As I entered my octogenarian years, I began to remember my father more and more. I searched the invisible archive in the deep recesses of my memory for reasons for the reminiscences about him. I came up with one strong reason—the close relationship he established with me when I was young and growing up. This was manifested in a variety of ways, four of which stand out and recur frequently in my memory.
No.1. I cannot remember when the practice started but I always found myself on his shoulders on the way to and from the farm until I was about age 6 or so. I would sit on the back of his neck, with my two legs dangling on his rib cage, one on either side of his neck. He would hold me by my thighs, and I would grab his head for support. Occasionally, I would remove his cap and put it on my head. It once fell off when I dosed off and neither of us knew until we got to the farm. Fortunately, someone behind us found it and hanged it on a nearby tree stump. We found it there a few days later on our return journey. That was in the late forties, when traditional Yoruba culture still maintained its essence.
No.2. Another memorable frequent episode was sitting on the floor between his legs at arbitration meetings. He was so popular and highly respected in the village that he was often the first choice in the settlement of family disputes. They usually came knocking before 5am in the morning before setting out for the farm. On one such occasion, one of our neighbours came to report his recalcitrant son. I recall that my father had settled the dispute when the same son sold one of his father’s cocoa farms and blew the money. On this latter occasion, he had sold his father’s Hercules bicycle, one of the most prized bicycles in those days. The man insisted this time around that he was going to drive his son out of the house, because he could no longer tolerate a troublemaker in his house. My father’s words to the man have continued to resonate with me. “Don’t drive away Troublemaker,” my father told him, “because he will be needed to confront Trouble, when Trouble comes knocking. A house without a troublemaker is an empty house.” Years later, as I reflected on my father’s words, I came to understand his admonition as a reference to the universal concept of the black eye in the family.
No. 3. I will always remember and thank my father, first for apprenticing me to an Ifa priest to become a diviner and later for withdrawing me from the divination school to learn to read and write. His father, he later told me, was a practicing diviner, but he on his own decided not to learn divination but to become a cocoa farmer. That’s why he joined other cocoa farmers from Oke Idanre to establish Ajegunle village in the valley below in 1926. But he promised his father that his first son would be a diviner. That explains why I was apprenticed to one.
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However, as his prowess in cocoa farming grew, he was made the treasurer of the farmers’ association, even before the Cooperative Society was established by the Western Region government. My father was intrigued by the ability of the association’s secretary to recall details of the association’s previous meeting, by deciphering some scribbles on paper, which, to my father, looked like an extension of Orunmila’s markings on opon Ifa, based on the configurations of the opele.
By the time I was enrolled in school, my father had partially converted to Christianity, but never at the expense of Ifa. He regularly consulted his diviner between church services, although he owned a copy of the Holy Bible and the Catechism. He had heard stories about Genesis and the creation in church, and he wanted me to read the Book of Genesis to him. I was in primary school but could read and write at the time. After over 30 minutes of reading the Yoruba Bible, my father stopped me to ask if I knew which part of the Bible spoke about Oduduwa and Orunmila. All I could tell him as a small boy was that the stories in the Bible were not about Yoruba people. By the time I learned enough in anthropology classes to give him a full answer, he was already gone.
I would later combine the experiences of Ifa and of learning to read and write, by doing my doctorate research on divination and writing my PhD dissertation on the subject. One of my defining contributions on the confluence between Ifa and literacy was an article I wrote in 1992, titled Schooling, language, and knowledge in literate and nonliterate societies, and published in the Cambridge Journal, Comparative Studies in Society and History.
No. 4. In recent months, memories of my father became more frequent. I began to see in me what I noticed about him when last I saw him alive—getting slower at simple tasks; taking longer to finish a meal; taking more time to get in and out of a car; forgetting things once in a while; mismatching names with faces; and so on. But I keep seeing some positive similarities as well—the unending love of our children, and dedication to our calling, he to farming and I to reading and writing.
One other thing, and this is very important. During one of our last meetings, as I was preparing to go overseas, he warned me not to make sacrifices like him for any family member or relative. Anyone who knew my father knew that any family member’s or relative’s problem was his problem. He would go all the way to render any and every possible assistance. He wanted me to have none of that. Why? I asked him. He confirmed that his diviner told him to warn me, if I wanted to have a long life.
He died a few years later on the eve of my dissertation defense, while I was away in California. I got the news around 2:00am but told no one until after the exams that afternoon. I could not have dedicated the dissertation to no other than my father.
