Remembering Rachel: Ojo Onukaba’s Taj Mahal to his late wife

Dr. Adinoyi Ojo Onukaba, former star reporter of The Guardian and informed commentator, playwright, consummate PR practitioner and drama/communication teacher, belongs to the small tribe of accomplished writers for whom the art and science of writing is in their blood. For that rare breed, any material, incident or event in their life or in the […]

Dr. Adinoyi Ojo Onukaba, former star reporter of The Guardian and informed commentator, playwright, consummate PR practitioner and drama/communication teacher, belongs to the small tribe of accomplished writers for whom the art and science of writing is in their blood. For that rare breed, any material, incident or event in their life or in the lives of others, whether good or bad, can become a good source for writing even a best seller thriller. They can turn some arcane subject; an innocuous incident that may not have been noticed by even the keenest of observers; a sad or traumatic personal event or an intense private grief into a must read piece. This is true of his self-published book Remembering Rachel.
If this book had been written in the 16th or 17th century when the vogue then was to have long explanatory titles for books which sort of summarises the theme, it would probably have been titled Seven Years of Pure Marital Bliss: An Interesting Account by the husband himself of The Remarkably Short But Immensely Enjoyable Marriage Life of Dr. Adinoyi Ojo Onukaba to former Miss Rachel Ogirri whom He Married on October 12, 2002 and who died of Cerebral Malaria in Abuja August 29, 2009 at the National Hospital, Abuja in the hands of sloppy, callous and unprofessional care givers.
The 290-page coffee table book is an unputdownable account of his fairy tale love affair with his late delectable wife Rachel Ogirri. So gripping is the account of the love of his life that when I started reading it in Abuja on my way to Katsina State by road recently, I did not put it down until I finished it a few kilometres to Zaria in Kaduna State about three hours later.
Renowned scientist Albert Einstein’s humorous definition of his famous theory of relativity is that ‘’if you sit on the lap of a pretty lady for one hour, it looks like a second and if you sit on a hot stove for one minute it looks like an hour’’. Onukaba’s seven years with Rachel looks like seven seconds and he shows the extreme pain of his loss in the book. Every sentence in the book about Rachel oozes with the author’s passionate love for her.
You get the feeling that if it were possible to bring Rachel back, Onukaba would have done anything to achieve that goal.
The book is written to achieve three main goals. To celebrate a life well lived with Rachel. Two, to mourn her loss.
Three, to lament the decay in our healthcare system as reflected in the poor attitude of medical professionals at the nation’s supposed number one medical institution, the National Hospital Abuja, whose conduct the author suspects may have contributed to the death of Rachel.
The author says the book is his own kind of Taj Mahal to Rachel and that is no idle talk. Rachel dominates the book from the beginning to the end. She is the heroine and no one shares that glory with her. She is the centre of the universe of the Onukaba household and a major planet in the milky highway of the Robert Ogirri family of Ayua-Uzaire in Etsako West Local Government Council of Edo State. Henrietta, Ethel, Oshioke and the author himself feature prominently and may be described as some of the main characters in the book but the story is
Rachel’s. Every incident remembered and remarked upon in the book is told in relation to Rachel.
The book is divided into 15 chapters each with a short, usually two-word heading and each ending with Rachel. Well planned and produced, every other page is splashed with a full page photograph of Rachel which tells a story of her beauty, her dress sense, an aspect of her life and character and a trajectory in her short but remarkable life. It is not in any way, as the author modestly claims, a modest tribute; it is indeed a monumental literary memorial to love.
Adopting the breezy, readable, racy and thrilling style he and Dele Olojede had once used in writing Born to Run, the biography of the late Dele Giwa, Onukaba in spite of the enormous pain in his heart, writes a gripping account of his meeting, marrying and living happily after, albeit for only seven short years, with Rachel. It all started with a prophecy. The ill-fated marriage was foretold by a diviner in far-away Iraq. “Towards the end of 1998’’, Onukaba narrates, “Shilan, an Iraqi Kurdish young woman with whom I was in a relationship, had lured me into the home of a Chaldean Christian woman diviner in the northern Iraqi city of Erbil’’.
She had brought Onukaba who was then working with the United Nations in Iraq to the Chaldean to know if he was the man she will eventually get married to.
The diviner studied the coffee sediments in an empty cup she had poured and foretold that Shilan and Onukaba will not go far in their relationship. That Onukaba would return to Nigeria and go through a disastrous brief marriage before meeting the woman he is destined to marry.
“Sometimes in April 2002, I was seated in my office in Ikeja. Lagos, when a tall, beautiful lady in black suit and trouser walked in to interview me for a story she had been assigned to write. At the risk of sounding corny, I knew immediately that she was the figure the Chaldean seer had seen in the coffee sediments and had described to me so vividly’’, Onukaba writes. “She is tall, very tall and beautiful.
You will be sitting somewhere and she will walk up to you’’, Onukaba said the Chaldean had added.
Two things stand out about this book. The first is that in spite of the fact that the account is written as a part of mourning a very painful loss, it is, in many places, full of hilarious scenes and recollections.
In the chapter Courting Rachel (page 56-67), the author recounted with some self-deprecating honesty and humour his first time to be formally introduced to Rachel’s family members.
“When she first spoke to her family about me, some members expressed concern over the wide age difference between us. Rachel was then 25 and I was 42. Some said age was not an issue. They wanted to know if Rachel was sure she was making the right choice. She said yes.’’
Wise beyond her years, as her husband described her in another tribute, Rachel took to coaching her intended husband about what to do, say and wear in order to disguise or minimize the age gap.
Onukaba himself tells us: “Agbada was ruled out completely so as not to make me look too old. A simple Senegalese-style jumper was picked out for me. I was ordered to get a haircut and to trim my moustache. First impression, I was told, matters a whole lot. I had to make myself likeable’’.
“Love can make a stubborn man suddenly become obedient and submissive’’.
No matter how stout-hearted you are even as an Afro macho man, you will shed a tear or two in several places when you get to chapters 10, 11, 12 and 13 which are titled Ailing Rachel, Losing Rachel, Probing Rachel’s Death and Burying Rachel respectively. In these, he narrates the trauma he went through in the hands of doctors and other supposed healthcare providers at the various hospitals he had to go to treat Rachel and the white wash a medical panel set up by the Federal Government to probe Rachel’s suspicious death had made of their assignment obviously to protect their colleagues.
It began with a prophecy and, it seemed, it all ended with a prophecy.
For me, the most chilling of the account of the life, times and death of Rachel by her husband is contained in chapter 14 titled Prophetic Rachel. Onukaba said that soon after Rachel’s death, he found an unpublished short story entitled The Sacrifice of Love written by her in one of her drawers. In it, Rachel tells the story of a young girl who was sold by her poor, selfish parents to a rich man she did not love. She ran away from him into the waiting arms of her high school sweet-heart only to die from the gunshot wounds she received while defending the boy from hired assassins sent by the scorned rich lover.
This story appears to prophecy Rachel’s death by Rachel herself and left what looks like an advice in form of a poem When I Must leave You by Helen Steiner Rice perhaps telling her widowed husband: ‘’And for my sake and in my name/ Live on and do all the things you used to do before’’.
The dubbing of Rachel by a Lagos pastor as an ‘’Innocent Lamb’’ and the content of her own unpublished story The Sacrifice of Love leave a lot of intriguing questions hanging in the air. Was Rachel a child of destiny specially designed to accomplish a particular yet to be unraveled assignment? Was she destined to live briefly and extinguish like a candle in the wind, leaving all those who loved and cherished her devastated forever?