Emmanuel Gladstone Olawale Rotimi, popularly known as Ola Rotimi, is a playwright, director, producer, actor, critic, scholar, and teacher. In 1959, as one of the first three Nigerians (the others being Joel Adedeji and Yemi Lijadu) to receive a Nigerian Government Scholarship to study drama, he attended Boston University, earning his B.F.A. in 1963; then he specialized in playwriting and directing at the Yale School of Drama and developed skills that have made him one of Africa's most popular dramatists and theater directors. His popularity derives from his use of a language capable of reaching a large audience of theatergoers and his ability to sustain dramatic interest through sheer mastery of stagecraft.

Born to parents who did not speak the same language (a Yoruba father, Samuel Enitan Rotimi, and an Ijaw mother, Dorcas Oruene Addo Rotimi), Ola Rotimi grew up in circumstances that made the problem of language...