Stephen Adewale
Destiny is both unpredictable and fickle. Nigeria has experienced men and women whose lives changed the course of history. They would have been remarkable in any era in which they were born. But by living and dying when they did, each defined the times in which they lived. Their actions transformed the imprint of their generation and the country.
One of those men was a man whose white-moustached statue stands proudly in front of the 15-storey Church and School Supplies Bookshop House, 50/52 Broad Street Lagos. The name of this man was Olayinka Herbert Samuel Heelas Badmus Macaulay, one of the forefathers of Nigerian nationalism. At a time when the colonial sword was held aloft and the subjugated country proliferated with oppression, this man stuck his neck out to defend the interest of the downtrodden. His courage never failed him. By the time he dropped the baton of life on May 7th, 1946, everyone agreed that he died as a true champion of the masses.
In addition to the annual Herbert Macaulay Memorial Lecture and Merit Award usually organised by the Association of Lagos Indigenes, naming the Yaba Library in his name, and naming a few streets after him in both Lagos and Abuja by the government, Herbert Macaulay was largely confined to the history archive. And as blunt as historians have always been, as quick as they are to criticise and condemn, it is to the eternal credit of the man that historians have never found any negative thing to say against this grandfather after taking the inventory of his life. His praise is always on every lip, for Nigeria owes the remnants of its freedom to him. However, his exploits were largely forgotten on a general note. Even the currency with his portrait is nearly obsolete.
But life, through other incidents, has a way of reminding us of big things. Sixty-eight years after his death, his great granddaughter, who sacrificed her life to save a country from a disastrous epidemic in 2014, rekindled the heroism of Macaulay in a great dimension. She has the most senior stuff of the medical team attending to Patrick Sawyer, the Liberian-American who brought to Nigeria the deadly Ebola virus. Following treatment of the index case, she contracted the virus.
It was Adadevoh who took the initiative to bring the index case to the attention of the Lagos State Health Ministry. She prevented Sawyer physically from moving out of the hospital and owed the moderate containment substantially to her credit. Finally, Adadevoh paid with her life. She could not get decent and appropriate burials because of the nature of what caused her death. If there was a spark of human feeling and solidarity with citizens left in our leaders, these supreme sacrifices of Dr. Ameyo’s likes and her pathetic ending should shame them in mobilising everything that could be mobilised in this country to ensure that not only the health sector recovered, but that every sector of the country is up and running.
We should not have limited our remembrance of them in naming buildings alone, but ensure that their sacrifices would not be forgotten by enshrining good governance. Those sacrifices should have been buried in our spirit. By strengthening the health sector, we should have remembered them; by building a country that would be safe for their children and grandchildren to live, we should have immortalized them. We’ve got the brain, brawn, reserves, resources. Then, by setting up the developmental structures that Nigeria’s surviving men and women badly need, we should have remembered the dead.
No sacrifices are too great in honour of the people who considered no sacrifice too great for our safety on their part. We are too often unaware of the intensity and magnitude of health practitioners’ sacrifices because of their modesty and humility. The modesty and meekness were best exemplified at the First Consultant Hospital in 2014 by health workers who put their lives on the line of danger. The best tribute we could have paid them and all like-minded men and women who continue to sacrifice their lives so we can have our own is to make the country a better place for everyone to live in and improve health workers’ working conditions across the country.
Dr. Adadevoh’s death should also have made some of our reckless leaders think again. Every time there is a call to join the crusade for good governance, politicians, some wealthy institutions and individuals are much less concerned. They proceed with false hope that they can be protected by their great wealth and positions. They send their kids abroad to avoid the troubled home education system. They keep their savings abroad and invest abroad. I have even encountered some of them trying to be like the white man. They refuse to employ Africans and are proud to have white cooks, white stewards and white mistresses. They work under the delusion that their sequestered businesses can endure the collapse of their homeland. They fail to realise that no one can be safe in the midst of violence because the poverty of society’s generality is a threat to a few wealth and security. History has made it so, and no mortal can do anything about it.
The great grandfather of Dr. Adadevoh, Herbert Macaulay, was a good man who did not deserve this kind of generational reward. After 105 years of amalgamation, Herbert Macaulay would not have imagined that Nigeria would be in this underdeveloped mess. He died demanding self-determination for Nigeria. Unfortunately, the nation for which he fought has become so complacent that he has fallen asleep and finally woken up in chains. The biggest compensation we could have given for the monumental loss to Herbert Macaulay’s family is breaking the country from its fetters and putting her back on her feet.
Our government mistakenly believes that, to remember and honour the dead, is about naming a building or other monument after them. They love to seek immortality in perishable things. But as I argued elsewhere, how to remember them is to follow what is articulated in the constitution: cater for the common good of the living. Put more people into jobs: give more houses for people, allow them unfettered access to free and qualitative education, and allow them to afford sound health care facilities. This is the only acceptable and decent way of honoring the dead.
It is saddening to note that at a hospital in Obalende, Lagos, the late Dr. Ameyo Adadevoh contracted the deadly virus, not far from where the British once imprisoned her famous ancestor. Let the nation always remember the great family’s sacrifices. Considering the men and women immortalized by the world, I found out it was because of their sacrifices and not because of their selfishness. Late Dr. Ameyo Adadevoh is not remembered five years after her death because of any great temporal power she had, because she had none. For her great wealth, she’s not remembered because she didn’t have much. She is not remembered for her befitting burial, because, again, she had none. Yet, she will never be forgotten.
Let the enfant terrible among us learn great lessons from the exemplary lifestyles of fallen citizen! The men and women we will remember are those who have worked selflessly, like the late Herbert Macaulay and Ameyo Adadevoh, not just to preserve their own generation, but for generations to come. From this, all those who seek immortality should learn that it is not in how much we are served, but in how we serve. It is not about how much we are taking up but how much we are giving up.
Herbert Macaulay in the colonial Nigeria and Stella Adadevoh in the 21st century Nigeria had different challenges but both faced them with energy, drive and a hard-edged intuition. It is high time we started to appreciate these great men and women and learn about them. By studying their lives, we gain a sense, not only of who they were, but of what we have become as a civilisation because of their influence. If any of these great people were to be removed from the record of history, the resulting gap would be huge. As we study the lives they have lived, we can look back on their accomplishments and be happy that we journey upon the roads that they paved for history to travel.
Stephen Adewale is a fellow of the American Council of Learned Society and currently serves as the Director of Africa Dialogue Mission, Abuja, Nigeria
THE VIEWS OF THE ABOVE ARTICLE ARE THOSE OF THE AUTHOR AND DO NOT NECESSARILY REFLECT THE VIEWS OF THE KAFTAN POST EDITORIAL TEAM
