The price and prizes of the postmodern society
To the historic and heavily storied Yoruba ancestral city of Ile-Ife and the piquantly named Harvard Continental Hotel Event Hall this last Saturday for the funeral reception of Chief Gilbert Olanrewaju Togonu-Bickersteth, a former top official of the Maintenance Department of the old University of Ife and beloved husband of Emeritus Professor Funmi Togonu-Bickersteth. It had been drizzling for three days and the atmosphere was damp and depressing.
The hotel proper stood on the main Ife-Ibadan Express Road, but a steep decline led to the Event Hall, a rather grand and daintily appointed affair which stood like a tavern hollowed out of the cavernous bowel of mother earth. Your eternally conspiratorial mind immediately alerted you to the possibility that judging from the geography and topography of the place, it could not be far from Oke Dio or Oke Pau in proper Modakeke, the craggy summit nearby where your family still held on to a farming land almost a century after their ancestors were dislodged and displaced from the old town after a fierce civil war.
It was from there that they sought refuge in adjoining towns and rural neighborhoods. It was also with pride and immense satisfaction that your old man, an ancient political warhorse, informed you that he was born in 1909, the very year the war began and the Modakeke people were forced to beat a hasty retreat. That is what the Yoruba call Obenbeleku, the child who has come to the world for the purpose of war. And he lived to the billing. On the few occasions we came to farm before the next round of forcible dispersal, the old man always regaled his audience with the tales of an ancient boa constrictor that lived deep inside the rock and whose asthmatic sneezes could be heard in the dead of the night. The day it dies will also be the day the whole place would be swept off by a watery deluge. Centuries after, still counting.
Myths and ancient history apart, it is obvious that Ile-Ife has witnessed some dramatic transformation in the last thirty years. And it is ongoing. It is a classic instance of what is known as creative destruction. In the forcible dispersal, or what the South Africans call Mfekane, new settlements and suburbs have sprung up gobbling up ancient landmarks and familiar signposts. There are new gleaming neighborhoods and incredible conurbations which have shattered old binary divisions of culture and ethnicity. Ife municipal city now hugs the precincts of Origbo up to the scenic Oduduwa University swallowing and mopping up the rural settlements of Ajebandele, Coker and Olugbon. On this corridor alone, you could count up to thirty new hotels including the aforementioned Harvard Continental all glistening in dominating resplendency while diminishing the visual beauty of ancient establishments such as the iconic Diganga Hotel and the majestic Mayfair Hotel.
They have become historical monuments; relics of a glorious past.
By the time one arrived at the venue shortly after 2pm, the whole place had been filled to the brim. One was left speechless by the dazzling array of human distinction in the hall. It was a tribute to genuine greatness. To escape into the realm of hyperbole, one can say that it was the greatest collection of eggheads since Chief Obafemi Awolowo dined alone. It was indeed a gathering of academic illuminati. Illustrious administrators, distinguished emeriti professors, former vice-chancellors, globally acclaimed scholars, tested systems’ people and emergent kids on the economic and political blocs. There were people one had not seen in over thirty years who showed up. It was an elephant’s funeral. They had all come to bid Engineer Lanre Bickersteth a grand farewell. But judging from the number of them sporting walking sticks, those struggling to walk, the vacant stares and the unsteady gait of one or two, it was clear that the day was far spent and the evening of life in hot pursuit. It is late afternoon.
If the dead could look back, Chief Togonu-Bickersteth would have been very pleased, perhaps permitting himself the winsome cherubic smile that was his trade mark. He was kind, generous, warmly solicitous, affable and clubbable to boot. He was an old Gregorian and the third leg of the inseparable Gregorian tripod of himself, Obong Asuquo Tony Ani and late Barrister Debo Akande. He could drink almost everybody under the table only to get up to resume his fancy dancing foot works. He was a master-dancer. There was something about his dancing which reminds one of another old Gregorian, Alhaji Ganiyu Olawale Dawodu aka GOD, as he capered and cantered to the old war beat of the Action Group: Gbogbo’gba e standby, gbogbo’gba e stand by.
Lanre Togonu-Bickersteth was a true son of his illustrious father, Akinola Togonu-Bickersteth, a great socialite of the swinging fifties and sixties and an outstanding first generation Nigerian surveyor, famously immortalized in Ernest Tunde Nightingale’s memorable lyrics about surveyors. His sprawling pile at the beginning of the upper market Seventh Day Adventist Road, Oke Bola in Ibadan attests to early professional success. The Togonu-Bickersteths, together with the Osinloyes, the Oginnis, the Ogunkoyas and the Jeyifous at the extreme reach of the road, formed the nucleus of a new middle class elite class in Ibadan whose educational attainments and scholastic distinction resonated throughout the city and the wider region. One of the Oginni clan attained the rank of a two-star general in the Nigerian Army.
As a teenage reporter traipsing the entire city all the way from the downtown commotion and combustion of Agbadagbudu this was the go-to place for inspiration, for social initiation and for casting off the slough of ill-mannered coarseness and lack of refined etiquette. And if you want it the hard and unpretentious way, there was our bosom friend, Ajasco, the master-tailor, just around the corner with his knowing wink eternally puckering with devilish mischief. In one of the houses nearby lurked a chap called Ade, a no-nonsense boy-soldier, who had just returned from the war front with a fetching damsel as trophy.
Chief Lanre Togonu-Bickersteth preceded yours sincerely as the president of the university Staff Club by a whole generation. There were at least four or five former presidents between us.
But we got on very well. The only point of disagreement, which the civilized and urbane fellow communicated through body language, was when yours sincerely decided to arraign his friend and former presidential colleague before the club’s disciplinary board for conduct prejudicial to public order. He had unfortunately allowed himself to be provoked to an open brawl near the swimming pool. To condone this and let him off the hook was to sanction impunity. He was suspended by the board. Luckily after the tension had cooled down, everybody, including the suspended former president, honorably and graciously agreed that it was the right thing to do in the interest of discipline and public good.
For this writer, small gestures of friendship and generosity of soul matter more than grand empty flourishes and fake attestation of closeness and phantom bonding. Perhaps unknown to the Bickersteth couple, yours sincerely was in Ife to discharge a debt of filial obligation.
Despite not being known to be politically inclined or ideologically primed, it was through the couple one was able to furnish funds sent from abroad to his parents during the years of Abacha’s despotic diktat. Even here, there was a piece of delectable irony waiting for everybody.
As soon as my ever alert and inquisitive old man caught a whiff of the strange sounding name, he had inquired from the couple whether they knew any person by the name of Akinola Togonu-Bickersteth. Upon confirmation, my old man informed the younger man that he was the one that provided lodging accommodation in the town for the famed surveyor while he was undertaking a major survey of the Ibadan-Ife-Akure thoroughfare in 1947.
No one can stop a river determined to reach the sea. It will get there either on its own steam or carried on the back of bigger and stronger brothers. There is something about life which makes certain destinations feel like prearranged rendezvous. As the glorious afternoon tapered off to a cloudy evening in this storied town, the discerning could notice another development. The hall had been filled with younger people who had taken up strategic positions all over the place. Our own generation had been literally boxed into a corner as the new owners arrived without any apology. In a sense, we can say that they were the real celebrants having journeyed from all corners of the globe to be with their friends, the Togonu-Bickersteth children: Maosi, Vinuyo and Dehumo.
The aforementioned academic illuminati and superstars began disappearing one by one. Even yours sincerely began feeling the chill of mortality. It was not unlike watching the brutal dethronement of an aging Alpha male by a younger punitively primed and better endowed rival. These days, the wiser primate declines the challenge and walks away into oblivion in despondency and desolation but with his body still intact. A friend, a retired professor of Pharmaceutics and notable writer, who had arrived early for the occasion was pointedly told that there was no room for early arrival. He had loitered around for quite a bit before giving up and heading for home.
An allegory of life was playing out in the vast hall. It is a dramatic enactment of human existence itself, another sobering instance of creative destruction. This is how life brutally and with unforgiving cruelty re-orders the order of existence. To enlist the authority of the great bard, the world is indeed a stage and life a poor player that struts and frets his hour around the stage and then is heard no more. The young men and women who took up position inside the hall are entitled to their own fifteen minutes of fame. Their own time and appointed hour will soon be here with equally dramatic flourish. They are the children of dislocation and dispersal, the new global mfekane making their way to the ancestral shrine and site of original scatter-scatter. When they were young, their parents sent them to the university staff primary school and its secondary school. It was a way of reinforcing and cementing the order of succession. But now most of them having returned abroad against their will the order of succession is breached and broken forever. Their genes will be found in the universal bank of smelting and genetic meltdown.
Yours sincerely moved further afield in the hall to take in the last mental snapshot of history in a hurry; the final glimpse of this sneak preview of the time of our time only to find himself sandwiched among four remarkable women, all widows. To our extreme left was Mrs Funke Lawanson, the widow of our much mourned older friend Professor Abayomi Lawanson, a retired Deputy Registrar and daughter of retired Police Commissioner in the old West, Chief Jeremiah Agunbiade Odofin Bello and sister to the famed athlete and socialite, Victor Oluwole Odofin-Bello. Next to her was Mrs Vidal, wife of the late professor of Music. Next was Mrs Yewande Ekundayo-Adedeji, relic of Professor Adebayo Adedeji. Finally to our immediate right was the wife of the deceased, Emeritus Professor Funmi Togonu-Bickersteth.
Funmi Togonu-Bickersteth is a rarity in the world of scholarship combining academic excellence with native wisdom, circumspection and the perspicuity of the traditional matriarch. It is little surprise that she had had an illustrious academic and administrative career.
After stellar education in Queens College, Lagos, University of Ibadan and the prestigious Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania, America where she took a Ph.D, she rose through the rank becoming a professor of Adult Psychology at the Department of Psychology, Faculty of Social Science, Obafemi Awolowo University, Dean, Deputy Vice-Chancellor, emeritus professor and pro-Chancellor of two federal universities. For a person so humble, unassuming and understated, it has been a glorious career.
•All in all, it has been a great departure for Chief Gilbert Olanrewaju Togonu-Bickersteth.
