My Grandfather’s Notebook
Dear Fellow,
My mother, my siblings, and I always celebrated my father’s birthday on the wrong date until one day in August 2022.1 We were not alone in this error. Every second day of September, my father received birthday messages and gifts from his family, his colleagues at work, and even from his bank and network service providers on the same date. You would see this mark of uncertainty on his face, even in his words, whenever he is asked to fill the biodata section of any form. My father had always been unsure of his birth date, but he was helpless all along. Or was he?
My grandfather Tongjal Yilsu Elisha (1909-2022) died on the 27th of August 2022. Married to Najim Yilmunt (my grandmother) for 62 years at the time of his death, he is survived by nine children and four step-children.2 My father Tongjal Nungbulla Elisha is his first son and the third child among his nine children. My grandfather was favoured in his 113-year-lifetime, not only as a man of wisdom and good report among the people in my village and beyond but also in the fact that he never used eyeglasses
once.3
At the family reunion fellowship in 2021 at his house in my village, Garram of Kanke LGA in Plateau State, Nigeria, I noticed he sometimes stayed up late at night having his quiet time and sweet fellowship with God. All he needed was good lighting—by burning wood, that is—and that was good enough for him. His loud outbursts of joyful singing wouldn’t allow you to sleep deeply at night, especially if your room was close to his hut (or close to a special hut built for him by his sons as a prayer room) at the village. My grandfather lived a life worth writing about, and I am glad my father lived up to that call with a singular attempt at a small biography of him published mainly for the family in 2021.4 However, his story is not told completely yet. Maybe, I will write a more extensive version when I am ready for the job. But for now, enjoy this aspect of my grandfather in the following paragraphs.
My father’s birthday anniversary this year is tomorrow. Notice there is no sign of uncertainty in the sentence. My father was born on the 24th of September 1964. Unlike my grandfather whose birth year was deduced by some intelligent guesses because there was neither a journal entry of his birth date nor a birth certificate bearing his name, my father’s birth date will not have to be a piece of guesswork any longer.5 My grandfather kept a clean record of the birth date of each of his children written by hand in a pocket-size notebook bearing the title “Cash Book”; the pages of the books had nothing else written in it aside from the dates of birth. In the notebook are seven ₦1 notes bearing images of Herbert Macauley (1864-1946).6 You wonder what inspired the recordkeeping. I wish he were alive to give me an answer. It is interesting to note that, it was still this notebook that helped us guess at his age during his funeral, alongside his marriage certificate. However, I am still sceptical about the year of his birth stated above. Only if my great-grandfather had a similar initiative—to record the birth dates of his children. Maybe my grandfather’s exact date of birth is encoded somewhere I don’t know yet.
Yesterday, I read further into Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers and Marshall Broomhall’s biography of Hudson Taylor (1832-1905). I could not miss out on the illustrations in both books of the significant influence of our family background on our becoming. For example, see what Broomhall wrote about Hudson Taylor’s father:
James Taylor was a man possessed of a strong personal faith in God as the living God, and in His unchanging faithfulness. To him nothing was more important than that his children should be imbued with the same convictions. To this end he took them with him into his closet, when he shut the door that he might pray to his Father in secret, in this way not only were habits of prayer taught, but a sense of the reality and presence of God was communicated to his children.7
Consider Gladwell’s treatment of the fascinating history of Jews who were skilled garment workers immigrating to America in the nineteenth century, as a background detail to explain Joe Flom’s remarkable ascent to a lawyer of repute:
“Louis and Regina Borgenicht and the thousands of others who came over on the boats with them were given a golden opportunity. And so were their children and grandchildren, because the lessons those garment workers brought home with them in the evenings turned out to be critical for getting ahead in the world.”8
I am now curious to learn more about my ancestry with the knowledge gained from these two books—and my grandfather’s notebook. In fact, I have this thought forming in my head that my commitment to writing (precisely documentation) is hereditary. Remember that my father wrote two booklets for the family—one about his grandfather and the other about my grandfather. Do you see a trace of the trait, in that my grandfather wrote down carefully the birth dates of each of his children?
As I grow older and read wider, I am becoming more concerned about documentation. The need for it gets clearer by the day, I can’t resist its appeal to me. Writing this despatch, there is this sense of obligation to posterity. One of my joys is that never would anyone else’s birth date in my family be a piece of guesswork again or a source of a mistaken celebration. The mistaken birthdays of my father are now a sweet old memory; the 28th of August 2023 being the day the veil fell off my eyes, the very day I found my grandfather’s notebook in his small metal box. Reading my first biographical essay of my grandfather published last year, this line shines bright: “Apart from God, the most reliable witness of our lives is our diary.” I’d rewrite it thus, for you to heed: Apart from God, the most reliable witness of my life is my diary.
Good Fellow, document your life!
Your LetterMan,
Tongjal, W. N.
Tongjal Wungakha Nungbulla, “A Beautiful Interruption: Roses, Heroes, and Witnesses”, RANDOM DESPATCHES, 3 September 2022, https://randomdespatches.substack.com/p/a-beautiful-interruption.
Tongjal Nungbulla Elisha, Icon of Hope: Manifestation of God’s Faithfulness (Jos: Sicomm Global Press, 2021).
Tongjal Wungakha Nungbulla, 2022.
Elsewhere, I narrated how being the editor and proofreader for that project which commenced in 2018 is a major contribution to my evolution as a writer.
Though we relied on markers such as the birth year of his first child (21st September 1959), the notion that he didn’t get married early, and the fact that he had no child in their first 10 years of marriage, I am still sceptical that my grandfather was born in 1909.
It is disheartening to find that the year the ₦1 notes were printed is not shown anywhere on the notes. According to Wikipedia, Herbert Macualey was featured on the naira note from 1979 to 1991, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Macaulay.
Marshall Broomhall, Hudson Taylor: The Man Who Believed God (Estes Park-Jenta Mangoro: 2023).
Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers: The Story of Success (Strand: Penguin Books, 2009), p. 145.
This is beautifully written
Superb !
Happy birthday to Daddy