Dr. Salihu Bappa of the Department of English at the Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria. His is the passage of one of the academics who gave Theatre Arts at Ahmadu Bello University its radical and guerrilla flavour. A product of the University of Ibadan and a student of Wole Soyinka, Dr. Bappa was, in fact, with the Nobel Laurete in Stockholm, Sweden when Soyinka collected his Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986.<\/p>\n
Before he gained admission to the then Jos Campus of the University of Ibadan and the subsequent transfer to heartland Ibadan, he attended Gindiri Boys High School, Jos. It was along with Tanimu Abubakar, one of the most solid remaining literary theorists in contemporary Nigeria. Dr Bappa did his graduate studies in the sub-Department of Drama at ABU, Zaria where he entered academia and remained for the rest of his life.Professor Jibrin Ibrahim who is his contemporary in those years in Zaria told Intervention how seriously Dr. Bappa took propagating popular theatre, especially in the small peasant settlement called Bomo near Samaru Campus of ABU, Zaria. Bomo was the ground for operationalising Hausa traditional theatre packaged under the framework of \u201cKallonkowa\u201d within the larger idea of community theatre which has been part and parcel of the Theatre Arts academic programme in Zaria.<\/p>\n
Prof Tanimu Abubakar, Prof Ahmed Babajo and Prof Umar Buratai who were late Bappa\u2019s colleagues in the Department of English, ABU, Zaria added, among others, how he acted in both \u2018Cockcrow at Dawn\u2019 as well as in \u2018Magana Jari Ce\u2019, the collection of stories in Hausa which the NTA was producing but in English.<\/p>\n
The three academic colleagues disclosed how Dr. Bappa\u2019s specialisation was in performance, not in essays or books as such. It is not surprising that the academic essay that came up against his name in a quick search is a 1981 essay titled \u201cThe Maska Project: drama work for Adult Educators\u201d. He was a judge of the Association of Nigerian Authors, (ANA) Literary Prizes as late as 2017.In the tendency schisms which characterised the Ahmadu Bello University\u2019s Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, (FASS) in the 1980s, he was in the Zaria Group which was ideologically opposed to the PRP ideologues led by the equally late Dr. Bala Usman. The now defunct Zaria Group did not think the People\u2019s Redemption Party, (PRP) or the politics of the Bala Brought Ups, (BBU) followed correct theoretical cum doctrinal lines and that it was bound to be consumed by the contradictions of such approach to politics. But that was in the early 1980s before the coup against the Shagari regime in 1983.<\/p>\n
As a person, he is generally described as a gracious soul. Again, Prof Jibrin Ibrahim was spot on in describing him as very jovial, extremely active and always in a hurry. The dramatist in him could never be missed. Dr. Bappa retired from the services of the university about six months ago but remained in Zaria.
\nDr. Bappa was between 65\/66 at death, leaving behind seven children, four boys and three girls.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"template":"","categories":[176,3245],"writer":[],"class_list":["post-26340","biography","type-biography","status-publish","hentry","category-academia","category-lecturer"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blerf.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/biography\/26340","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blerf.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/biography"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blerf.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/biography"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blerf.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blerf.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/biography\/26340\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26341,"href":"https:\/\/blerf.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/biography\/26340\/revisions\/26341"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blerf.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26340"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blerf.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26340"},{"taxonomy":"writer","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blerf.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/writer?post=26340"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}