Veteran Yoruba actor Lere Paimo has answered Pete Edochie’s seniority challenge with a date of his own. The 86-year-old says he was already on stage in 1958, four years before the Things Fall Apart star says he began acting.
The row flared after Edochie, speaking on the Curiosity Made Me Ask podcast, dared colleagues who claim they started before him to prove it, pointing to a 1962 school production of William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, when he was 15.
Read “I’m Bigger Than Every Nollywood Actor!” — Pete Edochie Declares
Paimo took the challenge. In an interview with actor Kunle Afod, posted on YouTube on Monday, the Ogbomosho-born star known as Eda Onile Ola said his career started earlier.
“I started acting in 1958. I met Hubert Ogunde, who was senior to me and others, and there were big movies produced back then,” he said.
Public records support Paimo’s timeline in broad terms. He was born on November 19, 1939, and is widely documented as joining the Oyin Adejobi Theatre Group in 1958 before later working with Duro Ladipo’s company, where he played Chief Basa in the stage production Obamoro. He later became a household name as Soun Ogunola in the epic Ogbori Elemosho. Edochie, born March 7, 1947, has long said his first stage work came at St. John’s College in Kaduna in 1962, years before his famous 1985 television turn as Okonkwo.
Paimo did not stop at personal dates. He argued that Yoruba travelling theatre came first, long before English-language film became the industry’s loudest story. He named Hubert Ogunde as the pioneer he knew.
“I heard from history that when he (Hubert Ogunde) started in the ’40s, there was nobody before him, and we never heard from history that the English industry, or any movie done in the English language, started before him. Since we didn’t hear or read that in any history books or documentation, I believe the Yoruba industry started first,” he said.
On whether another old-school figure, Baba Olumegbon, predated Ogunde, Paimo was careful.
“I don’t know if Baba Olumegbon started before Ogunde, but all I know is that Ogunde was the person I knew who started acting first. Although I have been hearing about him for a long time, I can’t say he was senior to Ogunde,” he said.
Edochie has framed his argument around Nollywood’s later birth. He has said Things Fall Apart came in 1985 and that the industry as people now know it arrived with Living in Bondage in 1992. Paimo’s reply shifts the clock back to the travelling stage, where Yoruba troupes were already packing halls before home video existed.