About
Tai Ajayi
Writer, poet, theatre producer and product builder. Tai of Africa is where those parts of the work meet and where the questions about Africa get asked out loud.
01 · Writer
It began with a poem about birds.
At twelve, during a school break, Tai saw a flash of birds and wrote his first poem, Island of Peace. His English teacher had him read it aloud to a room of twelve-year-olds. He kept writing every day and on every subject, in a notebook he showed to every guest who came to the house.
Wole Soyinka was an early and lasting influence. At seven Tai struggled through the first pages of The Trials of Brother Jero. In secondary school he performed Soyinka’s “Abiku” on speech day and went on to lead the Literary and Drama Society.
At seventeen he took his poems to Ibadan in search of a publisher. The result was God must be a poet, a collection of work written between fifteen and eighteen. He paid for it “by missing lunch for the entire first year of university.” At university he wrote spoken-word pieces for matriculation ceremonies and directed a play about Black history.
He tells this story himself in Alayo, published in full on this site.
“…a creative hand of nature whose primal ordinance was to seek, find, take back every form of love and hope and put all of these in the public where everyone can share.”
02 · Theatre
Afrobeats on stage.
Tai founded Vibra Company and is executive producer of YE! An Afrobeats Musical. ThisDay announced its debut at the MUSON Centre in Lagos. He describes himself as the creator of Afrobeats Musicals and the Cultural IP Lab.
On Medium he wrote: “I finally produced my first Afrobeats musical after writing about the music genre and quoting from it.”
Read the ThisDay report (opens on thisdaylive.com) Read “Let the Stories Bring You Home” (opens on medium.com)
03 · Builder
Products, teams and talent.
Alongside the writing and the stage, Tai works in technology. He leads product and teams and curates the 1M+ Tech Talent ecosystem. One instinct runs through all of it: build the thing, then build the room where other people can do their best work.
04 · Questions
What can we become?
The thread through the work is a set of questions about Africa: what it would take for every African to live well anywhere on the continent, which stories carry a shared identity and where public money really goes. Tai gathers that thinking under the name Meta Africanism.
Influences named in Alayo
- Wole Soyinka
- Ola Rotimi
- Chinua Achebe
- Chris Abani
- James Baldwin
- Maya Angelou
- Yusef Komunyakaa
- Ben Okri
- Lola Shoneyin
- Lucille Clifton
- Fela Kuti
- Miles Davis
- Billie Holiday
- Malcolm X
- Marcus Garvey
- Kwame Ture
- Thomas Sankara
Bring the conversation to your stage.
Talks and conversations on Africa, theatre and culture, building products and public-interest research.