Goodnight Y.A.M; Yulisa Amadu Maddy—Brother and bosom friend

To us who have related very closely with him for well over three decades on a work-a-day basis in normal, routine (if routine was possible with YAM) life, it is death most cruel and unacceptable. Amadu had worked in the Theatre Arts Department of the University of Ibadan before joining us in Ilorin as a […]

To us who have related very closely with him for well over three decades on a work-a-day basis in normal, routine (if routine was possible with YAM) life, it is death most cruel and unacceptable. Amadu had worked in the Theatre Arts Department of the University of Ibadan before joining us in Ilorin as a Senior Lecturer in the Performing Arts of the University of Ilorin I believe in 1982. But it is his work with me in my theatre troupe, Ajon Players in those five or six years, that had created a well of tears in me long before his death and since I saw him last in August of 2013. A man most misunderstood, even contemned and  despised, by many insensitive observers about the depth of his humaneness, generosity and passion for the growth of society, any society he confronts anywhere, anytime ,  Amadu has left us alone in our world of selfishness, self-seeking and blindness to the possibilities that inhere our world as Africans –be it Sierra-Leoneans in its present state of recuperation and re-invention after years of dystopia, war-ravage and fratricide, and, indeed, Nigeria where he had tried hard, giving his all in stage-craft and word/thought weaving  to make the stage mediate the social obsolescence that impede the fulfilment of the dreams of the founding fathers of this great country that our country leads the rest of Africa as the continent of the late twentieth and the twenty-first century.
In that effort to deploy the artistic/literary and theatre medium to canvass and mobilize/conscientize  for social transformation, Maddy has, through the unorthodoxy of his method, his impatience for elite hypocrisy and phoniness, angered too many comfortable people in government, in the universities and in the society at large. The reward for the idiosyncrasy of his delivery and rhetorical strategy, his often over-angry, adjudged rude and arrogant disposition, his company has always been easily dispensed with and abhorred. This has led to his being shoved aside or pushed into incarceration, rushed into unwilling exile in the bid to escape from threatening death from the hands of those he loved most, or simply haunted psychologically. So fleeing the land of his birth, which in itself passed from trouble to trauma, from crisis to warfare, from  freedom to re-designed slavery—free town to a manacled city—leaving the fleeing man with his sore heart in his mouth, always exasperated with desperation for the fate of his country who loved to kill him, but who dies because it failed to heed his and other voices of reason; his uncanny message of redemption and his warning that the nation should toe the path of regeneration which his literature, poetry, theatre advocates; remains even today, largely ignored.
I know that after his death, Sierra-Leone will mourn and may even give him a semblance of state burial at best or give him a decent burial as one of its foremost men of letters and theatre proponents in English Language. They will shower accolades on him  as a celebrator and practitioner of her popular culture—the language of his literature is in conscious Creole; his poetry is palpable and his theatre is electrifying in relevant ethos and indigenous idiom. His song is in the market place, both in ideas and in lyrics. His art is uncomfortably people-centred but bearable all the same. They can forgive him all that now that he has gone to join his ancestors, finally. Some will come to relief while the common man mourns and weeps for they have lost an advocate, a partner in struggle. But the world of culture in Sierra-Leone will never be the same again. I was in Freetown last August and in the Ministry of Culture and his name was on every lip of the new generation of culture practitioners, especially the voluble, versatile Director of Culture and Tourism, who enthusiastically describes Amadu Maddy as their patriarch of the Sierra-Leone theatre. There was so much excitement when they found out that he is/was my friend and they wasted no time in linking me up with him.
(Concluded next week)

I know that all of my students and members of the Ajon Players of the University of Ilorin in the mid-eighties will remember him fondly and celebrate his life for his numerous contributions to our troupe and our repertory. As a fledgling and vibrant acting company of enthusiastic amateurs, Amadu and his wife, the late inimitable dancer and choreographer, Amatu Braide—a couple always brawling in the midst of passionate affection—helped to hone the talents of the troupe members in acting, dancing, technical theatre and all departments of production and performance. Amadu was simply an inspiration, as he drilled the troupe in those many Nigerian Premiers of my plays—including Nights of a Mystical Beast and The New Dawn. He joined us in our performance trips to Ibadan, Lagos, Jebba and Kabba. He taught the troupe endurance in the long hours of rehearsing into the wee hours of the mourning and joined us In the post-rehearsal unwinding sessions in the bars of Baboko, Surulere, Taiwo Road and Sabo Oke—all in Ilorin. He would lead the songs when the spirit is high, including some of those lurid songs in Soyinka’s early performances in his quaint heavy Krio accents. What love he lost among the academics in his Departments and Admin staff of universities, whom he quarrelled with for not doing their duty the way he felt they should, he gained from the anxious eyes of the youngsters who drank from his well and wealth of theatre and performance, garnered from many decades of stage life.
Many people had wondered how and why we became so close and how I could calm his tempestuous rages and stormy tempers.  It was simply because not many were willing to be patient and hear him through the many travails of his life as a writer, as a culture administrator and activist, as a husband and as parent. Especially, he was a man who could not stand any and all kinds of social injustice, rampaging corruption in high places and above all, professional indolence being richly rewarded in a society which has rated merit in the obverse.
When I saw YAM in early August in Sierra-Leone, he was a broken and ailing man. He had narrated to me, with unusually slow and pain-burdened cadence, the ordeal of his life on returning home a few years back—how he has been spiritually attacked, afflicted by an unexplainable ailment, even by orthodox medical personnel. He was on the crutches for more than a year and still carried a walking stick. In spite of these dispiriting and hard conditions, he was full of hope that Sierra-Leone and Africa will still get there, if the right and visionary leadership emerges. He had remarried and has a companion of his last son, six years of age, going around with him and symbolizing his belief in the future generation. The hatred and fear of him by the bourgeois elite in authority had not diminished. He was offered salary to keep away from the university, he told me. He had asked me to arrange for him to visit Nigeria again to revamp his spirit and was hoping that would be possible in the next Summer, which is never to be!   It is as if, after all, his hope to reconstruct that his novel—No Past, No Present, No Future, never come to pass, in the end. Adieu from your sister, Dupe and I and the Ajon family at large, nowadays!!