Adieu, marvelous Mabel!

LOGICALLY, it seems, no one can be a consummate short story writer, poet, playwright, broadcaster, teacher, table tennis champion and administrator rolled into one. No one, that is, unless you are Mabel Segun, one of Nigeria and black Africa’s most notable writers, athletes  and role models for generations of young people. Today, people talk about multi-tasking, but a life-long multi-tasker par excellence and one of the few Nigerians whose story intertwined with the story of Nigeria from the pre-Independence era through the First Republic, military rule and the return to democracy, Mabel Dorothy Okanima Segun, an icon who will never be forgotten, has already shown through a life of excellence what it means to get actively involved in different segments of the national life and write a story that will be studied for generations. The renowned children’s story writer and avid lover of children breathed her last after decades of service to the nation on Thursday, March 6, aged 95. And announcing the sad development, her  family said in a statement : “It is with gratitude to God for a life well spent in the pursuit of excellence in literature, broadcasting, and sports that we announce the passing of our beloved mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother, Mabel Dorothy Okanima Segun (née Aig-Imoukhuede). She was 95 years old.”

Mabel Segun. What a complete marvel! Pick up a copy of any of the following texts and you encounter the essential, inimitable Mabel Segun that generations of literary, media and sports lovers loved to encounter and engage:  My Father’s Daughter (1965), Under the Mango Tree (co-edited, 1979), Youth Day Parade (1984), Olu and the Broken Statue (1985), Sorry, No Vacancy (1985), Conflict and Other Poems (1986), My Mother’s Daughter (1986), Ping-Pong: Twenty-Five Years of Table Tennis (1989), The First Corn (1989), The Twins and the Tree Spirits (1990), The Surrender and Other Stories (1995), Readers’ Theatre: Twelve Plays for Young People (2006), Rhapsody: A Celebration of Nigerian Cooking and Food Culture (2007). The trailblazing writer and sportswoman literally had a finger in every pie. And she baked her pies extremely well. Even literally. She wrote a cookery book instructing generations of Nigerian women. You do not encounter the likes of Mabel Segun all the time: they are simply special, in a class of their own.

Born in Ondo city in present-day Ondo State in 1930, Mabel Segun had her secondary-school education at CMS Girls’ School, Lagos, and her higher education at the University of Ibadan, graduating in 1953 with a BA in English, Latin and History. These subjects she taught in many schools and would later become Head of the Department of English and Social Studies and Vice-Principal at the National Technical Teachers’ College, Yaba (now Yaba College of Technology). In the world of broadcasting, Segun won the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation 1977 Artiste of the Year award. But decades before that, she had captured the national imagination in the field of sports. Up until the early 50s, women used to be excluded from regional and national competitions in Africa, but that would change in 1954 during the National Singles Championships when the first female singles competition was introduced in Nigeria. And who else was to play the final match of that competition, up against an expatriate? The then Miss Mabel Dorothy Aig-Imoukhuede. She lost the match, but the world took notice of her talent, and the door was burst open for young, motivated and talented female athletes to shine. It is no exaggeration to say that Mabel Segun blazed the trail for Nigerian women, and Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka said as much during her 95th birthday celebrations in February. Taking his images from sports, Soyinka said: “While some were busy looking for a ladder to climb over the wall and retrieve the ball, one of you had already climbed over the wall, retrieved the ball, tossed it back to your yard and followed the game by the same route. That person would be Aunty Mabel.”

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Mabel Segun it was who won an ‘honorary male’ title at a Men’s Singles Tournament at the then University College, Ibadan, where she was classmates with such great names as Chinua Achebe, Grace Alele-Williams and Christopher Okigbo. She won the University’s Table Tennis Half Colour, and a gold medal in the doubles category in 1954, only calling it quits in 1988 at the age of 58! The honours were always bound to come: Mabel Segun won the Nigerian National Order of Merit (NNOM) in the Humanities and the UNESCO Prize for Literature in the Service of Tolerance. In 2015, the Society of Young Nigerian Writers under the leadership of Wole Adedoyin founded the Mabel Segun Literary Society. The objective was to propagate her ideas. Two years later, the LNG Nigeria Prize for Literature came calling. That was not fortuitous: the story was well told regarding how the writer of writers had championed children’s literature in Nigeria through the Children’s Literature Association of Nigeria, which she founded in 1978, and the Children’s Documentation and Research Centre, which she set up in 1990 in Ibadan. She was also a fellow of the International Youth Library in Munich, Germany. Her love for young people was deep. The founding member of the Association of Nigerian Authors authored literary texts widely used as a literature text in schools around the world, and translated into different languages, including German, Danish, Norwegian and Greek.

A perfectionist, Mabel segun once took all of 18 years to write a book. The title: Rhapsody: A Celebration of Nigerian Cooking and Food Culture. She won the LNG Nigeria Prize for Literature in 2007, and the Nigerian National Order of Merit Award in 2009. Certainly, Mabel Segun lived a distinguished life. With admirable courage, she rose above the odds of her time to set the pace in many fields. We commiserate with her family and friends and members of the sports, creative writing and journalism professions. May her soul rest in sweet repose.