I had just finished a truly interesting interview with my good friend, Stephen Ereboh, when he asked me as a parting shot if I had heard the sad news. What sad news could that be, I wondered. Prof. Prince Efere is no more, he said. I stared at Ereboh as if he wasn’t there. If he was looking at me straight in the eye, he might have said I blanked out. I felt deflated.
You don’t mean it? I said, finding my voice after a long pause. There is only one Professor Prince Efere I know. In point of fact, I knew him in the days when he was Dr. Prince Efere. I remember asking him why he was going by two titles before his name, as if he was short of titles. He should choose between Dr. and Prince, I insisted, and what was that name missing in the line-up? You have a first name, don’t you? What is it?
Prince, he said. It isn’t a title. That’s my first name. So I told him how princely he was as a person, and I was to confirm that later in the course of our interaction. A few years later, when I met him again in Yenagoa, he told me he was now a full-fledged professor. I could not help but sound out the alliterative resonance of his new name with all the musical flavour that goes with it. Professor Prince Efere. I felt under obligation to call him all three names every time I met him.
I first met Prince Efere in London on a day when I was feeling particularly bored and home-sick. I was living in a white neighbourhood, and I was tired of seeing the faces of complete strangers who knew me as the only African in the tenement. I wanted to see my people from back home, and word got to me in good time that the Ijaw Peoples Association of Great Britain and Ireland was holding its monthly meeting that Saturday.
I took proper note of my directions, boarded the first train from West Hampstead where I lived, changed trains repeatedly through London’s convoluted underground, and finally climbed out of the depths of the earth at Stepney Green station in East London. No. 3 Globe Road was just around the corner. That was my first visit, and the address remained stuck in my head because I went there every last Saturday of the month for the next one and half years of my two-year stay in England, to meet with my Ijaw brethren and talk about home.
It was an old house built entirely of red burnt brick. I climbed up a narrow staircase at the side of the building, walked into a lobby and into a large hall upstairs. There were a number of adjoining rooms, and I was to know soon enough that the property was actually a primary and secondary school. This school was owned by a young Nigerian adventurer called Prince Efere.
I was truly impressed. Here was a son of Bayelsa running his own school in London, and I couldn’t help but admire the fact that he wasn’t even a politician. He had lived in the United Kingdom for the better part of thirty years, was married to a respectable British lady who loved and adored him, and they had such wonderful children.
When I eventually ran into Efere along the corridor, I told him to take me to the real Dr Prince Efere because the famous man I just met could not be this young, simple and easy-going fellow. He laughed a short civilised laugh and assured me that I was in the right and proper company of the selfsame Prince Efere.
I took a good look at him. He was wearing a pink shirt inside a striped blue blazer, and I immediately sought permission to remember his face. Go ahead. Take a photo of me if you want, and so I focused the lens of my camera and took that first historic shot that was to grow into a modest collection in my London album.
He had an obvious slant to his English accent that I couldn’t miss, and if he didn’t disclose his roots, you couldn’t tell where he hailed from. It didn’t take me long to notice that everyone at that gathering of Ijaw sons and daughters in diaspora found reason to consult Prince Efere one way or the other. He was the all-time host of the Bayelsa Union meetings and the meetings of the Ijaw Peoples Assembly (IPA) put together. All the deliberations having to do with the Isaac Boro Day celebrations in London took place under Efere’s commodious roof.
After all the debates and arguments about the relevance of the IPA to the overall cause of the Ijaw people back home, we would pause for refreshment. We would clear the tables and dance in the open space, the popular numbers of Robert Ebizimor and Barrister Smooth resounding through the very being of the hall and driving away the cold of London.
I have it on good authority that Prince Efere never charged one penny for the use of his place. He gave out the space for free, and was there to welcome every son and daughter of Ijaw land, if not the Niger Delta, who happened to be living anywhere in Britain and Ireland, so long as they showed up along Globe Road. Efere would go out of his way to replenish the stock of refreshments, and help out any stranded Londoner who came to him at the end of the day with a hardluck story. He was that accommodating, that open-minded.
The friendly bond we had established in London could not be discounted in Yenagoa. From time to time, we met in traffic, at the occasional public banquet, and at one social event or the other. We swapped memories about bygone times, thanked goodness for just how good it was to be back to Bayelsa, our homeland, and exchanged contacts with a promise to keep in touch.
In all that time, Prince Efere remained the same smooth, fluent communicator he was, the well-cultivated gentleman that I have always known him to be. He had a ready smile to share, and decent manners to demonstrate without any apparent effort on his part. Etiquette and good breeding were simply second nature to him.
I was truly happy for Prince Efere when he told me that he was taking up an appointment as the pioneer boss of the new Institute for Tourism and Hospitality under the Restoration government. I had no doubt that he would bring his impressive clout, to say nothing of his widespread network of contacts, to bear on his new assignment. I was convinced that he would bring a new edge to promoting the evident tourist potentials of Bayelsa State, and he would do it in style.
Prince Efere did amazing things when he sat before a computer, and the internet was home to him long before I found my own humble niche in it. His knowledge about life in cyberspace was vast and authoritative, and he explored that brave new world with the confidence of one who was sure of his high intelligence quotient.
One Sunday morning, I received a text message from Prince Efere right out of the blue. It was a short solicitous script which sought to know if I was in good health and excellent spirits, and it expressed prayers for the well-being of me and my family, ending with good wishes for the forthcoming week. I replied in like manner. The following Sunday, Prince Efere sent a similar message to my inbox, slightly different in phrasing but announcing the same cheerful felicitation. I did not hesitate to return his prayers with a steadfast thumbs-up.
After many weeks of repeated Sunday messages from Prince Efere, I fell out of line and could not reply his messages again. They had become standard expectations every Sunday morning. I had no doubt that the young professor was sending the same heartfelt homily to all his friends, and I was glad to be counted among them. The fact that I couldn’t meet up with my replies did not stop Efere from extending his goodwill prayers to me and my family at the start of every week.
It is a mark of just how distant I had become from the world that I didn’t know anything of Efere’s relocation to the University of Africa, Toru-Orua. I had no reason to be surprised. A professor, after all, belongs in a university setting. For that reason, I was gratified to see Efere in academic hood and gown for the first time on Facebook, and to hear how instrumental he was to the start of a new tertiary institution in his home state, to say nothing of just how effectively he coordinated the maiden matriculation ceremony of the university.
Clearly, Efere’s input to the educational curricula of Bayelsa would have been salutary and far-reaching, if he had lived beyond this day. Alas, he had to go the way of all flesh too quickly. In losing him, Bayelsa State lost an ebullient and practical-minded intellectual whose patriotic love for his homeland can only be described as exemplary.
Indeed the Niger Delta lost a keen facilitator, a noble son who was at home with the history of his beleaguered people in a foreign land, one who was ready to take you, if need be, to Lancaster Castle where Harold Dappa-Biriye debated pertinent matters of interest alongside Henry Willink, QC, on behalf of Nigeria’s swamp country.
To say the least, the Ijaw nation lost too soon a son who was truly devoted to the cause of the patriarchs, a son who related well with anyone holding a fervent opinion about the ideals of the proverbial struggle for resource control and self-determination. Needless to say, his remarkable insights into the topical debates of the day will be missed. On my part, I certainly miss my Sunday-Sunday dose of prayers from my thoughtful friend, the jolly good fellow I came to know in the heat of self-exile many years ago.
