My mama, Felicia Jolaade Fakinlede, was born in 1926 into the Ojo-Ologun family in Igisan quarters, Akure. Her father was the late Ojo-Ologun. He was a descendant of Benin warriors that garrisoned in Akure during the Benin conquest until 1894. Her mother was one of the displaced people during the internecine wars that gripped Yorubaland creating the Ekiti-parapo, Kiriji, Adubi, and other local conflicts both internal and against the British overlordship. Mama’s history is tied to a complex relationship between Akure and Ado (meaning Bini) that included wars, conquests, and rebellions, and the emergence of a distinct Akure component known as “Ado-Akure”. My Ado-Akure mama spoke an accented form of the Akure language that easily gave her away. She had a unique Bini outlook and culture which included eating “yellow gari”. She greeted her people in accordance with Bini culture. Yet she was an Akure woman. I learnt to speak the Ado-Akure dialect from my mother. I clearly remember being picked out of groups of children as one of “them”.
In 1944, mama married the late Chief Isaac Fakinlede of the Olabiwoonnu-Alasa family at the Ijemikin quarters in Akure as his fourth and last wife. She bore nine children: Olubodun, Ayo, Womiloju, Jumoke, Coli, Sunday, Sola, Reuben and Abegbe. Four of us survived her. She had eight stepchildren: Adunni, Ibitoye, Ojo, Kayode, Apeke, Feyisara, Funmilayo, Ranti. Mama (and my two stepmothers) taught me several things in life. Most of all about love and sacrifice. I saw life from our mothers’ perspectives. They influenced the love with which we all related to each other as brothers and sisters.
Baba Fakinlede concentrated his efforts on paying our school fees. Mama competed with her fellow wives to ensure that her children got the education she did not have. Even when school fees were enormous for the resources of our small trader baba, our mothers were insistent that their children go to school. Our father was frequently on the debtor’s list at St Joseph’s college Ondo for most of my school days. Mama sold her gold, her clothes and anything of value to keep my brother Olu in University, against my father’s advice. Mama was by her children’s side through sickness and health, happiness and loss. When my sister Womiloju died from complications due to a teenage pregnancy at 18, mama cried and cried through the night. I remember my father waking up at night to give her consolation. She was inconsolable.
My older brother Ayo was born with a neurological condition that made it impossible for him to cope in school. Some people would remind us that we had a brother that was “not well” – a madman, or an “odada”. Mama struggled to cope and her mother took over the care of Ayo for a short time. When my grandma passed on in 1975, Ayo returned to mama. For more than sixty years, mama looked after her son like a baby.
When Ayo died in May 2014, I travelled with my sister, Apeke, to bury him. I counselled mama, “you must not cry”. You have labored on this child for more than sixty-five years. God has declared “Enough”. You must look at the rest of us alive and well. We are here to comfort you. Therefore, you must not cry. Mama wiped her face and complied.
Fourteen years ago, my father died at the same age of 97. I travelled home from Lagos. There I saw my mother having siesta. My entire life, up till that time, I had never seen my mother sleeping in the afternoon. While baba lived, mama served him. When we employed a nurse to take care of baba, mama and my step mother – both in their 80s at that time – refused to allow a stranger do “their work”. The training of women in their era was brutal. They were mere slaves to serve their husbands and their children. They never thought they had any right to enjoy this life. It was only after Baba’s death that she remembered she could get tired and have a siesta.
Mama taught us perseverance. O how she persevered and did not run away from her troubles no matter how severe, or how hard. Mama suffered and bore it all. She stayed at her duty post till the very end. She cried, she complained, and could be talky! But her duty post, she never abandoned.
Mama cared for her health. She purchased and took her drugs regularly. Beyond that, she did nothing for herself. The only way you could make her happy was to speak about the successes of her children. The video clip below was how mama celebrated when she visited my house in Oda. She fell to the ground and rolled over risking injury from a vehicle’s hot exhaust pipes. Nearly two months ago, mama moved into the house she financed herself. Mama, an illiterate woman, married off at 17, enduring so many life challenges, breathed her last breadth in the comfort of her own home at 9:00 am on September 14, 2023.
In Jolaade Fakinlede, we have lost our mother. We lost our mother-hen. We lost our guardian angel. We lost our caregiver. We lost the last leg of our hold on this life. For us children, it is time to take stock and ask ourselves, how do we live to be worthy of such care.
Coli Omotayo Fakinlede