By Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D. Twitter: @farooqkperogi During my last six-minute phone conversation with my late father on December 28,...
By Farooq A. Kperogi,
Ph.D.
Twitter:
@farooqkperogi
During my last six-minute phone conversation with my late
father on December 28, 2016, he said something that was morbidly poignant.
When I told him not to talk as if his life was ending, he
said, “even if I die today, I would die a happy, fulfilled man because in you I
live. In your daughter whom you named after my mother, I live. In your son whom
you named after me, I live. In your siblings, I live. In the legacies I imparted
to you and that you’ll impart to your children, I live.”
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| Photo taken in the summer of 2009 when I visited home |
Two days later, he died peacefully surrounded by his wife,
children, and other well-wishers. In retrospect, he had come to terms with his
own corporeal mortality, but was buoyed up by his confidence in his incorporeal
immortality.
Six qualities defined my father: trust, truth, faithfulness,
kindness, hard work, and a deep aversion to superstition and ignorance. He ossified
these qualities in the names he chose for his first three children. His first
son, my older brother, is called (Al-) Amin, which is Arabic for the
trustworthy. My name, Farooq, is Arabic for one who distinguishes truth from
falsehood, and my younger brother is named Abdulmumin, which means servant of
the faithful. He told me the choice of the names was deliberate.
From our formative, impressionable years, he let us know the
meanings of our names and the importance he attached to the meanings. Through
his constant reminders of the moral burden of my name, he caused me to
internalize the imperative of truth-telling. I often “betrayed” my brothers by
telling our dad inconvenient truths about our childhood indiscretions that got
us into trouble with him.
My brothers used to
call me a treacherous chump who easily fell for our dad’s flattery. “Must you
always get us into trouble because you want to live up to daddy’s flattery that
you are truth teller?” they would say.
A compulsive urge to tell the truth, even if it’s against me,
or makes me unpopular and disliked, has become an inescapable part of me. Of
course, I would be making false claims to superhuman perfection if I said I
have never lied, but I always feel a deep, gnawing sense of philosophical and
existential unease when I knowingly lie or omit the truth.
I never knew my father to lie under any circumstance. I
recall that when I was growing up, people in my community thought my dad, being
a Malam, used to feed me on steady staples of mysterious,
intelligence-enhancing charms, called “faham”
(Arabic for “understanding”), which is believed in Muslim communities to
possess the capacity to make students excel in school. But my older and younger
brothers were average.
People came to him to ask him to give them the faham that he purportedly gave me. First,
he didn’t believe in that superstitious crap and he always told us that.
Second, he would tell the people that he had three boys all of whom he wanted
to excel in school. “Why would I give faham,
if it were real, to one and not the
others?”
When the requests became persistent and he got tired of
telling people that there was no such thing as faham, he asked us to write random Quranic verses on a wooden slate
with edible ink, wash it and save the water in a bottle. He asked the people
who asked for it to drink it, but on one condition: that they studied every day
or risk insanity. A couple of months later, a bunch of them came to tell him
their performance had improved in school and wanted to show gratitude by giving
him money.
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| Adam Kperogi and Adamu Kperogi--summer 2016 |
He politely declined their money and told them it was their
hard work of reading every day, and not the edible ink (or fahan) they drank, that caused the improvement in their grades.
“Any Malam who collects your money and tells you he can improve your class
performance by giving you faham is a
fraud. Such a belief has no basis in Islam,” he said.
I also recall a day when a Hausa preacher came to our town
to preach. A small crowd gathered. His sermons were translated by a Baatonu
translator. The man would read passages from the Qur’an in Arabic, translate
them into Hausa, go into elaborate exegeses, and his interpreter would
translate his Hausa translations into Baatonu. It turned out that he was just bullshitting.
There was no connection between the Quranic passages he read out in Arabic and
the Hausa translations he gave to them.
My dad spoke and wrote fluent Arabic and the Kumasi dialect
of Hausa, and told me the preacher was bullshitting. He went to the preacher
and spoke Arabic to him. The man didn’t understand Arabic. Then he spoke to him
in Hausa and told him he was mistranslating the verses. The man thanked him
nervously and abruptly ended the preaching. I was about 8 years old when this
happened, and it has endured in my memories to this day.
Another fond memory I cherish was the day he and I were
coming from the mosque when two men approached him and importuned him to give
them money. They said they hadn’t eaten all day. My dad was the kindest human
being I ever know. He would give his last penny to people in need. So he gave
the men all the money he had on him. “I don’t have a lot with me now, but I am
a salary earner and the month will end in a few days. You need this more than I
do,” he said.
As soon as the men left, we overheard their conversation in
hushed voices. “I told you this good luck charm is very efficient,” the man who
got the money said to the other. “The man brought out all that he had against
his better judgment!”
My dad intensely disliked and disdained sorcery, charms, and
all modes of superstitions. He knew that I had overheard the two men’s
conversations and might believe in the efficacy of charms, which he taught me
was fake. So he called the man he gave the money to. He put his hand in his
pocket and said the man should bring the money he had just given him. He said
he wanted to give him more.
When the man handed the money to him, my dad said, “I gave
you the money out of compassion. I thought you really needed it. I didn’t give
you because of your good luck charms. There is no such thing as a good luck
charm. Have a good day.”
My most cherished memory of him, though, is that he bought
me my first dictionary when he realized that I had tremendous interest in
language. He told me the dictionary contained the secret to understanding a
language. How true!
He was right that that even in death he lives.
Interestingly, after my children and I cried when I told them of their
grandfather’s passing, my son, Adam, consoled me by saying, “I’m Baa’s
replacement since you gave me his name.” I was overwrought with emotions.
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