Eight years ago, precisely on September 19, 2015, Mrs. H.I.D. Awolowo, the Amazonic paragon, matriarch of the distinguished Awo dynasty and the Jewel of Inestimable value of her affectionately beloved Inamorata (hmmm!), Chief Jeremiah Oyeniyi Awolowo, the towering political figure, great sage,and unarguably Nigeria’s greatest statesman, departed the earthly space for surreal eternity, aged 99 years, just two months and six days to November 25,2015, which coincided with her grand centenary.
It was a dramatic gasp-breathe departure – with all the fiction-like make-believe sensationally hyped by a celebratory ritual of a centenary birthday day bash, contiguously staring just over the shoulders with the portentous promise of a memorable all-time reference in grandeur,pomp and pageantry – ironically dashed in the serio-comic mockery of phantom elusiveness,riding on the beguiling wing of death.
Remember how mama,had disappointed popular pessimistic doomsday vision, which in the wake of her husband’s demise,had inspired the counting game,in the bated breathe expectation of the imminence of her own passing,for an other-worldly turn of marital re-wedding, considering the close-knit affection between them,for which they had thought she will not be able to cope with the emotional vacuum – and how Mama confounded these cynical Thomases hands down with her magical armour of longevity,till they lost count,thus abdicating the counting game – only for her to disappear amidst a “stagy” popular impatience with the fructification of the grand centenary and the ceremonial glee,glitz and glamour,only a speck away from the maturative zero point.
Chief Ayo Adebanjo’s inquisitorial remonstrance on “why Mama decided to leave us before her centenary birthday”as quoted in the Tribune,adducces as ample credence to this sentiment.
Permit me to digress in recount of a narrative pertaining to a particular edition of the birthday anniversary of Alhaja Abibat Mogaji,the legendary market leader of blessed memory.
I watched over the T.V. how Mama Awolowo,present at the occasion,went down the memory lane to recall the gruelling campaign of the 50s,perennialy undertaken with the celebrant,Alhaja Mogaji,for the Awo-led A.G.and the huge toll on the physical frame – to which Mogaji herself corroborated with intermittent nodding acquiescence interspersed with “beeni”meaning “yes”.
Looking back today,as the birthday reminiscences of that occassion welled through the space of memory,I could not help but imagine,whether the sky of the centenary could not have been the beginning on the scale of gerontocratic senescence,rather than the limit – in a scenario devoid of such excruciating exertion among the diverse buffetings of life.
Honestly life at hundred would just have been the begining.It would sure have been an interesting counting game.
Looking back to successive military take-over decades ago, initially by the Buhari-Idiagbon duo,and later, Ibrahim Babangida,it was not unlikely for Mama to have rejoiced,seeing in that hiatus,a recuperative prospect to salutiferous health for her husband – expectedly sparing her by extension – of course on account of the good wife she was – of the immensely supportive synergy on the political front, which over the years,had similarly taken on her,an excruciating huge toll.
Mama’s expectations on this score, was to be dashed on a grossly lamentable note,as Awolowo’s disappointment at the progressive suppuration of the polity,the systemic dysfunction,the fading efflorescence of the Nigerian dream,the irredeemable parlousness of the people’s plight,coupled of course with physical exertions of immensely flagellating proportion on the trajectory of politics over the years,soon got the better part of him,sapping every ounce of his essence for a transmogrifying heavenly turn.
With Papa’s passage to heavenly glory,Mama,informed by the displeasing experiential antecedents of the political past,coupled with the prejudicial rantings and attitude – “a o le sin baba tan,ka tun maa wa sin omo”- translating literally to “we cannot worship the father,only to begin again to worship his child” – emanating from reactionary anti-progressive quarters of Awo’s political foes,coming in the wake of an attempted foray of Awo’s daughter,Tokun bo Dosunmu into the muddy waters of Nigerian politics – mama only fell short of asking her children to a stygian oath binding them against the political vocation which over the years,had garnered for their worthy partriarch International glory and acclaim.
With this settled,Mama would unlikely not have reclined in triumphant ardour of having at least got to grips with the thorny issue capable of heating up her temperature.She would have been secured in the prospect that at last for the first time – apart from the ineffaceable wound of her husband’s painful departure – she was settled for a relished new lease of lasting peace.
Unfortunately,fate soon exerted its mocking art,with the painful passage of his beloved priceless pearl in the persons of Chief (Mrs) Ayo Soyode,a British-trained lawyer,and Chief Oluwole Awolowo,the treasured heir apparent of the family.
That Mama triumphed over the creepingly malignant vicissitude, with remarkable stoicism and equanimity, waxing ever luminous and stronger in spirit, convincingly emblematized her Olympian stuff.
For those who in intuitive empathy may be persuaded to reason along, it may appear as if Mama’s longevity, perceived from the esoteric perspective,may be such that transcended sheer whimsical happenstance, and not unlikely a demonstrative example of mother nature’s compensation for the unexpectedly dramatic exit of her husband,the Great Awo.
If we recall Awo’s publicly pronounced desire in the course of a newspaper interview,that God may spare him to attain a minimum of 80 years, which unfortunately he could not make,by no account of nature though – as the depressive inability at salvaging the labyrinthine rudderlessness of the ship of state – if we appreciate his sincerity of motive and his puritanistic altruism – then may we begin to give more than a casual thought as to the plausibility of this compensatory logic of causation.
On a comparative note,deservedly salient and pertinent at this juncture,it becomes pertinent to emphasize at this juncture,that Mama evokes the memory of Eleanor Roosevelt,wife of Franklin Delano Roosevelt,believed by a school of European historians as the most influential First Lady in American history.
As a girl and later a young woman,she suffered from a highly malignant paranoid shyness that public activism of any sort,was for her an anathemic no-go zone.
However,borne of the consequential sacrificialism of marital piety,she rose to the challenges,emerging from her paranoid hermetic seal,to a burst of evangelistic activism against prejudicial racial relations, religious injustice, nuclear proliferation and vigorous campaign for recognition of Red China by the United States, including regular convening of weekly press conference for women journalists.
It was from this pedestal of enviable achievements that Harry Truman appointed Mrs. Roosevelt to the General Assembly of the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization
Eleanor Roosevelt brought a combination of strength,idealism and pragmatism to bear in lifting the United Nations to greater heights during her tenurial epoch-making era in that global body of world nations.
This reference of epic proportion in the paradigm of elevated accomplishments may really not avail to sufficiently proper appreciation without a voyage in memory exploring the convoluted journey from a reproachfully diseased anti-social bashfulness,caging her in her pathologically imposed void of social ostracism,to a transformative prime-mover on the global scene.
In HID Awolowo,we find a symmetrically apt portraiture of Eleanor,in terms of the sacrificial immolation of a woman initially fired by the visionary idealism of the quintessential traditional wife, pandering to the magisterial whims of her husband,in a millieu in which she consumates her Midas gift for mercantile prosperity – a trait that genitively runs across their lineage – in matrimonial privacy devoid of the hysteric restiveness of politics.
To be sure,left with Mama, politics with Awolowo,would only have resided in the province of abominable no-go area – avoided like a plague rather than a dessiderative adjunct to fulfilment of destiny.
However, as the trajectory of fate negotiated a diametrical violation of matrimonial privacy,amidst the militating maelstrom of vigorous political engagements,mama took up the gauntlet with maniacal zeal in breathe-taking mobilisation of the women across the vast national space,in a political pulpitry that remains second to none in geo-political scope, frenetic rigour, vigour and intensity in the annals of politics not only in Africa,but the larger macrocosm of the global universe
To be sure,the similarity between the two,that is Mama HID and Eleanor consists only in sheer symbol.
One refers by this,to the sacrificial commonality,as in the forced discountenance of primordial preferences, for the overwhelming super-imposition of the interest of their husbands, underlying the two.
However,beyond the fore-going,Mama clearly excels in quantitative progression of the nitty-gritty buffettings she was fated to contend with,in the volatile political oddysey of which she partook in actively prominent proportion with her husband.
If we take cognisance of the fact that Awo remains the most villified,harangued and persecuted politician in the annals of Nigerian politics,viewed from the episodic monstrosities of the maliciously concocted farrago of the Coker Commission of Inquiry,it’s genitive pair in the rapacious falsi crimen of the
Treason trial,his harrowing ordeal in the gulag, initially in Broad Street, and latter in Lekki,the very gravitational hub of hoary hell in those days,the forest of a thousand demons, dreaded haven of the demorgorgon,infernal conventicle of an ever rampaging larger-than-life swarm of ravaging killer mosquitoes, frightening ogre of wild sharks, guerillas,hyenas,Lions, Tigers,Hippos,Crocodiles and dreaded pythons, mounting all over,in terrifying ubiquity – and Awo sequestered all alone in this Island of hermitage,like a plague,from the larger mass of humanity,with Mama and none but Mama,as his inseparable Siamese appendage,his eventual prison destination in far away Calabar – aptly towing the inglorious precedent of the deposed King Overamwen of Benin,who also served there,after the 1897 British invasion of the ancient Benin empire – the electoral tomfoolery of 1959, the electoral daylight robberies of the federal election in the old West, followed by the Western regional election,all during the first Republic, the terrimotive quake and the accompanying celebration of blood bath, as aptly summarised in the evocative epigram of ” The Wild Wild West”, Mama’s Amazonic ardor in shielding the otherwise highly vulnerable family from the rampaging blood hounds of the powers that be and their vicious occultic propensities which had earlier halted the soaring star of Segun Awolowo,a Cambridge educated lawyer,via a ghastly motor accident on his way to Lagos at the heat of his father’s political travails in detention at Broad Street Prison,the herculean campaign sweep of the Second Republic,the electoral chicanery of the most vicious order,the flaggellating savagery of those period on the psyche;if we remember that Mama was the hand that held forte at the home front throughout the challenging epoch of turbulence,if we reflect that Awo couldn’t have surmounted the turbulence without the supportive fortitude of amazingly factotum dimension,oozing as it were from the emotional bossom of his loving wife,if we ratiocinate on the great Awo as the only politician who had exerted the greatest ounce of energy in the strategic physical,mental, intellectual and emotional towards the enobling cause of nati onhood and that he could only have accomplished that with Mama’s managerial adroitness at the home front,then may we begin to comprehend in poignantly clear relief,her draconian sacrificial self-flagellation,which made her not only unique, but eminently sui generis,in the annals of First – Ladyship in the illimitable transcedence of time and space
Equating Mama with Moremi,that is,negotiating the primordial native turf,amounts still all the same to an under-estimation.This is because unlike Moremi who sacrificed her only son,Oluorogbo at the Eshimirin River,in the desperate bid to save her Ife kith and kins – Mama’s stature comparatively loomed beyond that.She sacrificed her most priceless Jewel,Segun Awolowo,a victim of the occultic wickedness of Awo’s political foes, not just for her primordial geo-political satrap of Yorubaland,but the macrocosm of the larger Nigerian nation.
Yes she sacrificed Wole Awolowo and Ayo Soyode,also in the process,because had Awo lived,considering his elevated placing as an illuminati – his presence would not unlikely have rubbed off in the utilitarian spiritual consequences on his children.Remember how the great Awo once openly expressed his joyousness that he prayed for his cerebral beautiful daughter,Dr. Tokunbo Dosunmu to have a child,when it appeared as being rather late,and how God answered his prayers.
Unfortunately,Awo himself was to fall a victim of sacrifice to national cause, arising from sadistic brutishness by successive power cabals rather than the natural.These are to pinpoint the immensity of the sacrifices of the Awo’s for collective national cause.
For the egocentric zealots of the school of women’s lib,Mama offers a markedly exemplifying model – because here was a woman,who from the onset,was fired by the avowed zeal to be simply nothing than a housewife – housewife in the puritanistic denotation of that description – subordinating her centripetal personal fads and fancies to the superogative solar supremacy of her husband’s will and interest – riding in the end,on the sacrificial wing of “marital servile acquiescence”, to the pantheon of universal fame and acclaim – worshipped no less by her husband whom she had initially set to worship.
Beyond peradventure however,Mama surely would go home with happy memories to relieve to her husband in the other-worldly hemisphere.She will tell him that the stone of Awoism which the builders had initially rejected,had eventually become the ideological cornerstone for national re-birth
To Awo, Mama will recount the exceedingly exciting tidings of a man, greater in death, than in life, whose essence in the all-embracing possibilities as imaginatively conceivable,continues with every passing day,to command a progressively increasing approbation encapsulating the national space, even in death.
But sadly enough,I do not know what Mama had to tell her husband and how to put across to him,the grim but brutal truth of the league of supposed Awoist confessors,who in one breadth, profess Awoism – but in practical actions and deportment, negotiate a diametrically antithetic negation of their supposed Awoist confession.
I also do not know how Mama will deliver to her beloved husband,the agonizingly grim fact that his ideological family of primordial contiguity in the Afenifere,sought a Messiah to vote for,and found none,other than Good luck Jonathan – Just for no other cause,than the deceptively laughable subterfuge of the promissorial article of covenant signifying his readiness to keep faith with the idea of a constitutional conference – as if the tragi-comic hokum contrived as a diversionary gambit to buy time,and hoodwink the gullible in perpetual perpetration of his faineant order of mountebankism,was in itself,the all magic wand to command food on the table for the bourgeoning mass of impoverished citizens,ravaged in the scorching heat of misery,squalor,and poverty under the draconian yoke of Jonathan.
With this piece of sad tiding I can visualize a despondent and grimly demoralised Awo as he sure was wont – absolutely lost at sea,as he imagines whether his familiar ideological devotees steering a supposedly sanctimonious common course in doctorinaire Awoism ever bordered for a diapause for critical self-questioning as to whether he (Awo) could ever venture on a suicidaly disastrous option of pitching an electoral tent of preference for a disastrously debauchic government of the dandiprats as epitomized in the Jonathan presidency,were he alive or even had the opportunity availed by esoteric power of whatever hue – of momentary incarnationary re-appearance on the earthly divide.I also do not know how Mama will deliver the depressive but real tale performance of supposed Awoist confessors,whose balanced sheet of stewardship scored an abysmal fiasco at the opportuned moment of call to service of their fatherland in the epoch after her husband’s demise, either in the ministerial or gubernatorial capacity, except of course for the ever reliable and dependent Alhaji Lateef Omokayode Jakande who till his last breathe stuck with inseparable Siamese embrace to his cherished ethos of Awoism.
I remember Mama also quoted during her visit to the Nigeria Tribune,which happened to be her last public outing that she will commend to her husband,the good work the management and staff of the reputable newspaper were doing.
To be sure,the Tribune ranks in eminently salutary terms,in the vantage bracket of the leading newspapers in Nigeria.As the longest surviving privately owned newspaper in Nigeria,the Tribune is unique in its own,but gone are the memorable eras of eminently iconic figures in the mould of Alhaji Lateef Jakande,Tola Adeniyi (aka Aba Saheed) the Felix Adenaikes and the Labanji Mobolajis of blessed memory – who in their respectively different epoch as the editorial Major Domo,personified the newspaper in terms of their brilliance,and pro-active interventionist genre of crusading journalism which at least, evoked sparks of the romantic historicism of the Tribune of ancient Rome as quintessential bulwark of classical democracy in those halcyon days of yore.
To be sure,Saburi Biobaku,the renowned historian of blessed memory,whom Awo was giving an extra educational tuition when he (Awo) was a bachelor living in Ibara,Abeokuta could not have been more apposite in suggesting the titular nomenclature of “The Tribune” to Awo at the time the later intimated him of his plan to establish a newspaper.
On his part,Awo realising the remarkable historical symbol of that name,in the libertarian code of democracy in its primeval origination in ancient Rome,grabbed the name without question,and to date,even in his abode in the great beyond,never could he for once,have had reason to regret a title which over the years,had proved a veritable talismanic stimuli steering and sustaining the newspaper to appreciable heights.
Tribune of the great Awo – as appositely here repeated for emphatic effect,must essentially make do with radical fire-brand gad-flys of essentially reformational,if not revolutionary progressive hue as in the mould of inspirational titans of the journalism fraternity,earlier afore-mentioned,for reason of the proprietorial imprint of the great Awo,and his evocative imageries of excellence,prodigiosity and exceptionality.In this lies the recipe of lasting consequences for the immortalization of Awo, because make no mistake about it – the Tribune converges as a major factor in the constitutive holism of Awo’s persona,as connotatively evoked in his leviathan frame,legend,immensity and grandeur.
As the buck shifts in motivic allusion to the genetive propinquity of Awo’s filial descendants,one is lost in a curious twist of puzzle,borne of the inability to unravel the causative logic for the paucity of this biologicaly privileged generation – animated as would have been expected by a visionary generational continuum – consumated with missionary zest – as an evangelistic agent of dispersal of the cherished corpus of philosophical thought,ideological worldview, ethico-moral heritage and reformational activism – at least in their own different ways as conveniently expedient – aggregating the distinctively heroic oddysey of their illustrious forbear.
The contemporary order evincing Tokunbo Dosunmu as the lone czar of activist amidst the distinguished constellation of the Awo dynasty must yield for an increased base of converts within the fold,for participatory proselytism of the progressive leitmotif of the great Awo.
To be sure, quite more than a handful of zealots are fanatically poised for an ideological dispersal aimed at keeping aflame the banners of Awoism,however,the participatory inclusiveness of the familial off-spring,only adds to the beauty of it all,as amply well attested by the illustrative example of Tokunbo Dosunmu,and Mama HID’s inspirational leadership of the Yoruba Unity Forum.
At this juncture,it becomes just so apt and pertinent to emphasize,if only for an utilitarian under-study by philosophers,sociologists, marriage counselors, religious bodies,conflict resolution experts – of Mama’s leviathan prosilience as an emulative paradigm for a stable familial home-front founded on the anchorage of a harmonious conjugal relation,as a primordial medium for cultivation of a breed of responsible citizens , anticipated as purveyors of world Peace,predicated on a sane moral order.
This in other words,is to emphasize the need to take a scrupulously scrutinous note of the pragmatic efficacy latent in the inspirationaly edifying millieu in which the woman takes the initiative as a prime mover,triggering this process from the home front to eventuate a multiplier culmination of global peace,based on a new order of ethico-moral re-armament.
And for my epitaphic elegy ineraseably etched on her tombstone:”Here was a woman.She simply came to be a good wife,kowtowing in servile deference to her husband – but ending up being worshiped by the very husband she had set out to worship.She achieved even more.She became the Mother of the Nation.
May her great soul continue to rest in perfect peace.
*Kola Johnson Is A Writer And Journalist.
