Olu Obafemi at 70
Saturday, April 4, 2020 1:18 am | Opinion |
Olu Obafemi
(Or,
Gambolling on Friendship in a Season of Plague)
By
Femi Osofisan
My
friend, Olu Obafemi, turns 70 today. A joyous event, except that it has been
shadowed by a cruel global pandemic called Covid-19, for which there is yet no
cure. Most of the nation is now in a lockdown to fight the virus, and
consequently therefore, all the jubilant events previously arranged to mark the
birthday have had to be shelved.
It
is a sad development, considering the still expanding list of casualties, but I
will not use that as an excuse here. Even without the coming of this deadly
coronavirus, I would still have been shy of words to celebrate my friend.
It
will not be the first time I confess. On every similar occasion in the past,
when I have had to talk about a friend, I have always found myself bereft. It
may be a flaw, but unlike with some others, eloquence deserts me when the subject
in question is a bosom mate.
It
is the same today. How do I begin to speak of Olu Obafemi, my cherished
brother, the small man famously known to be ‘larger than his frame’? I am
tongue-tied. Because the important things we share, the intangible secrets that
power the sinews of our relationship, are of such sensitive, even
conspiratorial, intimacy, that they cannot be shed into the public ear.
Otherwise,
the words come out merely lambent, too commonplace really to capture the
profundity of my inner emotion. For me, the attachments bred of affection are
too delicate to be easily amenable for translation into the vulgar vehicle of
speech. (And I expect you to counter here that this was why poetry and music
were born). But in normal quotidian jargon, in the syntax of day-to-day
discourse, friendship is always short-changed; rarely does one find the words
to fit it. You can pile adjective upon adjective, fiddle with proverb and
metaphor, but the real essence of your feeling would still be absent, unsaid.
That
is my dilemma today in writing about my friend, whose anniversary has been
ruined by this rabid pandemic. How far should I go, and how much disclose? When
you have known a person so closely for so long, where should you stop?
I
suspect that, to Obafemi himself, the occasion must look somewhat unreal. Like
catharsis, a floating moment in one of his plays. A few years back—or, why not
even say, up till midnight yesterday—the age of 70 must have seemed a long,
long way away, somewhere very distant, the territory of those longevous, hoary
fellows we used to refer to when we were young as ancestors and witches even.
But now today, almost incredibly, he himself is suddenly there too, a cohort of
Fagunwa’s Baba Onirugbon-yeuke, to be listed henceforth among the ‘elders’ of
the land.
It
was not totally unanticipated of course. We always know when age is piling upon
us from subtle intimations—such as when the simple act of lifting a bucket of
water, or climbing up a staircase, or moving the furniture, becomes a laborious
chore that has to be mentally rehearsed in advance. Only, we rarely pay these
signals any mind.
Unfortunately
for us, one of the marks of our ‘modern’ circumstance, of our sophistication,
is that initiatory rites no longer exist to usher us through the various
passages of life. Our traditional societies, we recall, were not that careless.
At various stages of transition—from infancy to adolescence to adulthood and so
on, till death—every individual was made to undergo certain rituals and
ceremonies, along with his or her age mates, in the course of which they would
be taught the duties and responsibilities expected of them by the community.
They would learn about the taboos that they must henceforth never infringe, the
limits of their rights and deserts, as well of course as the penalties for
deviance.
But
no more nowadays. Now, sadly, the young arrive at adulthood, and are on their
own. All they have to lean on is, at best, what they may have gleaned from the
screens of the globalized internet, the artificial wisdom of stranded,
self-obsessed robot men. But, Olu, you have travelled a different road. You
have been fed and nourished with the rich ingredients of our culture, and it is
this that brought us together to the same household of humane consciousness.
I
know I will have to explain this, since it took me myself some time to
understand it. Olu and I became friends, but to say here the exact details of
when we began is beyond my memory. It just seemed to me that we drifted
together after the death of his supervisor in ABU, who was a colleague of mine.
Then subsequently, when we were both, so to say, marooned here during those
difficult military years, we had little choice but to find solace in each
other’s company.
However,
we accompanied him to his father’s village some years back to bury the old man,
and it was then that I discovered to my amazement that our friendship had in
fact, unknown to both of us, been more or less pre-planned.
On
the occasion, I made a joke that if I had known that Olu came from such a
rural, primitive hamlet, I would not have made friends with him. But the joke
was really on me. For it was because he came from such a village
in fact that we bonded as friends. His rustic beginnings were an astounding replicate
of mine.
That
day, as we drove into the forests through the loam and dust, heading for the
village of Akutukpa, the landscape began to revive shards of forgotten memories
from my own childhood and, for the first time, a fundamental truth about our
relationship broke on me like an epiphanous revelation.
I
came to realize suddenly that Olu and I had been born to the same beginnings—to
the affinity of trees and forest spirits , the symphonic ambiance of insects
and crickets and grasshoppers, the medley of streams flowing unseen in the
underbrush to the chorus of snakes and creaking toads. I saw again as they
floated past, the old familiar flotilla of birds and butterflies whose wings
first awakened us as kids to the amazement of colours.
For
a while as the cars squelched along, I closed my eyes, and it was easy to dream
again, to recall the markets of yam and corn, pepper and salt and dried fish
and other delicacies that used to dot those village roads not too long ago in
my own Ijebuland. My mind wondered back to retrieve the pleasant nights when we
assembled under the moon’s mysterious spell for moonlight tales, those tales
populated by the feats of the tortoise and the farmer and frightful gnomes.
And
then the scene changed abruptly, and I found myself plunged back to our harvest
times of old, with their carnivals and processions, boisterous communal feasts,
and different masquerades mounted by Ogun and other deities!..
I
shook myself awake. So, this was where Olu came from, this haven of rustic
delights! Tell me, how could we have shared such a memorable childhood, and not
be friends? Wherever and whenever we found each other, inevitably, it would be
a meeting of kindred spirits.
He
has never visited my own ancestral village regrettably; none of my friends has.
But that is mainly because the place no longer exists. At least no longer as I
remember it. It has been swallowed, since my father went away, by so-called
modernization; the former farmlands and their surroundings have been crushed
into sorry urban slums by new dwellers, the rapacious speculators and
latifundists from the city. But that day however, as we drove further and
further into the forests for the old man’s final farewell, the resurgence of so
many common gems from our childhood past gave the simplest and most vivid
explanation for the depth of our friendship.
Thus
it is no longer surprising that, though physically dissimilar, we are like
spiritual twins, with near identical characters and similar thoughts and
opinions on most subjects. To these, add our sentimental attachment to our
mothers and to all women generally, and our sense of compassion, our
spontaneous identification with the plight of the downtrodden everywhere. And
furthermore, add that in spite of continual betrayal, we have refused so far to
surrender to despair, or to the death of laughter in our land. It is also
uncanny that we have both chosen the same weapon of literature and the arts to
articulate our responses to history and politics.
On
December 6 2018, not too long ago, my friend was conferred with the Nigerian
National Order of Merit (NNOM) by the President. At the ceremony in Aso Rock, I
was privileged to read his citation, and inter alia said as follows: “Olu
Obafemi is a multi-talented and many-sided personality. Playwright, poet,
novelist, scholar, teacher, translator, and much more besides, he is the public
intellectual par excellence, one who has exhibited throughout his turbulent
career, a moral commitment to interrogate the social injustices in our nation
and elsewhere, while striving to build bridges of understanding across the
contentious gulfs of class, culture and race.”
That
was one of my proudest moments. So I don’t need to say more. Even if we have
had to suspend our parties, no pandemic can ever erase such a dazzling tribute
to a stellar life. Welcome, my brother and companion, to the mid-winter season
and to the table of elders.
-Professor
Femi Osofisan is an award winning Playwright and distinguished Professor of
Drama at the University of Ibadan
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