I write this short farewell message to Pa Moses Adejumo Olaiya (best known as Baba Sala), with an admixture of pain and a palpable sense of guilt. First, that a man who, for over three decades, dominated and personified the Yoruba (and to a large extent the Nigerian) stage comedy, who provoked and provided so much laughter and humour in a world of ‘unordered anarchy ‘ (to borrow an intriguing phrase of Francis Egbokhare) and stress-filled existence should die, in circumstances which could hardly be defined in humorous terms; I dare not say in circumstances that could supply scenarios for tragedy, which he never traded in as a theatre and film inimitable practitioner; inflicts a lot of pain on kindred spirits and his erstwhile multitude of fans/acolytes.
On a personal scale, I owed Baba Sala one, which I never actualized; it is a four-decade old promise unfulfilled, unrequited, almost like love. In November 1978 I believe. I had gone on a research trip to the South-West, which was to take me to Ibadan, Lagos and Ife, to talk to the patriarchs of the Nigerian stage from the forties- a list that was to include practitioners of the travelling theatre and the literary theatre stage. I had gone to Moses Adejumo Olaiya’s home in Yemetu, Ibadan, literally without a previous appointment. It was not, as you know, the age of the explosion of telephoney. And if he had a land line, I had no idea and did not have it. I was lucky to find him but he was in the middle of preparation for a journey for a production but I was pleased I did. He was warm, receptive and decent. None of his stage trademarks was in evidence—the painted gap tooth, the smokeless long pipe, the cardboard- carved tie, the exaggerated hat, and so on…. He was simple and comely. When I told him of my mission, he was so animated that he promised instantly, to do anything for me if would come back at another time. I had quickly and naively requested for his play scripts. He laughed broadly (the dark-painted gap of his tooth was not there. He said ‘script-kini? I am not a playwright. I am actor, theatre man and musician.’ Before I could ask another question, he had dashed and brought two of his albums for me. Enthused and overwhelmed with gratitude, I had promised him that I was going to transcribe the plays, translate them and publish them after my studies in the UK. I never did. This is the reason for a sincere regret and I know he will forgive me—with his trade-mark largeness of the heart! I still have the transcribed edition of Tokunbo and probably Dayamondi. And there is still room for a posthumous amend.
Born on May 18, 1938, Moses Olaiya who died on October 7, 2018 at age 81, hailed from Ijesha town on Osun State. Popularly known by his stage name Baba Sala, (lesser known as Lamidi), Moses Olaiya is regarded, undisputably, as the father of modern Nigerian comedy. Notable names that he shares the travelling theatre hall of fame with are , Hubert Ogunde, Kola Ogunmola, Duro Ladipo and Oyin Adejobi and the numerous other members of the Yoruba travellng Theatre, with whom he had worked to influence the development of the Nigerian theatre and later Television drama. Comedy, as we know, is a difficult genre to realize. Even in the classical drama, there were many more patriarchs in the tragic fare—Euripedes, Aeschylus, Sophocles than in the genre of comedy where Aristophanes was the single dominant figure. This must add to our appreciation of Moses Olaiya among the giants in political, cultural and historical domains of the operatic theatre tradition. He built a robust clan of comedians many of whom are still very active in Nollywood today. The modern inheritors, the reapers of Baba Sala’s past labour, of the comedian’s guild, the stand-up comedians, are smiling to the banks today.
The death of this theatre doyen and comedy king has not only aggrieved Nigerians and comic theatre lovers across the nation but has also signalled the end of a phase in the canon of Nigerian comic theatre. In fact, it becomes the challenging task of contemporary comic characters on the Nigerian TV screens to sustain and out-live the already well-established and unmatchable legacy laid down by Moses Olaiya and also to ensure the continuous flow of the comic/farcical phase of the Nigerian theatre scene.
Moses Olaiya’s profile cannot be overtly contained in one brief piece. In fact, a textual-graphical outline of his life would reveal a series of events and memorable moments. As modestly, one of the earliest scholars on his theatre, I will only capture and ex-ray a few of the most relevant periods of Olaiya’s life on the Nigerian stage.
Moses Olaiya practised in the oral cultural era of heavy reliance on improvisation and script-less-ness with a robust and active involvement of a participant audience. The Yoruba travelling theatre was largely non-scripted and improvisational. With Olaiya’s theatre deployment of slapstick for humour and laughter generation, entertainment and social commentary, the script, which became the dominant communication armoury of the literary theatre, was hardly missed, except for permanence. Olaiya’s appearance on the stage alone, even before the other cast members emerge and the spontaneous dialogues ensue, was enough to throw the audience on the auditorium space into uncontrolled laughter. This oral, populist and non-scripted theatre form made it difficult for researchers on his work and those of others of his folk theatre generation, to capture a multitude of events that could have shed ample light on his early life, especially before the “known” Moses Olaiya emerged.
Moses Olaiya started his career as a civil servant, serving the federal government while working as a sanitary inspector in one of the government institutions at the time. He usually dedicated his evenings then to teaching and would occasionally transform into a nocturnal entertainer, with people gathering to watch him perform. He also daily substantiated these with the task of a thrift-collector (Alajo).
His professional career began with a full-time engagement in high life music. In 1964, he put together the band known as the Federal Rhythm Dandies which paved and etched his path to super-stardom as “the band was the toast of Nigerian elite.”
The club played quality Juju music at various social events and was massively received by music fans and investors.
Baba Sala shared the early days of his music career with some later-day notable personalities. Among his Federal Rhythm Dandy band members was Sunday Adegeye, known today as King Sunny Ade, the juju music maestro. It is generally believed that King Sunny Ade cut his professional teeth with Moses Olaiya before rising to stardom as one of Africa’s most successful and popular musicians. In an interview with PM News in 2011, Baba Sala declared the interment of theatre with his bones, so to speak;
“Drama was in my blood. I was a drummer. Sunny Ade liked playing guitar. I taught him how to play guitar and he was very good at it. I am proud of him. Sunny Ade’s ambition was to play drums. He said that it was not in him to act. I felt that I should concentrate on acting and leave Sunny Ade to drumming and playing guitar. That was why I gave him my drum and musical instruments.”
Moses Adejumo’s transition from music to the theatre stage was signalled with his receiving “a one year contract of drama-sketches” at the western Nigerian Television (WNTV). He began the Alawada series on this channel before he later took it the Nigerian Television Authority (NTA), Ibadan where he produced “every Wednesday between 7:00pm and 7:30”. He became known across the nation, not without an initial stage of negative audience perception of his farcical theatre as unserious, clownish and ‘gaarish’. This criticism did not come from the elite audience alone, but even from members of his theatre professional guild like Tunji Fatilewa and Ade Afolayan, who told this writer in 1978 in an interview that he had to part company with Olaiya because of the unserious-ness’ of his theatre. Moses Olaiya began acting fulltime in 1969 after he disbanded his Moses Olaiya Concert Party and created Moses Olaiya International Alawada Theatre Limited. Alongside its weekly TV show production, the theatre group travelled across towns and cities in Nigeria for performances. This theatre movement that shared similarity with and is influenced by the itinerant Alarinjo Movement of Yoruba increased his fame and brought him more popularity and some material fortune. He soon became known internationally as some of his plays enjoyed the feat of being staged outside in countries such as Germany, Burkina Faso, Republic of Benin etc.
His customary theatrical fare was usually slapstick in nature as he combined the incongruous in the ‘areas of speech, gesture and other physical actions deploying seemingly trivial themes and ludicrous costumes while playing lead roles. It must also be constantly said that, like his predecessor (Ogunde, Ladipo and co), in spite of this comical theatre form in which he thrived, Moses Olaiya had recourse, constantly, to the repository of the essential indigenous Yoruba traditional performance forms, modes and functions in his theatre.
There was, at his professional peak, appreciable material and commodity success in this popular theatre of humour-laden dialogue and music, with its immense capacity to entertain and to provide temporary escape from the scandalous harsh realities of social living in depressed and a comatose economy. It drew Nigerians, in a moth-like fashion in their thousands, to itself. Olaiya’s theatre took firm grips of the streets outside of his Yoruba base with his ability to code-switch from the vernacular to pidgin English within a performance, to suit the yearnings of the large non-Yoruba audiences. We must note of course that the success of his theatre also reclines largely on its non-verbal modes of communication. Again, without over-stating it, the emphasis of fun over matter, entertainment over instruction, ribald over didacticism, ensured huge audiences for his theatre for decades. Giving it to him and the popularity of his theatre of entertainment, which eschews diatribe or harsh criticism or acerbic denunciation of social absurdities and failings, his theatre relaxes, helps his audiences to cope with and survive hard social realities, through humour and laughter, with its unmatched therapeutic effect.
This was the story of his theatre of Awada held together by yeye or efe (the comic fare, until darkness palled through the lethal and monstrous agency of piracy which has wrecked many an untold havoc on Nigeria’s cultural productions—literature, theatre, film and music.
PIRACY caused Baba Sala a loss of fortune and a lot of misfortune. He suffered a very huge setback while at the peak of his career that almost sent him down, literally, to the scratch as it destroyed all his good work in which he had invested all his hard-earned capital, and more. At this time, one of his most celebrated plays “Oorun Mooru” which on its production would have returned so much fortune to him, was mindlessly pirated and sold in home videos by an unknown person. The havoc of this mean act of immorality hit him so hard that the theatre icon suffered an ill health from which he hardly fully recovered, especially psychologically. In an interview with Premium Times, Baba Sala revealed that “The film, Orun Mooru, was kind of stolen from me for dubbing by one man. He pirated it and made it into a home video. It affected me seriously because we borrowed money to do the film. The practice then was to borrow money from banks to do our films. The films were often done abroad, unlike today where they use video. The money we used to borrow then was so huge that it required heavy collateral. That was why my career almost took a dip. But that was how God wanted it. I now see it as a case of a woman killing a snake discovered by a man. It is neither here nor there. What really matter is that the snake is taken care of.”
Despite the level of damage caused by this destructive event of movie piracy, Baba Sala never relented or gave in to lamentation or interminable life of regrets. He went on to produce several other movies comparable in magnitude and quality with his much- acclaimed masterpiece “Oorun Mooru”. Some of his other movies include in order of emergence: Are Agbaye (1984), Mosebolatan (1986), Agba Man (1990), Obe Gbona (1990), Return Match (1992), Diamond (1995), Ana Gomina (1998) among others.
Did life regained its robustness, vibrancy and vivacity for Nigeria’s proponent and embodying merchant of humour? He took to the church business as an apostle for psycho-spiritual solace and renewal. Society, especially the custodians of governance, owes him and the Nigerian cultural industry a permanent routing of the piracy syndicate to terminate its ruinous impact on creativity, creative productions and its creators. Farewell, Moses Adejumo Olaiya (Lamidi, Baba Sala, the patriarch of the folk comedy theatre of Nigeria.
- Prof Obafemi, former President of Association of Nigerian Authors, writes from Ilorin.
