THE RAISING CANE
LESSONS FROM MY DAD: THE BIRTH OF VOLTRON F-DEFENDER OF THE UNIVERSE
One of my favorite childhood memories is of the day my Dad threatened our neighbor. With just cause. The man was a notorious wife-beater and I used to feel helpless whenever we would see his beautiful, elegant wife leaving home in dark glasses to cover up her black eyes.
The walls were too thick to hear anything and our neighborhood had a mixture of expatriates and celebrities (well, Sir Victor Uwaifo with his musical horned Citroen was a frequent guest at the home of Victor Vanni who lived opposite our twin duplex) who were too proper to ask questions.
Everyone knew that dark things were going on behind closed doors in that house but no one talked about it and no one intervened. Until this fateful evening. The poor woman ran through the gates of our home and I noticed that her nightdress and dressing gown were ripped to shreds as she frantically knocked on the side door that led into our house. Her left eye was bloodshot and her usually well-coiffed hair was disheveled. She shouted: “Help me, help me. He is going to kill me”. We were at the dinner table and I remember being terrified and angry at the same time. Terrified that her nasty bully of a husband was going to come into our home and kill her and angry that I was not old enough to stand up to him. My Mum got up from the dinner table and took her to the living room to comfort her. Since Dad was still at the table, the rest of us stayed put but I knew it was not over yet. Moments later, her husband came charging up to the door, huffing and puffing: “Where is she?”.
Then my Dad got up from the dining table and walked towards him at the door. “Do not take another step, Mr. xxxxx! You can do what you want to your wife when she is in your house but while she is here, she is a guest in mine. I suggest you do not even THINK about coming in here to hit her”. I expected the bully to charge at my Dad. He did not. In fact, I believe he visibly shrunk before my childish eyes by a foot or two. He turned around and went back to his house. In my eyes, my Dad grew by an extra three feet or so to his 6.1 frame. That day, he became not only my Dad but my hero. An inspiration to stand up to fight injustice, confront bullies and speak up for the downtrodden.
That family moved away soon after that and a much more peaceful family moved in but that day left an indelible impression on my young mind and a freedom fighter was born!
THE SCANDAL THAT SHOOK EKITI – FOLLOWING GOD INTO THE UNKNOWN
My Mother told me the story of Ayeyun Olisa and her friend Fajembi Alabo, two young women from my home-town of Emure Ekiti, who were determined to have a different destiny than that which had been fashioned for them. Ayeyun was betrothed to a man old enough to be her father. It was to be a powerful match – she, the daughter of the high Chief Olisa (the Senior king-maker of Emure kingdom in Ekiti) – was to be married to Prince Oluseri Okaso but she had continued to avoid the marriage rites that would finalize her marriage. She was locked into a battle of wills with her Father and as each year passed, she feared that she would ultimately capitulate. Her younger sister was already married and had two children but Ayeyun did not care. As she contemplated the prospect of succumbing to her Father’s intentions, a plan began to take shape in her mind.
Then the day came: Reverend Father and Mrs. Rankelor came to Emure for a Christian outreach with other English missionaries. After the programme, they left Emure to return to their base in Ibadan. When morning came, Ayeyun could not be found. As the community search progressed, the facts emerged: That impetuous, stubborn girl had done the unthinkable! She and her friend had run away with the Missionaries. Within days, they become house-hold names throughout Ekiti : ”Ayeyun omo Olisa, oun Fajembi omo Alabo mo b’oyinbo sa lo o”. What a scandal!!!!
Years later Ayeyun, now christened ‘Marian’ mounted the pulpit as the first woman to preach in Ekiti. Marian Obaweya was my grandmother. Her bold and radical decision bequeathed me the Christian legacy that I have today, for which I am so grateful. Like her, I am chasing after God into the unknown in order to give a glorious legacy to my progeny.
“You are ancestors to generations yet unborn”. What are you doing today to give a legacy of inestimable value to your seed after you?
STICKS AND STONES
Some of us are pacifists by nature. We dislike quarrels and cannot abide fights or malice. although not for want of trying. Growing up, my extroverted sister often trampled all over my sensitive heart. One day at the age of thirteen, as a punishment for hurting me one time too many, I decided to ‘cut her off’. Every morning, I would come out of my room and run into her in the hall-way, kitchen or at breakfast table, or anytime she would make some excuse to come into my room, my heart would skip a beat. That would happen every single time I saw her. After a couple of days, I decided to hide out in my room just so I would not have to see her but it did not work. Every time I heard her voice, my heart would skip a beat again. Having discovered my inherent aversion towards malice and keeping scores, it turned out to be more of a punishment for me. Unable to keep it up, I ‘magnanimously’ forgave her and had to face the fact that I could not hold a grudge. Still cannot.
“Sticks and stones may break my bones but words could never hurt me”. I don’t know who coined that little poem but they apparently did not have someone like me in mind. Words cut deep into my heart. I could never say what I did not mean and I would often mull over the words that were spoken to me in my very literary home for days. It seemed that my Father and I were perhaps the only ones who were somewhat literarily challenged. My Mum was not shy to say what she meant and led by my rabble-rousing sister, my siblings were very expressive also. In fact, witty comebacks were the order of the day at work or at play in my home and although I could always get the joke, I usually got lost pondering the genuine applicability of the retort to the situation, especially if it was a little mean or derisive, so I could never get round to a come-back on the quick like my siblings could. In fact, I remember a couple of friends who came to my home just to get involved in our word-offs. I was deeply curious and asked a lot of questions, which no one ever had the time to answer (no one that is, except my Dad). My elder brother gave me the nick-name “Why Dad, Why?” after a cartoon character in one of the weekly comics that were delivered by the Paper-man to my home. My reticence presented a problem in the world of me because I was very sensitive and often felt misunderstood as a child and teenager. I also had a weird involuntary selective amnesia towards things that distressed me. So I would never remember what my sister said or did to upset me, while she would recount the events to our Mother, showing herself in the best possible light. In a desperate attempt to convey my feelings verbally, I would often muddle the sequence of events up. I was toast in the face of my sister’s superior oration and account of wrongs done. Consequently I got blamed for ‘not acting grown up’, chastised to ‘be the bigger person’, scolded to ‘let her have the last say’, as if she did not have more than enough to say all the time!
Consequently, I retreated into my shell and spent more time in my room planning how to run away or day-dreaming about a long-lost twin with whom I would one day be re-united. One day, I decided to write about my feelings. Something clicked! In the sanctuary of my room, I discovered I had a super-power: I could write up a storm. Writing was my catharsis, my sanity. When I wrote, I was unhindered. I was brilliant. For every witty retort I failed to muster when I was having a word-off with my sister, I could write down a dozen when I got into the secure space of my heart and writing. I could never find the words to speak in an argument because no matter what they said to me, I could never bear to see the hurt on the face of the person to whom I meant to speak the mean words that I tried to push past my lips. Being introverted, I spent a lot of time exploring and dissecting my feelings and I found that the more introspective I became, the more I wrote. I often thought about the world I lived in, often cried about my Country. In an attempt to make sense of the world around me, I started to philosophize in poetry. I would write dozens of letters to members of my family who had hurt me. The letters would not be sent, but I felt better writing about the things that hurt me and my sense of isolation slowly faded away in my magical literary world.
THE ‘KOBOKO’ UPBRINGING
I hated my life growing up. Well, HATE might be too strong a word but I definitely thought about that word very often as a teenager. I felt that I was a disappointment to my mother and had fallen short of all her expectations of me. I used to be the apple of her eyes – up until those pesky adolescent years. As soon as I hit puberty, I became a moody, broody child and thought too much for my own good: ‘Day-dreaming’ my mum called it. With a sister who was an extrovert and the life of every party, my introversion and questioning of everything made me quite the wet blanket, earning me the nick-name: ‘Why, Dad, Why?’ bestowed by my older brother who was seven years my senior and my idol. Anyhow, puberty was when the caning started in earnest.
We were raised in a household where no one spared the rod. And it came in many forms: The back of my Dad’s hand across your face, the full-frontal of my Mum’s palm on any part of your exposed body and there was the famous ‘ko-bo-ko’ a three-part horse whip that was braided for maximum effect and left a nice pattern that would have been the envy of many a Ga-anda woman. The first girl in a family of four, my mother tried to raise me the way her mum would have raised her. She did not have the benefit of being raised by her mother who ran a kind of girls’ finishing school back in the day. My grandmother was a formidable woman who broke many molds. As a teenager, she had run away from home into the refuge of Christian missionaries to escape the life that had been set for her: marriage to a man who was older than her Father and the job of carrying on the family tradition as custodian of their ancestral gods and priestess of their household shrine. She dreamed of a different life, so when Christian missionaries came to her hometown and she heard them speak of education, she decided they had the answers she needed and ran off with them. She was educated in the Anglican communion and married a man of the cloth – a young man who was himself a convert from the ancient ways and had been named for the god that he once served. He changed his name and left behind a string of scorned women with whom he had previously carried on all manner of relationships including many who had children by him to ‘have and hold’ grandmother in a monogamous Christian marriage.
My grandmother was the first woman to preach on a pulpit in her home region in western Nigeria and she was a fervent believer who knew the Bible by heart. She had twelve children of which only four survived and many felt that she was the victim of witchcraft sent her way by the women my granddad had left for her. She pledged her life for her faith and knew a personal, dynamic walk with her God that was light years ahead of her days. As Christianity took root in Yoruba-land, many families in Ekiti wanted education and a fine western cultured life for their daughters, hence my grandmother began to take in ladies from all over Ekiti. The young women lived with her in a boarding arrangement, going to school during the day and learning sewing, embroidery, cooking and spicing among other skills at weekends. My Mum was the only daughter among four children and grandmother quickly realized that having a household chock-full of eager ladies-in-waiting meant that her daughter was not being properly ‘trained’. Hence my mother was shipped off to live with her aunt who had been ‘trained’ by my grandmother and was now married, so that she could bequeath on her the benefit of a dispassionate ladies training.
So it was with this skill of dispassionate ‘training’ that my mother set out to raise me. I had to grind hot peppers by hand on an ancient stone mill she brought from the village even though we had a blender. If she found a streak of oil on a plate, she would make me do the entire sink-full of dishes all over again. I washed, scrubbed and polished while our steward was only allowed to help me take the bin out at the end of every night after I had cleaned the entire kitchen till it was spick and span. I wept and wailed while my hands became blistered but she would not relent. She had this penchant for comparing me with her friends children; ‘I was at Mrs. So-and-so’s home the other day. We had only been chatting in the living room for a few minutes when her daughter who is the same age as you, invited us to lunch. The table was expertly set and in the time it took her to let me into the house while her mum came downstairs, she had made a scrumptious meal. The vegetable was crisp and the meat was succulent. She did her mother proud’. She taunted me every now and then with these stories to remind me how far I still had to go. However, when I begun to serve up expertly cooked meals on impeccably set tables and asked for the perks that I felt should to go with it, I was slammed down HARD! Me: ‘Mum, did you see so-and so at her mum’s party? She was wearing the loveliest nail polish and had on that shade of lipstick I asked to borrow last week’. Mum: ‘Of course she was! She’s SIX YEARS OLDER than you’. I couldn’t help wondering how she had become six years older than me within the one year it took me to learn to live up to her high standards as the age mate who was doing such a great job being the Lady of the house.
Ordinarily, all this would have been great because I could occasionally catch glimpses of how I was growing into a very capable young lady, but I was also a very sensitive child and took exception to the conveyor belt, mass-produced finishing school template my mum shelled out. For some reason, she also believed that all she had to do was get it right with me and my younger sister would fall into line. This meant that my sister got away with murder, while I felt like the Cinderella of the home. I begged repeatedly that we should buy a yam pounding machine, which all our friends had, so that I would not have to pound yam with a mortar and pestle but NO, I had to learn the old way. Funny thing is: the only people who are impressed to find out that I can pound yam the old way are my mum’s generation but I am now teaching my children to do the same for the heck of it! So anyhow at the age of 14, my final year in high school, I began to plot my revenge. I dreamed of how I would kill myself but was too cowardly to actually consider suicide. I however thought of many scenarios including one in which I would break open the windows of my room (which was my refuge) and leave a suicide note, while hiding in the ceiling at a vantage point from where I would be able to see my mother’s sorrowful face and hear her bemoan her regret for being so hard on me on discovering the note and broken window. All I really wanted was to get through to her to let her know: ‘You don’t need to push so hard, I get it!’ No such luck. The closest I ever got to meting out this punishment on her was my tirade every once in a while (for a period of about five months) whenever she had slapped me on the arm one time too many for putting the salt in too soon or turning the chicken the wrong way in the oven. I especially hated being bit because it made me feel like a mule. So I would say to her tearfully (that being the only guise under which I could get the words out without being hit again for my insolence): ‘Why do you hate me so much?’ ‘I know you’re not my mother’. One day when she had had enough of my emotional blackmail, she replied very calmly: ‘Well, if I’m not your mother, you must be here with me because she doesn’t want you’. That shut me up for good!
This year she turns 75 and is my mentor, best friend and greatest fan all in one. She is far from perfect: she speaks her mind without a care as to whose ox is gored, refuses to slow down in her role as a champion for women in her community in spite of the fact that on the passing of my Father three years ago, she could have officially retired from community service. She was never the stay-home-for-one-year-to-care-for-my- grandchildren kind of mother. I remember when I had my first child. The nurses had sneaked into my room to pick up the baby for her wash the second morning in a row. I said to them: ‘Please wake me up when you come in, I’d like to learn how to do it myself’. The stunned nurses asked: ‘What about your mum? Wont SHE be there?’. I smiled. She did come to visit and helped a great deal while she was around but she could only stay two weeks and that was plenty more than she had done with my sister who had her baby by C-section a few months earlier. What she did do, was to get me the best nanny in the country a few years later but a dear friend told me she felt sorry for me when she found me delicately washing my three week old baby complete with belly-button clamp amidst new-born wailing. My response: ‘How will I be a good grandmother if I don’t learn to do it myself?’. Age has mellowed her significantly and she is a much sweeter grandma than I remember her being as a mum. She’s always asking me to ease up on my eldest daughter. Although I think I’m doing things a little different from her: all the children (regardless of gender) share the chores and I thought better of the old grinding stone lesson. Oh, there’s very little caning in my home and definitely no ‘ko-bo-ko’.
ABOUT THIS BLOG
This is a collection of stories about my childhood and how it is affecting the way that I am raising my children.
