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celebrated his freedom. To discover a portion of my own homeland in that far-off place at the same time—now, that was a miracle that could be wrought only by a Mandelan avatar!
    For it was only on this visit, my second ever to that island, that I was made aware of a slave settlement called Bekuta, a name that immediately resonated in my head as none other than the name of my hometown, Abeokuta. This centuries-wide reunion with my own history sent a tingle down my vertebrae— an encounter with descendants from my own hometown on a far-flung Caribbean island, in the hills of a onetime slave settlement called Jamaica?
    The group of slave descendants who founded the settlement, in flight from the lowland plantations, had sought out a hilly terrain that would prove nearly impenetrable for their pursuing owners but would also remind them of home. They found it in the county of Westmoreland and settled among its rockhills, naming it Abeokuta. Yemi Adefuye, the Nigerian high commissioner in the West Indies, had already become acquainted with this history and could not wait to arrange a visit. What was only an academic though exciting discovery for him and others was, in my case, a most affecting experience. I found it strange indeed that during my first visit to Jamaica, in 1976 for Carifesta—the Caribbean Festival of the Arts—no one had thought to mention the existence of this settlement or propose that we pay it a visit!
    A famous Nigerian, now also deceased, had preceded me on this voyage of private discovery, I was informed. This was Fela Sowande, a composer, but a totally different spirit from his younger and more famous namesake, the “Afro-beat king” and iconoclast Fela Anikulapo Kuti. Sowande had been completely overwhelmed—he had broken down in tears. This older cousin would exact his emotional revenge on me some years later, unintentionally, for it was his symphony Obangiji, based on melodies from our common birthplace, that, unexpectedly swarming out of the violin and cello strings of the Swedish orchestra as I moved forward on the Stockholm stage to receive the Nobel Prize, nearly succeeded in making me a victim of the shamelessness of tear ducts. It was a brief but tense struggle! The rockhills of origin stood me in good stead, but it could have gone either way. (The horror of it—the immaculately pressed, ribboned, and sashed master of ceremonies, the Swedish prince consort himself, compelled to lend me his handkerchief!) Really, the Stockholm ceremonials should not spring such surprises on middle-aged susceptibilities!
    As the island slowly recovered from the hangover of Mandela’s visit, I could not wait to answer the call of Bekuta. There I encountered one of my yet living ancestors, the oldest inhabitant of the settlement, frail, as one would expect a being of more than a hundred years to be. Now, let no one dare tell me I do not know an Egba face when I see one! The parchment tautness of her face, the unmistakable features of the Egba death mask, captured so immutably in Demas Nwoko’s 10 painting
Ogboni,
attested her origins distinctly against any skeptical voices. Not much motion was left in her body, or else her body rhythm, I was certain, would have reinforced what her face pronounced. As she became bedridden, she ordered her bed moved to the window that overlooked the rockhills. Now all she sought was that her eyes would open and close on those rocks, dawn and dusk, until her final moment.
    She was the sole survivor of the original settlers. Her voice was still remarkably strong. Did I imagine the unmistakable Egba twang in her Jamaican patois? Of course I did, but what a conceit to let it linger in the resounding chambers of one’s head!
Oh yes, the real name is A-be-o-ku-ta
—never did music sound so tanned, so ancestral in authority—
but it gradually became corrupted to Bekuta. I tell them all the time
—
the name is A-be-o-ku-ta, but how
many of