Sarah Adebola: You Are Living the Beautiful Life
Mama Mi! I have written your biography twice over the last twenty years: for your 70th Birthday February 15, 1997 and the 80thanniversary, February 15, 2007.
In this third exercise, I am taking a different track. I am going to start with describing how I “met” you, and play up the verve in your life as I knew it in my childhood days.
When I came out of your womb in Mersey Street Hospital on Lagos Island on the night of Tuesday, May 17, 1960, you were a gorgeous, 33-year-old, Lagos belle.
I emerged 11 years after your marriage to Alfred Ibikunle, the love of your life, who you met at the Dance School (Ballroom Dancing), located in the Olaiya Family house at Tinubu Square.
It was Lagos of the 1940s. Alfred Ibikunle Akinosho, in his early 20s, was the soul of the party. You couldn’t resist him.
You got married on September 1, 1949, at the First African Church, off Broad Street.
With your vivacious approach to life that I witnessed as I grew up, I couldn’t have known that you were carrying a large, emotional scar.
You and Dad had lost my sister at the age of eight. Kemi Akinosho, the only sibling I could have had, departed in 1958, nine years into your marriage.
You both named me Oluwatoyin, meaning The Almighty Deserves Praise, because it had taken 10 years to have another child after Kemi’s birth and two years after her death. But how would I know? Our house was filled with laughter. What I remember, as I grew up, were: • The aroma of Bongo Coffee and frying eggs from your Kitchen, on Sunday morning before Church. • Loud arguments and protestations and banter as scores of friends of yours and Dad’s turn up for the Frejon Party you organised every Good Friday, the most important date in the Easter Holidays, itself being the most important event on the Christian Calendar. • The rendering of Olorun Bethel Eniti, (Oh God of Bethel by whose hands), the Cathedral “anthem”, from a chorus of drunken voices, as the Frejon Party reaches its crescendo. • Travelling together in a second class coach on the train from Lagos to Kaduna to visit Dad. • Your furious writing on scraps of paper, which turned out to be minutes of meetings of the Improvement Society. “The Secretary is the heart of any association”, you would say. • The frequent complaints about the Printer’s job after he had inserted another error, in yet another bunch of copies of the anniversary programme for the Improvement Society. • The smirk of victory on your face after you’d been announced the first President of the Cathedral Young Women Friendly Society. • Your roaring laughter, at tale after riveting tale, by Baba Ibadan, perhaps the most consistent customer at your Tavern in Ebute Metta. • Your sending me off to Choir Practice at
the age of 10, twice a week. • Your sending me off to that white garment church, every Wednesday evening, to ‘fortify’ me, in spite of our being some of the staunchest members of the African Church Cathedral Bethel. But why wouldn’t you turn out the vivacious, sociable, popular being that you are?
By your own telling, you were born in the market.
Your mother, Nancy Adetoun Nelson ( nee George), was heavy with you when she set out that morning of February 15, 1927, from her matrimonial house on Sawyer Street, near Tinubu Square, to her father’s house on 6/6/10 Upper Offin Lane, in Ereko, Lagos Island, where she sold clothes. Birth pangs hit her. She gave birth to you right in the shopping area. Your uncle, whose name you can’t recall now, promptly christened you: Adepate. But your parents; Anreti Samuel George (ASG) Nelson and Adetoun herself, named you Sarah Adebola. For this heritage, you claim to be Saro on the paternal side and an Ijesha on the maternal side.
You attended the infant school at the First African Church (Jehovah Shalom), where your father ASG Nelson was a founding member, went to the St. Mary’s Covent and finished secondary school at St Theresa’s College, before it moved to Ibadan. Post Secondary School Vocational Training was at Mrs. Remnick’s.
You chose merchandise and retailing and ran quite a successful retail store in Ebute Metta, as I recall. It was called Oluwaloseyi Stores.
“My Mum sold clothes; high quality damask, and velvet clothes among others,” you told me, one afternoon in your house in Festac Town. “She was successful at it, though not as wealthy as her own father Thomas Ige George.”
But your Dad was a grocer and you and your two sisters preferred that path.
And so each of your Mum’s three daughters; Omolara (of blessed memory), Adebisi (now 93) and yourself Adebola, ventured into the sort of merchandise that involved companies like the GBO (GBOllivant).
I have had the best education the country could provide anyone because of your generosity of spirit.
In 1983, you lost the main man in your Life. Alfred Ibikunle left in September of that year, at the age of 60. You had been married for 34 years. And you have spent the next 33 years living without him and still carrying on with the light you beam at everyone around you. Life has been good to you, Adebola. At 90, you don’t use eye glasses, you walk up flights of stairs with apparent ease and you don’t fall ill for any significant amount of time.
It is to the glory of God that we have come together to share time with you and celebrate your moment.
Happy Birthday Mama Mi!