D’Rovans and the vanity of life, By Festus Adedayo

At the height of its glory, D’Rovans Hotel in Ibadan, Oyo State, stood like the Chappal Waddi. Standing 2419 metres or 7996 feet above sea level, this mountain, infamously nicknamed the Mountain of Death, near the Cameroon border, in Taraba State, is said to be the highest in West Africa. D’Rovans shares that colossal legend. In top-tier hospitality and as a hub of entertainment and luxury, its fame rose tremendously in the 80s and 90s.

The zenith of its glory however came on 26-27 January, 1999. As the political history of Fourth Republic Nigeria was getting ready to be incubated, fate, in its elegant cursive, wrote D’Rovans into its script. Mindful of the historical role of Ibadan as the city where Immortal Obafemi Awolowo curated those eponymic developments of the First Republic, the feet of the egg-heads of politics, the Aworosasa of the Alliance for Democracy (AD) gathered in Ibadan. By midnight of 27 January, the South-West would lose its deposit, having been unanimously favoured to preside over Nigeria by the exiting military big-epaulettes, if the AD failed to submit the name of its presidential candidate to INEC.

Twenty three electors gathered in D’Rovans. I was there all through the night as a reporter. The electoral college comprised the ‘wise men’ who would determine the fates of Arole Awolowo, Chief Bola Ige and his rival, Chief Olu Falae. The aftermath of the decision to choose Falae and vote out Ige, as significant as it was for D’Rovans, also made the hotel the locus inquo, the place where the seed of the discord in Southwest politics was sown. Thus, it is impossible to write the history of the fictionalisation of Western Nigeria politics in this Republic, the rancour that subsists therein even till today, without a mention of D’Rovans. Afterall, my people say it is impossible to collate the process of turning the head of a dog into a delectable cuisine without mentioning the pot with which it was cooked.

Recently, viral videos, anchored by bloggers, have feasted on the ruins that D’Rovans has turned into. In the bloggers’ narrative, today, the majestic D’Rovans has caved in. Transiting from its franchise name, at a time, D’Rovans became known as Wallan Hotel. As the hive is home to bees, the deep sea the domicile of sharks, and the lair is palace of wild animals, this hotel was also haven for the rich and famous. Lodging at D’Rovans was an emblem of high society. It was out of example for any guest of note to the headquarters of southwest Nigeria to hibernate anywhere other than D’Rovans. It had panache, fame and majestic aura that stood it out, relative to its time. The brainchild of Edo-State born former Nigerian boxer, businessman and engineer, Francis Aiyegbeni, by the time of Aiyegbeni’s passing in 2016, D’Rovans was under the receivership of AMCON, which sold the hotel, purportedly for ₦340 million, to offset debt owed a bank. Its recent owner has just brought boulders into its premises, reducing a once magnificent hospitality haven into rubbles and dusts.

The bloggers also laced their narratives on the grandeur and death of D’Rovans with nuggets about the hopelessness and vanity of life. In the process, they attempted to make a synedoche of the hotel’s mutation from glory to ruins. A literary device, synedoche uses the small part of a thing to represent the whole, or vice versa. The video interrogates the question, can an object like the hotel summarise life in its entirety? Put differently, can a small life occurrence approximate whole existence? Can the transmutation from glory to ruins, life to death of D’Rovans represent the life we live? 

Talking about a part representing a whole, I am reminded of the life of Zimbabwean novelist, playwright, poet and short story writer, Dambudzo Marechera. His magnum opus book, The House of Hunger, is considered a huge chip off his distorted life. The preachings in Marechera’s is almost synonymous with late reggae music great, Jimmy Cliff’s House of Exile. In it, James Chambers (his real name) attempted to philosophize the vanity of life. He sang, “There’s a day of feasting and a day of famine/Day of sadness and a day of joy/You could see in the day of feasting/Life isn’t just a little play-like toy/So your day arrived when you least expected/’Cause you always thought you were well protected/Now you feel like a fish out of water/So now you’re wondering what’s the matter/Oh remember you said it wouldn’t happen to you last mile/…Everything in creation must obey a law/It’s true in words as it is in deed”.

Dambudzo was child of Shona ethnic nationality parents. His father was a mortuary attendant and mother, a maid. The violence, racial discrimination, his personal struggles with poverty, displacement, and mental health issues of colonial Rhodesia took a toll on his mentality. As he wrote about a body and spirit exiled from the land and the self in this iconic book, Dambudzo draws heavily on his personal history which was interpreted through the protagonist’s voice and the themes in the book.

Like the protagonist in the The House of Hunger, Dambudzo also lived an aimlessly wandering life defined by madness and brutality. As a pupil in Penhalonga, he was renowned for being very dirty and violent, always clashing with his teachers. Expelled from the University of Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, at the New College, Oxford where he began his student life all over, he also faced expulsion for his violence, academic dereliction and unsociable behaviour. Indeed, The House of Hunger was a metaphor for the tumult of his upbringing and life in general. The book won the 1979 Guardian Fiction Prize and Marechera became the first and only African to win it in its 33 years. He instantly earned celebrity status in the English literary circle. This was however eclipsed by his recourse to constant outrage. For instance, while the buffet dinner for the Prize award was ongoing, Dambudzo, unprovoked, relapsed into a tantrum, flinging dining plates at a chandelier. 

In Oxford, Dambudzo’s erratic behaviour was diagnosed as schizophrenia. On many occasions, he threatened to murder some people and set Oxford university on fire. He lived a troubled life and was in 1977 sent to the Cardiff prison for possessing marijuana. He later returned to his native Zimbabwe in 1982, to live a homeless life. He died in Harare in 1987 from an AIDS-related pneumonia at age 35.

As Dambudzo’s The House of Hunger was a picture of the totality of the dirty life and vagabond existence of its author, in what way does D’Rovans pose a lesson of life or picture of the life of perishable man? If we look at the transmutation of the hotel to what it is now, can we look at it with the lens of an elder’s eyes? Can D’Rovans pass for the Àgídìgbo, a traditional drum of Yoruba origin? The Àgídìgbo is a large, thumb piano box famously associated with Apala music genre. Though subtle in rhythm, Àgídìgbo’s drumbeat is proverbial. From it exudes words of wisdom. As it oozes metaphor and ancient sayings of our forefathers, like a speech surrogate, it conveys messages beyond just rhythm. It must be why it is said that the rhythm of Àgídìgbo comes in proverbial melodies. Only the wise (ológbón) can wag their buttocks to its melody and anyone but the discerning (òmò’ràn) can truly penetrate its cryptic message.

Let us try to use D’Rovans to explain the futility of human goals, the transience of the project of living, and the vanity of this world. Can it also be used to explain despair? The philosophy of despair asks questions like, what is the ultimate goal of life? Is life a futile, meaningless venture, an undertaking without any positive good or worth? If this is so, why then do we come to this world? If we were not privy to the process of being here, can’t we be privy to the process of exiting it midstream? In other words, is suicide justified?

Existential philosophers are at the fore of this enquiry into the life of vanity and the purpose of life. They agree that life is actually devoid of any inherent meaning or purpose. This submission on the vanity of life, they say, often pushes man to a feeling of absurdity or futility. One of its leading advocates, Algerian philosopher, Albert Camus, argues that we can however make meaning out of life by living it fully and creatively, thereby making its meaninglessness meaningful. However, rather than allow despair define life, existentialists canvass that we should get life’s meaninglessness to push us to embrace absolute freedom, create our own subjective values and define our existence the way we want it. To existentialists, suicide is cowardice and forbidden.

By using the illustration of the Myth of Sisyphus, of a man who pushes the boulder from the foot of a hill upwards and downwards daily, Camus indicates that we can create our escape route from the meaninglessness of this universe. This is also called existential nihilism. It is almost of the same persuasion with futilism, which also holds that life is ultimately meaningless. Sartre, the foremost existentialist, says this in his Being and Nothingness where he wrote that, “Man is a useless passion”. While a futilist says life is meaningless, Sartrean existentialists believe that our life is absurd. We must thus recognize this grim fact of the absurdity of our lives.

One missing screw that the Creator left on the lever of life is that joy is not absolute for humanity. Hardly can any man be joyful from morning till evening. In the midst of this, pain and pleasure define our lives. Hedonists say that the pursuit of pleasure over pain is the most desirable, but utilitarians say, getting either of the two –pleasure or pain – is a reward or punishment for our actions. 

Life and death, growth and withering are two inseparable parts of human life. I remember my Editor on the Tribune’s Political Desk, Bisi Abidoye, over two decades ago, once retorted that, without those vanities, life would not be life. It is what D’Rovans signifies. No creation can avoid the vanities of life. It should then ordinarily teach man to live right since no one will leave life alive. Realising the futility of existence and all human endowments and acquisitions, we should rather define the confines and boundaries of a good life that we want to live. No one can define it for you. How can we live a good and ethical life? Danish philosopher, Soren Kiekergaard, said that a life lived to serve others, one devoted to universal moral principles, is a life well lived. He asked that all human actions should be geared towards the common good and prioritising the betterment of the whole over the self.

In his The House of Hunger, Marechera emphasised the emptiness and despair that define existence. “Life,” he wrote, “stretched out like a series of hunger-scoured hovels stretching endlessly towards the horizon.” In another, he wrote, “The lives of small men are like spiders’ webs; they are studded with minute skeletons of greatness.”

All these suggest that the life lived for acquisition sake is an empty life. It is why, when you see Nigerian politicians enveloped in an orgy of acquisition, what you see is sickness of the mind. Delineate the boundary of when enough is enough in this empty life. When you do this, by the time you wither and pine away like the magnificent edifice of D’Rovans, you would rest happy that you lived a good life.

Soludo’s Emergency Laurel

The governor of Anambra State, Chukwuma Soludo, is currently earning his epaulettes the wrong way. Surrounded by accolades and garlands, I wonder if he realises that the honorific hung around him is second fiddle?

Recently, Soludo stormed the Onitsha Main Market. In his characteristic guttural, he articulated his government’s resolve to stop the Monday Sit At Home. On the 8th of August, 2021 when it began, the sit-at- home met me in my Upper Chime apartment in Enugu, Enugu State. It was one of the craziest things I had ever seen. The fear of the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) which decreed it as protest for the incarceration of Nnamdi Kanu was the beginning of wisdom. Even goats and hens feared to walk the streets on Mondays.

However, months morphed into years and the craziness of the exercise became very glaring to even the blind. This weekly lockdown began to take its toll on the economy of a people known all over the world for their commerce and industry. It resulted in widespread disruption of academic activities, transportation and businesses. Choosing Mondays, a sacred business opening day, was a further testament that it forebode evil. It was almost like desecrating the Eke market day in Igboland. Market days are associated with creation, trade and commerce, as well as renewal in Igbo cosmology. One of the four market days in the Igbo traditional calendar, the Eke is the Diokpara Ubochi – the first born – of the other market days which are the  Orie, Afọ, Nkwọ. Choosing that day as the day to idle away was almost like sacrificing a first son. On the Eke sacred day, an Igbo connects with his Chi – personality.

So, for five good years, the Igbo could not connect with their personality. Unfortunately, the man who was in the saddle when the sit-at-home was declared, Muhammadu Buhari, was too deaf to the humanity of the southeast and its people to bother about the self-destruction that underlined it. He had earlier called them a dot in a circle. Economies of Ndigbo thereafter stagnated, leading to businesses relocating to neighbouring Delta State where there existed greater sanity.

But, thank God, reason prevailed and IPOB itself announced its cancelation recently. However, the aim of this piece is to remove the emergency medallion Soludo seems to be wearing. If it also removes from his shoulders the patent for the epaulettes of a supposed bravery of stopping the sit-at-home malady that adorn his shoulders, I will be glad.

About three years ago, I was again in the Coal City. My visit coincided with Enugu State government’s resolve to stop the Monday sit-at-home. As articulated in a broadcast to his people, Dr Peter Mbah, the governor, said it was an anathema. At this time, Simon Ekpa was like a mascot, enjoyed widespread notoriety and it was almost a self-immolation for any South-East leader to think up the idea of stopping the Monday nonsense. Not only did Mbah breast the death tape, his bravery to dare the dreaded IPOB rebounded round the region.

Coming from the corporate world and being a businessman, Mbah told the world that what he had in mind for Enugu State’s economy could never be achieved by an atmosphere enveloped by fear of attacks from non-state actors. In partnership with the National Security echelon in Nigeria, the very first day he began the Operation No To sit-at-home was acrid in the state. There were pushbacks from Ekpa and his notorious cells of evil. Death threats for the governor and his lieutenants hovered in the firmament. Mbah was resolute and determined. Civil servants immediately complied. Corporate organisations connected to his decisive grits and in less than a month, the seemingly impregnable walls of the anti-development sit-at-home collapsed in Enugu State.

I’m writing this because, answering to Nigerians’ selective and short memory, Soludo must be the new kid on the block who patented this bravery. Mbah patented the rout. Already, Soludo is being garlanded for this “unusual bravery”. The truth is that, long before Soludo woke up to the destructive virus parceled for the Southeast by its internal enemies, one man rose like a matador to stomp on the vermin. To its death. Peter Ndubuisi Mbah is his name.  

Festus Adedayo is an Ibadan-based journalist.