by Rasaki Ojo Bakare
Joseph Edgar, also known as Duke of Shomolu, is yet to have any formal or informal training in Theatre Arts. However, he has proven to be an effective mobilizer of funds for theatre projects. He achieves this through a combination of strategies, not just with conventional marketing strategies, but shrewd business acumen. He has a rock solid foundation in investment banking, and with this, a wide dragnet of VVIPs and very influential people in the Nigerian space. Joseph Edgar is one of the most connected men of his age in Nigeria. So, to mobilize funds for his projects, he says the right words to each of these fellows at a given time. The money drops, and he brings it into our industry. Duke is, therefore, an asset to our industry. We need more men and women like him in the industry, and we should all encourage him to widen his scope and do more.
However, unto Duke’s neck, a fat hubris is fastened; innocent arrogance and suicidal audacity! When he talks to us, he forgets we are not those his VVIP friends. He forgets we are professionals he should listen to more than talk to. He talks to us using the same sweeping statements that bring wads out of his friends’ pockets. He forgets we are more knowledgeable in the subject than his friends, and therefore, the words that bring Kola nuts from the pockets of his friends will likely bring arrow from our pouch. Duke is actually a good guy, a soft, beautiful soul, but he needs help. That is why I deliberately work with him when I am invited. It smacks of stupidity to suggest we don’t need core business experts like Duke as part of us.
What we must do is to construct the mechanism to wean them from their natural tendency. I doubt if there is anyone that fights Duke like I do. The difference is I don’t fight him to rubbish his personality on the social media. When you do that to a 50 + year old man, you can never get him to reason and get transformed. His ego will spring in Self defense. I fight Duke without making a show out of it, and I do it for him to acquire the wisdom of the fowl that just arrived a new environment, it perches with one leg, studying the new environment and its layers of complexities before bouncing around with exuberant confidence.
Duke should sell his market the way he knows best, but should listen and learn theatre from theatre people. My first quarrel with Duke was right inside my living room in Ado-Ekiti. The legendary Yemi Sodimu was right there, and the way we battered Duke with words, my wife thought I was too uncharitable to a visitor, and I thought Duke would never talk to me again. Guess what? He called me 48 hours later and started discussing another project with me. Did he heed the advice I tried to force down his throat with the connivance of Yemi Sodimu? No! over and over again, he has done the same things we bullied him for. So, you are wasting your words trying to change Duke.
He will never change unless we do something. What is that thing we must do? Keep reading this piece, you will soon find out. I am surprised that my brother Mufu quarrels with Duke as often as he does. Mufu expects Duke to know better and I chuckle. When did Duke begin his new career of Theatre marketing that he will know for instance that I as Director and Mufu as my production manager led International Centre for Arts in Lagos ( ICAL) on a tour of Austria in 1999 with a performance of SALT and Southern Africa in 2002 performing DRUMS OF WAR in 12 States with Chief Segun Olusola and his African Refugee Foundation raising pounds in six digits for those projects? Are you not wasting words when you expect Duke to agree that British Airways is not the best to have happened to Nigerian Theatre when nobody has told him that in 2006/7, the legendary Alder Consulting raised 7 digits in dollars for me to tour Europe with THE VOYAGE as the performance content of the rested Heart of Africa project with Air France giving 50 percent rebate to 21 performing artistes touring with me. I am also surprised to read Mufu’s beatification of Bolanle. Is it not the same Bolanle that claimed her work was the first Nigerian theatre performance on the international stage? when, as far back as 1964, Duro Ladipo had already bamboozled the German audience with his fire – emitting effect in OBA KOSO. I still have in my archive the bitter words some theatre people used on Bolanle about 4 years ago.
So, if we have accepted her today and she is forgiven of her early sins, who says Duke can not become a Saint tomorrow.? So, instead of wasting words to chastise the unyielding, we should simply make it impossible for them to operate within the industry without the requisite foreknowledge and training. Instead of agonizing, we should organize ourselves and get the legal backing to regulate our Industry. Yes, you heard me. Theatre practice should be regulated in Nigeria. There should be an entry requirement that will save us from what we are presently going through in the hands of people who are not trained in the arts of the theatre. Entrants should be made to learn the history, ethics, and other fundamentals of the profession before they are registered to practice in our space. While Duke should keep his business wizardry to his boardroom friends and listen more than he talks on a platform like this, we should also speak with less bile and instead seek to eliminate the free – for – all status of our sub- sector. In the 19th century, would Nigerian sports men and women have folded their hands if a basketball coach was appointed by the government to go and coach the Green Eagles? That has just happened in the Nigerian theatre sector in 2024, and nobody is complaining about it.
Instead, it is Duke we bully for not knowing that Sonny Oti, a theatre student, was flown from Ibadan to America for an acting job as far back as mid- 60s and Ojo Bakare, in 2008, had a performance of his VOYAGE at Queen Elizabeth the 2nd Auditorium, London with a 32 member cast flown from Nigeria. Duke knows less about the farms of other folks, he therefore, thinks his own farm is the largest. It is his right to keep swimming in the ocean of that wrong belief. Let those of us who think we are not ignorant begin to organize and stop agonizing.
