To understand the living legend and national icon that is Olusegun Obasanjo, one must first read and appreciate his unforgettable autobiography.
“During his watch, a watchman has no sleep and no respite.” — Olusegun Obasanjo, My Watch There is a famous line in Chinua Achebe’s classic, Things Fall Apart: “Looking at the king’s mouth, one would think he never sucked at his mother’s breast.” It came to mind as I read Baba Obasanjo’s account of his early life, because few memoirs by men of such stature begin so humbly.
The book opens with his birth, as his mother narrated it to him: “You were born on Ifo Market day. I had put my wares together for the market when I suddenly went into labour. It meant that I could not go to the market that day.
But before those who went to the market returned to the village, you were already born.” With no birth certificates in those days, an event had to stand in for a date, and it was left to Baba to work out which Ifo Market day his mother meant. He settled on 5 March 1937.
What could have been a dry footnote becomes, in his hands, a window into a world that measured time by markets rather than calendars. His brief account of the Owu lineage works the same way: it gives just enough history to explain the audacity for which he is known, and never so much that it delays the story. This is among the book’s real strengths.
Baba writes as a historian, digging as deeply into the wars of Ogun State and the founding of Kaduna as into his own memories, and the personal vantage point restores what school textbooks flatten. There are stories behind the stories, and it takes someone who