Transition of a Friend 2 : The Adventure of the Iroko Shrine:Text and Videos
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Oluwatoyin Adepoju
Jun 18, 2024, 1:37:14 PMJun 18
to usaafricadialogue, Yoruba Affairs, comp...@googlegroups.com
Transition of a Friend
2
The Adventure of the Iroko Shrine
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems
Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge
''You are no longer welcome in these premises!
You have to pay for the damage the iroko tree has done to the church wall!
You can't simply take anything from the fallen iroko because money was paid to cut it up after its fall!
You can't take away any of the roots you have already gathered until after speaking with the church accountant!
Wale, watch him so that he takes nothing away!''
Who were these commands being addressed to?
Myself.
Why?
I had been trying and partly succeeding, in taking home parts of an iroko tree that had fallen into the compound of St Leo's church, on Amore Street, off Toyin Street, in Ikeja, Lagos, breaking part of the church wall and damaging electricity poles as it smashed through the air from its location on the street beside the wall, severely damaging cars in the church compound, but luckling only slightly injuring one person, the occupants of the cars having escaped what might have been the catastrophic effects of the crash by the sheer luck of having vacated their vehicles within minutes of the behemoth tearing through the air, the church security personnel who had been on duty avoiding the crash only by similar sheer luck of minutes.
''Why am I being banned from the premises?" I retorted. ''I shall involve my lawyer if that is insisted upon'', I declared.
''Am I the owner of the iroko that I am being asked to pay for the damage it caused?'' I responded to the demand that I provide compensation for the destruction. ''Did we not all meet the iroko tree here, predating my existence and that of the church?'' I thought, looking at the area where we stood near the base of the fallen tree and the still standing twin of the collapsed behemoth, well outside the gates of the church.
''The sections of the tree's roots I have assembled were cut by myself, not by anyone else, so the claim that I need to pay for the roots because they were cut by someone else does not stand'', I retorted.
''Anyway, that's what the church accountant says'' concluded the lady later described as the Chief Security Officer of the church by Wale, one of the workers in the car park adjoining the church wall, near the iroko, one of whom I had been paying for months to keep the area around the iroko clean.
I had been on the verge of sweeping success until this strange bottleneck emerged on 17th June 2024.
I was about to remove, from the small crater caused by the uprooting of the tree from its very bottom by its fall a large, multi-branching root which the church's workmen had severed from the body of the fallen tree but which had still been attached to the soil by a longer root extension.
Sinuous like a snake, even inert and disjointed from the gargantuan form which it had once fed nutrients, the root complex seemed to pulse with life, evocative of what Chinua Achebe describes as ike, energy, power flowing in many channels as it sustains the cosmos, as he describes that category of Igbo thought in "The Igbo World and its Art", a dramatization of the mysterious force of life, coming from a place unknown and vanishing to a place unknown.
Would it not be wonderful if this piece of the fallen iroko were in my study, at the centre of tree stumps from the same tree, as one sat on one of those stumps, and perhaps invited others to do so, reflecting on the mysterious power of life is, as represented by that expansive root?
I had severed the connection between the now exposed larger root and the smaller root using a cutlass I had purchased for that purpose a few minutes ago. I had even hired a pickup van to take the large root and perhaps one of the slabs cut from the tree's branches to my own space.
I planned to use the massive root complex as the centrepiece of a shrine and the slabs as a seat on which one could sit to reflect on the roots' demonstration of the dynamism of life demonstrated by its sheer size, unearthed from perhaps a century or more in the depths of the earth where it had assumed its dynamic configurations, a projection of power both individual and cosmic, of creative force sweeping through the universe, shaping being and becoming, ants to stars, planets to humans, skies to oceans, dew falling slowly, falling swifty, clustering of grass becoming savannah, assembling of trees becoming forest,
congregating of follicles becoming hair on the head, power moving in many channels, evocations of Yoruba, Igbo, Hindu and other ideas of cosmic force shaping the cosmos, from the large to the minute, converging in the Yoruba poem ''Ayajo Asuwada'', which begins with the emergence of existence and order in the universe expressed as dew descending to earth.
How was one to explain this vision to people in the church, as the way I hung around the remains of the fallen tree in the church premises and my stated desire to create a shrine out of the remains aroused suspicion as to my motives and unease about my attitude to the church in relation to the fall of the tree, one parishioner being quoted as describing me as agitated over why the tree should fall in the first place, suspicions prompting a security team from the church approaching me as I gazed at the tree's remains the previous evening, asking me very politely to identify myself and my mission in the church since I was not familiar to the parishioner who led the team.
The tree has been a brother to me, I informed them. In gazing at the fallen and now significantly dismembered tree, I was a person gazing at the remains of a loved one, assimilating the shock, and trying to work out how to preserve the memory of the departed personage, I explained. Courteous and refined, the team appreciated my explanation, engaged in convivial chat and left me alone. Others, however, seemed to have been less comfortable with me, leading to the encounter the next day with the lady described as the Chief Security Officer of the church.
Eventually, my sister, Ifuemi Adepoju, concluding that the church had no jurisdiction over the iroko, it being the property of the state government and the roots being of no use to anyone outside specialized interests like mine, working with her staff, Kingsley Opara and Daniel Ottonah, helped me lift the heavy root complex from the crater and used her bus in transporting both the larger root formation and the smaller roots to the estate where I live, positioning them elegantly on a piece of land there.
I made the videos below to celebrate that triumph as I eulogize my friend entering a new stage of his journey.
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