In the practice of law and in Christianity, the word ‘testimony’ (or its synonym) is top of mind stuff. It is at the center of their mission. Testimony is the compelling ingredient for advancing practice here. Savour the thoughts behind the following propositions: “There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact”- Arthur Conan Doyle “Faith is a response to evidence not a rejoicing in the absence of evidence”-John Lennox.
Joke Odumade presents evidence of God’s doings in her life in Wings of Grace. Unabashedly of the Christian faith Odumade chronicles her chilling experience from childhood to adulthood. It is a story of an “escape”, the type that cannot be described by any other word than miracle. By the force of nature water flows downstream and everything begets its kind. The story of a miracle begins when this natural order is breached. The tale of how a child changes faith from that into which she was born to a rival other will always command awe. The facts and circumstance of Odumade’s birth cemented her fate. Or so it seemed to humans. The superior being that formulates destinies executes His will even when it means standing nature on its head’. Here are some facts from the book without giving away too much. Her father, Kareem Olarewaju Sanni hails from Ilorin East local government in Kwara state. His father came from the Fulani lineage of Ilorin. Kareem was the last born of three siblings. Ilorin is predominantly Muslim community and so the Sanni clan were Muslims. This is the religion into which Joke Odumade was born and was exposed to. She practised the faith like she was expected to do with the extended family. Her tale continued with the marriage of her parents. “My dad got married to my mummy in 1971 at the age of 20years. My Mummy was 18 years old.” This was nature still taking its course as expected. Her father worked for Daily Times in their Sapele, Bendel state (now Delta State) office. Then, the seed of ‘reordering’ started taking roots as the days brought on new events. Joke was born in Sapele, evidently a more diversified and liberal community. Early in her life, couple quarrels between her parents sparked vicious fights. Then a separation was inevitable. These events weakened family bonds and tore away at commitment to puritanism and religious fervour. Her mum moved to Lagos. The journey to Lagos ended up in a crash. Joke and her mum were the only survivors of the fatal accident. They spent the next three years in Lagos, living apart from the father, in her paternal family house.
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Later, the quarrel between her parents was settled. Economic changes were followed by geographical repositioning in the family. Exiting Daily Times pay roll in Sapele, Joke’s father moved to Abeokuta in search of greener pastures. Male siblings were born, expectedly, responsibilities were mounting. The search continued as the family moved from Abeokuta to Ijebu-Ode where Joke started schooling. She went to Sanni Luba Private School. She stayed there up to primary 2. At Sanni Luba seeds were sown which brought the harvests of deliverance and freedom ultimately. It was not just in the education. It was also in the people who were like guide boards on her life journey.
For some unexplained reasons, Joke was sent back to Jodomo, a little settlement near Ilorin in central Nigeria. She made the journey in the company of cousins with whom she ended up living with their father in Jodomo. Another school and another life. While she was now the strange girl, her cousins had returned to the fold of their parents. This uncle who was a maintenance staff of the Nigeria Railway Corporation had two wives. Though Joke’s mother had left her father in Ijebu Ode, she stayed in Ilorin instead of Jodomo. Coming from a more enlightened background, Joke gained some respect for speaking better English than the village school pupils at Jodomo. Joke’s uncle was a very good man, but his wives were discriminatory in their treatment of the children in his care. It was shocking to Joke who was used to a much fairer standard of treatment. As unpleasant as her stay in Jodomo was, she made gains in how to handle local chores in a village, like grinding pepper on a mill stone, pounding yam with mortar and pestle, petty farming and other domestic chores. But her mother did not think doing these chores village style was gainful experience for her daughter.
And she made a point to protest to her husband, Joke’s father. Her protest paid off eventually when Joke had reached Primary five at Jodomo. She left Jodomo for Ilorin where she was admitted to school on afternoon shift. That offered her a chance to learn to be street wise and of course be exposed to the vagaries of unguided street urchins. In the morning hours she did ‘alabaru’ load bearers in the market, before going to school in the afternoon. She did that under the not too watchful eyes of her mother who had protested the impact of village life on Joke a little while before. Joke had more freedom in Ilorin than was good for her. Predictably she got mixed up with bad friends who introduced her to boyfriends even as a primary school pupil. Education was not really her priority because that was not in the trajectory for anyone in her world. She had been accepted to primary four at Isale Moliki Primary School. Her coming to Ilorin was gainful to her mother, she hawked her mother’s cooked food. That brought the family some stipend. Joke also made some money by working as messenger for orange wholesalers at Ipata Market in Ilorin. She thought the tips she got from their customers after helping to carry their purchases across the road to their parked vehicles was a windfall. “They paid me some token which I spent on fried chicken and fish as a teenager” she recalled. For her, life was at its lowest, in Ilorin. But that was where the journey to signifi-cance commenced. It is when you hit the bottom that changing course becomes possible. It is not always inevitable though. Joke be-lieves God set off the chain of events, encounters and intervention that thrust her on the path of progress and a meaningful life. Her maternal grandfather pulled over Joke’s father for a hard talk. He objected sternly to how he conducted his life. Why was he living in a separate town apart from his wife? Joke believed it was God straightening things out for her. “I know it was God’s intervention in my case, because after the talk, we reunited with daddy in Ijebu-Ode again”. Time was running out. At fourteen she was still in primary school. But they returned to Ijebu Ode only to find out that another woman had moved into their father’s apartment. It was the same aunty Jumoke who had been introduced to Joke while at Sanni Luba. The woman was very nice but she was a disciplinarian. She was staying alone with Joke’s father but they had no child between them. For even the most sceptical reader, the introduction of this ”an-gel” into Joke’s life will be the high point of the narrative. How she completed the reformation of a life that was already beyond re-demption is a masterful twist and the redeeming light in an otherwise gloomy setting. Her name is Jumoke. She was not the classical rival (orogun). Even as the second wife, she was not hostile to the first daughter in the family, especially when she did not have one of her own. She took her step daughter under her wings and performed the unexpected, giving and accomplishing the turnaround that Joke most needed. The story of Joke from there on becomes most inspiring. Once she was sold on education and a life different from being condemned to servitude and a chattel in a man’s house, there was no looking back. With speed and grace, Joke ate up the miles climbing the academic ladder with superior grades. At tertiary level, she had two admissions: one to be an engineer and the other to be a computer scientist. More destiny helpers and mentors showed up as she climbed until she became the owner of a budding manufac-turing enterprise in Lagos. Who could have believed that a confirmed candidate for “iyawo saraa” would become mentor to many and a shining light of possibilities to those who may plead their background or birth as reason for their failure in life? The book offers great hopes on how to resolve many social and societal questions. Parenting standards, male domination and worship, overbearing family members and their intrusion in the homes of their sons, religious conservatism, as well as mentorship and guidance by teachers, man-agers, churches and religious leaders. This book is a seminar on how to escape from the life of dysfunction to one of hope and strong significance. Everyone should read the auto biography of the girl of Fulani heritage who evolved into a power house of modern, liber-ated, and inspiring figure for all young people across religions.
