UPDATED ‘ABOUT BLOGGER’ – Tola Adenle

By the way, this is the same ‘Me’ as the one in the ‘Profile’. TOLA.

I am a wife, mother of four, grandmother of six, dragged to blogging by one of her kids but has been helped by all. This blog is the result of a monster error on my old blog, emotanafricana.com.   You started a new blog due to a mistake on another blog? Yeah, because I could not sort the error out.

The Clan, Xmas 2011.

Eons ago before all of the above and before the Information Age, I was born at Iju, a small town in Southwestern Nigeria’s Ondo State where I spent my first twelve years of life in bucolic surroundings among zillions of siblings, cousins, close and distant relations many of whom I would not realize the relationships till well into adulthood.  My father planted cocoa and while I hated farm work, I have fond memories of those times: when the first of cocoa pods started ripening which meant the beginning of school’s “third term” – towards September which meant farm work only on Saturdays!

From top, then left, and right: Xmas 2009, 2010 – also to mark 40th wedding anniversary & Xmas 2011

Xmas 2013 clad in Xmas colors

I must have eaten tons of the cocoa beans at harvest times; we also loved to eat the dried ones; the taste of high-grade dark organic chocolate to which I still treat myself reminds me of that long ago dried cocoa bean taste.  When the work of cotton harvesting was a little behind us – my father planted a little of a few cash crops apart from the main cocoa farm – Easter, with all those beautiful hymns, was at hand.  You would not be wrong to guess I was a chorister.  While I might have hated farm work, I cannot remember actually hating to go to the farm as much because the farm ensured that we were never ones to be sent away for school fees even during the pre-Awolowo free education era when tuition was paid from the day one stepped into school.

At the village school, I loved the ordered and orderly environment: the hand-washing bowls – and towels – at the entrance to each class – Nigeria takes foreign grants and aids for such this oil boom era – the paths demarcated with rocks that are white-washed by the school boys, the school farm where groundnuts (peanuts) were planted and at harvest time, each kid got to take home what would be up to 2 lbs each, AND the flowers – crotons, bougainvilleas, rose perinwinkle, marigolds and bachelor’s button.  I also loved school, especially after discovering the world of books in the last year of elementary school, thanks to an older sister who was already in, perhaps, Nigeria’s second best-known girls’ school – St. Anne’s – who passed down  Jane Eyre.  The day of learning about a world I could not imagine, and an abiding interest in the novel form and writing, had begun.

Xmas 2013

I cannot figure it out to this day how or why because even though I hated the never-ending cycle of farm work, I do enjoy the hard work of gardening that goes into producing an environment that replicates (a little bit) my early life of seeing wild flowers on the way to the farm and in the farm.  There are few sights prettier than when our little cotton patches came to life clad in a sea of yellow flowers. The white buds of cotton amidst a field of dried out stalks and leaves in January were probably pretty but sights of them reminded me of the work of harvesting which left one itching that lay around the calendar corner.

That early life shaped who I am.

When my family lived in arid Las Vegas for several years, I would step out of the house and smell moisture so pungent on the very rare occasions when it rained and would announce assuredly and gleefully to my Significant Other who understood not such: “the rain’s going to fall; take that from a farmer’s daughter”, and it would within 24 hours!

Still about where I come from, I have been a teacher both at elementary and secondary (high) schools; a secretary at  British Petroleum, Lagos and the University of Ife, Nigeria – now Obafemi Awolowo University in the late 60s, and at the World Bank in the 70s; the designation at The Bank was a bit of a stretch, though as I was more of a go-fer who worked for food and my college tuition running errands around The Bank’s growing empire in several Washington, D.C. buildings apart from the Headquarters while spouse attended grad school.  There were also two babies who needed to be fed and nurtured!

I cut my journalism teeth at the Ibadan-based government-owned The Daily Sketch first as a National Service Youth Corper and then as a features writer before editing the Women Affairs pages. In July 1977, I founded Emotan, A Woman’s Magazine which I published and edited till 1985 before it was rested. I also edited technical material for a consulting firm at Vegas during the exile [Babangida] years.

A croton deviant – kitteh-pawz.deviantart.com

This is an ad-free blog except when I have a charity to promote.  I even pay a little amount to wordpress.com to keep ads out.  It is a leisurely hobby I graduated into to store my old newspaper weekly essays and now that I’ve used most of what I’d like to share beyond the Nigerian borders in the old blog, I work at this as I did for emotanafricana.com really hard – to keep the brain busy as well as to continue to have a ready outlet to share my thoughts on my favorite subjects.

I keep my blogs clean as regards’ readers’ comments; I take out those that are not. As I’m no fence sitter, I make my stands on issues very clear in the responses to most comments or the additions through lead-ins to posted essays not written by me.

In addition to publishing my own essays, I use a few contributions of those sent to me and in addition, I post stories from the web that I enjoy and would like to share. In all, my old blog has not less than 40% of the 1500+ postings I had in 3 1/2 years written by me. Pardon my being the one saying so –  not bad for an Info Highway Student Learner [BUT] whose driver’s license application stands no chance of ever being granted. Reason: I look out of the Beetle to change lanes not realizing the vehicles the kids and a few middle age drive have devices that show behind and surrounding vehicular activities right INSIDE their vehicles!

As can be noted, I love Yoruba’s Aṣọ Òkè, and I particularly love the very old ones of which I’m a lucky owner of a few.  In fact, the run-away winner of attracting the most views on emotanafricana.com was Yoruba Engagement Aṣọ Òkè which had more than 10,000 – ten thousand – and the category still continues to attract scores of views weekly even after the blog has gone to shelf.

Aso Oke is from the Yoruba of Southwestern Nigeria where my roots run deep in more than one state.  There are many pictures of me wearing various styles and weaves of the textile on the old blog.  Yoruba’s Aṣọ Òkè has many sub-categories in the old blog, including the three great Classics – Sányán, Àlàárì & Ẹtù. As can also be noted, I am no gèlè  (head tie)  specialist; I just run them around my head whichever way, and off I go.  In Yorubaland these days, there are “artists” outside event centers who, for a fee, would turn my type into stars!

To know more ABOUT me – what I’ve done, et cetera, please check out: emotanafricana.com. Welcome aboard if you are just discovering me, and to my old friends, thanks for taking my blogging to enjoyable heights for me.

TOLA ADENLE Ibadan, Nigeria, Thursday, September 9, 2014.

UPDATED:  November 7, 2014.

Check out my rested blog for more essays on Sports, Politics, Health, et cetera:   http://emotanafricana.com/

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 7, 2014.  10:a.m. [GMT]