St.Peter's Anglican Primary School, Gbongan

Let me remember one of my performances at the annual end of the year party for graduating students in my primary school. I was not one of the graduating students then but rather I was an ante-penultimate student. Expectedly, there were series of performances from both students and invited professionals essentially to entertain the audience and to make the student enjoy the glamour of their 'end of the year party' as it was called then.

My performance was a short competition, I was paired with Moses Adekunle, a brother and a fellow student, to showcase our knowledge of Yorùbá incantation to entertain the audience. We were not 'Bàbà aláwò' but we had a vast knowledge of Yoruba incantation owing to the innumerable number of Yorùbá movies we had watched then. There was no need for any rehearsal. We had our knowledge from the likes of Ábíjà, Dagunro, Fadeyi-Oloro, Alapinnu, Lalude, etc who were prominent characters in Yoruba movies then.

So, I was called and given the microphone along with Moses, we mounted the stage, adopted two names from these prominent actors and immediately started to reel off the different lines of Yorùbá incantation we had stored in our memory. We pushed each other, staggered, stammered, screamed and jumped as it was usually done by the actors we adopted. We actually entertained the audience because we mimicked these actors extremely well and our performance was accepted with laughter, ovation and money. Moses won basically because a larger sum of money was sprayed on him than me.

(This story has always elicited beatific smile from my face. It is worth sharing. Thanks for reading it.)