Prof Akinwunmi Isola (1939-2018), famed playwright, poet, academic, actor and culture icon, passed away on February 17, a young old man at 78.
For culture lovers, particularly his protégées in the propagation of the majesty of Yoruba culture, his death came too soon, despite his old age.
Yet, the bitter-sweet reality of it all may just serve as a timely check: the imperative to apply the breaks at that apex, before cultural pride plumbs into into cultural chauvinism and ethnic irredentism.
That golden spot, it must be emphasized, would approximate the Isola legacy. Prof. Isola, from his works and other earthly exertions, was an epitome of Yoruba cultural grace sans empty arrogance.
Right now, there is too much ethnic toxin, most of it harebrained, in matters that concern the Nigerian common humanity. It’s an avoidable slur no sane country needs.
Somewhat, Isola would appear similar to Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), that famous Prussian-born German philosopher, with his even more famous Categorical Imperative in ethics.
Kant, it has been recorded, never travelled beyond a hundred miles radius from his native Königsberg, then in Prussia but now in Russia.
Wikipedia tamped that down, calling the claim a “myth”, particularly that, that he never went beyond 16 km from his home town: Kant taught at Judtschen, now Veselovka in Russia (20 km away) and in Jarnoltowo, near Mor¹g, in Poland (145 km away).
Yet, his lack of wide travel never affected his philosophical rigour.
Prof. Isola too was born in Ibadan, though as all native Ibadan have home villages, Labode, one of the surrounding villages, was his ancestral homestead.
He earned his first degree in French at the University of Ibadan, and a second degree in Yoruba Literature, from the University of Lagos, before becoming professor at the University of Ife (now Obafemi Awolowo University).
An interview, by his widow, Mrs Adebola Isola, revealed the professor had teaching stints in Lagos. He probably had sorties abroad and back, in the course of his academic career.
But basically, he lived his life around Ibadan which, according to his widow, was the playwright’s prime window into the world. That window, he regarded as the best city in the world.
Yet, that did not dim his brilliance or reduce his impact, in his global propagation of Yoruba culture, through his plays and other works, particularly his film collaboration with Tunde Kelani, TK’s Mainframe.
Incidentally, TK himself just turned 70 (born 26 February 1948), with the performance of Wole Soyinka’s The Lion and the Jewel (directed by Segun Adefila) running in his honour, on March 4, at the Lagos Country Club, Ikeja, Lagos.
Ripples first came across Prof. Isola, by proxy, as a teenage boarder at Odogbolu Grammar School, now in Ogun State, in the early 1970s.
Even then, Akinwunmi Isola was but only a faint echo off Isola Ogunsola, aka I-Show Pepper, of blessed memory.
I-Show, popular, dashing and electric, had brought his troupe to stage, in our school, Isola’s historical tragedy, Efunsetan Aniwura, Iyalode Ibadan. It was the golden age of the Yoruba travelling theatre, and their forays to schools.
Some forty-five years after, the final flourish, of the Efunsetan-Latoosa duel, appears as vivid as it was on that stage:
“Efunsetan, ina mo o!” [Efunsetan, you’re doomed], thundered Latoosa.
“Latoosa, ina mo o!”, Efunsetan countered, charm for charm, bluff for bluff, drama for drama.
In those young minds, gripped by the high drama on stage, Efunsetan was the clear villain, and Latoosa the hero.
Efunsetan had forced the death of the ravishing Adetutu, her favourite slave-maid who nevertheless had run foul of the grim Efunsetan household code: get pregnant and lose your life!
Efunsetan’s only daughter had died early; and the Iyalode would be damned, as part of the prevailing feudal tyranny, to see any of her slaves conceive and give birth!
But even with Efunsetan’s cruelty, the hero-villain divide was never that cut-and-dried.
From accounts in Samuel Johnson’s The History of the Yorubas, it was in 1874. Latoosa, the post-Kurunmi Aare Ona Kakanfo, was just another power freak, who despite the Ibadan constitution, with its rigorous checks and balances, would rather grab all possible powers.
The ill-fated Iyalode, against whom Latoosa cooked up many phoney charges, was just one of his many victims. Latoosa would later push his luck, in his gambit to rule Ibadan as a warrior-baale, despite Ibadan’s cast-iron separation of the two. He met with fierce elite opposition.
Ibadan was still in the throes of this elite stonewalling, when Latoosa led his hosts to the Kiriji War (1877-1893). The resulting stalemate not only sunk, forever, Ibadan’s military hegemony, it also effectively ended the Oyo Empire, with the British enforcing peace in the Yoruba interior, with the Alaafin himself, making the first overtures.
Efunsetan, and its fierce power play, ought to be a great lesson to current players: that the elite penchant to grab power, and vote for impunity instead of due process, often roasts the collective, on the irrational altar of a few.
That holds true for the Yoruba traditional polity, as it does for Nigeria’s contemporary one.
But if Isola’s striving in Efunsetan had linguistic limitations — the play was written in Yoruba — his other forays, in films, mainly of his works adapted into film, by long-term collaborators, Tunde Kelani’s Mainframe (Opomulero), had broader appeals.
O Leku (Mainframe’s first hit) — about students’ life at the University of Ibadan and catchment areas in the early 1960s; Saworoide (a parody of the venality of military era, with special focus on the Sani Abacha dictatorship); and The Campus Queen, a more contemporary setting, also on a university campus in the 1980s/1990s, with nubile female undergraduates, making themselves merry mistresses of the corrupt and morally bankrupt military overlords, often with disastrous consequences.
Isola, ever the avid cultural nationalist, was reportedly thrilled by O Leku, which triggered a Yoruba urban couture, a mass throw back at the high fashion of the 1960s, where the work was set.
But all of the films did justice to Yoruba culture — songs, dances, worship, belief system and even fashion, ancient and contemporary, bound to set every Yoruba heart heaving with pride.
Akinwunmi Isola, a culture ambassador like no other, is gone. When comes another, with his class and grace?
Poetic extra
Purgatory
By Olakunle Abimbola
A glitch,
in the engine,
consigns the car to rest.
But you,
to a purgatory,
in the street.
There,
the heat eats you up
like a dragon,
sworn to ending
the human race
in a blazing furnace.
And the rain?
Drenches you,
like a drowned rat,
except that you live,
to tell the story.
It is indeed another world,
from your comfort zone,
of purring auto,
all chill inside,
all heat outside.
The street!
Fela, the immortal bard,
once blared:
Eko o ni gba-gba-ku-gba!*
But not on Monday alone,
that tough race,
of daily survival!
The truck pusher,
to the road,
stakes a democratic right.
So does the Marwa** crab,
in its serpentine slither,
to beat every other,
to every available space,
on the crowded road.
Nigeria, they say,
teems with crooks.
But all I see, in the street,
are hardy folks,
sworn to forcing a living,
or die trying.
The purgatory!
The street!
Until the car finishes its rest,
for you, absolutely no rest!
*Roughly, Yoruba for Lagos (Eko) won’t compromise on its hustle
**Lagos commuter tricycle, in jerky road movement, like an iron crab
Lagos, 16 February 2018
