HAVING experienced the ups and downs of her journey in aye with Obafemi Awolowo, the post-jail years heralded an era of not only political and social glory, but economic prosperity for HID The search for economic prosperity in the era of political glory led her to Balogun Market to open a shop to sell textiles.
From its start, Balogun Ajeniya’s Market has been a veritable centre of profit-making in Lagos. It was and remains the best place to buy fabrics, shoes and other similar items. Spread across multiple cornerstreets in the shadows of the modern skycrapers in Central Lagos, you travel to the market either by descending from the Carter Bridge into Balogun Street or descending from Apongbon Street into Marina and then into Balogun Street. HID’s shop was on 10, Balogun Street.
In the early 1970s, HID was a big importer of damask and lace. Those were the years in which lace was the most prestigious cloth in most of Western Nigeria and beyond. She was importing the materials from Holland and Austria and selling wholesale and retail. She even had her own trademark damask, Delistar, which carried a gold crown. She was also the first distributor of Hayes headgear in Nigeria.
“We grew up knowing the Balogun Street shop”, says Yemisi Subair (nee Oyediran).
Yemisi, who is now an accountant, remembers going to the shop with her grandmother.
“I remember how we would use the (long)wooden yardstick measuring the cloths and then cutting with scissors from one end and zapping through to the other end”.
Even though she had assistants in the shop and maids at home, HID, never allowed her grandchildren to be idle either in the house or at the shop. Yemisi, who spent a year with her grandmother in Lagos as a student at her alma mater, Methodist Girls High School (MGHS), discloses that “Mama made us do everything her house-girls did”.
Yemisis’s elder sister, Oluwakemi Aderemi (nee Oyediran) – whom HID fondly called Agbeke, while her grandfather called her Feyisipe” – readily confirms the strict upbringing the grandchildren experienced with HID, despite her display of intense love.
Explains Kemi, who is now a lawyer, “this was where her strictness came in. When her goods arrived – they were usually delivered to the house in Apapa – it didn’t matter what time the goods were delivered, she would wake up to help receive the goods. She will say eyin le n na wo e (“You are the ones spending the money’)”
The work in the house was not limited to helping when her goods were delivered. They also had to join the house girls in doing chores. Mama regularly reminded her granddaughters, they revealed, that they were not born differently from the maids.
“I don’t remember her having less than five (maids) at any time”, explains Yemisi. “But she used to say she can’t train other people’s children without training her own children. Whereas with most parents, the house-maids will be ordered around, while sparing their children, the reverse is the case with Mama. She did not spare us at all… She will be shouting: she is the only child of her mother and her mother trained her. “I can’t train other people’s children while my own are not trained”.
Also at the shop on Saturdays and during holidays, says Kemi, “we helped to cut the lace”.
“When the customers came, we helped to measure out the rolls”.
Before Yemisi joined them in Lagos in 1975, Kemi and her two cousins, Funke and Segun, who were all living with Kemi’s parents, Professor and Mrs. Oyediran, in Ibadan, had moved to Lagos to join their grandparents at their new home in Park Lane, Apapa. Segun was enrolled in Igbobi College, Yaba, while Funke and Kemi attended Mama’s alma mater. The three cousins spent two years (1974-1976) before moving back to Ibadan with the Oyedirans. Yemisi also joined them at some point.
“There were always people around (the shop)”, Ayotola Ayodeji (nee Oyediran) who is next to Yemisi also recalls. “There was an ante-room, or back-room in the shop”. Ayotola who read Mass Communication in the University of Lagos and later read law, adds that HID by the early 1970s was not involved with the everyday interaction with customers.
“But I recall her being the large charcter living in the background. She was not the one doing the hands-on sales; she would be inside (the ante-room) and things would be going on. She was handling the figures, the purchasing, planning, collating, and pricing. (But) she kept us on our feet, whatever we needed to do”.
During Christmas, the grandchildren remember staging mock plays in the Awolowo’s compound in Park Lane, Apapa.
“At Christmas, we would stage plays that we had practiced ourswelves and everybody joined in, including the children of “Baba Senior” who was Papa’s (Awo’s) driver. “Baba Francis” and “Baba Lucky” who were the cooks. Their children too will participate, and we would all be in the play together. We will sing hymns and Papa will round it off with knockouts. He will arrange for us to have fireworks and all the rest of it. It was fun. Living with our grandparents certainly encouraged us to develop into rounded individuals”, concludes Kemi Aderemi.
One of the things they also learnt from their grandmother was what they then regarded as “excessive” devotion to prayers.
Kemi Aderemi and Yemisi Subair recall that both in Park Lane and Ikenne as they were growing up, they relished all the parts of living with their grandparents except the fact that she woke them up too early and insisted on long prayers.
“She used to wake us up at four in the morning”, says Kemi, “I am convinced that it was four a.m. – but it probably was slightly later than that – for prayers. We always… well, I certainly thought it was more of a (worship) service than prayers, because we would have Bible reading, psalms, hymns and prayers. We used to fall asleep and she would keep waking us up.
But certainly, you will be wide awake at the end of the ex exercise. And we used to think it was too early. She used to tell us to learn the psalm off hand, so that when we were reciting it we needed not look into our Bibles…. She was our first experience of practicing Christianity within the home setting, having a family altar where you gather together to pray. We always gathered in her room and all her helps also gathered with us. It was a household thing, nobody was left out”.
“I can’t think of a time Mama didn’t have something doing”, is how Ayotola puts it………..
TO BE CONTINUED
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