A Hero’s Home

After three days of touring local attractions in Abeokuta, southwest Nigeria, I make a final stopover at Ikenne, the hometown of chief Obafemi Awolowo, one of Nigeria's most celebrated first generation politicians who died in May 1987, aged 78.

The compound, expansive and quite, has a garden, whichby the look of itgets regular attention. A few metres from the gates (and immediately to the right) is the mausoleummarble-floored and sprinkled with artificial flowerswhere the late politician was laid in a transparent glass coffin for a decade, the guide says, before he was eventually buried inches away.

Opposite it is the museum, which houses Awo's surviving personal effectsacademic gowns, diaries, footwear, toiletries, photos and lots moreand gives the tourist a fair knowledge of what manner of man the late lawyer was in his lifetime. Beside it rests the 8-seater grey Mercedes Benz Saloon car which, the story goes, took chief Awolowo around Nigeria during his political campaigns for presidency in 1979 and 1983. He lost out on both occasions.

Awo's name, like Kwame Nkrumah's, can open doors. It is one latter day Nigerian politicians, especially from the western part of the country, like to peddle as the personification of people-based, visionary leadership. “I have never regarded myself as having a monopoly of wisdom,” Awo once said. “When most people in public life and in the position of leadership and rulership are spending whole days and nights carousing in clubs or in the company of shady characters…I, like few others, am always at my post working hard at the country's problems, and trying to find solutions for them”.

As premier of Nigeria's Old Western region, that wisdom pushed him to several landmark achievements, all which remain benchmarks for politicians who have sought the electorates' votes ever since. And it is common to hear admirers and Awo-enthusiasts say that he is the best president Nigeria has the misfortune of not having. “Awo made it a priority to create a solid middle class and invest in education at all levels,” said one academic in March 2004 at a lecture to mark his posthumous 95th birthday. “The resulting middle class and formidable intelligentsia pushed the Yoruba nation forward by fifty years.” Another speaker said, “He had a knack for choosing the right people for the right jobs.”

This Saturday evening there is nobody around, except for the gatekeepers and the guide. Awo's widow, Chief Mrs Hannah Awolowo, who turned 90 last November, is taking a well-deserved rest, I am told. In his lifetime, Awo had said he owed his accomplishments to three things: “the grace of God, self discipline and a good wife”. To date, she gets all the respect her husband isn't around to receive.

With all that's been preserved in there (an entire room in the library is dedicated to tens of albums of photographs), Awo's country home is one landmark yet to be declared a national monument by the federal authorities in Nigeria. Sadder still, it is one of the least publicised tourists assets in Ogun State (where it is situated), though the guide says that the complex receives quite a number of visitors daily. “I cannot really give an accurate figure,” he says, as he locks the museum door after us. “When people hear of Baba and his story, the urge to come here arises. Even we've had people come in just because a certain other event brought them to Ikenne.”

While looking round in the library, I open a file placed atop a filing cabinet. Inside it lays copies of the very first issue of the Nigerian Tribune, an 8-page periodical that Awo published in 1949 (still in circulation). It would, the statement reads, feature “constructive criticism, brilliant and militant articles; up-to-date news from all parts of the country”. It sold for one penny. In his maiden column, Awo berated the British colonial authority for always acting as if it had a monopoly of freedom, which it believed it could “dole out” to its colonies as it deemed necessary.

“The government of our country derives its powers (just or unjust) not from our consent as the governed, but from the whims, caprices, and selfish desires of the self-imposed rulers”, he says. A decade later, Awolowo, Nnamdi Azikiwe, Ahmadu Bello, Tafawa Baewa, Anthony Enahoro and a few others keen on indigenous leadership, called for Nigeria's independence, a dream realised a year later (1 October 1960).

“Awolowo is gone for many years now but we are still blessing him till tomorrow,” says Tunde Bakare, one of Nigeria's well known preachers. “People like us went to school because of free primary education in the Western Region. People like M.K.O Abiola (late multi-millionaire entrepreneur and politician, who is believed to have won the freest and fairest elections conducted in Nigeria in 1993) were able to use the scholarship of Western Region.”