The Man Whose Name I Carry

This is my Grandfather in London on January 9th, 1950. He was 37-years-old then, just as I am today.

I’ve spent most of my life carrying my Grandfather’s name without really knowing his story.

Olatunji Adisa-Williams.  It’s my name, too.

There’s something strange about that.  A name can be one of the most intimate things we possess while belonging, in some sense, to people who came long before us.  We introduce ourselves with it and sign things with it.  Other people inevitably shorten it, mispronounce it, remember it, and then forget it.

And sometimes it takes half a lifetime to wonder where it actually came from.  I've recently started doing that with mine.  And, the more I learn about my grandfather, the more interesting the story becomes.

His name appears in the historical record surprisingly early, and in a place I wasn't expecting.  Boxing. 

In 1938, the West African Pilot reported on a major inter-colonial boxing tournament between Nigeria and the Gold Coast, today's Ghana.  The manager representing Nigerian fighters Bob Savage and Reggie Williams was a man named Adisa Olatunji Williams.  That’s my Grandfather. 

My Grandfather traveled to Accra and returned to Lagos aboard the Apapa carrying the contract for the fights.  He spoke to the newspaper about the sophistication of boxing in the Gold Coast and the enthusiasm surrounding the sport there.  It's a wonderful little historical artifact.

My Grandfather, apparently, was managing Nigerian boxers before Nigeria was even an independent country.  But boxing was only one chapter.

Over the following decade, the trail begins moving toward journalism, writing and broadcasting.  By the late 1940s and early 1950s, my grandfather was in Britain and moving through the emerging community of West African writers, journalists and artists there.  It was an extraordinary moment.  London had become a gathering place for Africans and West Indians who were beginning to imagine, argue about and articulate a postcolonial future.  My grandfather was somewhere in that world.

And then came the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). 

The BBC was experimenting with programming specifically intended to bring West African writing to the airwaves.  One of those programs was West African Voices, a literary radio program connected intellectually to the better-known Caribbean Voices.

The idea was simple but enormously consequential.  Give African writers access to one of the most powerful broadcasting systems in the world.

By 1956, my grandfather, Adisa Williams, had assumed sustained responsibility for West African Voices.  The year 1956 was not an incidental year in African history.  Ghana would become independent the following year.  Nigeria would follow in 1960.  And, across the continent, political independence was moving from aspiration toward inevitability.

Alongside the politicians negotiating constitutions and independence were writers, journalists, broadcasters and artists doing something equally important.  They were figuring out how Africans would describe themselves.

My Grandfather was working in that space.

He wasn't simply a Nigerian who happened to work at the BBC.  He was involved in a broadcasting project specifically concerned with bringing West African writing, criticism and ideas to a wider audience during the final years of British colonial rule.  And then, at some point, the direction of travel reversed.

He came home.

My Grandfather went on to manage a Western Nigerian media operation during one of the most consequential periods in the history of African broadcasting.  At the time, Western Nigeria was then doing something extraordinary.

In 1959, television broadcasting began in Ibadan with Western Nigeria Television.  It was the first television service in Nigeria and the first television station established in Africa.  Together with the region's radio operations, it placed Western Nigeria at the frontier of a completely new African mass-media landscape.

My Grandfather had gone from working within the BBC—one of the great institutions of British broadcasting—to helping manage media in Western Nigeria at precisely the moment Nigerians were beginning to build broadcasting institutions of their own.

To me, there is an almost perfect historical symmetry to that.  He had spent part of the 1950s helping African voices reach audiences through British radio.  Now he was back in Nigeria as the country entered independence, helping participate in the development of a media ecosystem increasingly capable of speaking for itself.

I think that distinction does a lot of work. Independence wasn't simply about flags coming down and new ones going up.  A country had to be built.

That meant governments and courts, obviously.  But it also meant universities, newspapers, businesses, radio stations and television networks.  It required a generation of Nigerians who understood how institutions worked and who were prepared to take responsibility for running them.  And media had a particularly important role.

For generations, Africans had largely existed in the Western imagination as people being described by somebody else.  Now Nigerians had microphones, cameras and transmitters.  And more importantly, control over the institutions behind them.

My Grandfather appears to have been part of that transition.  And his career in Nigerian broadcasting seems to have continued beyond Western Nigeria. An international television directory covering 1965 identifies an Adisa Williams as the Commercial Director of the Nigerian Television Authority in Lagos.

The Nigerian Television Authority was the operated by the Federal Government.  The same directory lists alongside him people who would become significant figures in Nigerian broadcasting, including Christopher Kolade as Program Manager and Segun Olusola as Production Manager.

From boxing promotion in colonial Lagos, to the commercial leadership of Nigerian national television, his career didn't simply happen alongside the emergence of modern Nigerian mass media.  In a small but meaningful way, it appears to have traveled with it.

History becomes much more interesting when one realizes that it isn't actually history.  It’s family. The big movements we read about—empire, independence, migration, education, globalization—eventually resolve themselves into ordinary human beings making decisions about careers, marriages, children and where to build a life.  Those decisions travel.  Sometimes for generations.

And, this is where researching my Grandfather has become fractalic for me. 

I was born in Lagos, spent part of my childhood in England, and eventually grew up in America.  My own life has involved moving between worlds and trying to understand the relationship between them.  Nigerian and American.  African and Western.  Law and technology.  Institutions and communities.

And through all of it, I have written.  I write to understand things.  I write because occasionally an idea refuses to leave me alone.  I write about technology, community, belonging, institutions, people and the strange systems we build around ourselves.

For years, I thought of that instinct as entirely my own.  Maybe it isn't.

That’s one of the beautiful things about getting older.  You begin discovering that some of the things you considered peculiarities of your own personality may actually be echoes.  The questions you ask, the work you are drawn toward.  The way you move through the world.  Even the stubborn impulse to tell a story. Family history has a way of hiding in plain sight.

There are still enormous gaps in my Grandfather’s story that I won’t fill for you today with this piece.  There are undoubtedly things sitting in Nigerian newspaper archives, BBC files and broadcasting records that I haven't found yet.  And, there are probably stories sitting in the memories of people who knew him.  I plan to find them.

I've realized that researching my Grandfather isn't really an exercise in nostalgia.  I never actually knew him.  To me, it’s an investigation. I'm trying to understand the life of a Nigerian man who moved through some fascinating corners of the twentieth century—and whose name somehow traveled all the way through that history and landed on me.

We tend to imagine inheritance as something tangible.  Money. Property. Photographs. A watch. Maybe a house.  Those things aren’t bad.  But inheritance is much stranger and layered than that.  Sometimes you inherit a disposition, a curiosity, a relationship with language.  Sometimes it’s an inexplicable attraction to a particular kind of work.

And sometimes you inherit four syllables that follow you everywhere: O-la-tun-ji.

I used to think of my name primarily as mine.  Increasingly, I understand that I am merely its current steward.  My Grandfather carried it before me.  His life gave it meaning before mine ever began.  And whatever I manage to do with my own time here, will add another chapter to something that was already being written long before I arrived.

There is something humbling and enormously comforting about that.  

We spend so much of our lives trying to become somebody.  Then, if we're lucky, we eventually discover that we came from somebody, too.