Veteran actor Richard Mofe-Damijo has traced the discipline that still governs his life to a simple lesson he picked up from Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka: if the call time is 4pm, Soyinka is already there by 3:30pm.
RMD shared the recollection while speaking about the people and habits that shaped him. He said the standard was not theory. It was the culture he absorbed from men who treated time as part of the work itself.
“If you have encountered Soyinka, you would understand what I mean. If he says 4pm and you get there at 3:30pm, he is already there. Those are the kinds of people I have had the opportunity to work with, and I imbibed that culture. I hope that those who encounter me will also be conscious of what they can learn from me,” RMD said.
He tied the habit to a rule he still keeps.
“Timeliness is important to me. If someone tells you to be somewhere at 8 o’clock, you should get there by 7:30. That way, when they encounter you, you are already prompt and ready to take off.”
The lesson did not start with Soyinka alone. RMD said his mother drilled a line into him that never left:
“Don’t forget whose child you are.”
He said he was deeply attached to her, and that she taught him people represent their families and institutions at different points in life. In 1984 he worked as a resident actor under Professor J.P. Clark at the J.K. Randle Centre, and he also encountered Soyinka as a director. Those rooms, he said, taught discipline, punctuality and responsibility in the same breath.
He has carried the same standard into public life. RMD said he served in government for eight years and saw that the system can pull people in if their values are not firm.
“If you can’t fight the system, get out and go build somewhere else,” he said.
Years earlier he had already linked punctuality to opportunity, recalling that arriving early once helped him secure a role in a Soyinka production after the professor doubted television had left him stage-ready.
RMD said he still overcompensates so that he is proper in what he does, because at different stages a person represents something larger than himself.