The ultimate arrival of the new child brought to its parents mixed feelings.
They were happy that a new member had been added to the family but were filled with embarrassment and apprehension in view of the circumstances surrounding his birth and the incidents which occurred on the day he was born. It is said that the new child “stood up in its birth blood” desiring “to walk out three times.” However, the midwife who helped during the mother’s labour “pressed down the baby with force.” Summoned to the scene, the embarrassed father began to recite incantations which eventually calmed the excited child. He then went out to report to certain elderly people what had happened in his house [4].
This story probably is the way the United Church of Cherubim and Seraphim (C & S) accounts for Moses Orimolade’s prolonged paralysis. It is generally believed that, as a direct consequence of this incident, the boy Orimolade could neither stand nor walk until he was well over five years of age. The incantations pronounced by his father had the horrible effect of a curse which might have incapacitated him permanently. Tunolase was so frightened by this strange incident that he decided to avoid any further embarrassment by killing himself. At a family meeting, which he convened, he disclosed his intentions to do so but was condemned for his apparent cowardice. Egunjobi, one of his own children, thought it would be reasonable
for him to live in order to see what the child would become. While Tunolase expressed satisfaction with the entreaties of his family, his visible state of melancholy left no doubt that he had little time to live.
The final blow came with the message Tunolase received from the infant boy, a few days after he had dismissed Orimolade and his mother from his sight for good: that he should go to the top of a nearby hill (now known by C & S in Ikare as Calvary) and there in penitence confess his sins to God. This message threw Tunolase into a state of utter despair and he was taken ill. He requested that his wife, Orimolade’s mother, be summoned to his bedside. As the sobbing woman knelt beside him, he blessed her in the manner of an elderly Yoruba man about to die. He died a few days after this event and was buried honourably.
Orimolade Okejebu spent his youth in Ikare. Hardly had the excitement aroused by the incidents experienced at his birth subsided than he became the centre of attention again. This time the scene was in the only church in the town, St. Stephen’s Anglican Church, which belonged to the C.M.S. Mission. On this particular night, the minister was drawn to the church by a strange light and the sound of singing. It was puzzling to him how anybody could be using the building at that time of night without his knowledge so he decided to investigate. He knocked at the main entrance and the door opened by itself. To his great amazement, the whole building was empty except for a small child of about five sitting on the floor in a kind of bright phosphorescent illumination. It occurred to the shocked minister [5] that the child staring calmly at him, unruffled by his intrusion, was Orimolade the strange boy who had become the talk of the town, that he was doubtless the one who had been singing as though he were a whole choir.
As a result of this encounter, the minister persuaded his congregation to employ Orimolade to teach them some of his spiritual songs. The boy obliged and taught them a few religious songs, but soon gave up owing to their poor response.
This midnight episode is probably an illustration of Orimolade’s early association with the church. According to Peel, Christianity was introduced into Akoko in the late 1890s [6]. And if Orimolade was an early convert, then he must have become a Christian when he was still a boy. The Rev. J. K. Ajayi-Ajagbe, whom J. 0. Coker has identified with the midnight incident, though a Methodist minister, once preached publicly in the name of the C & S [7]. Coker might be right in his assumption that the minister had known Orimolade in his Ikare home before he began his missionary journey.
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