Part One: How It Began Near the Foot of Olumo
People who are fond of saying that love is blind have clearly never visited Abeokuta on a Saturday morning, when the sky is the particular shade of pale blue that exists only in those hours before the harmattan dust wakes up and the heat remembers its own name. Because it was on exactly such a morning, a Saturday in late November, some three years before the wedding, that Babatunde Adeyemi first laid eyes on Oluwafunmilayo Coker, and the truth is that his eyes were working perfectly well. Too well, perhaps. He had come to Olumo Rock with his cousin Lanre, who had developed the unfortunate habit of dragging people to tourist sites on the grounds that they were Abeokuta people and therefore had an obligation to appreciate what God and the Egba ancestors had erected on their behalf. Babatunde had protested the outing from the moment Lanre knocked on his door at half-past seven, pointing out that he had seen Olumo Rock many times since childhood and that appreciation did not require repetition. Lanre had responded by pulling him physically out of the house.So there Babatunde stood, at the base of the ancient granite rock that rose out of the Abeokuta earth like the fist of some buried giant, squinting at the vendors who had arranged their wares along the path leading to the visitor's entrance. There were women selling chilled zobo in rubber bags, men with trays of chin-chin and puff-puff glistening with oil, and children darting between the tourists with the energy of people who had nowhere particular to be.And then there was Oluwafunmilayo. She was arguing.
This was the first thing he noticed about her. Not her face, not the deep brown of her skin in the morning light, not the way her natural hair was pinned up with what appeared to be a pencil jammed through it at an angle that defied physics. No. The first thing he noticed was her voice, which was carrying itself across the small clearing with complete confidence in its own authority.She was standing at a wooden stall where a round-faced woman was selling commemorative key chains and printed postcards of the rock. Funmilayo, though he did not yet know her name, had picked up a postcard and was examining it with the focused attention of a magistrate reviewing evidence.
"But this postcard is saying 'Abeokuta, founded 1830,'" she was saying, holding the card up for the vendor's inspection.
"That date is not entirely accurate. The settlement began earlier! The Egba people had already gathered before 1830. You are selling people a wrong history."
The vendor stared at her. "Madam, it is just a postcard o."
"Yes, but postcards form impressions. Impressions become facts in people's minds."
Lanre had appeared at Babatunde's elbow. "Tunde!Tunde! look at your mouth."
Babatunde closed it.He found a reason, several reasons, actually, each one flimsier than the last to linger near the base of the rock that morning. He discovered that Funmilayo was a secondary school history teacher from Ibara, that she had come to the rock specifically because she was preparing lesson materials for her JSS2 students, and that she had very strong feelings about the public misrepresentation of Egba history. He discovered these things because he asked. He asked because Lanre, who was not entirely useless, had walked up to the two women accompanying Funmilayo and said, in his most sociable voice, "Good morning. My cousin is a very shy person but he would like to speak to your friend. Please help us."
Funmilayo had looked at Babatunde for a long moment who hesitantly went to join the group. Then she said: "You don't look shy."
"I am working on it," Babatunde said.
She laughed.
It was not a polite laugh or a performative one. It was the laugh of someone who had been genuinely caught off guard and had no time to manage it. Later, Babatunde would tell people when asked to describe the exact moment, that it was that laugh which ended him. That he heard it and something in his chest simply gave up its resistance, the way a door gives up when you've been pushing it for a long time and someone finally pulls it from the other side.They exchanged numbers under the watchful granite of Olumo Rock, which had seen, across its centuries, a great many things, and seemed perfectly capable of witnessing one more.