The Film Blog: In Elder Maya, another under-appreciated Nollywood veteran takes a bow

You don’t know the name Maya Ndubuigbo (credits including The Barrister, Battle of Indemnity, amongst others), but if you watched Nollywood well over the past two decades, you couldn’t miss him.

His role was usually that of ‘igwe’, medicine-man or Elder. Everyone called him Elder Maya.

He was a fine actor. And we don’t just say that because he is now gone.

No, he was fine. His diction was impeccable. We can’t speak to range because directors limited him so, but we can speak to depth – of the emotions that he needed to carry.

He was one of that fine breed that you wished you had the time to sit with and really find out what’s going on in his head, what’s his story, what does he think of his industry, what does he think when he is alone.

He is gone now, having battled liver disease for almost a year – ending up bedridden when his legs got too swollen – bobbing to the surface of public attention after actor Ernest Obi raised alarm in July. All he needed was N1 million.

A pastor eventually provided it (Joshua Iginla of Abuja’s Champions Royal Assembly), but it appears it was altogether too late.

We are sad, but it’s in a way that’s even more depressing. There is an entire generation of actors and film makers that don’t appreciate the space that people like Elder Maya occupied, and bvecause of that, entire generations of institutional memory disappear – ensuring that one end of an industry does not connect to the next.

It’s a problem that started before the Elder. It’s one we don’t see ending just yet after him.

And it’s one that ensured that you would scan the length of Instagram and Twitter handles of Nollywood’s present classroom, and you would find a silence on the death of one of their icons.

Because, that’s the kind of country that we are. And we don’t know enough of what we should. And the poetry in our souls… it doesn’t appear ever to have existed.

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