Kikelomo’s eyes shone brighter than the moon-design table lamp sitting next to her on the mahogany table. She looked forward to evenings like this when she could gather her grandchildren around, passing on stories she’d heard from her father like it was a cherished family heirloom. She flashed back to when she was five years old when her father would prop her on his thin, ageing legs, while other children sat on a raffia mat under the palm tree in their compound. The atmosphere was always right. A cool breeze caressed their almost bare skin, a twinkling sky, and of course, the osupa that gave light to the darkness. It couldn’t be folktales by moonlight without the osupa, so they always looked out for it, be it half or full. All the kids in the compound had their faces glued to her father’s mouth as soon as he started his narration in his singsong voice. “Alo o,” he’d begin to get their attention, and the kids will respond with “Alo.” signifying that they were ready for what was next.
Times have changed. No gathering under the palm tree with a twinkling sky and caressing breeze, and no osupa. The price you have to pay for modern living. But that didn’t stop Kikelomo from passing on this oral storytelling tradition to her grandkids when the opportunity surfaced, and over two years after a long pandemic, the opportunity surfaced. Her three children—Shonde, Shola, and Shade and their spouses—decided to spend the Christmas holiday at the family house in Ikoyi. It was a six-bedroom duplex Kikelomo and her husband, Shope, built a few years after they moved to Lagos to start their family.
Kikelomo’s eight grandchildren were spread across the sofas in the spacious living room. If the furniture—six grey sofas of varying lengths, two blue ottomans, a mahogany coffee table and four collapsible side tables—is taken out, it would pass for a mini football pitch. One of the walls was a gallery of family pictures, individual pictures of each child and grandchildren. A built-in bookshelf had medical books on the topmost part, fiction at the bottom, and in the middle was a herd of wooden elephants arranged with the smallest piece following the direction of the other bigger pieces. Next to it were three stone-carved monkeys, one with its hand covering its eyes, the other had the hands over its mouth, and the last covering its ears.
“Alo o,” Kikelomo had formed the habit of starting like her father would start, and she’d taught her grandkids to respond with “Alo”, which they did. Unlike her father who told stories in Yoruba, she told hers in English, but like her father’s tales, it always had a moral lesson. “This is a story my father told me many years ago when I started at my first job. It’s of a rich cocoa farmer, but because I know you can’t relate to who a cocoa farmer is, I’ll change it to a young doctor.”
“I’ll call this young doctor Olu. Olu is the only child of his parents. His mum was a public school English teacher and his dad was a physiotherapist at the Air Force hospital. They managed to send him to a private university so he wouldn’t have to go through the trouble of strike actions that often lengthened the number of years of those who studied in federal schools. Life was smooth as his parents never denied him any of his requests. He didn’t know what it meant to save for the rainy days because, for him, it’d been all sunshine.
He finished university with a first class in Medicine and moved on to specialise in paediatrics. With his father’s connection, he secured a job at the federal hospital in Abuja, and off he went. He was now his own man with his own money, which flowed in abundance, but he was someone my father will refer to as ‘eni to man fi owo mewewa jeun’. Do you know what that means?” Kikelomo asked her grandkids to make sure they were following.
They nodded in unison. They seemed to be invested in the story Nana was telling. Kikelomo uncrossed her slender long legs and placed them on the ottoman she’d dragged in front of her.
“It means someone who eats with his ten fingers. Now, that’s just the direct translation, but what that means is someone who doesn’t think about the future and spends all that he has as soon as he has it. Such a person doesn’t bother to save or budget their finances. They have it now, they spend it all. And that was exactly who Olu was. Can you imagine that in his five years of working at the hospital, Olu didn’t have any substantial savings, if he had any at all. And things began to go south. The hospital was struggling and they had to downsize and he was one of the people laid off. He had nothing to turn to and had to go back to his parents to start all over again. And that was when he learned his lesson. What do you think the lesson was?” Kikelomo threw the question to her mixed audience of sleepers and ‘attentives’.
Her last grandchild who was seven threw his arm forward and she prompted him to talk. “Not to eat with your ten fingers.” Pelumi smiled, delighted with his answer.
Kikelomo smiled at him and said, “Exactly.” Her second grandchild aged seventeen jolted off from his sleep and wiped his face before dozing off again. “Before you leave, I’ll tell you another story, but this time it will be just as my father told me. From his mouth to your ears.”