A market is kind haven for the wandering soul
Or the merely ruminant. Each stall
Is shrine and temple, magic cave of memorabilia.
Its passages are grottoes that transport us,
Bargain hunters all, from pole to antipodes, annulling
Time, evoking places and lost histories.
Wole Soyinka
DENMARK KO, COPENHAGEN NI!”
The matriarch of the Awolowo dynasty shot back at her granddaughters, Yemisi and Ayotola Oyediran in the summer of 1982. She was in England with her husband for summer holiday. They were planning to go to New York too as part of their summer trips to the UK and US. She wanted to take her grandchildren with them to New York. She had booked them on the flight to New York. She drove to Wiltshire, which is located near Bath, to pick them up for the journey to New York the next day.
Even though the girls had finished their main examinations at the Stonar School, Wilshire, in the South West of England, over a hundred miles from London, it was still a week to the end of the school year. Yemisi also had a minor typing examination. The Head of the School, an English woman named Doreen Denmark, was reluctant to release the girls from the sprawling day and boarding school occupying eighty acres of parkland and gardens. Yemisi and Ayotola told their grandmother that about the hesitancy of the head of the school.
“Who is she?” The matriarch asked rhetorically?
The girls took her question literally and responded: “Miss Denmark”
That was when she responded in dissatisfaction by mixing the woman’s last name and the capital city of the similarly named country with Yoruba words, indicating a dismissal of the woman’s disinclination regarding the release of her granddaughters.
For years, H.I.D’s granddaughters and their cousin would share jokes about this.
“She was like, finish up. We need to go”, reveals Ayotola, now a lawyer, married to Ayodeji. “I didn’t know enough geography then to know that Copenhagen was the capital of Denmark”.
But her grandmother knew the Scandinavia well. Since the 1930s and 1940s, she had been buying hats and clothes from Austria and Holland. By the late 1950s, she started visiting Holland and Austria from where imported lace and other fabrics to Nigeria. Therefore, she knew Western Europe very well……
In the years after the release of her husband from prison, H.I.D’s life revolved round three things. The care of, and support for, her husband and family – including children, grandchildren; devotion to the Church and community; and the expansion and consolidation of her business.
Even though the year after his release, that is, in 1967, Obafemi Awolowo again entered public life by accepting the position of Finance Minister and Deputy Chairman of the Federal Executive Council under Gowon and also ran for president in the Second Republic in 1979 and 1983, her activities in public, political life in these two periods were only extensions of her care of and support for her husband.
H.I.D’s care of and support for husband all through the years after his release up to the point of his death and beyond were helped in no small measure by the expansion of her business. Given that making money through trading was second nature to her, whether she was involved in politics or not, her business empire continued to thrive. The attention she paid to her business was only surpassed by the attention she paid to her husband and family and the church.
As they say in her culture, when the snail slithers, its shell follows. Therefore, when Obafemi Awolowo moved to Lagos as a member of the federal cabinet, H.I.D moved with him. Given her vow never to live in official residence again for the rest of their lives, given the experience at Bell Avenue, Ikoyi, they rented a house in Surulere. Awolowo also refused an official car. He drove his own car. Whenever the car needed servicing, H.I.D gave him her own car.
The decision to move to Lagos in June 1967 meant that she could no longer oversee her shop at Gbagi Market in Ibadan. Since it had become such a big business with a lot of faithful customers, she decided to keep the shop open, while she was planning a new shop in Lagos. She eventually found a good place in one of the major markets in the Central Business District (CBD) of Lagos, the Balogun Market. Both shops in Lagos and Ibadan were located at the CBD of the two most populous cities in West Africa.
Indeed, the belief in her culture that the world is a market place was no longer a mere metaphor true for H.I.D by the late 1960s. She had turned her world into a market place, one which “passages are grottoes that transport(ed)” her, as Soyinka writes in the poem above, as a “(b)argain hunter… from pole to antipodes”.
Balogun Market was one of the most important markets in the late 1960s and early 1970s Lagos when Hannah had a shop there. The market’s full name is Balogun Ajeniya market. It was named after Balogun Ajeniya from Epe, who was one of the closest followers of King Kosoko of Lagos and pioneer and promoter of Islam in the mid-19th century.
The Balogun’s name Ajeni-ya captures on of the key dimensions of the Yoruba concept of aje (wealth-creation). It translates to “wealth-creation requires toil”. But Aje is also a goddess or a spirit in Yoruba religion. It is the goddess responsible for profit-making in the market place and it “Supervises all aspects of life that relates to money”. The Yoruba therefore venerate this goddess. However, the veneration does not devalue the Yoruba understanding of temporality, in which the whole world itself is conceived as a temporal and temporary marketplace from which everyone would return home. The Yoruba therefore say that “Aye loja, orun n’ile” (“The world is a marketplace; Heaven is home”).
The conception of the world as a marketplace is also related to the conception of life in this world as a journey, “Ajo l’aye” (“Life is a journey”). Therefore, the world/life (aye), market (oja) and journey (ajo) constitute different dimensions of life course and transitions in the Yoruba ontology.
In Yoruba thought, the relationship of aye, oja and ajo define the total dynamics of life itself: “its uncertainties, unpredictability in human relations, failures at self-acualizing, conflict of relations, insecurity and fear derived from power. As A.B. Lawuyi has argued, capturing the experiential, the reflexive, the transformational and the transactional, the Yoruba concept of aye alerts us to the fact that “(t)o be alive is to experience the ups and downs of this journey”.
TO BE CONTINUED
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