By Babafemi Ojudu
I HAVE been looking at this photograph, trying to remember what made us laugh. Was it a joke? An outrageous proposition? One of those arguments in which young journalists settle the problems of their country before remembering that they have yet to settle their own? I cannot recall. But the happiness is there, preserved more faithfully than memory: the open smiles, the animated hands, the easy familiarity of three young men enjoying one another’s company.
On the left is yours truly. In the centre is Sam Omatseye. On the right is Dele Momodu. Before the titles, before the public identities, before life scattered its responsibilities across our shoulders, there were these three young men. We had all graduated from the Faculty of Arts at the University of Ife, now Obafemi Awolowo University.
We were idealistic and vivacious, full of opinions and eager to put our education to work. We believed in the power of words. We were setting out to earn our living by them, and we hoped, perhaps with more confidence than experience justified, to make a difference.
At the time this photograph was taken, we were journalists at African Concord, owned by the late politician and businessman, Chief MKO Abiola. The magazine gave us work, a professional home and an opportunity to test ourselves. It was also during that period that Chief Gani Fawehinmi invited the three of us to write his biography. It was an assignment that brought together our friendship, our craft and our interest in the forces shaping our country. We undertook it with seriousness and candour, completed the work and handed him the manuscript.
Yet, to my knowledge, that biography has never seen the light of day. Why? I do not know. I can only speculate. But one explanation I would firmly reject is that it was poorly written. Certainly not! Even then, we could confidently lay claim to knowing our craft. We could write, and we understood that good writing had to stand on facts.
We brought those convictions to the assignment. I sometimes wonder where that manuscript is today. Perhaps it lies somewhere among old papers, gathering dust, holding within its pages both a record of Gani’s life and something of the minds of the three young journalists entrusted with telling it. Who knows? One day it may surface. If it does, it may yet contribute to the history of our country and its chequered struggle to establish democratic values. What remained unpublished in one season may find its readers in another. That, too, is part of the mystery of time. We do our work without always knowing when it will find its purpose, or whose hands will eventually receive it. Somewhere, perhaps, a manuscript from our youth is still waiting for its own future.
Our coming together at African Concord had its own story. I was the first of the three to get a job there, through the assistance of Mr Lewis Obi and Bayo Onanuga. We later helped facilitate the employment of Sam and Dele. Dele just then completed his masters and acquired fame by joining effort with Kunle Ajibade, his classmate, to unearth plagiarism by one of our very senior colleagues.
Looking back, I am grateful for that small chain of assistance. Some people helped me through a door, and we were able to help my friends through it. There is a lesson there that has stayed with me. When we remember our beginnings honestly, we usually find other people in the story: someone who recommended us, someone who took a chance on us, someone who recognised a possibility we had not yet had the opportunity to prove. Whatever we eventually make of ourselves, we should remember those early acts of generosity. And when the opportunity comes, we should extend them.
What strikes me about this photograph is how little of the future it reveals. There is nothing in it to tell us where each of us would go, what we would accomplish, what we would endure, or what convictions experience would strengthen or disturb. Sam would become Chairman of the Editorial Board of The Nation. Dele would establish Ovation, building a publishing identity recognised far beyond Nigeria. My own journey would take me through journalism, activism and public office. But none of those later chapters should be allowed to crowd the young men out of their own photograph. Here, we are simply friends and colleagues. Dele is making a point, his hands enlisted in the argument. Sam is smiling. I am laughing. For that moment, whatever occupied us was enough.
I wonder what we would have said if someone had shown us the lives ahead of us. Would we have been pleased? Astonished? Would we have recognised the older men we were to become? And what questions would those young men have put to us? That last thought gives me pause. Youth makes demands of the future. It expects courage, achievement and fidelity to principle. It assumes that the older person will have the means to do everything the younger person dreams of doing.
Age discovers the complications. It learns what courage costs, how many competing claims a day can contain, how difficult it can be to preserve a conviction when doing so carries consequences. Yet the young deserve a hearing. Their idealism can still call us to account. We owe those earlier versions of ourselves an honest explanation of how we have lived. Friendship, too, changes with time. In youth, it is sustained almost effortlessly by proximity: the same workplace, familiar routines, conversations that can continue tomorrow because tomorrow we will see one another again.
Later, keeping in touch requires intention. Work expands. Families grow. Journeys multiply. Public life can make private companionship harder to sustain. You may know what a friend has written, where he has travelled or what occasion he has attended, yet realise that it has been too long since you simply sat together and talked.
Old photographs make that distance visible. They remind us of a time when we knew one another without needing an appointment; when there was room for an argument to wander, for laughter to interrupt it, for nobody to be in a hurry to leave.
They also remind us to be generous in how we see old friends. A public identity can become so large that it obscures the person we first knew. Yet behind the titles and opinions remains someone with whom we once shared uncertainty, ambition and the daily business of finding a place in the world. Remembering that does not require us to agree on everything. It asks us to retain a sense of the whole person.
There is tenderness in looking at our younger faces. We knew so little of what awaited us, and our ignorance gave us a certain freedom. We could laugh without carrying all the memories we carry now. I would not wish to surrender everything experience has taught me. But I would gladly borrow, for an afternoon, some of the lightness in this photograph. I would like to hear that conversation again. To discover what Dele was explaining with such animation, what Sam found amusing, and what had opened my face into that smile.
The photograph cannot give me the words. It has kept something else: evidence that, amid the work and the ambition, we were happy together. That is worth remembering. And it is worth acting upon while there is still time to pick up the telephone, arrange a visit and give an old friendship another afternoon.
For now, I look at these three young men and smile back.
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