By Damiete Braide
At At the recently concluded 2023 edition of Lagos Book and Art Festival (LABAF), dubbed Africa’s largest culture picnic, US-based Nigerian author, Cash Akinyemi Onadele, aka Aiyeko-Ooto, held a two-day mentorship session, with undergraduate students of the Creative Arts Department, University of Lagos on the first day at Kongi’s Harvest Gallery, Freedom Park, Lagos.
•Cash Onadele addressing children during the book fair
On the second day, Onadele continued his mentorship programme with pupils drawn from some public primary schools.
The prolific writer engaged the youths on the value of literature while unveiling an endowment for literature prizes in Yoruba and English languages. It was a rich, educative, and inspiring experience for participating students, as Onadele also shared his experience as a writer even though he has a BSc. and MSc. in Agronomy
The author has written over 109 works spanning several creative genres. In 2019, he wrote Enigewo Memoir, his biological tale and that same year, a four-part ethnographic fiction drama play collectively entitled Blood of Freedom. Additional works that followed include 53 children and young adult stories, screenplays, novels, novellas, short stories, and collections of novellas and stories.
Significantly, before the fiction were 52 anthologies of poetry he famously cataloged as Odo-Alamo Series.
A prolific writer and undoubtedly a culture-aware philosopher, poet, and playwright, Aiyeko-Ooto has a passion for mentoring young aspiring writers – playwrights, poets, and novelists.
Onadele, who also has a background in Artificial Intelligence (AI), recalls how being exposed to books by renowned Nigerian author of Yorùbá heritage who pioneered the Yorùbá language novel, Chief Daniel Olorunfẹmi Fágúnwa, popularly known as D. O. Fágúnwà, at an early age inspired his interest in writing. For him, the Yoruba native brings an indigenous voice to storytelling.
According to Onadele, who has built the world’s largest library of individual poetry work produced by any single author, there is a humble beginning to anything we mark as successful.
“From age three, I was on my grandmother’s lap listening to my grandfather tell tales every evening. People come and drink palm wine, and he entertains them and tells tales. And his local nickname was ‘Asoro muto olorunpelu’, meaning, he is someone who shares wisdom that is given by the deity. So, I did that but I went to school, Loyola College, Ibadan. I read a lot of D. O. Fahunwa’s books, and I like the characters of Kako, Efuye, and others. D. O. Fagunwa built characters that were memorable. I picked those from the Yoruba literature, and I was interested in that until I got to form three in secondary school, and English literature and Yoruba literature became too hard, because I started realising that there is no formula. In creativity, you need the muse, you need inspiration, and discipline, which you must harmonise to tell an emotional story.
“And I just didn’t think I have the breadth for it. So, I left the literature world and embraced science. I have Bsc. and MSc. in agronomy from the University of Ibadan; and then did an MBA at the University of Nottingham, UK, and also did Artificial Intelligence work for British Gas as an architect. And I have done that for a long time. In 2014, I decided to come back to Nigeria, and I was in Nigeria when I started getting the inspiration to write poems. And I did not write any prose book until 2018,” he recalled.
Why he chose to study Agronomy despite his early exposure to Yoruba literature, he said: “The man that told the stories was a farmer, and I guess I liked the life my grandfather lived, I said to myself, that’s what I’ll be. I’ll be a big farmer, but I’ll be an educated big farmer. He lived a very simple life; he had a cash crops farm which is about five miles from the house; he had the arable crops which are the horticulture, and which the vegetables were. And he farmed the other side for yam, maize, and beans. My grandmother harvested everything she sold from there. They didn’t plant palm trees as a plantation in those days, you just interlaced it with your big farm. So, my grandmother made red oil from that. The vegetables we eat in the house come from the swampy part of his land. So, everything seems to be complete in the echo system. And my father drank palm wine out of the palm trees there. I thought that this was idealist, but I’ll do it in a more modern way, so, I studied agronomy. And I rose to the Operations and Farm Manager position for IITA, at 27.”
“I am discussing the possibility of weekend masterclasses in Nigeria in the new year,” he continued. “We need to harmonise the relationship with the university that is interested in a university that has a masters programme in creative art and also vetting the curriculum, as well as additional faculty. There will be a business element. I could teach the technical part while others can teach how you market your books in Nigeria. I won’t be a specialist in that. But, initially, we can start with the technical part.”