Goodnight Yulisa Amadu Maddy, brother and bosom friend (II)

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 […]

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!!
(Concluded)