Life

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.