A-ARTs: The Femi Osofisan that I know

Celebrant, Prof Femi Osofisan; text author and poet, Ben Tomolu; and filmmaker, Tunde Kelani during 80th birthday of Osofisan...in Lagos, recently.

By Ben Tomoloju

IN 1973, as an 18-year-old Lower Sixth Arts student of Christ's School, Ado-Ekiti, I was privileged to play the lead role, Sanda, in Femi Osofisan's A RESTLESS RUN OF LOCUSTS. The second lead performer was a Class Four student, Miss Toyin Egunjobi (now Mrs. Eriye) who played Iyabo. The play was selected, produced and directed for the school's Drama Society by our Literature graduate teacher, Niyi Osundare and his colleague, Ebenezer Ojo.

At that point in time both of us, alongside other students, were burgeoning talents with recognisable artistic potentials, simply doing what we were told to do and making the best of it. However, it did not occur to us at that formative stage that we were tapping inspiration from those who, in years to come, would emerge as leading lights in African and global literary and performing arts scenes. By this, one is referring to the literary titans, Professors Babafemi Osofisan and Niyi Osundare.

The latter I already had personal interactions with as my teacher. But Osofisan I never knew in person beyond the power of his words in print, woven into exciting dialogue and titillating stories, lifting one's mind unto higher levels of social consciousness as found in A RESTLESS RUN OF LOCUSTS. At the time of our school's production, the play was yet to be published. We only relied on typewritten copies for our scripts. The first edition was published two years later, in 1975. As such, knowing Osofisan was, for me, only spiritual, textual, seminal and performative. And it remained so until I turned up as a fresh undergraduate at the Department of English, University of Ibadan in 1975.

Meeting Osofisan in person, my first impression about him was that he was not one to announce himself by his carriage and individual ego. His reputation loomed large enough to bring such annunciation into effect for whatever it was worth in the life of a genius, be it as a literary figure or a scholar-critic bristling with revolutionary fervour.

One of my earliest experiences of Osofisan's radicalism fell within my first few months as a freshman in the university. A literary event was being held at Trenchard Hall. It had to do with problems besetting academic publishing vis-a-vis the publishing industry in Nigeria. The event was a town-and-gown affair. It enjoyed the august presence of publishing executives and scholars, including some firebrand radical authors like our celebrant who seized the opportunity provided by the occasion to protest against the discriminatory and unfavourable disposition of publishers towards young writers with the right aptitude and evidently creative outputs. At the centre of the raging fire of the protest was the poet Odia Ofeimun, then a postgraduate student of Political Science who was the most visible victim of the attitudinal disincentive from the publishing sector at that time. As a landmark intervention in the history of literary development in Nigeria, the verbal assail launched by Osofisan and his compatriots like Biodun Jeyifo, Omafume Onogie and G.G. Darah was an intellectual liberationist move that opened the vent for new voices to be heard in the Nigerian literary firmament.

For instance, Ben Okri's FLOWERS AND SHADOWS (1980). and THE LANDSCSAPES WITHIN (1981) were published within a proximate time-range by Longman (Nigeria) Limited from the late 70s when the protest took place and the early I980s when the young author was only twenty-one and twenty-two years old respectively. Granted, the issue of the publishing of new writings was not so much about age. It was, indeed, all about merit. That Ben Okri went on to win the Booker Prize in 1991, ten years after his novels were first published was, albeit remotely, a justification of the advocacy by the radical authors of the 1970s like Osofisan. At least, it raised the awareness that promising talents should be promoted in real and prevented from suffering avoidable haemorrhage.

Besides literary activism, Osofisan maintained his distinction as a playwright, theatre director and dramaturg whom members of the younger generation behold as a source of inspiration. This is either through direct participation in his, reading his plays or watching their presentation on stage. Among my set, there are quite a number of these admirers out of whom two would be cited later as examples. Meanwhile, we can catch a glimpse of our experiencing of Osofisan's stagecraft.

His play, THE CHATTERING AND THE SONG was performed by the Unibadan Masques in February 1976, the sixth month of our first year on campus. The play exposed us to the radical departure from existing traditions in terms of form and content. If we had stepped into the theatre in the hope of seeing another Bambulu in the very character of what obtained in James Ene Henshaw's THIS IS OUR CHANCE, it was 'no deal' in Osofisan's THE CHATTERING AND THE SONG. Rather, conventional dramatic structure was overhauled and subsequently realigned to fit into new and socially relevant ideological train of thought. History was 'reinterpreted' - to use the word of Sola Adeyemi - discarding old, retrogressive prejudices and supplanting them with high levels of commitment to the advancement of society. Cultural nuances in dances, songs and spectacles are not mere decorative artifices, but powerful statements that can propel humanity towards new, positive reality.

The play revisits the history of Oyo in the 19th century where Alafin was generally perceived by his docile subjects as a benevolent ruler in spite of the attendant rot during his reign which was concealed by the grandeur of royalty. Employing the play-within-a-play dramatic effect, Osofisan created a scene of resistance by the Farmers' Movement led by Latoye, son of the late Prime Minister under Alafin Abiodun who was deposed by the monarch. Latoye, who could have patched things up to, at least, enjoy the remnants of opulence attached to his aristocratic connection, chooses to pitch his tent with 'the wretched of the earth' and becomes the arrowhead of the revolution which ultimately demystifies his bogey apparatuses of supposed invincibility.

The other play by Osofisan premiered in our U. I. days was WHO'S AFRAID OF TAI SOLARIN, a satirical drama created after Gogol's The Government Inspector. WHO'S AFRAID OF TAI SOLARIN was presented from November 29 to December 3, 1977, midway into our final year. By all standards, the production was very successful, with its biting humour, trenchant insight into corruption and the ludicrousness of corruptive elements in the Nigerian society. These elements, comprising the creme de la creme of the community were scared stiff at the news of the impending official visit of the famous, no-nonsense Public Complaints Commissioner, Dr. Tai Solarin. They are so panic-stricken and fidgety that they play into the hands of a con man whom they mistake for the commissioner. At the end, the con man defrauds them all and escapes into thin air.

One of the post-production activities usually organised by the Department of Theatre Arts in those days - and I suppose it is still being sustained - was the post-mortem, a forum that placed the playwright or director on the hot-seat to listen and respond to critical opinions about the play that had just been produced. I cannot quite remember seeing Professor Osofisan on any formal hot-seat as the activity kicked. But he was in the hall all the same. From nowhere, at a point, he rose to interject with a point of correction. All seemed well as a majority of the participants remarked in all honesty that WHO'S AFRAID OF TAI SOLARIN was another masterpiece by F.O. A few references were made to similar efforts by playwrights of great repute as exercises in comparatism. I recall, in fact, that a contributor compared Osofisan's mastery of the comic art with that of the Jacobean dramatist, Ben Jonson, author of Volpone. Indeed all went well until a prominent classicist and novelist of repute expressed his reservation about certain aspects of the play stating that he was disappointed... in that regard. Upon hearing that, the playwright rose, stepped forward from where he was seated in the auditorium and took a left-turn. Heading for the gangway left of the auditorium, he quipped tersely, "How can I disappoint you? Afterall, you didn't appoint me." Without betraying any emotion, he stepped majestically out of the Arts Theatre, indifferent to the scores of eyes that panned in his direction and many mouths that hung ajar between laughter and lamentation. And that was the end of the show or - shall we say - the post mortem. Many years later, reading Osofisan's essay in The Guardian titled "The Critic As An Assassin", my mind raced back to what I chose to call "The Tale of the Appointed and Disappointed". In sooth, our celebrant today has been an adept at the handling of critics from his arsenal of sarcasm.

I spoke earlier on about members of the younger generation of of playwrights and directors beholding Emeritus Professor Femi Osofisan as a source of inspiration. Let me state categorically here that I am one of them, especially in the use of music, songs and spectacles as elaboration and elucidation of critical sequences in dramatic enactments.

But let me also use this observation as a tribute to my late friend, Jide Ogungbade, one of the most outstanding theatre directors in Nigeria in his lifetime. However unsung this theatre hero might be even up till date, I want to crave the indulgence of everyone in the house, with the permission of our teacher, Emeritus Professor Osofisan, to be upstanding and observe a minute's silence in his memory......

Jide Ogungbade was that artistic director who was most passionately Osofisanesque in his directorial style. On so many occasions in his lifetime, he had had to tinker with fresh scripts to upgrade them - I dare say - to the Brechtian-Osofisan dramaturgical concept and win rounds and rounds of acclamation in the process. In addition, in some of our collaborative projects, the Prof. himself has been so benign that he would some time from his busy schedule observe our rehearsals and offer some invaluable advice to our production team in the same spirit of mentorship as we have always benefited from him. Sir, I thank you most sincerely for your kind gesture towards we, your 'aburos'.

On a very personal note, I would recall that I was an Ex-officio member of the Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA) at the national level when Professor Osofisan was the Association's President in the late 1980s. He was the one who gave my humble self and Sola Osofisan the mandate to establish a branch of the Association in Lagos. With the support of the late Otunba Eddie Aderinokun and other people of goodwill Lagos ANA continues to thrive till date as one of your literary legacies under successions of dynamic State Executives. Long before then, in the early 1980s, while I was the Reviews Editor of the Democrat Weekly, I had just published my review of MOROUNTODUN AND OTHER PLAYS when the news reached us that Professor Osofisan survived a ghastly motor accident. Strange imaginings whirled around my head even as I thanked God in sobriety that we did not lose an icon. A poem flowed from my pen as a follow-up titled "No Going Yet" which was published in subsequent edition of the DEMOCRAT WEEKLY Arts Page.

Thereafter, I was invited to The Guardian to set up the Arts Desk. Even as I appreciate Odia Ofeimun, Dr. Yemi Ogunbiyi, the pioneer Managing Director, Dr. Stanley Macebuh, the pioneer Editor, Mr. Lade Bonuola, and your good self, Professor Femi Osofisan, for the various roles you all played in bringing me aboard the flagship. Right there, you continued performing the unofficial role as a mentor even to the Arts Desk by deploying one of the typists in the Managing Director's office to the Arts Desk, thereby bringing us into parity with other desks.

Finally, Ladies and Gentlemen, Professor Femi Osofisan was my immediate boss and Overall Director of the Drama Section of the Ceremonies Committee of the 8th All-Africa Games (COJA 2003). Working at such close quarters under him gave me enough clue as to his indefatigable work spirit, a factor that must have accounted for his prodigious outputs in various terrains of life he has traversed, creatively, academically, administratively and most especially as family man.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY SIR. I PRAY THAT GOD IN HIS INFINITE MERCIES WILL GRANT YOU MANY MORE YEARS OF ALL-ROUND ACCOMPLISHMENTS IN ALL YOUR ENDEAVOURS.

(Text of a preface to the Roundtable on ‘Decolonisation of African Literature in Femi Osofisan’s works’ held as lead plenary during the 8-day ‘Femi Osofisan @80’ celebration. Talk delivered at the JRandle Centre for Yoruba Culture and History, Onikan, Lagos, June 14, 2026).

Soyinka at 90...revisiting Maya Angelou, superlatives of Nobel Prize