An afternoon of singing at Tinubu Square

Broad Street, as you approached Square, was choc-a-block with traffic.

Among the obstacles on the road were long articulated trucks from which huge bundles of imported goods were being carried on the heads of loaders into shops and warehouses located within the warren of alleyways around Kakawa Street.

The vast auditorium of Trinity Methodist Church, Tinubu, was already full by the time you squeezed your way through the crush. You were compelled to seek a seat in the gallery upstairs. It turned out to be an advantage that served your curiosity.

Looking down as you stood by the railing, you had a panoramic view of the cavernous belly of the ancient Church.

The celebrants and their spouses were seated on a front pew. The Clergy, who included a number of Bishops, were seated on the other side.

This Church, originally built in 1870, was one of the most historic places of worship in Nigeria.

It was a curious fact that old Churches steeped in history lined Broad Street on both sides, roughly from the area of the old Broad Street Prison where Herbert Macaulay had been incarcerated, which was now Freedom Park. The chain started from Our Saviours Church, which used to be the Colonial Church. It stretched to the First Baptist Church, and to the Holy Cross Cathedral on Campbell Street. Next was Christ Church Cathedral, on the Marina.

After that was St Peter’s Church, Faji, which was really in Ajele. It arrived where you stood, at Methodist Church, Tinubu. After the Square, which was largely taken over by street traders and beggars, was the African Church, Bethel, with its colourful story of how incensed Lagosians, bristling under what they deemed as racial high-handedness, trooped out from Breadfruit Church nearby behind their Peoples Warden on Sunday. 13th October 1901 to Rose Garden nearby to found their own Church.

Further down the road was the famous Breadfruit Church itself, named, according to the legend, for the Breadfruit Tree on the site where slaves were tethered, waiting to be loaded on slave ships berthed at the Marina. Bringing up the distal end of the route was the Wesley Cathedral, Olowogbowo, where you had visited recently to celebrate the appointment of a friend as Lay President.

Some day when the city got a handle on its Tourism assets, you reflected, some smart young entrepreneur would package the ‘Lagos Tour of Ancient Churches’, and tourists would queue up for the tour, starting from one end of Broad Street to the other., stopping at every Church to walk around. There was an alternative prognostication – that ‘developers’ would knock down the monuments, which were located in the pricey Central Business District, and replace them with shiny skyscrapers.

Faye Iketubosin, your friend, a soft-spoken gynaecologist and fertility expert, and his three siblings were celebrating fifteen years of the death of their mother – Deaconess (Mrs) Bella Iketubosin-Ademola, with an afternoon of Community Hymn Singing. They were a family with roots that mirrored the rich diversity of Nigeria – from Onitsha, to Uyo, to Abonemma and on to the Lagos-Abeokuta axis.

The hosts of the occasion were a body known as The Heritage. From time to time during the proceedings, one of them would step up to the microphone to speak. There was Professor Sagay – Aunty Aba to you, meticulously coiffed, soft and crisp of language, hard as nails on the issues. And there was your friend Sir Yomi, a lawyer who used to be a soldier, and who once recounted how he and his group moved through the cemetery determined to recapture Radio Nigeria from coup plotters or raze it down, even as Ibrahim Babangida strode into the Broadcasting House to parlay with the coup leader – Buka Suka Dimka.

Methodist Church boasts a rich Hymnal. The Deceased’s daughter would tell the audience that there were two things to be found on her mother’s bed in her lifetime – her Bible, and her Hymnal. The songs being sung this afternoon were some of her favourite songs.
At a point, Faye would go to the podium to take a solo verse in ‘All Things Are Possible to Me’.

His mother had grown up in Uyo and Calabar. She had studied Pharmacy at the School of Pharmacy Yaba, and worked at UCH, Ibadan, where she rose to become Chief Pharmacist before setting up her own pharmacy. She married Dr George Obene Iketubosin, a man from Abonnema who was the first West African to earn a doctorate degree in Pharmacy. Widowed at 29, she remarried after almost a decade. She was ordained a Deaconess of the Methodist Church. She obtained a Masters’ Degree in Theology from Edinburgh, and travelled extensively in the service of the Church and various Church interests. Her last years were spent at this Church in Tinubu, where she affected the lives of many of the people in the audience today.

The songs were deep and evocative of the purest  and loftiest aspirations of the human spirit, and it was easy to get transported by the beguiling sound of the pipe organ in the cloistered environment, away from the hurly-burly, dog-eat-dog passions that impelled the day-to-day actions of the outside world.

‘…The most impossible of all
   Is that I e’er from sin should cease
  Yet shall it be, I know it shall…
All things are possible to me…’

It was a solemn, graceful celebration, and the crowd were absorbed, not just in the music but in the words of the songs, which they could relate in the moment to the issues in their own lives.

All too soon the music was at an end.
A vote of thanks. A solemn prayer by the Bishop. Handshakes and back slapping.
It was back to Tinubu Square – the good, and the not-so-good. SUVs moving slowly in the traffic. The smell of drains that went nowhere. The frantic bonhomie of friends you had not seen in a while. A Sunday afternoon in Lagos