At his ancient ‘imperial’ home in Molete, Ibadan last Thursday, I wrote in the condolence register: “He was a man, like French philosopher, Voltaire, who had trapped inside a single skull the brains of generations”.
When I met Victor Omololu Sowemimo Olunloyo (VOS) for the first time in 1995, the facade of scales that decorated my eyes about him began to drop. If you followed the 1983 Nigerian elections, especially in the old Oyo State, you couldn’t like VOS. Gradually, on meeting him visiting the newsroom of the Nigerian Tribune, all negative typecasts of him began to thaw and flow away like a huge ice in the sun. By the time he died last week Sunday, with 30 years in between for me to learn and unlearn all the political profiling he was festooned with, I am left with the impression of a maverick, humanist and a Voltaire, the pseudonym of François-Marie Arouet.
Unlike many members of the political class of his time, Olunloyo was a humanist par excellence and who, like Voltaire, had wit sewn to his soul. He was a man high up there who was very much at home with the low. He engaged ordinary reporters like us and never bothered to go in to see our editors. If, like Voltaire did in February 1778 when his presumed death was afoot, Olunloyo had same opportunity to write his own epithet, his would be similar to this French philosopher of the Enlightenment who wrote, “I die adoring God, loving my friends, not hating my enemies, and detesting superstition.” Though Olunloyo was a mathematician and a scientist, he however didn’t, like Ludwig Wittgenstein, abhor metaphysics. Wittgenstein, an Austrian philosopher of Mathematics, mind and logic, later denounced metaphysics as “nonsensical” because many of its questions go beyond the boundaries of what can be understood.
When I visited him in 2022 at the University College Hospital, (UCH) in the company of another mentee of his, Lasisi Olagunju, amid rumours that he had passed, it was difficult not to believe that his time of departure had not come. Heavily intubated with an oxygen ‘noose’ across his nose, upon sighting me, his wit was at its octane. “Iwo boy onikokuko yi ti de” (You this satanic writer has come”, he said, wearing his trademark mask of a smile that was native to only him.
Last Sunday when the news of his demise exploded like a bomb, downcast, I saw it as confirmation of my 30-year old fear. Whenever Olunloyo died, I voiced out several times in the last three decades, humanity would be witnessing the gutting of a modern-ancient library. I asked everyone in sight how we could download him all that were inside his brain before death came calling. My wish couldn’t fructify. Whether as an interviewee or guest at his Molete home, you would scoop tomes of knowledge from history, philosophy, music, science, engineering, mathematics to religion and associated disciplines; knowledge which you may never encounter in books.
I remember him once narrating to me how Bode Thomas died, the hospital he was taken to and how he eventually succumbed to the death that killed him after a strange person visited him.
So, on Thursday, his gardener of over two decades told us that a few days before his death, Olunloyo told him to go clean up the library – and he did. But the connoisseur of knowledge never got near that house of books by the time death came. When I heard and reflected on this, it dawned on me that the totality of VOS’s life was wrapped around books. Tears in his misty eyes, Salisu, a native of Kano, did not know the time he stuttered, “Daddy ya tefi!” To Olunloyo, humanity knows no tribe, and was borderless in his consideration. Samson, his driver of over three decades, also doubled as his librarian. Many times, when VOS, sitting in his library, asked him to go pick a book from a particular section of the shelf and the driver told him it was not there, Olunloyo, who knew the geography of virtually all his books and the particular shelves where they were, told Samson he must have rearranged it.
Olagunju told me another story which encapsulated his lifelong bonding with books. His walks circumscribed by the wheelchair on which he was bound, one day in January this year when he went to Molete to meet Olunloyo, he was shocked to see him on the second floor of the building where his library is situated. How did he get there? Intuitively conscious, he told Olagunju he could see from his eyes that he was not happy seeing him being carried up and down the stairs. Olunloyo then muttered, “Agba niyen” – that is old age for you. It was when Olagunju was leaving him that he understood the great pains he took to go and read upstairs. Salisu and Samson had apparently taken his wheelchair to the feet of the stairs, cupped him up and lifted the highly cerebral mathematician up the stories of the house like the paralytic man at Capernaum. Biblical narratives told us that, desirous of seeing Jesus for healing, in spite of his paralysis, the man went through the pains of being lifted up the roof. To Olunloyo, redemption lurked inside pages of books.
He had a stroke in 2022 and was presumed dead. He came back from coma to joke about that electrifying moment. We were there in Molete with him; Olagunju, myself and Dupe Olubanjo. “What did you see when you ‘died’?” Olagunju asked him. He cast a look at the journalist and said: “Nothing. I saw nothing.”
The last time I saw Olunloyo was towards the end of last year, at his Molete home. Frail, totally grizzled and sitting on a wheelchair, his voice rang like a nightingale’s and his intellect razor sharp. It was a confirmation that though the body had become complicit in the ploy to whittle him, what lay inside of him was stronger than that ploy. His wit was undiminished with his brilliance intact.
On another visit to his library some years ago, he put a call to his colleague in Enugu, Jim Nwobodo. They were both governors of the Second Republic. They chatted like old time buddies, asking each other whether their “children” – current governors of their states – were taking good care of them. Olunloyo spoke so well of his ‘child’ Seyi Makinde, who reconstructed his old house, bought him cars and made him a proud father.
VOS was a humanist to the core. Inside the condolence register opened for him in Molete was the testament of a woman who, in 1994, as a reporter with the Tribune newspaper, lost her child at birth. Olunloyo heard of it and looked for her and paid her family a visit. When the woman eventually had another baby, VO drove down to Tribune to celebrate with her. He then narrated the chilling story of a relation of his who had a similar experience but never had a child again. Olunloyo gave the lady journalist a sum that was more than what she earned as salary.
Still on our Thursday condolence visit to his Molete home. It was heartwarming seeing the peace and amity of Olunloyo’s large family, a total disconnect from the madness rustled up by one of theirs on the social media. We met Gbenga, Funke and Olunloyo’s eldest child, extremely gracious and cool Auntie Yemi who proudly announced herself to us as 001. We met these well-read, well-bred and well-turnout children of our dead old friend who came home from across the world to celebrate the enviable memory of their dad. We met them in very high spirits. They were manifestly happy that they were bequeathed a legacy of purity, humanity and loving fatherhood. It was a delight that their bond could not be defined nor impeached by the obvious alien typecast of their father by some daughter whose presence of mind is on its usual flight.
Goodnight, our own Voltaire.
