A Tribute To Awo’s Daughter

I remember, sometime in 1989, I was then the Ondo State correspondent of an Ibadan-based provincial newspaper owned by an Ekiti-born veteran journalist and former senior editor with the glorious but defunct Daily Sketch of those good old days.

The occasion in question saw my fellow correspondents and I in a lighter and relaxed chit chat at the immediate next-to-the-wall frontage of the Daily Times office in Akure. Along the line, an elderly gentleman in Yoruba traditional buba and sokoto emerged from a car and moved towards our direction.

“Ha! That is Prof. coming,” said Remi Ibitoye, the then Daily Times chief correspondent, who was our host.

Just within the fleeting span defining his emergence from the car and traversing the earshot distance to our point of convergence, one thing had quickly led to the other, as it now dawned on me that the August visitor, or do I say the “visiting professor,” was indeed no less a personage than Pa Samuel Aluko, that enigmatic professor of world renown.

The arrival of Prof., as it turned out, lent a somewhat enervating heat to the hitherto relaxed atmosphere, as he reeled out an almost endless bout of no-holds-barred remarks on various issues of national importance in an encounter that gave you a privileged intimate close-up on the iconic intellectual as a rapturously engaging conversationalist, whose talking acumen permits no dull moment.

Sensing that the outpourings were actually at best, an off-the-shelve stuff for a provincial medium of confined horizon such as I report for, I quickly chipped in an abrupt intervention that eventually fetched me a front page placing in the following edition of my paper: “Sir, how would you appraise Tokunbo Dosunmu’s gubernatorial bid for Lagos State?”

To this, he opened up unhesitatingly, confessing with an unrestrained reservation that he actually fell flat for the gubernatorial vision of the British-trained medical doctor and daughter of Chief Obafemi Awolowo, who was then gunning for the Lagos guber seat.

“Look at a person like Jesus Christ for example, can you imagine almost 2,000 years after his death, the depth of affection he continues to enjoy? Then imagine if he were to have an offspring, the depth of love such an offspring is likely to enjoy from the people all over the world,” said the renowned professor of Economics, who vowed that he would surely vote for Dosunmu.

Such indeed was the profound depth of affection that was bound to be engendered by anything Awo, which by that token, explained the pathos of mourning and lamentation of the regrettably untimely demise recently of Ayo Soyode, the British-trained lawyer and beloved daughter of Chief Obafemi Awolowo.

To be sure, there’s an ironic similitude to Soyode’s death and her father’s. Fact is that Awo, the great sage, commanded a sacerdotal imagery of a sort, a superhuman divinity, so to say, such as conferred on him, at least, within the context of popular perception, a mythical immortality of a living deity and custodian of the key to death, who can never die.

It was for this that the entire world was swept off in stuporous fit of unguarded imbalance, that fateful night of 7 May, 1987, following the announcement of his death, in the breaking news of NTA.

Ever since the grievously mourned departure, a sustained focus had been cast on Mama HID as the Awo political family and indeed the teeming millions of Awo lovers all over the country and beyond, had consciously followed through, in a counting game that had seen quite an elapse of 24 odd years, following her husband’s death.

And just as the hitherto sustained anxiety had begun to abate with the astounding longevity with which the revered matriarch had confounded the world, the sanguinary great ripper reared its grotesque presence at the least suspected and most unlikely quarters, to pluck off an infinitely priceless jewel of Awo’s biological offspring. What a lamentable irony!

Such unsavoury eventuality befalling Ayo Soyode couldn’t have lurked even in the remotest fringes of Awo’s imagination while alive. And, of course, his passionate exhortation, as expressed by the wife, to the effect that she should be of good courage after his death in order to hold forte at the home front in which, of course, the children constitute the main defining essence couldn’t, of course, have been devoid of the implicitly confident expectation that the offspring would outlive the mother.

One could also express, with reasonable modicum of conviction, that crucial to this grand commission of matriarchy as might not improbably have been envisaged by Awo, was the possibility that in the event that any or more than one of the offspring happens to be kindled by the sublime vision of political activism, Mama would always be there, as a tower of strength.

But the unfolding scenario in the immediate post-Awo ascension only fell short of Mama HID, summoning the children for a sacred oath to register a compulsive loathing for the turbulent calling which above other facets of involvements, had earned their father, not only the admirable clout of world renowned, but also etched his name in the pantheons of the immortals.

Asymmetrical as this might seem to the most cherished expectation of the great Awo, it cannot be said to be without an endemic germ of credible logic, not at least in an exclusively peculiar clime like ours, which as it were, parade politicking of the most volatile strain of which the trades—tool for dominance excludes not the maximum summary option—as defined in the primitive brutishness of the Hobbesian extremism.

However, whatever she might hope to have safeguarded by this singular measure was almost frittered via the accident, which, in its frighteningly fatal dimension, almost snuffed with devastating finality, the life out of the only surviving son, Chief Oluwole Awolowo.

Lovers of the Awo clan the world over and Mama especially, must have heaved a sigh of relief that the first generation of Awo’s offspring remains intact after all, apart from the evergreen nostalgia for Segun Awolowo, the first son and offspring, whose gaping vacuum was almost somehow assuaged by the healing balm of time.

Mama’s rejoicing must have known no bounds that the surviving foursome of her glorious fruits, would by her bedside, after all avail, at that critically decisive moment that she would bid the final goodbye. But unfortunately, this would not be. Nigerians and the black race mourn because whatever touches Awo touches us.

Adieu Sister Ayo Soyode, may your soul rest in peace and may the good Lord give the family the fortitude to bear the loss.

•Kola Johnson is a Lagos-based journalist