The Angella Johnson Interview
Look at the photograph. Familiar, isn’t he? It’s Bankole Omotoso, or as he’s more popularly known, Yebo Gogo – the face that launched a slew of Vodacom cellphones. Here is a true Renaissance man; a master of many trades who refuses to be tied down to just one job.
When this Nigerian professor sought refuge in South Africa five years ago he had expected to be acclaimed as the venerable academic that he is. After all, he is featured in the Oxford Companion to Literature and his credits include at least 15 highbrow books and two plays.
Instead he has become an object of amusement – thanks to a series of popular comic television and billboard advertisements.
Not that he’s complaining. Au contraire, the adverts have provided him with a sizeable supplement to his salary from the University of the Western Cape, where he is a senior professor in English.
It was there that I sought him out, holed up in his cramped study in-between lectures and tutorials.
After knocking lightly on the door, a deep baritone (no doubt enhanced by the steady procession of cigarettes which are never far from his lips) bade me enter.
Gogo … sorry, er, Omotoso, looked up and I fancied I saw surprise in his eyes. It was only after the interview that he confessed that he had expected a white journalist. Well, I was expecting someone much more portly (proof the television does add the kilos) and definitely someone more cheery.
Omotoso looked, and sounded, like someone who does not laugh easily – unlike his screen persona. Maybe he was just in his academic mode. There he sat, a brooding genius who occasionally bared his pearly whites (rather wolfishly, I thought) whenever I said something with which he disagreed.
Initially, he appeared reluctant to discuss his accomplishments. “I find it very hard to talk about myself,” he muttered. “I always think it gives the impression that I’m bragging.” Good God man, I silently exclaimed, enough with the modesty, you know what I’m here for, so spit it out.
You see, Omotoso is a man who believes variety is food for the soul. A novelist, playwright, social commentator and linguist (he has a PhD in Arabic and contemporary literature) he is truly one of Africa’s treasures. “I see no reason to restrict myself to doing any one thing. Some people find it odd because they like to pigeon- hole you, but the world of tomorrow is multi-cultural, multi-lingual and multi- skilled,” he said sagely.
It is through his writing as a critic of repressive governments in Nigeria that Omotoso has had the most impact. In 1988, while working as a university professor, he wrote a “factional” novel, Just Before Dawn, dealing with 100 years of his country’s history and using the names of former leaders who were still living.
One of them tried to stop publication, forcing whole sections to be deleted just before printing. When others began to make financial claims against Omotoso he decided it was easier to leave the country. “I had come to believe that teaching at the University of Nigeria was more a case of trying to create an area of sanity in a general situation of insanity. The difficulty was that you were teaching in an environment in which you were trying to make sense of a senseless situation.”
Just Before Dawn won Nigeria’s major literary prize for prose and one for publishing in Africa. Season of Migration to the South, written in South Africa, was runner-up to Nelson Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom for the Alan Paton Award in 1995.
Over the years, either in novels or plays, Omotoso had explored the issue of the state and its progressive decline in a country where generals changed governments like millionaires change wives.
“It was like living out a farce,” said Omotoso. “For instance, I was involved with Wole Soyinka on a major road safety campaign, trying to reduce deaths. But then you reduce deaths on the road so the soldiers can shoot them, or so that they can die in hospitals which had the barest minimum of needs.”
He describes his homeland as a catastrophe. “I felt there was nothing I could do any more as an intellectual, as a writer and as a citizen. I could not play my role. So I left.”
He went to Scotland and spent a year lecturing at Stirling University. But Europe was not home. “I always thought my space was in Africa.”
He seems to veer between cynicism and optimism about a continent which the world believes is pretty buggered. “I feel South Africa provides an option to solve the conflicts and confusion going on in the rest of the continent,” said the professor.
And the panacea? Surprise, surprise – capitalism. “It’s an option that has never really been taken on as a viable one in Africa before,” suggested Omotoso. “It’s only now that it is being followed in places like Uganda, Democratic Republic of Congo and Mali.”
He argued that in West and East Africa there is still confusion between the idea that “we as Africans can create something that can transcend capitalism and open up a kind of Utopia for our people; without going through the process of first accepting that capitalism is not a segmented, total global thing that we have to absorb as a package”.
In other words: “Be part of it, learn to use it and then, like the Japanese, begin the process of trying to blend it with local traditions, without any apology for doing so, in order to build economically strong modern states.”
This, said Omotoso, is also what Deputy President Thabo Mbeki means when he talks of an African Renaissance. “If democracy and capitalism succeed here, then the rest of the continent will learn from it.”
The greatest potential problem is unpunished corruption – especially at government level. “When you get caught and don’t resign, then you are sanctioning a process that will eat into the state system,” warned Omotoso. But he could not, or would not, give an example.
Born in the south-west Yoruba region of Nigeria into a wealthy family which owned a cocoa plantation, his was a privileged childhood, where toys were ordered from Hamley’s in London. He has a brother and a sister.
The young Omotoso hated school and often played hookey – it says something about his natural abilities that he later went on to win a Commonwealth scholarship to do his doctorate at Edinburgh University.
On completing school he announced to his parents that he wanted to go to Britain to become a journalist. They insisted he first complete a university degree in Nigeria. Afterwards he taught French, English and Arabic in a local secondary school.
But the theatre always attracted him – his first book was on Caribbean theatre. He lived there for a while and is married to a Barbadian. His wife, Marguerita, works for the Tutu Educational Trust in Cape Town. They have three children.
Omotoso, who had been president of the Association of Nigerian Authors until 1988 when Ken Saro-Wiwa (a close family friend whose state execution he described as “one of the most painful things to have happened to me … I was devastated”), took over, first visited South Africa after Mandela’s release in 1990. He returned in 1991 and joined UWC in 1992.
He would have remained in academic obscurity but for the acting bug. “I had been involved in the performing arts in Nigeria for many years and wanted to do it here.” So he got an agent.
The first commercial, for Nissan, bombed after about five weeks when white farmers complained that they were the ones who bought bakkies, not black people. He was replaced by a white actor.
Fortunately, the people at Vodacom liked what they saw and Yebo Gogo (Hello Grandmother) was born.
“Actually, sometimes it’s not me,” he confided with a wolfish grins. “When I’m busy they sometimes use a double.”
At 54, Omotoso shows no sign of changing his multiple role in life. “By not having any one identity I’m able to live a fuller life.”