Gathering the Scattered Pieces: A Conversation with Akin Omotoso

The career of actor/writer/director Akin Omotoso is a case study in cultural translation. The child of a Barbadian mother and a Nigerian father, he had lived in both places before being uprooted again to go to South Africa, where he now lives. In South Africa, he not only had to come to terms with the reality of a place he knew only through the rhetoric of resistance to apartheid, but he also had to negotiate western classical theater after being brought up on indigenous Yoruba dramatic forms. Furthermore, he had to learn to see himself, not as a native, but as makwerekwere, an outsider, a foreigner on his own continent. His background and experience inform his work as director and writer, both highly attuned to different cultural contexts and capable of seeing with an outsider's eye, mixing humor and respect for his subjects.