25th April, 2019
Why did Chief Obafemi Awolowo describe HID, his wife, as a jewel of inestimable value? Here are the reasons
By Wale Adebanwi
The Countenance of Prosperity…
IBADAN IN THE LATE 1930s when Hannah moved there to begin a new life with her husband was an effervescent city. It was an old war-camp turned city-state which became a trado-modern city. It was later to be described in “five mercurial lines” by one of Africa’s pre-eminent poets, John Pepper Clark, ” as a “running splash of rust/and gold – flung and scattered/among seven hills like broken/china in the sun.” In the 1930s, the “running splash of rust/and gold” was in the throes of defining what would be its modern identity. It was the city to which Obafemi brought Hannah to experience “the beautiful soothing countenance of Prosperity”….
Hannah explained to her mother that her husband had requested that he wanted her to be a full-time “housewife” and they had both agreed on this. She wasn’t initially happy about the arrangement herself. When her husband first told her a few months after marriage that he would not want her to “trade” or do any work, she was very sad. It was not only that she would be wasting her skills, she had become used to earning money on her own and not depending on anyone, including her father; therefore, this new regime would mean total financial dependence on her husband. More important, she was already being put under some social pressure because she was yet to conceive. In that era in Yorubaland, perhaps the most important prayer for the newly wed is “eyin iyawo o ni m’eni,” which was a prayer for fruitfulness of the womb.
Hannah’s situation was therefore not made better by what some gossips had started to describe as infertility. She was not tending a pregnancy or taking care of a child. Yet, she wasn’t employed in any way. It was an untenable position for a young married woman in late 1930s Nigeria. Yet, as pledged, she had to abide by the wishes of her husband.
She visited Ikenne regularly and therefore was open to being constantly taunted alternatively by those who advised her against marrying the rascal and those who advised Obafemi not to marry an abiku.
However, regarding the issue of whether his wife should work, the transporter and produce-buyer was convinced that, as in the tradition of his people, it was his exclusive responsibility to take care of his wife. At that point, he could not imagine that it was possible for his wife to combine the administration of the home front with commerce. He would learn later that she could do so brilliantly and still support him in his proposed political life.
“He wanted two things – politics and law,” Hannah, on the eve of her seventieth birthday, justified her decision to obey her husband’s wishes in the early years of their matrimony. “When I married him, he was in business – transport and produce buying. But he had always said, ‘One day I want to be a frontline politician. One day I want to be one of the first class lawyers in this country.’ So, I knew what he wanted, and I wanted him to be what he wanted to be.”
Click to read the rest here: thenewsnigeria.com.ng/2017/02/obafemi-and-hid-awolowo-their-untold-love-story-part-2/