A peaceful oasis and a calm full stop to an unassuming street in a quiet corner of Lagos - that was my feeling on returning to Nigeria after an absence of 15 years to visit Auntie Annie and Uncle Osoka. This was an uncle and aunt who had always been a refuge, comfort stop, welcome point and second home on every journey we made as a family to or from or within the city where I grew up as a child. Even on those rushed Saturday exeats from boarding school, their home was a pit stop we had to make. And indeed throughout our lives our families ran parallel, a signal of the enduring bond that linked our parents.
Uncle Osoka and Aunty Annie were there when we first moved to Lagos in the beginning of the 60s; there too in the dark uncertain days of the first coup and counter coup when Oriaku was Baby Nnenna and parents gathered in their Surelere home to confer about the uncertain future.
Through the rushed exodus eastward to a situation where nothing could be predicted beyond the certainty of war, our families shared a refuge in Crowther Street, Umuahia and two sisters, my mother and Auntie Annie were pregnant and Ugonma and Erinma, two ‘win- the- war- babies’ were born.
The stumbling course of the Biafran war took us to Item and when that fell the frontline divided us. Our family escaped just in time ending up as internal refugees in Nkwerre, but Auntie Annie, Uncle Osoka and family remained behind the lines.
Until the day when Uncle Osoka turned up at the house of our friends, the Nwogu’s who had given us shelter, because that was the way it was in those days.
He was thin and exhausted and drawn. He had taken a dangerous journey through the bush travelling at night, hiding in the day with members of BOFF, the Biafran Organisation of Freedom Fighters.
I had never met anyone so brave.
I remember the day sitting, watching him as he talked with my mother, drinking in the fact that this was not a ghost but really Uncle Osoka and he had done this heroic thing, and more, was determined to return to the fear and terror of living behind the enemy lines. He was not going to leave his family alone.
If the test of a man is how he conducts himself in times of great difficulty, Uncle Osoka is up there with the best.
He combined this strong confident manliness with a deep emotional warmth. When he hugged you his grip was sure and heartfelt. Whatever was his to do he did, and left nothing unfinished.
Returning after 15 years to meet him in his later days, what I found was a depth of peace and calm I had not expected, but that is simply as it should have been.
His death last year, following that of his wife by little over 12 months, brought on remembrances of a life well lived and one that carries the legacy of the greatest love story of a generation in our family.
I recall my mother telling me how her younger sister had stood her ground despite threats and physical punishment and quietly insisted to my grandfather that she would marry the man of her choice. Let me add that my mother waited till I was an adult before she breathed a word of it. Duty was a virtue expected of every daughter and I was stirred by this story of self conviction, especially coming from my mother who was relating the story with what I sensed was a quiet pride. I was also struck by the contrast between the two sisters.
My mother was the first child in a polygamous family of 21 children. My paternal grandfather was one of the leading citizens in the community and my maternal father also had a substantial reputation for achievement in similar fields. He insisted on training his first child to the best of his ability despite her gender and I remember both grandparents urging me to see my mother as an example of what a perfect daughter should be.
Once she started working as a nurse my mother set down to financing her sister’s education. Auntie Annie became a teacher of maths and physical education serving her longest stint in a dedicated career at Methodist Girls School Yaba.
In his mischievous moments of which there were plenty my father would often wryly remark that my mother was such an obedient daughter that if her parents had told her not to marry him she would have complied. That comment of course carried the added barb of ‘see what a lucky thing it was for her that they did not!’
It is wonderful is it not, the versatility of the fabric life weaves from the threads of experience and how in every family there is enough for each member to cut a piece and wrap themselves in.
