When a rising hip-hop star named Dana Elaine Owens came up with the stage name Queen Latifah in 1978, she probably thought that name entered her conscious mind through her own intellectual effort. But I doubt it.
I believe Providence worked on her mind to choose that name, seeing as Nigeria failed to honour the memory of the real queen named Latifah. Thus, through Dana Elaine Owens, fate had given her a new lease of life to keep her memory fresh in the minds of people with enough consciousness to dig deeper.
You see, before hip-hop had Queen Latifah, Nigeria had Latifah Ademulegun, who did what only a woman of regal character could: She gave her life for her husband. Along with Colonel Adekunle Fajuyi, she was the highest specimen of what it meant to be an Omoluabi in the Twentieth Century.
She lived out the actual meaning of her name, Latifah, which is Arabic for a kind hearted person.
The attached photo shows Mrs. Latifah Ademulegun with her husband, the dashingly handsome Samuel Ademulegun, and their two children, Solape, and Goke.
Mrs. Latifah Ademulegun knew her killer. She was a typical Omoluabi, who, though a committed Muslim, would prepare Christmas dinners and Ileya (Sallah) foods and invite officers and men serving under her husband. Thus, Major Timothy Onwuategwu was a regular guest at her house, to the point that her daughter, Solape, knew him as ‘Uncle Tim’.
Every other coupist who has plotted and executed a military coup de tat in Nigeria’s history has limited themselves to either killing or arresting the politicians or soldiers in power. None of them have ever killed their family members, except two persons.
Majors Chukwuma Nzeogwu and Timothy Onwuategwu.
The sheer barbarism of what Onwuategwu did is almost unprecedented in human history up until that point. I am not even aware that it has an equivalence in any other African nation.
Mrs. Latifah Ademulegun was eight months pregnant when, in the wee hours of January 15, 1966, Major Timothy Onwuatuegwu stormed into her matrimonial bedroom in their house at Number 1, Kashim Ibrahim Road, Kaduna.
When Onwuategwu ordered Brigadier Ademulegun to go with them, Latifah got up from the bed, stood before her husband, and refused to move. Major Onwuatuegwu then gunned down both her and her husband.
Their two underaged children, Solape and Goke, were in the room with them and began to cry at the trauma of seeing both their parents’ bloodstained bodies. They never recovered from the shock.
Previously, it had been thought that Mrs. Latifah Ademulegun died on the spot. No, she didn’t. And Onwuategwu saw that she had not died. According to her house girl, Gbele, she lay there in a pool of her own blood, trying to give her instructions for the care of Solape and Goke until she gasped her last about an hour after the event.
Why didn’t Onwuategwu take her to the hospital? And if he was too busy going to find more Northerners and Westerners to kill, why didn’t Onwuategwu order his men to take her to the hospital?
And the even more dastardly thing is that after killing their parents in their presence, Onwuategwu left six-year-old Solape and her four-year-old brother, Goke, right there in the bedroom.
Hours later Mrs. Aguiyi-Ironsi came to take them to a Catholic orphanage in Kaduna.
The question that arises is: How come Mrs. Aguiyi-Ironsi was able to arrive so quickly in Kaduna after the coup to mop up after Nzeogwu and Onwuategwu? To an objective observer, this should raise questions about complicity.
Reno Omokri
