A Journey through Ikere-Ekiti with Niyi Osundare
- By E. E. Sule
- Published April 4, 2009
- Features
- Unrated
E. E. Sule
E. E. Sule is the pen-name for Dr. Sule E. Egya. He teaches Creative Writing, African Literature and Modern Literary Theory in the Department of English & Literary Studies, University of Abuja, Abuja FCT, Nigeria. He is the author of Impotent Heavens (a collection of short stories); Dream and Shame (a collection of short stories); Naked Sun (a volume of poetry); Knifing Tongues (a volume of poetry); The Writings of Zaynab Alkali (a critical book, co-authored with Umelo Ojinmah); In Their Voices and Visions: Conversations with New Nigerian Writers (a book of interviews), and What the Sea Told Me (a volume of poetry). His poems, short stories, literary and scholarly essays have appeared in journals, e-journals, anthologies and literary magazines in Nigeria, the USA, Germany, Spain, India, the UK, Senegal, etc. He has read his works to audiences both in Nigeria and abroad. In 2007, he had a nine-month writing residency in Senegal where he worked under the mentorship of the world class Ghanaian writer Ayi Kwei Armah.
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Humour. Geniality. Conviviality. Niyi Osundare is all of those, and more. A visit with him to Ikere-Ekiti, his birthplace, was full of fun and education, and the rare opportunity of sharing the “poetry of presence” overflowing around him.
At about 6.30 pm, when I had waited for him more than an hour at the Faculty of Arts, University of Ibadan, his Volvo pulled to a stop in front of me. He eagerly came out of the car, full of apologies. I stood up and moved to the car, convinced that the person I had seen on the wheels looked like the Osundare I had been seeing on the covers of his books. He stood tall in front of me. It was a surprise. For I had thought that, like most writers (or perhaps like me), Osundare was a short man! “So it’s you, E. E. Sule?” he asked. We were meeting for the first time after exchanging emails, text messages, and hearing each other’s voices on the phone.
I was extremely excited. He was also excited, introducing me to his friends now and then. People trickled in and out of the huge Faculty building. We drove to the University of Ibadan Staff Club where he was to fulfil his promise (“E. E., I assure you, you’ll eat plenty of pounded yam when you come”), but there was no pounded yam, only a miserable dish of white rice and stew. He was disappointed; I was not. It satisfied my hunger which was the most important thing to me then. A bottle of small stout each got us more enlivened. And we talked as we drove to his house, stopping to pick Lipton tea for me at a supermarket. Questions and answers, banters and laughter filled the car whose professorial complexion could be seen in the books cluttered on the back seats.
Osundare’s two-apartment house was impressive. Hurray! the poet-scholar who had no house of his own at fifty-eight, invoking our tantrums against the Nigerian government, now owns a house, because he has left the mess and mediocrity and mental torture that characterize the Nigerian academia. You may envy me: I was the first guest to sleep in the house. After he showed me into my room and I washed, I met him in the living room. Of course I would not let him be. He too understood that I had not travelled several hours from the north just to rest or watch his TV. I switched on my recorder and the legendary poet, fighting fatigue, held me sway with his outpouring, though he accused me of behaving like a journalist. He spoke of his birthplace (where we would visit tomorrow); he spoke of his childhood; he spoke of his father and mother; he spoke of his great teachers; and he spoke of the farms and the rocks he grew up knowing. His talk was punctuated by the intrusive memory of Katrina.
Much of his wisdom came from his father, Ariyoosu Osundare, and his mother, Fasimia Osundare, who did not have western education but were amazingly intelligent, perceptive and visionary. What was the single most remarkable thing his father did towards his career as a writer? When he was not old enough to write with pen, his father, in one of his trips to the city, bought him a ballpoint pen, telling him, “Here is your pen. I want you to put black spot on a white surface.” Nothing could be more prophetic. “The first thing I ever wrote,” Osundare said, “was a letter for Papa. Once I could write, I started writing his letters.” And as Osundare reveals in his trenchant valedictory lecture at University of Ibadan, his father’s letters always ended with the mantra, “My dialogue with you has no end.”
A very definitive opinion I formed of Osundare that night, as we talked, was that he did not only respect his father, he regarded him as a sage, and saw himself as his father’s ardent apostle. His summation: “Papa was a great man in his own way. He never had a bad harvest because he intelligently predicted the seasons. My first knowledge of geography came from him.” Of course, he quoted sparks of wisdom from his mother too, whom he regarded as a quiet and intelligent woman, and was eager for me to meet her. Osundare’s father was a drummer and singer, his bata the delight of all at Ikere-Ekiti; his mother a composer and weaver, whose quiet artistry Osundare began to imbibe when he was a baby strapped on her back. Osundare’s craft, unlike those of other writers, is not rooted in books, but in roots. While the art of drumming and singing naturally passed from his parents to him, his uncle, Tayo Olaitan Ayodele, exposed him to the Yoruba theatre; Ayodele organised plays in the family and Osundare increasingly grew enthusiastic about acting, taking most of the lead roles, and doing well.
As the night deepened and I listened to Osundare, I did not know where the stress of travelling by the road several hours from Keffi to Ibadan disappeared to. But because we had a crucial trip the next day, we retired into our rooms some minutes to midnight, even though I wanted us to talk throughout the night.
Our breakfast the next day was boiled yam with scrambled eggs (for me) and palm oil (for him), which he prepared. I would come to know in the five days I spent with him that Osundare is a yam-eating poet. He dished his food in a small earthen pot. Why the earthen pot? “I like eating from the pot because it gives the yam a rural flavour,” he said. After we had eaten, and he had settled the labourers putting finishing touches to the house, we started off to Ikere-Ekiti. We had a Toyota Corolla with a driver, given to us by University Press Plc, his publisher, to ease our journey.
The journey to Akure was smooth. While Ismaila, the driver, concentrated on the road, Osundare and I continued our interview, the tape rolling. Was the memory of Katrina so alive? “Oh well, Katrina humbled me. My wife and I saw death and would have died. Our daughter was away in school. We were saved by a neighbour, a Cuban-American with only a few sentences of English. He heard our shouting and came to our rescue. I lost everything to Katrina.” But why did he have to leave Nigeria for the US, having risen through a successful career in Nigeria? “I have a daughter who is intelligent and sensitive, but she is deaf and mute. In Nigeria she was just wasting away; she couldn’t get good education. I moved to the US because of her.” Interestingly, Osundare had a different plan other than retiring from University of Ibadan. He was stampeded into retiring. “I wanted an extended leave of absence to be able to take care of my daughter in the US. I met the VC and told him about my plight. His response: ‘no, the university cannot afford to lose a person like you. We must do everything to make sure that you remain with us’. But when my department wrote a support letter, requesting that the university should grant me the needed leave, the vice chancellor never gave any reply. So I had to put in a notice of early retirement.”
At about 2pm, we were in Akure, and headed straight for the house of Foluso, his immediate younger brother, where we were welcomed by Osundare’s mother. She was old, quite old, but sprightly and active, disappearing now and then into the kitchen. She had a quiet mien that belied the ecstasy of seeing her son again after a long while. Foluso is married and has three children. A short while after we came, he bounced into the house. He pointed at me, “You must be Dr Sule.” His vibrant voice and laughter indicated the vivacity he and Osundare inherited from their father, the unforgettable man of bata whose drumbeats echoed through the length and breadth of Ikere-Ekiti. Foluso would tell me later, when I trapped him for my tape, that “Prof is exactly a copy of Papa. His height, his skin, his face, even his voice are Papa’s own. He and Papa were very close.”
I got the tape rolling for Osundare’s mother. Her answers were brief and direct. She was unself-conscious. Her fingers continued to tap rhythmically on the arms of the chair in which she sat, and I could see that there was music going on in her head. What kind of a boy was Osundare? “He liked books from childhood,” she said. “He also liked playing. He participated in all the neighbourhood plays, and we also watched him acting outside the family, in the school.” Not the type to show much emotion, she watched the progress of her son mostly through the eyes of her husband whom she believed knew the best for their son. She carried Osundare’s luggage on her head and walked a distance of about five miles with him to Amoye Grammar School the day he started secondary school in January 1961. She was there every visiting day with food for him, and a message from his father. She argued that her son was not the type to be called naughty in his teens, but he was certainly stubborn (in the real sense of resistance), and would insist on a thing if he was convinced it was right and just. What was her son’s relationship with his siblings? “Like his father, he grew up a disciplinarian, berating his younger ones who did not measure up mostly in academics and etiquette.”
I was eager to go to Ikere-Ekiti, to dialogue with the rocks. Already I had begun to see the rocks in their rolling essence as they stood protecting Akure from the overarching bravado of Ekitiland. We took off at about 10am the next day. The thickness of the forest, punctuated now and then by a brotherhood of rocks, amazed me. More than twice, I had the urge to stop the driver, to get out of the car, to saunter into the forest, to get lost in it and slough off my northern-savannah skin.
At about 6.30 pm, when I had waited for him more than an hour at the Faculty of Arts, University of Ibadan, his Volvo pulled to a stop in front of me. He eagerly came out of the car, full of apologies. I stood up and moved to the car, convinced that the person I had seen on the wheels looked like the Osundare I had been seeing on the covers of his books. He stood tall in front of me. It was a surprise. For I had thought that, like most writers (or perhaps like me), Osundare was a short man! “So it’s you, E. E. Sule?” he asked. We were meeting for the first time after exchanging emails, text messages, and hearing each other’s voices on the phone.
I was extremely excited. He was also excited, introducing me to his friends now and then. People trickled in and out of the huge Faculty building. We drove to the University of Ibadan Staff Club where he was to fulfil his promise (“E. E., I assure you, you’ll eat plenty of pounded yam when you come”), but there was no pounded yam, only a miserable dish of white rice and stew. He was disappointed; I was not. It satisfied my hunger which was the most important thing to me then. A bottle of small stout each got us more enlivened. And we talked as we drove to his house, stopping to pick Lipton tea for me at a supermarket. Questions and answers, banters and laughter filled the car whose professorial complexion could be seen in the books cluttered on the back seats.
Osundare’s two-apartment house was impressive. Hurray! the poet-scholar who had no house of his own at fifty-eight, invoking our tantrums against the Nigerian government, now owns a house, because he has left the mess and mediocrity and mental torture that characterize the Nigerian academia. You may envy me: I was the first guest to sleep in the house. After he showed me into my room and I washed, I met him in the living room. Of course I would not let him be. He too understood that I had not travelled several hours from the north just to rest or watch his TV. I switched on my recorder and the legendary poet, fighting fatigue, held me sway with his outpouring, though he accused me of behaving like a journalist. He spoke of his birthplace (where we would visit tomorrow); he spoke of his childhood; he spoke of his father and mother; he spoke of his great teachers; and he spoke of the farms and the rocks he grew up knowing. His talk was punctuated by the intrusive memory of Katrina. Much of his wisdom came from his father, Ariyoosu Osundare, and his mother, Fasimia Osundare, who did not have western education but were amazingly intelligent, perceptive and visionary. What was the single most remarkable thing his father did towards his career as a writer? When he was not old enough to write with pen, his father, in one of his trips to the city, bought him a ballpoint pen, telling him, “Here is your pen. I want you to put black spot on a white surface.” Nothing could be more prophetic. “The first thing I ever wrote,” Osundare said, “was a letter for Papa. Once I could write, I started writing his letters.” And as Osundare reveals in his trenchant valedictory lecture at University of Ibadan, his father’s letters always ended with the mantra, “My dialogue with you has no end.”
A very definitive opinion I formed of Osundare that night, as we talked, was that he did not only respect his father, he regarded him as a sage, and saw himself as his father’s ardent apostle. His summation: “Papa was a great man in his own way. He never had a bad harvest because he intelligently predicted the seasons. My first knowledge of geography came from him.” Of course, he quoted sparks of wisdom from his mother too, whom he regarded as a quiet and intelligent woman, and was eager for me to meet her. Osundare’s father was a drummer and singer, his bata the delight of all at Ikere-Ekiti; his mother a composer and weaver, whose quiet artistry Osundare began to imbibe when he was a baby strapped on her back. Osundare’s craft, unlike those of other writers, is not rooted in books, but in roots. While the art of drumming and singing naturally passed from his parents to him, his uncle, Tayo Olaitan Ayodele, exposed him to the Yoruba theatre; Ayodele organised plays in the family and Osundare increasingly grew enthusiastic about acting, taking most of the lead roles, and doing well.
As the night deepened and I listened to Osundare, I did not know where the stress of travelling by the road several hours from Keffi to Ibadan disappeared to. But because we had a crucial trip the next day, we retired into our rooms some minutes to midnight, even though I wanted us to talk throughout the night.
Our breakfast the next day was boiled yam with scrambled eggs (for me) and palm oil (for him), which he prepared. I would come to know in the five days I spent with him that Osundare is a yam-eating poet. He dished his food in a small earthen pot. Why the earthen pot? “I like eating from the pot because it gives the yam a rural flavour,” he said. After we had eaten, and he had settled the labourers putting finishing touches to the house, we started off to Ikere-Ekiti. We had a Toyota Corolla with a driver, given to us by University Press Plc, his publisher, to ease our journey.
The journey to Akure was smooth. While Ismaila, the driver, concentrated on the road, Osundare and I continued our interview, the tape rolling. Was the memory of Katrina so alive? “Oh well, Katrina humbled me. My wife and I saw death and would have died. Our daughter was away in school. We were saved by a neighbour, a Cuban-American with only a few sentences of English. He heard our shouting and came to our rescue. I lost everything to Katrina.” But why did he have to leave Nigeria for the US, having risen through a successful career in Nigeria? “I have a daughter who is intelligent and sensitive, but she is deaf and mute. In Nigeria she was just wasting away; she couldn’t get good education. I moved to the US because of her.” Interestingly, Osundare had a different plan other than retiring from University of Ibadan. He was stampeded into retiring. “I wanted an extended leave of absence to be able to take care of my daughter in the US. I met the VC and told him about my plight. His response: ‘no, the university cannot afford to lose a person like you. We must do everything to make sure that you remain with us’. But when my department wrote a support letter, requesting that the university should grant me the needed leave, the vice chancellor never gave any reply. So I had to put in a notice of early retirement.”
At about 2pm, we were in Akure, and headed straight for the house of Foluso, his immediate younger brother, where we were welcomed by Osundare’s mother. She was old, quite old, but sprightly and active, disappearing now and then into the kitchen. She had a quiet mien that belied the ecstasy of seeing her son again after a long while. Foluso is married and has three children. A short while after we came, he bounced into the house. He pointed at me, “You must be Dr Sule.” His vibrant voice and laughter indicated the vivacity he and Osundare inherited from their father, the unforgettable man of bata whose drumbeats echoed through the length and breadth of Ikere-Ekiti. Foluso would tell me later, when I trapped him for my tape, that “Prof is exactly a copy of Papa. His height, his skin, his face, even his voice are Papa’s own. He and Papa were very close.”
I got the tape rolling for Osundare’s mother. Her answers were brief and direct. She was unself-conscious. Her fingers continued to tap rhythmically on the arms of the chair in which she sat, and I could see that there was music going on in her head. What kind of a boy was Osundare? “He liked books from childhood,” she said. “He also liked playing. He participated in all the neighbourhood plays, and we also watched him acting outside the family, in the school.” Not the type to show much emotion, she watched the progress of her son mostly through the eyes of her husband whom she believed knew the best for their son. She carried Osundare’s luggage on her head and walked a distance of about five miles with him to Amoye Grammar School the day he started secondary school in January 1961. She was there every visiting day with food for him, and a message from his father. She argued that her son was not the type to be called naughty in his teens, but he was certainly stubborn (in the real sense of resistance), and would insist on a thing if he was convinced it was right and just. What was her son’s relationship with his siblings? “Like his father, he grew up a disciplinarian, berating his younger ones who did not measure up mostly in academics and etiquette.”
I was eager to go to Ikere-Ekiti, to dialogue with the rocks. Already I had begun to see the rocks in their rolling essence as they stood protecting Akure from the overarching bravado of Ekitiland. We took off at about 10am the next day. The thickness of the forest, punctuated now and then by a brotherhood of rocks, amazed me. More than twice, I had the urge to stop the driver, to get out of the car, to saunter into the forest, to get lost in it and slough off my northern-savannah skin.