Upon receipt of a message from Kurunmi that one of the missionaries stationed in Oyo might be in danger, Stone set out on a journey from Ijaye on his Bucephalus. Their plan was to destroy Ijaye and Abeokuta and recapture Lagos but Balogun Ibikunle, “Ebekoonleh” to Stone, the civilian governor of Ibadan, being a friend to Kurunmi, was opposed to this plan. Ogunmola, in alliance with the Dahomeyans – now the Beniniose of Benin Republic – enemies of the Egba, conspired to wage war against the Egba and the English for their opposition to slavery. Ogunmola was an enemy of Kurunmi, who began to be referred to as Aare after his installation by Alaafin Atiba. This riled “Ogumulla, the military leader of Ebaddan” – according to Stone’s memoir – the friend of, again from the memoir, “the king of Yoruba” – I suppose the Alaafin of Oyo. The Egba supported the British in their war against King Kosoko and his Portuguese allies in ending the slave trade. From the account of the respected Yoruba history authority, Samuel Johnson, Kurunmi was the “greatest soldier of his age”, who possessed huge mystical powers and was highly dreaded. An ally of the Oyo Prince, Atiba, who later became Alaafin, Atiba subsequently installed him as the Aare Ona Kakanfo of Yorubaland. Kurunmi, translated to mean, “death has ruined me,” had the legendary fame of a warlord of the empire of Ijaye, which was just a 20-kilometre distance from present day Mokola in Abeokuta. After selling the horse to Stone, Kurunmi then purchased a beautiful Arabian white horse as replacement. The Ifa oracle had earlier counseled Kurunmi to dispose off his horse and subsequently ride only white horses. Again, while Akunyili was said to have been driven in a car, Stone was riding a war horse, which he named Bucephalus, sold to him by the legendary warrior of the Yoruba Ijaye kingdom, Kurunmi, who Stone had the opportunity of meeting with a man he called a despot in the memoir. No answer.įor want of a narrative to fill that void, I dug into the experience of Reverend Stone, who was subjected to a similar waylay, over a century ago.
What transpired between Akunyili and those beasts between that moment of his ambush and his eventual gruesome killing? Did he plead with them to spare his life? Did he identify himself? Did they know he was the widower of Dora, that ecumenical spirit, the angelic Amazon who saved many Nigerian lives from drug fakers? Were the killers that impervious to recognising Angelic spirits that they did not identify one in Chike? Questions. Nor could he tell anyone how these messengers of death fired rude, hot lead at his cerebrum. Save for the video circulating on the social media of his huge frame lying on the bare floor, writhing in unimaginable pain, his face a huge gash of ripped open flesh and blood, Akunyili didn’t live to recount the gory horror of his waylay by that band of bloodthirsty hounds in the last minutes of his life. About eight other people were said to have been shot dead or beheaded in that melee.
Akunyili was shot and killed at Nkpor, Idemili Local Government of Anambra State by yet unidentified gunmen.
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He lived in Ijaye, Abeokuta, and Lagos and traveled to “Ibadan, Lahlookpon, Ewo, Ogbomishaw, and Oyo”, in his own words.įor both Stone and Akunyili, I struggled, with scant success, to reconstruct the horror of the grisly movie in which they starred. I find a symbolic similarity between the travails of Dr Chike Akunyili and Reverend Richard Henry Stone (1837–1915), with the latter’s experience narrated in his memoir that contains his missionary activities in Nigeria, entitled, In Africa’s Forest And Jungles. Stone was an American missionary who came to Africa during the nineteenth century to represent the Southern Baptist Convention and spent years among the Yoruba-speaking people of Western Nigeria.
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