My last child, for now, will be 23 years old in December. He grew up calling me Daa. He learnt it from his two elder brothers and their mother. It started with my first child who couldn’t or rather refused to call me daddy. By the time he learnt to talk, which was pretty early, he preferred to simply say Daa. His mother, my wife, tried everything in the books including incentives, to make him say daddy but it just didn’t work. He would call me daddy one moment, and the next he would revert to daa. I didn’t mind it, and I prayed for my wife to let him be. So it stuck. Before the other children came my wife had joined her first son in calling me daa. So by the time other children came daa had effectively displaced daddy in reference to yours sincerely. The boys are now tweenagers (children in their 20s), and daddy has still not been able to displace daa. Instead some close family relations have since joined in calling me daa in spoken and written words. So how could anyone or anything undo bonds forged over years and decades? For some people it is as simple as tossing or flipping a flimsy coin. Not so for others.
In 1958, a novel written by a Nigerian was published. It was written by Chinua Achebe. In his A Short History of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, Terri Ochiagha said that “The publication of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart was heralded as the inaugural moment of modern African fiction, and the book remains the most widely read African novel of all time. It has been translated into more than sixty languages, has sold over twelve million copies, and is a required text at the primary, secondary, and tertiary educational levels the world over”. Ochiagha said that Things Fall Apart was neither the first African novel to be published in the West nor necessarily the most critically valued but that its “enduring, larger-than-life iconocity has surpassed even that of its author”.
