BabaOlutunde’s Profile

Olutunde Chisom Olufemi was born in 1968 into a family setting of West African and American ethnicity. He was the fifth in a family of seven children. “My father believed in culture and my mother believed in religion,” he remembers, “divided, yes, but spiritual in profound ways. As a child I struggled terribly with mixing Christianity with Ifa so I was forced to abandon the most important part of my roots to make the church my guiding haven.”

Needless to say, Olutunde’s greater self could not adorn what appeared to him to be a myriad of fallacies. He left the church at the age of 13 and began to explore his buried talents. Doing so not only enabled him to discover his inner and outer strengths and weaknesses, but also his powers to think/design/create the drive behind his talent to write. In this is where Olutunde found his hidden voice.

His lost or rather stolen heritage did not impair his zeal and passion to follow in the footsteps of his great grandfather, whom he later discovered was a revered storyteller, oral poet, percussionist and writer. From the days of his youth, Olutunde has had a strong command of lyrical skills that prompted powerful delivery of basic and abstract literary styles earning him the title “The Griot”. His fortitude for the arts carried him through adolescence and into adulthood. With each passing year, he became sharper and more artistically refined.