I read manuscript of Ngugi’s Weep Not, Child in his Makerere University hostel room —Pa Tunde Aiyegbusi

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16 hours ago

Tell us a bit about yourself – your name screams Ekiti?

Yes, I am of Ekiti origin because my father migrated from Ekiti to Lagos in the 1920s and worked as a teacher in Lagos and in the Railways. I was born over 80 years ago in Idi Oro, a community at a place that used to be the border between Lagos and the Colony. I attended a private primary school in Lagos and then I moved to Ibadan where I attended Ibadan Boys High School and Government College, Ibadan for my A-Levels. Then I won a scholarship with which I went to Makerere University which was a kind of melting pot of African students, because students came from all over Africa to the school for the purposes of getting to know more about other Africans and the continent.

From your educational trajectory, it appeared like you were set for academics but you ended up in broadcasting. What caused what might appear to some people as a derailment?

If you have a particular path, I think the question of derailment doesn’t come in. I just wanted to do well in subjects I found that I was comfortable with. I did what you now call Humanities, and when I went to Government College, I went to do History, Geography and General Paper, and I got a scholarship. Even the scholarship given to me was to study pure air if I could, because in those days, if you get a BSc in anything, you will get a job. So, primarily, I needed a job with a very good salary. So, the question of whether I wanted to go into academics or anything didn’t really come. The profession that appealed to me then, because they featured more in Nigerian newspapers and politics was Law. But I didn’t come from a family that could easily afford sending me to read law and anything like that; maybe that is one thing. Then, secondly, in those days people were very modest. One day I saw one lawyer walking with an umbrella on his way to court in Lagos Island. I said ‘so you mean if I went to study law, this is what I would come back to doing – walking with an umbrella to court?’, not knowing that the man’s house was very close to the court. So, there wasn’t the question of derailment although if I had gone into academics too in any of the subjects I studied, I don’t think I would have done badly.

However, going into broadcasting was accidental in a way. When I was at Makerere University, I started featuring in some programmes on their local radio station, Uganda Broadcasting Corporation. They did one of my small plays, and from then they called me for discussion and everything. So, when I came to Nigeria, the first job the Federal Government offered me was to go and teach in a newly-established secondary school in a place called Okposi (now in Ebonyi State). I turned it down. I told them that I came to Nigeria because my mother just lost her husband and I wanted to be near her. I couldn’t be near her if I went to Okposi or anywhere else in Nigeria. You can imagine the audacity in those days. Eventually, I applied for a position advertised in the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation then. Once I got in there, I felt so much at home that no other profession appealed to me.

What were those things that sucked you in in broadcasting?

When we were young, there was this thing called rediffusion which was the system of giving information to the masses then. It was a box that transmits the programmes that come from the national broadcaster – NBC. We used to listen to football commentary, we used to listen to other programmes as they were broadcast. Then, there were mysteries about it and then also, there were what we call now ‘star broadcasters’ everybody emulated. When I went there, it was like going into the company of stars. I remember that time when I joined them, we had people like Ralph Okpara, who created the enormously popular radio dramas called ‘Safe Journey’, ‘The Adventures of Alao’ and ‘Shaky Shaky’. It was a humorous ring and, behold, it was very popular. Then most of the people who were there were stars on their own. Then in the Music Department, you had people like Fela Sowande, Lijadu, Kehinde Okusanya, you had Fela, the same Fela. They all worked there including one Mr. Ikechi who eventually went to UNN Nsukka to lecture. Quite a lot of stars were there, even in the Nigerian Languages. Everybody was a start and so, when you get there you feel you are really in a select group of people.

I was sent to the Drama Department to work there and the man who was the first African Head of Drama Department, one Mr. Yinka Lijadu, had then gone to work with the UNESCO in Paris. So the man I met at that department was Mr. Sam Iyamu and it was a very thriving department. We were doing a lot of work with good satisfaction. We were broadcasting indigenous plays in English by Nigerian writers. It was challenging but it was a very satisfying endeavour.

You wrote a beautiful eulogy to one of your friend, Mr. Anthony Gerald Shaibu (AGS) Momodu in 2022 and one of the things you said about him was that he had “passion for everything beautiful: Women, works of art, homes and cars”. How did these things inspire you?

It is said that rest is good after labour. People struggled academically through university and other institutions of higher learning and you succeeded and you got a job, go for something of class; not frivolities. AGS went to the University of Ibadan and I met him when I was working in Radio Nigeria. He was writing for us and we became friends. He was driving a Citroen car, a French-made car that rests on its belly when it is resting, and rises like a tortoise when it is started. It is a fine piece of engineering. So, to find that a man who was just a couple of years ahead of me was riding that kind of car, and of course he was also always impeccably-dressed, was a motivation for me. He was a kind of role model for me.

You must have seen and worked on a lot of scripts in your career. You were said to have also seen the manuscript of the hugely popular novel by Ngugi wa Thiongo, Weep Not Child. How did your encounter with him come about?

In 1962, we got this American-sponsored scholarship to go to East Africa. By the time we got there at Makerere University, Ngugi had already got his reputation as a budding writer. When I got there, I was fortunate to have him in the same hall of residence as me. We were together in Sir Geoffrey Northcote Hall. He was active. In fact, in that same year, 1962 there was a conference of African writers earlier before we got to the country. It had taken place before we arrived in the country in July. The conference was also attended by Nigerian writers like Soyinka, Achebe, Okigbo and others. The Nigerian writers were already well-known, but in East Africa there was no outstanding writer of their class except for a man called David Rungadede, who later became the Tanzanian representative in the United Nations. He was writing a bit of poetry. But James Ngugi featured in that conference. We were not there, we had not arrived in the country but when I read the reports, we saw that Ngugi was there. So, he interested me and he was such a humble man. When I tried talking to him, he showed me some of his short stories he had written and got published in some literary magazines in East Africa, edited by whites who didn’t think so much about African writing or even Africans’ capability to write. He was very proud to show them to me.

It was in that kind of relationship that he showed me the manuscript of a novel he told me he wrote. He said it was his second effort because the first one he wrote – The River Between – was not accepted and that there were some comments on it. So he thought of rewriting it. But instead of rewriting it, he went on to write what has become an African classic now – Weep Not Child. So, I was privileged to have read it then. I didn’t edit it please. No, he just gave me the manuscript to read and I read it in his room.

So, from there, the relationship grew to the extent that when he left and went to Leeds, he was still communicating with me and when he came to Nigeria in 1982 for a conference at the University of Lagos, he was even my guest for the greater part of one day with some other writers from East Africa. Later on when he had his experience with Arap Moi, the president of his country who jailed him. I lost contact with him. But then there were a lot of people who, when they went abroad and saw him, he would always send greetings to me. So, he encouraged me a lot because he made me write my first short play which was presented in an inter-hall competition, and won. That was what gave me confidence to continue to write up till even today.

How many of your Northcote mates are still in touch?

Ha, a lot of them are dead now. We are talking about a good number of decades now. Even those of us who went from Nigeria, quite a number of us have passed on. And then, of course, Idi Amin did a lot to scatter talents in East Africa. I think some of the people I could have been in touch with in East Africa fell to Idi Amin’s killers during the civil war and everything in that country. So, we are talking about a new, different Uganda after Idi Amin, and those people are not my generation.

When you remember the broadcasting of your era in comparison to the broadcasting of this time, do you think it is as fulfilling as it was then for you?

I worked in a broadcasting house as a writer and a producer. Those who trained as broadcasters, who were trained for broadcasting, were the announcers. And then, the announcers we had in those days were people who understood the language, who had good diction and who were thorough in researching names and strange things. It is like most things in Nigeria today – anything goes. However, whether people like what it is today compared to what it was in our days, depends on interest. Today, they have 24 hours broadcast time while we had 12 hours, so you can pick what you want. You could pick children’s programmes, women’s programmes, drama, vox pop, book review, music. In music you had indigenous music and foreign music. Talking about music, it is not everything that was recorded that could be played on air. One of the first things I found interesting was that when I started listening to records in the Broadcasting House, you would find some records with NTBB written on them. NTBB means Not To Be Broadcast. But nowadays, everything is broadcast…everything no matter how terrible the lyrics are. Is this progress? However, I listen to news but the way it is packaged today is more like entertainment. Of course, the emphasis is always on the gruesome, something that would catch people’s attention. It’s like newspapers today. You buy a newspaper, you flip through and you find seven pages of advertisements and birthdays and you find one or two good articles or letters to the editor and read. So, I think those who consume the contents of the many radio stations are in a better position to make a better critical assessment of what they consume.

You noted that in today’s Nigeria, anything goes with regards to broadcasting unlike what it was back in your days. Could we attribute this to some gaps in government policies or their implementation by the requisite regulatory authorities of government?

When I say ‘anything goes’, I am really talking about standards. You see, there is no way we could have sustained what I am talking about – that kind of attention paid to details which we had at that time. You remember that at that time the population was very small compared to now; I think at that time Nigeria was supposed to be about 30 million or so. Today, what are we? Over 200 million and broadcasting stations increase everywhere, even schools. Some schools have people who shouldn’t really be called teachers. So things went down, that is why I am saying that. And when it comes to rewarding merits, a lot of factors come into play: factor of power, factor of ethnicity and then you just find people being placed in positions where they could not function maximally. That is what I am saying. The government policies change from time to time, anybody who comes in looks at the earlier policy, takes what he wants from it and jettisons the rest and so on. That is what happens in governments today, mostly in Africa.

If you find yourself in a gathering of young broadcasters of today and you are to give them pieces of advice, what will you tell them?

I will just give you one experience I had about six years ago. I was in a shop to buy something and there was a radio station on air in the shop. I cannot remember the name of the radio station now. There was this young man who maybe, had been working for a few months at the radio station or so. His diction was nothing to write home about and everything and he was being interviewed by a colleague of his on that station. He was asked something about how far he was enjoying his job in that station. The man started by saying: “Before I became a star…” The unknown fellow was saying ‘before he became a star’? You see, it is that humility that is not there, that humility to know that you have to learn every time. Even their body language when they are talking on air, and what they are talking about is even almost close to rubbish and they are even very arrogant about it. However, for those of them who are arrogant and almost illiterate, there are a lot of people who are really very good and you can get them yourself on radio stations. I think more does not mean less quality.