Like most of our consequential writers, Osofisan has created a body of writings with which we will still have to come to terms, and the occasion of his 70th anniversary provides scholars, gathered this week at Ibadan, an opportunity to undertake one such accounting. I appreciate the fortunes of having him to turn to as I tried to find my way to an idea of what I would like to do…
The Nigerian dramatist Femi Osofisan, who turns seventy this week (born June 16, 1946), was my most important intellectual compass during my undergraduate days at the University of Ibadan. To get an idea of how much important he was to my desire to write, “to become a writer,” as we used to say, you’ll have to imagine this: an ardent student with little to show beyond enthusiastic consumption of anything in print sitting across the table from a highly prolific, well-traveled, constantly-feted writer with a weekly, elegantly-composed newspaper column.
In April 1987 I was a hungry-for-knowledge student of Theatre Arts, sitting inside Osofisan’s office at the Faculty of Arts, receiving feedback on a playscript, my first completed manuscript which, as I must have thought at the time, had taken him longer to read than it had taken me to write! I must have gone to knock on the door of Room 73 a dozen times that week, as I had done nearly every week, hoping to be lucky to hear a voice within answering “Who’s it?!” To begin with, I must have noticed him at the parking lot, then waited patiently as he saw a female visitor to her car, and pounced on him with my request, manuscript in loose sheets already at hand.
I must have waited for what I calculated to be more than six months, and how was I to know that he had other things to do as a writer, teacher, parent and mentor to other students, far and near? But here at last he was, affording me precious tutelage, one-on-one, on how to become a writer. He patiently explained to me what he meant by the comment that the script was “thoughtful but too novelistic for a play,” how “conflict and contrast” worked in drama, and the uses of comic relief. I often carried books with me, and the one I brought to that meeting, I recall, was The Penguin Book of Socialist Verse. He suggested that I could begin with African poets, read J.P. Clark, Gabriel Okara, Kofi Awonoor…
For the next decade, he provided what I now view as incalculable support in my desire to become a writer, lending me books, reading for me, granting me audience, and most importantly being physically available as an intellectual point of reference, for me and for others of my generation of students. How appropriate, then, that it is through writing that I pay this homage. It is in writing, or more accurately in learning to write, that I have received the most lasting gift, that of mentorship, from him.
Osofisan’s status as a writer is assured; his achievements too numerous to list here. The ‘Chronology’ section of Portraits for an Eagle, the festschrift which Sola Adeyemi prepared when the playwright turned sixty in 2006, ran into seven pages. It was the most exhaustive documentation of his recorded achievements up to that point. Author of over seventy plays, (the earliest, Oduduwa Don’t Go! dates from 1969), Osofisan is also a fine poet, writing under the penname Okinba Launko, translator, novelist, newspaper columnist, composer, biographer, teacher and administrator.
He has, we know, made his name principally as a dramatist of international renown, but he is also a magnificent prose stylist, and has, throughout his long career, carved out a recognisable signature in prose: one which is relaxed, reflective, seductive, funny, and expansive; a string of long sentences, each a solid unit of thought, and each controlled with a conspicuous use of commas and extended metaphors, of which the one you are reading now is only a sorry imitation.
In those days I went frequently to his office, where it was normal to run into his friend and fellow writer Kole Omotoso, who had apparently suffered the wrath of the Cameroonian writer Mongo Beti, or be told with a gesture toward a tall man with forbidding bifocals that “This is BJ, Professor Jeyifo.” These were people with whom he had formed strong and lasting attachments, members of a variety of radical groups such as KOMFESS Artists and Positive Review, who took it upon themselves to “speak to our people,” and who calculated literature to be an agent of change, and revolutionary change, make no mistakes about it. This political choice played a prominent role in Osofisan’s most mature work.
Osofisan is perhaps also unique among African and postcolonial playwrights in his eclectic grasp of dramatic practices. He adapts, rewrites, and revises the work of writers from other and older traditions; he is equally at home responding to Clark’s The Raft as Another Raft, and rewriting Sophocles’ Antigone as Tegonni. The music in his plays, whether in English or Yoruba, is almost always entirely original compositions.
Although art is clever at speaking behind its maker’s back, although Osofisan is now returning to his beginnings as a writer, the grounds where François Rabelais meets Bertolt Brecht, the elegantly comic and satirical world of Kolera Kolej, and although he now writes poems in Yoruba, seeing every public appearance as an opportunity to sing, he is still very much taken with the urge to “speak to our people.” This urge, I think, embodies what the late critic Sesan Ajayi once characterised as “the chivalric ideal,” but it is also admirably Pan-Africanist, ethical, heroic, and humanistic. This is what he tried to locate in a specific cultural orientation by opting for Orunmila, the Yoruba deity of intelligent seeking and algebraic reasoning, as a metaphor for creativity. He is unique among writers of the black world in framing this urge capaciously, with plays composed about figures such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Kwame Nkrumah, Samuel Ajayi Crowther, and Amílcar Cabral.
Osofisan is perhaps also unique among African and postcolonial playwrights in his eclectic grasp of dramatic practices. He adapts, rewrites, and revises the work of writers from other and older traditions; he is equally at home responding to Clark’s The Raft as Another Raft, and rewriting Sophocles’ Antigone as Tegonni. The music in his plays, whether in English or Yoruba, is almost always entirely original compositions.
And he helped me to grow as a writer when it mattered.
He was on the teaching staff of the Department of Theatre Arts, but our formal classroom encounters were few. I remember vividly his presence at the classroom screening of a film about Modigliani. I remember a voice-training session in which we recited poems by Christopher Okigbo, Alice Walker, and Niyi Osundare. I remember the heuristic process of producing his play, Twingle-Twangle, A-Twynning Tale, as a classroom assignment, the play which, as the luck of history would have it, gave us Elereko, our treasured nickname for him, which we now confidently say to his hearing. For me, the most mature example of this form of apprenticeship was serving as the Stage Manager when he directed Wole Soyinka’s The Road in 1990.
Like most of our consequential writers, Osofisan has created a body of writings with which we will still have to come to terms, and the occasion of his 70th anniversary provides scholars, gathered this week at Ibadan, an opportunity to undertake one such accounting. I appreciate the fortunes of having him to turn to as I tried to find my way to an idea of what I would like to do, and I conclude this tribute with a song of uplift from one of his plays:
Elereko, Elereko
O se o, Elereko,
Ongbe o gbe mi, ebi o tule ka
O m’aye tu ni lara
O m’aye tu ni lara
O m’aye tu ni lara
Oro ore lo fi’selu se
Bee lo t’aye se…
Happy birthday, Tisa a wa!
Akin Adesokan is an Associate Professor of Comparative Literature in Indiana University Bloomington, USA.
