By Okoh Aihe
It was RMD’s birthday yesterday. He was 60. And the Lagos crowd serenaded him with a programme, TIMELESS Experience with RMD @ 60. When he invited me last year to do a material that could be published in his book, having known him from the University days, nobody expected the day would come upon us all with so much speed. Yesterday, it came with all its colours.
When we spoke a couple of weeks ago, he was on his way to South Africa to do a shoot for Netflix. I could just feel that resonating excitement in the voice of a guy enjoying the trade he has fully donated himself to. That was a couple of weeks ago. Since then he has been to Miami and back to Nigeria. That kind of movement reminds of Gary Busey, the American actor, who once said he flies from location to location and calculate his money in between flights.
But I stumbled on a material I had written on RMD in 2004 on the occasion of his birthday. It evoked certain things in me not only because of the raw innocence of expression but also because in 2004, Netflix was just seven years old!
Netflix is an Over-the-Top (OTT) company. One of those companies whose operations are embedded in the infrastructure of other companies in order to create value and wealth. Just like Twitter. Just like Zoom among others. And we are quarreling with OTT companies mainly because of our inability to understand the movement of technology in history and in the life of a nation.
In 2004, Netflix wasn’t in Nigeria because our telecommunications sector was only trying to rev into life from the sheer magic of Engr. Ernest Ndukwe and his team at the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC). At that time content was already king but our legacy technology hid that from a creative group that labored under the weight of analogue technology.
But just one other thing, RMD feared he couldn’t live up to 60 because he parents never did, just like Ted Turner, founder of CNN, feared he would not live up to 35 because of the way his father committed suicide when he was only 24. Or a Raymond Dokpesi, founder of Raypower and AIT, feared he won’t live up to 35 because of an ailment that blighted his childhood. All three of them lived to sow hope in reality. I ended the 2004 material with some hope that RMD would be celebrated someday. What a prognostication! The material is reproduced below but the most important lesson for me is for the country to unshackle modern technology and let us enjoy the advantages and, perhaps, a little bit of its disadvantages.
RMD: The Performer and his trade
RMD. That coinage sounds poetic now. It rolls in the mouth of the female folk like a kind of aphrodisiac, like some wine warming its way down the throat and giving a kind of feeling that transports one beyond the imagination of dreams.
RMD. He is the kind of magazine cover that people dream about. The tall, ebony carved out personality with the dimples that make him look very innocent. He even carries with him what in the Kirk Douglas family – remember Michael Douglas – they call a curse. That very little cleft that marks off the lower end of the jaw.
RMD. He is a character made in heaven. Those who met him in Lagos claim they met him at the peak of his career where he has everything going for him. So the man they know is city’s man, the guy who creates excitement with any character and entertains people with his roles even to the point of tears. That is RMD, the man who can do no bad, the straight personality without any foibles.
But those who knew Richard Mofe Damijo, for that is his full name, in Benin can tell his story. At the University of Benin (UNIBEN) where he read Theatre Arts, RMD was just the regular guy but there was always something different about him: a rare ordinariness and capacity for work and dedication to service. He was flashy but brilliant, so brilliant that in his set he made one of the best results.
City folks see RMD as the modern man, the perfect illustration of designer wares. RMD always wanted the good things of life and this perhaps challenged him to develop an insatiable capacity for work. Although grades were illustrated with A-s and B+-s then, the practical aspects of Theatre Arts couldn’t be hidden in any school, and so it was in Benin.
Those who saw RMD in Ola Rotimi’s Kurunmi and JP Clark’s Ozzidi would testify that he has always had his eyes set for the top. Playing the eponymous characters in these productions, RMD applied extra strength and ability to deliver roles most performers wouldn’t want to touch with a long pole. Kurunmi was so successful that it was taken to Togo for a one-week performance. That was when the magic of that production came to light; the palpable electricity generated by his performance in each production, with John Nwaobi as the antagonist in Ogunmola, elicited endless cheers from audiences that spoke little or no English.
When I see RMD, I see the past. I see the history of a young man struggling all the way towards achieving perfection. Whether it was in Classique Magazine or MR. or as a performer in Who is Afraid of Solarin? RMD has always been a perfectionist and the zenith, for me, was registered with his star-dust performance in Violated. At the premiere that evening at Muson Centre, recovering from a stroke of tragedy which we all shared with him, when RMD emerged on stage for a re-introduction into a community that had always adored his performances, the audience rose to salute the performance of a genius.
RMD is a playboy and the perfect executioner of romantic roles, so you wouldn’t know he is a genius? He is one!
But for me the very importance of RMD is not in his histrionics but in the very fact that he is one of the very few that have displayed the true face and discipline of professionalism. The movie industry is brimming with all kinds of charlatans and wayfarers who are in a hurry to show the superficial and ephemeral wealth of a new dawn. But RMD remains one of the very few who represent the industry well and point the direction it should go.
The celebrations now, for me, present more than an occasion to have fun and enjoy the good things of life. We celebrate a man who constitutes the purity of a profession, a man who has refused to be adulterated by the waka-pass syndrome but instead, has remained a paradigm platform, providing a kind of legacy in performances, which posterity ought to actually study, if we lived in a country where heroism is respected and achievement celebrated. Perhaps, this may yet happen as the future unfolds.
Okoh Aihe, Lagos, 23/06/2004
