Thread by @RevYinkaAdeleke

THE POWER OF A GODLY HERITAGE
One of the best gifts that God gave me in this life is the gift of blessing me with excellent parents. Now I know that most people think their parents are the best thing since sliced bread, but mine were truly exceptional.
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My Dad, Adebayo Atanda Adeleke came from very humble beginnings, a gifted child with limited opportunities who grew up on a farm around Oyo Town. His big break in life came when one of his uncles came to visit and saw that he was not going to school at the age of 12 years.
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It was this uncle who took him back with him to Offa in Kwara State and sent him to primary school at that age. My father was not just the oldest in his class, but the poorest (I remember him showing me his class picture and he was the only one without shoes).
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Against all odds, he went through primary school and modern school and then proceeded to Niger Baptist College, Minna, where he was trained as a teacher. There he converted to Christianity (he was from a Muslim home) and also met his future wife.
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Their college romance blossomed into marriage and God blessed them with 4 boys, of which I am the last. He worked in different duty posts until he was transferred to Iseyin in 1985 where he worked and lived until his retirement.
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My father was not a religious man.
After converting to Christianity, he was a practising Baptist for some years until he got tired of the "religious" part of Christianity and simply stopped going to church (except on special occasions like Christmas or New Year's Day).
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When our mum was attending the Cherubim Seraphim Church, he attended only sparingly and often had critical things to say about the church and their conduct. He criticised the practices. He criticised the prayers. He criticised the lifestyle.
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This continued for many years until Mum joined CAC Oke-Ayo and started trying to convince us all to join her there. Dad was initially resistant to her overtures as he saw all churches as pretty much the same. But he eventually yielded and tried it a few times...
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...and found the church suitable to his taste. So he started going more regularly until he rededicated his life to Christ there, and eventually became a Sunday School Teacher, a Counsellor and one of the pillars of the church community.
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But he was still never a religious man.
He always criticised a life of overt piety ("carrying Jesus on your head" as he used to describe it) as being nothing more than using Jesus to cover bad behaviour.
However, he was a good man!
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He was a very morally upright man.
He was a man of extreme integrity and brutal honesty.
He hated hypocrisy and pretence and was a man of deep and abiding values. Most of the values I hold dear today were values I imbibed from him.
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He was an extremely diligent man and a lover of hard work (he would always say in Yoruba, "labour does not kill, it is a refusal to labour that makes you go hungry").
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Apart from being a teacher, he was also a farmer. He farmed our compound and all 4 pieces of land that surrounded our compound, in addition to another 2 large farms that were like an hour's walk each from our house. He farmed almost everything we ate - yams, cassava...
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...maize, vegetables, peppers of different kinds, tomatoes, etc. We made our own Garri, Fufu, Ogi, and so on. We kept chickens and goats, so we didn't have to buy eggs and only sparingly bought meat.
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He was also a great husband to our Mum and a wonderful father to me and my siblings. He was a man who, to give our Mum opportunities to rest, would cook, clean, do the laundry and take care of the children and the home. He was always the last to go to bed...
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...and the first to get up in the morning to help us get the day started (fetching water, boiling water for us to bathe, getting breakfast started, etc.) He modelled to his boys that there is nothing like "a woman's job", men are also supposed to do chores.
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Despite all that, he was also a stern disciplinarian!
He never brooked nonsense from any of us.
His favourite scripture was Proverbs 22:15... "Foolishness is bound up in the heart of a child; The rod of correction will drive it far from him."
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Yet, he was also intensely loving, down to heart, and quick to apologize if he got something wrong. He was extremely funny and approachable and was a father figure to many in our community.
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He was also a man of great intellectual heft, a lover of knowledge, a man of broad learning spanning multiple fields and a bookworm; my love and admiration for him contributed heavily to my intellectual disposition and scholarly inclination from an early age.
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There's a lot more I could say about my father, but the truth is that I would not be half the man that I am today if not for his influence on my life throughout the 34 years we shared on this earth. Tomorrow, I will talk about my mother...
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...but today, Day 29 of #40DaysOfGratitude towards my 40th birthday, I am grateful to God for the gift of a godly heritage that I have enjoyed in life, embodied in my parents, Adebayo Atanda Adeleke and Felicia Adefunke Adeleke.

© Adeyinka J. Adeleke
08/05/2024
Ibadan Nigeria

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