Tears For My Father - Excerpts from 'I found my voice'

I was only six years old when my father passed away to the great beyond.  We spent many nights sleeping in our mother’s bed and she comforted us by telling us ‘Daddy’, my father had gone to ‘Summerland’.  I spent years haunted with so many questions about him and the circumstances of his death. 

“Why did he die early?  What killed him?  Will we see him again?  Will my mother die next?”  

To me he was the enigma who occupied the space in my dreams and the one who for years I dreamt of his return home in triumph and glory!   I simply could not settle down because my father and my hero was missing, and nothing my mother or relatives uttered could erase that single, immutable truth.  I felt so starved of his attention and craved his warmth, so every other relationship to the outside world felt unspeakably hollow, and the effects suffocated me.  My face always presented a forced and fixed grin constantly betraying my mood and my tongue usually felt too bloated to utter any words.  With time because of the several sleepless nights these induced, my mother moved my siblings and I into her own room at our Abule-Oja flat as a temporary solution but in fact the three of us never left her room till we turned eighteen. 

In the early 1975, my mother fell very ill and was admitted to Lagos University Teaching Hospital for weeks.  It was as if our nightmare was being re-lived all over again, we felt very anxious and for many moments contemplated our fate as possible orphans.  The main relief at the time was the Odeniyis who made arrangements for us to spend every weekend with them until my mother was well enough to be discharged from hospital. The weekends were usually spent visiting the Apapa Amusement Park, where we rode various rides and forgot about our worries.  During the weekdays, Mr. O.K. Atewologun arranged for us to be taken to school and picked up afterwards. 

We normally had cereal for breakfast, the small kid sized Kellogg’s variety boxes.  At my suggestion, my siblings and I decided to devour the contents of the cereal as a snack in the night fully aware that in the morning we would have nothing for breakfast.  The morning came and there was only the milk I had prepared but no cereal, we then proceeded grumpily to the Atewolguns for our regular lift to school.  Mrs. Atewologun noticed our mournful looks and guessed something was up.  She placed us under inquisition, whilst I stuck to the agreed line that we had had our breakfast, my twin, Folashade interjected, broke ranks, contradicting me and confessing we had had nothing to eat.  Aghast at the revelation, Mrs. Atewologun prepared some eggs and bread and then summoned Mama Taiye my mother’s younger sister to establish why she had subjected us such to deprivation.   She was of course rendered speechless and unable to provide any answers since she was unaware of our antics. No one really shared with us what strange affliction had been visited upon my mother, but thank God in a few weeks my mother had returned to full health.

The spoken accounts my relatives gave could not sufficiently explain why or how my father died.  Weeping uncontrollably with my eyes constantly red and sore, my heart always yearned for something more but no one could tell me what it might have been like had my father lived.  I remember Colonel Alimi Ogunkanmi one of my father’s close friends who had been paralysed from gunshots he sustained during the Nigerian Civil War at Owerri in 1969, now wheel chair bound, investing so much in our happiness, purchasing expensive Raleigh bicycles for us.  Yet none of the gifts offered the much sought after succour, my mind was throbbing for even fun and games provided me no release.

Like great figures in the pages of history books, my father became an attractive prop in my own story, a remote figure with a pure heart, the mythical stranger who did so many great things in his lifetime but a prop to me nevertheless. This was demonstrated through a vivid encounter in my First Form at King’s College, Lagos, I had a tussle with a mate and all of a sudden, I blurted out crying:

“Is it because I do not have a father? …”