Gerd Meuer mit Nobelpreisträger Wole Soyinka
   |||  Contact  | Imprint     

Nobody will go hungry here!

Early 1980 I am embarked upon my hardest job in Africa ever: I am organizing a seven-week African tour by the German pop-jazz group Volker Kriegel: 23 concerts in 11 African countries, with 2 and half tons of equipment and up to 23 people to care for – musicians, technicians and wifes/girl-friends – all new to Africa.
Before the tour, I had told the participants in a three-day seminar that the hardest time would be in Nigeria. But it was also there that the concerts were the most interesting, playing together with Sunny Ade in Lagos and with Sunny Okosun at the university of Ife. Sunny comes late for the concert because of ‘go-slow’ on the Ibadan-Ife road, but the concert is a superb one, lasting late into the night.
And so dinner is also going to be late – if it happens at all... The people in the Senior Service University Club kitchen simply refuse to serve dinner after midnight. But they have no chance, because a ‘young lecturer’ suddenly intervenes, goes to the kitchen himself and gets everybody working, including himself, declaring:
“Nobody is to stay hungry here!”
The ‘commander’ and kitchen-helper was none other than... the ‘man’.