Ogunniyi was the chief of Ifon for years before his death, his grandfather was a pioneer of Christianity in the village. The imprints of this religion made him a very Orthodox Christian. He ruled over a court and a large family. He settled disputes among the sons of the soil with an impartial mind, but he had nothing to do with Muslims and heathens. He shunned every activity that could make him fraternize with them. The eerie fire he carried in his heart towards them was very cryptic to his kinsmen and his fellow pious converts. Even in his court, no one dared to say anything profane about his religion. And with the skill of an alchemist turning steel to gold, he infected the hearts of his children.
Like the tide flowing from the sea and ebbing back into it, Ogunniyi’s fire flowed into his son. As the strength of his youth, he built a source of illumination in him to guide his path through life. The fire he thought would illuminate his path and fight off the waxy fingers of darkness from his son. He believed his son would embrace his illumination and detest the darkness, the herald of the abyss, the abyss of the outer world of Muslims and heathens. Since life speaks in vague languages and signs, archaic and arcane signs that only the conscious could decipher.
These conscious minds stoic and simple are the ones who could understand that in the universe of a babel of minds, accepting others is the true definition of a man with sapience strong enough to walk through life; even as a pious being.
Growing up Alade was astonished at his father’s misanthropical lifestyle towards Muslims and heathens in his jurisdiction. His hands were always outstretched towards the needy but not to non-believers but he was too illuminated to see the pitch darkness at the end of the path he was threading, he was choked by his father’s stewardship of illumination, the illumination he had begun to have a lust for. He was lost to his father’s enigma. But in the middle of spiralling towards the fountain springing with fulgent fire that flowed from the estuary of his father’s blind hate, he fell
into a moment of reminisce.
He began to see that the path that he thought was leading to the treasury of illuminated sapience was a fjord he would fall from into a gulf of pain and inhumane lifestyle if does not disembark.
Ogunniyi was too blind with his stewardship to notice that his son wasn’t illuminated but was burnt like the Phoenix and returned a different being. Many years after Ogunniyi’s death, his son took the rein of the rulership of the kingdom and he treated everyone as equal because having hateful sapience about others is not a source of power for leadership.
Oladejo Victor Olayemi a budding artist from Ore. He wrote in via ezekieloladejo375@gmail.com
