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“I Want to Dialogue” Chief Muraina Oyelami Talking O‹Ogbo and Beyond

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“I Want to Dialogue” Chief Muraina Oyelami Talking O‹Ogbo and Beyond “I want to dialogue” Chief Muraina Oyelami Talking O‹ogbo and Beyond CHRISTINE MATZKE Suru baba iwa. Patience is the father of good character. – Yorùbá proverb As I lie on my bed and spread my bones for God to count… I say: There may be few of us left. Soon there may be none. But ... the beautiful ones will continue to be born.1 N 1988, ULLI BEIER INTRODUCED MURAI NA O YELAMI by relating the Yorùbá concept of ori to his reading audience: the ‘head’, ‘spirit’, or I ‘fate’ chosen by a person before coming into this life, and the indivi- dual’s responsibility to shape their own existence. There was general agree- ment, Beier writes, “that Muraina has a ‘good head,’ that he has chosen wisely.”2 Born in 1940 in Iragbiji in southwestern Nigeria, where he still lives today, Muraina Oyelami has excelled in many creative disciplines, and he has done so continuously for over five decades. Raised in an environment where he was simultaneously exposed to Yorùbá traditions and Islamic and Chris- 1 Esiaba Irobi, “Elegy for Ezenwa–Ohaeto,” (7 July 2006), in Of Minstrelsy and Masks: The Legacy of Ezenwa-Ohaeto in Nigerian Writing, ed. Christine Matzke, Aderemi Raji-Oyelade & Geoffrey V. Davis (Matatu 33; Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2006): 34–36. 2 Ulli Beier, “Patience Is the Father of Good Character: The Artistic Career of Muraina Oyelami,” in Three Yoruba Artists (Bayreuth African Studies Series 12; Bay- reuth: Eckhard Breitinger, 1988): 72. 334 CHRISTI NE MATZKE &CH I EF MURAI NA OYELAMI tian beliefs, which, it appears, engendered in him a very tolerant and pragma- tic attitude towards life, Oyelami left a string of odd jobs when invited by Duro Ladipo to join his theatre company at the Mbari Mbayo Club, O‹ogbo, in the early 1960s. From there his artistic career took off, and it moved in many directions. Beginning as a musician and actor in the Ladipo troupe, he soon became a visual artist in the now famous Oshogbo School initiated by Ulli and Georgina Beier before following an invitation to teach music and theatre design at the University of IfÁ (today’s Obafemi Awolowo University) in the mid-1970s. Oyelami also performed traditional Yorùbá and fusion music all across the world (Africa, Europe, Asia, North America, and Austra- lia); he had major group and individual exhibitions in Nigeria, Germany, the UK, and the USA; and he held various residencies in Europe and North America. His collaborations with other noted artists and scholars are too numerous to name, but they include work as composer and music director of the 1990 production of Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman at the Manchester Royal Exchange Theatre, UK, and a life-long connection to the pioneering academic and promoter of Nigerian (and Papua New Guinean) arts, Ulli Beier. In the early 1980s Oyelami rejoined Beier as guest professor at Iwalewa-Haus, University of Bayreuth, Germany, which had just been established as a research, documentation, and teaching centre for African cul- tures. In 1987, Oyelami opened his own heritage site, the Obatala Centre for Creative Arts, in his hometown, Iragbiji. The centre includes a museum and an art gallery and offers Yorùbá drumming and drum-making workshops to students from all over the world. In 1993, Muraina Oyelami was installed as Eesa (Chief) of Iragbiji. 3 Some twenty years later, in October 2013, Oyelami returned to Bayreuth as honoured guest of the international conference ‘From Mbari Mbayo Club to Iwalewahaus’.4 The conference was intended as both a retrospective of 3 Muraina Oyelami, ÀbÀfÁ: An Autobiography of Muraina Oyelami, ed. Ulli Beier from taped interviews with Muraina Oyelami (Bayreuth: Iwalewa-Haus, University of Bayreuth, 1993), My Life in the Duro Ladipo Theatre (Bayreuth: Iwalewa-Haus, Uni- versity of Bayreuth, 1982), “Obatala Centre,” http://www.oyelami.com/obatala.htm (accessed 11 November 2013), and “Welcome to the Site of Chief Muraina Oyelami,” http://murainaoyelami.com/index.html (accessed 11 November 2013). 4 Iwalewa-Haus is currently undergoing major changes, including the move to a new building in 2014. The different spelling, “Iwalewahaus,” indicates its new corporate identity, aimed at securing the significance of this unique institution for the future. See Chika Okeke-Agulu, “‘From Mbari Mbayo to Iwalewahaus’ Conference,” Ofodunka: .
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