Adunni Morenike Oyelaran

Adunni Morenike Oyelaran was born in Abeokuta in March 1946, the second of five children, and died in Ibadan in October 2024. In between she taught for thirty-nine years, ran a school for seventeen of them, raised three children, and kept a garden that half the street had a key to.

Her father was a court clerk and her mother sold cloth; the house was full of paper and full of people, and she grew up assuming that both were normal. She read anything with a spine. When the mission school offered a scholarship to the teacher training college at Ilesa she took it without asking anyone, and told her parents afterwards. They forgave her by Christmas.

She began teaching in 1967, at a girls’ grammar school on the Oke-Ado side of Ibadan, and never worked anywhere else. She taught English and, when nobody else would, geography. Her classes were quiet because she was quiet; she had discovered early that a low voice makes a room lean in. Former pupils, decades later, still lower theirs when they talk about her.

She married Gbenga Oyelaran in December 1970. He was an engineer with the water corporation, a tall, patient man who built the shelves the books lived on and then more shelves. They had Folake in 1972, Tunde in 1975 and Bisi in 1979, and the house on Adekunle Street became the kind of house other children were sent to when their own parents were travelling.

“A child who is looked at properly will grow towards the looking. That is the whole of teaching. The rest is timetables.”

She was made headmistress in 1989 and held the post until she retired in 2006. She was not a reformer in any loud sense. She fixed the roof, paid the teachers on time, kept the library open through the holidays, and made a rule that no girl would be sent home for fees without the headmistress being told first. The school’s results went up and she declined to take credit, which people found more persuasive than credit.

Retirement gave her the garden. She grew things that could be eaten and things that could be given away, and on Tuesday afternoons the back veranda filled with whoever came: former pupils with their own children, neighbours, a nephew with a problem. The Tuesday table had no agenda. People left it lighter than they arrived, and most could not have said exactly why.

She was reading, as usual, in the week she died. She had marked a page. Her family have kept the book open at it.

She never once raised her voice at us, and it was the most frightening thing in the school. When Mrs Oyelaran went quiet the whole room went quiet with her, and you found yourself sitting up straighter without being told to. I have tried it on my own children. It does not work for me. I think you have to mean it.

Years later I asked her about it and she laughed and said she had simply been too shy to shout. I did not believe her then and I do not believe her now.

Dad built shelves. Mum filled them. That was the arrangement, and it lasted fifty years. The house on Adekunle Street had books in the kitchen, books on the stairs, books in the bathroom, which Dad objected to on engineering grounds and lost.

She did not read to us so much as near us. We would be doing something else and she would be in the corner with a book, and one by one we would drift over. I do not remember learning to read. I remember wanting to know what she was smiling at.

I was the bursar. I was the one who had to go and tell her. Every term there would be a list of girls whose fees had not come, and every term I would take it to her office, and every term she would read the list slowly and then ask me about each name. Not the amounts. The names.

Some of those fees were paid from her own salary. I know because I was the bursar. She would have been furious if I had told anyone while she was alive, so I am telling you now.

Nobody was invited. That was the rule. You just came. From about three o’clock on a Tuesday the veranda would start to fill: a woman she had taught in 1970 with her granddaughter, the neighbour’s boy who had failed an exam, the pastor’s wife, somebody’s driver who had been sent to deliver something and was told to sit down and eat first.

She sat at the end of the table and mostly listened. I asked her once what the Tuesday table was for. She said, “For people to find out that they are not the only one.”

We have left the book open where she left it. Nobody has read ahead. It sits on the small table by her chair, with the glasses folded across the page, and when the grandchildren come they go and look at it the way you look at a photograph.