Uncle D: Too Soon to Say Goodnight. Tribute to Prof Dapo Adelugba. Olu Obafemi I had had occasions to lament, with a positive note of envy of my friends, the likes of Biodun Jeyifo, Femi Osofisan, Niyi Osundare, the late Jide Malomo, and lately, Duro Oni, my having not studied directly under the envied feet of Dapo Adelugba—inimitable theatre scholar and practitioner, pedagogue, essayist, theatre director, faithful nurstender, teacher, incurable mentor and a doting humanist; ‘Uncle Dapo.’ Happily, what I lost by not being directly taught in the classroom by this teacher of teachers, mentor of mentors, I scooped in other ways—as a younger scholar who had crossed numerous paths with Uncle D, as an examiner in UI for many years—and he has been the longest serving Head of Department of Theatre Arts in Ibadan, followed only by his erstwhile student, Femi Osofisan. I had fed from his hands through a number of collaborative works of scholarship. During these interactions, I have learnt from Professor Adelugba what you could hardly or never learn in the classroom. I learnt a lot of humility from him. His capacity for unfeigned self-effacement is hardly surpassed. For a man with the enormous name and pedigree that he carried on his slim shoulder, Uncle Adelugba was inimitably humble, ordinary, almost in a way that embarrassed. He never saw me as a younger person who happened to be the external examiner for his Department during those years in the late eighties and nineties at the University of Ibadan. One day, sitting in my office at the University of Ilorin, Uncle Dapo was brought into my office by a Performing Arts Student, clutching large, brown envelopes. It turned out to be Draft examination questions to be moderated by me! Why him, Head of Department? The Examination Officer responsible for that assignment had disappeared two days before and he ‘could not keep the External waiting’! All effort to let him know that he could have sent for me or do something else was brushed aside with the explanation that things must be properly done! The painstakingness and thoroughness with which Professor Adelugba handled the examination process, the marking of scripts, the devotion of disproportionate time to supervision and the pain he carried on his mind for diminishing standard and quality of academic work gave me a lot of instruction in my own career ever since I worked and interacted with him as a senior colleague, and as a friend. No one should ever mistake his simplicity and humility for softness or weakness. He demanded from his students and colleagues as much as he personally gave. Uncle Dapo never suffered fools gladly. If a student wrote carelessly or informally, he must go back and get it right until it is absolutely right. His ‘finnickiness; was taken as ‘eccentricity’ by some of his less steadfast colleagues. On two occasions, he had sent students with their dissertations to Ilorin, at their own expense, for failing to submit their thesis while the examiner was visiting and he never made a case for leniency nor pleaded for concession for any defaulting students. Somehow, and I don’t really know how it happened, we became so close to the point of being confidants. Uncle Dapo poured out his heart to me over many of his worries in Ibadan with colleagues who had gone astray and who had sacrificed their calling for material and other trivial issues and the depth of his pain was palpable. I enjoyed an intimate relationship with him, even to the surprise of some of my friends who have been with him for decades before I met him. It was a surprise to me when my teacher and supervisor (his own teacher too), Professor Martin Banham, requested us both to write the chapter on Nigeria in his book The History of African Theatre. He simply sent words to the effect that ‘I can think of any other two people that can give me this chapter.’ I live in Ilorin and Uncle D was of course in Ibadan. It was ever so easy to work with him because he deferred to you, even when you know you don’t deserve it and you are compelled to give your best. Another instruction that Uncle D gave all of us scholars coming after him was his selfless promotion of scholarship generally and the celebration of other artists, creators and scholars when they mark their rites of passage in life. He started the tradition of publishing up-coming scholars in the Humanities in Ibadan and other universities, comparable only to the way in which Ulli Beier was promoting the works of Nigeria’s and Africa’s early generation of writers through the Mbari publications—some of the earliest works of Wole Soyinka, J.P. Clark, Christopher Okigbo, Ata Ama Aidoo, Lewis Nkosi and so on, were published by the late Ulli Beier. Professor Adelugba’s Occasional Publication titled Language, Arts, Culture and Education (LACE) was devoted to the works of many young scholars who could not easily find outlets for their works at that time. He compiled the longest Festschrift that I have seen to mark Soyinka’s Seventy Birthday, just as he had marked his sixtieth with Before Our Very Eyes. Dapo Adelugba was too busy promoting and cultivating others, bringing out the best in any promising creative and critical artist to ever write about himself in memoirs and autobiographies. Neither did he spare any thought for personal, material comfort like building mansions or amassing wealth. His mansion was the ideas he generates and the training and mentoring he gave to hundreds of students who passed through him as undergraduate, graduate students and young academic in Ibadan and elsewhere in Nigeria, Africa and the world. Professor Adelugba was the most sustained name on the Nigerian modern stage. Adelugba’s name is synonymous with the growth and development of the literary theatre tradition in Ibadan and by extension in Nigeria and Africa. Thinking of Ibadan, Adelugba is like the proverbial wall gecko, who stuck, undetachably, to the walls of Ibadan, its street’s wisdom and its reflecting stage. No doubt, the critical role he played in sustaining the work that Geoffrey Axworthy , Martin Banham and Wole Soyinka had done in building the School of Drama and the Arts Theatre from especially 1966/67 when Wole Soyinka was arrested and incarcerated in various Nigerian prisons during the Nigerian Civil War, is largely responsible for the nature and character of theatre development in Ibadan—the sustenance of the Orisun theatre, his collaboration with various dramatists and theatre practitioners throughout the later part of the sixties, seventies all through to the nineties is unparalleled in the annals of theatre tradition moulding and cultivation anywhere on the continent—in longevity, quality of effort and indeed human and textual development of the stage. From growing as a student under Axworthy and Banham to sustaining Soyinka and Clark’s pioneering effort, through acting, directing and producing the plays of J.P. Clark, Wole Soyinka, Wale Ogunyemi, and others, Professor Adelugba wove and represented the inimitable thread of continuity, typified and actualized between the Ibadan stage of the sixties, with specific reference to the Orisun Theatre, the Theatre on Wheels from the mid-sixties, the years which Soyinka had graphically captured in his autobiography; Ibadan and the Penkelemesi Years; where he acknowledged the fibrous frailty of Uncle Dapo and the mammoth work-intellectual and physical which he did in the sustenance of the theatre tradition which his own incapacitation would have ended. These were years of raw and heady ‘confrontation’ of the stage and politics—the mere necessity and the hubris it demands to continue to ensure that the plays went on as theatre and as social crusade. These were years which only Dapo Adelugba could truly account for as an engager and sustainer. Surprisingly, in his normal life, Uncle Dapo could really not be described as a radical, or even a stronger reformist, in ideological terms. His commitment to the stage, to drama as study and scholarship and to growing the minds that will carry on with stage performance, acting, directing, teaching and theorizing the essential concerns of the arts and the life of the society it mediated, investigated and interrogated, brought him, all through his life, into partnership, antagonism and affection with all the people interested in the business of creativity and ‘creative strategies’ to borrow a part of one of Soyinka’s titles of Lectures, of confronting raw power. For instance, he has no patience with bureaucrats and bureaucracy, yet for the sake of the theatre and its sociality as carrier of social ethos and values, Uncle Dapo accepted appointments as Director of State’s Art Councils and produced plays at government events, including producing Langbodo for Festac 77. In all of these, excellence, social message and commitment to culture have been the informing motif of his life’s engagement with people of the theatre and its undiscriminated audience. Now, it is a great pity that I did not set eyes on him during the last two years of his life with us. Shortly before then, I had shared kolanut with him, as always, in his office in ABU where he had had his last regular stint in academia, having been seduced by the late Yakubu Nasidi and other kindred spirits of the stage in Zaria to help nurture, ( as he does better than most) the Theatre Department in ABU Zaria. On that occasion of my visit, I had persuaded him to come to the National Institute, Kuru, Plateau State, to give a talk on the role culture can play in stemming the rampaging insurgency and terrorism in our country. He had agreed to come but sent word through the Professor Sam Kafewo, a young dynamic scholar who, sadly now is also deceased, that he was unable to come. I never saw him again before he left us alone on an empty stage. He has taken away all that inimitable cadenced, ceaseless laughter to the other side of the world. Here goes a man that will be sorely missed by all of us who have fed from his abundance of grace, kindness and compassion. Ha! Uncle Dapo, it is too early to say goodnight! Yet, Adieu, dear Uncle D.
Posted on: Fri, 19 Dec 2014 10:33:49 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015