Herbert McCaulay Street is a stone’s throw from Noble Street. It is on this street that our prince lives in the seventies. The street is named after the great Nigerian nationalist statesman, who, in response to the British colonial government’s statement that they had the ‘true interests of the natives at heart’， once retorted, ‘as the dimensions of “the true interests of the natives at heart” are algebraically equal to the length, breadth and depth of the white man’s pocket’。 When our prince got older, he decided he would only wear traditional Yoruba attire when travelling for work internationally. ‘Let them know who I am,’ he would say. He was the son of a man who changed his surname from a white man’s ‘Cole’， which had been assigned to his ancestors, to his father’s first name, Babalola, which means ‘Father is honour’。 In a freshly free Nigeria, his new surname also lives freshly free, heralding a reclamation of rightful ownership, a repossession of the ancestral. Father is honour, motherland is honour.
Our young prince would grow to be one of the most honourable men among men. His first name, translated, is a version of ‘God loves me’ and, just like our princess, he is kept and protected by God’s love. He lives with seven family members: a quiet, gentle, peace-loving father; a powerful, firm, formidable mother, who also extends her care to lost children in the neighbourhood; and five siblings – four brothers and a sister. He is the fourth born （two of his brothers are twins） and love staggers through to him, eked out through the gaps between troublemaking, bullying brothers, who soak up attention and emotion. Yet, our boy does not starve – God loves him, after all. So, where our prince’s brothers lack, he fulfils; in their brutality, he finds in himself gentleness, in their attacks, he cultivates a firm protectiveness. It is an earthy, organic love, thick as honey straight from the comb. You may risk being stung, but it is all the sweeter once accessed.
Our prince loves to play. He is rough-and-tumble and skinny and scrawny and quick with the quips. One day after school, when he is ten years old, our prince is outside in the neighbourhood kicking a football around with his friends, all elbows and knees and crumpled shirts. He kicks the ball and it lands squarely on the head of a girl who is walking along the street. It thuds against her long, thick black plaits. She is holding hands with someone older with a similar face to her – her older sister. The girl drops her sister’s hand, rubs her head and gives our prince the most eviscerating look he has ever seen in his young life. The girl looks his age, maybe a little younger, but she has an imposing air, one of authority and regality. Before he can release a stuttered ‘sorry’， she throws the ball at him and shouts, ‘Watch where you are going. Ah, ah. Are you blind? With that your big eyes!’ She picks up her elder’s hand and storms off, as if she is the one in charge. The prince is impressed, despite himself. He kicks the ball to his friend.
At eleven years old, our scruffy prince is sent away to secondary in a boarding school in Abeokuta. It is a place with an abundance of space, far from the pressures his brothers create, and where his muscles can flex. It is a place he can be himself and grow unimpeded. He reckons it will be an adventure.
Noble Street and Herbert McCaulay Street are situated in a subsection of Yaba known as Alagomeji – two clocks – named after the two clock towers that punctuate the area. It is a place marked by time and, for love, the time has to be right. If you ask our princess what she thought when she first properly met the prince, she will probably shrug and release a somewhat coy smile, and say she doesn’t know and why are you asking her that? She’s busy. If you ask the prince, he will laugh and say, ‘She’s bluffing. Of course she noticed me. Afro like mine? Cool dude like me?’ If our princess is near him when he says this – which will most likely be the case, because most things he says, he says for her amusement – she will laugh hard, scoff and retort: ‘What afro? You were already losing your hair, my friend.’
For the first two years in secondary school, he was the playful and benevolently mischievous boy who she rolled her eyes at often. In her third year in school, his desk was next to hers. By the fourth year, they were best friends. They talked for hours and hours about everything, anything, and there was laughing, so much laughing. Their sentences would run into and roll around each other, their spirits compounded into their words, each conversation pulling them closer and closer together. This was to remain years later, with their conversational layers and loops running so deep into the night that their eldest child would stomp downstairs to the living room and command them to ‘Keep! It ! Down! You are laughing too loud!’ Not knowing that it was a blessing to be kept up by her parents’ giggling rather than fighting, not knowing that she was witnessing a unique trick of the combination of love and time; the ability to keep one young. You will mature and your relationship will develop, but love has the habit of keeping a part of you evergreen, retaining within you an adolescent flirtatious giddiness. Ten, twenty, thirty, forty years after meeting, she will still blush when he compliments her or when he playfully chucks her chin. He will still seek to impress her, make it his mission to put a smile on her face, and he will still feel staggered that he is the one she chose.