Memoir, Memory and Mnemonic Device: The Yoruba in Toyin Falola’s “A Mouth Sweeter than Salt: An African Memoir.”
Memory: Similarities and Differences
An excellent work of scholarship is often compared to the “Good book” because it inspires or provokes new ways of looking at the same reality. Toyin Falola’s “A Mouth Sweeter than Salt: An African Memoir” Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press(2004) is an example of that category of work, which of necessity, must assume so many things to so many people. It is a great piece of literary work on the finer elements of the complicated genres of Yoruba culture. It is a well-researched anthropology monograph on the transition from the chaos of 19th. Century Yoruba wars to the more organized chaos of twentieth century Colonial rule. It is a superb autobiography in which the protagonist is the narrator who guides us through the labyrinth of new structures of urbanism different from those the urban Yoruba were familiar with. The benefits of Pax Britannica were manifested in such luxuries as railway transportation, postal services, adequate hospital care at birth or in sickness, being able to study in schools with standard education (be they Catholic, Muslim, Protestants or African Traditional Religionists) going to the Odeon Cinema as well as the provision of pipe borne water which dried off completely in most communities three years after Independence. Together with the instruments of Law and Order maintenance, these accoutrements of European Colonialism had significant impact on all Nigerian cultures including the Yoruba ideas, institutions and material technology.
If the increasing spread of infrastructures, free but good education and the efficient imposition of the rule of law were the benefits of colonialism, the brief period from 1945 to 1953, one might idiosyncratically surmise, was the golden age of colonialism. That makes those Nigerians who were born at this period quite lucky. The youngest of them would have, by 1960, reached the age of reason and could have been able to make comparisons between what life was before and after Independence. October 1st. 1960 was Nigeria’s date of Independence from Britain. I was born on January 1st. 1950. Toyin Falola was born on January 1st.1953. A generational connection, both of the same early 1950s and the coincidence of date is the first preface of this work.
The second personal reason for undertaking this review is that, by some historical accident, I left Imeko, now in Imeko/Afon Local Government Area of Ogun State, to begin the long and tedious journey to the Catholic priesthood at St. Theresa’s Minor Seminary, Oke Are Ibadan. Reading Toyin Falola’s’ “A Mouth Sweeter than Salt: An African Memoir” has provided me considerable information, from what Ethnographers call the “emic” perspective, to illuminate the many unanswered questions about the same people, familiar places and certainly, painful moments in history that I knew from the “etic” or outsider’s perspective. I was admitted into the boarding school at Oke-Are in 1963 and was there when later, the first military coup took the lives of Tafawa Balewa, Sadauna Sokoto and Samuel Oladoke Akintola, unleashing a virus from which Nigeria has not, and may not fully recover – military rule. I was there when the second coup, whose theatre of action was Ibadan, took the lives of Aguiyi Ironsi and Roland Fatuyi, the then Governor of Western Region. I was also in Ibadan when Oba Asanike served as the King of Ibadan. Toyin Falola not only alluded to the coups but provided in-depth analyses of Ibadan notions of diplomacy, as exemplified in Oba Asanike’s use of traditional chieftaincy titles, as a carrot with which to exhort resources from the ambitious egotistic Ibadan young aspirants to political power(2004: 49 – 52). Upon the completion of my junior studies at Oke- Are Minor Seminary, Ibadan in 1967, I went to Saints Peter and Paul’s Major Seminary, Bodija, Ibadan in 1968 to continue my studies to the priesthood. l became a priest in 1974 and was sent back to Oke Are to teach at my alma mater until 1977. Toyin Falola’s insights to the political climate of Ibadan during those fourteen years have not only jugged my memory, they have forced me to rethink my outsider’s perspective on issues that troubled me during those years. Strangely enough, therefore, this time period in our lives, unbeknown to each other, provide a template for cross-checking historical experiences that effectively shaped the lives of our “lucky” generation.
If I have pointed to similarities above, the differences are equally there. An essential difference in our perspective, besides the ethnographic methodological differences of the etic and the emic, is the rural versus the urban divide on Yoruba culture. This divide altered considerably our interpretations about cultural expectations, allowed practices and the environment as well as the rules allowed in child-parent relationships. A few cases will suffice. In the rural areas, by virtue of the professional obligations of farming and teaching, the child is often in the custody of adult care. In that location, he was expected to be seen but not heard. If the child does not want to be the recipient of that discipline, which is the right of anyone certified to be older than one to impose, one had to keep quiet and be sensitive to his environment. Therefore, what bored me stiff about those few Ibadan students that I had as classmates as well as their “Lagosian” counterparts was their inability to stop talking and bragging. While the urban student was mostly on his own after school, and had to think of ways to spend his/her time by manufacturing tales and pranks, the rural child was often in the vicinity of adult control. Unfortunately, the quietness of the rural student in the urban classroom was often interpreted as dullness, in the same way that some teachers interpret the silence of immigrant children in some American classrooms, until the examination period when the “rural” or “immigrant” completely out-performs the urban or main-stream talkative student. The second irritant was the tendency to create an artificial taxonomy in the two categories of “good” and “bad’ and then to arrange under “good”, concepts like “modern”, “urban”, “superior” “functional” and “appropriate”. Of course the next column of categories in this bipolar taxonomic exercise was “rural”, “ancient”, “inferior”, “decrepit” and “inappropriate” under the category of “bad”. Many a fight occurred between me and my urban colleagues by the mere implication that my relatively well-to-do cocoa farming father was, according to any measurement or even insinuation, inferior to those fathers who work in the urban environment in the new professions. These new professions and opportunities were seen as superior to the traditional professions such as farming, even when the latter pertains to the farming of cash crops, which integrates the farmer more quickly and directly into the modern global economic system ruled by market forces. This urban superiority complex is piquantly obvious in Falola’s work when he noted in relation to his father’s occupation:
“To remove English from the full description of his job would be to insult him. After all, he was not trained to make Yoruba attire, which any of the illiterates in town could do, as his uncle used to boast about him with unmistakable arrogance; but even if some of his jobs appeared simple, they were “English” enough to be complicated”(2004:4).
In addition to the rural/urban divide is a second dichotomy. This is more rigid and inter-denominational religion-driven. It is based on the perspectives and comparative child-rearing practices of a Catholic cocoa farmer’s son versus those of a Protestant descendant of the modern professions. The category of this latter difference was a product of the accident of the sudden death of the protagonist’s father before he was born, an event over which he had no control. Like the Yoruba Political icon, who quite a few Yorubas love to hate, Obafemi Awolowo reiterated in his autobiography that the passing away of a parent, particularly a father in a patriarchal society, fundamentally alters the prospects of the individual. In fact, this circumstance of posthumous birth was still so traumatic, even for the unborn child, Toyin Falola, that fifty-one years later while writing his book, “A mouth Sweeter than Salt: An African Memoir”, he blamed the circumstance of his birth for depriving him the chance of giving his deceased father befitting funerary rights, as dictated by Yoruba culture, as the cause of his problems in life:
Then came May. Another loud noise, this time of mourning. Adesina died. He never lived to realize all the prayers, certainly not that of long life. I was still a baby who did not know that he was dead. By not being able to bury him, entertain all my relatives and friends, show off my abundance, I broke the first promise I had made to Ibadan, which was sealed in prayer. I broke the promise rather early, the first in a series of Ibadan’s mandates that I would break, of manners that I would forsake. As I have broken each mandate, the city has been cruel and unforgiving in seeking its revenge. Toyin Falola started life by staying close to a river and abusing the crocodile… Each time I remember the leap into the future, following 1953, I take Ibadan, Adesina and the crocodile with me. (2004:56-57)
That Catholic-Protestant inference is quite remarkable in its effects. For an unborn child to mark himself with the stigma of an unfulfilled duty, to a beloved who died before he was born, is too severe and psychologically daunting. Its severity is reminiscent of ancient Catholicism that specified that a child who died before it was baptized could not be admitted to the presence of God, but needed a period of cleansing in purgatory (limbo). Not only was this view pushed aside by the Second Vatican Council, a functional way of seeking release for the psychologically sensitive Catholic was to unburden it in the sacrament of penance which enacts in the confessional rite the forgiving mercy of God. This element of psychological sensitivity in Toyin Falola’s “A Mouth Sweeter than Salt: An African Memoir” will be perused further later. Suffice is it to note here that Emile Durkheim’s classic book Suicide: A Study in Sociology (1951: 155-166), attributed high suicide rate to cultures that off-load heavy psychological burden (stress) on individuals without providing rituals for seeking release from this stress. Hence Durkheim noted that Catholic and Jewish societies have less frequency of suicide because they have stronger cohesion. This translates into greater opportunities to relief stress.
Cultural Assonance
Although the rural environment supports the reinforcement of values, norms and rules of good behavior because the child is constantly under adult supervision and has very little distraction, one of the over-powering elements of our generation’s up-bringing in the 1950s, whether rural or urban, was a remarkable cultural assonance in the lessons that our generation received at home, in the schools and the places of worship. These themes invariably were – work hard, have respect for God, your parents and elders, be loyal to your country and do not steal and thus bring shame to the name of your family. At that time, the end did not justify the means. In songs at home, in the school plays, evil met with punishment, unexplained and sudden arrival of wealth were met with leveling cultural mechanism that decried rather than lionize their owners. A clear sense of shame and honor followed the action of children in relation to their family. Good behavior of children brought honor to their ancestral name while bad behavior brought shame that could effectively seal the prospects of the family to pursue its own progress in the community. Perhaps, it was the severe austerity measures at work during 1939 to 1945 that forced many people to do so much with so little for so many people. Again, in the home, the school or the house of worship, habits of sharing what one has with others and doing so much with so little were identified as acts of godliness which pointed to a sound spiritual foundation.
This cultural assonance was also national, not just ethnic. The rule of law and the determination to achieve through education, meant that all ethnicities came to live in the urban centers where one could avail of the new trades to earn as well as make sacrifice for one’s children to excel. Coming from the Nigerian-Benin(Dahomey) Boarder area with little or no amenities, my father’s cemented house with corrugated iron sheets, thanks to money earned from cocoa cash crop, housed our nuclear Catholic family, relations from the extended family and Mr. Linus Onyemekpu, the Igbo Headmaster of St. Augustine’s Catholic school plus his retinue of ten souls. So even at the periphery, I grew up, played with and was taught by people from different ethnicities. One of the most popular pastimes for us children was enacting the annual Igbo masquerade dance ritual to the applause of all grown-ups irrespective of faith, ethnicity or gender. In the boarding School in Ibadan, I met Igbo people who were born in Northern Nigeria. They spoke Hausa and Igbo fluently and by the time we got to our final year in High school, they added flawless Ibadan Yoruba to the list of languages. Toyin Falola’s narration has provided me with some much awaited catharsis. It has brought back to the mind, like turning a video of long lost familiar old footages, memories which unleash a rush of nostalgia for the old days before “memory and money were becoming mixed”(2004:11), perhaps too mixed for our collective sanity. While in boarding school, I was surprised to find out that my school mates, be they Igbo, Hausa, Fulani, Ibibio, Esan, Afehmai, and Bini, had learned the same songs about the importance of farming to our country Nigeria.