Category: Arts & Life

At last, Professor Wole Soyinka’s The Beatification of Area Boy was premiered in Nigeria.  Written and directed by the Nobel Laureate himself, the play formed part of the just-concluded Lagos Black Heritage Festival plays held at the Freedom Park, Lagos, last week.  It is a play written in 1990 to indict the leadership of Nigeria over their indifference to the people’s quest for development, for the alleviation of poverty and the seemingly glorification of everything bad in the land.  Edozie Udeze, who watched the play reports

For once in many years, the theatre sector was quite agog with life as many thespians and theatre buffs were indeed excited.  The excitement was mainly occasioned due to the ever presence of Professor Wole Soyinka, Africa’s foremost theatre practitioner, playwright and director. As the Lagos Black Heritage Festival went on uninterruptedly last week, Soyinka was seen in his natural and familiar element putting everything in order to ensure that his play, The Beatification of Area Boy came out beautifully well.

From every corner of Freedom Park, Lagos, venue of the event, his well-trimmed baritone voice could be heard as he shouted instructions to the artistes during rehearsals.  The play ran for three consecutive days and before it came on stage the first day, the playwright himself was on hand to direct proceedings.  His orders were obeyed to the last latter because the artistes themselves also wanted to get it right.  It is not always that the calibre of Soyinka comes out to direct one of his works.  It is also not in his element to be seen mixing so freely and walking the paths for almost one week non-stop.  So, when the cast and crew noticed how precious this play was to him, they quickly made the situation more pleasant and appealing to him and others.

Written during the turbulent days of Nigeria, when the Late General Sani Abacha held the reins of power, The Beatification of Area Boy which is making its debut in the country, chronicles the tenets of the military style of governance.  Not only that, Soyinka is deliberate in his choice of themes, events, concepts and atrocities in the play.  His concept was to relate the genesis of Nigeria from the moment she discovered oil in the Niger Delta.  What did the military do with the oil and what it supposed to yield to the nation?

Where is the pride of Nigeria as an oil producing state?  Has oil really been a blessing, a curse or a mixed grill of confusion?  At the height of the oil wealth when Nigerian leaders were supposed to invest and develop the nation, what did they do?  All sorts of benefits and promotions were being given to civil servants who in connivance with the powers that be, busied themselves siphoning and plundering the resources of the nation.

From oil wealth to oil boom and then the advent of oil doom, Nigeria has now fallen from her utopian heights as poverty, crime, backwardness and more have taken over the soul of the society.  In situating the story and carving out the different scenes, Soyinka made the metamorphosis real and evocative.  Here the role of different types of individuals like the trader – turned-area boy, the judge, the policeman, the mama put, the job seeker, the ever-insatiable and deceitful Nigerian young lady and more, became a clarion call to periscope deeper into the voices of the society.

Almost all societies of the world use their wealth to build infrastructures and provide for the masses, but in Nigeria wealth is used to further impoverish the poor and make the ruling class richer.  Now the people themselves sit idly by and encourage the government to continue to plunder the nation by not doing enough to task their leaders.  Who will now bail the cat?  Who should be the final arbiter?  How would the society function well if the people do not task and query those in power to give them what they deserve?

In using the circuit type of rotating theatre stage, Soyinka further ensured that the rudiments of the play permeated the audience.  As people sat in circles, they were made to shift their seats and move to different directions as the play progressed.  This was permissible, for most of the scenes were made to represent and register serious flashbacks and introspects that dug deep into the fabric of the nation.  This type of setting which is not common in Nigeria, further gave the play an undue aesthetics that indeed created so much hype and excitement in the minds of the audience.

For three hours, the likes of Governor Chibuike Amaechi of Rivers State, Sam Omatseye of The Nation Newspapers, Yemi Ogunbiyi, Olaokun Soyinka, the Ogun State Commissioner for Health, Kunle Ajibade and such other high calibre theatre enthusiasts sat to watch the play to relive the sorrowful historical stages of a nation in dire need of leadership.  The Area boy himself who was in the habit of being in the know about everything that happened in the country was at the centre of the play.  He controlled his retail business as he liked and increased prices whenever he felt duty-bound to do so.  He waited for every action of government to hike the prices of his wares.  And he would invent all kinds of tricks to ensure that people patronized him.  Moreover, he would tell his people how government’s senseless economic policies have been destroying the image of the society thereby making him and others unable to survive.  The area boy syndrome was all over him as he mesmerised the stage and forced the audience to rely on him for the latest information about the state of the nation.

In tow was the policeman who was to keep order but was also weighed down by the ever-troublesome and recalcitrant people around him.  He moved from stage to stage, from one corner to the other to pester the audience and ensured that decorum was maintained.  He himself was equally piqued by the situation of the country where hunger is a serious nightmare, where the payment of salaries was a huge problem and insecurity has become the order of the day.

At a point the playwright narrowed the story down to Lagos.  To him, Lagos is a symbol of Nigeria.  The story of Lagos, is the story of Nigeria.  With the Lagoon around, with the array of issues and masses of people in the city, what has the place become in the annals of Nigeria?  In order that the beauty of the play is made manifest and more appealing and entertaining, Tunji Oyelana was brought in to sing his popular and evergreen track ‘I love my country I no go lie’.  The interlude equally made the audience go back into the labyrinth of time when Soyinka first composed the song to spite leaders.  Fortunately, Oyelana sang it with renewed vigour and mandate that people joined him in the choruses.  In all, the profundity of the play, proved that Soyinka was the best to have directed it.  All the issues of the nation within the period periscoped in the play were brought to the fore.

However, the play has been seen by many as being on abridged form of the original text.  The playwright may have done it on purpose to save time and keep the audience wholly entertained.  Besides that, it would have been more instructive too if the playwright had incorporated the latest style of political thuggery into the play.  The system of area boyism in Nigeria keeps evolving.  Their manner of operation gets more sophisticated day in day out.  The ease with which political leaders engage them for their selfish motives is endless.

Today, many of them have guns.  Some have even become too powerful for their masters to control.  After elections, they now constitute themselves into powerful forces that become a big headache to the society.  If, in the process of the presentation of this play, the director had updated this to suit the current situation it would have attracted louder and more pleasant applause from the people.  The mood of the nation now is for the people to know how the political thugs had fared and operated in different locations in Nigeria during the just-concluded elections.

Even though the play harped seriously on austerity measures, military interregnum, transport problem, the menace of social miscreants, bad leadership, oil pollution, bicycle allowances and later car allowances and such other monstrous issues that tend to keep Nigeria down, The Beatification of Area Boy is still an evolving theme.  It is a play that has to be done in a comprehensive manner to espouse in totality all the ugly and monstrous issues tearing Nigeria to shreds.

The hilarious responses of the audience showed how they followed the sequences and how they felt that the issues truly touched on their psyche.  This is one of the effects of live theatre, which its primary motive is to appeal to the conscience of the people.  It is a lesson and that was why when it premiered in Leeds, England and other parts of Europe, the play was well received.

The cast and crew included Dr. Tunde Awosanmi, Ropo Ewenla, Wole Oguntokun, Makinde Adeniran, Tunji Oyelana, Peter Badejo, Ijeoma Agu.  Others were Wale Ojo, Toyin Osinaike, Jennifer Osammor, Taiwo Adeyemo, Tunji Sotimirin and many others.

Whether traditional or contemporary, realistic or abstract, an artist choice is guided by expressive purpose. And Stanly Dudu’s numerous drawing attest to this.  His works revolve around women and children, which are done by memory and imagination. “Basically, my works are works that reflect the society, particularly women and children because I tend to favour them more,” he said.

Dudu interprets every day activities of women. The resulting images thus reflect the artist’s feelings about the subjects, which are worth discussing. The woman in the village, the woman who sells food by the roadside, the house wife who attends to children and market women are the subjects you come across in his drawings. “The connection between me and market women is that I find them very interesting. I find it very hard to walk pass them. I want to look at them, the arrangement of the baskets, the gesticulations, the transactions; all these things are what inspire me about the market women. I kind of drawn to that,” he asserted.

His works are lavishly composed and they offer bigger than life experience that paradoxically lead viewer away from the real world and its surface appearances into the inside spaces of the mind and spirit; though Dudu said his works are not spiritual. He achieves this inward view by balancing a realistic drawing technique with addition of symbolism and allegorical elements. His true ambition is to remind us of where we are coming from, where we are and where we are going.

Dudu mainly work with paper and charcoal, but introduced colour to his works last year during his second solo exhibition: Next Episode.  His works were generally monochrome, an identity he created for himself before he decided to add colour to his works. “I realized I needed an identity and fortunately it was at the period people got tired of seeing coloured works everywhere. By the time I was showcasing more of these, I was welcoming, I was receiving accolades,” he hinted.

 Dudu depicts a lot of children participating in all sorts of plays, such as playing “mummy and daddy.”  He asserted that these set of works were inspired by his childhood experiences.

His major influence he said: “Is my brother, Emmanuel Dudu. He is one of my major influences. I grew up seeing him doing drawing, attempted the ink, do creative things. It wasn’t just him alone; I had another brother though he fell by the roadside. I saw the two of them work. With his (Emmanuel Dudu’s) own little achievements, I was able to pick up from there.  I must confess he has been a very big influence in my life,” he said and described his brother as “my mentor”

He is working towards presenting something to his viewers which said: “In the next five years I want to move beyond this, I want to experiment things. I want to do arts that the society can associate with; I mean art that can reach out to the whole society, even beyond because I am equally nursing the notion of doing art internationally. Like in residency programmes, even participate in the auction they do abroad.”

Since 2009, Dudu has been producing captivating works which people often ask if they are paintings. Like most artist, Dudu asserted that his has challenges. “The materials I work with, people will say they are cheap, just paper they will say. The papers are not easy to come by. I travel abroad, to Spain, to acquire papers,”

He is an Auchi Polytechnic graduate with Ordinary National Diploma (OND) in General Art in 2003 and Higher National Diploma (HND) in Painting in 2006. He is a full time studio artist.

41-year-old businesswoman down with Leukemia, appeals for financial support from kind-hearted Nigerians, as she prepares for an urgent bone marrow transplant in South Africa.

I was supposed to be the happiest period of her life. Mrs. Abimbola Mordi’s second child arrived eight years after the first and her joy knew no bounds. But in the midst of this celebration, she discovered she was experiencing general body weakness. That was two years ago.

“I realised that my body was not the same again. I started feeling strange and feeling leg pains,” she began. But she dismissed the weakness, ascribing it to probably old age or the long space between her two children.

She figured that taking pain-killers should handle the weakness. But the situation deteriorated, until last August when she discovered her legs were swollen and reddish.

“I was alarmed but thought it was normal pain. I bought herbs, took them and the thing went away. But my body was not the same. I felt it was malaria and typhoid,” Mordi explained.

When the tiredness refused to go away, she decided it was time to visit the hospital. By then, she was getting weaker and dizzy every day. But all she got were malaria drugs. Yet the pains intensified. That was when she was advised to go for a comprehensive test.

After several delays, she finally dragged herself to the laboratory on March 20 for a comprehensive test. Three days later, the results came, and Mordi’s world crumbled. Her PVC was just at a miserly 14. Tests revealed she had Leukemia, the dreaded and rare form of cancer.

The 41-year-old businessman required immediate blood transfusion, for which she was admitted at the Lagos State University Teaching Hospital (LASUTH), Ikeja. She’s been on admission in the last five weeks, undergoing various forms of treatment.

When our correspondent met her last Wednesday, she looked perfectly fine with a broad smile. Only the worried faces around her indicated that something was wrong. At the last count, Mordi has taken ten pints of blood.

She has also undergone the first stage of the draining and painful process of chemotherapy. A second session was already scheduled when it was discovered that her platelet had completely broken down. The count was 65 by 10 as at March 24, according to her medical report signed by Dr. Balogun, a consultant Hematologist.

 Dr Olaitan Adewunmi, who is well familiar with her case, said Mordi’s body is producing bad blood. “All the functions of her red blood cell are deranged,” she added. The implication, she added, is that if there should be bleeding from any part of Mordi’s body, there would not be platelets to clot the blood.

Her medical record suspects “poor response to available chemotherapy,” for which a bone marrow transplant is being recommended. Adewunmi said: ‘She needs the transplant in a matter of few weeks from now.”

To undergo the transplant, Mordi needs nothing less than N15million, covering air ambulance, treatment and recovery. She also needs a donor from any of her two children or relations.

“She cannot fly in a pressurized cabin. She has to go by air ambulance,” Adewunmi stated. Mordi’s medical team has chosen a specialist in South Africa for the transplant. The mother of two therefore appeals to well-meaning Nigerians to come to her aid.

Her husband, Victor, said life has never been the same again for him and the family since the diagnoses. “We have been devastated but we are hopeful that God will spare her life,” he began.

He appealed to kind-hearted Nigerians to come to their rescue. “We will appreciate whatever we can raise. I believe my wife will live again if she gets the money. I believe God will touch the hearts of Nigerians. They should please come to her aid at this trying period.”

To support her, kindly send donation to:

Mrs. Abimbola Mordi

First Bank Plc

Account no: 3009893985

Three Nigerians share their stories of lucky escape and survival at the hands of xenophobic South Africans with Sunday Oguntola and Taiwo Alimi.

Emeka Eze considers himself the luckiest man on earth. Only luck anchored on sheer divine providence prevented him from being burnt alive in KwaZulu-Natal, a town in South Africa where he has lived for over six years during the last xenophobic attacks in that country.

When the attacks started, the 34-year-old shop owner, felt insulated. “I was very popular and much loved in the town. I was more or less a citizen, having assimilated and even lived like one,” he stated.

All the indigenes, as well as foreigners, loved him; and his grocery shop, up until that moment was well patronised in the community. Eze’s fiancée is also from the densely populated town. He thus felt sure that such ‘insurance’ should shield him from any attack.

“When the attacks began, I was not moved. I felt I was untouchable. My fiancée even joked that no one will ever think of me as a foreigner. I had become so involved and accommodated among everyone,” he reiterated.

But all those layers of ‘insurance’ dissolved in less than six hours of “hellish nightmare” a few days later. Eze was closing his shop around 10pm on this fateful day, when he saw some local guys moving towards his direction.

“I knew them so well and joked that I wouldn’t even reopen for them since I had closed for the day. Suddenly, one of them moved closer and landed an unexpected slap on my face. I was taken aback. Before I could recover, they made for the shop, ripped it open and looted everything in stock.

“I was so surprised and I couldn’t say anything. It was like a dreamland to me. They made me stand by and witness all the looting. When they were done, one of them asked me to undress. He said he wanted to see that ‘thing’ I was using to deceive my fiancée and other ladies.

“When I objected, I felt a cut through my head. Within seconds, I was drenched in blood. I lost my vision and became weaker and weaker. I started begging them to please spare my life. But they laughed and laughed. One of them said I was befriending a lady he had always eyed.

“I was dazed because this was someone who was always laughing and playing with me. Before I knew it, they had cut through my left leg again. I couldn’t walk again. I gave up hope for death. Then, I heard one of them saying I was making the money they should be making. This was someone I had borrowed money in the past,” he recounted.

It was when he gave up hope that help came. His fiancée, who heard about the attack, quickly called on local police to salvage the situation. Anashe had to devise a way to call the police because she had been placed under surveillance by local gangs. They had anticipated she could muster help for her Nigerian boyfriend.

Just when Eze was about breathing his last, police officers arrived the scene. “By then, I was almost gone from the severe beating. They used all manner of weapons on me. I only remember being carried into a vehicle. When I opened my eyes, I found myself in a hospital. I had been in coma for two days, I later realised.”

Eze, who was already well-established in the country, headed straight for the airport, from where he came back home. According to him, South Africa is a better forgotten era of his life.

“All I worked for in six years gone with the winds just like that. I was building a house in the community to settle down. All of that and my other investments gone down the drain?” He lamented.

Philip Agade’s encounter with the merchants of death was even scarier. At the restaurant where he worked as an attendant, he was way ahead of his peers. By all local standards, he was one of the big boys in Alexandra. His accommodation was always full of friends from Mozambique, Angola and South Africa. He was a star among all of them, having lived in the town for over a decade. Incidentally, it was one of his South African friends that set him up for what turned out to be a trip to the valley of death.

“I had closed for work and was heading home when he (Bezile) called me to come over to a section of the town for a drink. I was tired but since we were familiar friends, I accepted to go. I was almost at the place, when I ran into a group of young men.

“They beckoned on me but I moved on. However, when I saw my friend amongst them, I changed my mind and headed their way. On getting to where they were, they suddenly seized me and took me to a fast-approaching car. I was shocked and surprised. My friend kept quiet throughout. When I asked him what was wrong, he maintained his silence.

“They took me to a dark spot where I was told to kneel down and say my last prayer. I started begging for my life but they wouldn’t bulge. They kept beating me with weapons. I begged and begged until there was no strength in me again. I passed out completely when the beating became unbearable,” he said.

Apparently mistaken for dead, Agade’s attackers left satisfied. He surprisingly came alive three days later and trekked for another two days before he came across help. “I cannot explain but I just found myself alive. I trekked and trekked until I got to a village where the locals helped me escape to Mozambique by road,” he recalled.

He left South Africa without as little as a shirt despite working for over ten years as a hospital and restaurant attendant. He said the wounds he sustained from the beating would take months to heal. But that is nothing compared to the knowledge that he was completely left to die.

 Another returnee, who simply identified himself as Chuks, said he had more than a kiss with death in South Africa. Chuks said he was in a torture chamber somewhere close to Soweto with other African immigrants.

According to them: “I was working in Soweto when I was abducted and taken to a place where several immigrants were detained and tortured daily. I believe it is an underground. We were chained down and made to go through hell every day. Our only offence was working as foreigners in South Africa. They also said we were marrying their ladies more than they did.

“I was there for three days during which I went through all manners of torture. Feeding was only once and we were beaten black and blue. We were in chains and nobody could really escape. Some were from Zimbabwe, Angola, Mozambique, Congo and other places.

“They were just beating us. They said they will watch us die in agony. They beat and beat us until they become tired, only to resume the following day. When the suffering became unbearable, I started speaking privately to one of our torturers to please save me.

“He agreed after I was able to smuggle a few rand I had kept with me to him. He led me through a dark path in the night and I had to work another full day before I could get help. It is the most heartless thing I had ever seen.

“I can’t understand how you can just turn against your fellow blacks out of envy and frustration. I will never return to that country again no matter what happens. I am done with them.”

                ‘We locked ourselves     indoors for three days’

Kelvin (Not real name) relocated to the Rainbow country, South Africa in 2014 to seek greener pasture. In Nigeria, he was a journalist of high repute having worked with foremost newspapers: Champion and This Day, before delving into the banking industry with the now rested Intercontinental Bank Plc.

His relocation was made easy because his wife, who holds dual citizenship status of Nigeria and South Africa had gone ahead with the children. On arriving South Africa, he and his wife settled in Johannesburg, the famous South Africa commercial city.

Kelvin, who is pursuing PHD programme at a public University in Eastern Cape, South Africa, said he was away on Campus, when news of the xenophobic attack filtered in through the media.

Violence targeting immigrant shops recently opened erupted in the port city of Durban, where two foreigners and three South Africans were killed. Prior to this explosion, tension had been building up, with South African indigene accusing African immigrants of taking their jobs and contributing to the rising spate of crime in the country. According to government figures, the unemployment rate in South Africa is 25%.

A sixth death occurred penultimate Wednesday, as the violence reached its peak. The body of a 58-year old male foreign national was found in Verulam town, after a mob had attacked him in his home. In an attempt to save his life, he fled his home but later died of injuries sustained near his home, South African police said.

“My family was in Johannesburg, which is close to the scenes of the attack. I had to return quickly to join them and for three days, we were in door for fear of our lives.”

Though, not directly affected by the public attack, Kelvin revealed that he had contact with some foreigners affected. “While we were holed up inside our apartment, we got calls from our friends in Durbar and Johannesburg, intimating us of happenings in the streets. One of our friends got his boss, a Zimbabwean, badly beaten up. It was God that saved him from being killed.”

He noted that after the third day, he had to take his family outside Johannesburg and only recently returned home.

“I had to relocate my family prematurely to the University premises. We stayed back there for a week and returned home when normalcy returned. The reaction of the South African government was however reassuring with the massive arrest of key trouble makers and today we are walking around doing our business like it used to be.”