Film, Theatre and the Visual Arts

Nollywood, the largest film industry in Africa by output, has a Yoruba prehistory that most accounts of it skip. The Yoruba travelling theatre, which ran from the 1940s to the 1980s as a commercial network of companies performing across the west, is the institutional ancestor of the video film industry: the same companies, the same audiences, the same economics of touring, and in several cases literally the same people moving from stage to celluloid to video. Understanding that line is the difference between treating Nollywood as a 1992 invention and treating it as the latest form of a fifty-year-old commercial popular theatre.

The visual arts run on a separate track, from the hereditary carving lineages through the Òṣogbo workshops of the 1960s to contemporary artists working internationally, and this file covers both.

The Yoruba travelling theatre

Hubert Adédèjì Ògúndé (1916 to 1990)

Ògúndé is the father of modern Yoruba and Nigerian theatre and founded the first professional theatre company in the country.

He was born at Òsọ́sà near Ìjẹ̀bú Òde on 10 July 1916, worked as a teacher and then as a policeman, and left the police in 1945 to found the African Music Research Party, renamed the Ògúndé Theatre Party in 1947 and the Ògúndé Concert Party in 1950 1. It was the first contemporary professional theatrical company in Nigeria 1.

The form he built is specific. It combined dramatic action, dance and music, took the folk opera structure of the church cantata and the concert party and turned it to secular and political ends, and moved Yoruba performance from masked and processional forms to a proscenium stage with realist acting 1. The company toured constantly, took its own generator and its own transport, and lived off gate receipts across the west and beyond. He wrote over fifty plays 1.

He was political from the start. Strike and Hunger in 1946 dramatised the general strike of 1945 and drew colonial attention. Bread and Bullet addressed the shooting of coal miners at Enugu in 1949. Yorùbá Ronu, "Yoruba, think", in 1964 attacked the Western Region political leadership over the crisis, and the Akíntọ́lá government banned his company from performing in the region for two years, lifted in 1966 after the coup 1. That is a rare case of a colonial and then a postcolonial government both banning the same theatre company.

He moved into film in the late 1970s with Àìyé (1979), Jaiyesimi (1980) and Aropin N'Tenia, and in 1986 was commissioned by the federal government to establish a national troupe, which he led until his death in London in 1990 1.

Dúró Ládipọ̀ (1926 to 1978)

Ládipọ̀ is the dramatist who took Yoruba òrìṣà material and made it into theatre of the highest formal seriousness.

He was born on 18 December 1926 and died on 11 March 1978 2. He was the son of an Anglican catechist and began by writing Yoruba church music, which caused conflict when he used traditional drums in a Christian service.

His reputation rests on three plays: Ọbamórò (1962), and Ọba Kò So and Ọba Wàjà, both 1964 2. Ọba Kò So, "the king did not hang", is the Ṣàngó story, treating the fourth Aláàfin's transformation into an òrìṣà, and it was first staged at the Mbari Mbayo club in Òṣogbo in 1963 23. It was performed at the Berlin Festival in 1964 and toured internationally through the 1960s and 1970s, and it is probably the single most successful piece of Yoruba theatre ever staged. Ọba Wàjà, "the king is dead", treats the same 1946 Ọ̀yọ́ horseman episode that Ṣóyínká later used in Death and the King's Horseman, and it is worth reading the two together: Ládipọ̀'s version is in Yoruba, sung and drummed, and treats the failure as a ritual and communal event; Ṣóyínká's is in English and treats it as tragedy in a formal sense.

Ládipọ̀'s productions used bàtá and dùndún drumming, oríkì and traditional chant forms as the actual substance of the drama rather than as decoration, and he was the most important artist of the Mbari Mbayo circle at Òṣogbo.

Kọ́lá Ògúnmọ́lá (1925 to 1973)

Ògúnmọ́lá was the third of the great travelling theatre managers and the finest actor of the three. His best known production is his adaptation of Amos Tutùọlá's The Palm-Wine Drinkard, staged as Ọmùtí or Lanke Ọmùtí, developed during a fellowship at the School of Drama at the University of Ìbàdàn 4. It is a landmark: a Yoruba folk opera made from a novel written in non-standard English which was itself made from Yoruba folktale, the material passing back into Yoruba performance after a detour through print and English.

Moses Ọláiyá Adéjùmọ̀, Baba Sala (1936 to 2018)

Ọláiyá is the father of modern Nigerian comedy 5. Born on 18 May 1936, he began as a highlife musician fronting the Federal Rhythm Dandies in 1964, in which Sunny Adé was briefly a member, then moved into comic theatre with the Alawada Group 5. The Baba Sala character, a bumbling, vain, elaborately dressed man perpetually undone by his own schemes, is the template for Nigerian screen comedy and its influence on everything after it, including Funke Akindele's Jenifa, is direct.

His career also contains the industry's cautionary tale. His 1984 film Ọ̀run Mọ́orù was pirated on a scale that destroyed the investment, and the losses effectively ended his film career. Nigerian video piracy is not a recent problem and it broke the person who first proved that Yoruba film could make money.

Film

Ọlá Balógun (born 1945)

Balógun is the pioneer of Nigerian cinema in the technical sense and the person who established that a commercially successful film could be made in a Nigerian language.

He was born on 1 August 1945 and trained in film in France 6. Àjàní Ògún (1976), made in Yoruba in partnership with Dúró Ládipọ̀ and starring the travelling theatre performers, was a box office success and is the founding film of the Yoruba commercial cinema 6. He went on to make Ìjà Ọmìnira, Cry Freedom, Money Power and a substantial body of documentary work, and he influenced the Nigerian industry through the 1970s and 1980s more than any other single figure, paving the way for the video boom that began in the early 1990s 6.

The economics defeated him and everyone else working on celluloid: the collapse of the naira after 1986 made film stock and foreign laboratory processing unaffordable, which is precisely why the industry moved to video and became Nollywood.

Túndé Kèlání (born 1948)

Kèlání is the most important living Yoruba filmmaker and the one whose work most directly carries Yoruba literary and cultural material.

He was born on 26 February 1948, grew up in Abẹ́òkúta, and was introduced to Yoruba literature, philosophy and art by his grandfather, a chief 7. He trained at the London Film School, worked as a cinematographer and as a BBC correspondent, and founded Mainframe Film and Television Productions in 1991 to make literary adaptations 7.

Ti Oluwa Ni Ile (1993) was among the best-selling Yoruba films of its era 7. His major work is a sequence of adaptations of Yoruba literature, most of it by Akínwùnmí Ìṣọ̀lá: Ó Le Kú, Kòṣeégbé, Ṣawòrò Ìdẹ (1999) and Àgọ̀gọ̀ Èèwọ̀, along with Thunderbolt: Magun (2001), Àbẹ̀ni, Máàmi (2011), from Femi Osofisan's novella, and Dazzling Mirage (2014) on sickle cell disease and stigma 7.

Ṣawòrò Ìdẹ is the most politically substantial of them. It is a parable about a brass bell, a covenant that binds a ruler to his people, and what happens when a ruler evades the ritual constraint, and it was released in 1999 as Nigeria returned to civilian rule. Its argument is that the traditional check on a ruler's power was real and that its removal is the source of the modern problem, which is a serious political claim made in a popular film in Yoruba.

Kèlání's significance for this corpus is that he is the primary visual archive of Yoruba material culture in performance: the dress, the ritual, the drumming, the proverbs and the language are recorded accurately and deliberately.

Kúnlé Afọláyan (born 1975)

Afọláyan was born on 30 September 1975, the son of the actor and filmmaker Adéyẹmí Afọláyan, known as Adé Love, who was one of the travelling theatre performers who moved into film 8. That makes him a second-generation figure in a direct line from the Ògúndé tradition.

His films include The Figurine: Araromire (2009), Phone Swap (2012), October 1 (2014) and Citation (2020) 8. The Figurine is credited with beginning the new Nollywood of higher production values and cinema release rather than direct-to-video distribution; October 1, set on the eve of independence, is a thriller structured around ethnicity and the colonial legacy. He signed a multi-film deal with Netflix in 2021, part of the streaming entry into Nigeria that changed the industry's financing again.

Fúnkẹ́ Akíndélé (born 1977)

Akíndélé, born 24 August 1977, is the most commercially successful figure in current Nigerian film 9. Her breakthrough was Jenifa (2008) and the character she created for it, a semi-literate village girl in the city whose mangled English and Yoruba became a national comic idiom, sustained across the Jenifa's Diary series 9. As a producer and director her films Omo Ghetto: The Saga (2020), Battle on Buka Street (2022) and A Tribe Called Judah (2023) successively broke the Nigerian box office record, the last becoming the first Nollywood film to gross over one billion naira 9. She contested for deputy governor of Lagos State in 2019.

Others

Ramsey Nouah, born 1970, one of the leading Nigerian screen actors of the last thirty years and director of the Living in Bondage sequel, is of mixed background: his father was Israeli and his mother is Yoruba from Ọ̀wọ̀ in Ondo State 10. He is included with the parentage stated.

Bímbọ́ Adémọ̀yè, born 4 February 1991 in Lagos, is Yoruba and among the leading actors of the current generation, working across both the Yoruba-language and English-language sides of the industry 11.

Visual arts

Lámídì Ọlọ́nàdé Fákẹ́yẹ (1925 to 2009)

Fákẹ́yẹ is the most celebrated Yoruba wood carver of the twentieth century and the figure who carried the hereditary carving tradition into the modern art world without leaving it.

He was born in 1925 into the Fákẹ́yẹ carving family of the Inurin compound in the Isedo quarter of Ìlá-Ọ̀ràngún, a fifth-generation carver, and died on 25 December 2009 12. He trained in the family workshop and then with Father Kevin Carroll of the Catholic mission at Ọ̀yẹ́-Èkìtì, a workshop that commissioned Yoruba carvers to produce Christian imagery in Yoruba form, which is an unusual and productive episode in the history of mission and indigenous art.

His work is in doors, panels, house posts, and òrìṣà and Christian figures, executed in the Yoruba idiom of frontality, hierarchical scale and controlled surface. An exhibition in Ìbàdàn in 1971 showed three generations of Fákẹ́yẹ carvers 12. He was appointed to the faculty of arts at the University of Ifẹ̀ in 1978 and taught and exhibited internationally 12. He is the bridge between the anonymous master carvers of the earlier arts files and the named individual artist of the modern art system.

The Òṣogbo school

The Òṣogbo school is the most consequential episode in modern Nigerian art. It grew out of the Mbari Mbayo club, founded at Òṣogbo in 1962 by Dúró Ládipọ̀ with Ulli Beier, and out of the workshops run there by Georgina Beier from 1964. Its method was deliberately anti-academic: it took people with no formal training, often from the travelling theatre companies, gave them materials and technique, and did not teach European art history. The Austrian artist Susanne Wenger, who settled at Òṣogbo, became an initiated priestess of Ọ̀ṣun and led the rebuilding of the Ọ̀ṣun grove shrines in monumental concrete, work that is central to the grove's inscription as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Twins Seven-Seven (1944 to 2011), born Ọmọba Táíwò Ọláníyì Oyèwálé-Toyeje Oyèlálé Òṣuntókí on 3 May 1944, is the best known artist of the school 13. He attended his first Mbari Mbayo workshop under the Beiers in 1964 13. He was a dancer and musician before he was a painter, and his work in pen, ink and paint on board is dense, linear and populated with the spirits, ghosts and hybrid creatures of Yoruba folktale, closely related to Tutùọlá's material. He was named a UNESCO Artist for Peace in 2005.

Nike Davies-Okundaye, born 1951, is a textile artist and adire designer and the most significant institution-builder among Nigerian artists 14. She grew up in Òṣogbo, learned indigo dyeing and adire production informally, and was for a period married to Twins Seven-Seven 14. She has run free training centres for women in textile art at Òṣogbo, Ògìdì and elsewhere, training thousands, and the Nike Art Gallery in Lagos is the largest privately owned gallery in West Africa. Her importance is as much in what she built for others as in her own work.

International contemporary artists

Yinka Shonibare was born on 9 August 1962 in London to Nigerian parents, raised in Lagos from the age of three, and is of Yoruba descent 15. He studied at Goldsmiths and emerged with the Young British Artists generation, appearing in Sensation in 1997 15. His signature material is Dutch wax printed cotton, the fabric universally read as African which was in fact designed in the Netherlands in imitation of Indonesian batik and sold into West Africa, and which he uses precisely because its supposed authenticity is manufactured 15. He was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 2004, made Nelson's Ship in a Bottle for the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square in 2010, and was elected a Royal Academician in 2013 15. He was appointed MBE in 2004 and CBE in 2019 15. He contracted transverse myelitis at eighteen, which caused partial paralysis, and works conceptually with fabricators 15. He runs the Guest Artists Space Foundation, with residencies in London and in Nigeria 15.

Toyin Ojih Odutola, born 1985 in Ilé-Ifẹ̀ and raised in the United States from childhood, works in ballpoint pen, pencil, charcoal and pastel on paper at large scale 16. Her subject is the surface of Black skin rendered as a topography of marks, and her major projects have constructed fictional Nigerian aristocratic families as a way of imagining a Blackness not defined by subjugation 16. She has had solo exhibitions at the Whitney and the Barbican.

Pẹ̀jú Alátiṣe, born 1975, is an artist, architect, poet and novelist and a fellow of the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art 17. Flying Girls, eight life-size winged girls, was shown in Nigeria's first national pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2017, and it takes as its subject the interior life of a ten-year-old girl working as a domestic servant in Lagos 17. She won the FNB Art Prize in 2017 17. Her work draws directly on Yoruba cosmology, particularly on àbíkú and on the spirit world's relationship to childhood.

Exclusions

Several of the most prominent figures in Nigerian film and art are not Yoruba and are named here only to prevent misattribution.

Genevieve Nnaji, the leading Nigerian screen actress of her generation and the director of Lionheart, is Igbo, from Imo State.

Ben Enwonwu (1917 to 1994), the pioneering Nigerian modernist sculptor and painter and the artist of Tutu, was Igbo, from Onitsha.

Njideka Akunyili Crosby, the painter and MacArthur Fellow, is Igbo, from Enugu State, and is the daughter of Dora Akunyili.

Bruce Onobrakpeya, the printmaker, is Urhobo, from Delta State.

Victor Ehikhamenor, the artist and writer, is Edo, from Edo State.

All five are major Nigerian artists. None of them is Yoruba, and the frequency with which Nigerian and international writing collapses "Nigerian" into "Yoruba" is the reason this list is here.

History and evolution

The earliest documented Yoruba theatrical form emerged in the sixteenth century from the court of the Aláàfin of Ọ̀yọ́, developing out of Egúngún masquerade into the itinerant professional troupe tradition known as Alárìnjó 18. Under imperial Ọ̀yọ́ in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Alárìnjó troupes operated as guild-based travelling companies under royal patronage, performing acrobatic, satirical, and mythological sketches across the empire 18. The nineteenth-century Yoruba civil wars disrupted courtly patronage networks, scattering performers across emerging military and trading centres where they adapted to communal festivities and commercial street performance 18.

Christian missionary contact in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries introduced the church cantata and biblical morality plays, creating a hybrid sacred performance culture that competed with indigenous spectacle 1821. Under colonial rule, Hubert Ògúndé secularised this church cantata format in 1945, founding the first modern professional theatre troupe and establishing the travelling theatre movement as an explicitly political, ticket-selling enterprise 1821. Following Nigerian independence in 1960, artists like Dúró Ládipọ̀ drew directly on classical historical memory and òrìṣà liturgies at the Mbari Mbayo club in Òṣogbo, touring major international festivals in Europe in 1964 and the 1970s 222324. Concurrently, hereditary woodcarving lineages adapted to modern gallery and academic frameworks through initiatives like the Ọ̀yẹ́-Èkìtì Catholic workshop and university appointments 20.

By the late 1970s, travelling theatre companies transitioned onto celluloid through films like Ọlá Balógun's 1976 Àjàní Ògún 25. The collapse of the naira and structural adjustment policies after 1986 made celluloid production unsustainable, forcing companies to adopt low-cost VHS technology and birthing the video-film boom known as Nollywood 1926. Today, Yoruba artistic expression operates across global cinematic streaming platforms, transnational theatre revivals, and international contemporary art circuits, connecting practitioners across Nigeria and the Atlantic diaspora 1920.