Will you say your years in Igbobi-College were very significant?

You may also add my time at the Cathedral because I had a teacher, he didn’t teach me but he caned some people and caned some people again at Igbobi. Igbobi is a combination of Methodist and Anglican; we had a lot of expatriates there. There was S.A.B. Babalola, Cyprian Ekwensi was also an Igbobian. And Igbobi had a tradition. There are certain things that you will do and I will know that you are not an Igbobian. You had it in other schools like Christs’ School, Ado-Ekiti started by an old principal of Igbobi.

We had a strong tradition introduced by Reginald Park. We had scholarships from Britain and so on. You know Ibru was an Igbobian. In fact all of them except one. Two of them were senior prefects at different times before and after me. My headmaster’s son at Osogbo was my classmate at Igbobi. I knew, many people at Igbobi- Dr. Shadare, the Ataoja’s son also came to Igbobi. You were taught to put in your best even in singing. If you are singing a wrong tune, Parker would stop you and you would go through a lesson in music till you got it right.

Were you also good at sports?

I think so. The one I gave up was athletics. I did because I didn’t see why I should struggle between here and there and kill myself.

But I loved football and cricket. I won a prize when they introduced a prize for that game. I played cricket for the university; I didn’t play football because I was always injured. In spite of that, I even played for the fourth term as a goal keeper. In my last two years there, Igbobi was the champion in school sports. I was the leader of the team.

I played against Ghana in inter-versity games twice. Christopher Okigbo and I. He had 49 knock-outs. I played two knock-outs. They would have beaten us.

You were trying to succinctly describe what you meant by the Igbobi spirit…

Yes. That meant, you gave your best. You avoided cheating. You tried to work hard. If an Igbobian went to politics and succeeded, it was because of the Igbobian spirit, because he was so open that you could see all that he did. Yemi Osinbajo who is the new Vice Presidential candidate of the APC is an Igbobian. You can see his records so far. Olu Falae was in my house, I was his house captain. You can see his records so far. You had to be straight. I didn’t send my children to Igbobi for a simple reason: Igbobi went into bad times. A group of people who ran Igbobi became bad. My first daughter went to Sokoto for her HSC. My sons went to Kaduna. This was to make them recognise that Nigeria is one; to make them know how to travel from here to any part of the country.

What were the motivating factors behind your activism as a student at the University of Ibadan?

The Englishman’s house is where his castle is.

How do you mean?

That is what we were taught. This was the time when we were talking about “boycott the boycottables” even before we even went to the university. We went there and started writing. Your language, your culture, you defend to the last. There were people who decided that we should try and act plays ourselves, with the leadership of Ralph Okpara. Then we joined and very soon, everybody wanted to express himself through the theatre. Even the Classics students joined. JP Clark was there; they started a company, with Professor Ferguson who played cricket but also acted plays. The idea was, let us have our own students productions. I have lost a lot of those pictures that I scanned where there was Yetunde Esan, Laide Idowu, Juliet Odezue. The people there were not all art students. Tony Adegbola, Professor Adegbola, later on, our first oil Minister, Bernabas Akobu, who was a good poet.

We had a few science students who joined the productions and they performed well. I was Hop croft mind, for which my friend Dr. Falase called me Oncro! You had shepherds’ Hell which became Oke Sapati. play Oke and Sepati. We produced one, two plays and the other people moved. We decided to do our own plays just when I got there. By that time, the Horn had been started by JP Clark and co. We went in for the theatre and wrote one act plays. I wrote Woman Palaver, Yetunde Asun wrote the Gossips of Ewa, Ayo Okunlade also wrote. And since we had no access to the Arts Theatre or Trenchad Hall, we showed in the dining halls. In the dining halls, we used the raised platforms as stage and people came from town and the plays became very popular. It was when I wrote the adaptation, Monkey’s Spur, that Nkem Nwankwo did the inventors. His book Dauda was adapted for the Negro Arts Festival in Dakar. The last one was The Wife, and by this time we had gone big.

We were accepted into the Arts Theatre. That was when I wrote The Curse, which was performed later on by one of the people who took part in it – Dapo Onobulu, who did it in 1961 or 1962. They did Wole Soyinka’s plays. After that JP moved in, he had done a dramatic poem, Edvie, which was published in The Beacon and the next after that was Song of a Goat. Then, they started scorpion in 1961. That was how I came in. And then outside, something happened. Ralph Okpara, who was the president of the Students Dramatic Society, was also boss man of the Capo and my brother jointly brought out Safe Journey Seki and Alao. People used to rush home to go and listen to that type of thing. Then my brother went abroad, and a new person took charge.

After my wanderings, I came back to Lagos and joined the writers and I wrote The Last Episode from 1964-1970. So, you can see why they think there was only one thing – Imoukhuede and that he is dead. Me and Ralph never separated.

I was readily available because I was in the Federal Film Unit, next door to Radio Nigeria. I could type my episodes out and then pass it to them. I wrote so many episodes and I was still writing other things for theVoice of Nigeria. As far as many were concerned, there was only one Aig-Imoukhuede who was responsible for those things and it must have been the one that died.

You are not thinking about collecting those materials together?

It is a pity. It’s symbolic of our approach to record-keeping or preservation. We were trying to get the tapes so that we can give them to someone to transcribe. But to get the tape is even the problem now. We don’t have regard for things that other people would prize. The only film that was released and was shown in cinema houses and television within 24 hours, it was done in October, 1970 and we can’t find it any more – Gowon Weds. I directed it, I was acting producer at that time. Do you know one day I went there and it was put at the balcony and rain was falling on it? It happened also at the National Council for Arts and Culture, where rainfall had destroyed a lot of the artworks.

When I was there, I insured all the artworks at the National Council for Arts and Culture. Go to the National Gallery of Art, ask them now whether they insured their artworks. That is a problem that we have in Nigeria. When I was in the National Council for Arts and Culture and the old radio stations were going to be dismantled, I spoke with Ahmadu Bello University and the Nigerian Cultural Centre there, and asked them to take those tapes. I don’t know what they have done with those tapes now.

If you go to the arts council, you will still see the black tapes there in their so-called library. It’s a pity that we don’t value records.