HE was more in control of his environment. She led a more out-there life, because Mama would go into the real world. But now, I am beginning to think they had it in equal measure…. I have a more holistic view of her now. I have come to see that this is a giant personality on so many levels.She is a forbearer, she forbears and she doesn’t like to pass on how much she is forbearing”.
However, once you took out the five a.m. wake-up calls and the long prayer sessions, the grandchildren fondly remembers the trips abroad with their grandparents.
“We would go on holidays to the UK and she used to rotate who would follow her amongst us. There was ayear that I went alone with her, there was a year Kemi and Funke went with Segun, there was a year myself and Ayotola went with her. After that, all of us used to go with her. But when she was going out shopping, she will decide who would go with her. You will carry her bag and all the shopping; any Nigerianthat she knows or she sees on the street, you are expected to kneel down with your two kneels touching the ground. She was just something else”. Yemisi states.
Yemisi’s memory of the disciplinary environment that her grand-mother imposed has not been dulled by the fun she had with her on the foreign trips. H.I.D took her grandchildren on foreign trips in rotation.
“Funke (Awolowo), Segun (Awolowo), Kemi (Oyediran), Yemisi (Oyediran), Ayotola (Oyediran), Dolapo (Soyode – later Osinbajo), Olumide (Oyediran), Ladipo (Soyode), Yejide (Awolowo – later Badmus), Femi (Soyode) that was the order. There was always a steady number of between four and eight of us, and along came our younger cousin”, explains Ayotola.
But not all the grandchildren loved shopping abroad like their matriarch.
“She particularly couldn’t stand shopping with myself and Dolapo (Osinbajo) because we were not enthusiastic about her shopping…. We were always distracted and she would then shout “What is wrong with these two skinny ones” – because we were so skinny”, reveals Ayotola.
“I remember once she had to go and buy hats at C.T. Lawrence – and she loved C.T Lawrence because Lawrence was Mama’s concessionaire in the UK. She may have been Italian. She made hats for royalties. She is a fantastic hat-maker. She used to make Mama’s hats …. Mama ordered the hats in colours, particularly for the (Anglican) Synods, because she wore dresses to the Synod. She didn’t like to go to the Synod in Iro and Buba. She was very smart. She knew what the occasion demanded and she usually just delivered it. Mama was very elegant; she really took the troubles to dress well”.
“She was a lady and she wanted us – her granddaughters – to be ladies too”, is Yejide Badmus’ summation of H.I.D’s attitude top modern fashion.
Propriety is always important for her, especially with her female grandchildren. She even extends this to other young women. Despite her old age, she is concerned about how young women dress and conduct themselves. And for someone with H.I.D’s remarkable attention to details, nothing escapes her.
The children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren share some jokes about her attitude to propriety and attention to details.
During a visit to H.I.D in Ikenne a few years ago, she complained to Mrs. Tola Oyediran about her sight. She needed her to get an optometrist to examine her eyes, she said, because her vision in the last few weeks have deteriorated. But a few minutes after that, H.I.D complained about what Oyediran’s assistant, a young lady, was wearing.
“Se mini-skirt e yi o de le ju?!” (“Isn’t this mini-skirt too brief?!”)
Was this not the same Mama who was just complaining about her sight? She could still notice the length of mini-skirt?
One afternoon in July 2015, I was interviewing H.I.D in Ikenne in the company of Segun Olatunji and Edward Dickson, the Consultant and Managing Director/Editor-in-Chief of the African Newspapers Plc, respectively. Her younbgest daughter was with us. At a point during the interview, Olatunji warned me that I had taken too much of the 99-year’s old time and needed to let her go back to the room to rest. Too late, H.I.D shot back. I had “strained her neck” already! We all laughed. At 99, her sense of humour is undiminished.
About a decade earlier, when I visited her alongside Segun Olatunji, who was then the MD/Editor-in-Chief of the Tribune, H.I.D had mentioned something that a very prominent man in Lagos told her during his visit the day before. Before she was done, Olatunji interjected that he doubted the veracity of the man’s claims.
“Ha! I know”, H.I.D responded. “Once the man sits down, a torrent of lies is unleashed!”
We laughed heartily. The eminent man would have assumed that he had successfully deceived the old lady who was then already an octogenarian. She is one of the most attentive human beings that one could ever had met. Even when she pretends not to notice things, she is fully aware of her environment. And she had an incredible memory. There is no one she ever meets whose name she forgets.
Yemi Osinbajo, the former Attorney-General of Lagos State, provides another example of his grandmother-in-law’s attention to detail – which also illustrates the fashion sense of the old lady whom Senator Remi Tinubu describes as an “open, cheerful fashionista”. About two decades ago, a disturbed man had broken into the Awolowo’s home with a knife but was apprehended with no incident. People came to identify with the old woman when the incident became public knowledge.
When Osinbajo and his wife, Dolapo, visited Ikenne, they found a number of people with her. So, after exchanging pleasantries, they sat a few inches away from her, as she was surrounded by people. After a while, H.I.D beckoned on Dolapo. She spoke softly into her hears; thereafter Dolapo went into H.I.D’s room and returned with her grandmother’s handbag. Osinbajo was wondering about the nature of the conversation.
As they left Ikenne to return to Lagos, he asked his wife what Mama told her. It turned out that, even in those circumstances, the octogenarian had noticed the ladies sandals that her granddaughter was wearing and liked it. So, she asked her to go fetch her handbag from the room and gave her money to buy her the same sandals!
TO BE CONTINUED
and then