Olusegun Adedipe, GPC Student

Uncle Tunde

When I was a child, there was nothing as amusing as listening to those nightly tales as told by Uncle Tunde Adedipe. He would sit in the midst of my siblings and me outside his house under the dull but beautiful moonlight, turning side to side on his old rusty wheel chair as he narrated the story of the evening. Several sets of big brown eyes followed his every move and we held our breath on his every pause, waiting for his next words.  Even after his untimely death, the memory lingers on in my mind as I reminisce on the lessons I learned from the many stories he told us. One day, out of curiosity, I asked him about how he became paralyzed. He wrinkled his brow and after a prolonged silence he gazed at me, took a loud but deep breath, and said “Olu, it is a long story.” He told us a shocking story that was to be his last; he died mysteriously three days later. This last story was and still is the most educational story I have ever heard.

This story happened in Lagos immediately after the civil war in Nigeria in the 1970’s. After six long years of merciless civil war, Lagos became the commercial nerve center of the country. Like most adults my uncle moved to Lagos with two of his childhood friends, Tayo and Kunle in search of greener pastures. They lived together in a three-bedroom apartment. Likewise, they worked together as craftsmen in a foreign construction company about ten miles away from where they lived. Because they were very intimate, people actually thought they were blood brothers.

This intimacy crumbled when they thought they had finally found their fortune. One fateful day as they wandered around one of the abandoned roads in their neighborhood, they stumbled onto a huge tattered bag by the side of the road. My uncle was the first to see it. Suspecting it might contain something valuable, he hesitated for a while before bringing it to his friends’ attention. Tayo eagerly reached for the bag and unzipped it. They opened their mouths but no words came out for seconds. They were amazed by the quantity of neatly packed bills in the bag. They agreed to take the money home to decide on what to do with it.

When they got back to their apartment that evening Tayo and Kunle insisted that it was Uncle Tunde’s turn to ensure that dinner was served after which they would take care of the money. Sensing a hidden agenda, he crafted his own plan and decided to go to one of the nearby restaurants to order some food. On his way back from the restaurant with the food, he planned to get rid of his friends and take full ownership of the money they were to share. He stopped at a nearby convenience store, bought a box of rat poison and carefully sprinkled some into the bowls of soup he bought for his friends. Meanwhile, after he was gone Tayo and Kunle conspired to get rid of him when he returned from the restaurant.

When Uncle Tunde got back with the food, his nervousness turned into a rude awakening as his beloved friends attacked him as soon as he entered the kitchen. They beat him with a big metal bar and stabbed him several times until he slipped into a coma. Taken for dead, they dragged his body into the woods behind the house. When he regained consciousness, he managed to crawl to a narrow footpath in the woods. A passerby eventually found him there during the early hours of the following morning. Based on his confessional statement to the local police, the bodies of his two friends were found lying dead on the floor of the kitchen in their shared apartment. They had eaten the poisoned food my uncle brought for them with no remorse. Uncle Tunde was consequently sentenced to life imprisonment, but was released after twenty-five years for good and exemplary conduct.

I was indeed very shocked to hear that the uncle I cherished was a felon! To me Uncle Tunde was an old man with smiling eyes and a kind for everyone.  I viewed life with contempt, and the air around me was full of disappointments. After he passed I came to terms with the lesson he intended to teach us by confessing his life-long secret. He had often told us that the love of money is the root of all evil. For this invaluable lesson I learned from Uncle Tunde’s terrible past, his memory will definitely be on my mind forever.