When We Made Men

WHEN WE MADE MEN

  T. T. Oyetimein

  Copyright 2014 by T.T. Oyetimein

  This novel is a work of fiction and all characters are purely fictitious. Any resemblance to any person living or dead is purely coincidental. However, certain buildings, landmarks and names of organizations, traditional systems, offices and positions are simply used in a description of artistic imagination and may not necessarily be a realistic depiction of such institutions.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher

  Paperback Edition printed in Lagos, Nigeria by

  Premium Publishing Company (a division of Premium Management Training and Consultancy Services)

  Tel: 07035005165, 08056138414

  E-mail: [email protected]

  About the Author

  Tito Tobi Oyetimein is the author of When We Made Men, his debut novel, and three other books including the highly-reviewed script of the anthology, The Chess Diary and other Poems. He is an avid reader.

  A humanitarian and member of the Nigerian Red Cross Society. He also holds a masters degree in Engineering Management.

  About the book

  A 13 year old boy of the Yoruba ethnic group gets caught in the intriguing world of changes sweeping the political landscape in his native Yoruba state, which in itself, is a fragment of the Nigerian state broken up by coups, corruption and ethnic disputes.

  The raging storm of political antecedents forces the boy to take a philosophical yet seemingly childish entry into the world of his nation's cultural, social and political landscape. With historical information supplied by the few adults around him, scholarly storytellers who believe that history and past incidents are the best predictors of future incidents, he is forced to take the role of a rising younger generation whose heroic actions can clean the past mistakes of the men made by the nation’s corrupt political class, he puts down his thoughts and experiences through a whirlwind of events. His story forms the trigger that eventually establishes a new system of government in a state where democracy is considered a failure. What will you see if you look at the political landscape through the eyes of a child?

  Will these responsibilities become the initiation of a good man made by the politics played around him or be the birth of a new generation of men carrying the genes of the old class.

  God give us men

  A time like this, demands

  Strong minds, Great Hearts, True Faith and Ready Hands

  Men whom the lust of office does not kill

  Men whom the spoils of office cannot buy

  Men who possess opinions and a will

  Men who have honour, Men who won’t lie

  Men who can stand before a demagogue

  And down his treacherous flatteries without blinking

  Tall Men, Sun Crowned, Who live above the Fog

  In public duty and in private thinking.

  Tribute to Olusegun Osiboye, Principal Mayflower Secondary School, 1991-1998.

  PART 1

  OUR HEROES PASSING

  CHAPTER 1

  The old papa’s house

  It’s a misty early morning in the city of Ibadan I thought as I rose up from the chair I had been sitting on for a couple of minutes. And just at the instant, the clock struck seven with a loud tick.

  “It’s not an accident anyway” I thought as I reached for my towel which hung loosely from a nearby aluminium rack. It’s not an accident that the clock struck at the exact time I stood up from my reading chair.

  At age thirteen, and on holiday at my grandfathers’ house in Ibadan, the largest city in Africa boasting ownership of the oldest television station in Africa and where the dawn still sneaked up on you quietly from behind seven hills unlike Lagos where my parents live and the dawn rushed up on you with loud horns blaring from both the sea and land scaring you out of bed with loud cussing from danfo drivers and other neighbours similarly woken rudely by the dawn.

  One thing Lagos and Ibadan however have in common was a large population with Lagos slightly edging out Ibadan in the race to be the city with the largest population in Africa. Having been here in Ibadan a few days with my eccentric grandfather who’s thought me the art of documenting the smallest details of my day in a diary and notebook I’ve suddenly developed the habit of writing my experiences of every previous day in a small diary between 6:30am and 7:00am the next day.

  The day I wrote what you’re about to read was a Monday but it happened so quickly I never had the chance to write on Sunday morning and here’s Saturday and Sunday you’re reading.

  The family prayer time is between 5:30am and 6:00am. As a normal boy, it is natural to take another thirty minutes rest from these early risings and 7:10am is when mama instinctively remembers that I should start my chores. Somehow I don’t get these benefits when I’m at home in Lagos but I’ve been here for a week and know the routine well. Grandpa is a professor at the university and that means he wakes up at 2:00am, starts prayers at 5:30am and remains hidden from sight until 8:10am, when breakfast is on the table.

  I’ve really never been curious about what he does between 2:00am and 5:30am, until now. I’m an inquisitive person but this particular assignment may require that I’m awake by 2:00am. But in the last one week, I’ve discovered a whole lot of things, which I think must be beneficial in some ways I can’t fathom. If not why would papa commit much time into it?

  I called my grandfather papa and my father daddy.

  As I went into the bathroom, I remembered papa’s answer to my question.

  Why was he committing much time to this stuff? Here’s his answer.

  This is 2025, and as things are going, some of you children will use your mobile phones to wake your parents up every day, if you’ve not started that already.

  I wonder what he means but then I remember he added,

  ‘‘That’s probably the only thing I respect about your father, he ensures strict discipline in his children but discipline without proper understanding of its traditional roots and native essence will leave children with a heart of steel. If you keep instilling discipline in a child without making him understand the traditional roots and native essence of discipline, you’ll just make him headstrong like those soldiers in the Nigerian army who didn’t respect women or old age but will insist that they can stay three weeks in the battlefield without relieving themselves of shit because they’re disciplined’’. He laughed and I laughed. I knew what he was driving at, the teaching of customs and traditions to the younger generation. In fact, that’s what he has always been driving at. It was his life’s work, the reason he existed and the reason he was a lecturer at the University of Ibadan and many more. But still it’s hard to know why papa did what he did, waking up at such time and virtually not taking a rest.

  Papa and daddy have always been at variance over almost everything on the earth, yet they have a way of arguing these things with a lot of strong words and smiles. Papa would say, “a well-trained child never gets angry with elders, especially if you are Yoruba, and that’s what we are, Yorubas”.

  And daddy will say, smiling, ‘‘and fathers should not provoke their sons to wrath nor teach their grandchildren idolatry for God will visit the sins of the father to the children and children’s children even to the fourth generation’’.

  Papa kept quiet for a few seconds, then they both burst into laughter like they had just been excited over a children’s trivia puzzle or a little show by Charlie Chaplin. The exchanges never got heated but it was very obvious that there was a disagreement of ideas and concepts about life, tradition, culture and
religion. And when daddy spoke to my mummy about the exchanges with Papa, he used papa’s own words, “we can never fight, a well-trained child never gets angry with elders, especially if you are Yoruba”. He also added some of his own words, “we are not like those barbarians up in the north who fight and kill themselves over a religion the Arabs sold to them for groundnuts, I don't mean to be biased but I think more people are accepting the fact that the Yoruba people of former South-Western Nigeria are the most tolerant people in the world, we build churches beside mosques and share our faith and culture freely with others and it is not uncommon to see the ease with which members of other ethnic groups in the country prefer to settle with us. Such tolerance, the world has not seen in any group since the days of convivenzia in 16th century Spain where Catholics, Muslims and Jews lived together and influenced each other’s culture and learning positively. Yorubaland here in the southwest is the only place in the world where two imported religions are mixed in an almost equal ratio and still without friction and fighting”.

  I have my quick bath and dress up just in time to hear mama say “Akin, s’o ti setan”.

  Yes ma.

  ‘‘Good morning ma’’ I repeated the third time or so in the morning, Yoruba people are probably the politest people in the world, we have a plethora of greeting phrases that are suitable for every situation and time and we’re generally known to repeat the same greetings over and over. Good morning in the language is e k’aaro and is a major reference point.

  Easily repeatable and accompanied with one gesture or the other. Generally, males are expected to prostrate fully face down (the new generation bows instead, and that’s what I just did, mostly to the elders’ chagrin) and females kneel with both knees and we have always been teased at the overblown proportion of our greetings. It’s not hard to imagine a situation where I have to greet several adults along my way to school. It’s like public push-ups. Little wonder why the Yoruba people are called Omo k’aaro o ji ire, which literally means ‘the children of those who greet each other with the phrase good morning and good health’. An English man would call that tautology but to a Yoruba man it’s politeness and it’s not too much to give or too little to ask for.

  She smiled and pointed at my food, served and ready (that’s another privilege I enjoy here and would never get at home in Lagos).

  Thank you ma, I said knowing I could not touch the food until my chores were completed.

  When you finish your food get your things ready quickly so your papa wouldn’t be delayed she said as she left me in the kitchen. I hoped I could open the covered plates but we have a proverb among our people that says there’s no point smelling what you won’t eat, at least not in the next couple of minutes or maybe there’s really no point eating your food before doing your chores, that’s the only thing that makes mama angry. I remember what she once told my mum, who complained to her of my sisters’ laziness in home keeping.

  She just wakes up early in the morning without doing anything; she sits down with her laptop and starts typing all sorts of things. She says she’s updating her blog or something like that. Ever since she came back from the USA, she’s been obsessed with this social media thing, living everyday just to upload all their activities to friends and enemies all over the world.

  I’m sick of it; Omolarami doesn’t even brush her teeth and take her personal hygiene serious before opening her laptop early in the morning. All the values we thought her before she left the country for her secondary education is going down the drain. She’s just fourteen. She’s all this and all that.

  Mama had been quietly listening to my mummy’s description of my elder sister’s deplorable attitude. Then at the end of it all, she simply said, ‘It’s your fault’.

  Does she help you with the housework?

  No.

  Do you give her food when she’s finished her laptop blogging?

  Yes, of course mama she has to eat.

  And who says that?

  When she finishes the food, you then begin to ask her to do house work, abi?

  Stupidity.

  She hisses and rolls her eyes in a ‘heaven-may-fall’ fashion. It’s wickedness to let a child who has just eaten to do tedious work; it will turn her stomach but it’s honourable to work before eating and whoever does not work, will not eat. The tone with which mama had said it made it sound like it was a quote from the bible or the book of life itself and it subsequently became a major quote in our house. I even daresay mummy enforced it too far beyond what mama herself would have done. That was three years ago.

  Nevertheless, it worked, for Lara dropped her useless American attitude and joined the rest of the house in carrying out the early morning chores. Now she steams the moinmoin every Saturday morning (she initially pretended to have forgotten how it’s done) and pounds yam for daddy every Sunday afternoon when she’s in Nigeria on break from her American school. Being the only daughter in the house, my daddy had given her the privilege of having her secondary education and obviously tertiary education in the USA. Everyone is naturally afraid of releasing their male children too early into the hands of a society where there is little control of guns and ammunitions, especially everyone with daddy’s problem. Daddy’s problem is that he only has two male children out of three children. If he had up to four boys, it’d have been less risky to allow any one or two be educated far from home, especially in a place like America. Anyone can just wake up and give a young boy a gun to shoot himself, and then we start hearing big big english like serial murder, mental imbalance, depression. Female children are safer there than males, he explained to us on our first holiday trip to the USA after Omolara was admitted into her secondary school. The white boys bully the black boys but consider the black girls beautiful so they never bully them thereby allowing them the good education they went there for. I imagined a white boy beating me up and pouring white paint on my head, then taking Omolara out on a date, telling her he wished he was black enough to be acceptable by her parents as an in-law. I guess that was what my elder brother too was thinking because later he would ask me after getting admitted into Yale University

  How many black boys has America ever allowed to become billionaire icons?

  None, but there’s Oprah for the women.

  There was huge potential in Michael Jackson being a 20th century American icon before they turned him white. No one even remembers who he was again.

  Who’s that? I asked, not really knowing.

  Michael Jackson.

  I really didn’t know who Michael Jackson was until the day we had that conversation. Then I watched clips and videos and documentaries about him. Small phenomenal black boy with beautiful voice for singing ABC and 123, then he metamorphosed an hour later in the video into a beautiful white woman facing child molestation charges several times. Only the voice remained unchanged, which also is abnormal because it’s normally supposed to get thicker. It wasn’t the best picture of America to give a young Yoruba boy like me who has enjoyed a trip to Disneyland in Anaheim, California.

  In all, it sounded like a shallow argument but I took it in at least I knew that Michael Jackson was black and later turned white.

  An hour later, I was having my fill of beans and fried plantain, when papa came out. He’s one person you could possibly see smiling every hour of the day. There really is much reason for him to smile. He is a father to an engineer, a world-renowned sportsman and two medical doctors. He sat beside me at the table, saying nothing for about half-a-minute but visibly studying my face as I ate. Papa is a man who easily takes interest in the tiniest things around him so I quite expected him to see the talcum on my cheek but he seemed not to notice and turned his attention to his food at the head of the table. I was quite taken aback when he suddenly turned to face me again with his hand raised in a sweeping gesture which transfixed the spoon midway between my mouth and the plate of food with my mouth quite ajar. Instead of what I expected, he calmly picked a fly off the spoon and
showed it to me with a non-chalance that seemed to say, “son, you’d have eaten that extra protein, do you really not watch what you put in your mouth”. Papa was observant at all times and ate with little time to spare. Get my papers in the car and let’s go, he said a few minutes later.

  And added “get a notebook for yourself”.

  He whispered a few words to mama and said smiling ‘we are off to school’ with a brief nod in my direction. Of course, papa’s school is not an average school to me.