(Dedicated to – and inspired by - an absolutist African historian who thumbed his nose at “stories” because he deals with “facts” and “real people”)
Among the two-dozen or so names I was given when I came for the third and - what my parents fervently hoped was – the last time, Dad and Mom finally settled for Adebola Ota Adesanmi. That all Yoruba combo survived only the first decade of my life. On my tenth birthday, it suddenly occurred to Alfred and Lois Adesanmi, both ferociously more Catholic than the Pope, that it just wasn’t going to cut it for their precious only son to arrive at the Spiritan Catholic seminary in Eastern Nigeria with a combination of utterly pagan Yoruba names. Such was their devotion to Roman Catholicism that they were determined to pray, fast, rosary, and angelus me all the way to the Major Seminary after High School. Naturally, the villagers believed that the Adesanmis were completely nuts to be so open with their desire to sacrifice their only son to Catholic priesthood. The implications were ominous and I grew up hearing village elders regret that my parents went to England to study and oyinbo people messed up their heads. Whoever heard of parents praying for their only son to sign up for a vocation that would signal the end of their lineage? In Yoruba land? What was the world coming to?
Exit Ota. Enter Pius. Adebola, my first name, was shoved into the middle. Adebola Ota Adesanmi disappeared and Pius Adebola Adesanmi was born on his 10th birthday. The “Adesanmi” itself had originally been “Ifasanmi” but the European priests who baptised my grandfather when he was pacified and converted in his youth would not tolerate “Ifa” in the church. They guillotined the offending and offensive “Ifa” and asked for the Yoruba word for crown. Ade? Okay, you shall be Adesanmi. Joseph Adesanmi. As my family is not royalty, I still believe to this day that those missionaries had only one crown in mind when they renamed my grandfather: the crown in Buckingham palace. In essence, my family name tells me that an imperialist crown I don’t give a rat’s ass about in England augurs well for me. Named for Queen Victoria, Achebe would call it. For some of us, it rings home. Literally.
But Africa has always been known to have funny ways of resisting total erasure by Christianization, civilization, modernity, and all the other glittering gifts of Europe. So, like the kolanut that ripens and matures on contact with the elder’s tongue, Ota clung to my mother’s tongue, to be used sparingly only on the occasion of extremely solemn mother-son conversations: “Ota, Ota, Ota, you are heading out to France, remember the son of whom you are. Remember that the Church is your first family”. The night clubs and women of Paris ensured that I visited my first family by attending mass very regularly at the Eglise Sainte Eustache: at least once or twice every six months. Or: “Ota, Ota, Ota, what is this we hear that you now drink alcohol? Do you want to kill your parents?” I would reply in the negative and reassure Mom very sincerely that nothing of the sort was happening, while probably caressing the second bottle of merlot or downing a respectable helping of cognac, wondering what mysteries of African motherhood would make a woman imagine her full-blooded, hormone-laden, over-six-feet tall black son in his riotous early twenties in the West and still manage to excise booze and (white) girls from that dangerous equation.
Mom was not the only one who clung to Ota. All the elders in my village alternated between Adebola and Ota. Like Mom, they called me Ota at their most ponderous and pensive moments, indicating their awareness of the fact that I am story. I began to pay serious attention to Ota when I encountered Negritude poetics and philosophy as an undergraduate student of French studies. You do not get into the poetics of Léopold Sédar Senghor, Aimé Césaire, David Diop, Léon-Gontran Damas, and Edouard Maunick without developing a thirst for the finer details of stories of origins and beginnings. You do not study the writings of the Haitian indigénistes and remain indifferent to where the rains of culture and history began to beat you. At about the time I encountered these new discourses in my first year as an undergraduate, it also happened that the most popular undergraduate course in the neighbouring Department of Religions at the time was a course entitled Esu. Esu, is the Yoruba deity, who urgently needs to sue Christianity for defamation of character. Christians have ruined his otherwise good name. Unable to find a Yoruba equivalent for the Christian Satan/Devil, European missionaries reached for the closest equivalent and that was how Esu had the misfortune of entering the Yoruba Bible as Lucifer and his aliases: satan, devil, etc. Today, hundreds of thousands of ignorant Yoruba Christians still go about believing that Esu is satan or the devil. The sheer audacity of an undergraduate course entited Esu made many of us audit that course.
The combination of Esu and Negritude heightened my desire to know why I was named Ota. So one day, during long vacation ( we call it “long vac” in Nigeria – the equivalent of summer in the West) I asked Mom about it. Ota is the Yoruba word for stool. No! Not that stool! I mean the wooden stool that is commonplace in West Africa. Certainly, my Mom would not have named me after the other messy end product of the call of nature. When my parents returned from England to start their careers in the first decade of Nigeria’s independence, jobs, a house, and a car were waiting for them. Next thing on the agenda: make babies. Two girls came in quick succession and stayed. For a long time, nothing happened. Mom began to panic: the eternal damnation of women in my part of the world was setting in. Mom had no male child.
Anxiety. Stress. Tension. Whenever my father’s people greeted my Mom, the ordinary hello took on inflections that only an African woman ‘cursed’ with only female children would understand. Village men whose spinster daughters had gone to Teachers’ College or were doing Grade II began to pay nocturnal visits to my Dad. Those visits made my Mom extremely edgy and uncomfortable. There could be only one reason why men with marriageable daughters would visit a man ‘whose wife couldn’t bear male children’ at night. Then Mom had a boy! He took one look at this ugly world, decided instantly that things were much better where he came from and returned there. Two years later, Mom had another boy. Same scenario: he died within one month like the first boy. Mom was definitely on her way to becoming Dad’s senior wife…
Then I came! The villagers had absolutely no doubt that I was the same troublesome male child who had come twice previously. Even Dad and Mom temporarily suspended England, modernity, and Catholicism and truly believed it was my third coming. The Abiku narrative brushed aside all their Western-ness. There is no educated/Westernised/Christianised African who doesn’t know when to temporarily (and quietly) suspend the West we have acquired and let Africa take over. The façade of the West returns only when we have solved the problem. Even Senghor hid his totem from the arrogance of the proud races.
As the narrative of my abiku-ness gained legitimacy in the village, my paternal grandmother was not going to let me fool everybody again. She promptly branded my face. This explains why my undergraduate students in North America can’t have enough of me whenever I teach J.P. Clark’s and Wole Soyinka’s “Abiku”. Very few colleagues enjoy the extraordinary privilege of being able to stand in front of an undergraduate class and tell them that those two poems are remarkably accurate accounts of his or her life. That they are not just superstition. Those poems are indeed my autobiography. I came for one and the repeated time.
I survived the first month. The second. The third. The fourth. Like Ezinma’s mother in Things Fall Apart, my Mom began to dare to hope that I had come to stay. The nocturnal visits to offer my Dad a second wife stopped. Mom was greeted normally again by my father’s people. After the fifth month, Mom concluded that I had indeed decided to stay. So she named me Ota, the stool on which she was finally able to seat securely in her husband’s house. She now had a proper seat in her husband’s house and among her husband’s people. She was no longer what the Yoruba call fidihe – sitting tentatively on one buttock! Naturally, my two elder sisters, one a lawyer, the other a nurse, hate that name. They don’t like it when Mom calls me Ota. I don’t blame them. It certainly cannot feel too good for them to know that the two of them combined were not sufficient to be the Ota that could secure my mother’s place in her husbands house. So, they tend to dismiss that name as superstitious nonsense.
Not so my mom and all the elderly members of my extensive extended family for whom that name is at once memory and story. That is why they are ever so pensive when they call me Ota. Some tease me by asking if I know the stories and memories my mother packed into that one name. They grin in satisfaction as I tell them the story as I heard it from my Mom, adding a bit here, correcting a detail there. Ah, son, I was there when it all happened. Your Mom really tried. You wicked boy. Did you have to treat her like that? Did you have to come twice before making up your mind to stay? My Dad passed in 2007 but my paternal grandmother is still alive and kicking. We call her Mama Isanlu, the first person I go to see as soon as I arrive in the village on trips home. After all these years, Mama Isanlu still doesn’t trust her abiku grandson completely. You get a sense she feels she cannot afford to sleep with both eyes closed as far as my case is concerned, lest I pull a fast one on everybody and return to the great beyond as is the wont of my ilk. So, I undergo intense interrogation while she is mixing concoctions – how long are you staying this time son? The length of my stay will determine the nature of the concoctions I would drink, eat, mix with my bath water, the incisions that would go on my head, etc.
I let her do all that. I endure all the incisions, drink all the concoctions because I no longer believe like I was taught in Cathechism years ago that those things are pagan. Outside, my furious Catholic Mom, who won’t move near those things grandma is doing to and with her son, is waiting impatiently for us to go to evening Mass. I indulge my Mom too and accompany her to Mass, wondering if Jesus and the Holy Ghost would take kindly to the invasion of their space/violation of their privacy by all the ancestral spirits and forces grandma had only just injected into my corporeal being. It is the same old Roman Catholic church building in the village, where grandpa Ifasanmi had become Adesanmi. Now his grandson returns to the same church as Ota, his body reeking of concoctions, wondering in his scholarly mind if Africa isn’t exacting a little revenge…
Epilogue…
When next an arrogant African historian disses “stories” and forgets that his entire discipline is based on stories – especially in relation to Africa – do not forgive him. Just tell him the story of your life and ask him: what and how do I mean as a being without this story I just told you sir? I am people too, you know. Real people. But I ain’t no f…king people without my story sir. Deal with that.