Afenifere leader, Chief Ayo Adebanjo, died on Friday. He would have been 100 years old if death had not been too fast; if it had waited three more years plus two months. An age of almost a century is a huge haul, a boon anywhere. Yet, when the 96/97-year-old’s death was announced four days ago, the world gasped and agonized over his departure. In courage and in principle, he was vintage wine, the older the better. He lived well and strong; he ended very well and very strong. He never lost his voice – literally and as a metaphor. In a season when his mates followed the scent of soup, he followed his conscience. He comported himself so well that at his exit, it has not been difficult to say of him that he delivered what he carried successfully with the chinaware unbroken.
In the days of our ancestors, when a mainframe cracked, got broken and fell, the cry was “ayé ti bàjé” (the world is spoilt). As he was ebbing away, Adebanjo was utterly shocked at how our world found it very easy to accommodate and excuse evil. He raised his voice, he shouted and cried himself hoarse; regime hailers raised their noses against him and his warnings. He didn’t keep quiet; no one could shut up or shout down the voice of his gong. But before our very eyes, ayé ti bàjé. Just as the genius of George Orwell’s ‘Nineteen Eighty Four’ warned, there is no more curiosity about anything ennobling, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures are progressively destroyed; a flood of intoxication of power increases and is constantly growing, not subtler now but bolder. Boots stamping on the human face enjoy the thrill of victory; they savour the sensation of trampling on the helpless till eternity. What Orwell wrote as the picture of the future is here. The earth has lost what made it see.
Two years ago when he turned 95, the newspaper I edit asked Chief Adebanjo if he was going to take a break when he turned 100. He was quick to answer with a resounding No. He said “That is not possible. Until I am buried in the grave, I won’t stop and I took that from Chief Awolowo. When we asked him: ‘are you going to retire?’, he would say ‘no, when I’m in the grave I will still be tall fighting’. We didn’t know what he meant at that time. He is dead now but is there any day people don’t mention the name ‘Awolowo’? Oh, Awolowo did this! Oh, Awolowo did that! That is what I’m doing. I’m a lone ranger now. ‘He doesn’t like Tinubu’; ‘He is against a Yoruba man’; ‘He is against Igbo man.’ I don’t go the popular way that is not good.” That was his answer and he was not done; it was not his last answer.
He said he was “a lone ranger now.” When a man declares that he is not afraid to walk alone, watch him. You remember Robert Frost’s ‘The Road Not Taken’? The traveller is confronted with two roads diverged in a yellow wood. He examines the two roads carefully, then takes “the one less travelled by.” The traveller says that decision “has made all the difference.” Standing alone can be very lonely, but it always makes a difference. The pain of Adebanjo’s death is palliated by the courageous way the dead lived his life.
The Yoruba, in elaborate ways, celebrate the death of the aged who lived and died well; we call it ‘òkú síse.’ And that is what I am doing here. As we celebrate life, it becomes necessary to celebrate the death of death also. In ‘The Great Refusal’, Maurice Blanchot is ecstatic that “we have lost death” I read Blanchot and the defeat of death. I read Michael Purcell’s ‘Celebrating Death’, a piece on death, its management and its overcoming. I skimmed Adebanjo’s ‘Telling It As It Is.’ I took a long look at the life the departed lived, the grassy road he took and the global applause he got at his full time. I agreed with those who described death as life maker.
Whether its victim be young or old, death’s pang is painful. Man loves and celebrates birth; he rejects and outlaws death. Yet, birth and death are two experiences that unite all that live. Like the skies and the ocean, life feeds death; death feeds life. My Christian friend donates a verse: “Unless a wheat grain falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single grain; but if it dies, it yields a rich harvest.” And, to this, I add a verse from the Qur’an: “A sign for them is the dead land which we bring to life and from which we bring forth grain of which they eat.”
Death is so final and I wonder why. Nothing we do reboots the game after the final whistle. Ancient Egyptians thought they could defeat death with denial. To achieve immortality, they invented the science of keeping their dead intact forever. In museums of the west today are bodies of Egyptians who died thousands of years ago. They called the process mummification. Read Herodotus, father of history; read Diodorus of Sicily, universal historian. Move further west, in the southern desert of the science and tech capital called California in the United States is an aboriginal tribe of Indians who harnessed death to serve life: Zuni Indians made masks and carved images. Their motive was to ‘save’ the life of their dead in perpetuity. Our ancestors did that too. They called theirs Egúngún, a masked construct for social immortality. But mummies and masks are what they are – lifeless fillers of life.
Egyptians and North American Indians were not alone in the search for life without death. Ancient Mesopotamia was celebrated as the land between two rivers (Tigris and Euphrates). The Arabs call it Al Jazirah (The Island). In Mesopotamia and Babylonia, its southern neighbour, were people who worked round the clock in search of magic to overcome death. The magical formulas were carefully encased in capsules of words called poems. Some of the arts survived the ravages of age, fires and flood; many went with the ruins of wars and the eccentricity of monks, kings and clerics. Among the survivors is the Epic of Gilgamesh where we read of the king of Uruk who risked his all to crack the code of immortality, the secret of eternal life. This king moved from one end of the world to the other end; he was in search of what would end death. And, in the end, the royal who was seeking eternal life got the eternal truth: “Life, which you look for, you will never find. For when the gods created man, they let death be his share, and life withheld in their own hands.”
The MAMSER man, Professor Jerry Gana, famously said in the mid to late -1980s that “if you are a director, direct well…” For several decades, Chief Adebanjo was a director of the Nigerian Tribune. I observed his excellence displayed on that board; he protected that legacy institution with the attentive eyes of a mother hen. At his departure last Friday, the board of directors of the Tribune was more than grateful to a man who was a guardian angel. A fitting tribute, effusive in thanks and appreciation, was competently penned by the chairman of the newspaper house, Ambassador Olatokunbo Awolowo Dosumu. The piece says it all on how well the nonagenarian discharged his duties to the 75-year-old newspaper of his leader. I quote from the board’s message of appreciation:
“A man of remarkable dedication, Chief Adebanjo never treated any board meeting with levity. Even in his advanced years, he was always prompt and consistent, undeterred by long journeys, considering absence from meetings a personal failing. His resoluteness, passion, and absolute concern for issues affecting ANN Plc were both admirable and infectious. To him, the Tribune was more than a newspaper—it was a sacred legacy. He often declared: ‘I want to be able to give my Leader, when I see him, a good report about our newspaper, the Nigerian Tribune.’ His love for the Tribune was unconditional and absolute. He would accept nothing less than excellence in preserving the ideals and values upon which the paper was founded.” No testimonial can be better than that from a board chairman to a departed board member.
Some people don’t read newspapers; they study them – for various reasons. Chief Adebanjo studied the Tribune and had appropriate words for whatever he observed on its pages. On more than one occasion, he sent nice words to the editors – or he complained if something displeased him. Our last encounter was at the secretariat of the Awolowo Foundation in Lagos. Frail in body, strong in spirit and resolve, he looked round and asked “Olagunju dà?” (Where is Olagunju?). My colleagues pointed me out. I greeted him; he looked deeply into my eyes, then smiled broadly. That was all, and it was last year.
I have spent the last couple of years meticulously studying him and his mates. He stood out in courage and forthrightness. He was a very reliable and effective Yoruba leader who was not blinded to truth and justice by his Yorubaness. He spoke just and did just no matter whose ox was gored. He was an akekaka who demanded what the concerned would do if they heard his hash words. He gave his autobiography an unusual, audacious title: ‘Telling It As It Is’. He called rose rose and bullshit bullshit. Even his enemies know that he was not afraid to be unpopular. He never hesitated to take a stand in support of anyone or any cause or group that deserved justice. That is the meaning of godliness. “It is joy to the just to do judgment.” That is a verse in the Bible. “Whoever knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, for him it is sin”. Another from the Bible. And he was a Christian who read his scriptures, believed, lived and acted according to the teachings of his religion. I wish all who claim Christianity read and act those verses. And, if you are a Muslim, like me, it is in our Qur’an too that all believers should “be persistently standing firm in justice, witnesses for Allah, even if it be against yourselves or parents and relatives.”
It is significant that those Adebanjo worked against agreed at his death that he was a champion of justice and democracy. I read that in President Bola Tinubu’s tribute on Friday. There is power in being positively different. In the Tribune interview I quoted earlier, Chief Adebanjo declared that the progressives’ political family he belonged to always charted a path for the future. He reminisced that “by the time Chief Awolowo founded the Action Group, how many people followed him in the Western Region, including the obas? Some of them are talking now; how many of them followed Chief Awolowo? It was when we won election in 1951 and we began to do the wonders of development and education and everything, everybody now started saying ‘all of us are Afenifere’…Those were the days of politics of principle. It was the principles and manifesto that we used to defeat the NCNC in the Western Region. We never killed ourselves; we never did murder.” He lamented today’s erosion of values, declaring that “that was why I could not celebrate my 95th birthday.”
He will also not participate in the celebration of his centenary in 2028. Death has said no to that. Victorian public schoolmaster and Anglican hymnographer, Reverend Gerald Moultrie (1829-1885), wrote “Brother, now thy toils are o’er.” John Ellerton (1826-1893), another reverend gentleman of genius, took it further from that verse with his version: “Now, the labourer’s task is over…” All tasks were over for Chief Adebanjo on Friday in Lagos; and all his battle days past. The voyager has landed on the farther shore, and, now, in God’s glorious keeping we leave the labourer to rest, to sleep. May his great soul enjoy the Lord’s repose.
