Remi Ladigbolu/
Since his passing in the ill-fated Ethiopian Airlines flight on Sunday, March 10, on the way to Nairobi, Kenya, for a committee meeting of African Union’s Citizens & Diaspora Directorate from Addis Ababa, many have cited Professor Pius Adesanmi’s last column in the Nigerian Tribune, in which he gave a hint of what he would love to be remembered for, as biggest proof that he had a premonition of his own death.
For the records, Adesanmi, a Nigerian Canadian professor at Carleton University in Ontario and whose second book, a collection of essays entitled: “You’re Not a Country, Africa” (2011), received the inaugural Penguin Prize for African Writing in the nonfiction category, began writing the newspaper column, which he portentously named ‘Injury Time’, after a July 2018 auto accident that almost took his life during a visit to Nigeria. That experience appeared to have made more vivid to him the reality of his imminent transition.
The most quoted part of that prescient article, which was published a day before his death, reflectively reads: “Sadly, I think our people have been psychologically defeated and have come to accept and love these things about Nigeria. They turn on whoever tries to awaken them. Nigeria’s irresponsible rulers have us where they want us. I write basically these days for the purposes of archaeology. A thousand years from now, archaeologists would be interested in how some people called Nigerians lived in the 20th and 21st centuries. If they dig and excavate, I am hoping that fragments of my writing survive to point them to the fact that not all of them accepted to live as slaves of the most irresponsible rulers of their era.”
But, Pius, like a prophet that he was, had long before then predicted the manner that he would die, but not without fully accomplishing his earthly errands. And he did appear like a man racing against time (or death) to ensure that nothing was left undone.
Forget the superstitions of his Abiku-ness (a child destined to die prematurely) as he recounted in a 2009 article. Recalling the relentless efforts of his paternal grandmother to cleanse him of the scourge of Abiku-ness and ensure that he outlived his parents, Pius wrote: “My dad passed in 2007 but my paternal grandmother is still alive and kicking. We call her Mama Isanlu, the first person I go to see as soon as I arrive in the village on trips home. After all these years, Mama Isanlu still doesn’t trust her abiku grandson completely. You get a sense she feels she cannot afford to sleep with both eyes closed as far as my case is concerned, lest I pulled a fast one on everybody and return to the great beyond – as is the wont of my ilk……”
After falling on a body of snow in his compound and hurting himself badly in January 2017, Adesanmi had poignantly expressed a deep sense of realisation of his imminent death in an email to Mitterand Okorie, one of his numerous mentees and a doctoral fellow at the University of Kwazulu Natal, South Africa.
“I thought I’d ask if you have any news for me from SA? If there is no news from UJ, you have to start making preparations for Rhodes.
“On another note, I’d be lying if I said I haven’t found your lack of concern for my health painful. It is almost unbelievable. I’ve been battling this horrible knee injury since Boxing Day. It has kept me out of circulation for long periods of time. Not a single phone call. Not a single email or text to even ask how I am doing. The period of my recent long silence due to pain from the knee, everybody close to me was worried. I received calls, texts, emails, etc. Not a whimper from you.
“I am at an age now where I should be confident that should anything happen to me and I quit this realm eternally, somebody like you would go out of your way to find Tise and worry about her welfare,” Adesanmi portentously told Okorie, his friend and confidant.
But, the biggest testament to his unquestionable gift of prescience manifested at a workshop in 2013, where the participants were asked to inscribe their own epitaph in an uncanny exercise suggested by Nigerian writer, Chuma Nwokolo. In his own response, Adesanmi reportedly wrote: “Here lies Pius Adesanmi, who tried as much as he could to put his talent in the service of humanity and flew away home one bright morning when his work was over.”
It therefore appears it was no coincidence that it was on a bright Sunday morning, on March 10, at the airport in Addis Ababa that Adesanmi wrote a Facebook post, which turned out a final foretelling of his impending death. Referencing Psalm 139, he wrote: “If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost part of the sea, even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me.”
That same morning, after his task was done, Adesanmi, aged 47, mounted the wings of the Ethiopian Airlines Flight ET 302 to fly to his final abode.
Then came Chuma Nwokolo’s turn to mourn the man he had taken to task six years earlier.
“Beyond his indelible place in the hearts of family, his greatest life was lived on record, with an industry and perspicacity that a flaming jetliner cannot efface,” Nwokolo wrote in a tribute to his departed friend.
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