Ola Rotimi was born on April 13, 1938 in Sapele, Nigeria. Rotimi was a Nigerian scholar, playwright, and director. He obtained a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Boston University and a Master of Fine Arts from Yale. He earned the distinction of being a Rockefeller Foundation scholar in Playwriting and Dramatic Literature. His graduate project-play was declared “Yale University’s Student Play of the Year.
The British Broadcasting Corporation twice commissioned him to write for its overseas broadcast. Playwright Rotimi has variously been Visiting Professor and Playwright/Director in Europe and the United States. Twice a Fulbright Fellow, he also held the Doctor of Literature (Honoris Causa) from Wabash College, U.S.A. He was also the founder and artistic director of three theaters.
Born of Yoruba and Ijo parents (a significant cross-community parentage in terms of Rotimi’s committed stance against the destructive elements of tribalism), his father was an engineer and trade unionist. It is surely significant that both parents were heavily involved in amateur dramatics.
Rotimi’s father regularly directed shows, while his mother for a time ran a women’s dance troupe and promoted drama in the Ijo language. While studying in the US, Rotimi married his British wife Hazel May Guadreau who was also at Boston University, studying music. Upon returning to Nigeria in the 1960s, he taught at the Universities of Ife (now Obafemi Awolowo University) and Port Harcourt. Owing, in part, to political conditions in Nigeria, Rotimi spent much of the 1990s living in the Caribbean and the United States, where he taught at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota. In 2000 he returned to Ile-Ife, joining the faculty of Obafemi Awolowo University.
His plays – known throughout Africa – include Our Husband Has Gone Mad Again, Kurunmi, Ovonramven Nobaisi and The Gods Are Not To Blame which adapts the plot of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex for Nigeria’s cultural context. Rotimi’s humanism – like the southern African concept of ubuntu or the Tanzanian ujamaa – sees the collective rather than the individual as the predominant vehicle of social transformation. He died on August 18, 2000 at Ile-Ife, Osun State, Nigeria.
