- David Oyelowo has shared a funny boarding school experience, revealing that he pretended not to understand Yoruba while attending school in Nigeria.
- The actor said the delusion allowed him to overhear conversations about himself, including romantic discussions that eventually led to him dating his twin sisters at the same time before he finally revealed the truth on his last day.
Award-winning British-Nigerian actor David Oyelowo has shared a humorous story from his teenage years at a Nigerian boarding school, revealing how pretending not to understand Yoruba gave him an unexpected edge among his classmates.
Speaking during a recent interview, Oyelowo said he grew up fluent in Yoruba, but deliberately hid the fact after enrolling in a boarding school in Nigeria.
According to the actor, his foreign accent led many students to assume that he did not understand the language. Instead of correcting them, he decided to play along and quietly listen to the conversations going on around him.
“It was like I was an invisible man,” he recalled.
The actor explained that his classmates would openly discuss him in Yoruba, believing that he had no idea what they were saying. He said he often heard students gossiping about him, including girls who publicly seemed disinterested but privately expressed admiration for him in conversations with friends.
Oyelowo said the situation worked in his favor at times, jokingly revealing that he once dated twin sisters at the same time after learning information through conversations they assumed he didn’t understand.
The confession made the interviewer laugh, while the actor admitted that keeping the secret required considerable discipline during the two years he spent at the school.
Apart from the romantic side of the story, Oyelowo said he also heard colleagues speak negatively about him from time to time. Even so, he resisted the temptation to reveal how he understood every word.
According to him, the biggest shock happened on the last day of school when he suddenly started speaking fluent Yoruba to everyone around him.
The revelation stunned his classmates, who only then discovered that he had understood their conversations throughout their stay.
