When I started teaching this eight-week Yoruba class, I had modest expectations about the enthusiasm of my would-be students. They have, however, surprised me with their earnest curiosity as they have questioned, troubled, and teased out deeper meanings of the cultural texts I’ve put before them. As the class is ending next week, I’ve begun to reflect on the works we used in class. One of them is Tunde Kelani’s Oleku (1997), a film I first saw years ago and have now revisited through the inquisitive eyes of my students.
My students are Americans, as I’m teaching in the United States, and about 90 percent of them are what language scholars call “heritage learners.” Their parents are native speakers of Yoruba, the language of the films we’ve been watching, so most of them already speak Yoruba at an intermediate to advanced level. Another detail worth noting before I get into Oleku is that the majority of my students were born at least five years after the film’s release.
I’m not setting out to write a film review in the strict sense. What I want to share here are some quick reflections enriched by the experience of rewatching Oleku alongside students who are at least a decade younger than me, and with whom I share both a cultural bridge and a generational gap.
My students loved, and were intrigued by, the story of Ajani (portrayed by Yemi Shodimu) and his triangular love entanglements with Asake (Feyikemi Abodunrin), Lola (Pauline Dike), and Sade (Omolola Amusan). They could relate to the steamy college romance theme, as it mirrors experiences they might be living through themselves. But they were especially struck by the weight of family expectations on Ajani, pressures that shape, and sometimes constrain, his choices. Beyond his apparent philandering, Ajani carries the heavy burden of a mother who constantly urges him to marry so she can become a grandmother and deliver that good tidings to his late father when she, too, joins the ancestors.
Then there’s Asake’s father (Lere Paimo), who is a man whose rigid parenting is ironically tied to his embrace of modernity. He wants his daughter to attend university, which, in the 1960s postcolonial setting of the film, was seen as the ultimate pathway to producing “modern” citizens. Yet, while pushing her into the machinery of modernity, he clings to traditional fatherly authority, where his word is absolute.
“I want her to graduate with my name on her certificate,” he tells his friend (Kola Oyewo). He refuses to accept the possibility, which is presented by his friend, that a married woman could still graduate under her maiden name. His stance is a reflection of what can be described as provincial modernity that has persisted across Africa: the inability to reconcile the ideals of progress with the weight of tradition. Like Asake, many citizens find themselves stuck in the crosshairs of this unresolved dilemma.
Rewatching Oleku this time made me realize something I hadn’t fully appreciated before. It is as much Asake’s story as it is Ajani’s, even though for nearly three decades Ajani has been the major point of discussion.
After we finished the film, I asked my students for their final thoughts. While they enjoyed the story, they noted two things. First, the casting: the characters looked older than typical college (or university, as we say in Nigeria) students. I agreed that their observation holds true for American campuses today, and mostly even for present-day Nigerian campuses. But that, in 1960s Nigeria, it wasn’t unusual for students to be considerably older.
Their second observation was harder to dispute: the pacing felt slow. On that point, I had no defense.
Tobi Idowu 