“Isn’t this the new OSCAR?”
For a change Wole will be reading early at 11 a.m. in the ‘Culture Barn’ in Holzhausen in the idyllic Lippe region of Northern Germany. The evening before we have dinner in garden of the very feudal ‘Park Hotel’.
With us is Patrice Nganang, the young Camerounian novelist with whom I had earlier been on a lecture tour through several German cities. After which he was supposed to fly back to the US where he has been teaching... German for several years. But when I tell him that Wole will be reading in Germany in two weeks’ time Patrice calls his wife in the US and asks whether he might possibly prolong his stay in German to ‘at long last meet the ‘famous shon of...’ in person. Patrice did, after
all, write a comparative Ph.D. thesis on the playwrights Bert Brecht and... Wole Soyinka.
His wife agrees to his gallivanting across Europe until the Holzhausen date comes up. And while we are having dinner in the Hotel garden Patrice ‘has a human condition’, just like Heiner Müller had 15 years before. On his way back from the toilet Patrice is stopped by some over-dressed elderly local industrialists:
“Sorry, but the black man there with the white hair, isn’t that the man who was awarded the OSCAR yesterday night, isn’t that Morgan Freeman?”
To which Patrice answers in his impeccable German:
“You are dead right: that’s him!”
Comes back to our table and tells us about his ‘discovery’, which from then on was our running gag:
”So you are the one who won the OSCAR this year! Congrats! And you must be in money now!”
To which Wole fully agreed:
“Yes, Morgan Freeman! If any of the gentlemen at the table over there ever come to ask any of you whether I am Norman Freeman: that’s me! What is the Nobel anyhow... I could well do with my American brother’s income.”
The greeting at breakfast next morning was:
“Good morning, Morgan!” |
