To the magnificent and exquisitely upholstered Radisson Blu Hotel on Isaac John Street, Ikeja penultimate Saturday for the eightieth birthday ceremony of Professor Francis Joshua Abiodun Oluwole, aka Aladura. Not a particularly religious fellow, the nickname is as confounding as the man himself. The first impression is of a moody irascibility which does not suffer fools gladly. But this is an armour against inanities.
Once you get to know him, Oluwole is as humble and as humorous as they come. In keeping with the tradition of this column of looking out for worthy and exceptional Nigerians whose story can serve as a beacon of hope and trope of inspiration for coming generations, we bring you this morning the life and times of a great scientist and a great individual.
Among geniuses, there are more fabulous geniuses and among legends, there are more remarkable legends. The Oluwole family of Ijare Ekiti has already passed into legend. It is a known fact that the Ekiti people took to western education with a fierceness and zeal bordering on the fanatical. The result is there for all to see. It is the greatest local pool of self-educated titans that the country has seen. Almost every household in Ekiti can boast of a professor.
But even in this stellar galaxy the Oluwole family stands out, having produced five professors in a generation, two of which ended up plying their trade in world famous institutions: Berkeley and Columbia respectively. Yet they have all kept away from the klieg-light and the vapid garrulity that often accompany fake distinction in Nigeria.
What makes this family saga of unrelenting scholarship even more remarkable is the fact that the founding paterfamilias was an unlettered rustic farmer. But Oluwole the elder knew his onions. He might not have gone to school. But he had other things going for him. He was a man of phenomenal physical strength and energy, often rising before dawn to clear a whole farm before planting the seedlings.
This feat of bearish strength and exceptional industry was to earn the older Oluwole a memorable nickname. Allied to this was his remarkable integrity and personal honesty which made it possible for him to run a whole council with diligence and distinction. With the blessing of retrospective insight, it would seem that the founding father was an original visionary who stuck to his views no matter whose ox is gored. This seemed to have resonated well with his peers and contemporaries in Ijare who treated him with wary respect and reverence.
When these sterling genes found expression in another field of human endeavour through his offspring, they triggered a remarkable explosion of excellent scholarship. As the oldest child, the mantle of leadership fell on the young Francis Abiodun to continue where his father signed off. After his higher school education, the future professor assumed full responsibility for the training of his younger siblings. Despite the rumbling background of pulsating polygamy, this is a story of nobility and selflessness.
This was the remarkable man people came from all walks of life to celebrate this beautiful Saturday afternoon. But it was not an occasion for social lunchers and political wannabes. Going by Oluwole’s evident distaste and disdain for social climbing and unscrupulous political gaming, it was obvious that the guest list had been scrupulously vetted and stringently scrutinized. Oluwole was once known to have politely declined the offer of a choice plot of land at Victoria Island by General Yakabu Gowon in token appreciation of his services to his fatherland during the civil war.
Give me a place to stand, and I would move the world, goes a famous saying. Oluwole as a young and precocious primary school pupil announced his intention to move the world quite early. As a primary five pupil in his local school at Ijare, Oluwole wrote a letter to the principals of the leading secondary schools in the old Western Nigeria asking them to furnish him with details of admission procedures for their schools since he intended to arrive at one of them to study very shortly.
For a boy barely nine years old, this was a daring and extraordinary thing to do. Genius does not recognize human obstacles, only the unlimited possibilities of human aspirations. Even at a young age, the rural lad was already encumbered by the burdens of destiny. In the event, only Canon Mason of Christ School, Ado Ekiti bothered to respond.
This was to engender another round of mythmaking about the exceptional endowments and mystical powers of the young boy with the rural folks of Ijare whispering about in awe and trepidation that the white man had written to Aladura. The young man took it all in his stride probably wondering why a mere exchange of letters should be a subject of such agrarian ululations.
One person who was not greatly amused by the development was Oluwole’s primary school headmaster. Greatly pleased by the local fame of his gifted ward, he was nonetheless mildly nonplussed by the temerity. He had summoned the boy to his office to unfold the strategic route he had mapped out that would see him emerge as a pupil of Government College, Ibadan the following year. But that was on the condition that he completed his primary education.
But the rural prodigy was having none of that. Unknown to his headmaster, the young lad had already sat for the entrance examination to the star secondary school in the area and had been offered admission. And so with the support of his father, the young Oluwole headed for Aquinas College, Akure without having completed his primary school education.
Fate and his father’s declining fortunes immediately played a cruel card. As a result of his inability to pay his school fees on time, Oluwole was persistently sent home for long stretches. When his father came up with the fees, a mysterious bout with malaria intervened, hobbling the young lad for even longer stretches. At that point, it seemed the precocious chap already had a great future behind him and it was generally agreed that between them, either poverty or persistent illness was going to end a promising career.
In an act of exemplary nobility, his classmates wrote all his class notes for him making sure that he didn’t miss anything. According to his classmate and bosom friend of seventy years, Professor Sylvester Adegoke, Oluwole’s classmates not only made sure that that he didn’t miss anything, they were also willing to share their food and provisions with him.
As speaker after speaker rose to give their testimony, it was clear that we were dealing with a man of extraordinary brilliance, unusual humility, uncommon determination, utter selflessness and compulsive generosity. But it was Sylvester Adegoke’s moving tribute to his beloved friend that stood out for its matchless grace, its generosity of spirit, its utter devotion to sublime friendship and for the light it throws back on a golden generation of talented Nigerians.
Adegoke himself would go on to become one of the nation’s leading geologists and a stellar exemplar of the entrepreneurial egghead. It was said that the great battle of Waterloo was won and lost at Eton College, the Duke of Wellington’s alma mater. It was clear that afternoon what transformative role a great and innovative secondary school can play in the subsequent life of its pupils.
The two friends met at Aquinas College. As usual with many youngsters, they began to bond after a physical confrontation ended in a cliffhanging stalemate. Being taller, older and bigger, Adegoke thought he could give the agrarian urchin the trashing of his life. But the young Ijare native fought off his assailant with the determination and ferocity of a warrior ant forcing Adegoke back to his corner. The older boy developed a healthy respect for his younger classmate.
Thereafter, a lifelong friendship began which has been further cemented by marriage between the two families. Part of the pleasant fallout of this union of soul mates was a reversal of the normal order. The parents also became friends visiting each other several times and trading off the values of Ondo cosmopolitanism with the redoubtable ethos of pristine Ekiti. When the duo started receiving salary after their higher school education, they resolved to keep only two pounds for their monthly upkeep and to send the remaining to their parents.
On the academic front, healthy rivalry brought out the best in the two friends. According to Adegoke, he had led the class until the third year when the Ijare prodigy came from nowhere to rout everybody. Thereafter, Oluwole was simply unstoppable, smashing record after record until there was no record to smash. The loneliness of the long distance runner had kicked in.
According to Adegoke, after a stellar performance in the School Certificate examination which resonated and resounded through the ravines and gorges of the old Akure Province, the Ijare youngster pulled out another joker from the hat of genius. While his friends were opting for local universities, Oluwole began mentioning a strange word: Berkeley. Nobody in that provincial set-up had heard the name before. But genius does what it must.
And so it happened. While his colleagues settled for local universities, Oluwole headed for Berkeley University with its star-studded, Nobel laureate-suffused laboratories in faraway California. But once again, fate intervened to bring the two friends together. By the time Adegoke finished his first degree in flying colours, —Zoology specializing in Botany—Oluwole had already established himself as a prodigious researcher of exceptional promise in Berkeley.
A chance remark by Adegoke of interest in research in plant sedimentation brought out the best and most proactive in his friend. There was a great department of Paleontology at Berkeley. Pronto, the forms and documentations duly arrived. Before anybody knew what was going on, Adegoke had headed for the graduate programme at Berkeley.
Some years after his graduate programme, Adegoke, now a young and precocious professor of Geology at the old University of Ife, was instrumental to bringing his friend back to Nigeria. The then Vice Chancellor, the visionary Hezekiah Oluwasanmi, made it a habit of touring all the great centres of learning in the world to source for outstanding Nigerian talents to bring back home. The result was a university whose star-studded departments could rival the global centres of excellence.
But nothing lasts for long in the hot and sultry tropics. In retrospect, it can be said that Oluwole’s spell at Ife was a sad and sorry anti-climax. Politics, malevolent envy and sub-ethnic infighting set in with their septic claws infecting everything in sight. Despite his best and bravest efforts, the great laboratory he had hoped to establish never quite materialized.
The great talents he had hoped to mentor and nurture became victims of the larger societal rot as well as a military-inspired intellectual mfekane. By the time Oluwole threw in the towel in 2001, seventeen years ago at the age of sixty three, he must have been a sad, exhausted and disappointed fellow indeed. It is not inconceivable that some of his former colleagues are still plying their trade at Berkeley.
But Francis Abiodun Oluwole is not alone in this savage abridgement of hope and expectations. Nigeria is a demented hen which sucks the best of its eggs. The only consolation is that when the story of Nigeria’s brief intellectual renaissance is written, the Ijare-born prodigy will be remembered as one of its leading lights and exemplary luminaries. Here is wishing the great professor many happy returns.
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