ZAINAB MUSA KPEROGI: WE ALL MUST BE STRONG
Working from a three bedroom office on Alkali Road which is located in a rather select area of Kaduna, it was inevitable that some kind of bonding would develop. What emerged then was the crystallization of the entire group into one small but formidable family that was united in one goal: to produce a readable […]
Working from a three bedroom office on Alkali Road which is located in a rather select area of Kaduna, it was inevitable that some kind of bonding would develop. What emerged then was the crystallization of the entire group into one small but formidable family that was united in one goal: to produce a readable newspaper every Friday, take half of the day off on Saturday and resume the same tasking routine on Sunday. Zainab was a reporter at the time, and I was given the honour of being designated a senior writer.
But those nomenclatures hardly mattered because on Monday mornings when the paper is reviewed, you are only as good as the output you contributed; and God help you if you were caught breaking any of the numerous and sometimes, senseless basic rules that govern the English language. You would be the butt of all jokes for the rest of the week, until everybody is once again caught up in the frenzy of the next production circle, and the only thing that mattered was how to avoid being the next Mudi (dunce) of the next editorial conference.
I watched Zainab during that period closely and was struck by three things: a musical air about her that she probably wasn’t aware of; her impeccable grasp and mastery of the English language; and the patience and diligence with which she handled every task assigned to her. Oddly enough, her closest rival in the way she understood and did her job as a journalist was the young man who turned out to be her husband and father of her three children, Farooq Adamu Kperogi, who was as cheeky as he was brilliant. Zainab sang and danced at everything that caught her fancy, indifferent to who was watching—or who was jealous. That lively and playful exterior masked a very strong, determined and extremely competent young woman who had arrived at the 21st century some years ahead of her peers; this because even though she had the liberty to do as she pleased, Zainab chose to live the life of the ideal Muslim young woman . She wore her Muslim garb proudly without being extreme, without pretentions and was at home with others regardless of their religious or tribal affiliations.
By the time their romance became an open secret in the office, everybody knew that the pair of Zainab Musa and Farooq Adamu Kperogi couldn’t have been better matched. At some point, the two had done a story jointly, a survey actually, which they headlined “Why journalists don’t marry each other”. Perhaps, it was a private joke between them, which they decided to enjoy at the expense of the rest of us, their colleagues, because shortly after that ironically prophetic report, the two announced their engagement. They got married sometimes in 2002, thereby disproving the result of their own survey report.
By the time they became husband and wife, between them, Farooq and Zainab had contributed immensely to making the Weekly Trust a respected weekly newspaper that many people looked forward to every Friday. As a former editor of that newspaper, it is impossible to quantify Zainab’s contributions to that paper and to the subsequent titles. We were all indebted to her in more ways than we can recall; she corrected our errors and we took the credit for a job well done. No piece of writing ever passed through Zainab’s patient and thorough professional intervention without her raising it to a standard often far above the level the original author could ever hope to attain. It never mattered to her that she was burnishing someone else’s image and professional career; she did what was needed to be done almost compulsively, occasionally raising her voice to say how tedious it was to have to correct other people’s blunders.
It was little wonder then that when she eventually started a column of her own in the Weekly Trust, which she creatively called Femme Point, it was an instant hit. Although she wrote about women and children issues and only occasionally veering off into more conventional political matters, she wrote with feeling and sincerity that attracted readers of all classes and gender. She was the kind of person who could be described as speaking the way she wrote, or writing the way she spoke.
I recall one particular brief conversation I had with Zainab which had such huge impact on my life. She had just returned from her first maternity leave after giving birth to Hauwa, or Sinani as they fondly call her. I asked her how it felt to be a mother. She said: “If my mother were alive, I would kneel down and kiss her feet everyday. It is now that I understand what mothers go through”.
I was completely taken aback because it was not the kind of response I had expected. I had expected Zainab to be either coy, or excited. But in her characteristic manner, Zainab was giving me one of the most useful pieces of information I had ever come across. At the time Zainab illuminated my mind with that priceless piece of philosophical revelation, my own mother was still alive and my wife had just given birth to our second child, Zulaihat. That night when I returned home from work, I looked at my wife with new understanding, a new and greater respect. I became more active trying to help her cope with the children; I became more tolerant of her shortcomings. She is struggling to be mother to somebody.
As for my mother, with whom I had always had the best possible relationship, what Zainab told me simply consolidated that relationship in a way that I cannot explain. I could not possibly kiss my mother’s feet, but the Qur’anic verse that admonishes Muslims to be kind to their parents and never to raise our voice when we speak to them suddenly became clearer; Zainab had interpreted to me that Qur’anic injunction in a way no preacher had been able to do.
Such was Zainab: candid, intelligent and in the words of one of her closest friends, Zainab Okino, a person “who did not have an iota of wickedness in her”. One other quality about her had been her endurance. Among the people listed above as the pioneer staff of the Trust newspapers, she was the only one who remained with the company at the time of her death. That, in itself, is a testimony to the perception that she had within her a capacity for tolerance that all of us didn’t have.
Farooq, her husband, would need a lot of strength; but he is tough and I believe God will give him the strength to pull through. After all, Zainab did not just walk away without a trace; she left behind three lovely children. When Adam was born about three months ago, Farooq had sent me a text message at 1.00am Nigerian time saying “My wife has just given birth to a baby boy and I am told that he is my carbon copy”; to which I replied, “ I hope the carbon copy includes your brains”. We laughed over that. Today, we are grieving over our loss. That is the normal graph of life. Neither joy nor grief lasts forever, though it might take a while and a lot of efforts to get over some moments of trials.
We hope and pray for Zainab to rest in perfect peace; we also pray for God to nourish her children and provide them a replacement that only He can provide.