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First of all, a big shout out to everyone in this Yuletide season. As
expected I have been thinking hard on what to offer during at this time
of celebration , something with which to brighten the celebration of
the birth of Christ. It took days and weeks of thinking, and nothing
came up until last weekend when I stumbled into some old works of mine.
And did that sweetened my heart? I bet you it did. Now, you must be
wondering what it was I stumbled into, I will tell you. I was looking
for an important document and couldn't find it, I checked everywhere it
should be, but to no avail. You know how it feels. You go looking for
something in places you were sure the object you are looking for will
never be. Well that was what happened to me, I looked into an old shoe
box full of old papers, a shoe box I have not touched for years. But at
a point I forgot what I was searching for, for the box started yielding
some interesting papers; Old letters, drama scripts, personal notes,
poems and so on. One of the papers contained a drama script written by
one Mr Tony Ozoalor.
Now, let me briefly tell you about this
gentleman. Tony Ozoalor hails from Ngwo in Enugu state of Nigeria. I
first knew him when I was a college student. At that time he was a
tenant in my fathers house in Enugu. A very genial fellow, jovial and
friendly to all. That was the much I knew of him then. Years later I
was to find out another side of this gentleman, his intelect. He is
well gifted with the use of words be it English or Igbo. He is a
creative writer as well as speaker. His writing ability covered a wide
spectrum, from prose to poetry, even speaches. Indeed I still do not
understand why he has no published work in the form of books, or maybe
he there some I am not aware of. He is really a very talented person.
He wrote short plays, stories and poems, that were published in many
Nigerian newspapers. I also learnt that at a time he was the speach
writer for one of the military governors of Enugu state, I do not
remember which one it was. He retired as the zonal public relation
officer of NITEL Enugu.
His script that I found was a
drama script he wrote which, I was supposed to produce for the program
'Radio Theatre', one of the programs I was handling at the time.
Unfortunately due to the austerity measure in the country at that time
I was not able to use the script until I left the shores of Nigeria.
How the script ended up still being with me, beats me, but surely, the
find made my day. It made my day because I quickly remembered that Mr
Ozoalor also featured prominently in my other program 'Poetry Time'.
Many of his beautiful poems were featured in the program. Among some of
the copies of my old productions that are presently with me, is a
Christmas poem he wrote that was aired in December 1987. I searched for
it, found it, and will like you to listen to it, hoping that it will
brighten your Christmas
The
program was presented by Oseloka Zikora, one of many gifted and well
trained announcers of that time. I must admit that the standared and
quality of most of present day voices heared over the Nigerian airwave
are not encouraging. There is the need to improve standard through
training and selecting trainable persons for the job, not just anyone.
I guess this may be the topic of my next post.
I wish you all a Merry Christmas.
Visit my Blog @ http://griotradio.blogspot.com
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Posted by Robot| 18.12.2007 21:05