ABOUT – Tola Adenle

 Déjà vu;  I know!

Thanks to a new reader of this Blog who wrote recently to find out about me.  The mail sent me scurrying to the Statistics Section of this Blog which I remembered have shown two high-ranking pages with high numbers as being “deleted”.  After searching without success, I found that what had stared me in the face for several months were, indeed first, the ABOUT page,  and then THE STORY OF EMOTAN page!

A Nigerian born in the age of dinosaurs, I am a down-home dyed-in-the-wool Up-Country girl from present-day Ondo State, now a grandmother – six times over.

I’ve worked as a teacher, a journalist, and a stay-at-home mom but if you want to  know what I’ve enjoyed most, it’s being a teacher both at elementary and secondary school levels.  I had two stints at The World Bank: first, while I was at College in the early to mid-70s, I worked full time as a Secretary which overstated what I did which was more of a go-fer running errands up and down The Bank’s HQ in Washington, D.C.  I also had a short 9-month employment after checking out with Nigeria’s mythical “Andrew” during Babangida’s time on the Nigerian throne.  I was still no “World Bank Consultant” but worked on documentation in the Women In Development Division.

Before the employment at The Bank during my student days, I had worked at the Nigerian Embassy as a locally-recruited staff (bottom of the barrel) first as a secretary before becoming designated as Social Secretary to Ambassador John Mamman Gabar, a stint that lasted a few months before I got the World Bank job, thanks to the Ambassador.

I have authored works of fiction, including Deeper by a Tear:  A Collection of Short Stories by Tola Adenle (2000) as well as two non-fictional work, the biographies of my late father, Those were the Christians, a biography of J.F. Adamolekun of Iju, Akure North AND the biography of my late father-in-law, H.H. Samuel Adeleye Adisa Adenle I, Ataoja of Osogbo, Portrait of a Yoruba Oba by Depo Adenle with Tola Adenle, 2006.

I got interested in books at a very young age, thanks to an older sister who had already entered one of Nigeria’s [then] prestigious secondary schools. Reading Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre in 1958 was the start to what has remained a life-long love of the classics which developed an abiding interest in the novel form for me.

I cut my journalism teeth at the Western Nigerian-owned Daily Sketch where I served the National Youth Service in the 70s after earning a U.S. college degree in Business Administration.  I founded and edited Emotan, A Woman’s magazine and with the Babangida years’ arrival, my family emigrated back to the USA.  In the recent past, I had a weekly column in The Comet on Sunday which metamorphosed into The Nation on Sunday from 2002 until December last year.

I’m  passionate about books, politics, social issues, various sports and the arts, especially Music and Literature. Huge Nigerian parties?  I pass as most of the times as I can.   Happily, most family members are the same and most friends and acquaintances accept me as I am.

This Blog was conceived to be a repository for some materials from Emotan magazine as well as my old newspaper writings.  While I registered it in July last year, it took Buhari’s candidacy for another Nigerian presidential run to get it going after I had publicly declared for him in an essay in the The Nation on Sunday back in March.

I’ve been married to an Osun guy, a George Washington University doctorate in Hydrogeology for 42 years come January 2012.  He’s an avid cameraman.  We have four kids and six grand-kids.  We call Ibadan, Nigeria and Washington, D.C. homes; the two places are where we can function the most although we feel very much at home in Vegas where we spent almost a decade during our Nigerian Babangida’s evil reign, and could actually function in most places where the challenges that Nigerians face in daily lives are things of the distant past!

With Dr. Adenle, Vegas, December 2011

TOLA ADENLE,

Updated December 27, 2011.