This past Friday, in the idyllic rural paradise of Ijesha Isu Ekiti, the remains of Ebenezer Moyosoretoluwapesefunmi Ogundipe, a.k a Lancey, were committed to mother earth before a scanty crowd of admirers, friends, family and well wishers who had come to pay their last respect to one of Nigeria’s most gifted children.
It was not as if Moyo would have resented the absence of the chattering and nattering class. As a matter of fact, he would have relished it as the ultimate irony of a nation that pays scant compliment to genuine talent; a nation that has little or no regard for its most genuinely gifted children. Long before he died, Moyo had seen through the social, political, intellectual and spiritual hypocrisy of a nation that canonises mediocrity at the expense of merit; a nation permanently rigged against rational procedure and reason. He would have none of it. He made his own rule and stuck by them.
He was not going to be fazed by the social conventions of a philistine society he held in sublime contempt. In fact in his last years, he seemed to have relished cocking a snook at societal norm and its sartorial etiquette often turning up at the odd society event he chose to grace with his presence in his custom made tradesman jeans and open shirt, quietly soaking the inanities of the high and the mighty with a poker-faced delight.
Beyond his ears, a few murmured and muttered their embarrassment. Some of his old acquaintances that had made some money and fame in the intervening decades steered clear of him. Others preferred to point at him from a distance as if he was a bearer of a deadly contagious disease. A mutual lady associate dismissed it all as the antic of arrested development, of a boy who refused to become a man. Lancey couldn’t give a hoot about the objections. Many of us were willing to lionize and fete him even if he chose to appear in pajamas. We knew what drove him.
Having sworn to the oath of self-seclusion and recluse-like existence, Lancey stuck to it, particularly after he returned to Nigeria after a long hibernation in the US. Not even many people knew he was back and was teaching in joyous obscurity at Bowen University in Iwo. A man of immense gregarious charms, Lancey could also be an obsessively private person. It was hard to lure him out of his liar. But snooper succeeded twice.
Once after a funeral in Ilesha, he was cajoled into following yours sincerely to his country home together with his childhood friend, Chief Ishola Filani, a.k.a I-Sho, the PDP juggernaut. Thereafter followed three days of eating some rural delicacies and drinking, listening to the animals chatter all night and the birds singing at the break of daylight.
Each morning, the scantily clad Ekiti nobles looking like stalwart farmhands would start raising hell, demanding breakfast and traditional respect for elders from snooper who had obediently vacated the master bedroom for them. Yours sincerely finally sent the duo forth with the firm assurance that they must not return very soon. When you connect with Moyo at the right angle, he was such a delightful human being with no airs or pretensions.
A man of spectacular endowments, Lancey was too self-assured to care about what they think about him. Poet, painter, sculptor, playwright, filmmaker, raconteur and University professor, Lancey was a prodigy even among prodigies. As it has been famously observed, talent does what it can but genius does what it must. Lancey did what he thought he had to do.
The word genius is not to be lightly invoked, particularly in a society that cares little for genuine talent, not to talk of the very summit of human endowment. Yet the word genius comes popping up in several tributes to Moyo by friends and admirers. Akin Oyebode, his old schoolmate and titan of International Law, describes him as “a self-effacing genius who demonstrated traits of greatness at an early age and who definitely made his mark before his transition”. Niyi Osundare, his friend and classmate at Christ School, concurs in a deeply moving obituary.
But if Moyo Ogundipe had little time or regard for the local scene with its hustlers and wannabes, its diabolical conspiracy against artists of genuine worth, he was quietly scornful of the international scene and its hollow rituals. A moving tribute by his younger friend and mentee, Moyo Okediji, a professor of African Art at the University of Texas at Austin, explodes like a simmering volcano:
“The perfect artist, he was never a hustler….But he did not realize that contemporary art is not about talent or brilliance; it is about who could shout the loudest, who sleeps with whom, who knows you, and who you know. It is about mediocrity, sycophancy and frivolity, wrapped in the cover of racial, gender and sexual discrimination”.
Having plied his trade in America for several decades, the younger Moyo should know. It will take perhaps another century to properly evaluate the horrendous damage the west has inflicted on African intellectual self-esteem and the integrity of its artistic production. But Lancey took it all in his stride refusing to care a hoot for local and international recognition knowing that in the fullness of time all injustice done to genius will be fully restituted.
Having made up his mind to shun the society and its chicanery, Moyo retreated to Iwo to teach in a private university and mentor the young ones. Perhaps he was hoping to catch them young before the Nigerian Disease caught up with them. He might have succeeded beyond his own expectations, given the outpouring of emotion among the students’ community on his demise and the gale of tributes testifying to his inspirational leadership.
Lancey would have been surprised to have himself described as a leadership candidate and would have fixed them with a look of quizzical bemusement. He never considered himself a leader of anybody or any group. He was not interested in leading anything. He considered himself a free artist of a free world.
He never quite outgrew a fierce independence of spirit and a Bohemian contempt for formal structures and conventional politics. Yet anywhere he berthed, whether in secondary school, or at the NTA Ibadan where he was an inspired and inspirational manager of human resources and fountain head of creative innovations, he always attracted a sizeable crowd of admirers and disciples who aspired to walk like him, dress like him or adopt his unique gait of thespian royalty.
It was at the old University of Ife where his political star shone the brightest when he contested for and won the post of Secretary General of the Students’ Union in 1970. It was a landmark election which swept away the cobwebs of the geriatric order that had dominated student unionism in Ife since the inception of the university. With the telegenic and aristocratic Egba Owu prince, Sunmade Akin-Olugbade as president, Remi Olowu nee Komolafe as Vice President and Bola Ladapo latterly Bola Awe as PRO ,it was as if Kennedy’s Camelot had come to Ife.
With Ogundipe in the driving room of change as Secretary and with Akin-Olugbade electrifying the students’ crowd with his superior phonetics and dazzling mannerism of delivery, the administration laid the foundation and the template for radical and purposeful Students’ unionism for which the university would become famous in the next two decades. At the end of it all, not a whiff of scandal surrounded the Sunmade Akin-Olugbade administration which also set the benchmark for accountability and integrity in students’ administration.
There was always something about this charismatic and tantalizingly talented fellow which stood him out from the crowd. He had what is known as star quality. Star quality can be improved upon and honed to perfection, but you are either with it or you are not. It cannot be faked or duplicated. It is the ability to do ordinary things in a way that makes them look unique and extraordinary.
It is the magical power of defamiliarization, of making the familiar to become unfamiliar in the crucible of genius, a creative neurosis which some ancient Russian fathers believe holds the key to the power of poetry itself. From the ordinary language known to everybody, the great poet creates extraordinary language which extends the frontiers of the language until everybody gets there only to find that the poet has moved on.
The restless quest for excellence and perfection often turns the committed artist into a compulsive-obsessive character. An arch perfectionist by nature, Moyo was also notoriously reclusive, despite the easy, charming manners and urbane insouciance making him a difficult and virtually impossible person to live with on a day to day basis. Each work has to be honed to perfection. It is the finished and polished gem that the world knows and not the pains and trauma that go with their gestation and production.
What made this unique man tick? If you look at the picture with his parents and older brother, it is the portrait of the young man as an artist specially marked for divine grace. Even as a boy, Lancey already had star quality. One can already glimpse the self-assurance of the man. Given the enormous age differential between him and his brother, it was obvious that the artist was seen by his parents as a special gift from God, hence the name: Moyosoretoluwapesefunmi. I am glad about the bounteous gift that God has granted me. The Christian name, Ebenezer, has a ring of firm, filial finality.
There is a lot about the psychology of the adult which can be glimpsed from the socialization of the kid. The truth of the matter is that unlike most of his contemporaries who emanated as village yokels from rustic, agrarian background and who have managed to fill the vacancies created by Chief Awolowo by sheer dint of brilliance and back-breaking diligence, Lancey came with solid and impressive middle class credentials. His father, Paul Anjorin Ogundipe, was one of the early graduates from Ekitiland and was a senator in the First Republic. In the picture, he was clutching a prized possession: a transistor radio. It is a far cry from the eighth senate of the Fourth Republic.
There was nothing more for this illustrious son of illustrious parents to prove. And there was no need for primitive accumulation. The Ogundipe have already been made. There was nothing more to struggle for. In the history of modern revolutions, the most determined and frenzied assaults on middle class values have always been mounted by scions of the middle class: Lenin, Leon Trotsky, the great Russian revolutionaries who constituted the bulk of the Bolshevik , Fidel Castro and Che Guevara must come to mind.
This is why in Nigeria , the bulk of social reformers and radical redeemers come from the established and much storied Yoruba middle class. We must recall The famous Kuti family, the Thompsons, the Fawehinmis, the Sapara-Williams, the Macaulays, the Braithwaites, the Aka-Bashoruns, the Dares etc.
As Moyo Ogundipe joins their departed forebears in this Hall of Fame, may God grant all of them sweet repose. Their story is the story of how a new class rises, settles, solidifies, atrophies and then unravels only to be redeemed and reinvented by revolting scions. Adieu and so long Lancey.
