college put me in a little jazz band. We would go around playing proms and things like that. I tried to learn how to play the blues. That was really the first beginning.

S.R: Interesting.

A.C.M: So I never thought about it in terms of being black. The musicians from Memphis, Tennessee used to come to Little Rock, stay in a black hotel and play at the white clubs. I had a crush on several of them. They showed me little things. So I was in that community. It was exciting.

S.R: Was there a moment where the reality of being a concert pianist for classical music was probably not the most easily attainable goal? I know Ron Carter had some stories about that too.

A.C.M: Well actually, that was fleeting because I went to college just to be a teacher. You had to have – piano was my major instrument. So I thought about concert. But I really didn't have the energy. I shouldn't say energy. But I really didn't have it in me to be a classical pianist. I really didn't. That was just a thought. I thought that's what I wanted to be. But no. No.

S.R: Okay. Interesting.

A.C.M: I have to stress that. Really. I was thrown into the jazz and rhythm and blues world. It's like the Creator said. I didn't know. I was just floating through, thinking I was going to be a schoolteacher. So the Creator just sent someone. He sent Gloria Salter to get me the job in the club. Then later on, the club owner put a drummer and a bass player with me. This was the club in Little Rock, Arkansas. One summer the drummer called me. He was living in Lexington, Kentucky – Nelson was his name. [7:30] He said, "I have a job for you but it's playing in Oregon." It was almost an identical conversation as Gloria Salter had. I said, "I can't play in Oregon. He said, "Yes you can. It's got pedals, just like the keyboards." That's how I started. So there was always somebody sent to lead me in the direction of being a musician, because I really loved to act. I wanted to act and be an actress and all that. So the Creator sent these people to show me what I was supposed to be doing. So, when I went to Chicago to teach school, I wasn't thinking about playing music really. But I was hanging around with some young man who played the congas. I hung out with him one night. He asked me to sit in. He told the bandleader that I played. The bandleader had me play, fired his musician and hired me. That's how I started playing in Chicago. So I was still playing. I went along with it. But I wasn't aggressive. I was going along. People hired me. Different people hired me to be in their group. Then, when I became a member of the AACM, I started realizing – and that was in the '60s. But when I really knew who I was, I would say was in the '70s. With the AACM I was able to develop and be creative because they were all creating, you know, Muhal and Roscoe – they were all just painting and writing poetry and just doing all kinds of things. It was very exciting. I realized I could do those things too.

S.R: Now that was in 1966 or 1965?

A.C.M: Yes, 1965, 1966, 1967.

S.R: Now, you were 23 years old at the time, approximately.

A.C.M: Yes. Yes. Yes.

S.R: In your early 20s.

A.C.M: Yes. Yes.

S.R: What did the AACM or Muhal – what was your first impression?

A.C.M: Well, our drummer, who was [XX] at the time introduced me. He knew Muhal, Steve McCall, all of them. Pardon me. [10:00] It was very exciting with [XX] the drummer and all of them. It was exciting to me seeing these musicians just doing their own thing and creating music. I realized that Muhal and they had realized what I had before I did. I taught school. We had a training program for young people. I was one of the teachers of the vocal class and everything. The respect that they showed me was like we were all on an equal basis. They had much more experience than I had because my music came from the gospel and blues, from down south and everything. I had never studied jazz or music or anything like that. I was accepted into the AACM and what I was doing was accepted. So that motivated me to do more.

S.R: What was the application process?

A.C.M: Well, you were brought in by someone.

S.R: Did someone nominate you?

A.C.M: Yes, I guess you could say it was a nomination. They brought in my name and they accepted me.

S.R: One particular person or a group of people?

A.C.M: Our drummer introduced me into the organization. You had to be brought in by someone. Our drummer brought me in, because I was playing with his trio, The Oregon Trio.

S.R: His name means jazz drummer when translated.

A.C.M: It's a name that he created himself. He said it meant drummer. He gave me my name Amina. He named a lot of people. We wanted to show my African heritage. He said, "You are not Duke Ellington. His features will appear lighter and lighter and then he may be considered white." So years from now they may lighten me up. Claudine is French and Myers is Jewish, the way I'm looking at it, which in reality it is. So Amina was more of an African name – Arabic, African. The young lady told me her mother in Mexico, her grandmother [12:30] was named Amina. That's what she told me. So the name Amina was more a definition of my African heritage. So our drummer named a lot of people. Some people went back to their given name they were born with. But I kept Amina because I had the name a long time before I started using it. When I organized my own group I named it Amina and Company. Then people started calling me Amina. I like Claudine too. My mother gave me that name and I love the name Claudine. So people started calling me Amina Myers and I didn't like that. They still do that. I said don't short change. Either Amina by itself or Amina Claudine Myers. Or you can say Amina C. Myers. But that's what happened.

S.R: That's great. What year was it approximately when you changed your name? Do you remember?

A.C.M: I didn't change it. I just added it on. I didn't do it officially. I would say around '72 the name started sticking.

S.R: Were there a lot of musicians? It was right after Muhal changed his name too, right?

A.C.M: Muhal – it's strange how things happened. My name had nothing to do with what Muhal did with his name but it came out that way. He came to Chicago. I came to New York. I had no idea they were coming and they had no idea I was coming. But we ended up here close to the same time. So we have some similarities. I think Muhal and I were related in our past lives or something because there are similarities in the things that happened. He has always been encouraging. He just speaks from his heart – the real thing. He is a very wise person. So Muhal – yeah, he is my spiritual brother. I love him very much. He's a beautiful person.

S.R: Would you consider the AACM, in its context and how it came together, a heroic effort? Are these musicians more than just musicians, but seekers on another level?

A.C.M: Well, there was something there, because Muhal [15:00] – as you know, the AACM came out of the experimental bands. Even they didn't know what a magnificent organization it would be. What they were doing was finding a place to present the music. There was nowhere in Chicago. The music scene was dying out. These musicians – Steve McCall, Phil Cohran, Muhal, Jodie Christian – they are the charter members. They came together and decided the place where we needed to present our music. That was very deep, very heavy. How did they even realize what they were developing? The organization is just to me – I use this term all the time – a rehab of activity. There was just so much love and so much unity. Even though we could disagree, we agreed to disagree and it was okay. It was wonderful. That period where creating plays – Muhal would write a whole play with no words, no dialogue. I would say he was way ahead of his time.

S.R: He made some way out records. Actually you were on one record – Lifea Blinec – that record is crazy. I still don't know what's going on on that record.

A.C.M: What's the name of it again?

S.R: I don't even know how to pronounce it. It's like Lifea Blinec.

A.C.M: Oh, Lifea Blinec. Yes, yes. I was on that and another one. Several I was on with Muhal. He asked me. But the Lifea Blinec – people still ask about that. We did a duo.

S.R: So explain that. Say a young child comes up to you, that is 12 or 15 years old, and you put that record on. Then the kid says, "What is this? What's going on?" How do you explain what is happening on that record?

A.C.M: Well, I have to think back. It was just life. It was just [17:30] we were creating and improvising life. I haven't heard that in a long time. I need to go back and listen to that again because that was done in the '70s. I haven't listened to it in so long. I need to listen to it again. But we were improvising and creating an event, right there on the spot, in my opinion.

S.R: So was there this idea that there was a kind of self-awareness of what was going on with the AACM, that we are taking complete ownership over what we are doing? This is sort of unprecedented. Nobody else had ever really done this before. What kind of awareness was there when you were doing it?

A.C.M: Well, when I first started, when I joined the AACM, later on I started playing with Gene Ammons. I used to hear things but I wouldn't do them because I figured it wasn't allowed. It was out of order to the formula or the standard playing and stuff. My drummer would tell me to play what I heard and felt. But see, in the AACM, you can do no wrong. I grew up thinking it wasn't right to do this and this was out of order. But with the AACM, you were completely free to write and compose what you felt. So various musicians had their own way of writing things and doing things. It was accepted because it made sense. In their eyesight they explained it to us. It was so creative and so new and it worked. The music would just grow. It moved forwards instead of just being the same thing over and over again, a repetition of something over and over again. But you look back on the past musicians, some of the musicians that were still living and creating – Coltrane and Ornette Coleman and all of them [20:00] – all that music had an influence on everything that I did, listening to them and even on the blues people. All that music brought me to where I was in the AACM. I can't speak for the other members, but for me the AACM just opened the door so that anything was possible.

S.R: How did you feel about Great Black Music? Did you like that moniker?

A.C.M: Yes. Yes, because all the music is great. Ornette and all of them created the great black music. It was the definition. It was great music and it was done by black people. A lot of times we didn't get the recognition, black people didn't get the recognition of the greatness of the music. So if they wanted to say Great Black Music, that was fine, because that's what it was.

S.R: Talk to me about how what was going on with the AACM either mirror or was a backdrop or was a reflection of what was going on politically during that era. Do you see a correlation? Could the AACM have only happened in that era?

A.C.M: Well, I don't know if it could only have happened in that era. But it was the time for that. As far as politically, I'm not a political person. But I feel that the AACM happened exactly what it was supposed to happen. It wasn't supposed to happen before it happened or after it happened.

S.R: So what was happening? I'm young. I don't even know. I don't know what's happening. Tell me what was happening.

A.C.M: What was happening was we were becoming more knowledgeable about who we were as musicians and as people [22:30] and that we had something to contribute. A change was coming where we were becoming more aware of, as I said, who I was as a person and we were speaking out more about opportunities and things that were happening in the world. We were making an impression that what we have to say is important and is just as important and as good as everything else that's going on in the world. I'm trying to figure out how to say that. But see, as I said, I'm not political.

S.R: But the AACM is certainly a political organization, not overtly, but by the fact that you guys organized. George Lewis even admitted it's a political organization, even though he's not. No one has politics. He's not talking about right or left or anything like that. But a group of people came together with a common goal to create things on their own terms. It had a political kind of purpose, regardless.

A.C.M: I see what you are saying. I didn't see it that way. But that is true when you put it like that. So I guess it would be considered political because it was something different and completely away from what had been going on. So it was like a political statement. Yeah, because we were very sincere and knew that the past – I remember playing one time after I had been playing with Gene Ammons. I had my own group. I went and performed in Gary, Indiana. This woman said, "What was that?" I guess she thought I was going to be doing the things I did with Gene Ammons. But you know, I was opening up. So I guess we were making a statement to the people. It was different from what they were accustomed to hearing, the same format and everything. So we were making a statement, yeah. But I didn't look at it, at that time, but I was sure about what I was trying to do, even though a lot of the time I didn't know what I was trying to do. I was just letting the creative forces take over. So we were sincere and strong in what we believed in.

S.R: Did you have a pride, [25:00] as in 'What we are doing is emblematic or representative of the modern African-American. We are part of this continuum. We are on the cutting edge of it.'

A.C.M: No, I never did think like that. No. No. I never did think that what we were doing – I knew it was different and there were no other organizations doing what we were doing. But I didn't have the ego about it, nor did I think that we were going to make any changes in the world. It was just a chance to express ourselves freely, without anyone trying to stop us. But no, I wasn't thinking in a political way or any way like that.

S.R: I know it's hard for you to put this into words or think about it, but I'll try again and ask you this. Why could this organization not have occurred in the '70s? Why did it have to happen in the middle of the '60s?

A.C.M: One thing is, in Chicago we were all on the South Side, the black community. We were able to come together. It couldn't have happened in New York, because I don't know about the other cities, but here in New York everything is so spread out and diversified. When you come to New York you really need to have your thing together or else New York will send you back where you came from. But Chicago had a sense of community for it to happen there. You had musicians in Detroit. They had musicians out of St. Louis – BAG. Chicago influenced a whole lot of people because we were able to come together. It was just the place where it was designated for it to be – in Chicago for some reason.

S.R: But it was also incredibly segregated, like you said. You are from the South Side and you had the North Side.

A.C.M: Yes. Yes. It was like a community there on the South Side with the painters and the artists. It just came together there. Like I said, it came out of an experimental band. Muhal was writing music and stuff and moving the music forward, presenting his ideas. It was just the place where it was supposed to be. [27:30] Now I can't say why it was there. But it was in the universe that we start there, with those people. It was the right setting for it to start in Chicago on the South Side.

S.R: At any time in your career, did you resent being called or known as a jazz musician? Did you have a problem with that word, jazz?

A.C.M: In my later times, yes. Not at first. But I realized jazz was limiting. Also, the music was done in speakeasies and all that kind of stuff. The connotation of jazz – to me it wasn't understood as it should be. This is a high art form and jazz was low level entertainment.

S.R: Do you still think it has that connotation?

A.C.M: No. Maybe some of the older people think so. But jazz is limited expression. But yet it is ambidextrous. When you say jazz musician, you say, "Oh wow, who is this? They are out there. Jazz." You think of jazz as suddenly being way out. But another thing is jazz is very sophisticated, very highly evolved and everything. So I use jazz, but it's not one of my favorite expressions to express music. Because it is all music. Jazz is limiting. I think it is limiting.

S.R: The word itself goes against the overall premise of what the AACM represented, which was, "We are beyond category.", as Duke Ellington would say.

A.C.M: You have the European classical, you have the blues, the country blues, you've got the African rhythm. It has everything. Extended forms. [30:00]

S.R: But also, did you get the sense that you were tired of being put in a box in a way? That's what the Art Ensemble of Chicago – for instance, each one of their members represented a different idea of the African-American experience on their own terms to show the world we can be whoever we want instead of being a certain way. Were these things that you were thinking about?

A.C.M: Well, I didn't like to be categorized. I didn't like it because some people categorized me as avant-garde. When I think about avant-garde I think about throwing the piano out of the building, coming on stage with a suitcase. Then they said I was too commercial. To me, it's music. People said, "How would you define yourself?" I said, "I do blues, jazz, gospel in extended forms." It's just music is really the word. But I can't define it. People define me in different kinds of ways. So I can't control that. But they had to put you in a category. So what would you say?

S.R: Well, I'm not the artist.

A.C.M: I think we are all musicians depending on what we have heard in life. We are a composite of everything we've experienced and heard in our lives. That's what the music is.

S.R: In the 1960s, if you can get back into that mindset, or even early '70s for that matter, what did Africa represent to you?

A.C.M: I loved Africa. It represented – I knew I was from there, but I still don't know where. But it was the rhythms I always loved. I was always interested whenever I saw something about Africa because I knew my beginnings were there. The rhythms and the music were just so beautiful. The people – I just felt related to that. [32:30] Eventually I had a chance to go to Africa. But before then I was always interested in things from Africa.

S.R: Where did you go?

A.C.M: I went to Senegal and Ghana and Cape Town, South Africa.

S.R: Did you meet with Doudou N'Diaye Rose?

A.C.M: I was in Cape Town with Archie Shepp.

S.R: But in Senegal? Do you know Doudou N'Diaye Rose, the drumming master?

A.C.M: No, no, no. I was in Senegal recently. My husband was from Senegal. He was Malian though. But I was at the St. Louis Jazz Festival and met a chor player. I can't think of his name now. But no.

S.R: Okay. Interesting. Fantastic. Alright, well, now in the book you stated that being the AACM, you wanted to keep it an all-black organization. You knew I was going to ask you this.

A.C.M: At that time.

S.R: It still is. I asked George Lewis this. I was like, "George, if I were a musician could I join the AACM?" He paused for a long time. He said, "Probably not." But it's fine.

A.C.M: Well, I can't say that because I don't know. It's a different time and stuff now. So I don't know. Here in New York, the chapter here, we are not having new members at this time. So I don't know what's going on in Chicago and what they would do. But at that time, I felt that the AACM was something that the blacks organized for us, because I felt that the whites had everything going for them. So here was something that we had, that we had complete control. I just felt that it should stay that way. That's the way I was feeling at that time.

S.R: Yeah, that sounds right to me. Historically, certainly that has been the case. Why not?

A.C.M: But I've played with a lot of beautiful white musicians that are excellent players [35:00] and they are beautiful people. I enjoyed playing with them. But at that time, no, I wanted to keep it black, because I said they take everything away from us. We start something and then they take over and then they are in control and we lose control. That was my mindset then. It's different now. I'm more open now.

S.R: Has it even changed again, would you say? Music, now that – is there an Obama age in jazz, do you think? Have we moved it even a step further or is that kind of foolish?

A.C.M: An Obama age?

S.R: Well, now that we elected the first President with African ancestry, does that change anything?

A.C.M: No. I don't think so.

S.R: In terms of whatever, I'm just asking.

A.C.M: I don't think so. I don't think so. I really don't. There was funding and grants. All that was going on. All of a sudden musicians were able to get grants to do things. All the arts programs had dried up.

S.R: Now he is cutting the arts.

A.C.M: Yeah, well before he came into office it was cut. The economics are getting worse and worse. So I don't see any great changes for the better at this time.

S.R: You made a record with Lester Bowie with African children.

A.C.M: Oh yes.

S.R: What did that mean? What was he getting at with that record and African children? What does he mean?

A.C.M: Now I can't speak for Lester. I don't know.

S.R: Was he speaking of himself and African-Americans? Were they part of the African children? Or is this something different?

A.C.M: As I said, I haven't the slightest idea. But, to me he was saying we are all African children, in my opinion. But I have no idea.

S.R: You made one of your records – you salute [37:30] Bessie Smith.

A.C.M: Yes.

S.R: The last track on that album is called African Blues.

A.C.M: Yes.

S.R: But it's not really a blues at all in form. What is your concept with that piece?

A.C.M: Okay, well I was sitting at the piano. The piano used to be over there. Cecil McBee was here. I just started playing and this voice came. It just came. I named it African Blues because I was trying to show that you don't have to have words to express. It was like a feeling, like a mournful prayer, a mournful expression about the conditions that were going on in the world today, that were going on in Africa and reaching out, crying out for understanding.

S.R: You don't sing. You use a different kind of thing in your voice.

A.C.M: It just came.

S.R: It just came? But it sounds like the voice, the quality of the voice, the timbre of the voice, it sounds like Baaba Maal kind of. It has this West African, nasal, heady kind of quality in the sound.

A.C.M: Baaba Maal – that's from Senegal, right?

S.R: Yes.

A.C.M: Yeah, the music – it just came. It had no arrangements, no nothing. It just came all at one time.

S.R: How did it just come? What do you mean? Your ancestors were speaking to you or something?

A.C.M: I don't know. I was sitting at the piano and that sound just came. It just came. So it had to be coming from the spiritual world that was put into me. That's why you have to keep yourself open and let the music flow, because all kinds of stuff will happen. Now I'm doing a thing that's called ritual, doing that kind of thing with my voice. That just came too, [40:00] like a guttural –

S.R: Tell me about this. What is this?

A.C.M: That's on my double CD that I self produced called Augmented Variations. On this there are excerpts from my choir. I'll give you a CD before you leave. Excerpts from the choir, The Oregon Trio and solo improvisation in piano and voice. I do the ritual on that. But it's another kind of thing. Then I'm doing some stuff now where it's more of an Indian, an American Indian kind of thing. This is what it came out sounding like. I have never recorded anything like that yet. So these different kinds of voices and things are just more or less feelings, no words or anything, but feelings with sounds. They just came. It's an experience that comes through me I guess. That's why you have to try and keep yourself in a good frame of mind, try to eat right, be as healthy as you can, try to feel good so that the Creator can come through you. It's not me doing it. It's the spirits. I'm just being used as, as they say, the vessel for music to come through. You have to be open so the music can flow and not worry. Other musicians have to be or you have to be in tune together so the music can grow and then all kinds of stuff happens and you don't even know where it came from.

S.R: Going back to an earlier question and then we'll wrap this up soon. Thank you so much for your time. Was there any correlation with the musical expression that you were doing with the AACM and being free to do whatever you wanted, whatever you felt, whatever you deemed appropriate was accepted and respected and presented? Is there a correlation between that idea and the civil rights struggle that was happening, the freedom of rights that was happening [42:30] for black people in the United States during that time as well? Was that parallel or were those kind of separate things would you say?

A.C.M: Was it parallel? In other words, was it going along at the same time?

S.R: Yeah, so what I'm saying is, is it just a coincidence that you guys were creating this organization now that's promoting the freedom of expression in every imaginable way. It was all approved. It was all accepted and presented. Is there any correlation between that and what was going on socially during that period?

A.C.M: I don't think so, because I think the musicians were thinking in terms of music only, not what was going on in the world. In the '60s, I remember going and doing a sit-in. I was scared to death.

S.R: You did a sit-in?

A.C.M: At Woolworth's in Little Rock, Arkansas.

S.R: Please tell this story.

A.C.M: Well, we were on campus and some of the student leaders said we were going to do a sit-in. Those that wanted to participate, could. The guys put on their suits and ties. They wanted us to look good. We didn't know if there were going to be people out there spitting on us. We didn't know. One of my friends had a briefcase, like he was going to work. The ladies were dressed nicely. Everybody was dressed. The people on TV said, "Oh, they are dressed nicely!" They were just amazed at how good we looked. So we went to Woolworth's and immediately when we sat on the counter – some of us did – they closed the store immediately. They closed the counters. Everything was just closed. We sat there peacefully for maybe 10 minutes. Then we got up and left. So we made the statement. We did a sit-in. They closed the store, but we sat in. I was scared because I didn't know what I was going to do. They were jeering and stuff. It was something that we had to do, that I had to do. So those students [45:00], there were students that came to Philander Smith that spoke about their experiences. Some of them had it hard. Those students were very brave that did those sit-ins. Not only the students but also everybody else, they put the hose on them, set the dogs on them and did everything. But they believed in themselves to such a point where they did this so that we could have the freedom today to go around. I will be grateful eternally. But the music – I don't think that was related.

S.R: Not even indirectly?

A.C.M: It could have been indirectly.

S.R: That's more subconscious. Maybe like a subconscious or indirect kind of thing.

A.C.M: It could have been indirect, realizing that we had the freedom to do whatever we wanted to do. That's something to think about. It could have been that time where things were opening up without us realizing what the possibilities were. It was more possible to do things without us even realizing. That could have been. That could be. But I don't know. I'll have to think about that more.

S.R: These are the things I'm thinking about as I'm trying to create this show. I'm just trying to understand the continuum.

A.C.M: I just think it was that time when everything was supposed to happen when it did. It came together. The AACM was doing its thing but here the freedom was being expressed and more things were open. People were speaking up. Malcolm X was killed – about to be killed. So all that could have been the result from what had happened in the past. It could have been related.

S.R: What did you think of? Do you remember where you were when that assassination of Malcolm X or Martin Luther King happened? Do you remember those times?

A.C.M: Dr. King, definitely. I had read Malcolm X's book. I was in love with him as soon as I read his book – the strength. He was a sincere, honest man. Dr. King – I remember I was teaching school and this man named Ben Branch had the Bread Basket Band from PUSH – Reverend Jesse Jackson's organization. That band was to go and play for the funeral. So the musician asked me to take his place. He couldn't go. So we went. We flew to Atlanta, took the bus from the airport [47:30] to Peach Street, that black hotel. We sat on the bus for about an hour. I think Ben Branch was gone. Anyway, the musicians started getting off the bus, one by one, going into the hotel. There was no room in the hotel, nowhere to stay. Finally we went in the hotel. I remember Mrs. Jackson was sitting and watching TV. Atlanta had swollen up with all these people. There was nowhere to stay, no hotels or anything. This one guy was with me and I wasn't feeling well. We had to stay at a hotel about 18 miles out of town and watch the program on TV. We got back to Chicago and people said, "We saw you Miss Myers on TV playing at Dr. King's funeral." I didn't get anywhere near the church. We didn't get anywhere near the church. That was our experience. It was phenomenal. People didn't realize there were going to be that many people in the city. It was just chaos. But yeah, that's what I remember about Dr. King. Of course, it was a sad, sad occasion all over. We were all saddened by what had happened. I liked Malcolm X too. They were both different but they both had interests of their people. I loved that.

S.R: Fantastic. Alright. Well, John Shenoy Jackson – John Jackson –

A.C.M: John Jackson.

S.R: Right. He said the AACM School was 50% performance and 50% social uplift. Would you agree with that?

A.C.M: 50% performance and 50% –

S.R: Social uplift.

A.C.M: John Jackson. Would I agree with [50:00] that? The school – 50% performance.

S.R: Or music.

A.C.M: Right. Right. He saw that social uplift. What did he mean by social uplift? I remember going there to the school. We taught. We gave our lessons and everything and then went home. But come to think of it, I won't say the school as such, but the AACM was like a social uplift. You saw that part of the play that was in there – I mean that statement, A Day In the Life. I don't know if you saw that in the book. George put that in there. I wrote about a day in the life of the AACM. We would go in and we'd meet. Before the meeting we would be fooling around in the office, playing cards on the side and maybe Joseph or somebody would be in the auditorium rehearsing. So it was social activity, definitely. But as far as the school or so, I would say the AACM was like a social activity as well as the music. But 50/50 – I don't know. I don't know. But John saw that. I can see what a social network – definitely social networking.

S.R: Do you stay in contact with all of them? Do you still talk to Joseph Jarman?

A.C.M: Yes. He called not too long ago because he was listening to my CD and said how much he enjoyed it and was inspired. See Joseph was the multi-theater. He was always coming up with something different. Joseph had theater and just all kinds of stuff. He is very creative. That he would come to you with peace and love. Yeah, Joseph. Roscoe – I love Roscoe.

S.R: What did you think of the iconography that Art Ensemble did – the theater bringing in all kinds of African instruments, using face paint and wardrobe, all that stuff?

A.C.M: I just thought it was wonderful, wonderful – Art Ensemble – every time I saw them [52:30] perform. I remember when Roscoe did his first sounds. That was just so interesting, just the smallest, little instruments, being able to make music with those instruments and then watching the whole meld. They were exciting, very, very creative. I still see Joseph. "Have you ever sat down on a pillow that's round?" He sings it too. But they were very stimulating to watch them – the regalness. Mel standing there with the bass, with his paint, Moye – it was just wonderful because of the combination of the African-American experience.

S.R: Was the stage just strewn with 50 instruments?

A.C.M: Roscoe had a skillet. I remember seeing one of those skillets, one of those black iron skillets up there. There were just all kinds of little instruments, just numerous things. Lester Bowie had the bass drum in the middle. He brought that in.

S.R: The writer must have been a nightmare.

A.C.M: The writer?

S.R: Well, the writer – the concert writer.

A.C.M: Oh, I have no idea.

S.R: When I saw the instrumentation on that Massey Hall concert, I saw 40 instruments. Logistically that must be just a nightmare.

A.C.M: They had a roadie I think at one time, that was responsible for all that stuff.

S.R: That's a tough job.

A.C.M: He knew how to put it together and how to set it up and stuff. Yeah, and then traveling with that. I can imagine, yeah. I heard one incident when they had to travel and the instruments hadn't shown up. They were going to Europe or somewhere and the instruments hadn't shown up yet. So I can imagine the changes they went through. I remember once we did a gig in Italy. We had to go up in the mountains, above the clouds. They had a U-Haul van, you know, one of those trucks. They went all up there and there was no concert. Something happened. There was no concert. [55:00] Muhal, all of us were there. There was no concert. We had been up in this town. It was strange. It was weird. We saw the stage where we were supposed to play. The lights were out and the town – we were standing in the street talking and stuff until two or three o'clock in the morning. Somebody drove by in a car. Some Italians drove by. What were we doing? We went and had dinner and stuff and then we left. But they had to travel all the way up there with all those instruments. Life on the road with jazz. That's what Lester Bowie would say. On the road mit jazz – m-i-t.

S.R: On the road mit jazz? What does that mean?

A.C.M: On the road mit jazz.

S.R: What does that mean?

A.C.M: With – mit is 'with' in German. You know, we are jazz musicians. We are on the road.

S.R: Yeah.

A.C.M: Anything can happen. Strange things happen on the road. Well, we are on the road. This is it. This is what happens when you are on the road with jazz.

S.R: When you saw an Art Ensemble concert, was it like one tune for the whole concert and it would just go from here to there to there to here?

A.C.M: Yes. It sounded like it would be one tune but it wouldn't be. Because when you are playing, when you're improvising and playing, there could have been thematic material throughout to introduce another segment. So it would sound like one but it could have been a string of melodies.

S.R: But there are no breaks. They program it that way.

A.C.M: You don't stop the flow of what's going on, right. Right. It's great. You don't stop the flow because you are stopping to pause and stuff sometimes it interferes with the creating process. They had different colors. Something would be slow and that thing would be fast. Whatever. So it was always interesting because of the different variations of the moods.

S.R: Did they introduce you to some instruments you had never seen before or heard before?

A.C.M: I think so. [57:30] I think so. I used to collect small instruments from drummers. So I have seen some instruments. But I can't think of anything right off hand. I know Karl Hill from Chicago made a log drum. I still have it. He gave it to me. It was made of old tree trunks. That was different. There were some different shapes of bells. I've seen some instruments in my life that have been a little strange. But I can't remember right off hand what they were.

S.R: Cool.

A.C.M: But I just did a thing with African – [XX] – do you know him? He is down in Fort Myers.

S.R: I don't know him.

A.C.M: He is Senegalese. He had some instruments that I had never seen before. There is so much stuff out here.

S.R: Yeah, it is. I would have loved to have seen Art Ensemble in the early '70s. That would have just been like, wow.

A.C.M: Yeah, they were hot. Yeah.

S.R: There is nothing like that going on now. You can't see something like that.

A.C.M: I know. I know. The last time I saw them together was up here at Lincoln Center. I think that was in the early '80s. Yeah, it was something.

S.R: Would you say the Art Ensemble was the poster group of the AACM?

A.C.M: Well yeah, they were very important. Yeah. Because when you think of Art Ensemble there is the AACM. They definitely were, yeah. They were highlights, yeah, I would say, yeah.

S.R: Well, thank you so much for your time. It was really a pleasure interviewing you. It was fantastic.

A.C.M: You're quite welcome.

---EniOlorutidak'oseFarawek'oseF'enutembelek'oseBinuk'oseNa'kaiwosisiWiwol'aawo

Afropop Worldwide: George Lewis Interview

2011-04-28T23:03:00.001+01:00

Afropop Worldwide

http://www.afropop.org/img/interview/GeorgeLewis/Lewis_chp8_06.jpg

Interviewer: Simon Rentner

Simon Rentner: I'm here with George E. Lewis, the author of the book A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music. First of all, why did you name your book A Power Stronger Than Itself?

George Lewis: The AACM was formed in 1965 in Chicago by a group of working-class musicians who were interested in promoting themselves in new ways. “Power Stronger Than Itself” was an early AACM promotional slogan. I don't know if it was Lester Bowie or Leo Smith who created it, but suddenly these bumper stickers began to appear around the South Side of Chicago that said "AACM: A Power Stronger Than Itself" in big black letters backed by Day-Glo orange.

Simon: Now you're using the word "power" in this era. Probably somebody will immediately think about Black Power. Was that in the minds of the people when they chose that slogan?

George: No one who was really conscious in the African American community at the time could fail to be aware of Black Power. But of course that could take many forms. I guess they could have called it AACM – Black Musical Power.

In fact, the second slogan that arose, which not everyone by the way was necessarily as equally invested in, was ‘AACM: Great Black Music,” which in retrospect seemed to have even stronger legs and somehow appears more emblematic of a certain view of the collective.

In fact, Black Power had certainly been on the agenda, notions of self-determination. But it seemed to me that the slogan itself seemed to refer to a kind of recursion, that is to say a power stronger than itself. It feeds back on itself. That's a potentially limitless power.

That seems to be, in a way, a more important notion of power and a more hopeful notion of power than any you might have. Although, certainly the connection with the conventional mode of thinking about Black Power was certainly there.

Simon: A sum greater than its parts basically?

George: Well, maybe even a stronger significance if you think about a kind of infinite feedback. The thing about infinite feedback is it's difficult to control. So you're actually telling people in a very subtle way that you're not going to be controlled and that you will be heard.

Simon: Let’s also look at the AACM. You can't help but think of the NAACP too, at least in the way that abbreviation is structured. Was that thought through, like the choosing of the word advancement? Instead of Colored, it's Creative. Was that the mindset too?

George: Well, if you think about it, 'Association for the Advancement of' is certainly a gloss on the NAACP. I don't have any evidence that people were really thinking about that, but it's a reasonable assumption.

In one debate I did have access to, through listening to the tapes of the early meetings, one of the discussions was whether the name would be “Association For the Advancement of Creative… “ Then someone said, "Musicians or Music?" There seemed to be arguments on both sides. So one person – I think it was Phil Cohran, who was one of the founders, a trumpeter in Chicago, said that basically we were here to advance the creative musicians because the music had been advanced for a long time but nobody was advancing us.

That seemed to make a lot of sense because it was basically referring to that history of exploitation of black music, which advanced the music to be sure, but the musicians were kind of left behind.

Simon: Muhal Richard Abrams – do you think the AACM would exist if Muhal Richard Abrams didn't exist?

George: Well, you know, the easy answer is, “Of course not.” The one that Muhal might subscribe to himself is that he was one of four cofounders. The others were Steve McCall, the drummer, Phil Cohran, the trumpeter and Jodie Christian, the pianist. Three of them are still alive today. Steve McCall passed away in 1989.

So in fact, it seems to me that what needed to exist for the AACM to exist was a notion of collectivity and collaboration rather than a concentration on a heroic individual. Muhal has always resisted this notion of himself as a father figure and he has resisted that kind of heroism right along.

So when you see the nature of the collective as a whole, which was one of many collectives that were formed at that time – you think about the Black Panther Party as being a collective--there were so many moments at which people felt that individual strategies for success weren't working and people had to come together in groups.

So the AACM was emblematic of that period, an artifact of that period. So you see that notion of collectivity starting right at the beginning.

Simon: Muhal probably did take on more of a leadership role, having all of the sessions with musicians, late at night, working out compositional strategies, original approaches, being the first president, etc.

George: There is no question that Muhal is a very dynamic individual, but he was there with a lot of other dynamic individuals who were also holding late-night sessions and workshops and inspiring people to study and grow and do these things.

A lot of people gravitated to Muhal because he was an open-minded person. He avoided critique in favor of collaboration. He refused the role of a conventional teacher. In fact, the AACM School of Music was his idea, the school that still exists today, providing free instruction in music to people of all ages – young people, but also people of my age and much older than me went to the school.

His initial idea was that in order to teach, they had to first learn to teach. So they got together a group of people to teach each other how to teach. There were these very practical strategies, these homegrown strategies for learning.

You see, a lot of the older strategies had broken down. If you can imagine the learning of advanced music, how many African-Americans had music composition degrees? How many were sitting on the graduate composition faculties of major or even minor universities? Well, the number at that time was very close to zero.

So if you're going to get that kind of information, you're going to have to do it in an autodidact way. You're going to have to take it upon yourself. Communities are going to have to take it upon themselves to build the structures that they're going to build.

Again, this is very resonant with what was going on in the period – this kind of intensive focus on communitarianism, the intense focus on the thing you would see in those Elijah Muhammad papers in Chicago – "DO FOR SELF" – in giant letters. People would just quote that to each other – "Well, you know brother, you've got to do for self."

Simon: The frequency with which you use that word "autodidact" in your book -- you could almost put that word in the title. What is the evolution of that approach in the African-American community?

George: Well, if you want to take it as far back as it really needs to go, you could imagine slave communities needing to adopt autodidact strategies to advance, for protection, at a period when knowledge was denied, suppressed, refused. People who wanted to gain knowledge were routinely suppressed, often violently. So people had to teach each other as a matter of survival.

Now, you start to find those strategies in people like J.A. Rogers, or what Jacob Carruthers, I think, called that first generation of the “old scrapper” African-American historians. These were often self-taught in the methods of history. So they went into libraries for themselves. They did their own research.

So by the time people like Muhal came along, or even before that – you look at Sun Ra and these people, there are all those books that are coming out now detailing all of his personal research – there are all kinds of people doing this. It's the dominant mode, not least because of the refusal of many traditional institutions to educate – or if they did educate, they educated in ways that really denied African-American or African histories.

At that time the idea was that there was no African history so you didn't need to study it. So there were communities of resistance to that. Look at Carter G. Woodson, John G. Jackson, Willis Huggins, people of this sort – the people who started things like Negro History Week, later Black History Month.

At that point you weren't really expecting to be taught from the outside. You were expecting to have to get a lot of it yourself. Indeed, Muhal is kind of an example. He basically leaves the academic institution to embark upon a lifetime of self-study.

Simon: Definitely there is a cultural divide. The way I grew up, I would think it would be remarkable that somebody would teach themselves how to play the piano. Whereas Muhal Richard Abrams thinks about it that there is nothing remarkable about that whatsoever. That's just survival.

George: Well, it's not like people didn't have models in the black community for teaching themselves. If you think about jazz and blues, these are autodidact musics. People didn't go to blues school, or if they went to blues or jazz school it was in a club or it was on the street or it was in somebody's house. That was the blues school. So it was only later that these things started, like jazz school with degrees and all that.

It's a crucial mode of self-determination, in response to social change. Eddie Harris, the saxophonist, talked about it in terms of how the institutions that musicians were involved with, that helped them to learn how to do traditional musical skills, were dying out. Things like big bands – there weren't any big bands anymore to play in.

Also, a lot of the music people were playing in big bands wasn’t the sort of thing these younger people were interested in. They seemed to be more interested in more experimental things and there wasn't any way to do that unless you organized in groups to do it yourself.

Look, communities do this all the time. Take Schoenberg’s Society for Private Music Performance as an example. People got together because they wanted to get their own music played and to establish ways to think about it and talk about it. It's as natural as breathing and I think that's why Muhal looks at it that way. It certainly seems to be congruent with experience.

Simon: So when they were first talking about forming the AACM in the meetings, Muhal Richard Abrams was really interested in the mission, the objective. For Muhal, performing original music was of foremost importance, perhaps more so than other people in the collective. Why?

George: Well, original music is a sign of self-determination. So you're going to be betting on yourself. You're going to be promoting your own ideas. You're going to really depend upon your own ideas instead of playing the music of others, and certainly the kind of music that people were being forced to perform in various ways for so-called survival. At one point the joke or at least the pun was, "Well, what about the old standards?" Then someone would say, "Well, whose standards are we talking about?"

They were talking about setting new standards and potentially taking all the risks that this entails. It's an assumption of responsibility. In a way it's like growing up. These were young people who wanted to grow up, I think. You have to remember, these people were all in their 20s and 30s at the time. At the time of the AACM, Muhal is one of the oldest people. But a lot of those people, Jarman and the others, were in their 20s.

Simon: So they weren't even going to touch, say, “I Got Rhythm” or any variation of “rhythm changes.”

George: Well, some people did that in their professional lives as artists for hire. But the AACM was a composer's organization. People were there to compose their own music and they could do whatever else they wanted in other places.

I think eventually the people who weren't that interested in composition, who weren't that interested in personal modes of expression, found less and less reason to be there. The others who were found more and more reason to be there.

Simon: Do you also think this creating original music also goes hand in hand with African-Americans trying to get their equal rights, to be completely free in America?

George: If you don't feel free to express yourself, then you are definitely not free. In this sense, personal expression is kind of a human right. No one could say that Charlie Parker wasn't expressing himself by playing “Out of Nowhere” or whatever. But you have to remember that even there, they would take these old tunes and put new melodies on them. They would change the music around, create new harmonies or extend the harmonies that were already there. They were already putting their stamp on the music. So they weren't just accepting it as received wisdom, as young people are told they must do today.

So this is a time when musical self-determination and political self-determination were being conflated, and productively so, I think.

Simon: So would you consider the AACM to be a political organization in some way, especially in its inception?

George: Certainly a form of cultural politics, which has a huge impact on the way we conceive ourselves and how we live our lives. To place new cultural views before the public can be a political act.

Simon: As a political organization, you would probably obviously say it was pretty progressive in nature? It has even been called radical at times. Would you call the AACM radical?

George: Well, it could be radical, but “radical” isn’t always the next step beyond “progressive.” In the book I recount some instances in which there are some significant dislocations in terms of gender with specific AACM people, whose views in that area seemed radically different, but really not very progressive, at least as the women who experienced the issues saw things. Then as now, the connection between gender and race was very fraught. There were groups of people, devotees of a certain strain of black cultural nationalism, who felt that women's natural place was somehow behind their man. In a way it was very much a reproduction of certain kinds of patriarchy in the white community – that patriarchy that we now see in, I don't know, the Tea Party or something.

So in that sense you can't say that there was this monolithic leftism in the AACM. You'd have to say that the viewpoints were very diverse. It's hard to say there is a simplistic left position in which we can place the organization.

Simon: Do you think that the gender issue had more to do with other systems, say in Africa or in Islam, and those kinds of things reinforced those gender issues?

George: I would say that there was a lot of personal research into cultural systems in Africa. For example, a lot of those early books were passed around as a kind of samizdat. You had books like Cheikh Anta Diop's African Civilization – Myth or Reality? You had Chancellor Williams' The Destruction of Black Civilization. You had the stuff that Neely Fuller was putting out. You had the Frances Cress Welsing color theories.

There was so much going on, so much stuff that you could read. People were researching ancient Egypt. They were researching Islam, several different strains of Islam. As people know, there was the Ahmadiyya movement in the '50s. But I think that a lot of the variations were kind of home-grown in the community.

That's very American, you know, to reassemble tradition to meet the needs of any given community. Maybe it's not exclusively American. There are various syncretisms in the Caribbean or elsewhere. But it seems to me the American variant of that has much more to do with an image of what Africa might have been like or an image of what people wanted Africa to be like.

This is how cultural change occurs. People re-read or misread the so-called originals to create something new. I think this even goes on in the Islamic countries, where we start to hear that a lot of the so-called gender dynamics don't seem to be supported by what we read in the Koran, but would seem to be somehow connected with local conditions or local interpretations of the Koran.

Not having that background, I couldn't really comment further. But one could certainly notice that people often interpreted histories to meet their own personal, political, economic, and cultural needs[GL1] .

Simon: Did you ever think about changing your name to reflect your African ancestry?

George: No, I didn't want to get involved in all that, it never appealed to me. That was interesting because some people did and some people didn't. If you think about that whole name-changing thing, lots of people would put an African or Arabic name in front of their family name, because people wanted to have both. Maybe they didn't want to disrespect their families by changing their name, their family name. You became a Muhal Richard Abrams or an Amina Claudine Myers, a Hamid Drake or a Kelan Phil Cohran. So you had both things there.

Simon: The same thing was happening earlier too with Art Blakey.

George: What happened is that a lot of these names became Africanized through their association with African-Americans. For example, everyone named Washington is presumed to be African-American in this country, except for George Washington. He's the only one. The others, you know, that's an Africanized European name. So it seems to me that a lot of that process was already going on. There were people who felt they needed to go further.

But there is a whole section in the book that discusses the people who used naming to effect a greater identification with Africa. One of the interesting people in this regard was Ajaramu, the drummer, an early AACM member, who actually changed his name several times. We found out in fact that after he died the name he died under was not the name he had lived under.

So at a certain point Ajaramu starts to think, "Well, people are saying if you don't change your name then people will think you are European." Then he goes on to conclude, "Well, you know, that may not be so important in the long run, really. Maybe they'll know you by what you did rather than what your name was."

Simon: Could you go over quickly the variety of reasons a musician might be inclined to change their name?

George: One reason might be to somehow connect with Africa. Now the funny thing about it was that a lot of the people who connected with Africa in this way never actually visited Africa. For example, I don't think Muhal has ever been to Africa, and it’s not even clear that “Muhal” is either an African or an Arabic name. So in a way the invention or construction of Africa becomes as important as what the "Real Africa" is.

So naming might be a way of having one's own Africa, to establish some connection with Africa. But that didn’t mean that if you didn't change your name you didn't want to be connected with Africa. After all, even various African people seem to have their colonial names – Nelson Mandela – things of that sort. So it's all very complicated, I imagine, on both sides of the Atlantic. People have multiple overlapping identities.

Simon: Very interesting indeed. Now, another thing that is very particular to Muhal Richard Abrams, and maybe particular to the AACM, probably one of the biggest misconceptions of the AACM would probably be that it is a jazz club. Like a Jazz Association. It's devoted to jazz and they are a band that plays jazz.

George: I don't think there are any people involved in the beginnings of the AACM whose primary formation was in anything other than jazz, so that jazz is certainly the starting point. But jazz is a contested image at this time, and what sometimes happens in the world of jazz is that there is an emphasis on genre immobility, sort of like I think what Michel de Certeau called peasant immobility, the idea that nothing ever changes in these kinds of communities. People don't leave certain things. If they are born that way, it's the way they stay all their lives.

So it seemed to me that, had they wished to be named jazz, they could have just called it the “Association for the Advancement of Jazz Musicians.” So why didn't they do that? Why did they make up this thing called “Creative Musicians”?

Well, it was clearly to win some space for a new conception of themselves. It wasn't as simple as a denial of jazz, because people felt that jazz was creative music, and after all it was our music. Our people created it, so it's ours and it's creative--our creative music.

So you think, well, what does it mean to be a creative musician? It doesn't say you have to be allied with this or that genre. It mainly means you have to be creative. So the open field, the possibility for mobility seemed to animate the choice. So I wouldn't say that the idea of the AACM as a “jazz club” is a misconception. I would say it's more of a diminution. It's an immobilizing trope for people who sought freedom.

Simon: Muhal Richard Abrams hates to talk about the music, jazz music in categorical terms.

George: He doesn't want to talk about any music in categorical terms (laugh) He's not the categorical type of individual. People found that very liberating about him. But nobody likes categories. There’s that wonderful quote that the historian Eric Porter identified, where Duke Ellington goes to Dizzy Gillespie and says, or Dizzy Gillespie remembers that Duke Ellington told him: "Dizzy, you should've never let them call your music be-bop, because when they name something, it becomes dated."

Because the minute they did that, they – meaning whoever was in the power position – they were taking power by means of discourse. It's just straight up Michel Foucault. So you can place a name on someone or place someone in a genre or a space, and from that moment they are stuck.

So you have to be a trickster to evade all that, again as a matter of survival.

Simon: But a lot of people don't know that Muhal Richard Abrams has also devoted a lot of time and attention to classical structures. More people probably know him through his improvisation and more, shall I say, “jazz” sounding compositions.

George: I don't know. I think that depends on who you're talking to. I haven't done any surveys, so I have no idea how Muhal's work is considered. I just look at how he looks at himself. He seems to be looking at himself as a creative, multi-voiced artist. Once you accept that, then you can go anywhere Muhal wants you to go and you can go anywhere you want to go too.

I guess the other option is you can imagine a segment of the public that believes anything and then you can go in that direction. But it might be better, in encountering anyone's music, just to use your own ears. Asking people to use their own ears is once again a sign of asking people to take up the symbol of self-determination that the music itself presents. In other words, the music was born in an atmosphere of self-determination. So it invites you to self-determine as well, and to self-realize.

Simon: If I wanted to join the AACM, could I?

George: Probably not (laugh). That's another part that was very interesting in the book, as it happened. In the last part of the book, where people are discussing the past, present and future of the AACM in this virtual colloquy, I'm taking bits from the interviews and staging them and saying, well here's everyone who talked about this topic.

They talked about race and they talked about the very difficult incident in which the sole 'white' member of the AACM, who didn't think of himself as white at all, was ousted in the paroxysm of 1960s interest in what it meant to be culturally black.

At the time the idea of having an all-black organization was very difficult to digest. But in the wake of these kinds of organizations, now we find that there are single so-called race or ethnicity organizations of all kinds. So that seems to have receded as a concern. It seems to be accepted now that sometimes it's best to address issues of race by somehow adopting strategies that foreground or privilege notions of race. I think that was clear because of the perceived failure of multicultural coalitions to achieve success.

The idea comes in the wake of Black Power also, as you can imagine. If you read the text of Carmichael and Hamilton you start to see that Carmichael is challenging white people, "Instead of wanting to be members of 'our organizations,' go into your communities and agitate for a while. Why don't you do that?" Many people did.

That seemed to be something that seemed to militate against the kind of naïve form of proto-multiculturalism that had been on offer, avant la lettre--there was no such word as multiculturalism at the time. But multiracial coalitions seemed to many not to be doing the job, while being easily destabilized through appeals to white privilege. So you see that in the writings of the leftist groups of the period, the SDS for example, who adopt these points of view.

Simon: Does the AACM employ the One-Drop Rule when it comes to race?

George: I think that jazz itself employs a One-Drop Rule--the idea that if one drop of what you do is jazz, then everything you do is jazz. That only seems to apply to African-Americans. Everyone else can be mobile, and jazz can be a part of the network. You can be a jazz musician today. You can be a classical musician tomorrow. You can be some other variant the next day.

I point out the difference between, let's say, how an Anthony Braxton is considered and how someone else is considered, the idea that you could suddenly become that sort of protean individual. So I think that what's going to happen with the AACM is that some variant of it is going to decide that the old rules don't apply anymore. I have no idea when that's going to happen--probably around the time that other variants of the One-Drop Rule also disappear. A lot of the power structures are based on that, and around the time those disappear, people will feel more comfortable about taking a less vigilant stance on these matters. Right now, though, race has not gone away or disappeared as a factor. It's unfortunate, but that's how it is.

Simon: People in the media are obviously willing to point out the One-Drop Rule in very subtle and disturbing ways.

George: Oh, I don't know. I think the One-Drop Rule is not as important as the No-Drop Rule as far as I see. That's been the dominant rule as long as I can remember. Let's not have any African-Americans. One drop? That's already too much. It's not that it's too little.

Simon: A big point of creating the AACM is to workshop, and embedded in that language, means improvement, or an approach to improving your work. Muhal Richard Abrams talks about personal growth and people growing in the workshop environment.

But, he is extremely careful with putting any kind of value judgment on the work itself. He is very sensitive to saying a piece of art is a success or a failure. Can you break that down for me?

George: I'm not sure. It kind of reminds me of my dad (laugh). That's what he did. You learned not to say things were good or bad around him. That was the moment for a philosophical discussion and if you didn't want to have a philosophical discussion, you just avoided those terms.

Simon: Well, I've listened to a lot of Muhal's records and sometimes I don't get it at all. I can't relate to it. Were you ever in a position where you are creating experimental music and you are like, "No, I don't really care for this very much. It was interesting that we tried it. It was a nice experiment." But experiments are not always a success, right? At the end of the day you are searching for growth and you are searching for improvement.

When I asked Muhal about it, he said didn't look at it that way. He said, “It's like cooking an egg. You can cook an egg in a microwave. You can cook an egg on a stove or you can cook an egg on the sidewalk under the sun. They are all valid.” But if I had a follow-up, I would be like, "But you really wouldn't want to eat that egg if it was cooked on the sidewalk, would you?"

George: I guess I take a little different viewpoint, not speaking about eggs--but you see it all the time. My son has a book called “Good Luck, Bad Luck.” OK, bad luck, he missed the plane. Good luck, the plane crashed and he wasn't killed with it, and so on.

So the lesson, even for kids, is that time and life are sort of indeterminate, and rather than passing a momentary judgment, we could live in a state of continuous awareness. If we can do that, then we can see how much better it could be to learn from the total range of experience. Once we dismiss some aspect of the experience, once we commit the final judgment, then that aspect of experience is inaccessible to us. That's how I interpret his ideas. So if you don’t understand or appreciate some piece of music, you just try again, and in doing that you learn, about yourself at least.

You were never told in the AACM that your concept was not good. You were always told that it was good. As an academic, I can tell you that this seems totally alien to the notion of academic critique, where someone would come to you and say, "Well, you have to be told the 'truth' about your work."

I think Muhal felt deep down that most people already knew the truth about their work and there was no need for him to say anything to them, and that if he did, it might interfere with the learning process, which they had to go through on their own, to come to their own terms about what they were doing and then to learn what they could from their own work.

The learning process seemed more important than a judgment that led to the reification of a perspective. Instead, we say, "That was a nice experiment. Great. It was wonderful."

See, the thing is that he's not just saying, or I'm not just saying, that you want to avoid saying mean things about other people's work. You also want to avoid a categorical judgment. Once you decide that it's great then you have no further claim on it. You can't learn anything else from it. So your continuous awareness has been broken at that point. It's a mistake. You have to keep things fluid and mobile.

Simon: Can you talk about the pieces of music that immediately come to mind for you that directly reflect historical incidents that were happening during the time, perhaps like when John Coltrane died or the Chicago Riots of 1968 or anything historically going on?

George: Boy, it's funny because I'm not trained in that way. I come from the post-Cage period. Anything goes with anything. To find some musical essentialism, I just can't do it, which is why I would be a terrible film composer. I collaborated with Lev Manovich on “Soft Cinema.” There were 400 video clips that were deployed randomly and the music was deployed randomly. It looked fine to me.

Simon: But you do say that clearly the music that is being played is not created in this vacuum. The black avant-garde musicians are much more connected to what's going on around them and that's reflected in their music.

George: No, I'm not saying that in the book. What I guess I'm saying is that there were areas of experience with which the white experimental avant-garde seemed unwilling to connect. But their work certainly seemed reflective of their own experiences. That is certainly what connected them.

Now, when it starts to become complicated is when you have a multicultural experimental avant-garde, where everyone has to connect with all kinds of experiences. That is closer to what we have today. We’re not quite there, but it's coming closer, at least in the U.S., which seems to be the place where these kinds of weird hybrids get started.

But see, it's sort of a funny thing. You have Charles Ives, a lot of the American tradition is based on depicting things. Copland – even though the piece wasn't originally called “Appalachian Spring,” somehow naming it that seemed to work. Somehow it seemed to be something that made sense to them. But I haven't been a big depicter of things. So I guess I'm not sure I actually believe or even said that somehow one could draw a direct analogy between the music and the situation of the time.

Let me give you a simple example of how that fails. When John Coltrane was being asked by critics if he was angry, there are two answers you could give to that. One is, "Yes, the music expresses anger because I'm really angry."

That would have been a very bad answer because the first thing that people want to know in that situation is "Well, why are you so angry?" The tenor of the times would be, "You have no right to be angry--hasn't America been good to you?"

Of course, the answer is, "Well, not really. You just bombed a church with four children in it. What are you talking about? That's why I wrote this piece called Alabama."

So at a certain point Coltrane says, "Well no, I just want to acquaint people with the many wonderful things there are to experience in the universe,” which I think is true. But it is also a diversion because people like him had every right to be angry.

Now the thing is that when some people decided that this was the voice of anger and anguish and all of that, it didn't seem to match up with the experiences of the musicians, who weren't particularly angry when they were doing the music.

Those kinds of really simplistic tropes that match up the music with a certain emotion or something have always been really difficult for me to understand. Because what you really want is for music to be not reflective or depictive but evocative. In other words, if it is stuck in a certain period, then it stays in that period. But if it speaks to a contemporary experience, then it seems to be something that doesn't get stuck.

But we do have to look at the historical conditions. We have to look at the social conditions, the class conditions, the gender conditions, the racial mixtures and everything. Even then it becomes very unclear. I haven't been able to draw that one-to-one correspondence.

So yeah, it's very difficult for me. I don't think I can do it.

Simon: What about more explicit ways that some artists in the AACM used, like visual iconography, like dressing up in African wardrobe like the Art Ensemble of Chicago and using face paint and things like that?

George: Jarman talked about that in their book, their big Art Ensemble book. He talked about the iconography and what it represented. Lester Bowie was supposed to represent the experimentalist impulse. Roscoe Mitchell was supposed to represent the street hipster; generally you didn’t see him with face paint. Jarman was the pan-Asian person. Malachi (Favors) was supposed to represent the Egyptian mysteries and (Famoudou Don) Moye was supposed to represent a pan-African sensibility.

So what does all that add up to? Well, five different evocations of what it meant to be an African-American, and the clear implication was that there were more besides those. What they are depicting is a kind of fluidity and mobility of identity. They are not depicting "here's what it means to be African,” unless they are saying that being African is as mobile as anything else. Because if it isn't, then change can't happen.

Simon: We haven't talked about it and we should just because it's important: Great Black Music.

George: Great Black Music was a very contested slogan. When it came out certain people didn't like it. Muhal didn't like it, for example. Other people thought it was very appropriate. The definition and the commentary that I found in interviews by people like Bowie and others indicated that it was by no means limited to people who were black.

In other words, Stan Kenton could be making Great Black Music or La Monte Young could be making Great Black Music. It all depended upon what you were doing musically. It didn't depend on what your ethnicity was or what your race was or anything like that.

At the time there was a notion that the idea of Great Black Music had to be racist because you were admitting only a certain ethnicity or a certain race. The analogy was, well, what about “great other kind of music,” like some other ethnicity or some other race? What about “great that kind of music”?

Their answer would be "Go right ahead and do it.” I think Roscoe Mitchell said it best. They asked him why he made up the term Great Black Music. He said, "Well, because nobody was calling the music great,” which was a great answer. Back then, if you were going to go to “great performances” that meant going to Symphony Hall or somewhere. That didn't mean going to hear some African Americans, doing creative music or any other kind of music.

So for them to reframe themselves as great – they were already black, so renaming themselves as “Great Black” meant that they could suddenly tap into another set of associations. They were great because they came from this legendary tradition of great musicians.

You see, in a way it was just as conservative a notion of promulgating a canon of greatness as what we found later in the '80s. In fact, there are sociologists like Herman Gray, who make exactly that point, that what happened in the '80s with the Jazz at Lincoln Center people and this unitary canon of greatness had already been anticipated by what these other people were doing.

In fact, they actually had the canon in common, except for the part about stretching back to Africa. I don't think the '80s jazz people were into that as much. But no one, as far as I know, regardless of whether they liked the term Great Black Music or not, seriously questioned the idea that this music had roots in Africa. It seemed really obvious because the people had roots in Africa. So the music that came out of it was presumed to have those roots.

Let me go a little bit further with this. This is in the center of what we might want to think about.

Everyone had their own way of thinking about that. Some people did it through depiction in the manner of the Art Ensemble. They would have drums going and they would adopt certain rhythms or certain ways of doing things that would be evocative of Africa or pay homage to Africa or draw sustenance from African sonic tropes. That was one way to do it.

Another way to do it would be more like what I do in computer music, which is having things be very multiple. You embody rather than depict. I think that at the time of people like Jeff Donaldson and the AfriCOBRA art movement, you had lots of colors in avant-garde African American art. They were responding to these countries in Africa where everybody would have these very vibrant colors. There was none of this washed out color field stuff. Everybody was bright and vibrant.

We are getting closer to the sense of what happens here – and this is not limited to the AACM, but it's right across the board – well not starting with Louis Armstrong, but having that as being an important touchstone--a very vibrant, non-classical, open, sharp, bright trumpet sound.

So with the saxophonists Fred Anderson or Roscoe Mitchell, the sound was on the verge of breaking up. It's got all these overtones. It's very bright. It's very intense. So that bright, intense multiple sound ideal was something that is characteristic of the period. People linked that, at the time, synaesthetically, with the colors that they expected to find in Africa, and Africa being this huge construction.

I think that when people look for connections with Africa, they are expressing continuity. But then they reserve the right to have rupture, which is also very important. That's how you get revolutions and things like that.

Simon: Talk to me about this idea of silence and silences, creating silences. What do you mean by that?

George: It seemed to me the major thing that was important about jazz was that it was an outgrowth of a condition of silence. That is to say the thing that I found remarkable about slavery was the degree to which people were enforcing silence. People were afraid of slave music. They didn't know what it represented. They wanted those slaves to be quiet.

You had the laws against making drums or drumming or whatever – you didn't want that. Then of course, the silence of terror, where you didn't know what was going to happen to you or your family, where really speaking out could be a death sentence. Even acting out, expression itself, could be easily misinterpreted.

So the best thing to do was to be as quiet as possible or to go along. Now, when all that starts to end, at least for a brief period, or even while it was going on, ring shouts become a form of slavery participation performance, or post slavery participation performance, in which everyone gets their opportunity to speak.

Everyone is moving back and forth in a circle, and someone does some incredible thing, some star turn, and then they go back to the circle. The next person goes out and does something else. Whether they are trying to top each other, whether it's competition or cooperation or whatever, the point is people are getting a chance to speak.

So the idea that people should speak and that they have something personal to say, unique to say, gets retained in African American music. I think that accounts for its power really, the fact that it survived things like the McCarthy Period. Periodically, silence becomes the order of the day. The culture survived many years of terror in the southern United States and also in the north with all the race riots. It survived all those things basically through a reasserting and insisting on speaking.

While it seems important in another branch of the avant-garde to have conceptual silences, that is three- or four-minute voluntary silences, it's not something that a post-slavery person would choose, to feel that a voluntary silence would be evocative of their situation, because they had already had the involuntary silence. They might be much more likely to want to speak out.

Simon: Is there a piece of music where the use of silence is deafening? The silence is used in such a way that makes a poignant statement, by an AACM composer?

George: Leo Smith and Roscoe Mitchell became associated with very quiet spaces, things that presaged the arrival of the so-called reductionist improvisers. They would have long stretches where no one would apparently be doing anything. There would be these long silences with groups like the Leo Smith-Anthony Braxton-Leroy Jenkins Trio.

I remember Leo telling me that at the beginning they did these pieces in all kinds of space, including traditional jazz clubs. They would do these silent pieces, and at some point somebody just said, "Play something or get off the stage!"

Now that's a voluntary silence that's deafening, if you want to look at it that way. The person just couldn't take it. What did it mean to engage in that kind of supposed self-abnegation? Or is it that we are asking people to listen to their own inner voices and juxtapose that, blend that with the noises they hear all around?

Of course there is a blending with the so-called ultimate silence piece, which is 4'33,” which shows you once again that –

Simon: The John Cage piece?

George: Yeah. 4'33" gets syncretized with the African-American experience. You've got these very interesting hybrids that you wouldn't get from either one alone.

Simon: Talk to me about Chicago. Tell me about the segregation of the North and South side and just the feeling. Can you paint a picture?

George: Of course I can't paint the same picture that the people who lived through the worst parts of it could do.

The AACM is a product of the Great Migration, really one of the largest, if not the largest internal migrations in the history of the US, if not the world. The Great Migration lasted from about 1915 to, let's say, the late 1960s. African-Americans left the rural South in large numbers to migrate to Northern, urban spaces – Harlem, Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, not so much to the West, but mainly to the Midwest and East. Chicago got the nod because of the railroads and, and then you have the New Orleans-to-Chicago route that jazz supposedly followed, and so on. But when people got to Chicago, they found that it wasn't like the Chicago Defender said, you know, this land of milk and honey.

Sure you found a job maybe, but you lived in often very squalid conditions. There were lots of fires. There was endemic segregation. It was an incredibly, incredibly crowded tiny space in which the African-Americans were basically being herded like cattle. People were living in one-bedroom apartments with five or six people in them. There was a lack of amenities, running water, heat, all these kinds of things – coal-fired stoves in the middle of the room. It was ridiculous.

So this is the environment of many of the AACM people, the earliest generation. This is what they grew up in. It's not how I grew up. But it was close to how I grew up. I was just a few years removed from that because I do remember the coal stove.

When I was growing up in the 1950s and 60s, the South Side of Chicago was one of those places where, except for Hyde Park, you really didn't see very many white people, or anybody else except for blacks everywhere. In spite of that it was a very mobile space. When you have that many people crammed together in one space and they all know each other very well, you get a community that's in some ways very insular, in some ways very open and outward looking. A crucible.

The 60s were a period in which the intensification of a kind of endemic depression of the area increased markedly. The classic novel on that is The Spook Who Sat By the Door, which is an amazing book by Sam Greenlee.

Simon: Do you think the AACM – Great Black Music – was nationalistic? Do you think because Chicago was so fiercely segregated and probably rougher than other urban areas around the United States -- did that somehow condition the AACM in a particular way?

George: I don't see the AACM as terribly nationalistic, Great Black Music notwithstanding, because as I said, a lot of people didn't accept that. People were free to call their music whatever they liked. Just as long as you don't call my music Great Black Music, you can call your music whatever you like.

So no, I don't see the AACM as an artifact of that sort of very narrow brand of black cultural nationalism, even though cultural nationalism in the more open sense was a strong influence. But I could certainly see that the AACM is an obvious product of the South Side of Chicago because it responded to the conditions of extreme segregation, or what the urban studies people called hyper-segregation.

It was a community of African-Americans who were thrown upon their own resources to create, living in a very circumscribed environment and looking for ways out of that circumscribed environment. Of course what happens is, by the time 1969 rolls around, a lot of them – well, not a lot of them, just a few – leave.

But they don't go to New York. This isn’t the standard sort of Chicago-to-New York jazz narrative. Instead, they do something kind of unprecedented for the black urban class. They go to Paris.

Now the black middle class had been going there and becoming expatriates for quite a while, but now you had the working class people – Frank Wright, people like this. That was a totally different environment--the boys who had grown up in the cut-and-shoot stuff. They went to Paris and transformed their lives there.

But we were talking really, I guess about Chicago.

There were very nationalist organizations in Chicago. After Phil Cohran left the AACM, he started the Affro-Arts Theater and[GL2] he started his own workshops. They brought in wonderful people. They brought in Amiri Baraka, who was already lionized in almost all segments of the black community. They brought in the then-named Stokely Carmichael. They connected things up with – Phil was always very interested in the “classical” aspects of African American tradition, particularly gospel music. So he had people doing that.

It was a staging ground for The Pharaohs and for the people who would later form the band Earth Wind & Fire. It all came out of that era in Chicago, and crossed over with the AACM people in a lot of different respects.

Obviously the Nation of Islam, also Chicago-based, was involved in that. You had so many organizations – OBAC – the Organization of Black American Culture, the artists who created the Wall of Respect street mural. Later you had the Kuumba Dance Workshop--all these cultural groups dedicated to various kinds of black cultural nationalism or pan-African cultural nationalism.

I'd say the AACM was one of those. But I would also say that there was always a part of it that resisted anyone who came with a dogma. People didn't buy it. There was always somebody there to ask a question or to say, "Well, I don't know if I believe that,” or to avoid it or something like that. People weren't true believers, except in the power of their own music, and that was sometimes very difficult.

We’ve mainly been talking about the first generation of the AACM, but the AACM lasted. It’s been going on for 46 years. There are whole generations of AACM people who came later who have a rather different set of viewpoints.. The AACM musicians of the 80s and 90s in Chicago totally embraced the concept of Great Black Music.

They took that slogan as a legacy for themselves and some were surprised to find, I think, when they read the book, that it wasn't considered universal, wasn't universally admired.

But that was the purpose of the book, to speak across the generations.

Simon: Thank you for speaking with me, George.

George: My pleasure.

---EniOlorutidak'oseFarawek'oseF'enutembelek'oseBinuk'oseNa'kaiwosisiWiwol'aawo

On eve of Nigerian elections and the opening of 'Fela!' in Lagos, Femi Kuti talks politics, legacy, and music

2011-04-14T22:41:00.002+01:00

By Jessica Hundley
Femi Kuti makes something more than music. His dozen or so album releases and hugely popular concerts (“one of the more powerful live shows on Earth,” according to the Onion) are imbued with the weight of family legacy and Kuti’s own individual intents.
It is "music as message" in a way few acts take on these days –- protest and admonishment and hope all embedded in Afrobeat exuberance. In his own words, Kuti’s songs are his primary “weapon” in a lifelong struggle to bring awareness and resolution to the strife in his home country of Nigeria.

The eldest son of the great musician and activist Fela Kuti, Femi began his musical career at age 16 as a member of his father’s band. After Fela’s death in 1997, Kuti continued in his father’s footsteps, embracing outspoken activism, maverick musicianship and a relentless tour schedule. His newest effort, Africa for Africa (released April 12 on Knitting Factory Records), was recorded in the same studio where he first laid down tracks with his father.

A direct return to his roots, the album embraces raw funk and deliberately dirty production -– a mix of joyous dance beats and deeply potent lyricism. With the upcoming presidential elections in Nigeria on April 16 and the opening next week in Lagos of the Broadway hit “Fela!,” Kuti is raising his voice high, still seeking, through music, revolution, renewal and redemption.

Pop & Hiss: I’d like to hear your thoughts on music as a method of communication, a way to connect to the times. I think great music is always indicative of the moment that it’s made in. With that said, can you talk a bit about the intent of this particular record and ideally what you would like people to take from it?

Femi Kuti: I think the most important thing for Africans to understand, especially the young people of Africa to understand, is that all African countries, despite their political structures, are all one people. I want them to see that we are brothers and sisters and to try to love one another instead accepting this divide that exists for very stupid, ignorant reasons. We need to unite Africa, because we are so far behind the rest of the world. We need to take steps toward health and education for our children. We need to take care of ourselves and not rely on the West, on the rest of the world, to solve our problems.

Finally, people need to understand what 500 years of slavery did to Africa, what 50 years of colonialism did to Africa, what so many recent years of corrupt government has done to Africa. Young people, especially, need to understand this history in its context. They need to understand what people like Marcus Garvey, my father, my grandmother, people like this who sacrificed their time and their lives to fight for the emancipation of Africa.

People need to understand the past in order to step into the future. Africa has resources –- the human resources of great African doctors, athletes and artists -– collectively, as a nation, we have natural resources as well. We have what it takes to move into this future. I am trying to enlighten people on these issues and trying to encourage them to move forward.

Why do you think music is such an effective tool to communicate these messages? You’ve called it your “weapon,” and your family, of course, has always been utilizing music in this way. What makes music so powerful?

I think there are many reasons. The most important is that music is a way to make very complex things understandable, palatable. Especially for young people, people in their teens, these topics are hard to understand; these issues are difficult to digest. Young people want to have fun. They don’t want to go to hear a lesson, but if you incorporate that lesson into a musical form, it’s a way for them to understand. You could put the knowledge of a whole book into a few lines of music, and because of this, the listener can quickly visualize everything on a large scale.

Growing up, listening to my father, I was able to understand what his deeper message was. It opened my mind. His music passed on information in a way that was pleasurable, simple, moving. Young people can dance and sing, and then it is only later that they realize what the song was talking about, that it had a deeper meaning. Music is very powerful that way.

Can you talk a bit about the elections of the last few weeks and of the upcoming presidential elections in Nigeria and how have they differed in the past?

We have had years of corruption. Africans are impatient right now. They just want to make enough money to live their lives. They want a job to support their families. This is a worldwide issue, of course, at the moment. The world is struggling right now. In Africa, truly democratic elections are still evolving as a process, but they seem to be much better this time, in part because we, as a people, as voters, have the same needs. We are unified in the same pressing desire for the basic rights to an education, to healthcare, to roads, electricity -- this is the right of everyone in Africa. It belongs to the bus driver, the household workers. It’s not just for the elite. It’s for all Africa. So we are hoping that these elections are closer to attaining some form of democracy for us.

And you are part of bringing the "Fela!," the Broadway production of your father’s life, to Lagos next week. Can you talk a bit about that?

A: I wanted people here to see how Americans saw the story of my father and how he changed the world. Now, a lot of critics here resent that the show is coming because they don’t feel it’s “African” enough. They resent that an American is playing my father. They are making judgments about the performance and the dance -- that it's not “African” dance. But these are trivial criticisms. If you keep an open mind, you see that the Americans were able to communicate the message of my father in a way anyone can immediately understand.

I didn’t go to the show on Broadway wanting to see my father. I didn’t go to the show to see “African” dance. I wanted to see a show that expressed the essence of what my father meant to the world. I cried when I saw the show because that message came across so powerfully. I’m hearing complaints like the American star of the show doesn’t look like my father or sound like my father -– blah, blah, blah. But they are complaints from minds that are not open. What I want to know is, if you are going to complain about the Americans telling this story, why didn’t an African company do the show themselves? Why did no Nigerian produce this show years ago?

If it were not for this show, then I’m not sure if as many of people would be talking about my father today. Now that’s not to say that the average person on the street here in Lagos will not come and enjoy and be moved and satisfied by the show. I think the average person here will love the show. The Americans succeed in communicating my fathers’ life in a way that is understandable to all cultures. If you were to take this show to Japan, people would understand, because the Americans have told it in way that crosses those boundaries. So I think it’s important that people here in Nigeria set aside their assumptions and open their minds to it.

You’ve been playing music (with your father first) when you were 16 and have been carrying on the work of your father, in your own individual way, since his death. Does that legacy ever weigh heavily on you?

Sometimes I do think that I wish could be somewhere in Hawaii on the beach or something. And of course, I would like to be able to spend more time with my family. But these are selfish thoughts, especially when you compare this to the history of my family. There are people in my family, and many, many other people in history, who knew they might be killed for what they were doing. So you can’t compromise when you see injustice and you see the truth. I try to give myself to my family as well as to my music, but I cannot compromise.

You just had a child a few days ago. Do you have hope for the future, for the world that she’ll become a woman in?

There are so many good people in the world, people who truly want peace and love and want it now. The world at this moment is going through a very drastic, very bad time. And all these recent natural disasters -- the tsunami in Japan -- these are heartbreaking things beyond our control. But we do have control over what we do as people. And we do have control of our own lives. I try to do my music and be strong and be there for my children and keep alive that hope for the future.

Culled from Los Angeles Times

---EniOlorutidak'oseFarawek'oseF'enutembelek'oseBinuk'oseNa'kaiwosisiWiwol'aawo

Should artists accept “dirty money”?

2011-04-14T14:39:00.001+01:00

Culled from The Cultural Weapon

Should artists accept “dirty money”?

Mike van Graan

A number of things strike one on entering Bamako, the capital of Mali. The first is the majestic Niger River responsible for much of the green in an otherwise dusty, gravelly, semi-desert city. Another is the industriousness of the people in an obviously poor country, as everyone is trying to generate even a meagre income selling mangoes, chickens and home-made furniture, or Chinese-manufactured T-shirts, electricity adapters and slip slops. Then there are some incongruously tall buildings and hotels, a number of the latter bearing the name “Libya Hotels”. One garish building is named after the Libyan dictator, Gaddafi, who has funded this – still empty - structure to house the Malian cabinet. There are two bridges across the Niger with a third being built by the Chinese.

As one walks through the market, there are hand-made posters in defence of Gaddafi, and in conversation with some of the locals, it is clear that there is much sympathy for the one time, wannabe-head of the United States of Africa.

Mali is ranked in the top half of the Mo Ibrahim Index on Governance in Africa and shares second spot for the best media freedom in Africa. But Mali is one of the poorest countries in the world with an average income of $680 per year and a ranking of 160 (out of 179 countries) on the Human Development Index. Should a country like Mali that is making great strides in human rights and freedoms – but which is relatively poor and in need of development assistance – accept aid from countries with extremely poor records in human rights and media freedom?

This is a similar question vexing some artists and arts organisations: should they accept “dirty money” that contradicts their own values of freedom of expression and fundamental human rights? Funding is often used to buy credibility, to buy political or other influence, to boost an image in need of a makeover, or simply to co-opt and mute critical thought and practice.

So, should arts organisations, cultural institutions and individual artists – given that they often struggle to survive and are more often than not in need of funding – accept support from countries with poor human rights records and that might even suppress artistic freedom in their own countries? How far back does one go to determine whether money is “dirty”? Previous Cultural Weapons have highlighted how European countries like France, the United Kingdom and Germany are increasingly compromising fundamental human rights and principles of cultural diversity, particularly with regard to immigrant communities. So, should funding be accepted from these countries? Is their funding not rooted in the repressive colonial period, partly in contemporary neo-colonial relationships and their current trade with countries that do not have exemplary human rights records?

And how many western countries that profess support for human rights and democracy, such as the USA, are not guilty of direct or indirect abuse of human rights whether through the torture of prisoners, illegal wars (not sanctioned by the United Nations) or propping up repressive regimes that serve their interests?

But if government funding may be dirty, what of funding from the private sector, from those that trade with and so sustain governments that abuse human rights, or who generate profits through weapons that are used for war against citizens, or through environmental destruction or simply through highly exploitative labour practices or who put profits before people such as drug companies who deny cheaper life-saving drugs to people who need them? Should funding be accepted from such companies? And what of more “harmless” funding from tobacco companies or wine companies that impact directly or indirectly on health and social problems? Should artists accept funding from the lottery that some regard as another form of tax, especially on the poor?

The reality is that it is very difficult, if nigh impossible, to find “clean money”, that in a world as structurally and historically inequitable as ours, with the global free market perpetuating these inequities, it is likely that all funding is tainted in some way or another. So then, is funding from any source morally acceptable, simply because it is unlikely to find funding that is not morally compromised through its generation, its source, its role or the associated strings?

Prof Es’kia Mphahlele, a highly respected South African writer and community activist who passed away a few years ago once said to the effect of “the closer dirty money gets to me, the cleaner it becomes”.

His was a pragmatic approach, one that did not see the world in binary opposites, but as a morally complex labyrinth. If the money is used to achieve a good end or a morally sound objective, then that would be acceptable in terms of this approach.

Sometimes, it is those with options, those with resources, those in relatively privileged positions who may make more “moral” choices so that a more wealthy country may not accept funding from Gaddafi, but a country like Mali – also trying to assert greater economic and political independence from its former colonial master - has fewer options. Similarly, artists and arts organisations with greater funder or income diversity are more able to adopt morally superior positions than those with less access to international or other funding sources. (Not only do the rich have more options, but they can also be more opportunistic, such as the artists from the West who were paid huge amounts to perform at a Gaddafi function, only to rush to return or donate the money to charity after he turned his guns on protesting Libyans).

The locals in Mali speak of how the construction of the building to house the country’s cabinet ministers is often halted by Gaddafi when he is unhappy with some internal Malian policy or international public position that Mali takes. (One can but wonder about the dynamics and varying interests of the current AU delegation to Libya that includes the Malian President).

In a complex global economic and political order where there are few absolutes with respect to human rights and only degrees of respect for such universal values, it is unlikely that one can adopt a one-size-fits-all policy about whom to accept funding from, and who not. It would appear to be a question of whether the individual artist or the organisation could live with the written and unspoken strings that come with such funding. Would an association with the source of funding compromise one’s image or the pursuit of one’s core objectives? Would it compromise one’s ability to “speak truth to power” and be a form of co-option or lead to self-censorship? Will it compromise solidarity with artists in the country of the source of funding?

Generally, there is a contract between a donor and the recipient spelling out the terms and conditions of the funding arrangements, and articulating the expectations of the donor. Perhaps - at least for organisations concerned about harming their image and reputations with funding from potentially compromising sources – recipients should draft a document that would form part of the contract, outlining their own values and principles, and the terms upon which such funding is accepted i.e. that the organisation will not change its principles, values, objectives or forsake its right to speak truth to power, even if such “power” includes the donor.

NOTES
1. The views expressed in this column are entirely those of the writer and are necessarily representative of any of the organisations in which he is involved.
2. This column may be forwarded by the recipient to any other interested party, and may be reproduced by any publication or website at no charge, provided that writer is acknowledged.
3. To engage with the content of this column or to provide feedback, go to www.mikevangraan.wordpress.com

Mike van Graan is the Secretary General of Arterial Network, a continent-wide network of artists, activists and creative enterprises active in the African creative sector and its contribution to development, human rights and democracy on the continent. He is also the Executive Director of the African Arts Institute (AFAI), a South African NGO based in Cape Town that harnesses local expertise, resources and markets in the service of Africa’s creative sector. He is considered to be one of his country’s leading contemporary playwrights.

For further information, see www.arterialnetwork.org, www.africanartsinstitute.org.za and www.mikevangraan.co.za

---EniOlorutidak'oseFarawek'oseF'enutembelek'oseBinuk'oseNa'kaiwosisiWiwol'aawo

For the masquerade who danced out eternal

2011-04-08T03:31:00.002+01:00

Olusola, Onobrakpeya, Babawale pay tribute to Beier
THE GUARDIAN, THURSDAY, 07 APRIL 2011 00:00 BY MICHAEL ORIE AND YEMI OLAKITAN ART - ARTS

DAYS after the death of the venerable arts and culture enthusiast, Ulli Beier, tributes and encomium have continued to pour in for the man who opened the Osogbo Art to the world.
According to Prof. Tunde Babawale, Director General of Centre for Black and African Arts and Civilization (CBAAC), Beier was passionate about Nigeria arts and culture. While commiserating with the entire art and culture community over the passing on of the culture promoter, Babawale said, “was as a unique personality who made passionate and indelible contributions to the development and popularisation of Yoruba arts and culture.”
The DG said Beier provided an enduring platform for interaction between Yoruba indigenous ideas, beliefs and practices and the European cultural space, the legacy of which is the Iwalewa House at the University of Bayreuth, which continues to host scholars in different areas of African Studies.

Prof. Babawale also recalled how the deceased enriched the holdings of Centre for Black Culture and International Understanding (CBCIU), Osogbo, by handing over his historical collections, which now provide a photographic history of Yoruba traditional institution, architecture, artistes and other areas of Yoruba culture in the gallery of CBCIU.
Chief Segun Olusola said, “his death is a significant loss to us; he lived a full rewarding life in the 50s in Ibadan at that time when I started as a TV producer in 1959.
The culture patriarch said “he became a constant companion and counsellor. I spent nights with him in Osogbo, while working with Duro Ladipo and his group at that time and he encouraged my warm relationship with Timi Ede, the master drummer.”
Olusola added, “in Ibadan, we worked on a number of theatre and TV projects and with Mbari group of artists.
“ After he left Nigeria, we met at Port Moresby Papua New Guinea North of Austrialia, there we reached out to the first generation of theatre artiste in that country and my story telling sessions became an unforgettable late night affairs with the students of Papua New Guinea.
“Ulli and I also met at Frankfurt in Germany. On two occasions, when he returned to Nigeria we sat at my to recount our days in those place and the long history we have kept. We miss him and the industry too.”
In keeping to his legacy, Olusola observed “I hope Tunji will remain a Nigeria child, as a drummer, it will be difficult for us to forget Beier.”
On the issue of Beier staying back in Nigeria before he returned to his country, Olusola said, “nobody stood on his way of living permanently in Nigeria, there were rather pressures, the first wife lived and died in Nigeria, in Osogbo. He did not mind staying, just that the arrangement did not work out this has nothing to do with Nigeria not wanting him to stay, rather that will be an indictment on people like us for not accommodating him in Nigeria. I don’t think there are any stories of Nigeria refusing to accommodate him,” he said
For the artist Bruce Onobrakpeya, Beier was a very important figure in Nigerian arts.
According to him, Beier made a great impact in the development of Nigerian arts, particularly, the visual arts.
He said, “Nigeria and indeed Africa would miss him a great deal. ‘In fact the global arts community in the world would miss him”
Onobrakpeya said Beier made a lot of impacts on numerous Nigerian visual artists such as Jimoh Buraimoh, Twin 77 and himself.
He said, “he made such tremendous through his various workshops in Osogbo, Ibadan and Ife that he became larger than life in the arts scene, bringing in teachers, instructors and participants from outside Nigeria.
According to the paint master, ‘‘His workshops were an inspiration to all of us. He was a great mentor. These workshops are what made Beier immortal in Nigerian arts scene. In fact, I created my harmattan workshops as a direct inspiration from his work in the Oshogbo workshops. There were also many theater artistes who got inspired through his work. His relationship with the late Duro Ladipo also helped developed Nigerian theatre because he contributed his talents and insights. The glory that Osogbo art enjoyed today was due in part to Beier’s contribution and various workshops there. He was responsible to a large extent to the development of Osogbo arts. Beier was a very important figure in 20th century Nigerian arts and we would miss him greatly.”

Rain of tributes for culture scholar, Ulli Beier
THE GUARDIAN WEDNESDAY, 06 APRIL 2011 00:00 BY KABIR ALABI GARBA ART - ARTS

TORRENTS of tributes have continued to pour in for the late culture icon, Prof. Ulli Beier. In the words of Osun State governor, Ogbeni Rauf Aregbesola, the demise of Beier is “a hole in the history of mankind that will take some hard time to fill.”
In a statement by Director, Bureau of Communications and Strategy, Office of the Governor, Osogbo, Semiu Okanlawon, the governor said the state government appreciated Beier’s “decision to utilize his ability to shape the course and engender the preservation of man’s progress through the theatre of life.”
The statement reads further: “For more than 40 years, his contact with Africa, the Nok Culture and Yoruba civilization became a hugely engaging revelation that shamed pessimists and further strengthened the capacity of the Black man to secure a place of his in the history of mankind.
“Along with Susanne Wenger, Beier, who was better known as a Black man in white skin, assisted the anthropological evolution, historical relevance, artistic creativity and emergence of first class artists of different genre in Africa.
“It was through his efforts that artistic titans like Duro Ladipo (Sango), Jimoh Buraimoh and others were unleashed on the world to showcase the potential of people that were not recognized as part of history. He encouraged the production of Oba Koso, a world-class drama that confirmed the sophistication of African people before the advent of colonialists.”
According to the governor, although the cultural titan, like all mortals, “has gone to the land of the spirits, his giant footprints remain indelible and matchless in the character of great minds that shaped the course of mankind.”
Similarly, former Nigeria’s ambassador to UNESCO, Prof. Michael Omolewa said,
“the transition to glory of Prof. Ulli Beier is a cause for celebration. Here is a man who had lived a fulfilled life. An intellectual, he spent his time and life outside the university walls, working in the Department of Extra-mural Studies and then moving out to African studies and finally living among the art practitioners.
“Although a European, he devoted his passion to appreciating African culture and art. He was not limited by space as he moved around all continents and regions of the world with his commitment and dedication to the protection of diversity.”
The renowned diplomat during whose tenure as Permanent Delegate of Nigeria to UNESCO, the global culture body ratified Nigeria’s desire to host Centre for Black Culture and International Understanding (CBCIU) in Osogbo said, “but we can also liken this quality transition to the burning down of a library and a cultural heritage site.”
Prof. Omolewa explained further, “For Ulli Beier carried with him immense treasure, profound knowledge and knowledge of the cultures and practices of the people. Yoruba culture was close to his heart and his work among the Osogbo people brought him honour and dignity, respect and recognition. Many people will recall how in 2008, his name was effectively linked to the justification for the establishment in Nigeria of the first Category 2 Institute in Culture for Africa by UNESCO. He was a gift from Germany to Africa.”
According to Prof. Dapo Adelugba, “it is very sad to hear of the passing on of the great scholar practitioner of culture and all round teacher and educationist.”
In the words of Adelugba, “Beier had 89 eventful years, which he spent selflessly and in the course of the humanities. He spent a good portion of his active life in Nigeria and he was innovative in his approach to cultural and artistic studies. I have no doubt that elaborate celebrations of his life and work both in Nigeria and in other countries of the world must by now be in progress. May his noble soul rest in perfect peace.”
The erudite scholar, however, urged “cultural experts in our ministries and culture departments and in our various universities and arts centres to hurry up with the grand plan for the celebrations.”
For Prof. Ahmed Yerima: “I never saw Beier as a German; I saw him as a Nigerian. He rediscovered a path for us, especially in the Yoruba culture, and some of the symbols of our culture. So, he delved deeply into our culture with the establishment of Mbari Mbayo in Osogbo where artists like Twin Seven Seven were discovered, his work at the Osogbo groove with his Austrian wife, Susanne Wenger, and then his intellectual work by assisting our intellectuals to be heard outside. All these show that he came for a mission.”
According to Dr. Osita Okagbue, who teaches African Theatre History, Postcolonial Theatre, Culture and Performance, Analytic Vocabularies, and Modernisms and Postmodernity at Goldsmiths, University of London, “Professor Beier did contribute immensely to African Studies and should rightly be remembered and celebrated by all, especially those who knew and worked closely with him.”
To culture activist and former Deputy Editor of The Guardian, Ben Tomoloju, Beier had been a pioneering protagonist of cultural dialogue across the world. “We are particularly appreciative of the works he has done in Nigeria, in terms of probing into the fundamental elements of indigenous culture. His interaction with some of our pioneer literary, performing and visual artists also provided a boost to the quality of contemporary Nigerian Art,” Tomoloju reminisced.
The late culture scholar, according to Tomoloju, “was not without some errors of judgement. For instance, in the legitimacy of African theatre, he ran into controversy with Nigerian researchers concerning the status of African theatre, but it was all a learning process that was duly resolved in favour of the global legitimacy of African theatre.”
The veteran journalist also regretted the inability to realize Beier’s wish to return to Nigeria and spend the rest of his life.
“It was kind of unfortunate that his wish in the 1990s to return to spend the rest of his life in Nigeria was frustrated by the officialdom. Otherwise, by now, Nigeria and Nigerian culture sector would have been hosting the entire world to the largest gathering of intellectuals in an unprecedented rite of passage to one of the leading citizens of the world,” remarked Tomoloju.
The Centre for Black and African Arts and |Civilization (CBAAC) has also commiserated with the entire art and culture society over the passing away of African culture enthusiast and promoter, Ulli Beier. Director-General of the Centre, Prof. Tunde Babawale, in a statement described Beier as a unique personality who made passionate and indelible contributions to the development and popularisation of Yoruba arts and culture. The DG said Ulli Beier provided an enduring platform for interaction between Yoruba indigenous ideas, beliefs and practices and the European cultural space, the legacy of which is the Iwalewa House at the University of Bayreuth, which continues to host scholars in different areas of African Studies.
Prof. Babawale also recalls how the deceased enriched the holdings of Centre for Black Culture and International Understanding (CBCIU), Osogbo, by handing over his historical collections which now provide a photographic history of Yoruba traditional institution, architecture, artistes and other areas of Yoruba culture in the gallery of CBCIU.

How Yoruba culture deepens Ulli Beier’s knowledge of humanity
THE GUARDIAN TUESDAY, 05 APRIL 2011 00:00 BY TAJUDEEN SOWOLE

During his last visit to Nigeria in 2005, Prof Ulli Beier who passed on two days ago in Sydney, Australia, at 91, explained to TAJUDEEN SOWOLE how the Yoruba culture strengthened his knowledge about humanity
IT was the second day of the photography exhibition by Beier titled The Face of the Gods: Yoruba Kings, Priests and Children, held at the Arts Gallery, Institute of Cultural Studies, Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Osun State.
The exhibition was organized by the institute in honour of Oba Moses Oyinlola (the Olokuku of Okuku 1892 – 1960) as part of a book launch. The book titled Every Inch A King: A Biography Chronicling the Legacy of Service of Oba Moses Oyewole Oyinlola, Olokuku of Okuku, (1934-1960) was co-written by Lasisi Olagunju, Bamidele Salam, Kayode Oladeji and Wole Ogundele.
Beier, during a chat at the staff quarters of the university explained how the royal class’ harmonization of Christianity and Islam with the traditional religion fascinated him. He cited the example of Oba Timi Laoye of Ede. “He was a Christian, educated through the American Baptist church. He would go to church on Sundays, to the mosque on the major Muslim festivals and still celebrate during the traditional Yoruba festivals.”
He also noted that this humility radiated in the children who “in the presence of elders were never unruly like European children.” Despite this seemingly submissiveness, the children, he noted, were given considerable rights. “A mother could not scold her child freely without facing protest from other women in the neighborhood.”
And on his larger cultural mission, he stated that through the royal fathers such as Timi of Ede, Oba Adetoyese Laoye; Ataoja of Osogbo, Oba Samuel Adeleye Adenle; Oogoga of Ikere, Oba Adegoriola; Olokuku of Okuku, Oba Moses Oyinlola, he was able to learn more.
Beier reminisced: “I was fortunate that I met Timi Laoye, one of my early students in the extramural classes. Through Laoye, I met other Obas like Adenle, Adegoriola and Oyinlola (father of the Governor) of Osun State.” Beier was so passionate about the Yoruba culture such that he gave himself different native names. One of such, perhaps, well known among the people is ‘Obotunde Ijimere.’
He also recounted how he met Oba Oyinlola in 1954, an encounter that would later “help me to study the history of Okuku and record the oriki of the kings and the people.”
His academic sojourn, he said had led him to the larger world of Yoruba cultural studies outside the school. “I had come to the college (University College Ibadan) to teach English, but I also had the freedom to introduce courses in African Literature, which I believed would be more interesting to my students than Chaucer, Milton and Wordsworth.”
On Yoruba art, Beier, in the brochure of the exhibition noted that the wood carvers whose works were largely of the doors and columns for the palaces as well as shrine doors, sacred images and masks for the egungun (masquerades) “did not consider themselves as people of a special standing in the society as their Western counterparts have done.”
And on a larger scale, Beier’s contribution to the informal sector of art education started with workshops for artisans in parts of Ife and Osogbo. He said of the people’s art: “In Yoruba art, as in all great art, form and content are completely identical. The artist, like the priest, operates on a certain level of consciousness, where he is in close contact with trees, animals, spirits.”
Beier’s study of the people also suggests a mystic perspective to the people’s culture. “Yoruba are particularly sensitive to inner vibrations of the world; they are still in tune with nature. They can still see meaningful relationships between certain natural forces, historical personalities, the force associated with certain animals, the magic quality of minerals or even colours.”
Although Beier and his partner, British-born Georgina, also included the Eastern part of the country in their experimentation, the Ife-Osogbo axis ended up as the couple’s major focus for which they are known till date.
From the several workshops spanning a period of five years, skills of artists such as Oyelami, Jimoh Buraimoh, Twin Seven Seven Jacob Ogundele, Rufus Ogundele were elevated beyond the artisan level. And it was not just about visual art, but culture in general: some of the performing artists who were brought to broader public glare through workshops were Yemi Elebuibon, late Oyin Adejobi, Tidjani Mayakiri, Ademola Onobonokuta and Lere Paimo.
However, the workshops for the visual artists, he noted, was made much easier when his partner Georgina joined him. Beier insisted that the workshop initiative was never “meant to teach the artists,” but to motivate them.
In 1949, Susanne Wenger, a lady who would later become Beier’s partner, met the linguist in Paris. Beier and Wenger came to Nigeria, settled in Ibadan and later moved to Ede where she also started inspiring artisans and helped enriched their art skills through the Yoruba traditional religion. Wenger an Austrian-born artist who adopted Nigeria as home and became a high priestess in Osogbo died in the ancient town on January 12, 2009. She was aged 93.
More interesting, four decades after Beier and his partner Georgina left Osogbo, the seed of cultural renaissance planted has grown into another dimension: UNESCO Centre for Black Culture and International Understanding (CBCIU) in Osogbo, which was commissioned on Wednesday, January 7, 2009. houses works of the Beiers. Some of the couple’s works returned by Beier during the commissioning of the centre are books, posters and photographers. In a message sent to the occasion through his son, Olatunji Beier, he stressed that Osogbo remains the spiritual home of the works compiled by him and his wife during their stay in Nigeria. .
The important role of the Beiers in documenting Yoruba art and culture was brought to fore earlier as controversy arose over where these works should be kept.
In 2008, UNESCO’s Goodwill Ambassador, Soyinka, had campaigned strongly against what he termed clandestine plan to deposit these works at UNESCO-designated Institute of African Culture and International Understanding located within Olusegun Obasanjo Presidential Library (OOPL), Abeokuta, Ogun State. Also, the Beiers, according to sources, rejected offers from some universities in the U.S. to house the works.
However, at $680, 000, the couple (Ulli and Georgina) accepted to have their collections return to Nigeria on the condition that the centre be run as a non-governmental entity.
Thus, the Centre for Black Culture and International Understanding approved by the Executive Board of UNESCO at its 180th Session in France in October 2008 became the custodian of the Ulli Beier’s archival materials. This is in line with the couple’s wish that their archival materials — over 10, 000 items of books, articles, photographs, negatives and albums, films, videos, audio cassettes, record and CDs, printed momento about concerts and exhibitions — be transferred to Osogbo where most of them were originally collected in 1950s during their (couple) sojourn in Nigeria.
Beier is well known for translating works of African origin such as poetry, drama, particularly of Yoruba language into English.

Repositioning The Nigeria Prize For Literature: The Stakeholders’ Resolve

2011-02-15T10:48:00.001+01:00

Repositioning The Nigeria Prize For Literature: The Stakeholders’ Resolve

Repositioning The Nigeria Prize For Literature: The Stakeholders’ Resolve

THE GUARDIAN, SUNDAY, 13 FEBRUARY 2011

ABOUT 30 workers in the various disciplines of the Literature discipline gathered in a function room of Eko Hotel & Suites, last Monday to review the state and status of the $50,000 Nigeria Prize for Literature with a mission to setting it on a more progressive and widely beneficial path for the creative writng community. the gathering was at the instance of the Nigeria Liquefied Natural Gas company, NLNG, which initiated the prize (as well as its $50,000 Science counterpart) and has been its facilitator over the years.

According to Siene Allwell-Brown, General Manager, External Relations, of the gas company, the forum was conve of making it the “best and the biggest for rewarding excellence” as well as one of the best administered prizes in the world. Said the ex-newscaster, “We believe it is time enough to ask some pertinent questions: in the eight years of its existence, would we say that the Prize definitely lived up to this billing? Has it presented a large enough canvas for writers, publishers, editors, book sellers, literary critics, and journalists to paint their dreams? Has it made excellence its prime guiding principle and have the aspirations, yearnings and dreams of the stakeholders in promoting excellence in writing and publishing been met? Has the Prize been administered in a fair and transparent manner?”

Former Vice Chancellor of te University of Ibadan, Emeritus Professor Ayo Banjo, who chaired the session, noted that the Prize has been growing from strength to strength, and that the Stakeholders’ Forum would help in propelling NLNG on the best way forward. Banjo counselled that the Prize should remain a prestigious one that will “command the respect of Nigerians and one that can be a model for the rest of the world to emulate”. He advised that the interest of literature should be uppermost in the resolution of the issues that would arise at the forum.

Jerry Agada, ex-Minister of State for Education and now, President of Association of Nigeria Authors, ANA, who was deputy chair of the Forum, described the session as a necessary initiative to make the Prize more inclusive; and bring out the best for literature in general.
President of the Nigerian Academy of Letters, Prof. Ben Elugbe, recalled that the academy became part of the Nigeria Prize for Literature through invitation from the NLNG. NAL’s involvement is to ensure that literature Prize, like the Science prize, is better managed and better judged. He would want NAL to be seen as a fair judge in the issue of the management of the Prize money.

Ifeanyi Mbanefo Manager Corporate Communications and Public Affairs, NLNG reviewed the Prize from when it was conceived in 2003, stressing that now that the project is concluding its second phase of four years per phase, there is indeed the need to review its journey so far and position it for the next phase as well as greater accomplishment.

A consultatnt Strategist and Corporate Governance expert, Deji Toye of Lodt Governance Centre, Lagos, reviewed the management structure of the Prize, and recommended among others that:
• The Award should remain The Nigeria Prize for Literature as against Prize for Humanities
• In place of the current Literature Committee an Advisory Board should be constituted comprising a carefully selected group of stakeholders, appointed by organisations/institutions in the industry value chain to carry on the creative, scholarly and disseminative aspects of the project. The proposed organisations/individuals are: Association of Nigerian Authors, Nigerian Academy of Letters and National Library of Nigeria. In addition, a senior executive from the Corporate Affairs/CSR team of NLNG to serve as Secretary of the Committee and the head of the Secretariat; an eminent Nigerian of an iconic status well respected for his/her integrity to serve as the Chairman of the Committee. The reduction to five from 12, the Consultant said is in view of NLNG’s desire to reduce administrative costs.

• The Advisory Board should have the power to appoint Judges which membership should comprise the following:
Three scholars experienced in the genre under consideration for the year; one seasoned practitioner in the genre under consideration;
one iconic, public figure who is a proven enthusiast/connoisseur of literature, especially the genre under consideration. This is for common touch and popular appeal.
• The Judges be invited through public advertisement to serve for a year on the panel.
• The Stake holders Forum should be maintained and converted into a virtual General Assembly. This forum should hold at the end of each four-year cycle for review of governance framework and operational processes.
• The winner of the Prize should be announced through an interaction with the Press prior to a befitting Prize Presentation ceremony. In view of cost, the Grand Award Night Ceremony should be shelved.
• In a No-Award year, the Prize money should be donated to a charity that is active in the promotion of the literary arts or the money returned to source.

The Consultatant’s presentation and those of the Academy and ANA as well as other contributors from the various organisations present were reviewed, after which teh followuing resolutions were passed:
• Endowment: It was generally agreed that the NLNG should create a Foundation which will endow the Nigeria Prize for Literature and Nigeria Prize for Science for sustainability and perpetuity.
• Purpose: It was agreed that the strive for excellence must remain the core for award of the Prizes.
• Reading Culture: It was agreed that a National Book Tour and in case of Drama a National Play Tour be reintroduced to take the book and the author to the reader across country.
• Scope: The Award should remain restricted to Literature and not the Humanities.
• Book lists: It was agreed that the long list should remain an internal consideration of the Judges while a shortlist of three should be publicised.
• Stakeholders Forum: It was agreed that this should be convened annually.
• Judges: The recommendation that the position of the judges be advertised was rejected.
• Award of Prize: Announcement of winner should be on the Presentation Day.

Represented at the meeting Various organisations within the Literary and Creative writing community; including Association of Nigerian Authors; Nigeria Academy of Letters; Nigeria Publishers Association; Society of Nigerian Theatre Artists; Abuja Writers Forum; Arts Writers Organisation of Nigeria; Women Wriers Association; Committee for Relevant Arts, CORA; Literary Agents; as well as some notable workers in the creative and literary discipline including Odia Ofeimun; Tony Ujubuonu. Also four of the past laureates of the prize were in attendance: The poet, Dr.. Gabriel Okara ; The dramatist; Prof. Ahmed Yerima; The Prose writer, Prof. Akachi Adimora-Ezeigbo. Nigeria Guild of Editors;

Living In Two Cultures: Story Of A ‘Prize For Excellence’

THE GUARDIAN,SUNDAY, 13 FEBRUARY 2011

BY IFEANYI MBANEFO

Preamble:

A poem,” Robert Frost once wrote in a letter to a friend, “begins as a lump in the throat … a homesickness.” Frost was an American poet highly regarded for his realistic depictions of rural life. His work frequently employed settings from rural life to examine complex social and philosophical themes. He won four Pulitzer Prizes for poetry.

This morning, I have a big lump in my throat that has nothing to do with poetry; it is for gratitude. I hope Frost and other poets in this hall will forgive me for appropriating this vital medical sign for purposes other than poetry.

Eight years ago, my company forged an immensely successful partnership with writers and scientists to reinvigorate and nurture learning and culture in Nigeria. The partnership was founded on the very simple idea that writers and scientists have important roles to play in the society and deserve public support and recognition. Creating awareness, stimulating competition, rewarding and recognising excellence in literature, science and technology will enable this country to provide meaningful existence for its citizenry and shore up standard of its education and literacy.

Permit me to share a secret with you. Meltwater News Inc., a global specialist in online media monitoring that keeps track of business critical information published online for 16,000 of the world’s most admired companies and organisations, has found that The Nigeria Prize for Literature and The Nigeria Prize for Science, between October 2008 and October 2010 generated 511 online articles. You may say that is a few hundreds, but, wait for this: those articles were read by 139, 940, 496 people.

Seeing the size of the entries every year, the vast improvements in the writing value chain – editing, proofreading, publishing, etc – and the media attention these prizes are receiving, and feeling the drive, energy, and intellectual force flowing from this project, I believe the proof is undeniable: there is hope for science and literature in this country; this partnership has given science and literature a new lease of life.

I still have the lump in my throat. So, with your permission, I discharge it, presenting on behalf of my Board and management, a bouquet of our thanks: for everything you have done, so far, to make the project a resounding success. Individually and collectively, you have made this journey very exciting for us.

I also thank all of you who, forfeiting all else, have made it here this morning to join us in discussing literature and these prizes.

I am not exaggerating when I say that writers everywhere make great company; this is no doubt going to be a gorgeous day.

INTRODUCTION:

Companies don’t become model citizens overnight; it’s a long journey from corporate to model citizenship. And for this journey, there are no beaten paths.

The challenges of responsible business practices are huge and learning pathways are complex and iterative. Every company’s journey is unique. Some companies become responsible citizens by choice, others by circumstances.

Take Nike, for instance. A leader in responsible, ethical practices, Nike’s metamorphosis from the poster child for irresponsibility to a leader in progressive practices makes for an interesting reading. In the 1990s, protesters railed against sweatshop conditions at Nike’s overseas suppliers and made Nike the global poster child for corporate ethical fecklessness. Nike’s every move was scrutinised, and every problem discovered was touted as proof of its irresponsibility and greed. The intense pressure that activists exerted on the athletic shoes’ giant forced it to take a long, hard look at corporate responsibility faster than it might otherwise have.

Since the 1990s, Nike has raced through a bumpy road on this front, but has ended up in a much better place for its troubles. To become a model company, Nike cleaned up its processes, became an ethical company, but above all turned its attention to the society, to the people through corporate social responsibility programmes. Let’s take a roll call:

Nike is partnering with the New York City Department of Youth and Community Development to install and refurbish 25 basketball courts throughout New York City giving 10,000 children access to the game.

Through its N7 initiative, Nike has built an environmentally friendly performance shoe to address the specific width and fit requirements for the Native American foot. Diabetes is prevalent in this community, so this shoe will help combat it by encouraging and improving exercise

Nike supports the Homeless World Cup, a world class, annual, soccer tournament engaging players from 64 countries. About 71% of the participants significantly change their lives after competing in the Homeless World Cup.

In Soweto, South Africa, Nike built a football training centre, giving 20,000 young footballers access to a programme that includes high-end training facilities, top-level coaching and HIV education.

In 2007, South African sprinter Oscar Pistorius ran the 100 metres in 10.91 seconds. Without any legs. The first amputee to break the sub-11-seconds barrier. Some critics claim that the carbon fibre blades he ran on gave him an unfair advantage. Nike has helpfully pointed out that these critics have legs!

The lessons from the Nike saga will help other companies traversing this same ground.

Coming in the wake of Nike’s troubles and Shell’s scuffles with Ogoni and other communities in the Niger Delta region, Nigeria LNG Limited, was ready from Day One to be an exemplary corporate citizen ready for the new era of end-to-end responsibility.

In this new era, it’s no longer good enough to do your job well, satisfy customers, and generate financial returns. You are accountable for the supplies you use and where they come from, what your customers do with your products and whether it improves their lives, and the costs and benefits to the countries and communities touched along the way. This, perhaps, explains the public interest in Dangote’s business or Otedola’s empire.

Operating a fast-food franchise, for example, requires much more knowledge than how to cook, bake and serve. Where was the food grown? Is it organic? Does it lead to childhood obesity? Is it healthy food?

Companies and leaders are assessed not only on immediate results but also on longer-term impact—the ultimate effects their actions have on societal well-being. It is a trend, which although it came in small waves is now surging.

Signs of this trend are everywhere. Questions were constantly directed at Nigeria LNG Limited concerning shortage of cooking gas regardless of the fact that it was built and licensed only for export of natural gas and NGLs. The refineries were meant to supply the domestic market.

Hey, it’s a brand new world out there and Nigeria LNG Limited was quick to grasp and master it. Take the infamous Land Use Decree that has dispossessed millions of compatriots of their property. Realising sentimental attachments to land and the deep feeling of dispossession inflicted on communities by this law, immediately it acquired the pipeline routes, NLNG sought to make amends. It signed long-term contracts with land-owning families for grass-cutting and surveillance of pipeline routes to ensure that they continue to earn revenue from their property.

With land-owners protecting our gas pipelines, there have been minimal, almost negligible, cases of their vandalisation. The lesson in all these is that obsolete systems of territory mapping, of sequential processes, in which each group denies responsibility for what it was not directly responsible for, have given way to more integrated planning and management, with everyone bearing a share of responsibility for the products and processes and not just for its direct footprint.

On the corporate social responsibility sphere, NLNG realised early that hierarchical and transactional relationships should be replaced by circles of influence, business fortresses by collaborative business ecosystems. This is why NLNG initiated the Joint Industries Committee (JIC) in Bonny to pool resources and provide power, water and roads on the island. JIC is today responsible for providing and maintaining these infrastructure in Bonny. NLNG is the operator of the JIC projects and pays 50% of the bills.

Truth is: a new paradigm is afoot. Leading companies are beginning to find inspiration in an unexpected place - the social sector—in blighted public schools, orphanages, working with widows, and unemployed youths. These companies have discovered that social problems are, when carefully examined, economic problems, whether it is the need for skill acquisition, shortage of cooking gas or entrepreneurship training in poor villages.

Companies are learning that applying their energies to solving the chronic social problems powerfully stimulates their business development. Today’s better-educated children are tomorrow’s knowledge workers. Lower unemployment in the neighbourhood means higher security for life and property. Indeed, a new paradigm has emerged: a partnership between private enterprise and public interest that produces profitable and sustainable change for both sides.

It is in the spirit of this new partnership that The Nigeria Prize for Literature and The Nigeria Prize for Science were conceived by Nigeria LNG Limited. In addition to numerous cogent reasons adduced for the establishment of these prizes there was a clear understanding that traditional solutions to recalcitrant social ills amount to very little.

Companies often just throw money at a problem and walk away. But the fact is that many recipients of business largesse often don’t need charity; they need change. Not spare change, but real change—sustainable, replicable, institutionalised change that transforms their business, their prospects, and their outlook. And that means getting business deeply involved in non-traditional ways.

The way to go about it is not in business making donations to the society, but treating community service as business. And for society to understand that a public trust cannot deliver public good over a long haul if it is not run on sound business principles.

So from the outset, the company embarked on a bold experiment in social innovation to demonstrate that a different way of investing in non-profits would generate demonstrably superior outcomes to drive change in the sector. The ultimate judgment of its faith and investment in public trusts will not be known for years, but its efforts have triggered a quiet revolution that must be sustained.

It is this policy that underpins the legendary power supply in Bonny driven by NLNG. Power supply on Bonny Island which has remained at a consistent 98% availability for over 10 years is paid for by users, although there is a margin to accommodate those who are unable to pay and those whose electricity bills are less than N2000.

It negates the principles of sound economic management to provide free utilities anywhere. It is impossible to sustain free utilities. This principle guides NLNG’s investments in non-profits.

THE NIGERIA LITERARY AND SCIENCE PRIZES

Recognising, therefore, that the country’s education is in dire straits, NLNG sought to create conducive environment for learning and competition, reason why it promotes scholarship in tertiary institutions, entrepreneur training for youths and two major prizes — The Nigeria Prize for Literature and The Nigeria Prize for Science.

These awards were entrusted to The Nigerian Academy of Science and The Nigerian Academy of Letters and some eminent writers. These bodies assess the worth of scientific discoveries and contemporary works of literature and, in so doing, consolidate the needs of the publishing and academic worlds: boosting sales of the award winner’s work and simultaneously effecting a change in the Nigerian canon.

SCIENCE PRIZE: The case for supporting science cannot be more urgent. Nigeria is a developing country with aspirations for joining the ranks of developed nations.

Only science and technology can make these dreams come true. And creating awareness, stimulating competition, rewarding and recognising excellence in these fields are conditions precedent, not only for realising these dreams, but also for providing meaningful existence for the citizenry. Some of the reasons proffered by experts seeking greater recognition for science include that:

It will provide leaders with answers to crucial issues such as food shortages, fuel shortages, electoral malpractice, poverty, health and environment;

It will encourage the authorities to take science-based decisions;

It will bring about improvements in the standards of living;

Support for science in a developing country will help resolve myths that tend to cripple development.

And by instituting a significant prize for science, NLNG seeks to bring science and scientists to public attention, save them from their current low rating in national estimation and avail the nation of their immense benefits.

Science can only be relevant if it is supported to play vital roles in the society. A major pillar of support for science comes through recognising and rewarding excellence in science and creativity.

LITERATURE PRIZE: The case for instituting a worthy prize for literature was more straightforward. For decades, Nigerian writers bemoaned their fate. They griped in newspapers, conferences, and workshops about the neglect their noble profession had fallen into. They were unhappy with the declining levels of education and literacy; unhappy with the loss of a reading culture; and for good reasons, sad that writing and publishing in a nation that gave the African Continent its first crop of literary giants had all but become lost art.

OUR BUSINESS MODEL FOR THE PRIZES

At about the time we intervened, the literary business was struggling, locally and internationally. It was not a business any investor would rush into. It was like investing in the stock market during the crash. Our research showed us what to expect.

Abroad, the great Booker Prize was in serious trouble. The original sponsors, the Booker-McConnell company, were bought out by a frozen-food concern called Iceland, which declined to continue sponsorship of the prize estimated at over £400,000. The prize went for an open bidding and was won by a firm called the Man Group, a London-based international stock broking firm, which agreed to take over sponsorship for an initial five years. That’s how come Booker became Man-Booker Prize.

The founders of the Orange Prize for fiction launched in 1996, had announced with fanfare that it had secured an anonymous endowment sufficient to provide for a £30, 000 annual award. It was a false start, because they immediately returned to the drawing board when Martyn Goff of the Book Trust fame and other experienced administrators pointed out that, for the prize to succeed in practical terms, the organisers would need a far larger budget to cover operating expenses, particularly the expenses associated with promotion and publicity.

The Orange Prize was rescued by Peter Raymond of the cellular phone service company, Orange PLC. By 1999, Orange Plc was spending £250,000 yearly minus the prize money. The real cost of organising the Orange Prize was 10 times more than its declared value!

Back home we had a potpourri of prizes, many of them not exactly exciting.

The Nigerian Academy of Science was running a prize for young scientists in partnership with the Third World Academy of Sciences (NAS-TWAS). The prize was instituted in Nigeria in 1995 to be awarded yearly on rotation. It has a cash value of USD $2000.

Another prize, The National Science Prize, was instituted by the Academy jointly with the Manufacturers Association of Nigeria to reward outstanding research in science and technology, particularly projects with potential industrial applications. It was worth N30, 000.

Another was a postgraduate award instituted in 1993 to honour outstanding doctoral theses in the pure and applied sciences in Nigerian universities. And yet another prize was for best graduating science students in universities. This prize is very popular with companies and many of them have instituted chairs in the universities.

Shell has however done most for the universities, building multimillion Naira classroom blocks in many universities. Agip and Total have carried out similar projects but their generosity was restricted to universities in their catchment areas. African Portland Cement Company also instituted a prize for the best graduating geology student from Obafemi Awolowo University.

For Literature, there was the Association of Nigerian Authors’ prize which was then struggling. Its cash prizes were not promptly redeemed. There were other attempts to establish a decent prize, most of which failed.

We shall not forget The Nigerian National Merit Award, which is an order of dignity and distinct from the National Honours. It was instituted to accord proper and due recognition for outstanding intellectual and academic attainments and contributions to general development of Nigeria and is conferred on the recipients by the President and Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces. It had a cash value of N500, 000 only. (Currently, it is worth N1million).

In setting up The Nigeria Prize for Literature and The Nigeria Prize for Science, we were determined to take steps to change the chemistry and character of philanthropy, by incorporating not just money, but also moral character and commercial orientation. This is not entirely a new phenomenon; we were merely reprising and building upon the ground work laid by Tyler Cowen in his masterful piece: “In Praise of Commercial Culture.”

Cowen, an economics professor at George Mason University had argued persuasively that free market unbridled by government produces the best environments for creative expression. And that business, by fostering alternative modes of financial support and multiple market niches, vast wealth and technological innovation is the best ally the arts could have.

Our intention was not charity; far from it. We were determined to deploy the skills of business, flexible corporate ‘philanthropy’, and the rigour of the marketplace to develop systems-changing solutions to rescue the ailing prize-awarding industry.

We believe that philanthropic capital, combined with large doses of business acumen, can build thriving enterprises that serve vast numbers of our people. We also believe that our presence would lure other giants and blue chip companies to invest in the industry. Our ultimate vision is that this industry would change and grow if mega companies get involved; that the culture of philanthropy in Nigeria will change in the next few years strongly influenced by the ways of some multinational corporations because of the scale of wealth at their disposal and the sense of purpose they are expected to generate.

I confess, that we have not fully realised our dreams, but then The Nigeria Prize for Literature and The Nigeria Prize for Science are work in progress. We need to take them to a level that allows them to become public trusts in fact and in deed.

Eight years on, The Nigeria Prize for Literature is turning our initial vision into a reality with tangible, compelling results and a clearer understanding of the truly formidable nature of this undertaking.

CURRENT STATUS

The following resolutions were reached with stakeholders (university teachers, writers, and journalists) at an exploratory meeting of 14th November 2003:

That high profile literary prizes of significance and commensurate prestige be set up to stimulate creativity and promote indigenous literary and scientific culture

Cash value at take off $20,000 (now $50,000) each to be reviewed regularly as occasion demands

Prizes awarded yearly to alternate amongst four literary genres: prose fiction, poetry, drama and children’s literature and to the work of science that provides solution to a major national problem or one that breaks new grounds.

NLNG to provide logistics and administration services, pending the time a BOARD OF TRUSTEES will be constituted and the prize endowed.

There will be publicity, advertising, press promotion and national promotional tours to promote the award

Prizes will be awarded yearly at a prestigious ceremony to draw local and international attention to prize and winners

Only works published by Nigerians qualify to participate. This rule has been modified to accommodate Nigerians in diaspora.

CURRENT FUNDING

Prize Money : US$100,000.00

Logistics: US$436,044.03

Grand Award Night: US$241,691.92

Total: US$777,731.94

For sustainability, the Board and management of Nigeria LNG Limited think the administrative costs for these prizes are too high. That ways must be found to cut the costs without losing the essence.

FINAL NOTES

In his Rede lecture of 50 years ago, entitled The Two Cultures, C. P. Snow, a writer and a scientist said: “There is something wrong with a civilisation where knowledge is so compartmentalised that people can count as highly educated and yet be wholly ignorant of huge swaths of what other highly educated people know. How could scientists not read Shakespeare? How could literary people never have heard of the second law of thermodynamics?”

I will reprise Snow, but with some modifications. How can we continue this business of writing and literature writing thinking about economics? Why should the arts not work with business to find workable and lasting solutions to problems besetting the arts? Why are we not working more and more with business to find solutions to our problems? Why are we not paying more and more attention to sustainability of our programmes and projects? This is one of the reasons we called this meeting to re-examine this prize, ensure it is both sustainable and businesslike

The long and short of my mission, with the permission of Snow, is: let’s spend the next couple of hours, discussing literature and economics or economics and literature, as the case may be.

The ball, distinguished ladies and gentlemen, is now in your court. Please play it – with eyes on the Prize.

EniOlorutidakosefarawekosefenutembelekosebinukosena'kaiwosisiwiwolaawo

TAIWO AJAI-LYCETT in Some Mothers do Have 'em Scene

2011-02-11T17:48:00.000+01:00

TWO DAYS TO AJAI-LYCETT CELEBRATION

The Committee for Relevant Art, CORA in collaboration with the African Movies Academy Awards, AMAA, present ARTHOUSE FORUM in celebration of the 70th Birthday Anniversary of the veteran actress and stage matriarch, TAIWO AJAI-LYCETT.

Theme: STATE OF THE STAGE: CONVERSATION WITH, AND AROUND TAIWO AJAI-LYCETT featuring dialogue between TAIWO AJAI-LYCETT and two Sister Actresses -- TINA MBA and KATE HENSHAW.

Also, Q & A between the veteran actress and the audience.

Moderator: WOLE OGUNTOKUN (Director, Theatre @ Terra)

Date: SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 13

Time: 2PM

Venue: TRIBECA, Adetokunbo Ademola Street (opposite Eko Hotel, VI, Lagos

Gate: FREE

EniOlorutidakosefarawekosefenutembelekosebinukosena'kaiwosisiwiwolaawo

CELEBRATING TAIWO AJAI-LYCETT @ 70

2011-02-10T08:36:00.011+01:00

ARTHOUSE FORUM

The Committee for Relevant Art, CORA in collaboration with theAfrican Movies Academy Awards, AMAA, present:

in celebration of the 70th Birthday Anniversary of the veteran actress and stage matriarch, TAIWO AJAI-LYCETT.

Theme: STATE OF THE STAGE: CONVERSATION WITH, AND AROUND TAIWO AJAI-LYCETT featuring dialogue between TAIWO AJAI-LYCETT and two Sister Actresses -- TINA MBA and KATE HENSHAW.

Also, Q & A between the veteran actress and the audience.

Moderator: WOLE OGUNTOKUN (Director, Theatre @ Terra)

Date: SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 13

Time: 2PM

Venue: TRIBECA, Adetokunbo Ademola Street (opposite Eko Hotel, VI, Lagos

Gate: FREE

TAIWO AJAI-LYCETT, OON, FELLOW (SONTA)

(Sourced from http://taiwoajailycett.co.uk)

NATIONAL & PROFESSIONAL HONOURS

Taiwo Ajai-Lycett, OON, Fellow (SONTA), was born in Lagos, Nigeria, on 3 February 1941. She was honoured with an OON (Officer of the Order of the Niger) in the 2006 Nigerian National Honours List by President Olusegun Obasanjo, President of the Republic of Nigeria on October 1st – on Nigeria’s 47th Independence Day Anniversary. She was, also honoured in the same year, with a Heritage & Honours Award of the Association of Advertising Agencies of Nigeria, for her services to the profession of Advertising in Nigeria, and as a former Executive Member of the Association. Taiwo is also a Fellow (SONTA) a Fellow of the Society of Nigerian Theatre Artists.

For her meritorious service to the cause of Creative Arts, Education, Business and Community Development, Taiwo has received several other Awards, among which are Outstanding Role & Enviable Accomplishment Award 1997 (Neimeth/Pfizer-CKC Partners); The REELS Merit Award (the Academy of Creative Arts in Nigeria) 1999; The Amazon Award – for Outstanding Contributions to Nation Building 2002; Award for Service as a Mentor in the FATE Programme for Aspiring Entrepreneurs, 2001; the Lagos State Government’s Merit Award in Recognition of Meritorious Service Towards the Advancement of Education in the Alimoso Local Government Education District of Lagos State, 2005; Tiwa ’n’ Tiwa – Lagos State Television & Broadcasting Corporation; Recognition – Main Frame Film & TV Productions; and Opal Awards, among others.

EDUCATION & PROFESSIONAL TRAINING

Taiwo Ajai-Lycett had her early school years in Lagos, Nigeria, and was a Pupil Teacher before proceeding to the UK in 1960 in search of the ‘Golden Fleece’! She worked as waitress/washer-upper at Lyon’s Tea Shop in the City and from 1960 to 1962, studied at night schools and at Pitman’s College, London. Taiwo combined working with further education, attending the Christine Shaw School of Beauty Science and Cosmetology, London; the North Staffordshire College of Technology (now Keele University) and graduated with the Higher National Diploma in Business Studies in 1969 at the Hendon College of Technology.

TRAINING & CAREER (THEATRE)

Taiwo attended the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, London, City Literary Institute, (City Lit.) and the Dance Centre, Floral Street, Covent Garden, London, studying Acting, Music, Voice, Singing, Ballet, Modern and Contemporary Dance. She is professionally trained in front and behind the camera, qualifying as a Television Producer/Presenter at The London School of Television Production.

Taiwo has performed in many leading theatres in the UK, such as the Traverse Theatre at the Edinburgh International Festival; the Gaiety Theatre, at the Dublin International Theatre Festival; The Bristol Old Vic; The Hampstead Theatre Club; the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, in Richard Wagner’s Tannhauser; The Royal Court Theatre; The Palace Theatre, Westcliffe; and The Mercury Theatre, Colchester. She has also appeared in numerous UK Television drama productions for the BBC (TV & Radio Drama), ATV, Granada, COI, ILEA and Thames Television. She had a film appearance in the film A WARM DECEMBER starring and directed by iconic Oscar winner, Sidney Poitier.

She appeared recently, in July, 2007, at the Almeida Theatre in the Almeida Opera’s & Streetwise production, Critical Mass, directed by Emma Bernard and Composer Orlando Gough.

Her stage appearances in Nigeria and on Nigerian National Television include, Song of a Goat by J P Clark; Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman; The Lion and the Jewel; Wale Ogunyemi’s The Divorce; Fred Agbeyegbe’s The King Must Dance Naked; Wole Oguntokun’s The Inheritors; Arnold Weskers’ Shylock; Laolu Ogunniyi’s television series, Winds Against My Soul; Jab Adu’s The Young Ones; and Nigerian Television Authority’s The Honourable; For Better for Worse, Eyo Fancy and Rasheed Gbadamosi’s The Mansion; Wole Oguntokun’s The Inheritor

TINA MBA

Tina Mba is a household name in entertainment industry both in Nigeria and Africa. Her performances over the years have earned her the respectable and envied position she now enjoys. She is an actress and Producer of over two decades and a mother of two kids. She has produced two majors plays namely, Williams Shakespare’s ‘AS YOU LIKE IT’ in 1989 and the return of ‘GOLDEN SWORD’ in 2008.

Some of her works on stage are: Visit of Bishop Alaba (National Troupe of Nigeria); Women of Owu (National Troupe of Nigeria); Lion and the Jewel (Dir. Felix Okolo); Aetu (Dir. Ahmed Yerima); Midnight Hotel (Dir. Femi Osofisan); One Legend Many Sessions (Dir. Osofisan); The Return of the Golden Sword (Dir. Niji Akanni); Toy Soldier Boy Soldier (for Coja 2003); Iphigenia finds Aiyelala (Dir. Ben Tomoloju for Afrika Projekt/German Cultural Center); Asylanten (Dir. Ben Tomoloju for Afrika Projekt/German Cultural Center). She is currently involved in Wole Soyinka’s Beatification of an Area boy.

Some of her works on TV are:- Everyday People (Dir. Tajudeen Adepetu);Magnate (Dir. Taiwo Ogundipe); Living Next to You (Dir.Opa Williams);Behind the Siege (Dir. Tade Ogidan);

Tides to Fate (Dir.Royal Roots); Shadows (Dir. Dunfex Produnctions); Foot Prints (Dir. Isichei Productions)

Her works on Film include: Baba Zak (by Ladi Ladebo on 35mm); Metamorphosis (by Royal Roots on 16mm); Tango with me (by Brick wall (Mahmod Balogun) 35mm);

Some of her works on Radio are: Inspector Joe (Prod. Ihria Inkhimio); Sisi Clara (Prod. Bimbo Manuel).

KATE HENSHAW

Henshaw-Nuttall is the oldest of four children. After completing her primary and secondary school in Lagos and Calabar, she spent one year at the University of Calabar reading remedial studies, and then majored in Medical Microbiology at the School of Medical Lab Science, LUTH (Lagos University Teaching Hospital) in Lagos. Henshaw-Nuttall worked at the Bauchi State General hospital.

Her career began In 1993, when she auditioned for an acting job in the movie When the Sun Sets and was handed the role. This was her first appearance in a major Nollywood movie.

Kate Henshaw-Nuttall has starred in over 40 Nollywood movies.
In 2008 she won the African Movie Academy Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role for the film Stronger than Pain.[2] She is presently "The Face of Onga".[1]

Her work on Screen include: Broken Tears 1 & 2 (2008); River of Tears; Take Me to Jesus 1 & 2 (2008); Tears in My Eyes 1 & 2 ; A Brighter Sun 1 & 2; (One Life (2007); Show Me Heaven (2007); Stronger Than Pain; To Love and to Hold 2 (2007); A Million Tears 2 ; Blood on Ice 2; Consequences (2006) ; Costly Mistake (2006); Costly Mistake 2 (2006); Games Men Play 2 (2006); My Little Secret (2006); She 2: You Must Obey (2006); The Search (2006) (V) [Actress]; Diamond Forever (2005); Diamond Forever 2 (2005); Emotional Hazard 2 (2005); Girls in the Hood 2 (2005); The Bridesmaid (2005) (V) [Actress] ; The Carcass (2005) Inheritance (2004) ; Negative Influence (2004) ; Sleeping with the Enemy (2004/I); The Legend 2 (2004); The Stolen Bible 2 (2004); The Substitute (2004) ; Domitilla (1996); Silent Night 2 (1996).

On Stage: She has featured in The Other Side; and in The V-Monologue (2008 & 2110 (Nigeria); also in Ghana) directed by Wole Oguntokun, among other plays.

MODERATOR:

WOLE OGUNTOKUN

Wole Oguntokun, a trained lawyer is a playwright, stage and film director, theatre administrator and columnist. His written and directed plays include: "Who's Afraid of Wole Soyinka?", "Rage of the Pentecost" (August 2002), "Ladugba!" (September 2002), "The Other Side" (November 2002). In 2003, he produced his adaptation of 'The Pied Piper of Hamelin' titled "Piper, Piper" (March 2003), and "Gbanja Roulette” in May and July 2003. In December 2003, he featured the matriarch of Nigerian Drama, Taiwo Ajai-Lycett, in his play, "The Inheritors". Other plays of his produced at the Muson Centre include "Prison Chronicles" in March 2004, "The Other Side" starring Kate Henshaw-Nuttall (November 2005), "The Sound and The Fury" (April 2006), "The Inheritors" featuring Joke Silva (August 2006), and "Anatomy of a Woman" featuring Stella Damasus-Aboderin (March 2007). Plays by other playwrights Wole produced at the Muson Centre include "The Trials Of Brother Jero" by Professor Wole Soyinka (July 2 and 3, 2005) and Professor Femi Osofisan's "Once upon Four Robbers" in December 2004. He directed Aime Cesaire's "A Season in the Congo" for the Lagos State Government-sponsored "Black Heritage Festival" in April 2010. Early in 2010, Wole was commissioned to write and direct a play on the life and times of Bishop Samuel Ajai Crowther, the first Black African Bishop of the Anglican Church, titled "Ajai The Boy Slave" made up of cast members from Britain and Nigeria.He is currently Assistant Director to Professor Wole Soyinka in the production of the Professor's "The Beatification of Area Boy," which also has Tima Mba in the cast.

EniOlorutidakosefarawekosefenutembelekosebinukosena'kaiwosisiwiwolaawo

ARTHOUSE FORUM for TAIWOI AJAI-LYCETT @ 70

2011-02-08T03:53:00.003+01:00

The Committee for Relevant Art, CORA in collaboration with the African Movies Academy Awards, AMAA, present ARTHOUSE FORUM in celebration of the 70th Birthday Anniversary of the veteran actress and stage matriarch, TAIWO AJAI-LYCETT.

Theme: STATE OF THE STAGE: CONVERSATION WITH, AND AROUND TAIWO AJAI-LYCETT featuring dialogue between TAIWO AJAI-LYCETT and two Sister Actresses -- TINA MBA and KATE HENSHAW.

Also, Q & A between the veteran actress and the audience.

Moderator: WOLE OGUNTOKUN (Director, Theatre @ Terra)

Date: SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 13

Time: 2PM

Venue: TRIBECA, Adetokunbo Ademola Street (opposite Eko Hotel, VI, Lagos

Gate: FREE

TAIWO AJAI-LYCETT, OON, FELLOW (SONTA)
(Sourced from http://taiwoajailycett.co.uk)

NATIONAL & PROFESSIONAL HONOURS

Taiwo Ajai-Lycett, OON, Fellow (SONTA), was born in Lagos, Nigeria, on 3 February 1941. She was honoured with an OON (Officer of the Order of the Niger) in the 2006 Nigerian National Honours List by President Olusegun Obasanjo, President of the Republic of Nigeria on October 1st – on Nigeria’s 47th Independence Day Anniversary. She was, also honoured in the same year, with a Heritage & Honours Award of the Association of Advertising Agencies of Nigeria, for her services to the profession of Advertising in Nigeria, and as a former Executive Member of the Association. Taiwo is also a Fellow (SONTA) a Fellow of the Society of Nigerian Theatre Artists.
For her meritorious service to the cause of Creative Arts, Education, Business and Community Development, Taiwo has received several other Awards, among which are Outstanding Role & Enviable Accomplishment Award 1997 (Neimeth/Pfizer-CKC Partners); The REELS Merit Award (the Academy of Creative Arts in Nigeria) 1999; The Amazon Award – for Outstanding Contributions to Nation Building 2002; Award for Service as a Mentor in the FATE Programme for Aspiring Entrepreneurs, 2001; the Lagos State Government’s Merit Award in Recognition of Meritorious Service Towards the Advancement of Education in the Alimoso Local Government Education District of Lagos State, 2005; Tiwa ’n’ Tiwa – Lagos State Television & Broadcasting Corporation; Recognition – Main Frame Film & TV Productions; and Opal Awards, among others.

EDUCATION & PROFESSIONAL TRAINING
Taiwo Ajai-Lycett had her early school years in Lagos, Nigeria, and was a Pupil Teacher before proceeding to the UK in 1960 in search of the ‘Golden Fleece’! She worked as waitress/washer-upper at Lyon’s Tea Shop in the City and from 1960 to 1962, studied at night schools and at Pitman’s College, London. Between 1962 and 1970, she worked with the United Kingdom General Post Office (GPO/HQ), Gresham Street Headquarters, at different levels, for a period of eight years, as the Personal Secretary to the Director of Personnel, the Director of Research & Development and as Senior Personal Secretary to the Chairman, Lord Hall, and in the Private Office of the Postmaster-General, Mr John Stonehouse, at the General Post Office Headquarters, London.
Taiwo combined working with further education, attending the Christine Shaw School of Beauty Science and Cosmetology, London; the North Staffordshire College of Technology (now Keele University) and graduated with the Higher National Diploma in Business Studies in 1969 at the Hendon College of Technology.

CAREER DEVELOPMENT
Upon leaving the UK Civil Service, in 1970, Taiwo had a brief spell as the Personal Assistant to the Chairman/CEO, Compound Sections, UK, fabricators of component parts for the UK automotive assembly plants. She was also a Secretary to the Personnel Director, Young & Rubicam Advertising Agency, UK.

JOURNALISM
In 1975, Taiwo joined Africa Magazine, an Economic, Political, Social journal, based in London, as an Associate Editor. That same year, she became the Editor and Launched AFRICA WOMAN, a political, economic and social magazine for Black and African men and women in the Diaspora.
In 1975, Taiwo Ajai-Lycett covered the inaugural Conference of the International Women’s Year in Mexico and the then Germany’s East Berlin, as a photojournalist, for both AFRICA MAGAZINE and AFRICA WOMAN.

COMMUNITY SERVICE & MEMBERSHIP OF PROFESSIONAL ORGANISATIONS
She was the Secretary to the UK Organising Committee for FESTAC ’77; the Secretary Women’s Organisation of Nigeria (WIN/UK); a Member and Secretary of the Commonwealth Countries League; a Roving Lecturer for the Commonwealth Institute, London, at various institutions of Higher Education, and Teacher Training Colleges in Britain, on African, Art, Music and Dance and lectured on African Arts and Craft and on African Theatre for the Inner London Education Authority (ILEA).
Taiwo is a member of several professional bodies in Nigeria and abroad, including the Black Programming Consortium, USA; The British Actors’ Equity; The Advertising Practitioners Council of Nigeria (APCON); The National Association of Theatre Arts Practitioners (NANTAP); The Nigerian Institute of Management; The Governing Council, Nigeria-Britain Association.

LEADERSHIP ROLES
Taiwo Ajai-Lycett, herself the Proprietress and Rector of TALHOUSE PRIVATE SCHOOL, was the President, The National Association of Proprietors of Private Schools, Alimoso Local Government Education District, Lagos State; Member, Advisory Board of the National Council of Women’s Societies; Member, Board of Trustees of the Media & Development Centre; The Millenium Pictures for Development Trust; Member, The African Network for Book Development; Mentor, and Member of The Strategies Board of the National Academy for Future Leaders (Nigeria); Mentor since 2001, for FATE FOUNDATION’S Aspiring Entrepreneurs Programme.
She is a Member of the Editorial Board of Nigeria’s Media Review, and has been for the last fourteen years, a Member of the Award Nominating Panels of both The Nigerian Media Merit Award (NMMA) and the Diamond Awards for Media Excellence (DAME).
Taiwo started her acting career at the prestigious Royal Court Theatre, Sloane’s Square, London, and the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). (1969-76). During this stage of her professional life, she combined acting on the UK stage, television and films with print and electronic journalism.
BROADCASTING CAREER
She was for years the weekly Presenter for the BBC’s magazine programme, CALLING NIGERIA – broadcasting from Bush House, London, produced by Florence Akst. She was produced in many Radio productions by John Gordon and Gwenneth Henderson. She was also regularly seen on the popular children’s programme, PLAY AWAY for the BBC. She was co-founder, joint Artistic Director, with Pat Amadu Maddy and Louis Mahoney of the GBAKANDA THEATRE.

PROFESSIONAL TRAINING
Taiwo attended the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, London, City Literary Institute, (City Lit.) and the Dance Centre, Floral Street, Covent Garden, London, studying Acting, Music, Voice, Singing, Ballet, Modern and Contemporary Dance. She is professionally trained in front and behind the camera, qualifying as a Television Producer/Presenter at The London School of Television Production.
Taiwo has performed in many leading theatres in the UK, such as the Traverse Theatre at the Edinburgh International Festival; the Gaiety Theatre, at the Dublin International Theatre Festival; The Bristol Old Vic; The Hampstead Theatre Club; the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, in Richard Wagner’s Tannhauser; The Royal Court Theatre; The Palace Theatre, Westcliffe; and The Mercury Theatre, Colchester. She has also appeared in numerous UK Television drama productions for the BBC (TV & Radio Drama), ATV, Granada, COI, ILEA and Thames Television. She had a film appearance in the film A WARM DECEMBER starring and directed by iconic Oscar winner, Sidney Poitier.
She appeared recently, in July, 2007, at the Almeida Theatre in the Almeida Opera’s & Streetwise production, Critical Mass, directed by Emma Bernard and Composer Orlando Gough.
Her stage appearances in Nigeria and on Nigerian National Television include, Song of a Goat by J P Clark; Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman; The Lion and the Jewel; Wale Ogunyemi’s The Divorce; Fred Agbeyegbe’s The King Must Dance Naked; Wole Oguntokun’s The Inheritors; Arnold Weskers’ Shylock; Laolu Ogunniyi’s television series, Winds Against My Soul; Jab Adu’s The Young Ones; and Nigerian Television Authority’s The Honourable; For Better for Worse, Eyo Fancy and Rasheed Gbadamosi’s The Mansion.

BUSINESS CAREER
In 1978, in Lagos, Nigeria, Taiwo and her late husband, Thomas Aldridge Lycett, a former Shell marketing communication executive, founded Partnership Advertising Limited and Taiwo Ajai Communications (Public Relations) – marketing communications consultancy outfits. After her husband's death in 1993 she founded Talhouse Private Schools and Talhouse Worldwide Limited for the promotion of the Arts and the training and nurturing young artists.

SOCIAL COMMENTOR & MENTOR
A social commentator, Taiwo Ajai Lycett, is a regular on the Nigeria lecture circuit, speaking on topics such as Relationships, Motivation, Health and Ageing, Stress Management, Sex and The Single, Fidelity, Loyalty, and Cohesion, Youth Development and Social Orientation; Positive Thinking, Mental Focus – arguing that the only value which can attach to any principle is in its application; Gender Emancipation and the Pursuit and Attainment of Political Leadership by Women; Service – as the secret of success – the possession of power is contingent on the proper use of the power already in our possession

VOLUNTEER WORK
Taiwo Ajai Lycett has over the years attended many Seminars and Workshops including the Black Programming Consortium (a film-making, distribution and networking convention) in Atlanta, Georgia, USA; Personal Development Seminar; Energy Champion Workshop; the Pre-Volunteer Programme for the London Olympic Games 2012; Business Development Workshop; Communication Workshop; Writing Skill Workshop; Child Care Business Workshop; and Workshops in Understanding Equality & Diversity; Understanding Effective Customer Relations; Emergencies & Basic Fire Awareness; Public Safety; Conflict Resolution in a Public Setting; Developing Team & Interpersonal Skills; and Prepafring for and Reflecting on Volunteer Work.

EniOlorutidakosefarawekosefenutembelekosebinukosena'kaiwosisiwiwolaawo

Presenting Nigerian Films at the Festival of Frenc... Tour

2011-01-30T13:27:00.003+01:00

EniOlorutidakosefarawekosefenutembelekosebinukosena'kaiwosisiwiwolaawo

Presenting Nigerian Films at the Festival of French Films Tubingen, 2009

2011-01-30T12:39:00.002+01:00

EniOlorutidakosefarawekosefenutembelekosebinukosena'kaiwosisiwiwolaawo

iREP DOCUMENTARY FILM FESTIVAL

2011-01-08T21:11:00.001+01:00

(An international touring Documentary Film Festival located in Nigeria)
(www.irepfilmfestival.com)

PRESS RELEASE
Organisers of iREPRESENT (iREP) International Documentary Film Fest, wish to thank you immensely for the support you have rendered so far towards the realisation of the maiden edition of the annual touring festival, which is billed to hold January 20 to 23, 2011 at the TERRA KULTURE, TIAMIYU SAVAGE ST. VI and the LAGOS BUSINESS SCHOOL, VI. LAGOS
We also wish to apprise you of the latest information on the festival.
The iREP festival, initiated with the objective of promoting independent documentary features, in its objectives and contents, places emphasis on training and skill development to the benefit of the young, aspiring and practising film makers in Nigeria, especially for those with flair for Documentary films.

iREP 2011
(i) CONCEPTAL FRAMEWORK:
Africa In Self-Conversation
(ii) THEME:
Can Documentary Change the World?
(iii) OUTLINE:

3 Day Festival Schedule – JAN 20 – 23, 2010
The Opening Ceremony
Paper Presentations
Training & Workshop
Interactive Panel Discussion
The Screening Room
Networking & Mingling
Gala & Award

iREP 2011, the maiden edition of the fest is a 3-day event featuring paper presentations, screenings, networking, forums and workshops that will afford young filmmakers the opportunity to learn from industry veterans and build connections across the spectrum of creativity.

OBJECTIVE:
The maiden edition of iREP aims at introducing young filmmakers to the many opportunities documentary production offers. The Theme of iREP 2010: The Impact of Documentary Production in a developing Society/Economy; its cost effectives visa vice Film & Television production, Shooting techniques and tricks, Career advisory and more. Hence at least 4 professionals, specializing in key departments of documentary film making have been invited to conduct workshops and clinics in the course of the three day event.
A tentative line up of activities for the Documentary film fest is below:
:: Paper Presentations
:: Panel Discussion Session
:: Meet the Filmmaker
:: The Jury
:: Open Call
:: Documentary Film Screening
:: Workshops & Training

SYMPOSIUM/WORKSHOPS/PRESENTATIONS

(i) THEME: The Impact Of Documentary Production In a developing Society/Economy
Theme Summary: Written By Femi Odugbemi
"Can documentaries provoke change?
For Africa the global information order presents a narrative of wars, death, corruption and diseases. Who is telling the story of Africa and its realities and from what perspective? Can African filmmakers bring better understanding within and outside the continent with documentaries that give a more rounded definition of the African experience?
There is a dialogue on-going. Africa is in a conversation with itself concerning the shape of its future. A new order identifying new voices and new leaders, propagating new values of accountability, transparency, fair competition, social justice and economic empowerment is emerging.
It is a revolution of immense significance that is bringing a new optimism and pride about our future. Documentary filmmaking can be at the centre of shaping these discourses -- guiding and laying bare the issues.”

(ii) WORKSHOP/ SYMPOSIUMS
1. CAN DOCUMENTARY CHANGE THE WORLD?
(A keynote by Prof MANTHIA DIAWARA, New York University); (Responses by Discussants)
MODERATED BY : MR AFOLABI ADESANYA, MD, NFC

2. REDEEMING THE AFRICAN IMAGE : A CASE FOR AFRICAN DOCUMENTARY FILMS
(A panel of Filmmakers and Critics led by Lydie Diakhate ( Senegal/France)
MODERATOR: EMEKA MBA, DG, NFVCB

3. AFRICA IN SELF CONVERSATION
( A panel of Speakers led by Tunde Kelani and Sandra Obiago)
MODERATOR: TUNDE ADEGBOLA, Lecturer UNIBADAN

4. FILMS FOR DEVELOPMENT: ENGINEERING CHANGE IN AFRICAN POLITICS
(Lead paper by Bongiwe Selane (SA); Discussants)
MODERATOR: SANDRA OBIAGO, Director, CFC

5. MOTIVES OF BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS IN AFRICAN DOCUMENTARIES
(Roundtable, moderated by PROF TUNDE BABAWALE of CBAAC);
Panel led by Awam Amkpa

6. DIGITAL FILMMAKING, SHOOTING TECHNIQUES AND TRICKS FOR DOCUMENTARY PRODUCTION
A mini training sessions and workshops within the festival for our audience of young and aspiring filmmakers on the above topic.

(iii) SCREENING
A rich collection of award-winning Documentary films by renowned filmmakers from across the world, especially Africa in the Diaspora and at home complemented by works of young and old filmmakers in Nigeria will be screened during the three day course of the iREP.
The List of Films to be screened include :
1. THE NIGHTMARE IN DREAMLAND - Edgar Wolf, Eva Grun
2. IN SEARCH OF HIP-HOP - Issraa el-Kogali
3. OULED LENINE - Nadia el Fani
4. NORA - Alla Kovgan and David Hinton (US/UK/Mozambique)
5. AWAITING FOR MEN - Katy Lena Ndiaye (Senegal/Belgium)
6. IN MY GENES - Lupita Nyong'o (Kenya)
7. THE TRUTH IS UNBELIEVABLE (Sri Lanka)
8. ZIMBABWES FORGOTTEN CHILDREN (Xoliswa Sithole) (South Africa)
9. BEHIND THE RAINBOW (Jihan el-Tahri) (South Africa) (FESTIVAL FILM)
10. THE MANUSCRIPTS & TIMBUKTU (Zola Maseko) (South Africa)
11. THE TROPICAL HOUSE (Manthia Diawara) (Mali/USA)
12. THE RABBABA MAN (Mario Mabor), (Sudan)
13. GREAT AFRICAN Series ( Soyinka, Mandela, Haille Selassie) (Akin Omotsho) (Nigeria/South Africa)
14. ORIKI; IBADAN; BARIGA BOYS (Femi Odugbemi (Nigeria)
15. CFC Documentary Films (Sandra Obiago) ( Nigeria)
16. NAIJA DIAMONDS (Inspire Africa) (Nigeria)
17. FESTAC 77 (UNESCO/CBAAC) (Nigeria)
18. OMO ALAKEETU (CBAAC) ( Nigeria/Brazil)
19. THE NIGHTMARE IN DREAMLAND (Adama Adamni) (Germany)
20. There are also others from Nigerians who have indicated interest in participating in the festival.

NB: A jury made up of professional and young filmmakers will shortlist the documentary films by Film Students in Nigeria to be screened at the festival.

(iV) EXPECTED PARTICIPANTS, BENEFICIARIES
Our Target Audience includes young/professional filmmakers, screenwriters, production Company executives, TV executives, feature Documentary development executives, film workers, distributors, commissioning editors, cinematographers, sales agents, producers’ reps, entertainment lawyers, animators, Editors, national and state film organizations, government agencies, trade show exhibitors, new media professionals and content
creators. Attendance is approximately 500 participants.

CONFIRMED PARTICIPANTS
Among renowned professional filmmakers who have confirmed their participation are
1. JIHAN EL-TAHRI, Producer of BEHIND THE RAINBOW (South Africa)
2. DAVID MAX BROWN, Producer of THE MANUSCRIPTS & TIMBUKTU” directed by Zola Maseko (South Africa)
3. MANTHIA DIAWARA, Producer of THE TROPICAL HOUSE, who is also giving the keynote on Can Documentary Change the World ( Mali/United States)
4. Mario Mabor, Producer of “THE RABBABA MAN” ( Sudan)
5. TALAL AFIFI, ( A Film Festival organizer who is leading a team of three from Sudan
6. AKIN OMOTOSHO, Director of MNet GREAT AFRICAN Series
7. LYDIE DIAKHATE, Director of REAL LIFE DOCUMENTARY FORUM, who is leading Workshop Session
8. PROF. AWAM AMKPA, Director Africana Studies, leading discussion in the Symposium/Workshop sessions
9. ISSRAA EL-KOGALI, Producer IN SEARCH OF HIP-HOP (Sudan)

AWAITING CONFIRMATION:
10. BONGIWE SELANE, Producer of the MNet GREAT AFRICAN Series (South Africa)
11. ADAMA ADAMNI , producer of THE NIGHTMARE IN DREAMLAND (Germany)

NB: And from home-front is a list of about 10 film makers out of which at least the following have been confirmed:
1. SANDRA OBIAGO, presenting a collection of films from the COMMUNICATING for CHANGE
2. FEMI ODUGBEMI, presenting ORIKI; EYO; BARIGA BOY
3. INSPIRE AFRICA presenting NAIJA DIAMONDS
4. CBAAC presenting tow films – OMO ALAKETU and "FESTAC 77": a UNESCO and Nigerian Television Authority Documentary film
5. NATIONAL FILM INSTITUTE presenting works by about FIVE students

Each of the filmmakers will personally present their films and entertain questions from the audience, while also participating in the TRAINING and WORKSHOP sessions that have been scheduled to run in the course of the festival (please see details below).

The Symposium and Workshop sessions will have as LEAD SPEAKERS/DISCUSSANTS:
1. MR AFOLABI ADESANYA, Managing Director of Nigeria Film Corporation
2. MR EMEKA MBA, Director General, National Film And Video Censors Board
3. PROF. TUNDE BABAWALE, Director-General Centre for Black and African Arts and Civilisation, CBAAC
4. PROF MANTHIA DIAWARA, Director African-American Studies, New York University
5. PROF AWAM AMKPA, Director Africana Studies, New York University
6. Dr TUNDE ADEGBOLA, Lecturer University of Ibadan
7. MR TUNDE KELANI, Cinematographer and MD, Mainframe Productions
8. MR FIDELIS DUKKER, Director, Abuja Film Festival
9. MR BUSOLA HOLLOWAY
10. MR JAIYE OJO
11. MRS SANDRA OBIAGO, Director Communicating for Change

NB 1:
THE TRAINING/ WORKSHOP WILL BE DIRECTED BY MS LYDIE DIAKHATE , Director REAL LIFE FILM FORUM, the Major Partner of the iREP Documentary Film Festival.

NB 2:
The Festival Film Is BEHIND THE RAINBOW By Jihan El Tahri
(2009, 124 min.) documentary by Jihan El Tahri
Focused on the conflicts within the ANC, in power in South Africa after the end of Apartheid, this rigorous, complete and richly documented film deals with the fratricide struggle between Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma. It is not restricted to the political analysis but also studies in depth their psychology. The destructive nature of power emerges and in particular the threats that hang over a country, the evolution of which is decisive for the future of the whole of the African continent.
Behind the Rainbow features key interviews with ANC current and former leaders including Jacob Zuma, Kgalema Motlanthe, Pallo Jordan, Thabo Mbeki and Terror Lekota.
Co-winner of the Walter Mosley Award, Real Life Documentary Festival 2009, in Accra.
Second Prize for the best Documentary at Fespaco 2009, in Burkina Fasso.

BACKGROUND INFORMATION
About iREP
The Conceptual framework of iREPRESENT (iREP) is AFRICA IN SELF-CONVERSATION; and it is designed to promote awareness about the power of documentary format to serve as a means of deepening and sharing social and cultural education as well as encouraging participatory democracy in our societies.
iREP is conceptualized to create platform of awareness and expression for aspiring and practising filmmakers who are creating socially relevant documentary films to positively impact our world.
To fully engage an array of trans-cultural creativity, iREP will provide a forum for everyone's ingenuity to be showcased without prejudice to style or subject.
iREP celebrates the ever expanding world of documentary films by inviting talents from across the globe to share ideas on trends and technological advancements in the format.
It will be held in different international locations; and will be networked to other established documentary projects around the world.
In 2010, iREP International Documentary Film Festival was founded by a board of directors which include; Femi Odugbemi, producer, director, past President of ITPAN (Independent Television Producers Association of Nigeria) & CEO of DVWORX STUDIOS; Jahman Anikulapo, culture journalist and activist, Programmes Director of CORA (Committee for Relevant Art) & Project Director of Culture Advocates Caucus, (CAC); and, Makin Soyinka, culture activist, filmmaker and Director of The Lagos Film Office --- all are operatives of the West African Documentary Film Forum, WADFF – with a mission to develop and nurture the talent of young filmmakers in Africa and internationally. Dapo Kolade is Festival Director of iREP 2010.

Notes of iREP for Nigeria
It is imperative that at this time in its socio-political history, Nigeria ought to stand up and be counted among the real filmmaking countries, not only in Africa but also in the entire world. The example of countries like South Africa, Burkina Faso and many of the North African countries should serve as inspiration in this regard.
We recognize that in spite of the high rate of debutants, many of whom lack appropriate knowledge in relevant departments of film making, there are still quite a good number of well-trained, talented and serious filmmakers in Nigeria who are willing and ready to work hard to reclaim the lost glory of the industry. And this is a goal that the iREP desires to pursue in its operation, especially through its annual iREP International Touring Docu Festival.

Signed on behalf of iREP by

Femi Odugbemi
Executive Director
iREP INTERNATIONAL DOCUMENTARY FILM FESTIVAL
(January 5, 2010)

DESCRIPTIVE FILM PROGRAMME

BEHIND THE RAINBOW,
(2009, 124 min.) documentary by Jihan El Tahri

Focused on the conflicts within the ANC, in power in South Africa after the end of Apartheid, this rigorous, complete and richly documented film deals with the fratricide struggle between Thabo Mbecki and Jacob Zuma. It is not restricted to the political analysis but also studies in depth their psychology. The destructive nature of power emerges and in particular the threats that hang over a country, the evolution of which is decisive for the future of the whole of the African continent.
Behind the Rainbow features key interviews with ANC current and former leaders including Jacob Zuma, Kgalema Motlanthe, Pallo Jordan, Thabo Mbeki and Terror Lekota.
Co-winner of the Walter Mosley Award, Real Life Documentary Festival 2009, in Accra.
Second Prize for the best Documentary at Fespaco 2009, in Burkina Fasso.

OULED LENINE 2007, 81min., Tunisia) documentary by Nadia El Fani

The director Nadia El Fani portrays, through interviews and travelling over the country, her own father, one of the chief of the Tunisian Communist Party! “That was the time when we achieved Independence for the country, when women and men were equal, when…“ This film is made as a profound investigation upon modern History. Yet, it is full of emotion as it depicts a family ‘saga’ over a few generations, over just the last fifty years or so… on both banks of our common sea: the Mediterranean.

AWAITING FOR MEN
(2007, 56 min., Senegal / Belgium) documentary by Katy Lena Ndiaye

Oualata, the red city to the extreme east of the Mauritanian desert. In this small island, rampart against sands, the women devote themselves to the art of painting, they decorate, the walls of the city. In a society which seems dominated by tradition, religion and men, three of these women express themselves with a surprising freedom on their manner of perceiving relation between the men and the women.
Co-winner of the Walter Mosley Award, Real Life Documentary Festival 2008 in Accra.

THE TROPICAL HOUSE
(52 min., 2008, Portugual, Niger, Congo) documentary by Manthia Diawara
In the late 1940’s, bulder and architect Jean Prouvé designed three prefabricated aluminium Maisons Tropicales as prototypes for the housing of French colonial administrators in Africa. One was sent to Niamey, Niger and two to Brazzaville, Congo. Recently they were removed and have since been exhibited in Europe and North America, and sold for millions of dollars. In 2007, Angela Ferreira made an installation on the Maisons Tropicales for the Portuguese pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Manthia Diawara’s documentary to a complement to the Ferreira artistic project, and brings to the light the hidden stories and memories of those left behind in Africa when the Maisons Tropicales were removed. It is a postcolonial excavation into African identity, art, and the notion of cultural patrimony.

IN MY GENES
(2009, 78min., Kenya) documentary by Lupita Nyong’o

In My Genes addresses the personal and societal challenges that people with albinism face as members of one of the most hyper-visible and misunderstood minority groups of Kenya's predominantly black society through the experiences of eight individuals from different cultural and socio-economic backgrounds. Through this uplifting story of discrimination on the basis of skin colour, not only does she want to shed light on the problem of stigma, but also hopes to celebrate human difference.

NORA
(2008, 30 min., US/UK/Mozambique) documentary by Alla Kovgan & David Hinton

“Nora” is based on true stories of the dancer Nora Chipaumire, who was born in Zimbabwe in 1965. In the film, Nora returns to the landscape of her childhood and takes a journey through some vivid memories of her youth. Using performance and dance, she brings her history to life in a swiftly-moving poem of sound and image. Shot
entirely on location in Southern Africa, “Nora” includes a multitude of local performers and dancers of all ages, from young schoolchildren to ancient grandmothers, and much of the music is specially composed by a legend of Zimbabwean music - Thomas Mapfumo.
AfroPop Prize, Real Life Documentary Festival 2009 in Accra.

THE NIGHTMARE IN DREAMLAND
(45 min., 2010, Ethipia-Germany) Edgar Wolf, Eva Grün, Adamu Adamni

Dubai is the Gulf’s very own fairytale city, yet tales of misery lurk behind its gleaming facades. Many emirate families retain a housemaid, mostly from the Philippines, Ethiopia and elsewhere. What initially seemed to be a dream job often turns out to be the stuff of nightmares with long working days, no breaks, very little food and no wages. Many of these young women are beaten, and even sexually assaulted by the men of the house. The investigation relates a tale of modern slavery. It accompanies Trungu, a young Ethiopian woman, as she prepares for her new job with the help of an agency in Addis Ababa. The camera follows her as she flies to Dubai up until the moment her passport is taken from her upon arrival...

IN SEARCH OF HIP-HOP
(7min., 2010, Sudan) by Issraa El-Kogali. In Arabic with English subtitles
Why is Rap a means of expression for young Sudanese? Who is their audience? What inspired them to become Hip-Hop artists? We see a few young men who introduce themselves as Hip-Hop artists and MCs at their performances and/or in the recording studio, around the city, and at a major Hip-Hop event – the “Sudan Boom Box”. We get a taste of the flavor of Sudanese Hip Hop by glimpsing their talent.
On stage they are Mojo, DZA the Dissenter, MC Mo, the BiB and LUAL. Who are these Sudanese artists forming the emerging Hip-Hop scene in Khartoum?

THE RABBABA MAN
(15 min., Sudan 2010) by Mario Mabor. In Arabic with English subtitles
Mohamed earns the money to feed his 14 children by manufacturing and selling Rabbabas (traditional Sudanese string instruments) on the local markets of Khartoum. His qualities as an entertainer brought him street fame, but never made him rich.

CORA holds Publishers’ Forum as part of 12th Lagos Book & Art Festival.

2010-11-09T18:05:00.002+01:00

The Committee For Relevant Art (CORA) is hosting decision-making executives of publishing houses to register for the Publishers Forum at the 12th edition of the annual Lagos Book & Art Festival.

The Festival runs from the 11th till the 14th of November 2010. The Publishers Forum is the very first programme and the only event for November 11, 2010.

The Lagos Book and Art Festival is unique for being an event where the emphasis is as much on insights into the content of books as it is in their promotion and sales. Therefore, for this year’s festival, we have designed what we call the
Publishers’ Forum to provide a concentrated space for key publishers in Nigeria to collectively appraise their current operations within the context of the challenges facing their industry, brainstorm on their findings and identify key steps that can be taken as individual businesses or as a collective to improve their bottom line. At CORA, we picture ourselves as midwives to the different facets of the creative industries in Nigeria, therefore what we hope to achieve through the publisher’s forum is to provide a platform for Nigerian publishers to collectively brainstorm on how to improve their business.

Within the four hours marked up for the business forum, we intend the participants to add value to their businesses through critical feedback on their processes, input on the most challenging areas they have to deal with and useful
networking.

The Publishers forum will be followed from 4pm to 6pm by a conversation (open to the public) tagged: “Wooing the mass market” where two publishers representing old business and new business will share from their current work and their
future plans, by discussing a selection from their publishing list. The discussions will be brought to a close with a cocktail.

A most apt way to describe the Publishers' Forum is to call it a 'focus group' or a strategy session where the facilitator(s) serve as umpires in a series of brainstorming sessions. The forum is targeted at principals of publishing houses who seek to grow their market and are willing to engage in creative thinking towards identifying strategies that can make this possible for them whether within a collective or through their individual operations. Our expectation is that cogent strategies would emerge from the session which are immediately implementable or could be built upon in future.

The Lagos Book & Art Festival is a comprehensive, four day programme of events; readings, conversations around books, art and craft displays, kiddies’ art workshops and reading sessions, book exhibitions, live music and dance. It will run from November 11 to 14 at the large exhibition hall of the National Theatre, Lagos. (The Publishers’ Forum will hold from 10am – 2pm on the 11th of November at the Eko Hotel and Suites in Victoria Island, Lagos.)

Please contact the undersigned to register for the Publishers’ Forum or for more information on the 12th Lagos Book & Art Festival.

Toyin Akinosho
Secretary General
africaoilgasreport@yahoo.co.uk

* The CORA Publishers’ Forum is made possible by kind support from Evans
Publishers and Nigeria Liquefied Natural Gas (NLNG).