The Woman, According to Obi of Owa
EDIFYING ELUCIDATIONS BY Okey Ikechukwu
The man spoke with measured cadence. He refused the offer to speak from his seat. Instead, he stood to speak. The request that he should not stand to address the audience was clearly in consideration of his age. His position as the Chairman of the Delta State Council of Traditional Rulers may have been part of it, but the latter point is open to argument.
The memory of the woman he wished to speak about demanded that he should stand, he said. His respect for what the woman, who had come to represent courage and hope for many people, also demanded it. The royal father’s sense of duty to a younger generation made his standing up to speak a compelling necessity. Yes, he believed that this generation should learn to value a genuine woman of courage, industry and deep intuitive insights. So, he stood to speak. But “what” did he say?
There he stood. Calm, emotion-laden, unbowed. He quivered a little. Then he was still again. His years were hardly visible in his carriage. Bolstered by a deep but subdued sense of reverence, and in calm acknowledgement of the life he had come to know through a woman he clearly respected beyond measure, His Royal Majesty, Emmanuel Ifeizomor, went on and on about the mother of publisher of Thisday Newspaper, Chief Nduka Obaigbena.
He dwelt on her sense duty, her diligence, her industry. He spoke of her of her ever-unbowed spirit and of how much she influenced the world and people around her. Then he went on to speak of the very notion of “woman” and of womanhood. He moved into this subject with such deep feeling that his short but moving discourse had the effect of a long homily on what it meant to be a woman, especially a woman like the person he was talking about. For him, the late Princess Margaret Obaigbena was everything a woman should be to a man, to her children and to her environment. It was, at once, sobering and exhilarating.
Then came the brother of the departed. His love and respect for his late sister was unconstrained, uncontrived and simple. It was easy to see and feel. His brief, revealing and touching contribution was followed by the bereaved family’s eldest son and brother to Nduka Obaigbena. He spoke at length about “their” mother. I noted, in particular, his continuous use of the first-person plural “our”. His narrative conveyed the image of a focused, generous and hardworking mother who was concerned about all to the same degree. His genuine love and admiration for her were evident, beyond mere a recital at a church ceremony.
He touched on her life as a mother, her capacity for hard work, her tendency to be a mother to whomsoever crossed her path and how she was often guided by her intuition to give the best advice to her children and to strangers at all times. Then he went on to the life-changing experience that made the woman become a nurse. That life-changing experience came from the simple task of nurturing her injured son (the speaker) back to health, after a car accident.
The young boy was knocked down by a car on the street and ended up in a hospital. As was later narrated to the accident victim, it was the white man driver of the car that knocked him down who stopped, picked up the unconscious boy, put him in his vehicle and took him to a hospital. His parents and family were later contacted, etc., etc.
All that the boy could recall was that he woke up to see himself lying on a bed. He later found out that he was in a hospital. He had clear and unmentionable aches in partly unidentified places. His ever-prayerful mother was always by his side. He was eventually discharged, but with strict instructions to his family on the type of care he needed at home before his next hospital appointment. When the day came and he went back to the hospital, the hospital authorities were astonished at his condition.
They wanted to know the type of care he had been receiving at home, and from whom. Without waiting for the details, they advised the family to simply continue whatever it was that they were during to him, and with him, before they brought him for the appointment. In other words, the woman was asked to take her son back home and continue the good work she was doing with him at home. She complied.
It was on this hospital trip that the woman told her son that she, his mother, had just discovered that she loved taking care of people, particularly sick people, more than anything else. She announced, there and then, that she would like to be a nurse. A nurse? Yes, a nurse who would always take care of sick people and others in need of one type of care or another.
Forthwith, she took up the matter. She applied to a nursing school and got admitted. She enrolled, studied and passed her examinations. Then she went ahead to become a formally and properly trained and practicing nurse. The son spoke of how his mother set up a maternity home in her community, to take care of her fellow women in need of health care during those critical months of pregnancy and childbirth. For the record, she never made any profit in all the years that the facility existed. She also never complained about the inability of most beneficiaries of the facility to pay. Her job was to offer them the opportunity to bring healthy children into the world and also remain healthy themselves.
And she was as much a nurse of the body as she was of the soul. That much was clear from the comments of the traditional ruler and that of others who spoke.
And this entire incident was mostly private. Yes, Alhaji Kashim Imam who has somehow managed to become an ever-welcome son, brother or even father in many families all over the country, was there. So were a few others, like my friend Dr Henry Nzekwu, Proprietor of Bridge Radio in Asaba, and Emeka Izeze, the Editor’s Editor.
But it was really a private and very simple occasion that the Obaigbenas put together on 16th August at the posthumous birthday of their mother. It all showed genuine respect for the departed, wherein mostly the family and people she knew, or spent her life with, came to pay their last respect in a not-purely-social setting.
I thought about my late mother and the relatively quiet farewell we, her children, gave her. I thought of how, perhaps, some members of the Obaigbena family might be feeling at that very moment. I wondered how some would manage their sense of loss. I hoped, and prayed, that their gratitude for her life and the guidance she gave would be uppermost in their minds. That they never forget that their mother’s legacies are already established in the values she espoused and that the only way to immortalize her was to replicate, improve upon and further propagate every good thing she represented.
Sitting in that quiet hall, surrounded by close relatives of the departed, I recalled that my mother had such a strong sense of propriety and personal dignity that it was simply impossible for us to do anything other than do all we knew that she would approve, if consulted. Her intuitive clarity was legendary. A mother who would call you in very trying moments of your life to tell you that she was praying for you over what you were going through? And who would also not press you to tell her what the problem was, but who would urge you to trust that God would not forsake you since it was not your fault.
I remember once coming back from Lagos to meet her and one of my younger sisters arguing over the avocado pear she kept for me, in addition to a late lunch she had made. My sister wanted the pear because my mother was carrying matters too far on her intuitive certainties. Then woman had actually prepared a meal and then kept my favourite avocado because “something” told her that I would come home that day and that I would be very hungry on arrival.
“Is this not him? What did I tell you? was her excited declaration to my sister the moment I walked in. Then they filled me in on the controversy that was getting somewhat heated between them before my arrival. My mother was the ready adviser, trainer and nurturer for many young and not-so-young people.
But we are digressing too much, are we not?
The quiet post humous birthday organized by the children and family of Princess Obaigbena for their departed matriarch was a very good idea. Let her meet, for the last time, her own. Many were bowed in pain, but content to follow what is divinely ordained. Owa Oyibu was without the commotion you find during burials was not their on August 16 when the event under reference here took place. It was simple, traditional in a modern and dignified sort of way. It derived its solemnity more from the frank, uncontrived and very visible show of admiration and love by all those whose lives she touched.
Which brings me again to the subject of woman, women, motherhood and womanhood. Any person of the female gender can be a biological mother. All that is required is a functional biological equipment. But one can be a good or bad mother. In addition, one can bury oneself in motherhood and still be far from genuine womanhood.
The true woman is firm, without being brash, intuitively alert and resolutely so, without obtrusive self-inflation. She nurtures, but does not allow herself to be taken for granted. She does not need the man’s loud, and often empty voice in order to assert authority. “Grace makes the woman”, we are told. Not the deliberate projection of the woman’s “physicality” and sexuality.
The occasion portrayed showed those of us there that, in life and after her life on earth, Princess Margaret Obaigbena was seen as a woman of perceptible personal dignity.
