There are some religious organisations that have this kind of arcane modes of worship and other activities as you mentioned. What were the areas of convergence and divergence from the religious organisations?

No, no, no. Pyrates Confraternity has nothing to do with religions. You bring whatever religion you have embraced into it. Nobody attempts to convert you, nobody tells you to turn away. Now again, the tendency of seadogs to gather, party and ‘inter-talk’ all night long in bush clearings – many people then contort this into satanism in forest shrines. People get scared so easily of anything to do with Nature. I live in the bush, my house is built inside the bush. I personally have a deep affinity to nature. When Boys Scout march into the forest to camp as part of their personality build-up, nobody says Boy Scouting is a cult. I think we should stop being frightened about Nature environments. One favorite space in the University of Ibadan – where the PC was born – was the bush across the road from the University gates. If you were walking past, you would see dancing – or ‘sallying’. There are traditionalist religionists who similarly prefer to worship right in the heart of Nature, Religions are not cults, but there are cults within religions. Yes, these cults are all over the place, they are there and they will claim that they derive their inspiration from the bible or the Koran. Remember Okija? Remember Owegbe? Some will even quote the bible. Don’t forget the cultic christianity at the basis of Alice Makwena’s Lord’s Army, that christian predecessor of the Koran spouting Boko Haram. We are talking about the phenomenon of cults, obsessed, anti-human cults supposedly derived from holy texts, waving the texts as justification for their murderous rampages. You can always extract what you want from religious scriptures, you manipulate, extrapolate, distort and pervert extracts, then make your reading the rigid principle of righteousness. You claim authority over the originating source. This is a problem of humanity in general, not just of Nigeria. Education is vital.

When you graduated from the University of Leeds with a two-one, you initially decided to pursue a Ph.D in Literature but then you abandoned it for a practical experience in drama and Performance Arts at the Royal Court Theatre in London. Why that switch?

Yes, I’m a doctoral dropout. And I am far more an intellectual than an academic. I suspect that my temperament is secretly anti-academic. In academia, the thesis is more to be read in the length of footnotes than in the actual substance of discourse. I preferred to be creatively productive, I’m not denigrating academia – very much the contrary. But as I began my research, encountering past theses, I felt less and less inclined to devote four, five years to producing a tome of foot notes to dubious original thinking. All that ‘ibid’! I was getting deep into creativity. During my undergraduate days, I was already writing plays, I had participated in the activities of the university Drama society. I used to sneak out to watch play rehearsals and so on. I wanted to be productive, I could take academia in stride as I went along – at least, so I thought. I preferred to produce my own work and let others write long footnotes to my own works. I still carry on my intellectual life, I still teach in universities as you know. I recently resigned from my last attachment. In fact academia is fascinating, playing mind against mind, probing ideas, testing and recomposing ideas is one part of the needful activities of the brain. But my pull was towards the observance and probing of human nature and the phenomena around it.

You had some formidable teachers like Arnold Kettle, Wilson Knight. Do you want to talk about them?

I gravitated towards three teachers in the main. There were Bonamy Dobree, Wilson Knight and Arnold Kettle. With the last, I was sceptical but found him fascinating because he was a Marxist. It was the same way as I approached religion. I began questioning religion very early. You see, any dogma for me, right from childhood, was something to be thoroughly examined. I began critiquing Marxism under Arnold Kettle. But I gravitated towards Bonamy Dobree because he was a medievalist, a specialist of the kind of a historic creative atmosphere of the medieval era. He frequented medieval churches to study the iconic aspects of the church and so on and the significations of the carvings in each of the churches I’m talking about.

You can find a correlation with our own approach to the deities. He was fond of calling himself a pagan. He found that there is a continuity in the relationship of humanity to the phenomenon of Nature and the concept of deity, godhead and the development of religion. And those paganistic aspects which exist in Christianity until today, they were central to his study. I was already questioning Christianity, I have been doing that since I was in secondary school. With Dobree, I began to find great significance in the artworks that were produced by the followers of Orisa in one form or another. I found correlation between them and also the carvings which you found on pews and church iconography. It’s no wonder Orisa found correlation with Roman Catholicsm and they ended up in a syncretic fusion in Brazil, Cuba etc.

Not only that, the stained glass windows of saints depicting events from the passage of Christ, all pointed to my early understanding to the meeting point of religions. Dobree was somebody who influenced me in that direction because his predecessors called them devil worship and here was this oyinbo professor struck by them. Once, he actually sent for me to express his shock when he encountered an African student who said he was ashamed of his uncivilized past. And he told me this story, he said he asked this student why he considered his past uncivilized. The student replied that it was because we used to worship ‘idols’. And Bonamy asked him – what is civilised? He said Christianity. Bonamy had the shock of his life. This was the kind of mental template we shared which drew me to him.

Regarding G. Wilson Knight, he was a great mythologist, a self-taught academic who had great insight, very original insight into what was being taught was great literature, a lot of insight and a unique intellectual approach. Even where the poets were not what I call mytho-poets, Wilson Knight quarried their works for embedded mythology! And the extra-special gift I had from him was when he quoted one of my essays in an introduction to one of his books. He revealed that he had been puzzling certain aspects of, shall we say – Shakespearean world-view or whatever – I’ve forgotten now – and that an essay of mine clarified it for him to such an extent that he felt he had to acknowledge it in his introduction. Ah, I said, that is my Ph.D.

What about Arnold Kettle?

Unlike what happens in our colleges today, students were close to their professors, their teachers. They met outside the classes a lot, they joined the same clubs, they would meet in pubs and fall into discussions. Much learning took place outside the classroom. I wasn’t specializing in the novel but in dramatic literature with all its trimmings – history, criticism, philosophy etc. I wasn’t his formal student so to speak. I only took the mandatory courses under him. But I began to intrude into the Arnold Kettle corner in the student pub, I was fascinated by his ideological approach to literature, especially as, during that period, there was a very big tussle between very different schools of Marxism— it wasn’t just an intellectual tussle, it was a life and death development – with the ‘deviationists’, ‘revisionists’, vanishing into gulags, never again to re-appear. Or simply lined up for ‘confressions’ and self-criticism for execution in the infamous Stalinist trials.

Marxism was a life and death issue at the time. In other words, this social philosophy was at war with the world of capitalism and the social values of the bourgeoisie, even at war with itself! Deadly war. It reached beyond academic exercise where unfortunately it has remained for many African Marxist followers, except of course you consider dictators like Kerekou who additionally dressed like Mao – which he thought marked him indeed as a Marxist thinker. Or Mariam Mengistu of Ethiopia, for whom the word “Purge” was understood only in the count of bodies he could pile up in the streets of Addis Ababa. All this would come later of course. Right then, Josef Stalin’s show trials were on in full gallop and so there was ideology in academia, and then again ideology made manifest in real life – more accurately in death realities. As you can imagine, It was a soul searching period for me, hence my constant presence in the Arnold Kettle Marxist circles.

And so, I want to make it very clear, it was a very crucial, testing and formative period for me, not too different from my private investigation of the nature of religion. I never became a Marxist but I was able to engage those who thought that they had the secret of life, the beginning and end of discourse in Marxism – that was what happened with those students. Many thought that all they had to do was to invoke a phrase or two of Marxist jargon and that gave them the right to trample over the thought processes of others. In fact some of them equated intellectualism with Marxism; if you were not a Marxist, you had no intellectual capability whatsoever. That was the mentality at the time and that was what I wanted to beat out of them – with varying degrees of success.

As a student in Leeds, you were able to size up all the political leaders who were in the UK for constitutional conferences. You were obviously not satisfied with them. Can we say that you came back to Nigeria fully prepared to confront them and their politics? Or shall we say that the confrontation had actually started before your homecoming?

The confrontation outside began quite early. I took on the then Prime Minister, even before full Independence. In his case, what happened was that my aunt, the same Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, was invited to the Soviet Union and her passport was seized. Reason provided was – to quote Tafawa Balewa at the time – “I think that communism is an evil thing”. I have never forgotten the phrasing when they seized Funmilayo Kuti’s passport. On that day, I made a fool of myself. I had been informed that it was Tafawa Balewa who was visiting France at the time, and that he was staying at Claridges Hotel – along Champs Elysee, I recall. I was in Paris at the time. I phoned him and requested audience. When I got there and saw him, he didn’t quite look like the Prime Minister – but then, I hadn’t seen too many of Balewa’s photograph, so I thought that he’d merely put on weight.

We started our conversation and I asked him, ‘What do you know of communism that you call it evil?’ I can’t describe the atmosphere, how it changed abruptly. We had been talking normally about this and that, what I felt the leaders should do, our future as homecoming students etc. etc That question – I think I narrated it in my IBADAN, The Penkelemes Years – ended most abruptly. His aide got up and said, “Who are you? What right do you have to come and ask the premier about communism?” We were all coming home, I replied. We wanted to know what we were going to meet on the ground. Anyway, the meeting ended abruptly. That is one instance I remember in near-total recall. Then when I was in England we more or less watched the first generation leaders and took them on in myriad directions. For some reason, it is Hope Harriman’s face I recall most vividly during those sessions. We thought our destiny was to go and free southern Africa; some of us prepared ourselves towards that showdown. We were convinced that South Africa was our life mission.

Apartheid was the sole, or the major, identifiable enemy at the time, and we felt that our generation was useless if we didn’t go down south as part of an international African brigade to liberate that regional rebuke of our black existence. And we began to see our leaders, how they simply scattered money – ostentatious, exhibitionist, extravagant and disdainful of the rest of humanity. Liberation was not on the agenda of most. We suddenly recognised in some of the new leaders the departing colonialists. In other words, those whose whole sense of liberation and nationalism was to step into the shoes of the departing colonial powers. Our orientation changed – Listen, before we go South to liberate southern Africa, hadn’t we better go home first, check these people out? We may head south only to find that our supply lines have been cut, shall we say, because these people are too busy enjoying themselves.

Do they believe in what we believe? Do they know the meaning of liberation struggle? Do they understand Nkrumah? Do they think it is just enough to obtain independence? Do they understand the main mission of the transformation of society? I remember some of us, even If we were not Marxists we had a Marxist approach to liberation. It was not just a question of overthrowing the external parasites, but of transforming the society along progressive lines. So, we decided we should all return home as soon as studies were over, and take care of home first before sauntering out. That was how my clashes with establishment began, why they began virtually the moment I landed at home.