From Dr. Yemi Ogunbiyi’s unputdownable memoirs, “The Road Never Forgets,” I bring you today’s Book Excerpt—riveting remembrances on Dele Giwa, General Ibrahim Babangida, Chief MKO Abiola and President Buhari all weaved into a rich, evocative literary masterpiece.
***
There was an interesting subtext to my father’s funeral that I could never forget. Funerals in those days, friends and relatives gladly substituted as pall-bearers in the absence of present-day paid pall-bearers. In the process of lifting the casket, my close friend, Dele Giwa, hurt his lower back and ended up with a painful slipped disc. He never fully recovered from that mishap until he met his own tragic death barely two months after Papa’s funeral. Indeed after my father’s passing, the Saturday night before his death, I visited with Dele and asked after his back, he firmly stood up in the same study where the bomb would go off the following day to prove to me that his slipped disc had fallen back in place. I never saw Dele Giwa again after that late Saturday night encounter.
Dele’s gruesome death, barely months after Papa’s demise, was painful. I met Dele in 1975 in New York. At that time, I taught African Literature to undergraduates at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York. Dele, who was, I believe, at Pace University at the time, had opted for a summer school elective in African Literature at Brooklyn College. And I remember that meeting so vividly. In the middle of taking questions after a session in which I had tried to draw parallels between the intellectual, social and artistic ferment that came to be known as the Harlem Renaissance in New York City in the 1920s and the Negritude movement as espoused by Leopold Sedar Senghor of Senegal, Dele shot up his hand and asked a question. The accent was distinctly familiar. The exchanges that followed, then and after, enkindled a relationship that lasted until his death. So close was the relationship that when I had to undergo an emergency appendectomy in New York the following year, Dele, in the absence of Sade, stood in as my next-of-kin before the surgical procedure was carried out.
His death was the more traumatizing for me because we had been together during the last four day of his life. After the news of Wole Soyinka’s Nobel Prize award was announced on Wednesday, the 15th of October, Dele and I went on a drinking spree through Thursday, the 16, as if we were the recipients! Then after Wole Soyinka arrived from Paris on Friday, the 17th, we both ended up spending a long night at the residence of Dora Ifudu in Surulere, in the company of Soyinka himself and a couple of other friends in a melee of sublime ‘jollification’! The next day, Saturday, the 18th, we joined other media chief executives at a scheduled luncheon at the official residence of Chief Wole Adeosun, then managing director of NAL Merchant Bank. After the luncheon, Chief Segun Osoba, then president of the Newspapers’ Proprietors Association of Nigeria (NPAN), and managing director of the Daily Times, invited us to an unscheduled evening of snacks and drinks at the residence of Admiral Augustus Aikhomu, who, only a few days before, had taken over as the new Vice-President and Chief of General Staff replacing Admiral Ebitu Ukiwe.
As the snack session at the Aikhomus drew to an end, Chief Osoba called on Dele Giwa to give the vote of thanks on our behalf. When Dele stood up to speak, he made a stunning revelation that came as a shock to all present, one that was to feature prominently afterwards. He pleaded with Admiral Aikhomu to intercede on his behalf in a matter that affected his life, following his invitation by the security agencies for questioning only days before, over a bogus allegation of being a gun-runner. Dele said he thought he was being set up to be arrested, harmed or even eliminated. Admiral Aikhomu promised to look into the matter, which he did because Dele appeared to have received a call from the same security agencies assuring him of his safety and that the issue had been put to rest. The security officers even suggested that President Babangida would contact him on the matter. The president never did. What arrived the next day at about noon was a letter bomb that ended his life. It was so gruesome a murder that the renowned morbid anatomist, Professor Odunjo, by his own admission, had a problem preparing Dele’s remains for burial.
The sense of national outrage engendered by Dele’s brutal murder was palpable. Nothing like it had ever happened in the country, mainly because of the circumstances leading up to his death. Too devastated to pay him a fitting tribute at his death, it took me a year to come to terms with the tragedy and to do him a tribute. During the first anniversary of his death, I wrote this:
“In the end, therefore, the real legacy of Dele Giwa is his unfettering love for journalism. His legacy was in his life, in the example of what he shared with us, and taught us were possible. Like all true visionaries before him, he taught us that dreams were possible and that if you believe in yourself and your abilities, even without money and the backing of a notable and wealthy family, one could achieve great things in life. The instant success of Newswatch, which he started with his other friends, bears ample testimony to that fact.”
It’s strange how, over thirty-six years later, I still think of Dele as if the nightmare might go away someday. I sometimes wonder how he would have handled June 12 and the trail of events that led to Chief M.K.O. Abiola’s death and General Abacha’s reign of terror. What would he have thought of President Buhari, whom he knew very well, and whose government is now plagued by unprecedented and seemingly intractable security challenges? How would he have, I wondered, in his breezy, dismissive writing style, pontificated today as things stand, on the future of Nigeria?
Dele was something of an enigma, and his answers to these questions would have been uniquely and perceptively different from the general run-of-the-mill views that dominate the media space today.