REMEMBERING OLA ROTIMI (1938 - 2000)

By

Isaac Attah Ogezi Death can only make its vain boast, for though his bones are interred, the Storyteller lives on. This aphorism cannot be truer than in the case of the Nigerian playwright, Prof. Ola Rotimi. I studied his play, Ovonramwen Nogbaisi, as one of the recommended texts for the Senior School Certificate Examinations conducted by the West African Examinations Council (WAEC) in the mid-1990s and could not help but salute the intrepidity of the deposed Oba of the Benin Empire sent on exile to Calabar by the British colonial misadventurists. But Rotimi seemed not yet done with me, for the next year when I enrolled for my Interim Joint Matriculation Board Examinations (IJMBE) with the then School of Preliminary Studies (SPS), Keffi, Nasarawa State, the playwright was there waiting for me, not in person, anyway. His unarguably foremost play, The gods are not to Blame, was on the reading list of IJMBE! Here I met the great character Odewale whose tragic hubris led him inexorably to fulfil the gods' decree of killing his father and marrying his mother. An adaptation of Sophocles' Oedipus Rex that completely transplanted the work to Africa as though it sprouted originally from there. With these encounters with the playwright vicariously through his two great plays, you could imagine my excitement when I was told by members of the Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA) Plateau State chapter that Ola Rotimi was to grace the association's annual international convention as the Keynote Speaker! I had to see this playwright live at the convention, I vowed to myself. The D-day dawned in the year 1999, and there I was among the entranced largely writers' audience, after trekking from Abuja Hostel of the University of Jos, Jos, Plateau State, along Bauchi Road to Tati Hotel Jos. There I saw the larger than life, diminutive writer who had influenced my life without previously meeting him face to face. There I sat, drinking from the rich keynote speech of one of most influential writers in my life. It was with a blood-curdled heart that I received the shocking news of his death a few months later. Though Rotimi is dead, his works live on. Wole Soyinka is the most celebrated Nigerian writer and playwright, but perhaps the most popular play to Nigerian readers and audiences, both literary enthusiasts and non-literary enthusiasts., is Rotimi's The gods are not to Blame. In the hands of Rotimi, the golden past of African culture is brought alive, sizzling, spiced with grand, proverb-laden speeches, choral singing and dancing. It is total drama, unmatched anywhere in the world. He is to Nigerian theatre what Chinua Achebe is to Nigerian fiction especially those set in the past. His Kurunmi is not so satisfying a play to the present writer in terms of the great traditional speeches of The gods are not to Blame and Ovonramwen Nogbaisi, but these failings appeared ameliorated in the pacy plot, action and movements on the stage. The comic side of him is evident in the timeless and riveting comedy, Our Husband Has Gone Mad Again. He was to try his hands in theatre of the absurd with Holding Talks and Man Talk, Woman Talk, the latter published posthumously. After over two decades of his passing on to glory, the impact of his writing remains undiminished, and perhaps unsurpassed by playwrights in successive generations. Femi Osofisan may be a worthy successor, prodigiously prolific and versatile, but apart from Women of Owu, has not methinks produced a work of great traditional grandeur as Rotimi's The gods are not to Blame and Ovonramwen Nogbaisi. The multiculturalist playwright, Ahmed Yerima, is also another playwright that makes great strides in drama of the past in Nigerian theatre today traversing different ethnic cultures in Nigeria - in the North, specifically the Hausa-Fulani, we have Attahiru, in the Niger Delta, we have Hard Ground and Little Drops…, to mention but the most prominent. Like Soyinka, Yerima is at home with both the rustic past of our forebears as well as the cosmopolitan life unparalleled. However, where Soyinka remains unmatched in drama is his ability to be at home with both tragedies, for example his greatest tragic play, Death and the King's Horseman as well as satirical plays or comedies like the Jero Plays, A Play of Giants, The Lion and the Jewel, amongst several others. Despite the rich harvest of works by Osofisan, Yerima, Olu Obafemi, Zulu Sofola, Zainabu Jallo, Jude Idada, Friday John Abba, and a host of other twinkling stars on our literary firmament, Rotimi's lean harvest of plays sets the benchmark for the best of our theatre. It is a good thing to be prolific, if you can, but remember that a writer can make himself immortal with a handful of classics like Rotimi. I would rather be the soldier bee that packs its venom into one single sting and dies later, albeit leaving in its wake a writhing victim by the impact of one single sting of death, than be a writer of a hundred books without a single immortal or great work. Time cannot obliterate the impact of Rotimi's contributions to our theatre and the unborn generations to come.