Nigerian producer, TV show host, and media mogul Mo Abudu has expressed her gratitude to Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka for granting her the rights to adapt his play Death and the King’s Horseman to film.
Abudu also recalled their first meeting and how she came to acquire the rights to coproduce Wole Soyinka’s work with Netflix.
In the Instagram post, she said, “I mentioned a few weeks ago, that Professor Wole Soyinka was my very first ever interview when I started my talk show, Moments with Mo in 2006.”
“Many years later after my journey into TV and Film, it occurred to me that I wanted to produce IP related projects. So again I reached out to Prof. I made my request to acquire the rights to Death and the King’s Horseman.”
According to her, the acquisition was “a daunting task”; because of the gravity of his work, it “took a considerable amount of time getting to closure”.
“Now 5 years later I have the opportunity to produce this incredible piece of work in partnership with Netflix. I could not be more pleased. God is truly awesome,” Abudu wrote.
Abudu thanked Soyinka for “trusting [her] and giving [her] the opportunity to produce such a historical piece of our literature.
Wole Soyinka, in turn, commended Mo Abudu in a press statement he issued yesterday. He said, “In a creative industry which, even in pioneering countries, is so male-dominated; it is always a delight to see robust challenges offered by the female gender, and of attestable quality.”
“Mo Abudu’s incursion into this arena as film and television producer has been especially stimulating. It becomes part of one’s sense of achievement if one has contributed, however minutely, to the creation of an enabling environment.”
