For Jahman Oladejo Anikulapo: the music never stops

• Published date: 22 January 2023
• Publication title: Nigeria - The Nation

Jahman Oladejo Anikulapo one of Nigeria's most assiduous art-and-culture activists and curators, turned 60 today. Below, with minor amendments, is my tribute to him 10 years ago upon his attainment of the age of 50.

NIGERIA'S Arts and Culture community has literally declared January 2013 as The Jahman Anikulapo Month. January 16 is his birthday, and we have decided to ensure that every bird in the tree, every speck of the roadside dust, and every drop of the teeming lagoon sing with us as we troop out to mark the first 50 years of one of the most committed culture activists in our country's history. And the past sixteen days of the month have witnessed a real cornucopia of compliments: from writers and readers, play-writers and play-goers, drummers and dancers, song-composers and singers, creative artists and art connoisseurs, music hall stars and street crooners, culture-policy wonks and culture-practice wags, fervent dreamers and flat-out realists, friends and foes of the arts. When I look at the young man for whom the bell has chimed fifty memorable times, and for whom the drums rumble so thunderously from street to street; when I wade through the flood of gists, jests, anecdotes, reminiscences, fabus of Jahman's colleagues and contemporaries in his Baba Confuse days at the Theatre Arts Department of the University of Ibadan in the 1980's; when I put all these side by side with the generous encomiums pouring forth from those whose cultural lives have been so vitally touched by this passionately engaged maverick of a man, I cannot help wondering what exactly must be going on in his mind right now.

For the Jahman (or Oladejo as I've grown accustomed to calling him, teasingly) we have come to know is a culture warrior - no, a warrior for culture - an intensely motivated, doggedly driven, relentlessly inventive, remorselessly tenacious fighter with, ironically, a sometimes self-deprecating, self-effacing disposition. A true man of the theatre with an uproariously humorous mien and gravely serious inclination mixed in equal proportions, he has learnt to make us laugh at some of our grievous flaws and get deadly serious about what we have come to regard as mere trifles. Honesty of purpose; the readiness to serve without seeking immediate reward; humility - genuine, elevating humility; that refusal to take oneself too seriously which is one of the hallmarks of virtue - these are some of the attributes that have endeared Jahman to his throng of admirers. I still remember the day I introduced him to one of my students at the University of Ibadan, and the way young man exclaimed with a jaw-dropping curiosity: 'Waow, so this is the same Jahman Anikulapo of The Guardian?!' This admirer couldn't believe that the editor of one of...