Bolanle Austen-Peters: Nigeria’s own ‘Tyler Perry’ winning with film and stage

By Godwin Okondo

JUST the way American filmmaker and culture producer Tyler Perry is giving agency to black thought and aspirations through his numerous films and TV productions, so also is Nigeria’s own Bolanle Austen-Peters giving agency to a continent’s lost voice. Her intentionality about the African story and how to tell it with poise, finesse and uncommon dedication to detail is a joy to behold. Her mission has been to give Africa a voice, and indeed make the continent reclaim her voice that has been lost to centuries of wilful appropriation by strangers who speak for the continent and distort her narrative.

And she has energised this agency with two culture media outlets of visual narrative formats – theatre and film – with terrific aplomb. These perhaps were not in Austen-Peters’ initial reckoning when she set out to build Nigeria’s first major and integrated culture centre, Terra Kulture in 2003. There was the initial small hall of about 200-capacity size at the back of a facility serving Nigeria’s cuisines with a perfect ambience, a bookstore, an art gallery and a Nigeria language centre. The restaurant and the gallery became instant hits. The language centre wasn’t so great with the numbers, and it soon began to dip. The bookstore stocked great books and hosted Nigerian writers like Tony Kan, Uwem Akpan, Titi Horsfall, Lola Shoneyin and many others.

The theatre hall at Terra Kulture obviously marked time with folks like the late Wole Oguntokun, Kenneth Uphopho, Bimbo Olorunmola, Segun Adefila, Ikenna Okpala and other young theatre producers and directors trying their hands out with a small but faithful audiences attending these shows almost for free. But a certain unease had begun to sit in the pit of Austen-Peters’ stomach, a certain awakening that Nigeria’s theatre was under-performing in spite of the scattered offerings in unsuitable spaces across Lagos city. The national Theatre that ought to lead the way was in a state of disrepair and had fallen into disuse. This unusual stirring in her heart would find proper outlet after Fela! On Broadway was brought to Lagos and staged just a few metres away from Austen-Peters’ Terra Kulture space at Eko Hotel in 2011. It felt like an affront to bring Nigeria’s and her own Fela home from outside by outsiders!

Austen-Peters felt deeply challenged and stirred into waking consciousness. Nigerians own Fela or feel entitled to claim him to be theirs property, the musical legend who set out to create a unique sound never heard before. Yet, foreigners all the way from America, led by film and music star Will Smith, had come to rub Fela in their faces. It needed some response, any response. Austen-Peters felt it like a burden. What is this theatre musical thing that can’t or hadn’t been done in Nigeria? What was worse, no Nigerian was on the cast or crew list of the show that Nigeria’s big men fell over themselves to patronise – shamelessly continuing their patronage of everything foreign is better. It felt like robbery, as Nigeria’s culture community reeled from the impact of the slap of that Fela! production on their faces and psyche.

Bolanle Austen-Peters

Entered 2013, and Austen-Peters was ready. The unease of Fela! being imported back to its owners gave impetus to her creative awakening; she was ready to test the ground. So she started with something that easily resonates with her fellow Lagosians, a story that chronicles the founding of Lagos. That was how Saro the Musical was born in 2013, with the first staging held at Oriental Hotel, Victoria Island on October 25 – 28, 2013. It was a roaring success in terms of attendance and sheer performance brilliance. She would follow this up with a second musical, Wakaa in 2016. It would turn out to be the first Nigerian musical to be staged at London West End, with all cast and crew exported to London. It was a triumph of soft diplomacy and cultural export.

A year after Wakaa, she turned her gaze to film. The result was 93 Days in honour of another female Dr. Stella Adedavoh who battled Ebola virus to the ground and paid the supreme price for her medical bravery. She assembled a stellar cast from Nigeria and the US including the famous Danny Glover, among others.

But the culture lady whose name is also fondly shortened to BAP (of BAP Productions) will not be contented with these performances and thought to insert herself strongly into the thick of things. Austen-Peters would undertake a major dramatic step by enrolling in a drama course in stage and screen directing at the University of Illinois in the US, under the supervision of Nigerian-born professor of theatre studies, Segun Ojewuyi. It was like taking the ‘if you want to do something well, do it yourself’ aphorism to heart. Having learnt the ropes in directing, she became unstoppable in her prodigious outputs.

Other defining musical theatre productions will follow Saro and Wakaa in successive years after her training in directing include Fela and the Kalakuta Queens, Death and the King’s Horseman, Motherland the Musical and Dear Kaffy: Diary of a Single Woman in Lagos. Austen-Peters’ response to the imported Fela! was Fela and the Kalakuta Queens, a sold-out musical theatre performance that reenacted the ‘strange one’s’ life with his many women. Here, Austen-Peters makes a strong feminist statement. Fela was a larger-than-life personality, but his women weren’t always given their dues as integral part of Fela’s success story. For many they were a footnote to Fela’s legendary status, but Austen-Peters would give them agency with this unique performance. Fela’s women weren’t prostitutes, as many prefer to characterise them; they were part of the Fela phenomenon and so deserved to be given credit for helping to magnify the Fela mystique. Like Fela, they suffered much brutality and injustice in the hands of overzealous law endorsement officers.

Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman was performed with such great skill and nuance. Soyinka’s alluring but complex lyrical dialogues and stagecraft came alive in the exposition of one of Africa’s great royal enactment of a dreadful tradition during colonial Nigeria. She would follow this tragic performance with a politically conscious stage Motherland the Musical – a biting sarcasm against Nigeria’s feeble middle class who messed up the country and how the youth has risen to cleanse the Augean stables. Motherland the Musical chronicles a dysfunctional state badly in need of repair – a performance that rails against the socio-economic and political system that messed up a promising country at independence. Meanwhile, Dear Kaffy: Diary of a Single Woman that followed comes as a social commentary on relationship sagas and how women tend to hold the short end of the stick in a fast-paced place like Lagos.

As her theatre credit began to increase, so too her filmic credit. Collision Course (Collision) was made in 2021, followed by Man of God, The Bling Lagosians, the expository biopic, Funmilayo (the woman who caused the dethronement of a Yoruba oba and whose revolutionary fire burned in the veins of her son and musical legend, Fela), and then comes House of Ga’a.

Having made a round of both performance-specific and non-specific spaces to air her productions – Oriental Hotel and MUSON Centre – Austen-Peters would look inward and expanded her own space at Terra Kulture to a modern stage, so she could bring her productions home. The old theatre was too small for her expanded theatrical vision. So she knocked it down and built a better and bigger space that now sits over 400 persons per show, called Terra Kulture Theatre Arena. It is a testament to the vision of one woman who is not afraid to dream, dare and challenge the existing norm. What first started as a gift to others to air their theatre ideas became a bold, upscale theatre market catering to the tastes and hunger of Lagos’ theatre lovers.

As each show boasts of overflowing and fully booked audiences, one things is clear. One woman’s culture vision has flowered inexorably, and a new theatre and cinematic tradition is on the rise. Bolanle Austen-Peters is the pathfinder in this new tradition where vision matches realistic outcomes.