Are auto/biography and memoirs exclusive preserve of the literately elite? Don’t the illiterate have eventful stories fit for a book? Do you tell an author what to entitle his story?
Since the cover of MC Oluomo’s biography surfaced online, some people have been waxing lyrics of condemnation of the title. They question what MC Oluomo, the touted motor park tout, a ‘thug’, could have done to impact humanity positively. MC is being judged by what’s being reported of his professional activities. One doesn’t know how much of the other aspects of his life people know for them to have concluded that he couldn’t have done anything to impact humanity positively. The condemners feel entitled to condemn what the author entitles his biography.
These people go on to naively insinuate that MC Oluomo couldn’t have written the book since they assume he wasn’t lettered. In the world of creative writing and publishing, ghostwriting isn’t a new concept. Unlettered people have eventful stories to tell and they hire excellent writers to write for them while the resultant book carry their names as the authors. One is unarguably convinced that ghostwriting was adopted in the MC Oluomo’s book project.
Baba Lamidi Adedibu was thought of as a household name in political brigandages and thuggery. Though Baba Adedibu was lettered as he was a student of Ibadan Boys High School when Chief Samuel Lanlehin, the father of Senator Lanlehin, was the principal of the school, no one thought he could write a political memoir as voluminous as over 300-page extent. There was a political memoir, chronicling political events from the 50s to mid-90s, ghostwritten for Baba Lamidi Adedibu by two prominent journalists, entitled What I Saw! Whoever has read that book would agree that Baba Adedibu was an encyclopedia of Nigerian political events and histories. The issues surrounding the politics of the 50s, involving Action Group, NCNC, NPC and the political actors of the era were comprehensively told with copious references to dates and events by Baba Adedibu. One is not sure that any scholar of politics and history could have written profoundly as Baba Adedibu recounted in What I Saw! And talking about impacting humanity, though people might know Baba Adedibu as a garrison commander in politics of brigandages, he touched lives of many people in no small measures, such that he was said to have turned many slaves to freeborns (so erú d’omo).
The above treatise is not a comparison between Baba Adedibu and MC Oluomo. One goes to this historical length to lend credence to the fact that there is nothing wrong in the book ghostwritten for MC Oluomo and that it’s fallacious to conclude that he couldn’t have done anything to impact humanity positively. And, this sense of entitlement, and of being perfect thinkers, by the condemners, that he should have titled the book differently must stop! In memoirs written by many of our so-called eminent elites, what do we get to read if not embellishments of events in their lives?
