We lived in the town before it became a city. Before the construction of the lifesaving bridges, which annoyed people so much that they named them Confusion. We lived in the town before 24-hour television. Before the arrival of the internet and mobile phones. Before democracy. Before fila-wearing governors, before dancing senators and kleptomaniac House of Rep members. We lived in the town before Salisu Buhari’s certificate forgery. Before the annulment of the June 12 presidential elections in 1993. Before Babangida’s resignation. Before Fela Anikulapo Kuti’s death. Before a poisoned apple killed Abacha. Before Obasanjo became president. Before MKO Abiola won an election and was imprisoned for daring to call himself a winner.
We lived in the town before the Ogun River ran dry. Before its banks sank and its waters stank. We swam the river while its waters were warm or cold. We collected cowries and farmed for fish. Later, the Ogun River would get angry and drag some of us into its depths.
We lived in the town before video games and soap operas and cartoons. Before Nollywood movies became our mainstay. Before Tunde Kelani’s Ti Oluwa Ni Ile ati Ekun Re. Before Gbenga Adeboye’s Itu Baba Ita radio series. Before Amaka Igwe’s Checkmate. Before Wale Adenuga’s Super Story. Before Raypower and African Independent Television. Before NBC’s Passions on African Broadcasting Network. Before Mexican telenovelas entered our consciousness. Before Tuface Idibia sang ‘African Queen’. Our understanding of the world was primarily resident in the stories our elders told and the Friday night excursions we took to faraway lands via the baritone of Kola Olawuyi on the radio.
We made food from a fruit so rare we called it ‘fruit’. In these performances, we would sometimes do what we wished our adults did with us. We would read from storybooks we stole from my father’s library and lose ourselves inside their worlds. These stories became our own, just as the fables we heard from elders took root in our imaginations, blending seamlessly with the reality of a changing nation. Even as I grew older and Nigeria’s political landscape shifted, those tales of trickster tortoises and talking rivers clung to me, their moral lessons outlasting any political regime. I was usually the reader, raising my tiny voice ever so lightly to mimic the baritone of the fathers around us. Funmilola would stand a little far away from where the reading took place, an act that resembled the way her mother behaved. We were a people whose realities were steeped in stories, our days and nights sautéed in fables and imagination.
Before the age of five I was already versed in the machinations of what was considered pure and sour, good and evil and everything in between. My head was full of lessons, intentional and unintentional. I watched the adults perform their daily lives and aspired to the assured ways they moved through the world. In my free time and playtime with the other kids in our neighbourhood, we would reenact these lessons under the staircases in our house in Ijeja and inside a shack that was constructed to serve as a storehouse.
We played at being adults with the sincerity of children. The production was always the same. The man of the house would arrive from work, greeted at the door by his beautiful wife and playful kids. I was always daddy, carrying a small briefcase and wearing one of my mother’s scarves knotted into a tie. Funmilola, whose laughter was so pure its echoes were the soundtrack of my childhood, was always mummy. At the time, I was so certain that this was a glimpse into our future. That one day I would call Funmilola wife, and she would call me husband. That we would wear suits and dresses like we’d seen the adults do, head to work in the morning, and return home to kisses in the evening.
One evening, her mother told us that Funmilola had fallen ill. I didn’t understand what that meant until days later, when I saw her house draped in black. She was gone – taken to a place none of us could follow. I stood there, unaware that her absence would leave a mark on my childhood, like a torn page from a story, one whose ending I would never be able to mend.
When everything else has gone from my brain – dictators who became presidents, great musicians whose eccentricity ensured their deaths, the neighbourhoods I grew up in, the assurances of pastors, the prophecy of elders, my favourite television shows, and the lay of the lands I once called home – what will remain, I believe, is the enduring possibility of the fabular: stories told to me during those years of innocence.
I will remember in assuring detail the sound of Uncle Ladiran’s voice as he told his tales about fighting lions in the Kenyan jungle and how he outran a coalition of cheetahs. I will remember the woman at Sunday school in a pink blouse and a pleated manila skirt that swept the floor she walked on. I will remember her face and its grave fierceness whenever she described heavenly angels as beings with oblong faces and long fingernails that can be used to puncture the eyes of any troublesome kid. I will remember playing table soccer with bottle tops filled with candle wax underneath and designed with numbers to make them resemble football jerseys. I will remember listening to differing versions of stories, which I later identified in books by Amos Tutuola, Ben Okri, and D.O. Fagunwa. I will remember the arguments I had with my playmates about the reality of the realms of these stories. The certainty in our words when we talked about a road that could be famished, or a river that could be hungry for the flesh of little children who were hellbent on fishing it, or a forest with its own consciousness, and the all-wise tortoise who was almost always present in these stories.
I will also remember those times for what they represented for the little wildlife that shared the town with us before our city life aspirations. I will remember the noisy cries of the visiting pheasants during migration season. The yellow, white, and green flashes of the citrus swallowtail butterflies on hot April days. The black and yellow sun beetle which we captured and tried to tame so we could show them off to our classmates. The squirrels, rabbits, and moles that ran into our traps. The praying mantis. The big anthills and my imagination of the civilisation underneath the red mound of clay. I will remember the town for its serene cleanliness and all the things from those days that are no more.
Long after the town turned into a city, after the river ran dry and the last butterflies fluttered away, the stories will linger, those fables told during my years of innocence. They will be the bridge between what was and what is – a lifeline back to a simpler time, when rivers had voices and tortoises outwitted kings.
* Photo by Guerzeneldo Fernando on Unsplash