To the cavernous bowel of the NIIA auditorium this wet and windy Wednesday afternoon for the launch of Femi Olugbile’s fictional tribute to Madam Alimotu Pelewura, an iconic avatar of Nigeria’s anti-colonial struggle and one of those amazing women regularly thrown up by Nigeria’s turbulent history. In the event, it turned out to be a literary tour de force as well as a cultural and historical moveable feast.
The audience that came to honour Olugbile this pleasant afternoon was an A-grade list of the illustrious who have reached the pinnacle of their profession and have made some difference to their society. The chairman of the occasion was Dr Patrick Dele Cole, diplomat, top state bureaucrat and accomplished pen pusher in his own right.
The father of the day was Alhaji Musiliu Adeola Adekunbi Smith, former Inspector General of the Police and lately Chairman of the Police Service Commission. An urbane and quintessential Lagosian gentleman, the former top cop wondered aloud as to why he should be the father of the day when there were far older people in the gathering.
The reviewer was the irrepressible JK Randle, one of the nation’s top notch accountants and author of many fascinating books in his own right. In all likelihood, Randle will be remembered as a notable writer who also did sums.
A royal splash was added by the Oniru, Oba Abdulwasiu Omogbolahan Lawal, who has made a seamless transition from former top cop and former commissioner to the preeminent paterfamilias of his people. There were also Dr Abayomi Finnih, Fola Adeola and the boss of Emzor Pharmaceutics, Stella Okojie, a formidable matriarch in her own right who made a stirring pitch for the rights of women.
Quiet, contemplative and self-effacing, Olugbile can also be an indignant and abrasive fellow when rubbed the wrong way. A psychiatrist at the cutting edge of his profession, Olugbile has acquired a massive reputation as one of Nigeria’s finest and most accomplished writers. It is polished writing at the very summit of the trade: finely honed and well-nuanced, with a hint of public school prim.
Olugbile wields his pen like a surgeon’s scalpel: poised, surgical and lancing with delicate precision. It is writing meant for the aficionados and impresarios of the trade. Overtly apolitical and deliberately uncontroversial, he avoids drawing blood, as if he has seen enough of this on the operating table. The literary pugilist will search in vain for the savage putdown or the sledgehammer dismissal.
Ever since he burst on the scene with his 1986 collection of short stories, titled Lonely Men which won the Association of Nigerian Authors’ prize for prose fiction for that year, Olugbile has not looked back, writing newspaper columns and publishing other works of fiction including Batolica and the outstanding Heroes and Others.
Sigismund Freud, the great pioneering psychoanalyst, often worshipped Fyodor Dostoevsky, the revered Russian novelist, as his master and mentor when it came to the deep probing of the human psyche. When you add a dash of Anton Chekhov, the gifted Russian writer who was himself a trained physician to this mix, you get a hint of Olugbile’s illustrious precursors.
The psychoanalyst can only add clinical certainty and clarity to what a creative artist with the fecundity of imagination had already glimpsed as he plumbs the deep catacombs of the human conundrum. If he tarries, the artist himself becomes mere collateral damage, a casualty of the maze. And so does the clinical psychiatrist. According to a character in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Cancer Ward, the greatest affliction that can befall a doctor is to suffer an illness in his own area of specialization.
Perish the thought, Olugbile is far from the road to Aro. But his professional affiliations seem to confer a special terrorist status on him. It is a profoundly ironic development. In a land of the noble and upright, the psychiatrist is seen as a friendly healer, welcomed with relief by all. But in a society bristling with deviants of the highest order and at the top echelons, furtive glances are exchanged whenever the word psychiatrist is mentioned.
Consequently, a Foucauldian chill descended on the hall last Wednesday whenever the dreaded word dropped from somebody. Setting the pace was no less a person than the chairman of the occasion who in his jokey, self-depreciating manner let it be known that he ultimately consented to chairing the occasion out of the fear of being declared “mad” if he had refused.
Another guest, Sigismund Oludoye Fernandez, seasoned administrator and a scion of the notable Fernandez clan who was a member of the interviewing board that gave Olugbile his first job as a certified psychiatrist, also noted rather warily that he could not afford to miss the august gathering in honour of Olugbile out of the fear of being sectioned. Innocent jokes have a way of reflecting general turmoil and anxieties.
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Gimlet-eyed, soaking up all the plaudits and the occasionally cagey commendations of his professional distinctions was the author himself, a figure of Olympian rectitude and steely forbearance. There is always something mildly unnerving about Olugbile’s calm composure and placid comportment. Like an ancient deity of his people, the author hides it all behind a wall of reticence and veiled bemusement.
This writer must now confess that he once let Olugbile on to the case of his bosom friend who had puzzled and confounded him to no end since university days at Ife. Billionaire, philanthropist and a leading patron of the arts and prime culture, our man is also an indefatigable non-conformist from his days as a student union activist at Ife. Within a few years of graduation, he had made a dramatic transition as a leading boardroom guru where he continues to ply his devil may care, irreverent trade.
As the chairman of a committee to present his unusual memoir to the public, yours sincerely decided to invite Olugbile to solve a psychoanalytical conundrum for posterity. In his memoir, the rebel magnate with a touch of Croesus had described his political and business praxis as an example of positive deviance.
Yours sincerely described it as creative neurosis so imbued with emotional intelligence and gutsy nous that it would have been impossible to stop the fellow from reaching the pinnacle of his trade, no matter the adverse circumstances. Unlike his bookworm hidebound contemporaries, our man was already seeing beyond his fellow students and teachers alike who were unable to think out of the box.
The Civic Centre banquet hall came aglow that morning as Olugbile mounted the rostrum. Having reviewed the facts and the evidence, Olugbile concluded that what was before him was a classic case of positive psychosis. It was the hallmark of genius. The audience, including the sovereign of Ondo township, Oba Kiladejo, himself a noted medical practitioner, erupted in applause. A few days later, my friend called and insisted on meeting the remarkable psychiatrist.
It can be said that the practice of psychiatry has helped Olugbile a lot in his literary endeavours. Deploying a technique which can be justly described as de-estrangement, the writer relentlessly chips and chisels away at the subject matter from all angles until he gets to the heart of the matter. It is literary creativity on the couch.
This technique is very much in evidence in this remarkable fictionalized biography of an equally remarkable woman. The result is an outstanding work of art which is at the same time a historical and cultural tour de force. The Alimotu Pelewura that comes alive on these pages is a woman of uncommon grace, compassion, civility, courage and fearless patriotism.
The reviewer, Basorun J.K Randle, takes a mild and genial umbrage at Olugbile’s unrelenting capacity to conflate history with fiction and to fictionalize actual history. In the psychiatrist’s alchemy, fiction is historicized and history is fictionalized.
On a closer scrutiny, J.K Randle would have noticed his own illustrious grandfather, the eminent physician, explaining to the bemused Pelewura the surgical procedure for removing a particularly nasty fibroid tissue from her womb. The dialogue may be flat and flaccid but both Pelewura and Dr Randle are on the same page and in the right place, too.
So is Femi Olugbile’s feel for native politics in the colonial period which remains unfailingly acute. The Randle progenitor was an integral part of the anticolonial turmoil which convulsed the Lagos colony for almost a century.
Originally a Pharmacy Assistant, the then Mr Randle was handed a severe rebuke by an European doctor for daring to raise an alarm about the humongous dosage the doctor was giving a native patient. Randle resigned his appointment over this colonial contumely and headed abroad and to Edinburgh University. He did not return until he had qualified as a medical practitioner.
This is not a literary review. That can come later. It is the celebration of the life of an amazon, an unlettered female avatar who rose from very humble beginnings as a fishmonger to the pinnacle of power and glory. Nigeria’s colonial and postcolonial history has the knack of throwing up remarkable specimens of the female species. It is a trend that has continued till date.
After a particularly grueling encounter with the Ahomey invaders, the Egba warriors decided to take the corpse of one of their tormentors to their base. Upon close examination after stripping the body of charms and other escutcheons of war, they discovered that it was a woman. Thereupon the war chiefs concluded that it would amount to a mortal affront to Egba national pride to be defeated by an army of women. They rejoined the battle with greater ferocity and drove the invaders out of town.
From Efunsetan Aniwura who was gruesomely executed on the orders of Aare Latosa, the Ibadan generalissimo, through Madam Tinubu who was expelled from Lagos to later day heroines of resistance against external and internal colonialism such as Funmilayo Ransome- Kuti, Humani Alaga, Abibat Mogaji, Madam Bisoye Tejuoso and Kudirat Abiola, the Nigerian political firmament continues to throw up these amazing amazons. This fictional recall of one of them, Alimotu Pelewura by Femi Olugbile, is a major tribute to these heroic exemplars. May their brood continue to grow.
