THE FINAL GOODBYE: TRIBUTES TO MY FATHER

 

THE FINAL GOODBYE: TRIBUTES TO MY FATHER

Orilabawaye A. Kayode

 

Who was he? Chief Arayesomo G. Orilabawaye, my father, who passed away 18 years ago, bequeathed to all his children the greatest heirloom of legacies: a sound education. He never had the advantage of western education and I suppose that lack must have fired in him the all-consuming passion to have the children seize the path of knowledge. A book I always enjoy reading is Mongo Beti’s Mission to Kala partly because there is a similarity in the ferocity of the father of Mezda, the hero, for western education with that of my father. Medza bemoaned,” My father: the words evoked twenty years of almost continual terror. At any moment he was liable to materialize where I least expected him. He was inescapable. And, at once, he would begin an inquisition on my behaviour: what had I been doing, where had I been, had I worked hard at school, were they pleased with me, would I pass my exam? He was like a bloody policeman- no, worse: a private dictator, a domestic tyrant. There was never any peace or sense of security; nothing but rows, reproaches, and fear…He had packed me off to school as young as I could…My father had been obsessionally determined that I should get my immediate promotion from one class to the next every term, without ever staying put longer…”I wouldn’t say I enjoyed or even shared Dad’s passion for schooling; as a matter of fact I resented him for literally forcing us to keep our noses between the pages of books. He wouldn’t fail to tell you that his was to pay the school fees, buy the books and ours was to read those books. Woe betide that child that came home with poor grades! In my hometown, Akotogbo, in Ondo State, it was the practice in the schools to announce the position of each pupil in the Assembly Ground. So if you did well everybody would know; there was no hiding place. Those of us who knew what our fathers could do had to put in hours of unremitting practice at our studies until this became a second nature.

  With four wives (my mother being the junior wife), many children, my father’s house was always teeming with people, but our elder brothers and sisters had gone to the cities, and so it was elder brother, Adebiyi, I and my younger brother, Samuel, with some of our sisters, who were under the eagle-eye watch of an almost overbearing daddy. The primary school we attended, St. Andrew’s Anglican School, was directly opposite our house. My father, if he was not on the farm, would sneak into the school to consult the teachers, mostly about our grades and behaviour. We feared him, respected, but resented some of his actions. For years, even after his death, my feelings about him were those of Medza’s. No football, no parties, rigid control over the choice of your friends. You must read your books in his parlour where he always sat. To us this was too much! The boys must know their place: in his presence in the parlour. One morning I was washing some plates for Mum when I suddenly received beating from behind: “You’ll soon become a woman! Leave this kitchen immediately”. Surprisingly it was this same man, together with Mum, who would give you a piece of their minds for treading the shameful paths of never-do-wells if you hung around in the compound and didn’t lend a hand in the domestic chores. Another book I used to enjoy reading then was Francis Selormey’s The Narrow Path.

  According to the standards of the town, Dad was famous for his large farms. We would go to the farms during the holidays. He introduced us early to the glorious backbreaking labour that’s farm work. You had no choice in the matter; you had to work long and hard on clearing weeds, hoeing the soil, planting arable crops… The first week of school’s resumption had to be spent on farm; afterall, according to Dad, why should you waste your time when no serious academic work had begun? He was way ahead of his contemporaries in the art of farming for he applied fertilizers on the crops, sprayed the weeds with chemicals, and did unsophisticated crop rotation practices. He planted cash crops like cocoa (a fiasco), kola, and a plantation of rubber trees. He was into timber-cutting and he would transport beautiful rolls of timber, anchored to a powerful ship which we ignorantly called “a tug” through the Siluko River that borders Southern Ondo State and Edo State to Lagos. This business enabled him to travel throught the country and he must have picked some of his exotic agricultural practices from these travels. We were told that he had ventured into trading, dealing in shoes, leather sandals, oil and what- not in his mid-years. The wealth he amassed perhaps egged him on to embrace one –eyed money-sinker: polygamy; sent the children to school, some of them to boarding schools, maintained a dignifying and almost expensive fashion taste in society.

  Up till today, it’s something of a puzzle to me how he had an almost magical control over his home. The fainting sound of his approaching motorcycle was enough to make everybody maintain an un-flippant form of order. Those of us playing football at the backyard had to switch into something “serious” or got an immediate lashing of the tongue. In public places, Dad hardly talked. He maintained a friendly, even shy, mien. We only wished he would do that at home. It’s easy to think of him as always wearing a lugubrious look at home; on the contrary, he loved playing with his wives and friends in the evenings in the big verandah of our house. He got a kick from doting on his grand children. Nevertheless, I see so much of Okonkwo of Things Fall Apart in him. In my family, it’s still something of a complex to display open emotions. For example, we find it difficult to say: “Mum, I love you.” Or, “Bro, I miss you!” We display our affections through perceptible nuances of silence, grunts, nods, and so on. I can’t remember Dad ever telling any one of us: You led your class? Oh, that’s so great! Congrats! Never. What you got was pregnant silence of approval. He may later boast of your abilities to his close friends or wives if conversation skewed along that road, but strictly behind your back. If you were lucky to overhear it, you became overjoyed for days especially having known that at least your efforts at school or good behaviour at home didn’t go unappreciated. Perhaps the fear Dad had was the possibility of praise going into your head; so to tame the monster of hubris, minimise your praise or squelch the urge to dote.

     It’s correct to say that we too gave our old man a lot of stress. Don’t climb on the motorcycle; but no sooner had he gone out for his numerous town-meetings than we did exactly that. Don’t fight at school, but my elder brother, Biyi, who was Dad’s spitting image and alter ego, wouldn’t care. Three boys who followed one another in close succession, we were like a pack of hounds, breaking those rules the old man in his wisdom had enacted. In spite of his age, in his early seventies when we were growing up, Dad should be given huge marks for reining us in; otherwise God knows how we would have turned out. Today, however, we are most grateful he was hard on us. During sunshine and rain, we would be dragged to the farm. How I hated going to the farm during the raining season! Southern Ondo State, where we hail, drips with rain almost every day during the season. You work in that kind of environment and you begin to wonder if this is how you want to spend the rest of your life, harsh and agonizing work. When he died, it was easy for us to engage ourselves in one form of activity or another in order to pay our way through school. You can only imagine what would have become of us if he had pampered us. Of course, I didn’t see it in this light then. If anything, I felt it was wicked of him to have placed a big slab of responsibility on our shoulders so young. He was making us fulfil Prophet Jeremiah’s injunction in Lamentations: “to bear the burdens when you are still young”. But, many a youth knows how hard the burdens of life can be when the only thing closest to your heart is how to satisfy your unrefined urges.

    The day before his death, July 5, 1990, we were in the hut with him on the farm. That morning as he was having his breakfast, the rain was falling cats and dogs, furiously hitting the sheaves of the hut. The world outside was dark with clouds. I felt unusually elated for no reason, perhaps the laughter and banter we shared by the fire inside the hut was responsible for the elation. Dad shared with us the dream he had had the night before. In that dream he saw his late father, long departed relatives, especially he remembered having a long conversation with his late elder brother. You could see a glimmer of satisfaction on his face as he shared that dream. Little did we realise that it was a coded message for his departure, the invitation of the faithful singing bird for him to make up his mind to cross the loneliest of sea-sailing. We were unusually warm and gay on the farm, and I still remember that he complimented me on my farming exploits that day, a compliment I treasured because it was a rarity. He showed me certain things he kept secret on the farm as if he was to embark on a long journey. I never saw it this way until the unexpected happened.

      On the following day, he had, as usual, just taken tea in his parlour, when he couldn’t wait any longer for the young girl he had sent to buy him akara (fried bean cake). He was in a hurry to leave for the farm. As he strode to the passage to push his motorcycle outside, I was with my elder brother Biyi who was having his breakfast. We saw that Dad, who was still agile and strong, was shivering as he was making efforts to wheel the machine out. Quickly we were at his side to assist. But the old man was losing his grip on life. A local doctor came to minister to him, but he had already slipped into a coma. Efforts were made from that morning till the evening to resuscitate him. At exactly 10 PM, however, he slipped into the night, and, in the words of a third- rate poem I composed about him, “in that misty July morning the eagle has flown away!” So in that chill breath of the weepy night, when darkness draped Akotogbo, he went out to meet the cheering crowd of expectant relatives in the world beyond the womb of grave.

       There was a mango tree in front of the house of one of my friends, and we used to pass time under it until it was cut down. Any time I remember the cut tree that used to give me shade, I remember him, my father. What a shade he was to us. As a child I didn’t know his worth nor appreciate what he stood for until his demise. After his unexpected departure a paralyzing feeling of aloneness in the wilds of life assailed me. Something akin to the biblical desolation fell on the household, for the spirit of the household is no more. Our surname used to be his baptisimal name, George, until one day when he rode to the school and informed the headmaster to change it to Orilabawaye, a name that many a friend and foe love to roll in their mouths, because of the literal and metaphoric significance. The man was fighting against base colonial attitudes as he knew them. Dad taught us that our name is our identity and we must never soil it, no matter how ferocious the gale of temptation. In a wordless manner he drove into us the ethics of hard work; he believed that words are cheap: the extent of your care would be gauged not by the quantity of words but by your actions and deeds. He may not have told me, “Kayode, I love you” but he showed that in a variety of concrete ways. To him action has dazzling majesty. His bias for action and penchant for work are an unforgettable sermon on how to make it in any endeavour. He and Mum never had favourites among us, or, if they did, never showed it and this perhaps explains why we didn’t experience any sibling rivalries. Above all he showed personally how to treat vicissitudes of life, not cursing your lot, nor denying your Creator but to have a heart of iroko.

        Even at death, he still has that uncanny ability to influence what I do. When I was at the University of Lagos, some of my friends wondered why I was in such a frenetic speed about life and work, impatient with boring, limping theories, but how would they know the old man was still looking over my shoulder at what I was doing and how I was running my life? He wouldn’t be satisfied with feeble excuses for loitering or failing in life. It can be very annoying feeling looked over the shoulder, especially when you know the fellow doing it is a finicky perfectionist, a pedantic nitpick who frowns at floppy, cavalier attitudes. Life becomes overbearing, lordly, a cranky taskmaster demanding an explanation for every of your actions. You engage in a monologue which you know it’s a conversation with your old bugbear. So much for an unfettered unqualified life of liberty which demands you to live in debauched excess, to follow the unthinking mass, to float through life expecting that life owes you something. Those silent rebuking eyes burning at my back wouldn’t allow me to detour from the narrow path called life of virtue and significance. I may have felt like my old friend, Medza, who fell apart with his father, and I may not have loved some of the Dad’s methods, yet the scorching blaze of years has matured me and given me deeper appreciation for the man who to me possessed the enigmatic marks of a winner, my hero. It has taken me years to be able to put these thoughts out of my system, but doing so is very important to me, and it’s a symbolic way of saying to him my final goodbye.

       

 

   Orilabawaye A. Kayode is a banker who is based in Ibadan, Oyo State.