Title: Doing. Being. Becoming
Author: Rita Ezenwa-Okoro
Publisher: New Degree Press
Year: 2022
Pagination: 138
REVIEWER: Henry Akubuiro
“I like to see myself as the Queen Bee of the youth spaces I curate. I am more of a listener and observer, looking for a perfect opportunity for Zones of Proximal Development and collective teachable moments. My queenly expression happens often during Reflection Sessions: our innovative circle of trust where culture creators perform who they are, who they are not, and who they are becoming through immersive storytelling using various art forms” (p.123).
The above extract from Rita Ezenwa-Okoro’s Doing. Being. Becoming: For the Love of Creative Arts offers a glimpse of what the author is all about and the bent of her offering. The author is not just a high flier but one who spent her youth on profitable ventures and hasn’t relented on her drive for youth development. She has been part of the Nigerian creative industry since she appeared in a Raid TV commercial as a child model. She went on to study Creative Arts at the University of Lagos, graduating as the best student. She has also featured as an actress, performed as a recording artist and in the church for community development.
She was to get a master’s degree in Media and Communications after thriving as a copywriter and creative strategist across advertising agencies in West Africa. She has also been involved in personal NGOS and projects targeted at the youths over the years, including Street Project Foundation, Creative Youth Boot Camp, Digital Amazons, Street University, ARTvocacy, Talent Hub, Project Raw, Project Uplift, Haven Project, and a Smile for December.
This book seeks to establish a connection between creative arts and youth development and, by extension, other fields of human endeavours. It offers the target audience, including students, teachers and the general reader fresh perspectives and practical experiences on how the performing art can be harnessed for agenda setting purposes and radical development globally. It also functions as a semi blueprint for strategic youth organisation and how far they can influence the immediate environment and tackle broad challenges inherent in larger behemoths.
The beginning of the book deliberately reads like a coming of age story of a writer, as she depicts the Festac, Lagos, neighborhood as a young girl growing up in the metropolis. But the author is merely using her personal trajectory as an enticing gambit. Throughout the book, she draws from her repository of experiences as she passes through different stages of life to middle age and how each artistic experience unfurled, incubated and struck a chord with many hearts beyond her environment. It’s not a book valorising the self but a book in validation of the utility of arts, using her own defining moments as a ticket. A portion of the book also dwells on mental health and the arts.
Writing on the Foreword, Lois Holman of East Side Institute, New York, USA, describes the author as a powerhouse with impressive and inspiring accomplishments, but the developmental processes she chronicles in the book are what he considers premium for the reader. What are the developmental processes the book offers as a takeaway? A few examples would be illustrative in the course of this review, but the reader is obliged to find the rest for himself by reading this book written in a free flowing style, laced with relevant quotes culled from relevant authorities.
The first chapter opens with the author’s childhood fascination with books and how they shaped her formative years. Music and dance were also a fascination for her at home. Television programmes, both local and international, broadened her horizons of the outside world. These and others positioned her to be a change agent later in life.
The process of creating her Street Project Foundation, which its idea was nursed in 2002 at a point the National Theatre of Nigeria was comatose and Nollywood was fledgling, and investment in arts as a tool for human development was limited, opened her eyes in the second chapter. Meanwhile, she was enjoying herself with One House Music Unit of the NYSC, which saw her singing and dancing for fun during her national youth service. That experience led to the creation of Street Project Foundation and other groups for evangelism and community development. From Lagos where it set out, the author recollects how Street Project idea was replicated in West Africa and is now a global community that supports with training and mentorship.
The wider meanings of performing arts to the author is outlined in the fourth chapter. The EndSars nationwide protest of 2020 in Nigeria, championed by the youth, says the author, had an elixir of music and performance to it, which underscores the importance of arts to peaceful protests in today’s world. It’s equated to shining the light.
The author echoes in the fifth chapter that we need many community based interventions to liberate ourselves from poverty, which is widespread in Africa. In the sixth chapter, she focuses attention on community organising for strategic goals and changing the status quo. With the success recorded at the EndSars protests, the author gives a thumbs up for active citizenship and political participation by the millenials. In the seventh chapter, the reader is made to follow the endless organisational capacity of the author in the Queen Bee Project where the young and adults operate by providing a blow by blow account of proceedings as a youth development practitioner. Though the process takes time to achieve worthy results, the profits are marginal, as we find in the eight chapter where she offers important steps to follow to make a social difference. The importance of poetic healing and arts in mental health echo in the ninth chapter. We also get to appreciate her role in the mental health awareness drive here. This book is a goldmine for the creative industries and youth development. Read it.