Title: Daughter of Grace
Author: Assistant Pastor Bernice Olawunmi Ifaturoti
Year of Publication: 2022
Reviewer: Yomi Layinka (at the author’s 90th birthday celebrations)
Daughter of Grace is the autobiography of Assistant Pastor Bernice Ifaturoti, JP. It is dedicated to her late husband Peter Adeyeye Ifaturoti who, according to the author “showered me with so much love I have enough to share with those around me”.
Written within the covers of a modest 130 pages, it contains 10 short but truly engaging chapters, staring with the one in which she describes her very remarkable experience as an 84-year-old involved in a scary surgical operation that could have gone very wrong. Thankfully, it didn’t.
She goes on to regale the reader with recollections of her birth, school years and the unforgettably soft memories of her Prince Charming who departed from her just when their flowers were blossoming.
She caps it up with stories about her ‘Pauline conversion’ in 1990 and the Redeemed Years during which she met Jesus Christ anew; about how she got hooked on Him until she became a worker in His vineyard where she still serves today as an assistant pastor at ninety!
This remarkable example of amazing commitment to the service of God and humanity underscores the fact that it is never too late to be called to serve God. The book gracefully winds down with recollections of how she became a Jerusalem Pilgrim and her random thoughts on life and living, on widowhood and the everlasting life of purpose.
Chapter Two deals with her parentage and her multiple cultural roots — both animist and Christian – in Ilesa, Western Nigeria. It details the polygamous setting of her childhood and speaks to the intriguing hierarchies of relationships, especially between her father’s nine wives and his twenty three offspring.
This draws comparative parallels with contemporary realities in which monogamy seems to privilege possessiveness over community sharing. The way she describes it in approving terms, that era of shared love and forbearance, is a rebuke to today’s culture of individualism and the dwindling demonstration of love and mutual respect, even among families and siblings of the same mother.
Her narrative also spoke to the unusual liberal attitude of her late father, Pa Benjamin Olubode Fagbemi, who demonstrated an uncanny love for his children’s education in an era when schooling was still a rarity, especially for the girl child. Yet, he allowed all 23 of his children to go to school notwithstanding their sex nor the hierarchy of their mothers. This chapter also evokes the general state of the Ilesa community as it records aspects of pre-independence Nigeria. It recalls the wholesome nature of the education that children received in those days; and the instructional use to which folktales were deployed.
She longingly remembers one of the most legendary dramatis personae of those folk stories, Ijapa, the ubiquitous and cunning tortoise whose conniving wife was Yannibo. She reminds the reader of the simple yet impactful lessons derived from those folksy constructions and of the songs and responses between the adult storytellers who led the songs; and their giddy audiences of impressionable little children who enthusiastically chorused in return.
Some of the popular Yoruba folk songs of that era later made their ways into popular imagination through the works of musical artistes like Fela, Tunji Oyelana and Jimi Solanke, among many others.
Towards the end of that second chapter, she wrote very proudly about ‘Brother John’, her elder brother, who was admitted on full scholarship in 1944, into the famous Government College, Ibadan; from where he became (along with the likes of Chinua Achebe and Mabel Segun) one of the pioneer students of the University College, Ibadan in 1948.
He was later admitted into Cambridge University for his graduate studies before returning home to become Nigeria’s first Professor of Computer Science.
But was he the first professor of computer science in Nigeria? My personally long-held view was that the distinction belonged to the late Prof. Olu Longe of the University of Ibadan. This belief was supported by several Internet searches where I have read and heard the same version of that history until my recent reading of Mama Ifaturoti’s book, in which she claimed the same feat for her late brother.
Not sure of what to believe, I googled it up again and initially found the same, old results crediting late Prof Olu Alonge — until I stumbled on a 2001 inaugural lecture at the University of Lagos by another professor of computer science, Prof J.O.A. Ayeni. Towards the end of the lecture entitled “Computing Culture: the State of The Nation”, he requested the indulgence of the Vice Chancellor to acknowledge a few of the notable people who had contributed to making him what he had become.
Apart from the typical acknowledgment of God and family, the very next person he offered credit was a certain Prof. Olasupo J. Fagbemi. According to him, “One person I believe God used to drag me into computing is the first professor of computer science in Nigeria, late Prof Olasupo J. Fagbemi”. It would appear then that our author, Mrs Bernice Ifaturoti, is on firm grounds having been supported in her claims by no less a subject matter authority than a professor of computer science himself!
In chapter three, “Bernice goes to school”: As the earlier story of ‘Brother John’ demonstrated, Pa Fagbemi was a lover of education who did his best to give his children opportunities without discrimination against or in favour of any set of children or their gender. Young Bernice would end up in a teacher training college after which she began a long teaching career that lasted thirty three and a half years. Like her brother, John, mathematics was the favourite subject which she taught with gusto over those decades in several cities like Onitsha, Benin, Ibadan, Ile Ife and Lagos where she spent her longest teaching years.
Then, we get to read the story of how she met Prince Charming. Starting from page 24, our author wrote of the first time she set her eyes on this handsome and charming prince, who was from one of Ilesa’s ruling houses when she was barely 14 years of age; of how “he greeted me and I greeted him”; of how his relentless pursuit of love over the next nine years eventually culminated into her marriage into royalty on the 17th of October 1955. The blissful marriage was to last another 34 years before her prince charming left her in limbo in 1989. Before he transitioned into eternity however, the couple had had six beautiful and wonderful children — three boys and three girls – a full quiver of arrows indeed!
In this book of recollections, I found a very short but interesting story of “The Gold Thief” on page 40. It recounted the day when “Ojuole” came visiting the Ifaturotis. The tale concludes by drawing a parallel between the tragic end of the suspected gold thief and a long-held superstition about how according to her, “gold thieves almost always ended their lives in fire!”