A confident and bright-eyed young lad stared at the camera. The wide and starry look in his gaze spoke volume of a courageous boy with a thirst for adventure, determined to rule his world.
Decades after, his life became eventful, full of exploits, controversies, rebellions and more. That boy then, Prof. Bankole Ajibabi Omotoso turned 70 last Saturday.
Famed for his role in the advert of Vodacom Telecommunications, South Africa, he is popularly known in that clime as Yebo Gogo. He is a novelist, dramatist, actor, critic, biographer, founding General Secretary of the Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA) while Chinua Achebe was president and in 1988 was ANA president.
The picture of the ‘young Kole’ was an exhibit at The Kole Omotoso Exhibition – Akure to Joburg. It was part of a three-day activities marking his birthday that began with an exhibition at Jazzhole, Lagos and climaxed at the Ondo State capital, his homeland.
Being 70 is a feat worth celebrating, it was said, and so his friends led by the activist-poet Odia Ofeimum with the Ondo State government chose to honour the author whose creative and scholarly works have contributed to the development of scholarship. The events presented many, including family members, the opportunity to honour their own.
For his daughter, Yewande, being 70 is an accomplishment worth experiencing. “It is still my wish to be blessed enough to grow old and be my father’s kind of 70 – sparkly, mischievous and wise.”
The events were also spyglasses through which guests saw the writer, his works, ideologies, controversies and sojourns. Like a restless sojourner, his soul moved from one phase of life, clime and circumstance to the other, joining other restless but ‘progressive’ minds – Professors Soyinka, Biodun Jeyifo, Yemi Ogunbiyi, Femi Osofisan, Godino Darah, Ofeimum among others, who are bearing compelling voices of revolution. As Ofeimum rightly observed all the while, Omotoso was merely “shifting the camera” of life.
The reading, exhibition and lecture by Prof. Darah entitled: Radicals, Literature and Nigeria just before 2014 and performance of the celebrator’s play, Yes and Know to the Freedom Chatter, a play about post-Apartheid South Africa by Hornbill House of Arts, heralded his convictions.
Guests saw a man that is committed to the ‘Nigerian project’; one who Omotoso believes in “true federalism”. His despair over the state of the country was also evident. With the Democracy Day celebrations on the way, Omotoso asks: “What can we celebrate?” And when the efforts to create the needed change failed, he was left with no choice than to relocate. This led to his sojourns in the academic and abroad, it was said.
“You cannot have successful politicians in an unsuccessful polity. I believe that when we abandon the humanist tradition. Many would play up their own facts, ignoring the facts that affected others, pretending that those things didn’t happen. However, as always the facts people fail to acknowledge is what comes to haunt them,” he said.
Being involved with writers such as the late Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka in forming writers’ organisations in Nigeria, the West Africa regions, the continent and the African Diaspora, one would have thought he would praise the novel for its contribution to the development of the polity. That was not to be because, according to him, there is “an absence of the Nigerian Federation in the Nigerian novel.” Although he opined that the novel should not be prescriptive, it should galvanise ideas that would bring about positive change.
The Nobel laureate, Soyinka praised Omotoso’s penchant for intellectual radicalism, saying Omotoso was one of the radicals who “peppered all discourse and action with Marxian pellets of varied sizes, validity and effectiveness”. He dubbed him (Omotoso) along with Jeyifo, Ogunbiyi and Osofisan the literary quartet which he called “the ‘Gang of Four’”.
He recalled: “Kole Omotoso blew in from nowhere, an Arabic scholar with a yen for literature, and especially – drama. His exit from the Department of Arabic Studies in the University of Ibadan (UI) was a dramatic foretaste of academic Boko Haramism – but where you still lived to tell the tale – so I shall leave the telling thereof to him whenever he chooses. Beginning from UI where I then headed the Drama Department, he had begun to monitor rehearsals. I next transferred to Ife. I believe I invited him to join us for a spell as a visiting lecturer.
“Next thing I knew, he had transferred completely to my department where his presence was soon to be markedly felt as one of the radical faculty – Ife/Ibadan/Ahmadu Bello then formed the radical axis of Nigerian academia, with Ife as the hyper-active fulcrum…when he shifted to South Africa and found that the Rand did not quite fulfil its promise, and with a wife, two fast growing lads and a daughter to maintain in a strange land, he proved a very adroit adjuster and entrepreneur.
“…Curiously enough, what I remember most vividly of Kole’s sojourn at Ife had nothing to do with the foregoing. I had just had dinner with him and some others – this time in his home – when, as he saw me off to my car, a heavenly body streaked across the sky in a lance of sparks. It flew so low, and sank over a horizon so close to where we stood, that I was convinced it could not have landed further than perhaps five to 10 kilometres away. Kole, who had his back to this streaking visitor, had not seen it. For days, I scoured the pages of the media, expecting to read some report of the celestial landing. Nothing at all.
“Then I took to hunting in that direction, hoping I might come across a patch of recently charred forest that would explain the visitation. No such encounter. As I contemplated this piece, that meteoric event flashed yet again across the years. It strikes me now as symbolic of the constellation of some of the astute and restless minds that streaked across the campus sky of Ile-Ife, vanished over the horizon, split up and resurfaced in myriad places – some as far flung as the US and Carribean. Kole’s cinder re-surfaced – and continued to ignite young minds – in South Africa.”
Governor Olusegun Mimiko described Omotoso and the late D.O Fagunwa as two of Ondo’s exports to the world, noting that they are “our contributions to the pool of teachers, writers, scholars and professionals who have done both our state and country proud in their different fields of endeavour.” He said celebrating the writer is part of government’s move to make the state a creative and cultural destination.
He said: “My first interaction with Professor Omotoso was way back in the 70s in what then was University of Ife. The Ife of that era was the Ife of Socialist ferment, of progressive intellectualism, of committed lecturers – teaching eager and willing students. It was the Ife of Segun Osoba, Toye Olorode and many other scholars of the socialist hue.
“It has been an unending chain of collaboration since then between the birthday boy and his state of birth. he has never looked back in putting something back to the Sunshine State in terms of ideas, suggestions, and as you might have rightly guessed, objective and game changing criticism.
This, therefore, is to say a happy birthday to a worthy son of the soil, global player of repute, commentator, essayist and playwright – our own professor Omotoso.”
Ofeimum said Omotoso’s works herald significant lessons of history for people to learn from.
“As a foremost icon of the literary arts and of popular culture in Nigeria and South Africa, he happens to have been quite a very unobtrusive purveyor of ideas that are true, even if unusual. He always deserved to be feted beyond the rituals of raised wine glasses. Whether he is celebrated in grand Nigerian style or refused to oblige due to some writer’s quirk, it was, for us, less about his age than his devotion to things of the mind.”
