She was the Pioneer Director of the General Studies Programme, GST Unit, Federal University , Ndufu-Alike, Ikwo which is an arm of the Vice- Chancellor’s office.
What caused her death and how she died was not immediately available and could not be ascertained as at press time but the Monarch Igwe Ekwueme himself alluded to that during a brief chat with our reporter.
‘’I am not in the mood now because I lost my wife………………………’’ ? Exclusive to Odogwu Media
Details later
Below is a previous interview by Igwe as interest diversion
This is stranger than fiction and it happens only in the Oko Kingdom of Anambra State where erudite scholar, a professor of music, actor and former student of the famous Government College, Umuahia, Abia State, Laz Ekwueme is Igwe, (King of Oko Kingdom) that the King and his entire kingdom will stand up for a titled chief. And if you think this is a lie, hear it from the horse’s mouth.
Can you tell us when you last did it?
When I did what last? Be specific so that I can answer specifically.
When was the last time you had sex with a woman?
Oh, I think I need two weeks to think about it so that I can remember the correct answer. Ask me the question in two weeks time and I will give you the answer.
But are you still capable of doing it?
The taste of the pudding is in the eating. There is a bedroom nearby. We can try it out.
You are a composer, an actor, a teacher and a traditional ruler. How do you combine all these?
That is a very serious problem I have had to live with in the last 72 years. I am a man of multiple interests. I am so diverse. I have more or less done everything to the point that it was so difficult to choose a career. The career I eventually find myself in was at happenstance.
I had interest in very many things right from my childhood. I had flair for singing, music, mathematics, English, tradition. I had diverse interests. At school, Government College Umuahia, I had interest in the arts as well as in the sciences.
Back then in school, we were fortunate to have very good teachers. A balanced education meant that you studied virtually everything, including religious studies and carpentry. But you took school certificate exams in subjects at that time- four arts subjects and four science subjects. You could then choose your career in either the arts or sciences.
Most of my mates got into the sciences anyway. Only a few went into the arts.
My high school. I was good in drama at Umuahia. I could also play games a lot. Everybody had to play every game. Some of us even went into boxing. I was a captain of the boxing team. I almost went professional in boxing. Later, I changed from boxing to Karate.
I have a black belt in Karate but at 73, it would be foolhardy for me to break tables with my fists now at this age.
But this is to show you the diversity of my interests. It was difficult for me to choose a career and having no money made it more difficult.
My English master, P. J. Johnson, wanted me to read English. He told me to go to St John’s College in Kaduna to help him teach and establish the school in the way of Government College Umuahia.
My mathematics teacher wanted me to do Engineering. My principal felt I should be a writer because I wrote for the school magazines.
Of all these, I was at a loss to choose a career. I didn’t have money to go abroad at that time. So, I worked in Enugu. I followed my principal’s advice rather than that of my Maths or English teacher. But then, we had what we called festival of arts.
The festivals were held in regional centres like Enugu, Ibadan, Zaria. I was good in writing, music and drama and painting. You could take examinations in music but you couldn’t take examinations in theatre. I took examination in music and I won a federal government scholarship to study music. That was how I left the country.
Were your parents able to support your education abroad?
They couldn’t. In fact, they couldn’t afford to take me to Government College, Umuahia. If I hadn’t gone to that school, I would not have been able to go to any secondary school.
So, how did you go to Umuahia?
Don’t think I am being self-centred or that I’m blowing my own trumpet. But at the time we went to Umuahia, you had to be very brilliant and lucky. I say that because it is the truth. My primary school headmaster, the late R. O. Iwuagwu, was a very good man.
He prepared 12 of us to go to different secondary schools. Umuahia was the first entrance examination. The first test was on mental arithmetic. It was used as an elimination process. If you didn’t score up to a certain point in that arithmetic, they wouldn’t bother to mark your other papers. We did test in English, Mathematics and general knowledge.
Average students could do well in English and general knowledge but not in mathematics. Out of those of us that went for the entrance from Ekwulobia Primary School, two of us were just the ones taken finally. That was why I said luck had to do with your being accepted in Umuahia. One mistake, you are out.
At Umuahia, we had three square meals a day. We had soap. We had iron to iron clothes. If I hadn’t got scholarship to Umuahia, I wouldn’t have got any education.
Many of us became doctors, engineers and a few went into the arts. Umuahia has produced great number of writers like Chinua Achebe, Gabriel Okara, Saro-Wiwa. But many of them didn’t go into the arts. Chinua went to study medicine. I gave up medicine because the smell of formalin makes me throw up.
When I started my music, I didn’t leave drama. I continued studying drama in England. I also studied languages because I found out that it was necessary for music studies at the degree level. I had to do a language course in Italian and German.
So, how many languages do you speak?
English and Igbo very well. German and Italian, fairly well. A little Yourba here, a little Efik there. I am just trying to explain the diverse interests that made me go into different things.
While I was in England, I did a lot of acting and I did a lot of modelling too. People thought I was good looking when I was young. If you go for 10 casting sessions and you were chosen in all sessions, you didn’t need a priest to tell you that you are good looking. I did a lot of modelling and advertising in England.
I was very much also into religion. I was a Lay Reader of the Anglican Church at the age of 20. Despite my sins and all, I was chaste and pure until at I was at least 24.
I had too many interests and that may have obscured my choice of a career. I thank God that things happened that way, otherwise, I would have ended up as an engineer which I didn’t like. I would have been a very unhappy engineer.
Why did you return to Nigeria after your studies abroad?
That’s a million dollar question. When I was studying in England, I was always analysing and thinking- ‘ah, this will work in my home, this will not’. I believed that when I came back, I’d be the authority in music. Very few people had degree in music. I have been very lucky to have had the best of education and having the best teachers in the world. All the shortcomings were of my own making. God has given me opportunities that are so rare.
One has to be realistic. You may be a good conductor but you can’t imagine the London Orchestra being conducted by a black man at that time. I had to come home. There wasn’t even a question of not coming home. I came back to University of Nigeria, Nsukka as a lecture.
I then got another scholarship to go and do a Ph. D at Yale, which obviously is America’s number one University, though some may say Harvard.
The temptation might have come for me to stay back in the US, especially during the war in Nigeria. I was there in the US from 1966 to 1969. That was the peak of Nigerian civil war. But then, go east go west, home is still th best, particularly in 1974 when there was plan to hold FESTAC 75. Prof Ade Ajayi had this vision of making UNILAG the best University in Africa.
He invited the best scholars in different parts of the world to come home. I had been in America for eight years and I felt it was time go home. The war had finished in 1970 so I came back in 1974. FESTAC was moved to 1977 and I played my part.
How did you adapt on coming home to teach?
I was the second person in Nigeria to hold a bachelors degree in music in Nigeria. Two other people had a bachelor of arts in music which was not quite the same as a Bachelor in music. Coming back to teach at Nsukka then, I was just a young Nigerian who was coming back from England to teach in a Nigerian university.
I was happy to do so and I was young and exuberant. I mingled with the students. I founded the University of Nigeria Choral Society. We became a vibrant department. UNN was the first to introduce music as a subject in the University and I was one of the pioneer teachers. It was challenging but I enjoyed it.
Your parents backed your study of music?
My father died when I was six and I had three brothers. The first one entered Ibadan when I entered Umuahia. He died early.
He didn’t marry before he died. My second brother went to King’s College. He was the best student in his class, did school certificate under the age of 17. He read architecture. He was the first Vice- President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, Dr. Alex Ekwueme. My younger brother had the best West African result in higher school. UAC gave him a scholarship to read medicine at Ibadan.
My mother was a teacher. She didn’t have much say in whether we went to King’s College or GCU. There was nobody to tell us what to do or not. If you have a federal government scholarship to go and study music abroad, who is there to say you should not go? Will the person pay for you?
My elder brother had gone to America and returned before I went to England. He had no qualms in what I was doing. He was even the one that advised me to go to Yale and not Harvard for my Ph. D.
How did you cope without a father figure in the house?
We all gave our mother big stress. Boys will always be boys. My mother used to tell us, ‘All these problems you are giving me, your children will give you more’. But my mother was a fantastic woman. She didn’t spare the rod. If I tell you things we went through, you will not believe it. We had uncles who helped us but I tell you, we had a difficult childhood and we worked for it.
There was hardly any term in my primary school that I was not sent away for school fees. We would crack palm kernels to sell and use the money to pay our school fees. It was not easy. It was just God that saw us through. My mother was a widow for 50 years before she passed on at the age of 84. We can’t stop being grateful to God.
You didn’t marry a white woman?
That is a very difficult question to answer. The relationship one gets in one’s youth with people one lived with may vary from individual to individual. In England, many Nigerians were not very happy. The standard of living in England was not very high.
Many of the homes were not heated. You come back home from school and you use a paraffin fire heater in your house. You face would be burning and your back would be freezing. Many could not afford to live in centrally heated houses and many of our people were not so well-to-do as to mingle with the upper class of the whites.
But if you were happy in England as I believe I was, you do mix freely with the best of the society. You date white and black girls. It would be tempting to marry one of them but if you have come from a fairly good home, even if you are not rich, you will know that it will not be convenient for you to bring a white woman home under the circumstances of our society.
We found that many of those marriages didn’t quite work. An average white woman would look very beautiful in her teens but once they clock 35, they age more rapidly. An African woman will keep looking beautiful even in her 60s.
Now, I didn’t go straight from Umuahia to England. I worked for some time. And even before I left for England, I had friends who were white and I interacted with a lot with them when I went to England. But before I went to England, I had got engaged to a Nigerian. She was my first love and nothing could distract me from marrying her.
The question of marrying a white woman did not arise. It was not as if I wasn’t tempted but I learnt self discipline in Umuahia. I practiced absolute honesty, absolute purity, absolute love and even the most difficult, absolute unselfishness. I had this self discipline and I could control myself. I never smoked or drank alcoholic beverages because I wanted to be sober at all times. Even when I am committing a sin, I know that I’m not under any influences.
I could switch off anything.
I could switch off women and even acting. I have this self discipline which I try to maintain till date. It doesn’t mean that I’m not human. I’m fallible. I don’t believe in the infallibility of anybody, not even the Pope.
Did you say you lost your virginity at the age of 24?
I didn’t say that. I said I was chaste and pure at least until the age of 24.
Tell us how you met your first love.
You must remember that I’m 73 and memory fades. Everything cannot be as exact as it might have been then. The girl I was engaged to was my godfather’s daughter. We grew up together. She was eight years younger and she was an innocent and beautiful girl. We had same characters and we were naturally attracted to each other. I was in England and she was in Nigeria.
In 1966, there was a war and I was in England. For about nine years, we weren’t together. By the times we came together, things had changed. Many waters had passed under the bridge on both sides. Things didn’t work out as we thought it would have.
So you eventually married someone else?
Yes.
As a traditional ruler, it is allowed for you to take more than one wife…
It is not allowed but it is said to be allowed. If you are not a Christian, you can take more than one wife if you can afford it.
I’m a traditional ruler that can’t afford one wife not to talk of another one. I have enough headaches trying to maintain one wife and three children. I keep saying this but people don’t believe me. I don’t have girlfriends. There are three things that a Nigerian girl needs absolutely and those are the three things I lack absolutely. Therefore the two ends shall never meet.
And what are the three things?
The first thing is money in surplus. If you have money, then you can use it to pay for the other two things.
The other things are time. You have to have the time to be doing nonsense. You also have to have patience. You need to have patience to wait for her at the salon and spend two hours waiting while she plaits her silly hair with a lot of bought and burnt materials.
You have to have patience to watch her paint her finger nails, take her to a shop and watch her try one shoe for two hours. I don’t have that kind of patience. With all my interests as I told you already, I don’t have the time to chat over nothing.
Since you said you are very religious…
(Cuts in) I didn’t say I was very religious. I try to be. I don’t believe in all these shoutings from the rooftop. All that is pretence. God knows those who worship him. You see, people hang crosses and bible messages on their cars and yet when you overtake them, you see what comes out of their mouths.
I don’t believe in unnecessary religiosity. Love and do unto your neigbours as you want them to do to you. Pay your tithes but if you see your neighbour who has not eaten, give him food. I believe in practical religion.
They say for you to be a king, you must appease the gods. Did you get to do that?
What are gods? When an African religion practitioner erects a shrine in the name of his forefathers and puts a statue there and he comes to pour libation and make sacrifices there. What is he thinking of? Is it not that he is just using it as a symbol to reach the Almighty God. I believe that is his intention. Since he cannot see God, he has a visible, tangible token which represents for him the unseen God. He is not worshipping the idol. He is worshipping God but using idol as a symbol.
Somebody wrote a book and at one point in it made a comparison between a traditional worshipper with the Christian worshipper. She drew a man wearing leaves or raffia on his body, standing in front of a shrine singing incantation in one language and killing a goat or chicken and sprinkling the blood on the shrine and hoping that by heathen performance, he will get atonement with his gods. But to contrast it, she drew a man wearing a white cassock.
He stands in front of an altar of marble or wood. He doesn’t sing incantations. But he sings in Latin. But he breaks bread, which he purports to be the body of his saviour.
He pours wine, which he purports to be the blood of his saviour and he believes that with these rituals, he can get atonement with his God. What is the difference between the two men?
I know God to the best of my knowledge and I know what he has done in my life and that of my family. I need a priest to guide me.
 I don’t play God. My grandfather was not a Christian but I believe he is in heaven. When Christianity came to my village and they approached him to send his children to Church, he considered it a good baby-sitting thing. So, he sent his younger children. He didn’t bother to send the older ones who used to go to the farm with him.
God has done wonders in my family. I can’t stand illiterates who claim the holy spirt has inspired them and they talk rubbish in bad language. I don’t ascribe to that.
To come to your question, I didn’t have to go through any ritual other than the Christianity
 I know. When I was coroneted, there was a Bishop there, and an Archdeacon. People from different churches were there. But there was the head of the Ozo. I took Ozo title. If there is anything against Christianity in the Ozo title, remove it and take the title. If there is anything wrong in masquerading, remove it and continue the festival.
It is a sport and a culture of the people. No traditional ruler in my town has to go through any pagan rites to be made an Igwe or Oba.
I know some people believe that you have to eat some parts of the late Oba to become Oba but we didn’t go through that. Having an Ozo title is not a pagan thing, it is a traditional thing. But some so called sanctimonious Christians think that you have sinned if you take an Ozo title. I didn’t eat anybody’s organ and nobody will eat mine.
Do you still act?
Yes, I do. I play Igwe roles and I have played many other roles. I act but recently, they have not been paying me well enough to act. People like to buy you cheap. Though I am not a proud man, people think I am an arrogant bastard who thinks the world should fall at his feet because he has a degree in music.
But people confuse arrogance with pride. People confuse self-confidence with pride. When you do what you know how to do well with confidence, they say you are proud. They want to pay me peanuts and I say to them, where do you see any Ph.D holder on this screen?
 Where do you see a professor on the screen? Where do you see a real Igwe on the screen?
Yet, you are prepared to pay midgets millions. I know they are good. I like them and they are my friends but the Nollywood has suffered misfortune of being piloted by marketers who are traders. They are not interested in the quality of speech. They are not interested in the nuances of interpretation and they don’t notice the difference between this man and that man.
Some others play politics. Once they ask for me, they tell the people that Prof Ekwueme is so busy and you can’t get him. They are intimidated. They are in apparent competition with me and they want to take the small money since acting is the only thing they do.
As an Igwe, does your elder brother and former Vice- President, Alex Ekwueme prostrate to you?
My niece got married recently and somebody asked me if my brother would stand up when I arrive in town. I explained this way. He would have been theIgwe but he felt and I agree with him, that he would be more useful to the town not being the Igwe.
There was no need for him to be tied down. Moreover, as at the time my uncle died, he was still in politics vying for the presidency of Nigeria. Because he couldn’t be the Igwe, the town decided that they would accept whoever he nominated to be the Igwe. It fell on me. I wasn’t prepared for it but if I didn’t accept it, the throne would have left my family. But the constitution has been amended now. The Igweship will be rotated from now on.
Anyway, asking if he would stand up for me…In Oko, Anambra State, everybody stands up when the Igwe comes. But when the Ide comes (and he is my brother), everybody, including the Igwe, stands up for him. If he enters, I and everybody stand up for him.
What kind of relationship did you have when you were growing up?
Because we went through a difficult childhood, we have been a very close knit family. We are very close. Hardly will you see any family that is as close as we are. I thank God for that.
What do you miss as a teacher?
I have many things in my head I need to put down on paper but I don’t have time for it because I am called upon every time. After 38 years of teaching, my pension is only about 80, 000 Naira a month. It doesn’t last one week. Our governor does not pay traditional rulers much. We are paid N75, 000 a month. I have to find a means of surviving.
As to what I miss… I miss much, yet nothing. We don’t have quality students any longer. We have many illiterate graduates and it upsets me. I am finicky in my demands
By Ogbonna Amadi , Entertainment Editor since 2009
Tension in Oko over death of Igwe Laz Ekwueme’s wife
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Wednesday, November 25, 2015
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