Whatever a man or woman becomes starts showing at the impressionable stage. This holds true in science, music, literatue and others

My Son, Let Me Kneel Down For You…(For My Sweet Mum: Victoria Olufunke Adeoya(RIP). August 28, 1938 to April 10, 2015)

She must have been watching me very closely. But not in an obvious way because I completely missed her eagle eyes. She finally pinned me down in the carton room. The carton room was a room devoted to storing hundreds of cartons of Skol Beer, either empty or full. By this time she had not become a staunch prayer warrior that she would become years later. So it was OK to sell beer in the cartons as a distributor for Ughelli-based Superbru and even run a chemist on the side. And of course it was to practice as a midwife in Sapele Health Centre. Many years later, all that would change, dramatically.

The carton room was my secret hiding place. I loved to go there and do things privately. At just about 12, I already had a whole lot of need for privacy. The many cartons provided a million hiding places for my secret things. Hiding things in one of hundreds of empty or full cartons of beer bottles, no one could possibly find out my secrets. The other point is that the other kids hardly frequented there. So I could lock myself in and do things in secret.

Not all the things I did there were bad. That was the room, sitting among the scattered cartons and bottles, where my innocence was shattered reading hundreds of pulp fiction novels. In that private world nothing outside mattered, all I wanted to do was to get up and run to the neighborhood bookshop to get the next James Hardly Chase or another Pacesetter paperback. All I wanted to do was read those stories and then, write my own stories. If you asked me what I wanted to be, I never hesitated in telling you, “I want to be a novelist”.

Though the books were very much available in bookshops and even departmental stores at that time (The best of them was Chellarams, backing the majestic river Ethiope in one of the grandest neighborhoods in Sapele town). On the way from school in St Malachy’s, the secondary school where I spent one year before the long drawn teachers strike of 1982 forced my father to send me to school in what he thought was the calmer settings of Ekiti, we would stop over and spend a couple of hours window shopping books. Chellarams had a fantastic section for books and magazines.

In those hallowed chambers, I found out about the greatest fiction writers of the day. At that time, they all appeared to be Americans. James Hardly Chase, who I later discovered to be an Englishman! Most of his stories were either based in American cities or had American characters in the lead. Some were foreigners though. They were an unforgettable cast: Slim Grisson of the Grissom Gang and his mother, the inspiration, for the Gang, Ma Grisson. Lu Silk, the one-eyed killer who never missed a shot. Herman Radnitdz, the German billionaire. Malik, the great Russian spy with the powerful build and bold green eyes; Maddox the insurance guru; There was Sidney Sheldon, who specialized in writing unputdownable suspense novels; Frederick Forsyth too; A great favorite was Harold Robbins, he penned powerful stories weaving romance, crime, politics, civil rights and so many other things together. How can I forget the “unkillable” Nick Carter, author and spy; The popular effervescent and well-known Arthur Hailey, a skillful storyteller whose complicated plots could hardly ever be unravelled by the most experienced reader, until he was ready to reveal. You could say we were very experienced readers, even in that tender age.There are too many of these greats to recall or mention. But inside those stories we created another reality which made every other thing look puny.

In my young mind I had an easy familiarity with America, England, Vietnam, Russia and many of the great countries of the world and their cities, even though I had never been there…I was a citizen of the world and nothing, it seemed, could go wrong.

Music was not missing in our lives. In the afternoons, when our parents were not at home, we enjoyed music from Daddy’s JVC NIVICO. It was a small cassette player that played us the endless rhythms of Bob Marley, Our No1 favorite at the time. Fela Anikulapo Kuti, who brought us up to speed on the unfolding Nigerian story; Jimmy Cliff, Eric Donaldson and Nigerian greats like Hubert Ogunde (he was a popular one in that house, can’t remember why), Sunny Ade, Ebenezer Obey and a few others. I also had an early affinity for the Omimah highlife genius, Orlando Owoh. Our tastes in music never matched that of our peers. The great pop stars of the day from Michael Jackson to Cool and the Gang did not pass the test of “What’s the message”, we were carried away by the clearly worded cries of “Chant down babylon” and “International thief thief.”

•Jimmy Cliff

How does a 12-year old finance this rich taste in books, music and culture (I loved to steal into Olympia Cinema which was at the very end of Okpe Road, the most Commercial road in Sapele at the time if I recall well. If you take the right turn, that will be Cemetery Road which by the way led ultimately to the market by the waterside. I always wondered why not “Market road” instead of Cemetery Road. And we lived just off that Cemetery road so it was an ever present reality in my life though I never, to this day, visited that cemetery. Most of the time, it had to be those epic Indian movies. An occasional American and the once in a lifetime experience of watching Hubert Ogunde’s epic “Jaiyesinmi” live on stage.

How did this adventure into story land begin? My earliest memory of how it all started was Mummy gathering us for informal afternoon storytelling sessions on weekends. I can’t ever recall Mummy telling the popular “story story” African folktales. No, she told us the irresistible and fantastic stories of Sir Rider Haggard and the like. Her favourite characters were always well recalled: Captain John Good, Alan Quotermain of Durban and of course, Sir Henry. And of course the village of Kukuanaland where the brutal (Oh the Africans were always brutal and savage!) Tuala the king and the old witch mother, Gagool, who had lived for hundreds of years!

I remember the day she told the story of “The Merchant of Venice.” Retelling that Shakespearian masterpiece from memory posed no problems for her. She would recall the names of the all the important characters and places without a seconds hesitation. She would reel out quotes. In telling either the African stories or the European stories, I think she was never interested in the politics. She never, for instance give any footnotes about why author Sir Rider Haggard, who became one of my childhood favorites, but whom I later repudiated, would cast all the black people in his classic, King Solomon’s mines, as evil, except of course, those who were loyal servants to the white men. Meanwhile all the white people were heroes!

Her concern was to entertain us, to tickle our fancy. I think she herself was also fascinated by those fantastic characters, the way she used to repeat the names with emphasis: Tuuuuala the king… Gagooooool the witch…Captain John Gooood!!! Yes, she clearly had fun telling those stories. I remember her telling us that she read the books when she was in modern school, many years earlier, before she went to Wesley Guild College to become a Midwife, one of the earliest to do so from our native Ifaki Ekiti.

These renditions were the biggest inspiration to tear right into hundreds of books in a youthful career of unbridled indulgence in pulp fiction. Before then in primary school of course there were the fairy tales, sparked off by a demonstrative reading in school when I was in primary 4 by one of our teachers who wanted to promote sales in his bookshop somewhere in Oshodi. The strategy worked and I started hunting for fairy tales everywhere. I did not rest till I got a complete collection named My Color Book of Fairy Tales. Later daddy bought me The Children’s bible in color.

But all that paled into insignificance when she would start those stories. I knew instinctively that these stories were a notch above the fairy tales. At first, getting books to read was easy. The house was filled with books that my parents used in modern school or secondary school or in the case of Dad, the University of Lagos. Several of my uncles and aunts who lived or had lived with us had so many books just lying around. We started ticking off the African writers series. My constant sparring partner was Ayo, my immediate elder brother. The game was speed, for some reasons which I do not know to this day, he always trounced me in that department. But it never mattered. Our adventure into African stories gave us a powerful sense of identity. From Chinua Achebe (my childhood favorite was definitely Arrow of God) to Ngugi Wa Thiong’ O (His immortal trilogy: Weep Not Child, The River Between and A Grain of Wheat, was my first baptism of fire on race relations in Africa); From Camara Laye to Ayi Kwei Armah (The Beautiful Ones are Not Yet Born), it was a wildfire of politics, mystery, romance, war and peace all in the mix…a young mind in formation…

•Late Chinua Achebe

Soon all of the novels were consumed and we had to try out other stuff. By the time I was 13, I had completed My Dad’s Constitutional History of Great Britain (My passion for history began!) But it was only a matter of time before even those ones were entirely consumed. By then it was time to start buying our own books. When, one day mummy told us the story of Macbeth, his murderous wife and the witches of Endor, and all the drama and genius that made it one of the greatest from Shakespeare, it was an immediate flight to the bookshop because I had to read that book myself. I got it but reading classical drama in verse and Shakespearian English provided a totally new challenge for me at the time.

Gradually the bookshop habit grew and at a point fiction became an addiction. We gobbled up the books like they were going out of fashion. Each time the bookshop owner saw these kids walk into his shop he beamed a smile of welcome, there will be a sale. At a point, financing this habit became a problem with more than 20 books going down on a monthly basis, not to count a profusion of local magazines and rebel music.

•Ayi Kwei Armah

We didn’t have the courage to ask our parents to finance it. My father never liked the likes of James Hardly Chase. Maybe it was because of the almost naked girls gripping pistols that perpetually graced the covers or because(in my particular case) fear that I was paying too little attention to my textbooks in the orgy of fiction.

I started by helping myself to leftover coins. Initially I would wait for daddy or mummy to drop some change on the table and then go for it. After some time, maybe they wised up, the droppings petered out! I became bolder in my desperation to finance my addiction. I would pop into dad’s room and rummage through his jacket. The coins were mine! Sometimes I would watch mummy’s used milk tin where she used to keep money from sales. She trusted everybody in the house and used to drop the tin on the centre table in the sitting room!! All I had to do was wait till everybody had left the sitting room. Sometimes my brother, Ayo, would catch me but he NEVER told on me.

Many times I was caught in the act. And then my parents, both of them, would unleash hell. I would get an insane flogging with the used fan belt of my father’s car! They thought they’d whip the bad habit out of me. For some reasons, this brutal punishment never made any difference to how I felt about “picking” as I like to call it. How could I justify or accept anything that would stop me from feeding my addiction? I only schemed on how to get better at it, and yes, some kind of childish hatred grew inside me for daddy. “I would revenge one day”, I used to tell myself. After some time I got addicted to “picking”. To make matters worse, occasionally, when I did not even pick, and something would go missing, I would still get a “mad” beating, as I called it.

•Ngugi Wa Thiong’o

The more I got beaten in that manner, the harder my heart became, the more resolute my conviction that I was not doing anything wrong, after all was it not books I was using the money to buy? Whenever my daddy was shouting at me, I sealed my ears psychologically. When my mum will scream I would throw a sideways glance that said, “Et tu Brute”. I don’t think my father realized the kind of animal he was breeding at that time, nor the range of possibilities in my young mind. A young mind fueled daily by ideas and thoughts from every corner of the globe. I wonder if he knew that at that young age, I thought I was ready to take on the world. That I was fully convinced I could try many of the many things I had read in books and that perhaps it was time to break out…

But that woman knew…my mother could see that the beatings were not working, that the stone in my heart was gradually becoming a diamond, and that if nothing was done, a change of strategy definitely…this boy will go over the edge. I think that’s why she spent that afternoon watching me. She had studied me and knew my hunting time had come. I was looking bored and needed a fix. I needed money! I needed to visit the book shop. She watched me slip into daddy’s room and emerge a few micro seconds later. She saw me disappeared into my haunt, mummy’s carton room. As I tried to settle down for a moment to assess my haul, she opened the door and swiftly approached me.

I was caught again and I knew the consequences. As usual, I was ready. But there was something different this time, she looked straight into my eyes and asked:

“My son Akin, should I kneel down down for you?” This struck me as very odd and I stiffened.

“What did you say mummy, I don’t understand?”

I could see the tears well up in her eyes and it almost broke my heart in two, how can I cause her such pain?

“Mummy, please what is it?” I asked, feeling devastated and scared already, even without knowing why. It was a different kind of fear…born of love and admiration.

“Don’t you know it is very wrong to steal, Akin, don’t you know?”

I just gawked

“That’s why I want to kneel down to beg you to stop”

Even then, I knew that was taboo and would have none of it.

“No mummy…No”

“Don’t you understand, it is evil, it would destroy your life, if you don’t stop, it is a thing of shame”, she paused and touched me, carefully avoiding my loot, as if it was a sure cause of leprosy…That’s why I want to kneel and beg you to stop, let me kneel…”

“No mummy, please no!” I was alarmed she would do it, I was afraid of the leprosy in my fingers, I let them drop to the floor and till this day, I can still hear the clanging…

“Then you must promise me never to do it again”

It suddenly occurred to me that this wasn’t a game between me and my parents, that there was something much bigger at stake. It was my very first attempt to grasp the eternal conflict between utility and morality.

“No, mummy nooooo…”

“Will you promise me?”

“Yes, mummy, I will never do it again”

And that was it.

Later she would support my quest for fiction and later my effort to firm up my writing skills by financing my registration with the London School of Writing. At N129.00 if you were paying one off and N165.00 if you were paying in installments. Daddy almost threw me out of the sitting room a year or two later when I mooted the idea to undertake the correspondence course.

But mummy understood and provided the money to begin the program. Of course it was not announced, it was just between us. One amazing thing about her was that she never doubted my word. Also, I don’t think I ever lied to her. Even when she had become a strict Christian and we now had very different interpretations of good and bad, of pain and pleasure, I always knew I could tell her my exact aspirations, and she knew she could always disagree and preach. She never took credit for her efforts to effect change. To her, it was a duty that she dared not fail.

Over a quarter of a century later, mummy will walk into my sitting room at about 6am and exact another promise from me. I resisted initially but caved in when she pulled the strings. I kept my promise and lived.

I M U S T S T O P H E R E F O R N O W

Adeoya is the publisher of Marketing Mix