I’m getting ahead of myself. Father’s Day is still next
Sunday. But after the Executive Editor
of LeVogue, LEADERSHIP’s Fashion and Lifestyle
magazine, Nikki Odu-Khiran, asked me if I could write a
piece to mark the day, it got me thinking.
If my father, who passed on May 28, 2000, ever had to
write on Father’s Day, what would he have written? Of
course, he wouldn’t have written anything. A pensioner
who worked as a storekeeper at the Apapa (Lagos) Quays
of the Nigerian Ports Authority (NPA) before he retired in
1996, Robert could barely write.
But my, oh, my, he could hold a crowd with his speech.
And if you wanted to get him going, then talk politics,
especially about Nigeria’s Civil War.
I can imagine what he would have said about Father’s
Day back then. Being a father in his time is different from
being a father today. And if my children have to write
about Father’s Day two and a half decades from now,
they’ll probably be using the same lens of wistful
contemplation. Every generation thinks its burden is the
heaviest.
My father would not be surprised, for example, that I
didn’t know his real age and never once asked him until
he passed. Of course, I wrote 84 in his obit because I had
to write something. I got that from asking several sources
I thought would know. Not from him. For the over four
decades that he lived and as far back as I can remember,
I never could ask him his age.
What it meant to be a father was for the son to stay in
his place. Father’s authority was final, unquestionable.
Mucking about asking him about his age would have
been crossing a line.
Fast forward 2023. My children not only ask me to
“surrender” my PIN number and God-knows-what-else,
my four-year-old granddaughter asks me my name, my
mother’s name, and once teased her own mother to call
my wife by name. And that, of course, is woke.
I’m not sure my father would have thought so. Perhaps if
he had lived to see his great-granddaughter, he would
have half-jokingly, half-embarrassingly dismissed such
precociousness as a regrettable
consequence of the new-age bug.
If my father wanted me to become anything other than a
journalist, I’m not sure there was much I could have done
about it. You studied what you were told, which was
often either law, medicine or engineering. Being a father
at the time meant laying down the rules about virtually
everything from your child’s hairstyle to their course of
study. And being a son meant one thing: obedience.
Fortunately, my father wasn’t really interested in my
career choice. All he wanted was for me to be the best in
any career I wanted, a concession which I still find hard
to explain, given his dominance in my life.
My father believed that staying away from booze, parties
and girls was the beginning of wisdom and kept a long
cane to enforce it. You really couldn’t blame
him. Ajegunle, where I grew up, was one of the most
congested slums of Lagos at the time. Booze was cheap,
parties rampant, and girls plenty.
Of course, boys being boys (and occasionally with the
connivance of my mother), I sneaked off to parties a few
times, stayed out late and swigged a few bottles of
beer. I even wrote frothy love letters with lines from
James Hadley Chase.
However, when I crossed the line like when I went off on
my own to see a football match at the National Stadium
where dozens died in the post-game stampede, my
mother gave me the full measure of a fan belt hung on
the door lintel until I was covered in welts and near
passing out, while my father turned a blind eye.
Of my many transgressions growing up, bringing a girl
home, even when I was over 21, would have been
considered a cardinal sin. It didn’t matter that I was out
of secondary school and in higher school for my HSC, my
father often warned, sternly, that hanging out with a girl
when he was still responsible for me meant that I was in
a hurry to relieve him of any further fatherly
responsibility. His favourite phrase was, “If you get any
girl pregnant, you’re done for!”
I’m sort of stuck in that groove. Tried as I have to be a
modern-day dad, my children — all in their adult years —
still know I felt a bit awkward, especially in the very early
stages of their relationships. I think psychologists call it
conditioning.
It’s futile, isn’t it? I mean for a father, these days, to
worry too much about the social life of their grown-up
children? You worry as they grow up, hoping they will
pass every stage of growth when they should. Then you
worry when they start making friends, hoping they will
survive peer pressure.
Then you worry when they start going out, hoping they
will keep the right company; you worry when they start
going to school hoping that for all the huge bills you pay
(and for their own sake) they will make good grades and
turn out well.
Then when they finish, you also worry about how they
will get a good job; how they would marry and who they
would marry; and perhaps when they would have
children. And when the grandchildren come, the worry
cycle starts again.
I guess my father had all these worries, too, maybe less
so in many ways than my mother had them. Yet, in a
way, he had far more control of things than I could ever
hope to have over my own children. If he didn’t want me
to go out to a party, to see Ian Fleming’s The Spy Who
Loved Me or any of Amitabh Bachchan’s hit movies, for
example, which I rarely did, he only needed to say the
word and, very often, that was that.
As a father today, however, if I don’t want my child to go
to a party, he could bring the party home by phone. And
if I don’t want him to go to the movie, he could watch
Netflix on a speed dial.
If I told him that too many bananas and sweets could
unleash the village masquerades on him, which was what
my mother told me obviously for my own good, he could
simply ask Google. And I’ve just been told that if I give my
son a timeout, thanks to the next big thing, Apple’s
Vision Pro, he could simply recreate his own new world
indoors.
I wasn’t a sheltered kid. Back in the day, my father was
happy to put my school “chop money” into my hand
every school day and off I went, either alone or with
other students, covering a distance of at least 25
kilometres to and from school through shortcuts and
winding street corners on foot. We didn’t have to worry
about kidnappers.
It’s a different world today. Being a father when my
children were much younger also meant being their
driver for school runs, popping up on Open Day and
fretting about what age they should get a phone, things
my father would have considered helicopter parenting.
Sometimes, being a modern-day father can feel like the
Chartterjees in the legal drama Mrs. Chartterjee Vs
Norway, only in the domestic sense, where your own
grown-up children take the place of the Norwegian
authorities.
Today’s children have a completely different code of how
they want their own children raised, nurtured and
treated, different from what your mother or father
taught you!
And increasingly, a number of them relate to you
differently. On this Father’s Day, for example, if you’re
nice, your son might even offer you a bottle of beer! The
mere thought of it would make my father turn in his
grave. I can almost hear him say, “this generation is done
for!” Is it?
Ishiekwene is Editor-In-Chief of LEADERSHIP