By FESTUS ADEDAYO
When a few Nigerians bring disrepute the way of Nigeria abroad, some others uplift it. Tolu, daughter of Grace and Gbenga Ekundare, is in the latter category. Born in 1996, Tolu is an American celebrity in the entertainment industry accorded for her brain and passion. She was one of the cast of Netflix’s The Trust: A game of greed. In this game, total strangers to one another are handed $250k to divide among themselves. Miss Ekundare, Houston-based model and marketing manager, whose father hails from Ilesa in Osun State, strategised in that reality competition to take out the first player. While doing this, she exhibited the consistency that is the hallmark of a Nigerian and left the show as one of the five winners, going home with the sum of $73,600 as winner of the second-largest prize out of the group.
When the Nigerian Channels television interviewed Ekundare a few months back, she evidenced a spirit that borders cannot limit. The reality show didn’t go without her encountering that undying ghost of race in America. She confronted a huge pall of tokenisation and racism which every Black person doing the exemplary encounters in America. A memorable scene in the show exemplifies what she went through. It was a tear-provoking conversation between Jake and Ekundare. Perhaps egged on by the Osomaalo spirit of industry and resistance that is said to be genetically woven into the constitution of every Ijesa, she did not hide how uncomfortable she was at being typecast as the “African queen sister” of the house.
“I think I did amazing, especially considering how even with the whole house gone, I clawed my way out of the corner,” Ekundare told a magazine, Vulture. “I think my gameplay was on point. It was just who I was aligned with that was the issue.” Asked about the financials of the win, Ekundare said, “I can’t speak for everyone else, but the premise was so crystal clear to me, Winnie, and Julie. Mind you, $250,000 … if it was one person, that’s life-changing amount of money. But divided by 11, pre-tax, we are at $22,000 [each], and then Uncle Sam is going to take his cut. I can’t even buy me a little Toyota Corolla with that.”
Congratulations to Tolu, daughter of my childhood friend, Gbenga, with whom, in the company of our late friend, Adeyoju Peter Aiku, I walked the length and breadth of Ilesa, Osun State in the late 1980s and 1990s.
