By Kunle Ojeleye
Going through some documents, I stumbled on a letter written by my Mum to me in the early years of my sojourn in the UK.
Given the fact that communication was not easy then as it is now, she sought to make effective usage of having a rare courier to use her pen in a motherly emotional blackmail.
Mum was concerned about news that I was barely attending church services and was not known in the assembly I was attending.
She reminded me how at age 5, I would insist on going with my Dad to all church meetings of The Apostolic Church, trekking miles to and from locations in Oyo because Dad had no means of transportation and public transport was practically not existing.
She went on to how state how proud she was one Sunday morning at age 6, when after church service, a few elderly members came to tell her how impressed they were I could sing every hymn called in the service from memory.
She followed up with my teenage years’ activities in the church – playing instruments and leading worship in the choir with a few song compositions, attending youth movement conventions and being chosen to read whole Bible Chapters from memory either in English or Yoruba.
She then wondered why the fire waned, and her emissary to England found it difficult to quickly locate me through members of the church I was attending.
It was difficult writing back to let her know that survival in a hostile foreign environment, and shift working (one overnight and the other during the daytime), meant there was neither time for spending 6 hours every Saturday in choir practices etc, nor the luxury of spending the whole Sunday in one long unending morning church service before another two hours of evening service.
Even if I wrote, I knew she would find it to hard understand that ‘Life in Diaspora’ had happened to her son.
That pound sterling and dollars are not picked up on the street as you walk about.
That the seemingly prosperity of western life is based on 24 hours productivity,
And an individual’s romance with poverty is determined by his/her (dis)engagement as that wheel of economic activities spin.
By the time she was able to visit in 2002, she understood that her son had not lost faith.
Her son had become an individual that aligned his religious convictions, biblical principles as well as trust in God, with the practicalities of daily life.
I had simply transformed to a realistic Christian, unlike the idealistic and catalyst.
*Dr Ojeleye is a public affairs analyst