Ajo Fest returns next year, says Agbeyegbe @90th birthday celebration in Lagos
‘Uncle Fred wrote for Nigeria, staged in Nigeria and made his impact in Nigerian theatre’
‘In my own world, there’s Soyinka and there’s Fred Agbeyegbe!’
By Anote Ajeluorou
NEXT year 2026, 40 years after the famous Ajo Fest showpiece changed the face of theatre in the country, its founder and patron, Pa Fred Agbeyegbe, 90, has promised its return. For a man in advanced age, this is somewhat of a miracle. Slightly stooped but still standing and walking unaided, voice still firm, 90 years sit well on the man fondly called Uncle Fred by Ajo Fest production cohort some 39 years ago and many admirers. And his promised reenactment of Ajo Fest elicited much excitement from everyone at Freedom Park, Lagos, venue of the celebration, as they stood both to honour and film him with their smart phones, eager to catch and imprint the moment for keepsakes.
“Thank you all for coming,” Uncle Fred said as the celebration came to a close after dancer and songstress, Jumoke Oke, ushered him out front after serenading the audience with her unique vocal impressions. “Good as it is to be 90, if by any chance I stop in the middle of this rendition because nature has called, I’m sure you will agree with me that that call of nature is better than the one in which it will be ‘the type of person he was and the good life he led’. Like it has been said, everything here is novel to me. I’m still alive and you have come to give – some were songs, some were poems and some were beautiful words – all about me. I prefer this type of tribute than the one you will give when I’m dead. What has happened here today is absolutely incredible.”
He paid tribute to his friend and collaborator in the Ajo Fest pioneering journey, Mr. Jide Ogungbade, who he said a lady from NTA partly inspired the emergence of Ajo Fest by introducing playwright to theatre director. Agbeyegbe recounted how she’d visited his furniture company for set design materials. He didn’t want to be paid for what she wanted, but asked for credits in the production instead. She wondered what Agbeyegbe knew about TV production and credits and why it was more important for him than money. That was when Agbeyegbe dipped his hands in a drawer and brought out the plays he’d written. Then the lady said Agbyegbe must meet one Mr. Jide Ogundade; thus began a lifelong production relationship between the playwright and his director.
“When Jide Ogungbade and I started out in 1983, we did not envisage what has happened here tonight,” he reminisced. “But it’s happening, because 39 years down the road, you could not stop talking about Ajo Fest. Let us honour the memory of Jide Ogungbade with one minute’s silence… So really, it’s wonderful what you’ve done tonight, and we will keep the flag flying. Ajo Fest returns next year!”
Pa Fred Agbeyegbe with his daughter, Mrs. Ajo Balogun, at his 90th birthday event
Indeed, it was an evening of nostalgia as everyone acknowledged and testified to the pioneering role elder statesman Pa Fred Agbeyegbe played in setting a template for the establishment of theatre production companies in Nigeria. It was through his 1986 Ajo Fest, a feast of theatre, that the belief in theatre as a viable career path became most evident and many adventurous practitioners took their cue. It was the 90th birthday celebration organised by Theatre Collective for a man who has made significant strides in law, political activism and theatre as playwright and theatre company founder thereby changing the face of theatre for good. Indeed, as professor of technical theatre, Duro Oni, duly acknowledged, many Nigerian actors over 50 likely passed through Pa Agbeyegbe’s Ajo Fest crucible.
Actor and compere for the night, Mr. Edmund Enaibe, Committee for Relevant Art (CORA) and Secretary of Lagos Book and Art Festival (LABAF), Mr. Toyin Akinosho, Mr. Segun Adefila of Crown Trouoe of Africa, Prof. Segun Ojewuyi of Southern Illinois University, US, actor Mr. Fred Amata, Lara Akinsola, National Democratic Coalition (NADECO) chieftain, Mr. Ayo Opadokun, Mr. Lookman Sanusi of Bubbles FM, songstress Yinka Davies, Mr. Kenneth Uphopho of Pawstudios Africa, Jumoke Oke, Mr. Toritseju Ejoh of Oxygen Theatre, University of Lagos don, Prof. Duro Oni, Culture communicator and Programme Chair of Lagos Book and Art Festival (LABAF), Mr. Jahman Anikulapo, organiser of Lagos International Animation Festival, Mr. Mayowa Kayode and President of National Association of Nigerian Theatre Arts Practitioners (NANTAP) Mr. Makinde Adeniran and his predecessor in office, Mr. Israel Eboh and Mr. Olatunji Makanjuola, among others, including the celebrity’s family and other extended friends converged at the FoodCourt of Freedom Park, Lagos last Thursday, July 24, 2025 to celebrate the man many still fondly call Uncle Fred even at 90.
His niece and US-based academic, Prof. Lilian Agbeyegbe, took the first shot, paying glowing tribute to her uncle who made her enrol in school earlier that was required back in the day, saying, “He made me start school earlier than I should, when my hands couldn’t reach over my head to touch my ears. He’s a very passionate, caring person. We wanted to do the tributes, so he can hear what we have to say about him, his impact in our lives. He will hear all of it today.”
Actor Edmund Enaibe who was stampeded into compere role, remarkably set the tone by giving who didn’t witness Ajo Fest a taste of what it was like by enumerating the sterling qualities that stand Agbeyegbe out from the crowd and what his platform did for Nigerian theatre.
“He’s a nationalist who used his art to create political awareness, to accentuate national conversation,” Enaibe said. “Ajo Fest was a carnival, a celebration for a full month. The King Must Dance Naked, Woe Unto Death, Budiso are some of the plays that were staged. Unfortunately, we have not been able to replicate the same Ajo Fest feat ever since. We have attempted, tried but we have not been able to do it again. Fred whose touch is still burning still. We must give applause for his prolific writing, for his plays that we have not been able to replicate. Those plays gave is opportunity to be what we are today, both in Nigeria and overseas. I travelled because of Agbeyegbe’s The King Must Dance Naked.
“On behalf of Theatre Collective, that you have through your plays inspired us for the last 39 years, we say thank you. Thank you for being creative, for being relevant. This celebration is a scratch for what you have done. Your works won’t only be talked about but will be performed.”
Co-traveller in pro-democracy, NADECO activism Mr. Ayo Opadokun (left); Pa Fred Agbeyegbe and Mr. Olatunji Makanjuola
The tributes took a political activism tone when his friend, fellow political activist and confidante, Opadokun, gave the audience a snippet of Agbeyegbe’s other lives the culture community only know in passing.
According to him, “My friend and confidante has turned 90. Many of you know things about him in the theatre world. But there are others you don’t know. When you talk about law, there are lawyers and there lawyers. He’s the most important maritime lawyer in Nigeria. Fred is one of the most important finance experts in Nigeria today. I’m always amazed that a man at his age, when he gets to his laptop, he types like a young child. He learnt typing at a young age. Once upon a time, he was a politician. He was once a Mayor of Warri Municipal Council when Warri was the big one; he was the chairman. At the commencement of the Second Republic he participated in some of the activities but he couldn’t last long because he was not in the mould of Nigerian politicians of that era who were corrupt.
“I can say to you authoritatively that Fred Agbeyegbe is not a politician but a political activist like myself. I know for a fact that Fred has not taken a contract of ₦100 from any government as well as I have not in my life. He went to Ghana to stage a play at his own expense. He represented Nigeria at his own expense; he put the artists together to stage his plays. And on his way back to Nigeria, immigration people cornered him and asked for bribe but Fred showed them pepper.”
The moment gave Opadokun opportunity to talk about his harrowing experience as a fugitive in his own land when maximum dictator Gen. Sani Abacha wanted him dead or alive for his co-political activism with Agbeyegbe in National Democratic Coalition (NADECO) after the annulment of June 12, 1993.
“I’m grateful to God that Fred survived the travails of life till today,” he said. “When we launched NADECO on May 16, 1994, within one month, because I was the general secretary and spokesman during General Sani Abacha’s era, he came for my head. Only two people knew where I was hiding at Onikan; my late friend Real Admiral Ndubuisi Kanu and Uncle Fred Agbeyegbe. I was arrested and was put in jail for 24 calendar months. Then they released me. But after one year, Abacha concluded I’d learnt nothing from my prison period, and I was rearrested and put in Ikoyi Prison; I was there when Abacha died.
“Uncle Fred has been a reliable friend. He was one of the resource persons responsible for composing those serious educational and informative NADECO releases. He’s an intellectual giant. The way he reasons, I’m always amazed. I thank God that this man is still alive, and he will still be alive for us much longer. Sadly, the Nigerian state has not honoured this icon enough. God will honour you at His own time. Nigeria cannot remain a country of opposites. We export what we don’t have: democracy, and import what we have: petroleum! It’s a shame.”
For university don, Prof. Oni, “Not many people have the grace to stay up to 90 like Uncle Fred. Perhaps, the artistic world know him more as a playwright than as a lawyer. We salute you sir. Many artists who are 50 years and above cut their teeth in Uncle Fred’s plays. I remember when Uncle Fred’s The Kind Must Dance Naked was staged at the University of Lagos, and the king this time around was a woman – Clarion Chukwurah! And we were wondering: how is a woman going to dance naked on stage? We were watching keenly to see what was going to happen. At the point where the naked was to dance naked, the lights were switched off! Uncle Fred, we are very happy to have you with us. We will continue to celebrate you beyond 90; it takes the grace of God for a man of 90 to stand upright and be able to walk unassisted. Some use walking sticks or walkers.”
Prof. Oni expressed regret that Agbeyegbe had not been inducted a Fellow of the Nigerian Academy of Letters’ (NAL), promising that it would done soon.
“Uncle Fred’s productions – Woe Unto Death, The King Must Dance Naked and others – have been important plays in the annals of Nigerian theatre, and quite a number of universities stage these plays on a yearly basis. And someone asked me if Uncle Fred is a Fellow of the Nigerian Academy of Letters. I think we have not done our work well enough. But I can assure you that this is something that will happen in the foreseeable future. We are very happy that Uncle Fred has made tremendous contributions to the humanities. He’s a humanist, a lawyer, a playwright and everything put together.”
One of Agbeyegbe’s daughters who takes accolades for Ajo Fest being named after her, Mrs. Ajo Balogun also paid glowing tribute to her father who she described in flowery words.
Lara Akinsola who performed in all the four plays recreated the feel-good mood of the 1986 Ajo Fest era and sang one of Ajo Fest’s songs as she paid tribute to the man who has been a mentor for many. “He was always there to inspire us in camp,” she reminisced. “He took care of us. I was in all four plays, and we had a beautiful time together. Uncle Jide Ogungbade was the director. You (Agbeyegbe) brought something to theatre that was new and which has not be done again ever since.”
US-based academic and theatre scholar, Prof. Ojewuyi, lent a critical aspect to the Agbeyegbe celebration, reminding everyone how the immediacy of his plays spoke to the Nigerian condition. He also recounted how Agbeyegbe’s plays provided needed support platform for graduates of theatre of the era and became a career point for so many of his generation.
“Two things – if you’re aggressive and ambitious – if those two things are not properly managed, you slip from sanity to insanity,” Prof. Ojewuyi philosophised. “What stands Uncle Fred out from the crowd is not the money, it’s the lack of it. He’s a rare Nigerian man. If you begin to understand the trajectory of this man, you’d be so amazed and humbled, and most of us here will begin to celebrate him the more. And he has never made noise about it. He’s always so humble. There’s another Nigerian, and today we concluded the celebration of him – that’s Professor Wole Soyinka. In my own world, there’s Soyinka and there’s Fred Agbeyegbe!”
Prof. Ojewuyi commended the rare artistic vision of Agbeyegbe for investing his hard earned money in making theatre and which gave a platform and opportunity to graduates like himself who were hungry and yearning to put their training in theatre to practice.
“By the time we left university in the mid-80s, there was no job waiting,” he said. “We were hungry; we were ambitious and we were well trained. All we needed was a platform, a platform to be able to practice what we had been taught. And then there was this man, who put his own money, his own hard earned money, not to buy chieftaincy titles, not to run for office, not to buy himself some stupid honorary degrees from somewhere but to invest in the practice of theatre.
“While Ajo Festival was going on, we hardly saw him around; he didn’t hang around dictating what we should do. He was just quietly in the background supporting heavily. He probably might not remember my face; if he knew my name it would be from the credits. That was how absent he was after he’d put down his money. This is rare, this is very rare. Like Edmund said, that platform (Ajo Fest) helped in crafting our careers. By that 1986, I’d just returned with Prof. Duro Oni to the country from Germany where we’d performed Bode Osanyin’s Woman. So the rehearsals for Ajo had commenced.
“I got to the spot in Surulere; it was dingy, but I met people who were so committed to theatre that I decided I was going to be a part of it. It was a movement. In the life of a man or a woman or a nation, there’s always a point where you need a new injection of energy, of life. The theatre in Nigeria from 1977 to the mid-80s was in limbo until uncle Fred came up with Ajo Fest. When we came out of university, we met our counterparts who were already there, struggling in one project in weeks, months; so, I kept praying that we would get paid. That was the practice then; you would be in production but you hardly get paid. But with Ajo we were handsomely paid.”
Prof. Ojewuyi also spoke to the immediacy of Agbeyegbe’s plays in situating the Nigerian socio-political conundrum as against image-massaging some playwrights indulged in.
According to him, “Uncle Fred had written these great plays unlike the plays we were reading at the time. People were writing plays that served themselves, that serve their egos. He wrote plays that actually spoke to the heart of this country. And his plays were timely; they were not historical. They were not futuristic. They were immediate, addressing what we were experiencing, what we were going through in the country. Let me mention a few characters in the plays. General Bu was a character; General Di, the role that I played, was another character. Bu stood for (then Gen. Muhammad) Buhari, Di for (Gen. Tunde) Idiagbon, and then So was (then Chief Justice of Nigeria, George Sodeinde) Sowemimo; it was the exact thing that we needed to grow into our own and it helped our practice. Many of us went from there fired up. We were not going to take ‘no’ no matter; we were not going to be cheated, and our voices would not be smouldered.
“All of this contextualised the mode of Nigerian theatre at the time. Let’s put Soyinka aside; he wrote for his own time, and he became global and he got his respect globally. And we respect and celebrate him. But Uncle Fred wrote for Nigeria, staged in Nigeria and had his impact in Nigerian theatre.”
Prof. Ojewuyi, who some years ago proposed that the National Theatre should be converted to Nigeria’s University of the Arts to cater for country’s growing youth fervour in artistic in all aspects – music, film, literature, dance, photography, visual, etc – somewhat obliquely returned to the same theme. He projected that the renovated cultural edifice would soon be turned into a casino, hotels and strip club to poison the soul of Nigerian theatre, with its doors still shut long after renovation finished.
“We have a National Theatre now, so-called National Theatre,” he said, disdain palpable. “It’s glossy, it’s beautiful, but I have my own personal reservations about that building. It’s on its way to becoming a casino where people will bet, make money and they have strip clubs and hotels and all that. It’s insanity and it’s a poison to the soul of Nigerian theatre. During Ajo Fest at that National Theatre, we had people lining up to buy tickets, because the plays were fantastic.
“Uncle Fred is 90 years; it’s not just the numbers. Imagine the experience that comes with 90 years. Something is wrong with us in Nigeria. This man should celebrated every day.”
Cultural chronicler and publisher Mr. Akinosho did his usual historicisation of Lagos’ cultural landscape prior to 1986 and after when he said, “There were three things in Lagos, Nigeria 1986. There was Didi Museum; there was MUSON Centre set up, and then there was Ajo Fest. These three were those cultural revivalistic things that made Lagos what some today say made Lagos a cultural city. Then Nollywood coming up in 1992. That has basically been the trajectory.
“Now, let me tell you what Fred Agbeyegbe did with theatre. In that National Theatre area – Costain, Ebute Meta – people began to call that area the West End of Lagos or Broadway. A lot of actors and actresses came from all over Nigeria in that period, because of the kind of things that were happening with Ajo. So we’re looking at 35 – 40 years’ history of Nigerian art in which Ajo Fest was a pioneer, and a lot of production houses came on board and set up and were calling themselves all kinds of production houses. They were sold to the Ajo Fest philosophy.
“This was evident two Decembers ago when actress Joke Silva staged The King Must Dance Naked at Glover Hall. She gave a clarifying statement that mirrored the kind of thing that Segun (Ojewuyi) just told us. If you look around, several generations of Nigerians actors, actress and thespians who have sprung up don’t necessarily know that they sprung up on the Ajo experience.”
A combination of cohorts from Ajo Fest 1986 and PANAFEST 2003 singing some memorable Itsekiri folk songs: Lookman Sanusi (left); Kafilat Babatunde; Kenneth Uphopho; Dr. Oluwatoyin Olakodana James; Mawuyon Ogun and Lara Akinsola
For younger theatre maker and founder of Crown Troupe of Africa, Mr. Adefila, Agbeyegbe lit up the fire that would later burn in the hearts of latter-day theatre makers like himself. He lamented that the organisers didn’t reach out to young people like theatre students to witness the man being celebrated, drink from the well of wisdom and get inspired.
“I’m a young theatre maker. I didn’t witness Ajo Fest; I heard about it,” he said. “Look around you: the man we are talking about tonight and celebrating, nobody has mentioned the kind of cars he rode or the kind of mansions he built. We are talking about the legacy he laid for children like us. The tragedy is that there are no students of theatre seated here tonight who’d learn and understand Nigerian theatre history. It’s something I think we should all reflect on. I got to meet my father Agbeyegbe through his work when I directed Budiso, and it hit me: you might think nobody is seeing what you’re doing. But if you follow your convictions like Uncle Fred did, like Jahman Anikulapo and Toyin Akinosho who started Art Stampede did – I’m not sure they knew the kind of fire they were igniting in people like us. So what I’ve learnt from you sir, and I don’t want to say proverbs before my elders, but I have to say it nonetheless: when your fire was burning, you burnt something with it, and that’s why we are all gathered tonight. Than you sir!”
Ejoh praised his Itsekiri elder for giving his ethnic nation a voice in the field of global letters, noting, “Small boy like me, what should I say? Uncle Fred, what can I say? He’s a father to me, a trailblazer, someone who walked the path that I want to walk. God bless you sir. Thank you very much for what you’ve done for us, I mean Itsekiri artists. From The King Must Dance Naked to Woe unto Death and others, for letting the world know about the rich Itsekiri culture, because you could have chosen to not reflect on our kingdom. We wish you many more years.”
A journalist and writer who simply identified as Mr. A. and who’d interviewed Agbeyegbe several times over the years also paid tribute to his stature as a humanist, calling him an interviewer’s delight and fervent campaigner for a better Nigeria. He said the political activist always regretted the country’s continuing regression from its high destiny, pointin how firecely Agbeyegbe always deferred to his Itsekiri roots as an older entity than Nigeria, a space he is forced to accept against his will, because nobody consulted him before he was sucked into its anti-people system that continues to oppress him and his Itsekiri people.
And fittingly wrapping up proceedings for the night was the new helmsman of NANTAP, Mr. Adeniran who sees himself as a bridge between the past and the future of Nigeria’s theatre experience.
According to him, “I’m happy to have known you, and having time to sit with you and talk. You shared so many things. I want to share the last moment of Uncle Bayo Ogunleye with us, and this is why I’m particularly happy that there’s a tribute for you. We usually do tributes when people are gone, but let us do it in front of this man, so that we give honour in his presence. I thank you all for showing up for Uncle Fred. I belong to the bridge generation; I’ve been privileged to be part of the old and I’m so privileged to be part of the new. I see in-between; I carry history, and I’m not taking it for granted. Every time I have opportunity to sit with you, that’s what I carry, that’s the responsibility that’s on my shoulders. And with this blessing of age of Uncle Fred, I know that the future is bright.”
