He is the first Ado-Ekiti son to earn a university degree. His name is Alex Olu Ajayi. In his nine decades and one year on earth, Pa Ajayi has recorded many firsts. His life, which he has graciously recorded in an autobiography, is filled with lessons for the young and the old and also, in parts, a clarion call on the governments at all levels to make life better for the people, writes OLUKOREDE YISHAU.

Do you know that there was a time Igbobi College, Lagos was relocated to Ibadan? And do you know that D.O Fagunwa, the man behind many Yoruba novels and novellas, was an English language teacher at Igbobi College? Were you aware that the King’s College, Lagos was for some years evacuated to Achimota College in Accra? And do you know it used to take days to travel between Ado-Ekiti and Lagos?

These are some of the many history lessons in ‘A Legacy on the Move’, the autobiography of Alex Olu Ajayi, the first university graduate and postgraduate from Ado-Ekiti, whose footprint spans teaching and university administration.

The book, unlike many autobiographies which are ready tools for the writers to paint themselves in borrowed garbs, tries to stick with facts.

The book tells the story of a legend, a teacher, a father, a grandfather, a great-grandfather and the son of a true preacher who was more interested in the gospel of Jesus Christ and not the things of the flesh.

Within the pages of this book, you will encounter tales of self-denial, you will find stories of resilience, accounts of adversities defeated and memories of a close shave with death.

Life began for Ajayi on Saturday, June 28, 1930, in Owo, the hometown of his mother, Marian Ademubiola. His father, Joseph Adesuyi Ajayi, who later became a reverend, was working in Ikere-Ekiti at the time, and his mother had to come and stay with her mother so that she would be guided through the motherhood process.

The instructors for the first two years of his education taught in the Yoruba language, a development the author lamented its demise because of his belief that it helped in child development.

Read Also: DESOPADEC commissioner Akozor dies

The author writes: “Meanwhile, we had been grounded well in Yoruba language, our own native tongue. This is the great advantage of our generation, which the modern ones have lost forever. Skill in one’s language fortifies one for grasping the essence of any concept. It gives a linguistic skill that would enable the speaker more ability to comprehend and enhance his skill in the knowledge of other language.”

Being the first child of his missionary parents, his early life saw him moving from different stations such as Ikere-Ekiti, Owode, Ode-Ekiti and others. His father, in 1934, was headmaster and catechist of the Church Missionary Society Anglican School, Church St Mary’s School and St. Mary’s Church, Ode-Ekiti.

One of the remarkable things the elder Ajayi did why working with the mission was to get as many children as possible into school. His tactic was to get idling children to start school. One of those he got to school through this style was Sam Aluko, who would years later become a revered economist and professor. Aluko was then fond of spending quality time going around with masquerades.

The intrigue in the Anglican Church at the time got generous treatment in the book. His father’s quest to become a full-time church minister suffered a setback in 1937, all thanks to the then head of the Anglican Mission in Ekiti, Venerable Henry Dallimore. He was made to withdraw from the training that would have seen him become a priest. After a three-year hiatus, he returned to complete his training, but Dallimore almost struck again. The author’s father was to become the third Anglican pastor in the town, but after his father’s training in Oyo, Dallimore’s hidden agenda nearly scuttled his ordination. He was recorded to have sent some information advising against the ordination of the author’s father to the Bishop of Lagos, Right Rev. Leslie Vining.  When the information for the ordination eventually came, Rev. Dallimore was believed to have deliberately ensured it did not get to the author’s father on time so that it would be difficult for him to get to Lagos for the exercise. When he found a way around that by wading through the untarred road from Ado to Lagos, another spanner was almost thrown in the works.

‘A Legacy on the move’ is not just a recollection of Ajayi’s life; it is also laced with commentaries, especially about the good old days. For instance, while telling the story of the sacrifice his father had to make to serve as a priest, he noted: “In January 1941, my mother and we the children that had now increased in number to four with a boy Adekunle added in 1939, had to part with our student father. He had to go to Oyo and my mother had to take us to her parents at her original home in Owo. In those days, such were the sacrifices that anyone who had a sacred call to be a missionary had to make and give his all and even sacrifice whatever his extended family would provide to upkeep him and his employment.

“There was our father whose colleagues had left the mission to take on far lucrative jobs, being asked to undertake a theological course without one kobo provision for his nuclear family. Here was our father whose income as headmaster was slashed when he became a full-time Catechist after being a celebrated Headmaster in schools with Government normal convention. His parents-in-law now had to cater for us and our mother so that the church could employ his selfless services as a priest for years after, in contrast with these days when young Pastors who had barely left their seminary would want all the comfort of their affluent parishioners.”

The author’s first visit to Lagos was in March 1943 and he would not have returned to Ekiti alive. The visit was for his father’s second ordination to become a full priest. One day during the visit, the author and his younger brother, Silas, had gone to the lagoon and the author attempted to walk on water. He almost drowned and shouted at Silas to pull him out. That was how he was saved.

“Near us by the shore where we were standing, some fishermen had come out of their canoes into the water and seemed to be walking in the water. I then surmised that the fishermen were walking on solid ground and so decided to follow their example. I then backed the lagoon, put my two elbows on the embankment and tried to let myself down into the water. To my shattering disbelief, my feet did not touch any ground, and already, the strong flood was striking me as if I was about to drown!

“I shouted at my brother to pull me up who was himself a novice to swimming as he too would have somersaulted into the pitiless waves. Pull he did, and by some hidden hand of the Almighty, I got buoyed up by the waves and I rolled back on the embankment, saved from an assured tragedy which the Ajayi tribe would have agonised over down the ages as both of us would have gone down the bottomless lagoon, with those fishermen not taking the slightest glance at our direction,” the author recalls the scaring event.

That narrow escape notwithstanding, the two of them still went to the Atlantic Ocean on the quest to discover the ocean proper. It was a secret they kept for many decades.

The death of his maternal grandmother while on a visit to his father’s station in Owode shook his mother so much that she and the kids had to return to Ado-Ekiti, where Rev. Dallimore approved for him to complete his education at the Christ’s School in 1943. He emerged the overall best in English in the Ondo province.

After the provincial standard six examinations at the Christ’s School, he was looking forward to automatic admission to Form III in the Ado-Ekiti-based school, but his father surprised him with the news of his admission to Form I at the Igbobi College, Yaba. His father preferred Igbobi College because it offered pure sciences and Latin, which were not available at the Christ’s School at the time. His admission was, however, at a time the school had been relocated to Ibadan because of World War II so to Ibadan he headed in early January 1944. He had to stay at the Kudeti-Ibadan temporary home of the school for three years because Germany, Italy and Japan were battling the rest of the world. The Royal Air Force occupied the school’s 32-acre compound in Yaba during the war.

Life at Igbobi College was a far cry from what he was used to: there were laundrymen to wash the students’ clothes, pillowcases and bedspread, there were cooks to take care of their feeding and there were stewards to see to some of their needs. However, every Christmas, the school organised a staff dinner, where the students were made to serve the laundrymen and other junior staff in a sobering moment obviously aimed at teaching them to honour those who made life easy for them in the school.

He was nicknamed “Orinrin” at Igbobi because of an experience on his fourth day in school. He was sleeping and felt something was pinning him to the bed and started screaming in Ado dialect “orin rin nrin mi o”. The housemaster came into the dormitory, got him to have fresh air and took him to his room, where they both slept on the same bed.

World War II did not just make Igbobi College stay in Ibadan for three years; it also had other effects. The author, for instance, recalled how he had to queue from 4 am to 5 pm for essential commodities and was only able to get a cigarette tin of salt. As a way of raising Nigeria’s 20,000 Pounds contribution to the fund to win the war, schoolboys were made to go to the farm to collect palm kernels and extract the seed nuts for transmission to Britain.

The author’s years at Igbobi ended with his passing of the London Matriculation examinations, a feat which got him an automatic teaching job at the Christ School, Ado-Ekiti. The announcement of the result coincided with the visit of Rev. Mason, who was Christ School’s principal, to Igbobi College. They had to travel to Ado-Ekiti on October 7, 1949, through Agege Motor Road (there was no Ikorodu Road then), Abeokuta, Ibadan and Aramoko, where Rev. Mason broke the good news to his parents.

The author gives interesting accounts of his times in Freetown, London, Ibadan Grammar School, the West African Examination Council (WAEC), where, as Registrar, he took over the conduct of examinations hitherto conducted by Cambridge University and the University of Ife (now Obafemi Awolowo University). Also, his recollections on the creation of Ekiti State from the old Ondo State, which was championed by Elder Deji Fasuan, Brigadier Tunji Olurin, the National Democratic Coalition (NADECO) and many other issues and events make the book worth reading. He also recalled how he set up with A. G. Leventis a carpet manufacturing industry that lasted for a quarter century, sponsored a football team, Leventis United, and how by invitation, he served the longest term as Chairman of Ado – Ekiti Local Government under both military and civilian regimes.

In all, the book will make those who witnessed the country’s glorious era nostalgic and make those who did not witness it long for when things will work in Nigeria. Pa Ajayi has done this generation and generations yet unborn a huge favour by writing and publishing this book. His is a life worth emulating.