Among those who know him or have followed his career with interest, the only surprise in the translation to Cardinal of Dr John Onaiyekan, Archbishop of the Catholic Diocese of Abuja, is that it did not come much earlier.
I belong in both categories.
Onaiyekan and I were born the same year but six months apart in Kabba, Kogi State, and had our primary education there, he at St Mary’s Catholic School, and I at St Andrew’s Anglican School.
Our paths rarely crossed, since we lived in different parts of town, and even when we staged the obligatory Empire Day march every year to the Divisional Office, each school maintained its own formation.
That changed in 1956 when both of us were among a group of primary school pupils specially selected – so we were told — to travel to Kaduna to join our counterparts from other parts of Northern Nigeria to greet Queen Elizabeth and her husband Prince Phillip on their maiden visit to Nigeria. It was during the trip, and our four-week encampment in Kaduna, that I got to know the boy behind the legend.
His brilliance had long been the talk of the town. Among his peers, he was deemed the person most likely to succeed, not just on account of that brilliance, but also because of his dutifulness, and his impeccable good manners. He had everything going for him, including a handsome, athletic gait that would grow even more winsome in the years ahead.
His given name Olorunfemi (God loves me) could not have been more prescient: He was prodigally gifted.
Back then, the best pupils headed to Government College, Keffi, or the Provincial Secondary School, Okene, via the Northern Common Entrance Exam. Onaiyekan had already decided, it would seem, that those prestigious secular institutions would do little to prepare him for the life of the cloister.
He could have headed to St John’s College, Kaduna, easily the best-known Catholic secondary school for boys in Northern Nigeria and one of the best in the nation. Instead, Onaiyekan chose to go to the little-known Mt St Michael Secondary School run by the Catholic Mission in bucolic Aliade, near Otukpo, in today’s Benue State. There his brilliance and humility instantly endeared him to the authorities and to fellow students.
A schoolmate two years ahead of Onaiyekan once told me how he would call Onaiyekan to some quiet corner, far from the embarrassing gaze of colleagues, to seek his help with knotty problems in geometry or the proper use of the ablative absolute in Latin.
In his final year at Aliade, Onaiyekan’s brilliance thrust him – and his school – into the national limelight. He came first in the entire Northern Nigeria in the entrance examination into the two-year Higher School Certificate (HSC) programme to prepare students for university matriculation.
His prize was the Isa Kaita trophy, donated by Alhaji Isa Kaita, the much-respected Northern Nigeria Minister of Education. This achievement so impressed the premier himself, Sir Ahmadu Bello, the Sardauna of Sokoto, that he journeyed all the way to Aliade to present the trophy to Onaiyekan.
With that feat, and a performance of the same vintage in the West African School Certificate examination, Onaiyekan stood to receive a government scholarship to study anywhere he pleased. By the time the WASC results were released, he had already enrolled at the SS Peter and Paul Major Seminary, Bodija, in Ibadan, to prepare himself for the priesthood.
He could have elected to study mathematics or physics or biology or literature or chemistry or indeed any subject at the most renowned institutions in the world, for such was his prodigious talent. He could have become a doctor, a lawyer, an engineer, or an architect. With proper coaching, he could have earned a decent living in professional soccer as a goalkeeper outside these shores.
In the academy, he would no doubt have changed more than a few footnotes. He might even have played a leading part in changing a paradigm. But his commitment to the priesthood was unshakeable.
That commitment took him to Rome for further studies, culminating in a doctorate and versatility in Italian, French, and German and Spanish, took him back to Bodija as a professor of Sacred Theology, and saw him shuttling between wherever he happened to be based and Rome to participate in some of the most important deliberations at The Vatican.
Thus, his translation to the College of Cardinals was a forgone conclusion. The only surprise, as I was saying, is that it did not come much earlier. Something tells me that he has arrived only at a station, not the terminus.
In Nigeria, Onaiyekan has been a font of inspiration, always appealing to the moral law within us as Immanuel Kant called it, always speaking truth to power in measured terms but without equivocation, always seeking to promote acceptance and deepen understanding, always exhorting those who have taken the destiny of Nigeria in their hands to make it the country that Providence has endowed it most bounteously to be.
Not for him, however, the shrillness and sanctimony of a great many of the evangelicals and Pentecostals who are forever invoking “holy ghost fire” on those who don’t share their faith or fervour.
Sometime in 1968, Onaiyekan, then principal of St Kizito’s Secondary School, Isanlu, in Kwara State, came on assignment to Oro, also in Kwara State, where I was teaching at the Grammar School. During the visit, he said Mass at the local Catholic Church.
Not being a Catholic, I did not attend the mass. But it clings in my memory. A friend who was in attendance told me how young women literally swooned that a man so handsome could have chosen to be a priest of all things, and the older women wondered and wondered how his parents could have allowed him to make such a wrong-headed choice. It must be that he was orphaned in childhood and had no one to give him proper guidance, some of them speculated.
No, he was not orphaned. His father was warden of the Catholic Church in Kabba, and even if Onaiyekan was his only child, his father would still not have objected to his entering the priesthood. He is not an only child, however. His older sister was one of the first set of students to graduate from Ahmadu Bello University, where she took a degree in chemistry. Nor is she his only sibling.
While in Oro, Onaiyekan came to my residence on the Grammar School compound. What seemed to engage him the most in my bachelor home was my bookshelf, chockfull of an eclectic collection of which I was really proud. He picked out one volume from the collection and asked whether I had read it.
It was “The Phenomenon of Man”, by the French Jesuit theologian and paleontologist, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and I told him rather tentatively that I had read it.
“Did you understand it?” he asked in the manner of a solicitous family doctor.
In the book, with an elegant and engaging preface by the evolutionary biologist Sir Julian Huxley, de Chardin combined insights from his study of fossils with insights from sacred scripture to explain the universe and Man’s place in it.
I told him I found large sections of it tough going.
“Do you have French?” he asked, again in the manner of the solicitous family doctor.
No, I told him.
“No wonder you found it so hard.” He said. “The French original is far easier to understand.”
That is the image of Dr Onaiyekan that has remained with me ever since: the image of the solicitous family doctor, which translates in clerical terms into the good shepherd, tending his flock ever so solicitously.
The other image is that of a rather reticent savant, more concerned to guide and to make people better and wiser than to appear clever.
Ave Iohannes, Cardinal Onaiyekan.
