PRESIDENT GEORGE BUSH, MY FATHER AND CHIEF OBAFEMI AWOLOWO

"Growing into adolescence was met with a seeming familiarity that many Nigerian dignitaries worthy of mention knew of my father and it extended beyond our borders.   As evidence of this, a portrait of my father and President George Bush Senior assumes a place of pride in our home in England.  Mr. George Bush then the United States Ambassador to the United Nations had paid a courtesy call to him at the Institute in 1971.  He was also kind enough to send my mother a condolence telegraph when my father passed on.   What was it about Dr. Olasupo Aremu Ojedokun, his personality that meant in four short years he was able to enter into the sub consciousness of many? 

He bequeathed little in terms of material wealth but left a brand new olive brown coloured K70 Volkswagen sedan car.  The name "K70" referred to the fact that the engine had a power output of 70 PS.  It was an expensive car to run and it was not the best for top speed and acceleration, nor for fuel consumption, and the K70's indifferent fuel consumption became an increasingly pressing issue because the car's production run coincided with the 1973 oil price shock.  We had a squeezed income so my mother could not afford to keep it for too long.  He left a few newly purchased suits and other discarded clothes and a trunk box.  He also left a good name, which opened a few doors for my siblings and I.  The trunk box contained a treasure trove of documents and it was to become my most valued possession and one of my escape valves from this world.  It was where I could dream dreams and imagine how great my father might have become if he had lived just a little longer.

Years later after I had returned from England and to my horror I was informed that termites had with the passage of time decimated most of it and eaten up any trace of his memory.  The news hit me so hard and for months I grieved the loss of so many intimate documents from my father, it was as if I had lost him all over again.  Before the destruction of those documents I spent most of early my days going through every file, immersing myself in every detail of history it concealed.  It was my romance with these files and many of his books that introduced me to a world of politics and possibilities.  Another visit to Nigeria, however, established that some of those documents survived and may now rest in the residence of my mother’s late sister, ‘Mama Taiye’ at Mowe outside Lagos.

To all who cared to listen I would show off letter exchanges between him and Chief Obafemi Awolowo, I would devour contents of his letters that expressed anxieties about his and our future.  But from it, I learned he had a confidence and the makings of a man who would have gone on to ‘Speak Truth to Power’.  He had already become a regular newspaper columnist.   I recall while he was alive, he would fascinate us before the video age with television recordings of himself on current affairs programmes, we would wonder how it was possible for a man to be in two places at the same time." - Excerpts from 'I found my voice' ...https://www.createspace.com/4943826