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
He created Nigerian popular theatre in the 1940s out of the older Alarinjo tradition, wrote more than fifty plays, and made the country's first Yoruba feature films.
Hubert Adedeji Ogunde was a schoolteacher and then a policeman in Lagos when he staged The Garden of Eden and the Throne of God in 1944 for his church. It did well enough that he resigned from the police the following year and founded the African Music Research Party — the first professional theatre company in Nigeria.
What he built from it was a touring travelling theatre: a company that moved between towns with its own transport, performing plays in Yoruba with music, dance and topical comment, drawing on the older Alarinjo masque tradition and on church drama at the same time. The model was copied by Kola Ogunmola, Duro Ladipo and dozens of others, and it is the direct ancestor of the Yoruba film industry and so of Nollywood.
He was also political from the start. Strike and Hunger, written in 1945 about the general strike of that year, and Bread and Bullet got him fined and his company banned in parts of the country by the colonial authorities; Yoruba Ronu, in 1964, criticised the Western Region government so sharply that it banned him from performing in the region entirely, a ban that took a change of government to lift.
He made the first Yoruba feature films, Aiye and Jaiyesimi among them, and continued working until shortly before his death in 1990.
What he built from it was a touring travelling theatre: a company that moved between towns with its own transport, performing plays in Yoruba with music, dance and topical comment, drawing on the older Alarinjo masque tradition and on church drama at the same time. The model was copied by Kola Ogunmola, Duro Ladipo and dozens of others, and it is the direct ancestor of the Yoruba film industry and so of Nollywood.
He was also political from the start. Strike and Hunger, written in 1945 about the general strike of that year, and Bread and Bullet got him fined and his company banned in parts of the country by the colonial authorities; Yoruba Ronu, in 1964, criticised the Western Region government so sharply that it banned him from performing in the region entirely, a ban that took a change of government to lift.
He made the first Yoruba feature films, Aiye and Jaiyesimi among them, and continued working until shortly before his death in 1990.
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