Adoka Son

In turns funny and moving, a triumph of autobiographical writing, Adoka Son tells the story of Ad’Obe Obe’s childhood in a small Nigerian community of Adoka at the exact time when everything begins to change – for both Ad’Obe and the town.

My mother was approaching the age of 90 when she told me the story of how my father snatched her from her first husband. I was 70 years old. This revelation was one of many that came inside the flow of almost daily mobile phone conversations between Mother (in Adoka) and I (in Abuja) since Father’s death fifteen years earlier.

Mother died when I was 73, leaving a huge gap in my life, which I filled with fond recollections of the stories she had narrated to me. I was her eighth child but the first to survive childbirth. I could hear her cry on the phone as she told me the story of my arrival, but she quickly said they were tears of joy. Certainly not tears of pain, because physical pain, she believed, had been extinguished from her body after enduring the experience of being pregnant and giving birth fifteen times.

Mother knew nothing about telephones before GSM/mobile phones came into existence. She would dress up for the calls she made to me. Once, I called her from London, she asked me to call her back because she was not properly dressed for the extraordinary “meeting”. Mother never left the social and physical environment where I was conceived and born. Her account of my childhood years were snapshots of a world that only existed in her memory. Drama after drama, episode upon episode, Mother helped me conjure up and re-live my childhood. The urge to write it all down was irresistible. My journalistic instinct propelled me as I recognised that this was probably the best and most fulfilling story I would ever write.