Nigeria must replace Shakespeare with African writers – Author, Onadele

FILE: Cash Onadele

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Nigerian-American author, Cash Onadele, popularly known as Aiye-ko-ooto, tells AYOOLA OLASUPO about his effort towards using literature to empower the Nigerian youth, and how creative writing can serve as the engine of a future trillion-dollar creative economy and a vital tool for preserving authentic African narratives

Your writing spans poetry, plays and short stories. What drives this remarkable level of productivity?

I think it all comes from inspiration. I’m inspired to create stories, especially Yoruba stories. I am the President and CEO of Aiye-ko-ooto with a special purpose vehicle, which we call the Cultural and Literary Hub, dedicated to youth empowerment and upkeep

I also do Yoruba, Igbo, but I’m inspired. I want to tell the story of our people. I want to tell some of the stories my grandfather and my father told me. I want my children to learn it. I want the children of my children to see it somewhere documented. I just enjoy the act of writing, and learning to write, and improving creative writing.

How does it influence your recent workshop on creative writing?

The workshop part is a passion. I’m trying to find all possible ways to connect with Nigerian youth. Now, I don’t have the money to do it, but I know that maybe if I do it, somebody else will copy me.

That makes two of us, and we have halved the problem somehow. Maybe someday the Federal Government, the Bank of Industry, some trusts, the King’s Trust, or some other corporate organisation; all these banks that spend money on sports and things like that, maybe they will realise the potential that is in our youth, maybe they will realise that the future really believes in our youth, maybe they will realise that the narratives of this youth of ours are what will keep our culture together and forever.

If we don’t do this, the first thing is that we sell out, and secondly, all this creative economy the President (Bola Tinubu) is talking about which will generate trillions of dollars is not going to happen. Everything starts with creative writing. There are so many other things that I could do.

In fact, I produce theatre and write books. I do all those. But I have to sit down and think through this. How do we truly build a creative economy? Well, the Nollyhood is a jumpstart. But the stories in Nollywood will improve if we have better creative writers.

So, the bedrock of this creative economy is creative writing, and I want to see whether I and those who believe in me can help us drive it so that at least we get it to where we are producing a thousand youths with some level of introduction to how they can improve their work.

This is a country that is so diversified that we can find a true story, a genuine, original, authentic story in each of those 356 tongues or subcultures that we call Nigeria. So, imagine if those over 350 tongues come up with one nice story, the one that we have not heard, and it gets produced as plays and movies.

That is how that $1tn creative economy can get created. I believe we can create an institute where each local government brings somebody. Somebody comes from each local government. That way, all Nigerians are included, and that person must come and tell their story that comes from their place, and our job is to give them the competence, the skill level that is necessary in order to convert the idea into print at the first level.

Then, when it’s like that, maybe we’ll create a platform where they can all produce their stories, and all these people who want to do movies can go there and say, ‘Yes, I like the summary. I’ll pay for it, or I’ll auction it,’ which is what they do in other sophisticated countries.

They auction your story, give you a certain percentage of your money, and if they decide to turn it or adapt it into their movie, they pay you three per cent of their budget. So, this now creates new employment. Can we even start with one institute? Let’s go somewhere and create an institute.

You’ve often spoken about using literature to reset young minds. What specific gaps do you see in the moral or intellectual development of the youth that your work tries to address?

I think what we’ve got in all these liberal universities is just copy and paste. They probably created a curriculum and an outline, and the professors and doctors just research something and copy and paste it. That’s not what I’m giving them. I’m giving them a workshop.

I have produced about 120 rights, and I sat down and said, ‘If I’m to put my bag of tricks, what would they be?’ I put them into 21 boxes. So, I say, each one of these is a course. I can teach people how I do this. For example, in this foundational course, I have 60 techniques that I use to improve dialogue. So that’s what I’m teaching them.

I don’t have to go and find the perfect definition somebody wrote somewhere. I just give it a label, and I know if I teach you, and I tell you the tricks and approach, you can use it to improve what you’re doing. So it’s practical. We have professors who have probably written one or two books. Yes, they know the theory of it all, but practice is everything, and we want these children to be able to practise.

The more you write, the better you get. I mean, the first one I wrote, I’m sure I don’t even want to put my name on top of it right now. But I just kept writing and improving myself. However, they don’t have to go through what I went through.

Many of your works draw heavily from Yoruba culture and history. What responsibilities do you feel an African writer carries in preserving cultural identity?

At first, as a Nigerian-American, I started writing a Nigerian lead character in a setting in America or Europe. Then, to borrow the Pidgin expression, God lent me sense one day. How does that improve the culture you’re from? Am I giving you all this to be able to improve their culture? If my book is successful in America, it improves America. The editor and the publishing company make money. They’re all Americans.

Everybody makes money in America, and not one Nigerian exactly makes money. So, I have to think, why am I publishing like this to their benefit? When I talk about their setting, I’m promoting New York, Chicago, London, etc. How does that improve my own country?

So, I told myself that I’ve got to stop this. I find my settings now only in Nigeria, first of all. Most of all, in Yoruba land, because I was born and bred in Yoruba land. But I had a little thing with Bendel State of those days, which is now the Edo and Delta divide. Again, my best friends in the university were mostly Igbo. My best friend in the university was Obiora Ugo, an Igbo guy.

Therefore, I write some stories that have Igbo and Yoruba in them because I have a little exposure to the Igbo culture. I can only be true to my culture. That is why I had to tell myself that I’m a Yoruba writer, even if I have a story that is best in New York, I’ll put it in Ibadan, Abeokuta, Ijebu, or in my own native land, and when I publish, the first set of publications of my books should be here in Nigeria.

Yes, they can come and buy it now. The last time, they came and bought my books here and took them to Europe, and then whom do I reach? The person, who was the salesgirl, is a Nigerian. The printer is Nigerian, and the person who sold the paper to the printer is also a Nigerian. That is what I should do.

So, that is why I started, and my responsibility is definitely to the future of this country, the youth. I’ve not said I want to impress the rich. I’m not interested in impressing people my age. I’m 63, so I’m not interested in impressing them. I’m not doing this investment alone; FCMB supported me, and a company called Cinqteos.

Those two companies supported me, so when I say the corporations are not helping, at least two of them did. What I’m saying is that they can do better. They have the CSR, and we’re trying to raise N440m in order to get to at least 1,000 youths.

Even if all of them just give us N1m, Aiye-ko-ooto is set up particularly for the youth, and anything about the culture that will help them to be creative, that’s what I’m purposed to do.

With over 100 works attributed to you, how do you ensure that each piece maintains depth, originality, and thematic integrity?

I have evolved a process for myself, and I think every serious writer will get to a point where they will evolve the process for themselves. Since my career background is architecture, I put everything into frames. So, I framed how to create the title, and I’ll teach all those to these kids.

I’ve framed how to create a theme, how to layer a story, and a plot to a story. I’ve created all these things many times. I’ve found the right patterns in there, which I’m going to teach you all of them. But that’s how I have done that. I think I picked up from what I learnt while growing up with my grandpa. My grandpa’s name was Asoromutolohunpelu, shortened to Asoro.

He used to tell stories in front of his house in the evening under moonlight, and neighbours used to come and listen. As his grandchild, I used to fall asleep on his lap, and hear half of the story and all that. I think those things helped me initially. But the rest of it is a result of all the things I’ve read. So, I built my own Aiye-ko-ooto story architecture, which, in the future, I will teach these kids.

Would you say the relationship you had with your grandparents made you choose the name Aiye-ko-ooto?

My grandfather influenced storytelling. There’s no doubt about that. My father also encouraged storytelling. In fact, I was 12 years old when my father bought me ‘The Road’ by Wole Soyinka, and then he had this big Shakespeare book in his library at home. I would just go and dig into it, even though half of it I didn’t understand, but I would just read it.

There is a bird called Aiye-ko-ooto, but it’s not that. It means the world refuses the truth. That is what I want in my voice, which means in every story I write, there will be something about betrayal, deceit, untruth, somebody breaking a promise, and everything humans do that we shouldn’t do. I just bring some of those in, and I use them to point at the truth or to create a moral for that story.

Your play, ‘The Noble Warrior’, has been praised for its cultural resonance. What personal or historical motivations inspired that story?

Professor Wole Soyinka, who obviously my dad started me on, reading a little bit about him, and my dad used to talk a lot about him. So, from the age of 11, I just wanted to be Professor Wole Soyinka, but of course, I was a science student, and I was good at the sciences. I was always at the top of my grades, and I went into the direction of science.

I actually left literature in Form 3 because I thought I couldn’t connect with just going and reading all of this when I could be playing. But I was in the US in 2019, and they were celebrating his 86th birthday. And everything that was on the news, which I was watching from the US, was just about the poetry. I’m like, ‘These people have not researched this man.’

Fifty-three of his works were written, directed, and produced as plays. They see him more as an essayist, a poet, and a novelist. No, Professor has written only two books that I know of that are novels in his extremely long career. So, he’s obviously not a novelist, but he has written 53 plays. That’s the majority of his work.

He wrote many essays, but they are not compared with his plays. I then told myself, these people do not know Professor Soyinka. That some of us, who are not running in front, carrying placards and picket bays, are saying we love Soyinka. I was one of those people, and I said they need to celebrate him with a play because he’s a playwright.

Before that, I’d never written a play. So, I started writing a play. But I gave myself a long runway. That by the time he’s 90, if God spared his life, I should hopefully have this thing completed by then. So, it took me roughly three and a half years, and then we put it on stage for him on July 17, 2024. And we have since produced it about 12 or 13 times.

What challenges have you faced as a Nigerian-American author trying to bridge two cultural worlds in your storytelling?

I was lucky because I had written just about 10 stories before the awareness came to me that, ‘Why don’t you take your stories back home?’ But what I was doing was that I was always writing, and putting a Nigerian in there in different settings, not in our settings.

So, that was one of the greatest challenges because the place you know that you can talk about is your setting, which is where you live, and the majority of my time is spent in America. And then I studied in England, so I understand I could describe some places that I used to go to on the page without having to get up and look at the map.

I was writing stories for that place, and I had to also use languages that fit that culture. Talk about the snow, winter, and all this type of stuff. But we don’t have snow in Nigeria. I think God just decided that He needs to stop this very quickly because I struggle more with where the play is going to be set, and where the short story is going to be. I struggle more with that than the story itself. So, I needed to solve the problem.

How did you overcome the challenges?

Well, I just told myself that the first thing is this: I am a Nigerian-American, not American-Nigerian. So, it means my mentality is Nigerian, even if my domicile is America, and America has been good to me. I have no complaints. I’ve been in America since 1998, and it’s never a dull moment. But the important thing is I am a Nigerian-American, and I can actually talk more about my country, Nigeria.

If somebody reads my story, and he’s talking about Nigeria, I’ve sold Nigeria to that person, but as long as we keep distributing William Shakespeare (storybooks) in our secondary school curriculum, our children cannot stop having colonial mentality because what we are telling them is to come and look at England, and it’s the best place to be without using those words.

We cannot find a book by Ola Rotimi, Cyprian Ekwesi, or Chinua Achebe to be in the curriculum, but it has to be Shakespeare. So, there will always be a colonial mentality. Our children will always try to copy and tell tales the way they tell them in England. I don’t do that anymore. It is not the way you mask people in our culture.

You have donated books and endowed literature prizes in schools. What impact do you hope these gestures will have on the next generation of readers and writers?

Unfortunately, it’s not enough because I’m just doing what is within my power. I’m retired. What I spend mostly is my pension. If there is a way that, for example, my books are recommended and approved in both Lagos and Ogun states, but the purchase is not supported.

They say education is free, but if the governor does not buy the books, it won’t be encouraged. I can tell you that, even if it’s the whole of South-West alone that uses the books, we’re going to plough most of them back into creating this experience. When these kids leave university, it doesn’t matter what they study. If you think you are creative, and you have a project that you’re doing, we want to put you into our institute.

I will dedicate most of that money to the institute, but we’re not doing that. We prefer to order Shakespeare from the UK and distribute it to our kids. I digested the curriculum of Lagos State literature for schools, and everything they think is needed to teach these children literature; I made sure it was present when I was doing the storytelling.

It was important to me because it’s a tribute to Professor Wole Soyinka, and it needed to be done right. It took three and a half years to do that. But we can put this book into schools to make sure that at least in the whole of South-West, these books are in the schools, and they teach literature, and we should stop giving them a colonial mentality by giving them William Shakespeare.

It needs to stop someday. Even if it does not stop today, it needs to stop someday. We need to plan the exit of William Shakespeare from our curriculum, and start telling our children our own story from Bini, etc. I researched something on Opobo, but I don’t have enough time to write it. I’ve researched it, created 48-chapter headings for it, and I’ve put some bullet points in there, but I don’t have enough time.

Creative burnout is common among prolific writers. How do you sustain your creative energy and avoid stagnation?

I can write 400 and something more. If somebody just pays me and says, sit down at home, the only time you have is to do capacity building for youth, after that, do whatever. I can start now and make sure that I can first create all of them in short stories, one per week, 50 a year. Ideas are already there. For me, when a lot of people say they have a creative block, I have about three, four, five, six, sometimes eight stories going on at the same time.

If I don’t do something on this one, I just move on to the next one. I wrote one for three and a half years. There is one that I’m finishing now titled, ‘Liberty of Promises’. I had already written the first version as a novel, but now I’m writing an adaptation for TV and stage.

If I put the project years together, not linear, but just like from one thing to the next, because I went off it and did other things. So, you can see I actually started that in 2020, and I’m finishing it in 2026. If you keep your hand in many projects, maybe it doesn’t help.

I am retired now. I have nothing to prove. It’s not my bread and butter. I have a little change that comes as a pension. That’s all I have, and I try to invest part of that in Nigeria as much as I can, and then whenever it gets to whatever, I just say God, I’ve done my best.

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