Africa Magic honours late Olu Jacobs at 84 and shares his final advice to young Nollywood talents after the actor’s death and a 2013 AMVCA tribute
Africa Magic, the MultiChoice entertainment channel, honoured late Nollywood veteran Oludotun Baiyewu Jacobs, known as Olu Jacobs, on Instagram in Nigeria on 18 September 2026 by sharing an archival video in which Olu Jacobs urged younger African performers to keep working.
Olu Jacobs died on Wednesday, 16 September 2026, at the age of 84 after a long illness with dementia.
The post joined a wider wave of mourning for a man long regarded as one of Nollywood’s commanding elders.
Africa Magic called Olu Jacobs a true legend of Nigerian cinema and traced a career that ran from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London to the stages and screens of African film. Beside Olu Jacobs throughout much of that public life stood his wife, veteran actress Joke Silva.
In the footage, Olu Jacobs spoke with the calm force that made younger colleagues listen. “If you try and you don’t succeed, you try and try and try again. There is nothing more important to me than doing my personal best in whatever I do. One does not get everything right every time,” Olu Jacobs said. Olu Jacobs recalled hard years in the industry, then pressed the point that craft is built by repetition. “Do what you do as an exercise every day. The repetition of an act makes its performance almost automatic. Don’t give up. Work hard. Go.”
Africa Magic also recalled that Olu Jacobs received the inaugural AMVCA Industry Merit Award in 2013 for outstanding achievement in acting. “He leaves behind a legacy that helped shape the very idea of what African storytelling could be, and a partnership with his beloved wife, Joke Silva, that inspired us all,” the channel wrote. “Rest well, Sir Olu Jacobs. The magic you brought to our screens will live on forever.”
Born on 11 July 1942, Olu Jacobs spent more than five decades on stage, British television and Nollywood film.
Olu Jacobs won the Africa Movie Academy Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role in 2007 and later received Nigeria’s national honour of Member of the Order of the Federal Republic. Joke Silva first spoke publicly in 2021 about Olu Jacobs living with dementia with Lewy bodies. The family, announcing the death through their son Olusoji Jacobs, called Olu Jacobs “the Lion of Lufodo” and asked the public for privacy.
The Africa Magic tribute does more than mark a famous name. It returns Olu Jacobs to the work of teaching.
The old clip now stands as both farewell and instruction, a last public lesson from an actor who spent a lifetime telling younger talents that failure is not the end of the story.
