It was a very cold February day in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I had picked up the kids from their after-school program after leaving my office where I worked as the state administrator of a literacy organization. My husband, a professor in a nearby university, was in the living room. Strains of the children’s violin music wafted downstairs to the kitchen as I prepared dinner. Then the kitchen telephone rang. I answered and my brother’s harsh voice said “Bàbá ti kú o.” No preambles. My father is dead. He was seventy-eight and he had been sick with Parkinson’s disease for a decade. I went into the living room and collapsed on my husband’s lap sobbing, saying “It doesn’t have to be this way.”
I am the first child. My father couldn’t be buried without my being there. One of my duties was to organize members of the family and lead the traditional funeral rites and rituals. I boarded a plane to Nigeria a week later, loaded with the things needed for the burial. I flew into Lagos and embarked on the six-hour drive from Lagos to my parents’ town in Ekiti. On getting home, I stood on the veranda for a few minutes before entering the passage that led to the courtyard. The house was very quiet until I called out. People came out to welcome me and I burst into tears. All eyes were dry. They had been crying for over a week and were exhausted. I took control of the situation by rallying my siblings and we started the burial process. My father’s body was in his room. He had asked not to be taken to the morgue, so a local mortician stopped by as needed to attend to the body.
Soon after I got home, my father’s friend, a math teacher in the local high school, sent for me. My father taught English Literature and Grammar for decades before he became a principal. His friend told me my father left word for me. Among the things he told me was that I should not fight with anybody no matter the provocation. My father had a good reason to leave this instruction even though I had never fought with anyone. The polygamous marriage he engineered had exploded into deep open conflicts during his illness.
My father had two wives and six children. He married my mother, his first wife, in a monogamous marriage. I was just six months old when he got one of his students pregnant, a teenage girl, who subsequently became the second wife through the back door. This professional misbehavior could have cost him his teaching certificate. The culture was generally polygamous. Almost everyone in their generation descended from polygamous families, but Christianity and colonization were changing the rules of marital relations. Both of my parents were agrarian children. In 1940s Nigeria, money was very hard to come by in the rural areas. Boy education was the priority for many families, but my mother got educated, a very rare phenomenon. She and my father were classmates. She was the youngest in a class of much older boys because she was lucky to have the financial support of her family, unlike the boys who not only had to help their fathers on the farms, but also generate income for themselves to pay their school fees. My mother passed the Standard VI exams required to become a primary school teacher in flying colors, no mean achievement in that era. Teachers were highly respected in the towns and villages. It was a profession dominated by men. She became the first female teacher in our town’s Catholic Primary School and would go on to teach for many years before she got married. She was prosperous enough to go to Lagos to shop for beautiful clothes, shoes, and other accessories fashionable young ladies used.
My father wanted to further his education, and my mother wanted to build a house. They shared these dreams before they got married. My father worked hard to ascend the educational ladder with my mother’s support, eventually earning a university degree as an older adult, but he stopped my mother from working. She became financially dependent on him, and she did not know of the pregnant girl for some time because she was hidden away with his family members in a city far from our town where she had the baby. After she gave birth to her child, she joined my parents as a second wife, even though there were no traditional marriage rites between my father’s family and hers. The birth of a child was enough to consolidate her status as a wife, especially when that child was male.
Taking a second wife was a game changer for my parents’ marriage which had been that of equals. In a few years, my father elevated the younger wife above my mother, giving her the responsibility of housekeeping and turning tradition upside down. According to traditional rules of polygamy, the first wife was the one with authority and control of the home and the other wives, no matter how many wives the husband married. My father quickly dispensed of this marital order when he found a woman who was ready and willing to tolerate his worst behavior. He became authoritarian, lobbing verbal assaults at my mother, and using money to humiliate her. At the onset of this polygamous arrangement, my mother could have reported him to the authorities, but she did not. She had difficulty getting pregnant with me, and her family appealed to her to pursue motherhood instead of retribution. If my father lost his job, it would not be in my mother’s interest, it would destroy her marriage and the future of her children. My mother proceeded to have four children, while her co-wife had two. My father maintained a divide-and-rule ethos in our family. My mother lost several decades of steady income and upward mobility. The younger untutored co-wife who had never earned a living was satisfied with her dependence on my father, whom she treated like the older teacher she admired and feared. All she ever wanted was to please my father, even if it meant her humiliation and impoverishment. She served him like a slave. My mother suffered for years pleading with him to allow her to resume teaching. She consulted community elders, including his mother, to intervene and appeal to my father. He adamantly refused. He had tasted the power of control. He was not going to relinquish it. He controlled the purse firmly and he used impoverishment as a tool of that control.
As a young child, I saw my mother keep meticulous records of housekeeping money – tomatoes 2d, pepper 3d, beans, Is 6d, and so on, demanded by my father. He went over these records with a fine-tooth comb. The colonial British currency of shillings (s) and pence (d) was used by Nigeria until 1973 when the country established its own currency.
Most of the women in our town, literate or not, had active social and economic lives. They engaged in teaching, nursing, sewing, farming, trading, weaving, and produced household goods. They were a part of town governance as women chiefs who made important decisions, just like their male counterparts. Women formed musical, age-grade, and èsúsú groups, rotating loans among members so that they could meet financial obligations, either to their children or businesses. Both of my father’s wives hardly participated in these normal women’s activities because he didn’t allow them to. My mother was once invited to be the chair at a public event, a role she performed admirably, but soon as she got back home, my father forbade her to ever do that again. That role was reserved for him. He was highly respected, and he had a followership of both well-educated and non-literate men in our town. He became a man of honor, especially after he graduated from the university and became a teacher in the local high school. He was hardworking and ambitious. He was a leader in the town, consulted on public and private matters. He had a passion to help other people and many families trusted him with their children’s education. Our house was always a beehive of activities with his visitors. He gave his best self to the public.
He paid attention to the education of his children, sending us to good schools. But he chafed at the heavy financial responsibility that this entailed, resorting to insults, meanness, and rage, picking emotionally injurious fights with my mother. He created an atmosphere of fear and anxiety among us children which affected our self-esteem and school performance. His unpredictable rage led to verbal assaults and serious lashes for us. As children, we lived on tenterhooks around him. It was not surprising that most of his children performed poorly in school. He told us many times over the years in anger that he did not need any child to support him in old age, that we would amount to nothing, and that he would be satisfied if it was just one child who succeeded.
He prepared carefully for old age. He hoarded his money to build investment properties and hoped for a good pension. One of his most disastrous and flagrant abuses of power was his concubinage with several women, but the most consequential was to a woman married to my mother’s older cousin. This multi-decade scandalous sexual tryst was so distressing to my mother and so humiliating to my mother’s family they stopped visiting our house altogether. The concubine’s grown-up daughters who called my mother auntie were ashamed and embarrassed by this affair. The concubine owned a successful búkà, an eatery, across from grandfather’s house. She had money to live well, dress nicely and engage in social activities. Many afternoons, while my mother and her co-wife toiled over my father’s lunch, she would send delicious dishes over, in beautiful china, on a tray perched on the heads of her young apprentices, covered with lace or fancy antimacassars. My father then ignored his wives’ cooking which was always inferior to that of his concubine because of the miserly food budget he gave for housekeeping. The concubine was a de facto third wife as she sashayed with lovely hairdos into our house, sitting with the two wives, enjoying social time with my father. She spared no expense in preparing his favorite dishes and procuring fresh palm wine, a favorite local beverage. She was very proud of her position as his concubine because of his prestige as an educated man and a leader in the town. She, herself was illiterate, but she had the satisfaction of reigning over his literate wives who dared not question him or her about their sexual dalliance. In the twisted politics of toxic polygamy, my mother’s co-wife responded by making friends with this concubine, a move my father heartily approved of, but which made the household hellish for my mother. Her co-wife’s logic was that my enemy’s enemy is my friend. Besides, the concubine was too old to have children, so she could not really become a wife, limiting the third wife threat feared by the co-wives.
Then, Parkinson’s disease struck my father in his 60’s. He had been prematurely retired many years earlier when thousands of experienced teachers were dismissed arbitrarily by the military government. Not only did this affect the pension he had long planned for, inflation had also devalued its buying power. We children had grown up and left home. Parkinson’s disease was something my father never bargained for, with its devastating effects. As he gradually lost control of his body, my father came to rely entirely on the care of his wives who he had spent all his life disempowering, stripping them of dignity and efficacy. They could not give him the care he needed. Parkinson ravaged him for ten years. The co-wife said that at one stage, my father was so frustrated by his inability to move his body he attempted to get up from his bed by sheer willpower, resulting in terrible falls and injuries. His poster bed frame was removed and his mattress was put on the floor. He lay in his own filth without adequate care, despite the availability of financial resources.
I gave my father my nice Japanese car when I was emigrating to the United States because his old car was no longer roadworthy, and he could not afford another car on his retirement income. After he got sick, there was nobody to drive him to the hospital in the next town, because he didn’t allow his wives to learn driving when they could. The car just sat there. They had no social network to ask for help because he did not allow them to build one. Also, his chronically unemployed first son, colluding with his mother raided his bank account. He would have emptied the whole account if I had not alerted my father’s lawyer to put a stop to it. The money in his account, a lot of which I sent, could have secured excellent medical care to ameliorate his situation. He was abandoned in his last years. His followers and admirers stopped coming to the house. So did his concubine. His children who were struggling with their own lives and the traumas he inflicted on them, neglected him. He died, but the tragedy did not end with his death. Several of his children are psychologically damaged with issues of broken marriages, child abandonment, unemployment, poverty, inability to mate, and domestic violence. Some of their choices in life are selfish, destructive, and unethical.
The question of why women stay in this kind of situation is sometimes a mystery. As for my mother, the full mystery was revealed to me in my mid 20s when she visited me in Lagos to put pressure on me to get married. I bitterly told her she was not a good example, given the misery of her own marriage. It was then she told me she had been married once, and the marriage failed. The marriage produced a child that died, a memory that still caused my mother so much pain as she told the story in tears. This marriage and child loss happened over a decade before I was born. No one had ever told me this story. Her being married once reduced her bargaining power in her marriage to my father, who understood the shame of her position as an educated woman. A non-literate peer would have walked out of a bad marriage without caring what anyone said. It was not unusual for women to divorce and remarry. It was exactly what my non-literate paternal grandmother did when her husband was physically abusing her. She left the marriage and never remarried, leaving my young father, according to tradition, to be raised by his violently abusive father. Because of my mother’s education, she subscribed to the colonial Victorian-era subculture of restricting and shaming women. Both my parents were, after all, products of the British colonial education system. As for my mother’s co-wife, she entered the arrangement as a young girl with no skills. She was psychologically teetered to my father, always seeking his approval, even when his behavior demeaned and humiliated her. She lived with the fear of being sent away and the possibility of my father taking a third wife.
My father was a student and teacher of British Classics and African writers such as Camara Laye, James Ngugi, Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Ola Rotimi, and so on. He quoted frequently from Shakespeare to buttress his points in normal conversations. He was adept in the use of our proverbs that give deep insight into the human condition. He wrote and produced school plays. Yet, the choices he made in his intimate life were so tragically Shakespearean. In this light, his illness and lack of care could not but be seen as poetic justice. It is also a cautionary tale of the misuse of power and its terrible unintended consequences for the person who wields it. He left a legacy of a ruined family. It doesn’t have to be this way.
——
Image: MS Co-Pilot AI remixed