Refflections with Olu Obafemi
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IT is exactly four decades this June since we have become friends and brother. For me, and I sincerely hope it is also for you, it has been the journey of soulmates in search for ideals for our land; sharing and giving. In the harshness and inclemency of these many climes and times, wrought by declining living conditions and unfulfilled dreams and dashed promises of becoming for society, engendered by the rule of knee-jacks, jack-boots and tainted agbadas and babarigas—life expectancy has drastically shrunk to between 45 and 50. And so, even though you wear no scare or care over the though about it all; turning a Septuagenarian and hitting the mid-Winter Season, it is no mean feat—it is no casual meal which children kneel to devour with ravenous leisure.
It is, not, especially, for you Babafemi, Adeyemi Osofisan, dear Minstrel, Weaverbird, Alchemist of Cognition, craftsman, dexterous story-teller, dancing and glow worm, trotter across many shores of Globe, climbing this ladder of life these seven decades. It is not for a jolly ride across these many seasons, Okinba Launko, wearer f the spirit of restless locusts, bearing thought-smith, of the testimonies and witnesses of the unending rage of trauma, violence, dystopia, that have wrenched our nation’s psyche and ravaged the dream of our land, seeking solutions, giving illumination and sowing the seeds of regeneration through these many poems, plays more numerous than anyone else have created in this continent, inimitable tales in fictive form, adaptations, translations to and from many tongues, biographies and polemics and essays.
Femi, it is a wondrous miracle, you may not know it, and it seems to me talking to and watching you smiling through it all, last week as you handed over to me your seventieth published work, that you have survived it all, firmly on your feet, even though the strains and stress of compulsive industry and tireless trudging now show. Yes you handed over to me in your Ibadan living ‘studio’ your seventieth published outing, Ainsi Va La Vie (Such Is Life) your French translation of Lukuman Adeniyi’s play. Now, what does this gesture portend and reveal; it is that for every year on earth, you have published a book. You have created your story every single year of you sojourn on earth. Tell me, who among us has dared this feat? Yes, you have arrived here at Age Seventy, the Age of, for you, Spring(y) Winter, fairly fresh, hideously radiant and palpably lush, heaving sighs as usual not of despondency but for anxiety and yearning for more and more creativity—looking ahead to furnish forth from the forge!
I have witnessed much of these— with baited breadth—sharing a little of your journeys though this un-enviably bee-busy life of yours—telling and retelling, reading and re-reading the stories of our troubled humanity in a plethora of songs and defiant dance-steps, waking and re-making our many gods; Sango, kokoro f’ijo sayo (prodding Agemo, to simulate and translate into the Thunder-King, Ogun lakaye, and more and mostly rousing and buffeting Orunmila, dream-seeking on his divining chain, Esu, the Trickster-god among wandering minstrel vagabond- water goddesses- Oya, Osun, and Yemoja and her white floating calabash. You have arrived here through many hazardous fits and starts, rise and fall and rise again. Not for you but for our land—through troublous times when wisdom bade you flee from it all like many wisely did or were compelled to do.
Yes, flee from the reigns of jackboots and knee-jacks, under the dictation of Bretton Wood, IMF and no IMF but its conditionalities, SFEM and FEM, sapping away our economy and yielding only hard times on our people; cars climbing/jacked and staying put on abandoned mortars; normal staples transform to essential commodities meant only for the Lords of the Manor and their kiths; the rest fit only to pick crumbs from incinerators; then your songs and words on stage became the soothing balm to stay the season and tender the agonies of hungry stomachs and lacerated minds.
Even now, as we celebrate your Seventieth with your seventy books in attendance, the promise of good times remain a dream as violence gallop in the streets—as Nigeria remains, even if the lions and the bears will not hear it, remains jaga-jaga, everything scatter-scatter, poor main suffer-suffer, and the bombs of terror boom, gbosa-gbosa, bloodshed everywhere. But as you say, memorably, ‘we wear ‘hope like a jewel’
Only your wisdom increases, as the Holy book says , so that the sorrow increases—sorrow of the sensate mind seeking redemption.
So dear friend and brother, Ire o! as you step with your feet firm on the turf, into the age of the sages, where you rightly belong! Igba odun odun kan—fruitful years, very like a Springly year.