It is hard to believe that my good friend, Lionel Jonathan, is no more. I didn’t get to see him in hospital. He is not alive, even to use crutches. At least, one could have still made out time to pick his brains. I will always remember him as a healthy, lively, and friendly soul. I can only remember him the way I saw him the last time we met at the palatial residence of Iyerite Chiefson Awululu, paramount ruler of Oluasiri. I had gone on the invitation of the king, and ran into Lionel Jonathan and his regular entourage.
In all the time I knew him, Layo, as he was fondly called, was never alone. He was always surrounded by followers and admirers. The first time I had taken note of the spectacle was the day I arrived Nembe on a casual holiday from my desk as editor of The Tide On Sunday back in the late 1990s, before the turn of the century. This was long before he became a chief of the Omo war-canoe house of Nembe.
I climbed up the jetty at Dispensary Waterside after a long trip by boat from Port Harcourt, and was glad to set foot again on the soil that holds my umbilical cord. Taking and giving greetings along the way, I walked up the paved road, took quick strides across the public square, my heart waving out to the painting of King Josiah Constantine Ockiya, Mingi VII, Amanyanabo of Nembe-Brass. I turned left towards Tombi, and saw a large crowd approaching.
At the head of the train was Lionel Jonathan, swaying from side to side, knocking his staff on the pavement like an Italian don surrounded by his mafiosi. Even at that time, I was struck by the attention he gave me. He stopped to address me, and everybody shuffled to a stop just to hear what he had to say. He spoke in highfalutin terms about how I was doing what he would like to do, advance the frontiers of literature and promote the heritage of William Shakespeare and Wole Soyinka and Chinua Achebe, and all the great writers the world has ever known.
He always wanted to be a writer, he said. He promised that he would still make out time to write. But as for reading, that could not be contested. He was a voracious reader. No doubt about that, and he would like to read what I had written in the last edition of my paper. I promptly booked an interview with him for Port Harcourt at a date convenient to him. He gave a nod, ambled forward, and the crowd flowed past me with him at the lead.
That interview did not take place until a year after the creation of Bayelsa State. I caught up with him in Yenagoa, the new state capital, and he was glad to speak into my tape recorder. Two weeks later, I published the interview in the Encounter section of The Tide on Sunday.
He was overly delighted to see how faithfully I had reproduced his responses, word for word, in a question and answer format, without altering one shade of meaning. And right there on the page was his face. He liked what he saw, and so we booked another interview, a follow-up that would serve to expound on the high points we had dwelt upon in the grand opening of the initial publication. For the next ten years after that, whenever we met, we could only reschedule. He was that busy, that pre-occupied. That exclusive chit-chat never took place again till his last day.
Jonathan was well acquainted with what we might call “Big English”. He grew up in an age when it was fashionable to throw around polysyllables memorized from the Oxford and Cambridge dictionaries, grandiose words that caught the listener askance, and kept him bound by wonder.
He grew up in the days when Michael West had few grammatical contemporaries in the village. He grew up in the days when Bambulu and Bomber Billy were in the grandstand of recommended school texts. He took delight in the flight of resounding words, the phrase that brought consternation and bewilderment upon the faces of the villager, the sentence of extempore imagination at work, full of idiosyncratic verbalism and impulsive irascibility.
He believed in the expression of the young professional’s full potential as a learned, literate gentleman who deserved to hold his microphone in hand even when the English man is speaking English. In short, Layo spoke the kind of English that left his followers bemused, bamboozled and flabbergasted. After many years of bombastic existence, Lionel Jonathan did not have to make any more conscious effort to drop the next grammatical bombshell into the faces of his perplexed audience.
It had become a habit. He dropped big words without any effort on his part. All he needed was a pair of listening ears. In that sense, he reminded me of my father. Layo himself was a disciple of my father as far as high sounding words go.
Even Layo told me pointedly that my father was one of his role models, which was why he was happy to know that I was taking after my father in a more refined way. I couldn’t but agree with him. My father didn’t write books. I have managed to bring out one or two.
On Thursday, 25 January 2018, two days to the formal presentation of my two books in Abuja, I drove to Achievers Farm, if only to fulfil all righteousness, with an invitation for Lionel Jonathan to be my guest at the event. Achievers Farm remains his abiding legacy to agriculture, and he had chosen to live on that parcel of land. It was his modest idea of paradise. Anyway, he would be too preoccupied to attend, and I didn’t see him flying from Yenagoa to Abuja just to attend my book launch, but let it be that I invited him.
I went with the knowledge that he was bound to have visitors, but I didn’t expect to see the number of people I saw around him. He told me to sit next to him, and I did. But I felt obliged to stand up again in all humility and remain standing. Holding my books in his hand, Lionel Jonathan turned the conversation around, and began talking about me at length, deploying missiles from his grammatical armoury, so much so that I felt my citation was being read. More polysyllables were flung into the air with grand abandon, to the noisy acclaim of the audience who hailed him by his fond titles.
Oziriki!
Obodogo!
One of the surprises I received when I walked out of detention was the news that came to me. Anything you hear for the first time is news. A respected son of Nembe told me categorically that Chief Lionel Jonathan-Omo wept openly when he heard that I had been remanded at Okaka prison, following my controversial book of the forbidden title. I just could not imagine Layo weeping on my account, and the gesture struck me as noble, honourable and heart-felt. He was that passionate, that involved, about books and writers.
Jonathan did not call me as of habit, so it came to me as a surprise when I received two calls from him that year. The first was to ask me for the number of the Chairman of the Association of Nigerian Authors (Bayelsa State chapter). He had set his mind to host writers on Achievers Farm on a regular basis.
The other, the last call from him to me, was to commend me on my personal tribute to Inowei Dede, one of his departed acolytes. Until Layo began talking, I had not quite realised how much sympathy that script had evoked in the reader, even for those who didn’t know Dede.
It was Jnathan’s way of demonstrating frank fellowship in the spirit. If he liked something about you, he didn’t fail to say so. By the same token, if he detested anything about you, he spelt out his reservations with a straight face and a wholesome shower of words.
It is a great pity that a mind bristling with grand ideas, a stream so alive with words, dried up without notice, the man gone into eternity without a goodbye.
