American Boy: A Life Inspired by American Ideals

By Professor Fola Soremekun

This is an exhilarating autobiography of a dreamer, adventurer, historian, and a pioneer. In a captivating narrative that holds the readers attention throughout, Professor Soremekun weaves emotional, heartfelt, and sometimes humorous stories of his life in the context of his beloved family, his unshakeable faith, and major historical world events all of which greatly influenced him. The theme that drives and sustains him is truly the American spirit, in which he steeped himself at a young age. That and an innate drive early on in life earned him the nickname American Boy by his Nigerian peers. The culmination of his dreams was his journey, by sea, to the United States for school in 1956 and a half-century teaching career that periodically took him back to Africa (Nigeria and Zambia) and to traverse other continents and countries around the globe. After retiring in 2012 from Citrus College in California, Professor Soremekun returned to his native Nigeria where he currently lives out his dream of training a new generation inspired by the same ideals.

• Language: English
• Publisher: WestBow Press
• Release date: Mar 29, 2018
• ISBN: 9781973623106

Professor Fola Soremekun

Professor Fola Soremekun was born in Abeokuta, Nigeria on October 10, 1934. He came to the United States, aboard a freighter, in 1956 to attend college and ultimately earned his PhD in history from Northwestern University, got married, and started a family. In 2012, he retired with over fifty years of experience teaching at colleges and universities across America, Africa, and other parts of the world. The author of numerous scholarly works and books, he and his wife, Elizabeth, also a professor, founded Highlands Education International (HEI) and HEI school in Gembu, Nigeria, where they currently live. He has three daughters and five grandchildren. www.highlandseducation.org.

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Copyright © 2018 Professor Fola Soremekun.

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Scripture taken from the King James Version of the Bible.

This book is a work of non-fiction. Unless otherwise noted, the author and the publisher make no explicit guarantees as to the accuracy of the information contained in this book and in some cases, names of people and places have been altered to protect their privacy.

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ISBN: 978-1-9736-2309-0 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-9736-2308-3 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-9736-2310-6 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018903185

WestBow Press rev. date: 03/26/2018

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I’d like to take this opportunity to thank my entire family, my immediate family as well as some in the extended, such as Pastor Jide Shomoye and especially my siblings—my sisters Bisi, Ope, and Bukky—for pointing to a special resource person in the Shomoye family. If there was one thing I regretted in my early life, it was the fact that I did not ask my elders enough questions about their lives. In those days, we were in such awe of them. I encourage today’s younger generation to be bolder and ask us questions.

I thank all the people who have been responsible for uplifting me both in Nigeria and in the United States. I owe special debt to, among many others, Martha Bussert, the Medlins, the Gavlins, the Swishers, the Snodgrasses, Professors Franklin D. Scott, Melville Herskovits, Richard Leonard, and Gwendolen M. Carter. If there are others I have omitted, I pray that they would forgive me. For reading and making suggestions concerning this manuscript, I pay special tribute to Dr. Dale Salwak of the English Department at Citrus College and Dr. Olayiwola Abegunrin of Howard University. For typing the manuscript, I thank Eunice Low of Citrus College.

I thank my wife for supporting me and taking time out to do this writing, thereby heaping upon herself an enormous amount of work while getting the school going. I also thank her for reading the manuscript and my daughter Morenike for suggesting publishing venues and book-jacket designs. Needless to say, I bear full responsibility for the contents of this work. Please accept this blessing: may ferns flower for you.

CONTENTS

Preface

1 Family

2 To Lagos

3 Informal and Formal Education

4 The Passing of 6-19-19

5 The Big Examination

6 American Boy: Going to America

7 On to College

8 My Road to Northwestern University

9 First Return to Nigeria After Eleven Years

10 Return to America

11 From Glendora to Gembu

Notes and Bibliography

PREFACE

I undertook to write this autobiography at the urgings of my wife, Dr. Elizabeth Soremekun, and my children, Dr. Manita Fadel, Mrs. Morenike Ogebe, Mrs. Kristina Ramsey, and their spouses Pastor James Fadel, barrister Emmanuel Ogebe, and Mr. Elton Ramsey. For quite some time, they have been pushing me to give them a record of my life in writing. There had been many occasions upon which, during discussions, I would casually interject my experiences, and to my surprise, those experiences greatly fascinated them.

Obviously, over the years, my daughters wondered about some of the things daughters might usually wonder about. They were curious about issues that I believe are quite common in families, such as: How did you and Mom meet?; How did you get to go to America?; What was life like when you were growing up?; etc. My wife was also wont to ask me so many questions about African culture and other aspects of life that she wanted to know about as she is an African American. These urgings helped convict me, as I too had urged my dad in the past (to no avail) to write his autobiography, or for him to at least consent to my asking him a series of questions to use as a basis to craft his biography. What I got from him came in dribs and drabs and is included in this book. I regret that I could not get more from him.

Of the members of the family I have mentioned, the ones who hounded me—I mean really hounded me—were my wife and my daughter Morenike. Personally, I did not like to be hounded, but I knew they meant well, and so I let things ride. In reality, they did to me what I did to my dad. Truly, what goes around comes around.

As a historian, I love to read biographies. But the thing is, they are easy to conceive of but difficult to execute. The very task of sitting to write was extremely taxing in itself. I resolved to apply the seat of my pants to the seat of the chair, apply my fingers to the keyboard, and put MS Word to work for me. And I began to rack my brain, to push back deep into my memory. I started at the beginning of my life as I knew it and put in vignettes of my experiences. I chose not to fall into the trap of unwarranted dating as that made things boring. I found the work very challenging. Sometimes I laughed, and sometimes I cried, and sometimes I got angry all over again. I agree with St. Paul when he said we should forget the things that were in the past, but when one is writing an autobiography, one does writhe with the pain of remembrances. This calls into question whether or not the past is really gone. Truly, nothing can be gained by continuing to wallow back there.

In the technical issues of this writing, I had my share of disappointments. Twice, by accident, I wiped out one seventy-page piece and another fifty-eight-page piece. Both times, I screamed like a crazy man. For days after each occurrence, I could not write; neither could I sleep well. Streams of ideas swirled in my brain. But little by little, the memories came back and reassembled themselves for writing. After a while, as I continued to write, it became clear to me that my life had really been quite interesting, and others might find it so, too, and could take from it whatever might suit them. Principally, though, I hoped that my family would find this record worthwhile. There was no taboo subject. This should be the real path to the truth. This jar of clay is laid wide open for examination. Still, I wish to make it clear to my living family, friends and co-workers who are portrayed in this book that I truly value them and their support for me over the years. They are all good, decent people, and I do not intend for my memories of them to harm them in any way. I also recognize that their memories of some of the events described in this book may be different from my own. If the material I wrote may prod many to ask more questions, I am ready to answer these questions.

Although I am a historian by training, it is not my intention to clutter this autobiography with cumbersome footnoting and other such tools of the trade. In this autobiography, the truth of my experiences in my time and my perception of them stand paramount as to what I must need to reveal. An attached and selected bibliography ought to afford the readers the opportunity to tap into my experiences. Some of the items in the bibliography are my works.

In order to add more to the flavor of this work, I am preparing a CD for the Nigerian audience of the songs, street cries, children’s poetry, and so forth, of the time when I was very young. They will be in Yoruba. They will be in my own voice and thus add to the authenticity of my journey. I think the young people especially will find it interesting.

Fola Soremekun, PhD,

Founder’s Hill, Highlands

Education International

May 29, 2017

Gembu, Taraba State, Nigeria

1

FAMILY

W henever I think of my family, my eyes mist. I have to talk about the Soremekun family from several viewpoints: the overall Soremekun family in its widest scope, my own family unit, and some of our connections by marriage.

Starting with the generalized Soremekun family, we are from Abeokuta, Nigeria. The people of Abeokuta are called the Egba. They are of the Yoruba tribe. I do not know the origin of the word Egba. The town of Abeokuta, which is their major town, is rocky. Abeokuta means under the rock. The people of Abeokuta are also called people of under Olumo. Of major significance in the history of the town is the Olumo Rock, which is said to have sheltered the earliest inhabitants of the town.

If you go to Abeokuta, you will notice that the Olumo Rock is now a major tourist attraction. You will also notice there, some people who worship it and see the entire rock as a deity. To us today, we may wonder why this has been so. Let me explain why. This explanation is tied to the history of the origin of the town. Abeokuta was founded out of the turmoil of the Yoruba civil wars that lasted close to a hundred years. Sometime around the 1830s, a few of those (who would later be the leaders of the town) found their way to the present site of the town. Although the war still went on, a lot of the people in the general population were tired of it and were still living in the general atmosphere of insecurity. The Olumo Rock gave shelter, so it was seen, if not as something sent by God, then as a god itself.

Translated into English, olumo means, in full Yoruba, oluwa (god). Mo means builds, molds, or constitutes. Put together, the parts form something in the sense of made by God. Abeokuta was made by God, or so the people thought. Imagine a time of political crisis and war in which the people found themselves looking for protection, and the environment allowed them to feel safe from their enemies. They would naturally believe that God protected them and that the town was founded by God.

The reputed hero of the founding was one called Lishabi. This very name needs to be explained. Believe it or not, it has close resemblance to the previous explanation. In Yoruba language, orisha and oluwa mean deity or god. The letters l and r are interchangeable as linguistic equivalents. This being the case, Lisha can be read as Risha or Orisha. The word bi in Yoruba means to give birth to. Lishabi, therefore, means given birth to by a god or by a deity.

The people from other parts of Yorubaland refer to the people of Abeokuta as Egba, the children of Lishabi. One would get the same or a better sense by saying that the Egba are children of God. Here, we see the tendency of people to spiritually connect with divinity. All people love to claim that they are special.

There are four subdivisions of the Egba people. They are the Ake, Agura, Oke-Ona, and Ago-Owu. The Soremekun family belongs to the Ake subdivision. All the rulers of each subdivision are supposed to be equal in status, but Alake, the chief of Ake, became the most prominent in time.

The homestead of the Soremekun family is located in Keesi, opposite the cult compound of the Ogboni fraternity of the area. The Ogboni fraternity was a secret society whose concern was to bring order to a community. The Ogbonis were the final judicial authority in the community. They were found throughout Yorubaland.

Today, there are still many Ogboni groups in Yorubaland. They are now more hidden from public view and unpublicized because we are now considered more civilized. There was no indication that any of our forbearers belonged to the fraternity, but I would leave open that possibility. More research may well prove that this was the case since the members of the fraternity tended to be derived from among the most mature and upright men of the community. These were the so-called Agun-gbaniro (the upright ones who keep us upright, the wise old gentlemen) who helped keep the society going on a reasonable basis.

All the members of the Ogboni were ethical and religious people, even though they were not Christians. And side by side with their civic duties, they might also have worshiped the deity or deities that selected their families as being fit worshipers. Traditionally, the Yoruba could have over 400 deities. As soon as a child was born, one of the early ceremonies held was to find out which deity claimed the child. In the life of the Yoruba, a person would be chosen by that deity as soon as he was born. The parents of the child would know which deity it was when they visited a diviner who would tell them.

Just as a deity might choose an individual, it might also choose a corporate family of individuals. There could, therefore, be a family deity as well as different deities for several members of a family, and no conflict needed to emerge. Thus, a person in a family might have his own deity, as well as recognizing the deity of his family. Although we as Christians today may condemn our forefathers as idol worshipers, we should be aware that even in their ignorance, they practiced religious tolerance, at least for the sake of maintaining harmony in their families. They cooperated with one another in their various religious celebrations.

The deities of the Soremekun family were Orisha Oko (the deity of agriculture) and Egungun (deity of ancestors). They were also deeply influenced by and believed they were indebted to the deity of healing, Osanyin. The officiating practitioners of Osanyin were often referred to as Osho, or even as Aworo.

This leads me to try to explain the meaning of our Soremekun name. Our name was originally a double-barreled name, Sowole-Soremekun. Freely translated, it means healer enters or healer influences, healer consoles me, comforts me, redeems me from my tears. The first name means healer enters the house. The second part says healer consoles me from weeping. The redundancy is swept away by the second part of the names. The healing must have entered the house, either by influence or by other means. Nonetheless, he entered the house, and then the consoling took place.

I do not know what might have brought tears into the family at some time in the past. Clearly, there must have been some tragedies in the family. It may be futile to try to guess. But can anyone be surprised by this as we all live in this valley of tears we call the world?

However, there is a tantalizing issue that one can consider as a major aspect of our praise poetry. It refers (in Yoruba) to the scion who had tears and worked wonders with his tears: Omo a rekun we, omo a fekun sarada. Quite apart from the normal vagaries of life, this issue pointed to some unusual happenings in the lives of our forbearers. One should add that they were very sensitive and emotional people. They were equally very resilient.

Grandfather and Grandmother

I do not know the history of our family before the time of my grandfather and grandmother.

My grandfather’s name was Festus Sowole Soremekun (a.k.a. his self-given nick name 6-19-19, the order of the Yoruba alphabets F-S-S representing his initials). He was the elder of the Soremekun family. What I learned about him came from observing him and from the stories my parents told about him.

I had ample opportunity to observe him, usually during my long vacations from school. He had a twenty-acre farm at Alagbado on the way to Otta. The Alakuko farm was located about nineteen miles on the Lagos-Abeokuta road. Grandfather made mattresses, raised poultry (the Rhode Island Red type, very robust and beautiful). People came from all the surrounding villages to buy from him. He also took the poultry to the Alagbado Railway Station for sale on market days. The location and the landscape of the poultry farm were attractive to motorists who had the opportunity to shop for both poultry as well as commission him to make mattresses for them. Englishmen and their families, usually from Lagos, came fairly regularly to buy eggs and chickens, or have him make mattresses for them. They were probably in the British Colonial Service.

They either took the items to Lagos or to Abeokuta. There was one English couple who became regular customers. The man’s last name was Windham. The couple had a daughter called Meg who, as soon as the family got to the farm, attracted all the very small kids who crowded around her. She had a lot of sweets to give, usually the then-popular Trebor. I must confess that I would muscle myself into the group quite often whenever I was around visiting from Lagos.

The occasion on which I first met the Windhams happened like this: Normally, I was very shy, and was very afraid of white people. On that day, though, in trying to speak English, I became brave somehow, and I asked, Your name, sir? He had a newspaper in his hand, which he waved to and fro, saying, Wind-Wind-Windham. I said, Air-air. He laughed. I am Mr. Windham, he corrected, saying the word slowly. I somehow spelled it properly. He said, Clever boy. He patted me on the head, and I was happy.

Meg took a liking to one of the little kids named Keke. When Grandpa sent one of my uncles to Lagos to take eggs to the Windhams in Ikoyi at the GRA (the Government Reservation Area was one of those low-density housing areas where Englishmen and other colonial overlords used to reside; there were GRAs in all the major towns), he stopped at our house at Oko Awo so I could lead him there. This happened several times, as far as I could recall. The Windhams would send some clothes to Keke, their daughter’s friend. After about a year, Keke died, victim of a motor accident in front of the Alakuko Farm. We gave the grim news to Mrs. Windham when we went to deliver another batch of eggs. We did not see either Mr. Windham or Meg there at the time of that delivery. Mrs. Windham paid my uncle for the eggs. We were outside by her kitchen door. Uncle pocketed the money. As we started to leave, Mrs. Windham was sad. I saw beads of tears coming from her eyes. Uncle and I looked down. I am sorry, she said, as if she was musing to herself. We heard her say, What shall I say to Meg? She hurried from the doorway and went deep inside. As far as I could remember, that was the last time we delivered eggs to the Windhams. And that was the first time I ever saw a white person weep.

Let me go back to talking about Grandpa. If you have not so far had a consistent story about him, this is because vignettes of his life are the only facts available to me. Whenever I happened to be with him, I would not even dare to ask him personal questions. In those days, grandfathers commanded reverence. One did not speak to them. They spoke to you; otherwise, you had to be quiet in their presence. When you met them, you must prostrate yourself before them. Whenever I went to Alagbado, the first thing I would do in the morning upon rising was to go to greet Grandpa. He usually would have had his private devotions. How he managed to do it I didn’t know, as it would always still be dark. I always remember him singing his favorite song, There’s a Stranger at the Door.

Grandpa loved to sing. When he was younger, he used to be a public singer. I heard this from him one day when he was reminiscing with one man from the neighboring farm who had come to chat with him. Palm wine was flowing freely, and I was the designated one who dispensed it from the gourd and offered it to them in two calabashes. Grandpa was singing some of those songs, his common fare before he became a Christian. The lyrics of those songs were so raunchy. They were stories in song form, which was what made them so compelling. I loved to hear old people tell stories. They always had my rapt attention. I wondered what made him sing those story songs that day, and in my presence. He was oblivious to my presence. Probably for him, it was a flashback to his former days when he was not yet baptized. I believe that was an unguarded moment any of us could fall into.

Early in the morning, before he was out and about, he would have a jigger of schnapps. This was one of those drinks the slave traders used as trade goods for conquering Africa. The drink would burn Grandpa’s throat, and he would cough a little. I would prostrate before him in the morning, and he would recite my praise poetry, lay his right hand on my head, and bless me, wishing me a good day. I would then go to greet my grandmother, the mother of my father. She too would recite my praise poetry. Somehow her recitations tended to move me more than those of Grandpa.

Those recitations made me feel as if I were so many persons in one. They strengthened me and gave me a feeling that there was no danger I could not overcome. I was reminded of the core of who I was. The praises were essentially like a recitation of names linked together in a genealogy. I go into the details of it in my book How to Praise Children to Success.

In my grandpa’s domain, protocol demanded that I should do what I just narrated. As Grandpa had eight other wives, it probably would have taken all day if all the young ones were greeted by him every morning in the compound in this manner.

If I had the nerve, I would have asked Grandpa why he had so many wives and how he was able to cope with them all, particularly in light of the fact that my dad only had my mom. In both instances, I did not have the gumption to even ask my dad or mom. Such questions were just never asked. As I started to enter puberty and become sexually conscious, I discovered that my peers were equally curious, and we tended to discuss these matters in light of our situation. I contemplated my grandpa’s situation, in which the appearance of serenity in the compound seemed to indicate that all was well. Grandpa could be called a successful polygamist, if such a thing existed; and from the point of view of his sexual fulfillment, he must be in perpetual Eden. My conclusions were disputed as other peer group fellows came up with a variety of scenarios concerning the polygamy structure.

As the influence of Christianity grew, a long, drawn-out struggle was joined by the advocates of monogamy versus polygamy. It split churches. From the time when Grandpa was converted to the faith until he died, he was not allowed by the church to take holy communion. In time, it has now become clear that the edge belongs to those who have one wife at a time in Africa. Furthermore, the modern economic structure and the faster pace of life have now come to change us forever.

No, Grandpa was not in Eden; he was in a den of dilemma. But there was one thing I liked about him. He was a fair and stern judge in his compound. If someone came to him to lodge a complaint about another person, he would instantly call the party being complained about, and the two adversaries would face each other immediately. And judgment would be rendered by Grandpa immediately. If someone came to him to report a theft of his or her personal property, Grandpa would just make a statement like this: Do you have a box? Does your box have a lock and a key? Most often, the one who came to complain would answer positively. Grandpa would simply dismiss the person. When Grandpa became a Christian, early in the twentieth century, he was already responding as much to the blandishments of the new religion as to the reactions against the corruptions of the indigenous religions.

This was how it happened as he told the story in front of the family one day in the 1940s. The incident happened in the late 1920s when a cascade of problems rose to confront our grandpa. When he was in his late teens, he had braved the treacherous surfs of the West African coast to go to Accra in what was then the Gold Coast (present day Ghana). In those days, there was hardly an immigration problem for people moving fairly freely along the coast, trading, mixing, and marrying one another. People just went through the artificially drawn colonial borders without let or hindrance. When Grandpa arrived in Accra, he essentially found the Ga-Adamgbe people, essentially a Yoruba people who had been part and parcel of the migration triggered partly by the hundred-year Yoruba Civil War.

Moreover, the gold mined in the Gold Coast, the craftsmanship, and fine artistic traditions of the area had made it a magnet for those who were brave and adventurous enough to learn from Gold Coasters. Grandpa learned tailoring. After two to three years, he returned to Lagos, Nigeria. He took an agency of distributing sewing machines from the Dada Adeshigbin stores and headed to Zaria, where he did very well. He was sewing clothes for people and was also making mattresses, and he had a large general goods store. He was very successful.

Somehow, according to him, he said the authorities saw him as a threat. One idea he referred to was that they accused him of shagantaka—being cocky. People said he was too proud. He already had several wives, children, riches, and a Packard Saloon car. Somehow, he got involved in a court case, which he lost. He was asked by the authorities to remove his huge house and store. He had to return to Yorubaland. This did not happen all at once. In one of the series of his moves to relocate, his luggage was stolen. This he discovered when he got to Lafenwa, the popular railway station for Abeokuta. The problem was how to recover his luggage. He took another person’s advice and paid a large sum of money to engage a priest of Shango (the god of thunder) to help him recover everything. It was all going to be dramatic. There would be a thunderclap, the thief would be struck dead, and the luggage would appear, piled on top of him.

It never happened. The Shango priest disappeared, the luggage was never recovered, and the money was lost. Grandpa, having considered all his troubles, decided to follow Christ. Shango, the god of thunder, had failed him. Indeed, he reasoned that all the gods were useless. Where, for instance, was his personal deity, Orisha Oko, when he was going through all of his ordeals? The Wesleyan Methodist pastor who discipled him was Reverend Beckley. He was also the one who taught Grandpa to read and write. Through Grandpa, we all became Methodists. One among his children was going to become a bishop of the church. This was the late Bishop J. O. E. Soremekun. My own father was to become a prominent layman of the church and a principal of a Methodist high school. He was the late David Sunday Otolorin Soremekun. Other members of the family were to serve in various capacities in the church. Grandpa finalized his resettlement to Alakuko Farm in early 1930 and lived there until his death in the early 1950s. He was ninety.

My grandmother on my father’s side was Madam Jadesola Shomoye from Iporo Shodeke in Abeokuta. She was born in Abeokuta about June 1870. Her father’s name was Shangoremi Shomoye, and her mother’s name was Efunshola. The story of their marriage is very fascinating to me in light of the socio-religious practices common today in Nigeria. If they were living today, they might not have been able to get married at all, given the sharp divisions, prejudices, and acrimony among people of different religions. One was a worshipper of the great Yoruba god Orisha-nla. The other worshiped Shango, the god of thunder.

It is amazing to me to have learned that these people and others like them got along well as they struggled to recruit members and did not fight one another over doctrine and practices. They were both Yorubas from Abeokuta. They were fortunate, in my view, that there was so much religious tolerance in their society, in which a person had as many as four hundred gods to be called by. While they might be wrong from our point of view in what they believed, I admired their decency in tolerating one another. They did not camouflage the struggle for political and economic power in the guise of religion and faith. Were their days part of the good old days? In reality, no such times have ever existed. Every era always has its own challenges.

Grandma’s conversion to Christianity also came by the way of tragedies in her life. She was not a convert when she and our grandfather got married. The main problem, as far as she was concerned, was that she was losing her babies. She had five babies, three of whom she self-delivered, cutting the umbilical cords herself. She went to many traditional healers who couldn’t heal her. After the last loss of one of her babies, she gave up on using them.

Grandma also faced taunts, slights, innuendos, and songs that indirectly alluded to her, from other women. She complained that one time, an herbal medicine formula she was given, which was supposed to have given her an easy birth, did not work, so she lost a baby. Grandma also could not understand how she could be pregnant and still be menstruating. This, she thought, was due to some sinister forces working against her.

She also complained that one day, through an informant friend of hers, she was told that another wife in our grandfather’s household took a ram to a healer so that her child would be the first to be born in the polygamous family. She said that she and the other wife were pregnant about the same time. Now this was supposed to have happened in such a way that Grandma’s child was to be tied up inside her. And voila, the other lady had her child first. It was a boy. Grandma’s was also a boy. Both were born barely three months apart.

These events took place before World War I. It is easy to look back and judge the ignorance of some of our ancestors. The reality to them was that they saw things that way. Who, then, has the right to judge them? That boy who was born to Grandma was to be my father. The year was 1906.

Grandma became a Christian. She was so fervent that she said she was derisively called mother of the Bible by those who could not believe she had been converted to Christianity. My father was a child of her promise to the God who allowed her to carry that child to full term. She promised God that the child would be dedicated to the service of Christ. He was named David Otolorin. That second name seems to me to really show the mindset of the mother. The name means he walks a different path. It was as if his mother was saying to the world, I now walk a different path. Mother and son were very close. Our grandma never ceased to praise God for giving her our father.

More vicissitude was to follow her in pregnancy matters. Of the five children she bore, only two survived to adulthood. One of the dead was so revered that he was only referred to as the deceased. Neither my father nor his other surviving brother would give me his name when I dared to ask them. My father said of him in admiration, Oje ni won. Baba agba (He was an old one). (In Yoruba culture, oje refers to the wise old ones in the Egungun cult, cult of the ancestors.) The other brother called him simply a genius. He attended the Baptist Boys High School in Abeokuta and died in his final year. He probably died of tuberculosis. My grandmother thought he was poisoned when someone who was jealous of his brilliance swiped his saliva with a cut okra pod, which was then fed to a goat. After this, he started to cough, which led eventually to his death. This type of irrational causality was prevalent in the culture.

That the deceased was brilliant, there probably was no doubt. He was said to always come first in his class examinations, testing, as it were, off the charts. He was said to be precocious. It was said of him that he knew things beyond knowledge, which I consider to be an exaggeration. Now, my Uncle Nat, who in this manner complimented his late brother, ought to be partially right, for it takes one to know one.

I knew Uncle Nat very well for a large part of his life. His full name was Nathaniel Oshodipe Soremekun. He and my dad were blood brothers, the same mother and the same father, sired by Festus Soremekun. I watched in amazement the array of his accomplishments. Largely self-taught, he learned photography and made a living practicing it. That was during the time when the entire Soremekun clan was living in the Sabon Gari section of the city of Zaria.

Uncle Nat had two apprentices, one of whom saved his life. He once told me the story of how it happened: in a frenzied effort one day to reach a deadline of delivering some photographs to a client, he was snacking with unwashed hands after having just left the dark room, and there began for him what he recalled as the stomachache of my life.

Audu, one of my assistants, saved my life as he asked if I had forgotten to wash my hands. I dissolved baking soda in a tumbler of water, and that solved the problem. My uncle had a deeper problem, though: a perennial cycle of work binges and collapsing in ill health over and over again throughout his life. He was in and out of hospitals constantly. Put bluntly, the man was an invalid. The worst of his illness on the surface was rheumatoid arthritis.

The thing I admired most about him was that he refused to let his illnesses keep him away from his goals. Uncle passed London University matriculations by taking correspondence courses. He taught himself to read and write music. He taught himself to play the organ in the classical European fashion. He was a church organist and choirmaster. Uncle took to the study of accounting again through correspondence, and he fought the professional English guild, which had denied colonized people the right to join the profession, and won. He was a member of the Institute of Chartered Secretaries and Administrators (ICSA) and the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants (ACCA), and was a fellow of the Royal Economic Society (RES). His fight for entry into the accounting profession was an aspect of the fight for political independence few Nigerians have heard or read about. For many years, he also served as the manager of the National Bank in Lagos, having served also at the Abeokuta and Ibadan branches of the same bank.

I recall his efforts to encourage my sister Ope to take up accounting. She was inclined toward the profession, and I used to smile to myself whenever she and Uncle would sit at a table side by side as he would point out some accounting facts to her. It was amusing to me to see her seated on a chair, her little legs dangling, a pencil in her hand, listening intently. On one occasion, they were at the table for what seemed to me a long time, searching for sixpence so as to balance an account. As for me, I hated dealing with figures, so I took special note of these occasions.

As the British were preparing Nigeria for independence, Uncle Nat was a recipient of one of the British Council grants often referred to as the Colonial Development and Welfare Grant in his own area of specialty. When he returned to Nigeria, one of the Englishmen who had participated in the special program came back with him and visited us there at Oko Awo in Lagos. He told my father in my presence that my uncle was the star of the program, that he taught all of them who participated in the program, and that no one could teach him anything he did not already know. My uncle’s professional competence sufficiently satisfied many to the effect that he should have been the first accountant general of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, a post for which he was tapped. Tragically, however, death took him away on August 31, 1960, about one month before independence on October 1, 1960. He was forty-two.

The Family Unit of Felicia Cole and David Otolorin Soremekun

Let me now start talking about our immediate family. I shall