As the son of the legendary founding father of Nigerian theatre, Hubert Ogunde, Owobo made a breath-taking return to the screens with the ‘Anikulapo’ epic film. More recently, he left audiences spellbound and hopelessly infatuated with his dual performance in ‘Iwe Ala’. Having left the acting scene and the creative industry for decades, living a corporate life abroad, Owobo Ogunde, in a recent exclusive conversation on Nollywood on Radio, strips away the glamour to talk about his unconventional childhood, the true genius of the Ogunde estate, the realities of growing up in a polygamous powerhouse, and why he refuses to be boxed in by the term ‘actor’. ROTIMI IGE brings excerpts.
I must commend you for your fantastic performance in ‘Iwe Ala’. Were you the one that played the other Taiwo? Or was he another actor?
Yes, I played both characters, Taiwo and Kehinde.’
You did a fantastic job for me to be that confused.
When you’re playing two characters, the audience should not look at both and know straight away that it’s the same actor playing them. If you feel that way, you’re not the only one.
When you got the script of the movie, what was the first thing that crossed your mind? I know that you’re from Ososa, Ijebu, and you have a rich knowledge of the Ojude Oba festival. When you got the script, what was the first thing that crossed your mind?
I was pleasantly surprised. I knew straight away, just looking at the title without even reading the script, that I was seeing something rare. We rarely have an Ijebu-based story. And that tagline, ‘An Ojude Oba Story’, was certainly something that drew me in. Of course, before looking at the script, I’d already done my own research into the production company, just to know what they’re about and what they have done before. I see a lot of scripts, so a company has to be of a particular standard for me to consider even looking at the text. We had already gone past that screening stage before I opened it, and the script itself was an exception.
Your father lived a very fulfilling life. I’ve seen two documentaries on him, and I want to see even more. You cannot talk about the Nigerian film industry without mentioning his name alongside Ade Love, Baba Sala, and the rest. Did that reality put pressure on you when you decided that you wanted to return to acting? Did it pressure you that people would look at you through the lens of your father?
No, not at all. Now, the reason for this is that I get asked this question quite often, and I can almost tell every time I get it that whoever is asking is relatively new to this space. I’ve been around here a lot longer than most people realise. First, it’s no surprise to you that I was born into it. Everybody in our house was an actor. My mother was an actor, an exceptional one. In the documentary that you’re referring to, which is the ‘Aropin N’tenia’ documentary, there are two wives married to a king. One of those two wives was my late mother. She was exceptional. I grew up watching her, watching my stepmoms, my brothers, my sisters, and the other professionals who worked for my father.
I actually left school at form 3; I didn’t even finish secondary school. Till today, I never went back. I left school to join my father’s theatre company. So, I started acting full-time from about age 14. When international films like ‘Mister Johnson’ were being made in Jos, where we had world-class actors like Pierce Brosnan, the former James Bond, I was right there. When my father’s last film, ‘Ayanmo’, was made, I was there.
‘Ayanmo’ was after ‘Mister Johnson’? Because I thought ‘Mister Johnson’ was his final movie…
‘Mister Johnson’ was his last movie, but ‘Ayanmo’ came just before. ‘Ayanmo’ was shot entirely in Ososa. Everybody talks about film studios and film villages these days, but the first functional film village in West Africa, as we know it, was established in Ososa. It’s still there.
A lot of the industry concepts we’re looking at today have all been done before; we just didn’t have social media at that time to document it continuously. So, there is a generational disconnect for people who are just seeing this modern wave. I was with my father until his passing, and a few years after that, I decided to travel abroad. All my life, all I knew how to do were just three things: act, sing, and dance. That was it. I live and breathe those three things. I simply wanted to broaden my horizons and try something else, which was why I temporarily left the industry behind. I travelled in 1992. If anyone in Nollywood was not actively acting before that year, then they all started after me. You can do the math to see how many practitioners started pre-1992.
Were you featured in any of those early films?
No, I was too young for the earliest ones. The only major one I appeared in, not strictly as a lead actor, but appeared in, is ‘Ayanmo’, because I had already left formal school by then.
Is the Ogunde clan thinking of doing a collaborative project? Has it ever crossed your mind to bring the family together for a massive media production?
We’re always doing things collectively behind the scenes. However, up until recently, that direct artistic participation has admittedly tailed off a little bit over the last few years for many different reasons. If your question is specifically around the core family coming together to execute a massive commercial production, that is something we have not done lately. One of the reasons for that is because not all of Baba’s children went into the arts or acting. Everybody has their own distinct career and personal interests, and rightly so. For those of us who are deeply invested in the industry, it’s just that we hadn’t pushed that side of our legacy until recently when I made the conscious choice to step back in. But the talent is there, make no mistake. They are there. I think you’re likely to find that over the next few years, you’ll start to see some very interesting projects coming out of the family.
You grew up in a legendary polygamous setting. What was life like in that household? In the archive footage and documentaries, we see Baba driving in his car with his many wives, and them talking about the dynamic happily. Does it ever cross your mind to also practice polygamy?
I spend part of my time in the UK and part in Nigeria. Growing up, it was almost culturally expected for a man of status to have more than one wife; it was seen as completely normal. This was particularly true within the creative circles I was surrounded by. I grew up around the pioneers of travelling theatre companies, the Ade Love Theatre, Ishola Ogunsola (I Show Pepper), and Eda Onileola. Those were the patriarchal figures around me, and all of them had large families with many wives. So, it wasn’t something I grew up thinking was a shocking big deal. When I was young, I had many girlfriends, which traditionally tends to lead to having many wives.
But as you grow older, you become an evolved person. You learn as you mature. There are certain lifestyle paths you decide against because you realise they simply aren’t right for your personal journey. I haven’t got many wives because that is just the specific lifestyle I choose to lead now.
You said, ‘I haven’t got many wives’. Does that imply you have more than one?
No, it means I have exactly one. I understand completely. But just so you know, I have no issues whatsoever against anybody who chooses to have more than one. In fact, I always ask myself this philosophical question: What is the true difference between a Nigerian man who decides to marry many wives at once, and a Western man who decides to marry many wives sequentially through multiple divorces? Because they do it too. So, what is the core difference?
Or the alternative, where a man keeps one official wife and maintains many girlfriends.
Exactly, and many girlfriends.
Your father was a man of many parts; he was larger than life. He was everything a man in his career could have ever wished for, an actor, a producer, a director, and a dancer. What would you say he was absolute best at? Would you call him a better actor than a director, or a better dancer than a producer? Where would you rank his abilities?
I think he was a better human being first, long before any of those professional labels we like to put on people. For example, a number of people are very quick to call me an actor. I don’t actually see myself as an actor. If you look at my social media bios, it does not say ‘actor’. It says ‘artiste’. I see myself strictly as an artiste.
Most people are very quick to jump on the bandwagon of ‘I am an actor’, and there’s a specific way they say it with a certain swag, like it’s the ultimate cool title. I’m not saying it isn’t cool, but it’s an identity we imported from looking at Hollywood, where people introduce themselves solely by their performance trade. We copied it from them, but that’s not organically us.
So really, in the household where I grew up, there was no singular designation called an ‘actor’. You are an ‘artist’. What that means is that you must encompass the three core performance skills required to survive on stage: you must be able to sing completely live, you must be able to dance energetically, and I don’t mean the basic party dancing you see on social media; stage dancing is a highly choreographed, intense, and exhausting discipline, and then you must deliver impeccable acting.
When I started within my father’s company, I didn’t start by acting lines. I started at the very bottom with a gong, the agogo. That’s where my training began. Then I moved to the omele drum, then to the bass rhythms, then to the choreography line. Acting was the absolute last stage of my development. That is how I was trained. The majority of contemporary performers focus on just one isolated aspect, which is screen acting.
So, coming back to your question about what Hubert Ogunde was uniquely good at: you are asking that from the perspective of how you see the isolated structure of the industry today. Back then, you had to be a complete visionary. You had to write the entire story yourself. You had to compose the musical scores. You will never find an Ogunde play or film without an original motion picture soundtrack. You mentioned Aye earlier on, and you mentioned Jaiyesimi. Each of those films featured a full, original soundtrack composed entirely by him.
People talk about the kind of money they are making in cinema right now, but they are making nothing compared to the commercial scale of what happened back then. If you go back and look at the archival newspapers, the National Theatre was practically torn to pieces by roaring crowds whenever people wanted to watch Aye. Anytime that film was screening, the venue was packed to maximum capacity.
We didn’t have a vast cinema chain infrastructure at that time, so what we did was rent massive town halls, paste posters across the state, and run the films ourselves. We packed out every single time, not just in Lagos, but all the way up north to Kano, Kaduna, Sokoto, Kontagora, and Borno. There are vibrant Yoruba communities everywhere, alongside locals in Jebba and Minna, and they all came out in full force to support the cinema. Furthermore, all of Hubert Ogunde’s films were shot on premium 35mm celluloid film, whereas most other local films of that era were shot on cheaper 16mm. He would fly in a professional technical crew of about ten Caucasians to shoot. That is why the visual and audio quality of those films remains outstanding.
When you left school at 14 to join his theatre group, what was his immediate reaction to that? Did he just accept your choice, did you have a firm conversation about it, or was it just considered normal for him? I’d love to know how that transition happened.
First of all, let’s look at how the decision was made. Second, are you really asking if Hubert Ogunde sat down to have a democratic negotiation with a 14-year-old child? Who were you to negotiate? You were simply told what to do. He made the final decision himself. But I know exactly why he made it: I wasn’t doing particularly well in the rigid academic environment of formal school at the time, and he felt the best thing to do was to bring me into a structured, controlled creative environment. There, the family could directly oversee my personal development while schooling me in a more profound, artistic way.
Did your parents practice traditional Yoruba religion, or were they Christians or Muslims?
Both of my parents identified as Christians. Now, my father grew up in a traditional house of Babalawo (Ifa priests), that is a well-known historical fact, and he thoroughly learned the ways, philosophy, and wisdom of the Babalawo. Even in those documentaries, you might see him performing cultural rituals or sacrifices for theatrical authenticity. But by the time he passed away, he was a dedicated Crossbearer in the Grail Movement. He frequented Grailland in Iju. I go to Grailland myself. Back in the day, I used to attend the Cherubim and Seraphim church; that was where I went as a youth.