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| Segun Sofowote |
(February 2018) I
had to cancel a trip to Nigeria this month, and I am wistful for a few reasons.
One
comes from not being able to attend my final meeting as a member of the
International Council for Science (ICSU) Committee on Freedom and
Responsibility in the conduct of Science (CFRS). The CFRS pursues its mandate through
advisory-style policy statements, advocacy for scientists whose rights are
infringed, and scientific events. The
Committee’s session in the Nigerian capital Abuja will be coupled with one such
event, a workshop on “Shaping the future
of researchers in developing countries.”
A
collaboration with the Nigerian Academy of Science and the ICSU Regional Committee
for Africa, the workshop would have been an opportunity to contribute to
something meaningful, to listen to thoughtful speakers, and to learn. But
looking at my resumé and into the mirror, I admit that I would not have brought
much to the issue and would have participated more for my own benefit than
anything other.
Science in the developing world can probably adapt to my absence.
Science in the developing world can probably adapt to my absence.
But,
on a personal level, I have a harder time knowing that the cancellation of the
trip erased a unique opportunity to see my friend Segun Sofowote.
To
call Segun an interesting person trivializes his eight decades of life. He is a celebrated actor, poet,
playwright, singer, musician, broadcaster, journalist, scholar, and, of import
to me, humorist and humour writer. Because I try to learn a bit about the
regional sense of humour and humour writing traditions wherever I go, a visit
with Segun while in Abuja would have checked this obligation off my list in a
simple and enjoyable way.
Mr.
Sofowote’s humour credentials include those earned as a founding member of “Nineteen-Sixty
Masks," Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka’s acting troupe known for biting political
satire in a place that often rewarded critique with imprisonment. The Masks established its reputation for
daring with the performance of The Dance
of the Forest, a play that mocked Nigeria's political elites, in front of
dignitaries gathered to mark the country’s Independence Day in October 1960.
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| Daughter |
My wife Michele and I
met Mr. Sofowote a couple of years ago at the Gatineau, Quebec home of a
colleague from work, his daughter Loradé.
He has children and friends in other places, but he chose to come to Canada
to live and to regroup in the wake of his wife’s passing.
I was prompted to meet him, not so much by his artistic accomplishments and reputation, but because I was so moved by his country-to-country-to-country, hospital-to-hospital, treatment-to-treatment quest to save his wife’s life.
I was prompted to meet him, not so much by his artistic accomplishments and reputation, but because I was so moved by his country-to-country-to-country, hospital-to-hospital, treatment-to-treatment quest to save his wife’s life.
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| Funke |
Last fall, after a couple of years rebuilding his emotional will here in Canada, he returned to Nigeria to live with friends, to renew professional acquaintances, and to spend the next phase of life within the embrace of the culture that formed him, continues to celebrate his wife, and better understands his passions.
With
the cancellation of my trip this month, I wondered what I could do to connect
and synthesize another encounter with Mr. Sofowote. I recalled that his daughter regularly used the video messaging
service WhatsApp, that it was
inexpensive, and that it was said to be easy.
Not too easy though. My Ipod does
not have a phone number linked to it and my old Samsung refused to connect so
repeated efforts to access the app failed.
I shelved the idea of downloading WhatsApp and instead pulled down what was up on my bookshelf.
I
thought I might be able to simulate a meeting with Segun by re-reading Three Tales of the Tortoise, the book
that he gave to me shortly after we met. I remember reading it, smiling, and thinking
that it was something unusual and a window on a different culture. But I wasn’t sure I really appreciated
the humour.
Segun
writes in a very flowery way with extreme kindness and extravagance. His hand-written inscription calls me “One of so
few such well-rounded ones to be met anywhere in the world.”
When
his daughter left my employ, I tried to make her smile with a pretend letter of
reference imitating her father’s style in testimonials like “she graces every
room she enters.” Loradé thanked me
politely, pointing out only that I was mistaken in identifying her as a fan of
“reggae rock.” At that point, I realized
that majestic courtesy might be a routine feature of Nigerian communication and,
once again, that we might have different takes on what is humorous.
Three Tales of the Tortoise is different too. It is a collection of funny fables
unlike any stories I have read in Western literature. Segun admitted to me that he twisted the stories around to
formats, features, and content that pleased him more than their original forms.
He labelled his book as the “Retold Retouched” versions.
“It’s
like a chef using the basic food materials and prescribed ingredients in his
own recipe,” he said.
So, these are fables that are fables of
fables.
The
first story tells how the Tortoise passes a royal test and gains the right
to marry a princess: in fact, the right to marry a few of them. I knew I was reading something
different when I came upon the pages calling for the storyteller and book
readers to break for songs and drumming and to return to the narrative only
when the drums and the singers have had their say.
“You
can’t have a good African story without drums,” I learned from Segun.
The
second chapter of the book tells a tale at least one, perhaps two or three
steps removed from the actual storytelling.
It is the story of the telling of the story complete with accounts of
people interrupting the inaugural storyteller and with the current narrator
questioning his storyteller-protagonist’s original account. The final tale in the book relates the unfolding of a national storytelling
contest designed by a king. The
storytellers in the competition were challenged to stretch their stories over
three complete days with only very minor biology-based breaks. The Tortoise wins with an increasingly
tedious tale that features a mouse eating a barn full of corn one kernel at a
time.
When
I put the book down the first time, I wrinkled my brow and thought that this
was different, maybe even a little weird, asking myself “WhatsApp with this?” or words to that effect. I filed this reading
experience in the back parts of my brain as a package of sensibilities with few
parallels in our uncomplicated Canadian context.
But
this week when I broke open the pages of Three
Tales of the Tortoise for a second time, I had other knowledge and
experience to frame my reading.
A few months after I first read Segun’s book, I gave him a couple of
books that I had written. One was a
story collection that parodies Machiavelli’s The Prince. The other attempts to delineate a Canadian sense of
humour with reviews of all of the winners of our country’s national award for
humour writing, the Stephen Leacock
Memorial Medal. I wasn’t sure how my African friend would react. Although I like the Leacock Medalists a lot,
they have been criticized by some as a compilation of white-bread humour and
the veneer on the bland, innocuous, anglo-oriented (non-African) side of Canadian culture.
So,
I was a little surprised and confused when Segun told me he had read the book
and shared his reaction.
“When
I read it, I said to myself – this is my story !” he said.
My
first thought was that he must have been talking about a different book.
But Mr. Sofowote explained that my chapter on the 1968 Leacock Medal winning book, And Now … Here’s Max, an autobiography by the late Canadian broadcaster Max Ferguson described an experience he had had around exactly the same time, but in Nigeria. Segun said the parallels were uncanny and undeniable.
But Mr. Sofowote explained that my chapter on the 1968 Leacock Medal winning book, And Now … Here’s Max, an autobiography by the late Canadian broadcaster Max Ferguson described an experience he had had around exactly the same time, but in Nigeria. Segun said the parallels were uncanny and undeniable.
My
book review covered Ferguson’s account of his early days at CBC (Canadian
Broadcasting Corporation) radio in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
There
he fell into the role of performer rather than announcer when he was told to
host a “cowboy” music show called After
Breakfast Breakdown. Ferguson told of his distaste for this kind of music. He was
embarrassed and decided to cloak himself on air in the persona of "Old
Rawhide," an elderly cowboy who ridiculed the music he was playing. To Ferguson’s surprise, Rawhide was a
hit. Thousands of listeners believed the character to be real and wrote to
CBC requesting photos of Old Rawhide. The
program and its host moved to Toronto and the national stage.
Through
the 1950s and on, Ferguson, as Rawhide, anchored one of CBC Radio’s most
popular programs. Yet, as
the Leacock Medal book reveals, he was not paid a cent for his Rawhide work
during those glory days. Formally, Ferguson was just a regular CBC staff
announcer then and thus paid only for routine on-air duties at union-contract
scale. In a circumstance many in
government bureaucracies would recognize, CBC management said his job
classification would not allow for a raise or any incremental money for this “optional
work” though it was for one of the network’s most popular programs. Ferguson decided to test the
“optional” nature of the arrangement by staying home.
With
his termination in the works, a CBC executive suggested that he leave his
job, become a private sector producer, and provide the Rawhide show to the network as a contractor and non-CBC
employee. Ferguson took the advice - and immediately received a fee that
was four times his former CBC employee salary. The deal also gave Ferguson
the freedom to move his family back to Nova Scotia and to mock his meal ticket, now as
an outsider.
This
story and the irony around it have become firmly entrenched in the annals of Canadian
broadcast history and are considered as iconic of funny Canadiana.
So,
when this elderly West African claimed it as his story, I was unsure.
But
I became convinced as Segun slowly described virtually the same experience. We
worked as a staff announcer at the
Nigerian national broadcasting agency during the same era as Max Ferguson was
playing cowboy music for listeners in Canada.
Only in the Nigerian case, the music was Latin American, and to hide himself, Segun assumed the on-air persona of an elderly, crusty Latino that he christened
“Fernando Martinez.”
Just
like Max Ferguson’s Rawhide, Segun’s Fernando was presumed to be real by
thousands and attracted a following for his mix of music commentary and humour.
Demand eventually compelled the visibly African Segun to take his imagined
Latin American persona on the road in stand-up performances at venues across the
continent. The in-person performances in turn amplified the popularity of the radio program. The position
of Fernando as an icon of a nation's sense of humour and a peculiar element
of West African culture told hold. Just like
Canada’s Rawhide did in our country.
With
this knowledge, I thus re-read Three
Tales of the Tortoise last week through a different lens, one not distorted
with bias or the assumption that it was the product of something foreign and
unrelated to Canadian sensibilities.
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| Michele and SS |
Now
when I read the opening chapter with the drums, I recalled how African drumming
had been recognized by Canadian students of the information age as a sophisticated
early form of distance communication, one capable of nuanced messaging
including jokes and satire. I now saw
the drums and singing as integral to the stories, as adding colourful layers of
information, and as embellishments to the humour not disruptions to it.
The
second story, the story of the story being told two steps removed, struck me
now as something closer to a truth. The
challenges from listeners and the narrator’s queries made the tale more
believable than a simple, unfettered recounting of a folk tale.
It
also made the story a lot funnier.
In
the final chapter, the descriptions of a mouse slowly eating kernel after
kernel in order to consume a barn of corn now seemed logical and the only way
to convey the sense of the story, to describe the reality of the momentous
task, and to properly exploit the three-day story format. The process embodies a broad concept and a technique that could enhance
writing in any language and in any land.
Closing
the book yesterday, it also struck me that Segun’s Tortoise echoed a device used
in many of the Leacock Medal books, in the narratives of Indigenous people across
Canada, and in stories told throughout the world.
The Tortoise is just another “Trickster” – a character that literary scholars like
to analyze and to classify, but has many forms. He can be a she, can be
human or animal, can play tricks or be tricked, and can be silly or smart. In whatever guise or role, the
Trickster gives writers an outlet to think outside ordained norms, to absorb a
different persona, and to comment on society in a mischievous way.
Rawhide
and Fernando, Segun Sofowote and Max Ferguson were Tricksters just as much as
the Tortoise and were more alike than not.
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| Album Cover - CD by Daughter Loradé |
I
will give WhatsApp another try. But whether I connect with Abuja or
not, I am going to think of those various Tricksters, what we all have in
common, and what we can learn from each other whenever I hear country and
western songs, Latin American music, or from my Nigerian friends.