It was a matter of pure contingency and chance that just about the time that Tunde Kelani turned 70 about two months ago, his great mentor and collaborator, Akin Isola, passed away. Both events were and are milestones, one obviously more so than the other. (Isola was older and is gone; Kelani is still here with the living, still in full stride as a prolific producer-director). But it is remarkable that the news of Isola’s transition did not eclipse the birthday notices and celebrations marking the entry of TK (as Tunde Kelani is popularly known and called) into the ranks of the inspiring septuagenarians and octogenarians of our arts, culture and humanities, with particular reference to the medium of film. Speaking only for myself, I could not write this commemorative tribute before now primarily because I had, first, to deal both privately and publicly with the passing of Honestman.

It is for a special reason that I invoke Esu’s anti-teleological essence in this tribute, as contained in the verse from the god’s praise poetry that serves as my epigraph. This is because although he has worked tirelessly and productively in diverse areas of the audio-visual media of television and film for five straight decades now – cameraman, cinematographer, director, producer and documentarist – the nature of his contribution is anything but simply linear and teleological. In other words, as in the wonderful Janus-faced bidirectionality indicated in the epigraph to this piece, TK’s work and achievement simultaneously look far back in time and far forward into the future, most especially in those aspects of his oeuvre that were inspired by his collaborations with the late Akin Isola and Adebayo Faleti. This is the main line of the celebratory ‘testimony’ of this tribute, this claim that in the best of his work and his legacy, TK invites us to think and act creatively, expansively and humanely in matters pertaining to relations between the past and the present. Before we come to this central claim, first a few words to contextualize the nature and the scope of TK’s contribution.

Considered in isolation, TK’s filmography begins in the year 1993 with the three-part film, “Ti Oluwa Nile”. This almost makes his emergence as a producer-director coincide with the emergence of Nollywood about the same year and/or time. But this is deceptive, since for the previous two decades that go all the way back the 1970s, TK had been working as a cameraman for television and a cinematographer in the productions of other filmmakers. More precisely, TK had worked in and completely mastered the technologies, the technical and artistic means of cinematic production related to both 35mm and 16mm cinematography. Thus, long before the advent of Nollywood’s total, constitutive being in instant, cheap and free-for-all video filmmaking, TK paid his dues to those older and restrictive technical means of filmic production. Which is why, by Nollywood standards, TK’s total filmography of some 20 films in about 25 years is nothing to write home about!  Indeed, there are Nollywood film directors that boast uninhibitedly about having made dozens upon dozens of films!

Except, of course, that the overwhelming majority of the films made weekly or monthly in Nollywood are so poor in content and form, in storyline and technique that they are both forgettable and quickly forgotten. But not so the films of TK, virtually all 19 or 20 of them, including the most recent one, “Sidi Ilujinle” that is an adaptation of Wole Soyinka’s best work in comedy, The Lion and the Jewel, that was released just this past January. This is why, in the title of this piece, I describe TK as “pre-Nollywood”: his filmmaking career may have begun almost around the same time that Nollywood became known as a distinctive national tradition of African cinema, but TK’s sensibilities as a cineaste have a chronological and professional base that significantly predates Nollywood. We shall presently get to the more interesting “post-Nollywood” dimensions. Meanwhile, far beyond the local, indigenous context of Nollywood and all that came before and after it, in the professional ethos of world cinema everywhere, to produce 20 films in about 25 years as TK has done, is an outstanding achievement, especially considering the fact that around a dozen of them are major or even “breakthrough” films. Moreover, TK, in my opinion, stands alone in Nigerian cinema in this achievement – there simply is no other filmmaker that has produced, again and again, this number of films of considerable quality both in content and form.

The formal element, the dimension of technique and style alone is worth its weight in gold in the cinema of Tunde Kelani. In making this observation, I must reveal the embarrassing fact that I have a confession to make. What is it? Well, with regard to form and technique, I was initially not a great fan of TK’s. I respected him, I recognized the technical and professional competences that were everywhere in evidence in all his films, to the degree to which they are famously absent in most of Nollywood films. But competence and professionalism do not idiosyncratic and delightful style and technique make! In other words, though I immediately saw and appreciated the fact that all the embarrassing elementary lapses of sound, visual, editorial and post-production qualities and effects were not in TK’s films at all, I did not go away from his films with a sense that I had been in the company, the world of a cinematic stylist. Which means that it was only very slowly and in a sort of delayed impact that the best of TK’s work as a filmmaker grew on me.

This is of course such a huge subject that I can only very briefly discuss it in the present context. Perhaps some day in the future, I shall write a major paper on it. Meanwhile, in the present context, I can only say that it took me a long time to discover that what I was missing with regard to style and technique in TK’s cinema had been staring at me all the time with an obviousness that paradoxically served to hide it! What was it? Well, quite simply this: he had discovered or reinvented a diegetic, storytelling style of filmmaking that transferred the resources of the oral tradition into the celluloid medium of film. There is nothing like it in Nigerian cinema; in African cinema, perhaps two or three other filmmakers, all of them of the Francophone school. But unlike these who tend to be ironic and ludic in their deployment of oral resources as material for storytelling techniques in film, TK tends to be quite serious and high-minded in the use of oral resources without being ponderous or artificial.

The best examples in TK’s films of this unique achievement are – in a chronological, not a meritocratic order – “Ayo Ni Mo Fe” (1994), “Koseegbe” (1995), “O Le Ku” (1997), “Saworo Ide” (1999), “Agogo Eewo” (2002), “The Campus Queen” (2004), “Arugba” (2010), “Dazzling Mirage” (2015) and “Sidi Ilujinle” (2018). As I have not seen the last item in this list, “Sidi Ilujinle”, I am making an extrapolation from the trailers of the film that I have watched on YouTube. In all the films, the pace of narration is unhurried, but this is not because the camera prolongs its focus on an idle or trivial action like the parking of a car or the opening of the iron doors of a gate, as in the typical Nollywood film in which every opportunity to lengthen the playing time of the film is seized upon and overused. No, in TK’s films, the unhurried pace is an effect of the doubling of the narrative thread with a song, a mini-tale, a dance sequence, a dramatized proverb or aphorism, a play of lights and shadows to indicate a twist in the plot, or the use of camera angles or the soundtrack to underscore an either ominous or hopeful moment in the unfolding of the overarching story. Since nearly all of these instances or illustrations come from what we might describe as ojulowo Yoruba (deep, catechismal Yoruba), this means that one of TJ’s great achievements in film is to have reinvented Yoruba narrative and oral arts in the medium of cinema. Except of course that many of the same oral narrative and diegetic resources are found in other African languages and cultures. We might note here also that before Kelani, Hubert Ogunde had preceded him in the use of Yoruba oral resources in such films as “Aiye” (1979), “Jaiyesimi” (1980) and “Aropin N’Tenia” (1982). However, Ogunde was not ever a filmmaker in the degree to which he had been a giant of the arts of theatre and stage performance; indeed, he never quite made a successful breakthrough into the medium of film.

The communal or ethnic Yoruba element that TK successfully wove into the forging of a unique style of filmmaking is perhaps at its most significant dimension in his cinema in the collaborations that he made with Akin Isola and Adebayo Faleti. The most obvious level, the most noticeable level of the impact of this collaboration happens to be also its most easily missed: in all the films produced or inspired by the collaboration, Yoruba is not only the linguistic medium of communication, it is rigorously and exclusively the only one. Permit me to express this concretely: in such films as “Ayo Ni Mo Fe”, “Koseegbe”, “O Le Ku”, Saworo Ide”, and “Agogo Eewo” it is Yoruba all the way; there is not a single word of English or any other language for that matter. Please note that in terms of a rigorous social realism, this is quite artificial, especially in the context of the middle class, educated social background of most of the characters of these films in which, as first theorized by the late Professor Dapo Adelugba, the amulumala mixture of English and Yoruba known as Yorubanglish would have been the standard if not dominant idiom of speech. But in these films that were collaboratively produced by the trio of TK, Isola and Faleti, there is not a single word of English, not a single word of Yorubanglish. In their stead, what you have is an elaborately stylized and ornate Yoruba the like of which only the most fluent and gifted speakers of the language use and then only in quite specific, delimited contexts!

I knew Isola and Faleti well; TK I do not know as well as those late departed friends and elders. I can tell the readers of this piece that neither Isola nor Faleti spoke the exclusive, idealized and stylized Yoruba of these films all the time! No one does. But then, why create it? Why expend so much creative effort to capture and emblematize it in film? This leads me to the post-Nollywood aspect of TK’s cinema, the aspect with which I wish to bring this tribute to its conclusion.

A superficial reading of language in the collaborations of TK, Isola and Faleti in cinema might seem to imply a retreat into a past golden age of Yoruba as a language, a culture. Indeed, the plot in most of the films might superficially give the same impression: in all the films, all the colonial, postcolonial, neocolonial and neoliberal economic and cultural ravages buffeting Nigeria and Africa are dramatized only within a monolingual Yoruba city state, most especially in “Saworo Ide” and “Agogo Eewo”. SAP? Right-wing military coups? Predatory transnational corporations? Disastrous economic and financial policies like inflationary monetary policies and devaluations that render both the rich and the poor penurious and vulnerable? Workers that are unpaid for months, years? Restless, unemployed and so-called ‘unemployable’ youths? They are all in these films, but only in the framework of a monolingual Yoruba monarchical order struggling to adapt its linguistic and cultural heritage to forces and crises that that were unknown in foundational past ages. The achievement of stylization is immense, but the strain of representation is so awesome that in some films like “The Campus Queen”, “Dazzling Mirage” and “Thunderbolt”, exclusive, stylized Yoruba gives way to either English or a diversity of varieties of both languages.

And other “languages”, especially those of the new information age that brought us Nollywood, only to show us that its cheap, meretricious cinematic victories will not do much for us. In documentaries of aspects of Yoruba culture, language and metaphysics that TK has released within his tundekelani.tv production outfit – itself a branch of the Mainframe Productions and School powerhouse – he has taken up the challenges and possibilities of this new age. This is one of the least known aspects of TK’s work and achievement, these documentaries of tundekelani.tv productions. I cannot think of a more auspicious project for TK as he enters the ranks of the elders in life and art, even as I know that his old projects are still pushing him for their completion. Welcome, welcome, welcome!

Biodun Jeyifo

bjeyifo@fas.havard.edu