Last Friday, May 25, 2018, would have marked the 80th Birthday of Baba Bayo Solomon Oguntunase, the English language maestro, who kicked the bucket April 2017. The man that I knew would have celebrated the anniversary with profuse pomp in his rustic Ikorodu home amid gaiety and superfluity of foods and wines, particularly palm wine, ewedu, amala and other local delicacies.
Unlike most people these days who lie about their ages, Baba regaled in letting anyone know that he had been around for a long time. He would always give profiles of events years back right from his school days here and abroad to his employment/career trajectories. In a nutshell, he was very proud of his old age. He rightly insisted that those who lied about their chronologies were instrumentalities of fraud and perilous deception.
Baba enjoyed his old age! His cherubic face and youthful mentality diminished his advancement in age. Without being told, anyone who saw baba before his untimely exit would believe he was not more than 60 years! Pa Oguntunase did not just get old looking frail as is typical of most of his mates—he aged gracefully in profound youthfulness characterized by eye-popping boyish swagger! It was difficult to believe his age. If it were possible, the man would still have had pimples in his old age!
For me, this friend of mine was in middle-age even at 79, last May, on grounds of his attitudinal disposition to life and issues generally. He was a different species who lived so well as if the world would come to an end the next moment! He enjoyed life fully while it lasted
The final circumstances preceding Baba’s exit now belong to the realm of conjecture for me since I am not the Chief Medical Director of LUTH or its public relations officer, who would have been briefed by the hospital’s management ahead of internal and external inquisitions.
My lachrymal disposition since the shocking transition of this man who meant so much to me scholastically is not that he died or that 79 years’ life span is not ripe enough for thanksgiving and celebration in this age of existential abortion with women and men having life spans of 55 and 48 years on the average, respectively, but the circumstantial underpinnings and the finality of this reality that keep appearing to me like a mirage.
Who, now, will create in me a voracious appetite for collection and poring over of multi-disciplinary books as Baba, an avid reader and emotive lover of all sorts of books, did pleasurably? My efforts to become a bibliophile no longer have a motivator. The way I started with procuring and consuming James Hadley Chase’s series, among other books, as a young school leaver years back, I should have, by now, become a bibliomaniac! Alas, I am not in any way near bibliophilic threshold—let alone being obsessive about books. If baba had not untimely exited, my aspiration would have been accomplished.
Was it possible for us to have met for the last time and exchange blessings, notions and promises? Certainly, all that is dreary and dreamy without realism of any shred! This man, who completed his secondary education in 1962 before I was born, was full of life in spite of his age to have died now—worsened by the way and manner he passed on. If he had been ill for a while due to protracted health challenges, I would not feel this pang as much as I will do for the rest of my life, but to suddenly and fatalistically slump is irredeemably devastating to me.
We must weep for the loss of our dear ones irrespective of their ages. It is not the fact of death that matters, but the realization that there would never be any interaction again until rapture, possibly. In the case of Pa Oguntunase, a parting session and final lexical exchanges would have diminished my inconsolable and interminable anguish.
I can never forget Baba for copious reasons the most important being the commitment he showed towards the publication of my latest book entitled “Media Gaffes and Essays”. Pa Oguntunase, who began his illuminative “Mind Your Language” series in the defunct National Concord in 1984—a year preceding my own introduction of “Wordsworth” in the old Daily Times— painstakingly went through all the manuscripts for the 850-page book.With this kind of humungous pagination, you can imagine how many A-4 copies he must have perused line by line for months! Unfortunately, he could not see the final product because of logistical drawbacks: the local printer I constrainedly used messed up the book. Right now, I am in the fresh process of reprinting on remediation of all diseased fundamentals.
My only consolation in Baba’s translation is the irrevocable fact that wherever the consummate bibliophile and language activist is, he sure knows how I feel and will continue to feel till the end of time over his abrupt passage.
I repeat: who will fill the vacuum that Baba has created in my knowledge, comprehension and appreciation of the English language? Nobody can do it illimitably, authoritatively and with unassailable professorial panache as Pa Oguntunase did up till March last year!
If I had the power of resurrection, Pa Oguntunase, of course, will not spend a minute in the grave! How I wish Baba had been alive to mark his 80th birthday last Friday amid pomp and ceremony or circumstance (never, never, never use “pomp and pageantry” because of its non-existentialism)!
May the soul of “oga mi” (as he used to fondly call me) rest in peace (not “perfect peace”, please)! Anytime—and which is almost every time—I see the stupendous collection of brand-new books he gifted me at different times over the years on my desk in my mini-library in the expansive sitting-room, the feeling is indescribable! I lack words to describe our relationship, your love for me (and other people) and your exit. If you were alive, I could have run to you to provide the syntactic appositeness! What else can I say after good night egbon mi, oga mi, teacher, friend, scholastic ‘cousin’ and my English language compass and navigator? There can never be another Solomon Adebayo Oguntunase! For the umpteenth time, I wept and sobbed as I did this remembrance. Sadly, nobody can console me or fill the transitional vacuum that shadows me these days!
-Concluded