We take leave of the toxic and abrasive world of politics this morning to pay some unusual compliments. Constantly subjecting its customers to heavy-duty artillery bombardments, the column has little time left for niceties and polite anodyne.
But the world is not about big issues alone. There are many “small” issues that are far more important than the “big” issues, particularly where a civilized and orderly society is concerned. And there are times when the small issue is actually the big issue. This is the whole point about The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy’s prize-winning novel.
But then how do you begin to write a personal obituary about a stranger—in the fullest grammatical import of that word—and someone you never met? But we live in interesting and exciting times, a world in which only the thinnest strand separates living and dying. One moment someone is here and the next moment you hear they are gone, forever, never to be seen again on this side of the grim borderless continuum.
The Yoruba put it with memorable urgency. The leg of the spectator is entangled with the masquerade’s limb and it is no longer possible to separate the residents of the earth from the denizens of the other world. How many times has one glimpsed in the crowd what looked like an old friend only to remember as one was about to shout the name that the person had long joined their ancestors?
There is a cousin of this writer who joined the army at the onset of the civil war. He was known to have fallen during one of the early skirmishes around Obolo Eke. His bosom friend came home to report about his passing with unassailable evidence of his demise. He was deeply mourned while traditional rites to ease his passage were performed.
A few days after the termination of the war, our man showed up one morning grinning with trademark mischief to the consternation of everybody who almost took to their heels. He had spent the entire war in Biafran captivity. Today, he lives in London and approaching eighty still retains the swag and gait of a field captain of the old Nigerian Army.
Arguably the most surreal of these tales involved a cherished friend and a most accomplished Nigerian. Almost twenty years ago while the two of us where lounging and casually loitering about in a vast Houston supermall, my friend drew one’s attention to the fleeting image of a woman who just passed and wondered whether she didn’t look like his wife.
One was absolutely nonplussed by this development. If they were living together, why was he asking the question? It turned out that as part of pre-divorce proceedings the house had been effectively partitioned and walled in. Our friend kept to his side of the Berlin Wall for fear of the law and had not sighted his wife in five years. Such is the surreal nature of the world we live in.
The column takes it back that this obituary is about a complete stranger, or that the columnist never met the tragically departed, Mrs Yetunde Oladeinde, an accomplished journalist, senior staffer of this newspaper and mentor to many of the younger journalists who joined the Triumphant Procession in the early hours of Monday, 19th February.
To exaggerate in order to clarify or simplify is a familiar literary stratagem. Our “unofficial” path must have crossed a few times in the hustle and bustle of the ever busy newspaper corridor. We would have bumped into each other in the busy hall or newsroom. But she was never formally introduced. One can faintly recall her at an expanded board meeting with the staff, sitting quietly at the back: demure, dignified and matronly with a hint of upper middle class background.
One was shocked and devastated when news of her death filtered through late afternoon penultimate Monday. But due to the mad and manic pressures of the time, the news had found its way into the abyss of memory where active information burrow until they are reactivated. It was not until the early hours of last Monday after losing a deadly duel to insomnia that one finally got to the last two pages of The Nation on Sunday and Joke Kujenya’s moving tribute to her fallen friend that remembrance returned.
It was a tragedy of cumulative errors. The particular series of events that took the late journalist’s life could have been avoided entirely or medically mitigated in a society with a functioning medical system or a minimally proactive health facility. We may think that all this do not matter and that in the long run, one death is just a mere statistic. But in all likelihood the accumulated trauma, the symptoms of collective barbarism, will return to demand their dues.
From her friend’s record, it could be gleaned that the late journalist was a victim of a medical condition known as Hypoglycemia or Low Blood Glucose. Unlike its Siamese twin, which is the more common High Blood Sugar, Low Blood Glucose is more radically dangerous and life-threatening, leading swiftly to slurred speech, terminal disorientation and general organ collapse.
Both conditions are not summary death sentences if well-managed through both medication and an amenable life-style. In this columnist’s life time, one has known of two famous professors of medicine who have succumbed to the dreadful ailment, the one a globally recognized medical genius who plied his trade at the old UCH and the other an accomplished and high-flying immensely personable physician at the old OAU, Ife. If our memory serves us well, both left before they turned fifty. What an epic waste!!
But this was in the late seventies and early eighties. The ailment appears to be better managed nowadays. Nigerians are more health conscious. In this particular instance, adversity appears to be a better teacher than modern medical developments. There are well-known survivors. Many famous Nigerians have lived to tell the story. There is a former Nigerian ruler who has openly and a tad gleefully insisted that he has lived with the condition for almost fifty years.
Unfortunately, Yetunde Oladeinde has now been added to the sinister statistics, leaving her immediate family of four children, including a medical doctor, and several adopted youngsters to carry on. Everything that could go wrong went wrong that night. She was already feeling unwell when she left for work that Sunday. The glucagon kit for measuring blood glucose packed up the previous Thursday.
That alone ought to have triggered the alarm bell. By the time Mme Oladeinde returned from work, her condition had considerably deteriorated. Apparently, her sense of dignified suffering and stoic forbearance forbade any self-pitying drama or emotional incontinence. Instead of heading for the nearest health facility, she headed for her bedroom where her son later met her in a pitiable state with blood dripping from the corner of her mouth.
By the time she was rushed to the nearest hospital in the early hours of the following morning, it was already too late and a bridge too far. Medical staff at the Ifako-Ijaiye General Hospital noted that her eyes had already dilated which suggested complete organ shutdown and clinical death. Valiant attempts at resuscitation came to naught. The woman known to everybody as grandma due to her well-travelled column under the same moniker but also because of her doting matriarchal nature was gone forever.
Yetunde left for posterity one enduring and touching irony. The woman everybody called grandma never lived to see any of her own biological grandchild. But through her love, kindness and exemplary sense of duty, she has bequeathed a lasting legacy of affection and devotion to everything that is noble. By dint of heroic perseverance in the face of persistent and unrelenting adversity, she has fired the imagination of many and lit the torch of charity for unborn generations.
It needs to be added that the deceased was not a school drop-out come to journalism. Impeccably credentialed, she was given the best of education by her middle class parents in the best tradition of the old Nigerian middle class that came into its own at the tail end of colonial rule: elite primary school, famous secondary schools and the University of Lagos from where she graduated in 1989 in English and Literature.
With this kind of elite background, it was clear from where Yetunde got her poise and matronly presence from. Her father, Cyprian Akinola Francis, was the first African Director of Elder Dempsters Shipping Agency while her mother, Esther Folashade, was a star retailer with the UTC departmental store who was Miss UTC for three consecutive years.
In ending this tribute, perhaps it needs to be stressed that before our very eyes, the old Nigerian middle class is being decimated by a combination of medical adversities, societal atrocities against excellence and sheer fiscal brutalization in the hands of the Nigerian postcolonial state. Yet no nation or democracy can survive without a solid middle class that acts as a buffer between the filthy rich and the filthy poor. May Yetunde’s soul rest in peace.
