Demas Nwoko is a creative figure whose life spans art, theatre, architecture, and cultural thought. He is known as an architect, artist, and theatre designer, but these titles only describe parts of what he does. At his core, Demas is a builder of ideas, someone who believes that culture, like a house, must stand on strong foundations.
As a young man, he trained in Europe on a French government scholarship, studying art and theatre design in Paris. His talent quickly gained attention, and opportunities opened for him to remain abroad. At a time when success often meant staying in Europe, Demas made a different choice. He returned to Nigeria, not because the path was easier, but because it felt necessary. He believed that the knowledge he had gained would matter more if used at home.
Back in Nigeria, Demas helped shape modern theatre and design education as a pioneer lecturer at the University of Ibadan. From there, his work expanded naturally into architecture and large-scale cultural projects. He built studios, theatres, churches, cultural centres, and workshops spaces designed to work with the land, the climate, and the people who use them. His buildings are practical, thoughtful, and deeply connected to African ways of living.
What sets Demas apart is his respect for tradition. To him, tradition is not something old or limiting. It is living knowledge that adapts, grows, and supports the future. This belief runs through all his work, whether in concrete, performance, or writing.
Now at 90, Demas Nwoko is still active, reflective, and engaged with the world around him. This is a look into how a life guided by clarity, discipline, and cultural confidence can quietly shape generations.
A Life of Building: Demas at 90
For Demas, everything begins from one place. Not Paris, where he once painted frescoes, nor Venice, where an operatic future was briefly offered, nor the many Nigerian cities shaped by his hand. It begins with tradition. African tradition. Not as ornament, not as nostalgia, but as philosophy and foundation. Even now, at 90, he speaks of tradition not as something behind him, but as something still actively at work in his life.
He speaks of African philosophy as having no fixed constant. To him, this is its greatest strength. It is a way of thinking developed over thousands of years, flexible enough to absorb change without losing its centre. That understanding has guided every decision he has made, every building he has designed, every stage he has imagined. Each work begins with a traditional motive, not because the past must be repeated, but because the future needs a base. As he puts it later in the interview, “The task of development is ageless.”
This idea of continuity, rather than rupture, also shapes how Demas understands time itself. In his interview, he rejects the modern obsession with generational replacement. “There’s no generation time just rolling on in the life of the people,” he says. “We don’t recognize generations, because at the same time in one family you find the great grandfather, the fathers, and the children all working together.” At 90, he speaks not from theory, but from lived reality. His children and grandchildren now design, build, rehearse, and create alongside him. For him, culture does not advance by discarding elders or chasing novelty, but by layering experience, memory, and responsibility.
Demas believes the most serious problem facing African societies today is not lack of technology, but loss of grounding. Other cultures, he observes, advance technologically while holding tightly to their traditions. Africa, on the other hand, has been encouraged to discard its own philosophies and aesthetics in favour of foreign models. These models, he argues, do not serve the place where Africans live, nor the conditions in which they must survive. His work is a response to that imbalance. It insists that progress must grow from within, or it will always remain unstable.
This belief shaped one of the defining choices of his life. After creating a striking graphic interpretation of Mozart’s music in Europe, Demas received an invitation to remain in Venice. The production that led to the offer had been widely praised as a rare visual expression of classical music. Critics described it as an unusually sensitive reading of Mozart’s work. The offer that followed was to stay and help renew opera itself.
He declined.
The reasoning was clear. He had spent only one year in Europe. What enabled him to interpret Mozart was not European training, but African creative knowledge. Why, then, should he use that knowledge to strengthen European institutions while his own country lacked modern structures for traditional theatre? How could he help another society innovate when his own had not yet built the foundations to do the same? Looking back across nine decades, that refusal no longer reads as sacrifice, but as long-term clarity.
For Demas, recognition on the world stage is not granted through imitation. It comes from originality. Every culture is expected to bring its own creation to the common table. Cultural exchange, he says, is like trade. You offer what you have made, others offer what they have made, and value is exchanged. A society that produces nothing original becomes a buyer, not a contributor. Eventually, it can only afford copies.
This conviction explains his refusal to see his work as risky. When asked about relocating to Idumuje-Ugboko to build the African Design Development Center long before community-rooted design became fashionable, his response was characteristically calm: “Whatever I do, there’s no risk at all, because everything I do is fully in my control.” At 90, that sense of control has less to do with dominance and more to do with preparedness. “Because of my age,” he says elsewhere, “they couldn’t depend on me to run it.” Instead, he chose a model where younger artists own and operate the space themselves.
This idea runs through all his work. He does not believe in accidental beauty or unexpected meaning. Nothing he creates surprises him. Every response is anticipated because every element is deliberate. Creativity, he insists, is labour. It is a process of refinement, not chance. Like poetry, it begins as excess. Words are written, then cut away, chiselled down until only what is essential remains. At this stage of life, what remains matters more than what is added.
He often compares this to carving. African art, in his view, is unmatched in this discipline. It uses physical form to express complex ideas with precision. This is why his work resonates so deeply with people. Even when individuals believe they have abandoned their culture, it remains alive within them. His buildings and spaces draw it out. The recognition is immediate. People feel at home in the work because it speaks a language they already know.
This understanding explains why his Mozart set design resonated so powerfully. European audiences were struck by how intuitively an African artist seemed to understand their music. Demas’s explanation was simple. The sound of Mozart reminded him of home. The rhythms echoed the music he grew up hearing, played by his father. He was not interpreting Mozart through European experience, but through African memory. The work felt new to Europe because it came from elsewhere.
Architecture, for Demas, is never just about form. It is a social responsibility. One of the most misunderstood aspects of African architectural intelligence, he argues, is affordability. Before colonial intervention, shelter was universal. Every family could build a home using materials found nearby. Architecture responded to climate, availability, and human capacity.
Today, despite claims of technological advancement, many people cannot afford housing. Building materials are industrial, imported, and expensive. Even when produced locally, they remain beyond reach. Demas finds this deeply troubling. Animals can build shelters instinctively, yet human beings now struggle to do so. He questions what kind of progress produces homelessness rather than security. As he puts it bluntly, “Any thinking that does not materialize into your own growth and survival is not logical thinking.”
Festac 77 represented a moment when a different future seemed possible. The works created then pointed toward a cultural modernism rooted in African identity. Demas’s opera, Children of Paradise, was conceived as a national project. Performers were selected from across the country so that the work would belong to everyone. The plan was to tour the production nationwide, allowing communities to see themselves reflected in a shared cultural achievement.
That plan never materialised. Political and institutional failures prevented the gains of that era from taking root. The knowledge acquired after independence found no structure to sustain it. Institutions failed to translate learning into practice.
After Festac, Demas withdrew from national platforms and returned to his hometown. This was not an end to creativity, but a repositioning. He sought a space where his work could exist without distortion or ridicule. He continued to create, but largely outside the national spotlight. “I didn’t expect to live so long,” he reflects now, “but each time I came out of it, I continued to do what I believed I was created to do.”
For Demas, architecture, theatre, poetry, and design are not separate disciplines. They are expressions of the same creative act. All art is performance. Each work requires the careful orchestration of people, materials, technology, and intention. When it succeeds, the response is emotional and communal. People sing, dance, and give thanks. That reaction is not accidental. It is communication achieved.
Grounded in one’s own culture, creativity becomes universal without trying to be. The more rooted the work, the wider its reach. This is the principle Demas has lived by. By refusing to abandon tradition, he has remained open to the world. By choosing home, he has spoken globally.
At 90, he does not speak of legacy in grand terms. “Nobody gives himself a name,” he says. What he leaves behind instead are physical structures, working spaces, books, archives, and people who know how to continue. “I’m comfortable that even at 90, my projects that are unfinished can still be finished.”
His work offers a quiet argument. That Africa does not need to imitate in order to belong. That progress does not require erasure. And that the future, if it is to endure, must rise from foundations laid patiently over time, shaped by belief, labour, and faith in one’s own inheritance.
