BY NEHRU ODEH
Professor Awam Amkpa has never hidden his admiration and love for Professor Wole Soyinka, his former teacher, who turns 90 on July 13. Based on his pedigree, he is naturally suited to direct the film adaptation of the Nobel Laureate’s critically acclaimed prison memoir “The Man Died” whose much-awaited premiere coincides with his birthday.
So, when he decided to take up the onerous but intricate task of directing the movie grafted from a text many easily find complex, emotive and introspective, but not a few believed that that was his natural habitat and forte. And he has made a success of it.
Yet many who are enamoured of the Nobel Laureate, what with his literary exploits on the global stage and his activism, can’t wait to see the biopic hit the cinemas and evoke memories, albeit plaintively.
Hit the cinemas? Certainly. This is no doubt Amkpa’s moment of glory. This is another of his triumphant offerings and success stories. This is indeed a rare opportunity to shine on the global stage, he being an accomplished dramatist.
The facts are glaring and elicit attention. Not only is Amkpa an award-winning multifaceted artist, playwright, and director, he was Soyinka’s former student at the University of Ife (now Obafemi Awolowo University).
He has also spent most of his adult life researching him and upholding his principles. “Prof was always part of my adult life,” Amkpa says, opening his speech with a gambit, as he vouchsafes a glimpse into the making of the movie.
Soyinka was always part of his adult life. Sure. Still, Amkpa who teaches drama, film and cultural analysis at the New York University, Abu Dhabi, where Soyinka also teaches, has nothing to prove. And he’s not done yet.
Yet he has put his repertoire of knowledge about the writer, his close association with him over the years, to bear on the movie, thus giving it fresh perspectives.
“Most people read everything Prof writes just on his terms. But for me, it opens the window into what kind of mind conjures up this kind of thinking and how It goes through different kinds of stuff. I was fascinated by that.
“So when I read “The Man Died”, it opened up windows into how he synthesized that experience, how he dealt with the emotions and how he externalized those emotions to become what he wrote,” Amkpa averred.
Narrating what he set out to do while directing the movie, Amkpa started by referencing the story Soyinka had told them about a female nurse who fought back a soldier in a traffic jam. That woman’s show of bravery and courage was for Amkpa an act of defiance that not only represents Soyinka’s fight against tyranny, no matter its hue, but also reflects it.
“So you can see that by honouring the act of defiance of that woman, whom they just saw in a traffic jam and how she fought back the soldiers, that became almost like a microcosm of him and the system – the act of refusal to allow tyrants get away and so on.
“What you see there is that act of defiance. We used it as a template introducing his recognition of acts of defiance. It is more like the human impulse to refuse tyranny. And that is what it is. That woman’s act was amazing, as a subtext to his defiance and incarceration.
“So then the question is how do you now keep that person almost like a muse because that is what she became for his survival. If an ordinary person on the street can be that defiant why shouldn’t somebody like him do the same?
Still, based on his reading of “The Man Died”, Amkpa proffered a fresh perspective about the book, which is different from the critic’s earlier perception and indeed went a long way in shaping the movie.
According to the Professor of drama, “The Man Died” does not just detail Soyinka’s experience as a political prisoner during the tumultuous Nigerian civil war in the late 1960s but it goes beyond that as it is systemic, telling so much about the way the country was at the time and the impulse that drove his activism and defiance.
“He (Soyinka) wrote that book not as a memoir of himself but as a memoir of defiance to a system. So it was not really about Wole Soyinka per se. It was about Nigeria and so on.
“So much later we would see how he wrote more personal memoirs, but I think it would be wrong to see “The Man Died” as an exclusive memoir. It is more like a commentary to a particular impulse that he honours, the impulse not to allow tyranny,” Amkpa maintained.
Amkpa also said filming “The Man Died” was a learning curve as well as homecoming, as according to him he was fortunate to have worked with the ensemble of talented cast and production crew who not only made the work easy for him but learnt a lot while directing the movie.
“Learning is a perpetual process, and Nigeria was the best place for me to learn how to tell the story, “ Amkpa submitted. “The Nigerian story is a global story. And it was best for me to tell the story from here. That experience has been amazing, and so energizing for me. It opened so many opportunities to revisit a space that formed me.
“This is where I started my career and I never really left. I just would go and come back. And it was a formative time of coming back full circle to a place that I also came from. And to learn from the younger generation,” Amkpa noted.
However, the film director was full of praise for the cast which according to him was impressive, independent and easy to direct. The cast includes Nollywood stars and veterans such as Chidi Moleme, Sam Dede, Norbert Young, Francis Onwochei, Edmond Enaibe and Segilola Ogidan as well as newcomers Simileolowa Hassanm Christiana Oshunniyi and Abraham Amkpa.
He also said there were many moments in the movie that he found so amazing. “As a director, I thought my role was to set up, pick the story and allow the actors kind of put in their different contributions into that frame.
“Usually we started by telling everybody what our purpose was, allowing everyone to go rehearse themselves and come back to try. If it didn’t work, we would go back.
“But it gave people the room to take ownership of what they are contributing to the fabric. They were very committed to the story and they brought something that even I was not expecting.
Still,, Amkpa. Who said he was simply a conductor, and mentioned Wale Ojo (he plays Soyinka in the movie) who he thought was just extraordinary and waiting to be called to set.
“Two of them came in with that extra thing. I didn’t need to do too much in bringing the sense of the story out of each character and even the crowd scene.
“I was so impressed by the extras. I was like this is what we were looking for. This is what we are thinking. I didn’t even have a sound in mind.
He also spoke about the actor’s resilience and their readiness to take on any challenge. “I told one of the actors the night before, ‘Listen you are playing this role. I need you to come out with something that excites the prison or the prisoners…’ So that was not in the script. It was just based on my faith in the abilities of these actors to bring something out. And it came from the most unlikely space.
“Even Norbert Young who came into the space was surprised that I think he had imagined that when he came into that prison cell space, he would be the subject of that space. But the prioners were the subject of that space. And that was exactly one of the educative processes where you are learning.
However, Amkpa who thought that he had done justice to the prison memoir, used the opportunity to take a swipe at Nigerians who tend to euthanize issues of national importance and clothe leading lights of agitation and protests such as Soyinkai in an ethnic garb.
He bemoaned the ethnocentrism that had defined the Nigerian polity since independence, blaming it on the educational system and what he calls Nigeria happening to its citizens.
“The Nigeria that happens is a variety of ethnocentrism. Even when Soyinka is in his 90s and in the winter of his life; even at that stage the story is still the same, where the ethnocentric frame corrupts the purity of dissidence.
“It became so ethnicised that people from a particular part of the country would just lump Soyinka into an ethnic group. This is a guy who has always consistently transcended ethnocentrism. So, they wouldn’t see it because they are obscured by the thinking that the culture remains a deeply ethnocentric culture.
And the thing about ethnocentrism is that it always looks for the person who does not belong. It defines itself like that against the person who is not it. It is the same thing with nationalism.,
“The emotional aspect of ethnocentrism always obscures the purity of a rebellious purpose. And I think what you got is ‘Why would Soyinka who was a Yoruba man be interested in the Biafran war?
“For the simple-minded person, they would say it is not his business. But even Ojukwu realized the principle that Soyinka was following that scripted his desire to create a dialogue and avoid the war.
“It is a long-winded answer to the question about the difference in context between when he was younger to now, And I think the context never changed because the only thing from my perspective that changed is the volume of the resistance especially by young people to the system.
“But because we messed up our reception of knowledge, in other words, our education, Nigeria happened to our educational system so much that it became ethnocentric.
“And the beauty of this moment is Soyinka’s consistency versus the consistency of ethnocentrism,” Amkpa who is himself looking forward with bated breath to the premiere of the biopic he directed, maintained.