Taiwo Ajayi- Lycett has an impressive resume of film work under her belt, with a big screen career spanning more than fifty years. Though she had a child when she was just a teenager, she did not allow that to deter her resolve to struggle to become a phenomenon that she is today.
In this interview with media personality, Temitope Duker’s SERENADE WITH BOSSLADY on FAD FM, Calabar, the 79-yar-old thespian and former journalist, reflected on her journey to acting and the mantra that has served her a long-lasting career. eelive.ng brings your excerpts.
At what point did you decide to go into acting either on stage or on screen? What led to that?
I am what I call an accident lector and I am a thespian by anointing. There was not a time in my life that I thought I would be on stage. It never crossed my mind.
I was met by a director while I was sitting at Royal Court Theatre in London and he asked if I was an actor; but I was a British civil servant at the time. My holidays were coming and I thought I should venture into theatre.
At that time, every time I took my holiday for like six weeks I did one course or the other so I thought this would be a good adventure for it. I was never free on holidays; I used to learn something new. My programme for that year was to join the group and try acting; it never occurred to me at all that I would be an actor. I thought I would be a lawyer, but I started and it took off.
The first time I saw you on screen was on the sitcom Some Mothers ‘Ave’ ‘Em and it was amazing to see a black woman acting in an all-white sitcom. It was also elating to find out that she is Nigerian, how did it feel being on that sitcom?
You know when you’re working as a professional, you’re just working. It was later that I found out that people were really taken by the fact that I am an African. I am an Africanist, myself and ideologically rooted in Africanism and I don’t intend to be changed by anybody.
So it never occurred to me that I was different. I was an actor and meritocracy worked over there. If a producer liked what you were doing, it didn’t matter whether you had yellow or green eyes or what your skin colour is; they called it racially nutro roles later on, so people just employed me like that.
Somebody once asked how I feel being a trailblazer, it never occurred to me that I was, I was just a jobbing actor and I liked the challenge of working as an actor.
Was that your first time of being on screen?
No, I had done other jobs. I used to do a lot of TV roles with BBC in those days. There was a particularly successful sitcom, titled Crown Court, it is still very popular.
I still earned residuals from that for over 45 years on because it travelled far and wide. That episode of mine was the most successful of the whole series; it was played on cruise ships and airlines. The widest I have heard was it being played in Papua, New Guinea. It has travelled over the world; it deservedly ought to be praised for being such a high profile production. I am proud of that particular episode of mine; it earned me good money over the years.
Considering the fact that you did not plan to be an actor, at what point did you decide you were going head in?
It was my husband, Tom Lycett, but we were not yet married back then. He came to see me in a show at the Dublin international festival, the play was about the murder of Patrice Émery Lumumba, the first prime minister of Congo. He was murdered and I was playing the role of his wife at the festival.
When they came to tell me that my husband (in the play) had died, I didn’t have a line in the play but I asked the director if I could do a dirge for him, a wake keeping. The Irish are a little bit like us culturally, they would have wakes for their dead and they agreed I could have the dirge so I did. It was something I heard while I was growing up in Lagos. Some travelling players used to rehearse in the next compound to us which affected me tremendously.
It was about this old warrior who had taken off and this woman was lamenting his absence. When war broke out in the society, this woman was calling on the man to come and rescue us, so I broke into this song. My then fiancée, Tom Lycett at night after the show said that I was going to have to give up my civil servant work. He said that I was an actor and I shouldn’t just be dabbling into acting, that when I got on stage, you could hear when a pin dropped. He said the audience was so engrossed and he thought that I held the show.
The following day the headlines were about this woman lamenting the death of her husband. I was the toast of Dublin city for the run of the festival, I was opening motherless babies home, I was pulling pants at the pub, and it was incredible.
It’s interesting that you still went on stage after you lost your ex-husband, where did you draw strength from? What made you feel you could still go on stage and perform well?
That is the point, my husband, Tom Lycett felt that a stage should be a scene for advocacy. A scene where you work for people not people working for you, you think about the people, you bring ideas to the people, you communicate, and you are a conduit of good ideas.
He was dedicated to my career and what he thought I was. He felt I was the best thing since sliced bread actually and he thought there was nothing I couldn’t do. And I knew that since I knew that leaving this world is not about us as individuals but as collectives. You don’t think about yourself, however how difficult things are. You think about the people around you, that’s my mantra of my life. When you give to others, they will support you, hold you up. You shouldn’t ever be thinking about yourself.
Since that was how we lived, because this man left his job when I decided that I was going to come to Nigeria. Well he asked me to come to Nigeria; he said that I was doing such great work in England, that England didn’t need me. He told me that my people ought to know and see what I was doing. This is a man who is so dedicated to my presence and to my people in Nigeria. It didn’t even cross my mind that I should go back home.
There are so many cliché to feminism, like women not having husbands. As a feminist, can you give us a clear cut of you as a feminist and what people think feminism is about right now?
All the clichés are made up of ignorance of what feminism is about. It doesn’t say you shouldn’t have a man or marry, feminists realise that it takes two to make a family.
True feminists are not saying it takes only a woman, those are demented. It is a misunderstanding of what it stands for and a lot of that is going on in Nigeria.
People will take hold of any idea of which they know very little or don’t have a conclusion about and do whatever they wish to do with it. We invest in that idea with our own perception.
Feminism is talking about having a man but the minute he is gone, he is saying, ‘you must take care of the children, take them to school’. The children don’t even see him very much because he is running around chasing his tail. All his life is revolved around trying to make a life for you and he doesn’t want you to be making the same money he is making because you are a second class citizen.
But that is detrimental to his own health and wellbeing. So you begin to wonder that after a while our men can’t get it together any longer because they are worn out and the women look for other ways to get things going.
The man works himself to the bone and before you know what, he is dead, and if he is unlucky and not dead young, his children will leave home, travel abroad to start a family, and guess who the children will call to come and join them, their mother. The old father is left at home; he doesn’t know his children after working his back side out for them all his life.
Then he ends up alone and disenfranchised from his family, they don’t know him very well, they don’t talk to him, and they only talk to their mother. So the feminist are saying, why should my man work so hard and at the time we should be enjoying ourselves, he dies young. They are giving some responsibilities to the woman, let her use her talent as well. But our women are taking hold of that and saying ‘I don’t need a man, I am making my own money’, so they break up their homes and their children end up without a father.
That’s not what feminism is saying well. It is an erroneous perception of what feminism is about. Children need to grow up with a man’s influence in their lives. This perception of ‘I can raise my children myself’ is rubbish; it is ignorance on the part of women. No person man or woman needs to be alone; it is about a man and woman in partnership.
A good woman is the best support any man could have. You shoot yourself in the foot when you say your wife, no matter how she is, has nothing to offer. Look at what they are doing in our legislation how many women do you have? The men won’t even let them talk. Show me a wife and I will tell you what type of man her husband is.
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Let talk about growing up for you, you are a twin, what about your sister?
My sister has been dead for 32 years now. We both grew up in Port Harcourt and Lagos, we are true Nigerians. I didn’t understand Yoruba till I was about ten. That was when I came to Lagos, and I started school.
I went to Methodist Girls High School. My twin sister and eldest sister went to Holy Child College. We were Catholics. In my time, there was a great educational system. I taught at St. Paul’s Catholic School before I went to England and started as a typist with the civil service till I rose to the chairman’s office as a secretary. The civil service trained me.
When I first got to England, I was a waitress clearing tables and washing dishes. England was different in those days, which was just after independence.
When you were about 15, you had a child and it is believed that once you have a child out of wedlock or as a teenager, it affects your growth and progress in life, what saw you through those moments? What was your support system and how did you pull through?
Our destiny as they say is in our hands. I don’t know why people should think because they are teenage mothers; it is the end of the world. Their future is ahead of them, I knew my future was ahead of me. I stumbled but I knew I wanted an education. I am a self-made woman and I gave myself an education to the highest level I could attain, I decided that having done that I was going to have the best education.
Did you have a support system?
No, I worked myself up. I started as a waitress in England. I used to finish at 3pm, and I bought myself a type writer. So I started teaching myself how to type. I saw an advert and I applied, they said they would send me to school and that was it.
You need to make your own fortune and once you are in the right place at the right time, you will meet the best people who would give you the best opportunities for you to succeed. But if you are sitting around, waiting for somebody to live your life for you, to do things for you, forget it.
Yes, I made a mistake, but I picked myself up and ran. I didn’t except anybody to do anything for me. Nobody owes you anything in this world. You have to make your life as you want it to be and the only thing I tell people is you are at the end of the day, the sum total of the choices you made. If when you get pregnant early, there is somebody who waves money at you to go to bed with them, then you are going to get what you are looking for but if you have an ambition for yourself you’ll make it.
