Landmark is level 2 of 4 in the Nigeria Hall of Fame: a first that opened a door, or the pre-eminent figure of their generation in this country. See how the levels work.
Why they are here
His folk operas — above all Ọba Kò So — took Yoruba history and cosmology onto the stage, and are still the standard against which the form is judged.
Duro Ladipo was a schoolteacher and church organist in Oshogbo, the son of a catechist, and got into trouble with his church for setting Christian music to Yoruba drums — which tells you most of what his career was about.
He founded his own company and wrote the folk operas that made his name. Ọba Kò So, first staged in 1963, tells of Ṣàngó, the fourth Alaafin of Oyo, who hanged himself and became the god of thunder; the title means the king did not hang. It is built on Yoruba praise poetry, drumming and dance rather than on European operatic form, and it took the Yoruba pantheon seriously as tragedy. It was performed at the Berlin Festival, across Europe and America, and remains the benchmark for Yoruba theatre.
Ọba Waja, on the colonial officer who prevented a ritual suicide at Oyo, is the same historical incident Wole Soyinka later dramatised in Death and the King's Horseman. Moremi and Ajagun Nla followed.
He was at the centre of the Oshogbo art movement of the 1960s alongside Twins Seven-Seven and Susanne Wenger, and his Mbari Mbayo club in Oshogbo was where much of it happened. He died in 1978 at forty-seven.
He founded his own company and wrote the folk operas that made his name. Ọba Kò So, first staged in 1963, tells of Ṣàngó, the fourth Alaafin of Oyo, who hanged himself and became the god of thunder; the title means the king did not hang. It is built on Yoruba praise poetry, drumming and dance rather than on European operatic form, and it took the Yoruba pantheon seriously as tragedy. It was performed at the Berlin Festival, across Europe and America, and remains the benchmark for Yoruba theatre.
Ọba Waja, on the colonial officer who prevented a ritual suicide at Oyo, is the same historical incident Wole Soyinka later dramatised in Death and the King's Horseman. Moremi and Ajagun Nla followed.
He was at the centre of the Oshogbo art movement of the 1960s alongside Twins Seven-Seven and Susanne Wenger, and his Mbari Mbayo club in Oshogbo was where much of it happened. He died in 1978 at forty-seven.
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