Wale Adebanwi on mama HID –15

Between 1944, when he left for the United Kingdom, and 1948, Awolowo intermittently experienced spasm of this trauma. It can only be imagined what psychological, psychical. Indeed, medical disaster that Obafemi Awolowo would have suffered if Hannah had not only freed him from any financial obligation to the family in Nigeria – in his first year (1944-1945) in the UK when he was struggling with nervous disorder – but also constantly sent him good news about herself and the children while supporting him financially.

In 1945, Obafemi Awolowo partially shunned frame of mind or line of though which had led to “protracted self-condemnation and regrets” that “sunk (so) very deep to stir up some emotional conflicts”, such that he had to “struggle against nervous disorders”. However, it was not until 1948, when he totally abandoned this destructive habit of perpetual regret and self-condemnation and recognized it as “one of the causes of my nervous disorder”.

This psychological challenge was later deployed in a pathetic and contemptible way by Trevor Clark, Abubakar Tafawa Balewa’s spiteful biographer, in a statement he credited to Nigeria’s first prime minister. Clark claims that when Sir James Robertson (whom HID had taught how to dance to highlife music) Nigeria’s last British Governor General, told Balewa that Awolowo had said to him that he will be visiting the Governor-General’s residence more frequently when he became prime minister, Balewa responded in scorn that Awolowo must have “had another of these attacks of irrationality” which he knew of when “we were students in London”.

Either Trevor or Balewa was being economical with the truth about how they knew of Awolowo’s troubles. Awolowo and Balewa didn’t know each other while studying in the U.K. Therefore, the impression conveyed that Balewa knew of Awolowo’s personal troubles as at the time he was also studying in the U.K at the University of London’s Institute of Education on the ticket of the British was misleading. It is not unlikely that the British intelligence community was aware of Awolowo’s troubles when they started profiling him as he formed the Egbe Omo Oduduwa in London or when he returned to Nigeria and became a thorn on the side of the colonial government. They could have passed such intelligence report to Robertson who could have later divulged it to the British allies in the Northern People’s Congress (NPC), including Balewa. In the alternative, Trevor Clark knew of this after the fact, that is, when Awolowo’s personal journals were seized in 1962 in the process that led to the treasonable felony trial. The author, who was an Assistant District Officer (ADO), later District Officer in 1950s Northern Region – and one of those Southern Nigeria-hating Scottish officers who marginally influenced, but helped tremendously to implement, some of the most fatal structural policies that continue to plague Nigeria today – could have read the knowledge back to the pre-independence era in his voluminous book on Balewa.

Anyhow, before renouncing the unhelpful habit or frame of mind, Awolowo also frequently “entertained fear that my family – wife and children – might suffer financial hardship in the event of any untimely death, and without making sufficient provisions for their comfort in such eventually”.

Even when he returned to Nigeria in late 1947 and tried to stop Hannah from continuing with her trade, Obafemi Awolowo later confessed to himself upon reflection – on August 5, 1955 on his way to Benin City – that, by 1948, Hannah had become “sufficiently strong financially to look after the children”. Therefore, if his consuming fear if death had proved right in the late 1940s, he reflected, his wife and children would have survived.

ncredibly, all these secret thoughts which Obafemi Awolowo recorded in his “Flashes of Inspiration” under the title of “Me and Myself”, were later “desecrated”, when they were used by Mr. justice George Sodeinde Sowimemimo in convicting him. The notes were found and seized by the brash Irish police officer, John Lynn, who led the police investigation into allegation of attempts to overthrow the federal government in 1962.

Lynn, Awolowo notes in his memoirs, “was crude enough to break into the realm of my earnest private thoughts which were open only to God and disclosed to my wife”.

Therefore, it is obvious that Hannah standing by her husband, like a Rock of Gibraltar, helped in no small measure in helping him to overcome his psychological and psychical battles, so much so that in the end he was able to proclaim that “I am the Master of my Fate, I am the Captain of my Soul”. And no one recognized the important  role that Hannah played in Obafemi Awolowo’s life – a role which was so decisive as to be indispensable – like the man did before he died.

“(Obafemi Awolowo) had a very deferential attitude towards his wife so that her comfort appeared to matter so much to him”, observes Odia Ofeimum.

Chief Ayo Adebanjo adds that “there is no question that the moral and financial support that (Mama) gave Chief Awolowo made it possible for him to comfortably dispense the qualities of good leadership. He had no domestic problem either morally or financially. She is a woman in a million”. Reflecting on their lives together which he watched from a vantage position for a few critical years, Ofeimum adds that Hannah reciprocated her husband’s deferential devotion. “To a very large extent, it was as if her contributions (in Awolowo’s political life) were generally to make the man comfortable with his choices. They obviously have lived together enough for her to know all that he wanted. There is something that makes me wonder anytime I look back…. I wonder how they reached that position, because they agreed almost so totally with each other, so much that before (Obafemi Awolowo) did anything, she would have identified what needed to be done to support his choices”.

There was an exceptional union.

 

TOPSY EBINO – 080500-1735 (SMS ONLY PLEASE)