The Dropout Professor
In a world where a university degree is the first sure step to attaining success, a young Nigerian who dropped out of university to pursue his life’s ambition has gained much more. Solomon Elusoji had an encounter with Onyeka Nwelue, whose knowledge is be
The room is small, maybe six feet by six feet. There are seats arranged in rows on the rugged floor. A couple of people are present in the room. A projector is beaming images of a short film – The Beginning of Everything Colourful – across a wall. Onyeka Nwelue, one of the co-creators of the film, and the man premiering the short film to this sparse audience, is seated at a corner, his eyes flicking between the laptop in front of him, and the larger picture on the wall.
That was the first time I met Onyeka Nwelue. A fresh-faced intern reporter roaming the Lagos literary circles for interesting scoops, I had landed at the Committee for Relevant Arts (CORA) headquarters in Surulere, attending a modest gathering of industry stakeholders. Tall, brashly outspoken, Nwelue was conspicuous. It was 2013, and Chimamanda Adichie had just released Americanah. He saw me with a copy of the book, asked for it, flipped through it randomly, weighed it on his palm, and said, more to himself than me, this girl dey try sha.
I didn’t understand what the premiered short film The Beginning of Everything Colourful was all about. All I saw was a man walking across the streets of Paris, smoking, walking into a night-club, and I think there was a scuffle somewhere. My memories of the film are vague. It was too artistic, too abstract for me to relate with it. It was the sort of thing you made in film school for professors to critique.
After the CORA meeting, I did a little research on Nwelue. He is one of those people who, after meeting them for the first time, leave you with a kind of curiosity, a hunger, a need-to-know. I found out he was a University dropout, a celebrated teenage writer. He had gone to India and written a novel The Abyssinian Boy, which had featured in literary awards such as the T.M Aluko Prize for Fiction and the Tahir Ibrahim Prize for First Book. I started to follow him on Facebook; and that was that.
Fast-forward to 2015, and I meet Nwelue, for the second time, at Joy Isi Bewaji’s book reading in Ikoyi. He has grown a beard. He moves with ease, grace. His brash outspokenness is intact. When I walk up to him, to ask for an interview – partly because he had just been announced as an Assistant Professor of African Studies at Manipur University, India, and partly because I thought he was a fascinating subject – he was kind, courteous, almost humble. He handed me his card, and I promised to get in touch the next day.
As always, while working on my questions, I did a background check. Interestingly, on his Wikipedia page, which is one of the most detailed Nigerian profiles I have come across in a while on the site, Nwelue was described as “a Nigerian writer, filmmaker, cultural entrepreneur and professor, described by Channel O as ‘an unalloyed genius’. He divides his time between Paris, France and Puebla, Mexico.”
He had gone on to write two more books, Burnt, and Hip-Hop Is Only For Children.
Burnt is a narrative in verse. According to Wikipedia, “British-Hungarian poet, George Szirtes describes the collection as ‘a breathless series of vignettes, anecdotes and narratives.’ It explores abuse, dogma, tangled relationships and a love for hypnotic cities, and has been translated into Spanish by Venezuelan writer, Alberto Quero. It was also presented at the Poetry Festival of Maracaido.”
Hip-Hop Is Only For Children is “a creative non-fiction book that takes a critical, personal perspective on Nigerian hip-hop culture, as adopted by Nigerians with an American influence. The book, which has taken years to write, focuses on the Golden Age, the Silver Ager, the Bronze Age, the Stone Age, with a heavy concentration on the New Age Generation which includes Davido, Whizkid, Terry G, Oritsefemu, MC Galaxy, Iyanya.”
By the time I came around to contacting Nwelue, he had left Nigeria and was in France. I contacted him on Facebook, and we agreed to conduct the interview via email. I would send him a series of questions, he would respond, and I could ask follow-up questions based on his responses.
“Well, it feels great and I feel somewhat accomplished,” he told me, when I asked him how it felt to hold an Assistant Professorship in an Indian University. “My dream came true.”
His academic journey has been quite chequered. In 2007, Nwelue was admitted into the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, to study Sociology and Anthropology. He didn’t finish the degree. He went on to pursue a diploma in Scriptwriting at the Asian Academy of Film and TV, Noida. After graduating, he lectured at NSS College, Ottapalam, in Kerala, Southern India. He has taught at the University of Lagos as a guest lecturer, and has also taught Screenwriting during the Film-in-a-Box, organised by Africa Film Academy in Lilongwe, Malawi.
In 2014, he was appointed Visiting Lecturer of African Studies at the School of Modern languages and Cultures, Faculty of Arts, at the University of Hong Kong. He then moved to Mexico, where he was invited by Instiuto D’Amicis to teach African Studies and Cinema. His appointment at Manipur as an assistant professor may as well be the zenith of his academic career, yet.
“As a writer, I am a teacher,” he wrote