The Raconteur (Non-Fiction)
Adenike has a picture from the 60s or 70s, where she is crowned Miss Agriculture—a monochrome mid-size photo. In it, she wears a chic mid-gown made of ankara, a silver crown, and the sash across her shoulders bearing her new role. Her hair, in very short waves, like a cap cemented on her head, her watch the same silver as her crown, and her flowers, matching with the print on her gown.
Adenike was in the Teachers’ Training college in Ondo when that picture was taken. To attend Teacher’s College as a young woman was considered feminine elitism. The girls in the college had vocations they were mandated (I guess), and if anyone got married during their time in College, they would receive gifts from their course mistresses before leaving. Those years, on vacation days, or graduation ceremonies, boys from the University of Ife and the University of Lagos came with exotic cars to woo new catches, their low-cut afro styled seductively, their top buttons undone, bearing tales of summer in London, or a new contract with the government their fathers have just hooked. They would hang around the college gates and school fields, the boys serenading, the girls giggling, new bonds cradling. Some of them, during their most senior years in college, would get married, and the other girls, in conjunction with house mistresses would present gifts of sewing machines or baking bots and gas cookers to the brides. The new couple would go ahead to build standard homes —wives, teachers or housewives with mastery of sewing or baking; husbands, supposedly senior jobs that kept them away from home for a while. There was another category where both wives and husbands were teachers.
Adenike’s was different. I imagine that it had panned out like romantic tropes of old Nollywood movies — a beautiful and skilled young woman at the teachers’ college, turning heads of rich and flamboyant sons of professors and politicians, but none catches her eyes. None, except an uneventful young photographer there in Ondo, who did not have a degree from a federal university or any degree at all. And on that day when she was crowned Miss Agriculture, he had taken that picture of her. When he brought them days later, sealed in an envelope, she had laid on her bed in the lower bunk of her hostel, gushing, flustered by how much he had mastered her essence, making her see herself as she had never seen. Her friends would have reservations — of all the boys around, ‘Nike? Segun’s father has a mansion in Surulere o, I hear his mother has one big salon in Abuja sef. This one did not even go to school. Nike, are you sure?
But of course, she was sure. So sure that she married him, changed her middle Muslim name to a Christian one, started attending his Anglican church with him, and had five children with him, one of whom would grow up to marry my mother.
I had the urge to steal the picture when I first saw it, to add it to my collection of fossils from yesteryears, epochs that shaped my pre-birth years. But we were cleaning out the old house, packing her things to move into the new one. Fresh out of retirement, her first pension deposits and years of savings had helped complete her three-bedroom flat. Soon, other antiques piqued my interest — pieces of rendevous from Adenike’s younger years that startled more stories —stories from her early years of motherhood, years as a student in Teachers’ College, and far back to her childhood days in Oyo.
In years to come, when she is long gone, I’ll probably remember her, mostly, for stories. In fact, I think stories, rather than the sickness of old age, would bring her to her end. These days, when I visit, she sits with her radio, listening to the news, news that reminds her of long lost glory days replaced by the unbelievable wickedness that has become of humanity — there’s been another kidnap along Benin-Ore expressway, the body of a two-year-old was exhumed from a church’s alter, civil servants have not been paid for three months, ASUU might be going on another strike, pensioners spend their nights in front of the ministry, waiting for an answer. And for every sad story told, my grandmother always had their utopian alternatives which preceded current times, pleasant experiences that marked the years of her becoming.
She would reduce the volume of the radio and ask, in between serving me food, how I’m faring. How is Lagos? And your house? How much is rent now? Ah, this country, where are we going? These stories and reports would make her slap her palms against each other, her lips folded after a hiss, and her eyes staring long at something, her mind wandering far back to when things were better.
Sometimes in the 1940s, she was born into a staunch polygamous Yorùbá Muslim family in Ibadan. Her father was a respected patriarch in their humble familial community in pre-independence Oyo, Nigeria. As children, Adenike would say, my father would host his friends in the evenings at our house, and send my half-sisters and me from Ibadan to another town to get drinks. We would go at night, unchaperoned, unafraid of any danger. Sometimes, I went alone, as a girl, and no one would be afraid.
She would say this with nostalgia on her face, the kind of nostalgia that stings, mocks you, and consoles you at the same time. The kind that rubs the loss of something precious in your face, yet reminds you that you are fortunate to have its memories. And in those times, I become envious of her. I’d wish that we could travel back in time to her childhood days in Ibadan, clouded by national evolution — the last days of colonialism, independence, and then, the early years of tumult, when Nigeria was bad but not this bad.
It’s always difficult, but fascinating, to imagine that she was once a girl with quick steps, running down the streets of Oyo to run errands for her father. I imagine that on the eve of Nigeria’s independence, this great-grandfather of mine had hosted another soiree, his friends gathered on his verandah or in his living room, listening to speeches from the new Prime Minister, analysing and predicting, while Adenike and her sisters would lay on mats or sit in corners, watching their father, imagining what was to become of them, now that their country was free from Britain.
I imagine that years later when the Civil War started, normal living would be restricted, even though the torrents of the war were far in the east. Perhaps, it was during this time she had met her husband-to-be, crowned Miss Agriculture, on the brink of womanhood, but asked to come home for safety, at least till the federals were far away from the south-west. Perhaps, this was when things began to fall apart for them, when the tranquility of her childhood began to give away for a country plaguing itself.
Can you not find a good job here and leave that Lagos? Must you be there, she said during a visit almost two years ago. I laughed. No, Grandma. We have a Stockholm syndrome relationship with Lagos these days. It is a city that holds the opportunities to its chest and requires us to stretch our bones, almost ripping our bodies, to reach for it. What Adenike desires for me is the kind of peace her own youthfulness had been blessed with. The peace that comes with commonality. I would remember her for this too, commonality —a culture she groomed with storytelling.
When I turned six, I lived with her. That added to the years that solidified my love for stories. Our flat was one of the top floor flats in the large compound of many storey buildings. In the evenings, we ate dinner early on days when power was out, so we could use the moonlight and evening breeze. Those nights, on our balcony, standing at a vantage point where people on the streets could see, where it felt like you could reach out and pluck the moon from the sky, we would sit in a circle, joined by children of the neighbours, and hear her tell stories.
Yes, I am fortunate to be one of those whose childhood included stories by moonlight.
Years later, when I would read “Purple Hibiscus” and get to the part where Chima would ask Papa Nnukwu, Why does the tortoise feature so much in our stories? I would be taken back to those nights on our balcony. It was from those nights I heard tons of folktales, stories of the animal kingdom where Ijapa was a narcissistic menace, where humans and the spirit world collided, stories with songs —calls and responses that made us participate in the stories. It was from those nights my previous love for reading graduated into creating my own stories.
But it wasn’t just in the telling. It was in her living. She preserved histories and old practices in everything, preserving those stories that had happened before we were born. She used calabash when other households were exclusive with plastic. She had pots and art from the pre-2000s. We drank herbs when we fell sick. During morning devotions, she dramatized bible stories. Our domestic life was anchored on this telling and living and preserving of the stories that we created day by day.
Please, be careful o, this your Lagos, be very careful o. Things are not like they used to be o. After my visit, I imagined what it felt like for her to live alone in her 70s. I wondered if she spent her time reminiscing old stories, or if she found ways to tell herself new ones, proverbial tales of what the world has turned into.
Early December, 2023. I’m in Lagos. It’s night, and I’m taking a walk to stretch my legs after being indoors all day.
My phone rings; it’s my paternal grandmother in Akure, but when I pick up, the voice from the other end belongs to a man. A strange man who I don’t know, who I imagine has a mechanic shop by the roadside, buys stamina-boosting herbs, and will sneer if I reply to him in English because he isn’t fluent.
“Hello,” he says and proceeds in Yorùbá, “the owner of his phone has just been hit by a bike. We are at Àgàgú Road, start coming right now.”
Loud music is blasting from the barbershop just in front of me. Excited children and teenagers are firing knockouts (bangers) somewhere around. Cars are at full speed even though the street is packed with pedestrians and street food vendors. But the noise in my head is from none of these. It’s from my heart racing, my mind thinking different thoughts, imagining what my grandmother looks and feels like right now — perhaps, sprawled on the ground in a pool of her own blood, surrounded by strangers, the dirty road, and the curious gazes and pitiful remarks of passersby in what could be the final moment of her over 70-years life on earth. Quickly, I make calls to family members around her and everyone gets into action. Soon, they find her and take her to a hospital. She survives and is discharged that night with a few injuries and diagnosed with mild memory loss. She will be fine, don’t worry, my uncle and aunt tell me. I believe them. I believe them enough to continue with my walk, my ears plugged — some Nigerian retros streaming on Spotify.
In the days that follow, my brother gives me updates; she’s getting better. The memory loss may not be so mild, though. But she’s old, we both agree, and it’s okay to have amnesia at that age.
Adenike’s husband, my paternal grandfather, was the first grandparent I lost. It was in the mid-2000s. Many years ago, before even my father was conceived, I wonder if Adenike’s father too had opposed this marriage to a Christian man. But I imagine that my grandmother’s stubbornness had started from those days. How else, during such a patriarchal time like that, could she have married him, and changed her religion? But since I was old enough to know her as my grandmother, I have known Adenike as a die-hard Christian woman — a deaconess and sanctuary keeper, who, even in old age when she should be resting in her home, would still attend church on Sundays and weekdays, and vigils, and go to clean the church on Saturdays. It is during one of these days she would have an accident while trying to cross the express.
May, 2024
Àkúré’s red against Lagos’ white.
The contrast is sharp like you are flipping through the pages of a book of colors. The express road is not as wide as minutes before. Bamboo trees threaten to fall across them even, from left and right. And from inside the car, it’s like the trees are greeting each other from across the road. The car drives into town and the scenery welcomes me with tasteful nostalgia.
It had been over a year since I visited home, and I probably wouldn’t be there at that time if not for the funeral. It all seemed different, yet the same. That red earth, the crimson it paints the air when the ground is pruded, remains.
But it seemed the funeral was not the only thing I would face. There was a call to musing, to engage agedness in a conversation. A dialogue. A kind of dialogue where we look rather than speak, looking through three glasses–my Grandfather’s funeral, a visit to my paternal grandmother, and the town itself.
A kind of dialogue that doesn’t aspire to be prosodic or poetic or succulent with lush literary language and form. It’s just as simple and raw as it can be.
Two days after I arrived, I pay Adenike a visit. She hugs me, and I think it’s the very first time she ever has. Her mouth is open as well as the door. I prostrate to greet her before I enter her embrace, the stale smell of agedness slapping from her wrapper. Perhaps, the newness of my sight after her accident had just hit her. Or didn’t she know I would be home for her in-law, my maternal grandfather’s funeral? Or was that part of old age? Sincere shock at seeing your grandson?
How is Lagos? How is work? How are things? And the other very familiar questions again. She shook her head pitifully when I told her of how life in Lagos is. O ma se o. She empathizes and then proceeds to recount the stories of her younger days, as though I hadn’t heard it many times. But I came to understand that it’s part of the effect of the accident and old age. And for as long as she sees me, she’ll continue to repeat those stories, recount those years that formed me.
She’s the only grandparent I now have alive. My maternal grandmother died a few weeks before the lockdown. And my maternal grandfather died earlier this year. I spent hours with her, listening to those stories I have heard over and over again, taken back to her toddling years in Oyo, her coming-of-age, the teachers’ training college, early motherhood, and the years that welcomed me into her life up until the present.
Before I left, I promised to see her again, soon. And inside, I fervently asked that she’d give me room to fulfil that promise, to remain alive, because I think there are more stories to tell. Not recounts of tales I know word-for-word, but untold histories I have never heard. For a raconteur never leaves their prime.
