Made in Alagbon: The love story of Yinka and Joe Odumakin, Nigeria’s iconic activist couple

When Joe Okei-Odumakin was 14, her dream was to become a Catholic nun. Her father, despite being a staunch Catholic himself, vehemently opposed her dream.

How did he respond? He threatened to disown his 14-year-old daughter and print her obituary.

“But I was too young to be disowned,” she said in an interview. “Not only did my father threaten to disown me, but he also was to print my obituary because he said I did not want to procreate.”

The threats did little to discourage her. She wept but remained resolute.

A nun, that’s what she wanted to be. And she held on to the dream up to her days at the University of Ilorin where she studied English Education.

When she grew older and started activism, she modified her dream – vowing not to marry until Nigeria transitions to democracy from military rule. But she found love at the most unexpected place. Police detention, that was where she met Yinka Odumakin, the man who became her husband and father of her children.

Love, as they say, can come from the most unexpected places, and notwithstanding the circumstances, true blue love would come to fruition.

From meeting at the Nigeria Police Force Criminal Investigation and Intelligence Department (FCIID) at Alagbon, Lagos in 1994, Yinka, and Joe went on to build a reputation as Nigeria’s most influential activist couple.

They have a lot in common. They were born the same year. They both studied English at the university and were both prisoners of conscience when cupid’s arrow struck.

Yinka was born December 10, 1966, while Joe was born July 4, 1966, in Zaria, Kaduna State, just 25 days before the counter-coup of July 29, 1966, masterminded by soldiers of northern extraction to avenge the military coup of January 1966.

Their births came in a year Nigeria was shaken to its foundation by a series of events that included the first military coup in January 1966, a counter-coup in July 1966, followed by pogroms that led to the death of an estimated 30,000 Igbos living in the North, and a mass exodus of Igbo people from the North and other parts of Nigeria to the Eastern Region. And barely a year after, Chukwuemeka Ojukwu declared that the Igbos would secede from Nigeria. What followed was a civil war that lasted for about three years and claimed an estimated three million lives.

Joe grew up living a tomboy life as the only female among her siblings. While she was attending missionary schools – St Barnabas Primary School and Queen Elizabeth Secondary School, Ilorin, Kwara State, Yinka was also starting life in Ile-Ife, Osun State where he had his ‘A’ levels at Oduduwa College, Ile-Ife, and a bachelor’s degree in English Language from Obafemi Awolowo University (OAU), Ile-Ife in 1989.

Before Alagbon brought them together, the couple had committed their early life to activism.

In the formative days of their activism careers, Yinka was Public Relations Officer (PRO) of the Students’ Union Government (SUG) of OAU, while Joe on the other hand said she played football as a young girl and “loved defending people’s rights”

Yinka’s former schoolmate, Remigius Akinbinu, a lawyer, who also attended Oduduwa College and OAU, described Yinka as “a very studious and hardworking student whose only vocation was books, book, and books.”

How activism led them to prison

Joe joined the activism movement on campus during her A-levels at the Kwara State Polytechnic.

“While I was at the University of Ilorin in 1985, I had a lecturer who saw that I was brilliant and asked what I wanted to become in life and I told her that I wanted to become a nun,” she said. “She was the one who motivated me to read about Martin Luther King and other people like Karl Max, Malcolm X.”

Reading those books, Joe’s activism began to take shape and on January 10, 1985, her activism career took off. By March 1985, she was elected Secretary of the Kwara State branch of Women in Nigeria.

 

In the course of her activism she met the late Dr. Beko Ransome-Kuti, one of the sons of renowned activists late Funmilayo Kuti, and Afrobeat creator, Fela Anikulapo-Kuti’s elder brother.

Beko introduced Joe to Gani Fawehinmi, a human rights lawyer, and it was Fawehinmi who laid the foundation that birthed the Odumakins union from detention.

Between 1993 and 1998, Alagbon and the Directorate of Military Intelligence (DMI) cells in Apapa were populated by political prisoners under the repressive regime of General Sani Abacha who was Nigeria’s Head of State.

Many journalists, pro-democracy campaigners, politicians, who opposed the detention of MKO Abiola and called for his declaration as winner of the June 12, 1993, presidential election, were jailed.

It was during that ugly era in Nigeria’s history that Yinka was arrested and detained with Fawehinmi during a protest in Lagos in 1994. By a rare twist of fate, Joe who had also been arrested in Ilorin for pasting posters attacking the regime was transferred to Lagos.

“I have always given my life to the struggle and I met Comrade (Yinka) in detention. He and Gani Fawehinmi were detained at Panti (Police station, Lagos), and then they were moved to Alagbon,” Joe told a Nigerian online newspaper, PremiumTimes, in 2014. “I was detained in Ilorin because I was pasting posters at a barracks (the military headquarters) and I was there for about one month and then I was brought to Lagos. That was where I met him and met Chief Gani Fawehinm.”

“My husband was not a criminal, neither was I. Our ‘crime’ was standing strong for others as we always have been,” Joe said in a statement announcing the death of Yinka on Tuesday, April 6, 2021.

Life as lovers:

“I was first attracted by her guts,” Yinka told a Nigerian newspaper, The Punch in 2016. “I was swept off my feet that a woman could be that bold in a season where a lot of men were lily-livered.”

 

 

When Yinka decided to propose to Joe, it was at a gathering of activists.

“Even in proposing to me, it was where people were sitting around. We were supposed to write on the state of the nation. There were seven of us. Before we started he said, ‘I want us to debate the state of my heart. I asked this girl to marry me, but she said until democracy comes’. He said some other things. At the end, the comrades there said, ‘Yinka has won’. That was how it began,” Joe said.

They got married in November 1997.

“After our marriage, there was no honeymoon. We were in a hotel in Ilorin and the manager called us saying that we should leave,” she said. “The honeymoon was sharing teargas, running around, hiding. That is how life has been.”

Managing the home as itinerant couple

“We have an arrangement for that,” Yinka Odumakin said in an interview with Premium Times.

Joe admitted that managing the home has not been easy because, “in those days during the military dictatorship, I had vowed that I was not going to marry except there was democracy until I met Comrade Yinka Odumakin in detention.”

 

She said “if one fails in one, one has failed in all. I learned from my mother when I was growing up.”

“If I am going for the protest or anything, I make sure that I prepare about six different kinds of soup and keep them in the freezer just like I learnt from my mother who always went once a while to the market.”

Before Yinka’s death on Friday, April 2, 2021, at the Lagos State University Teaching Hospital (LASUTH), their best moments, Joe said, have been “when we debate the state of the nation, heated debate on the state of the nation.”

An apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, Yinka said their children now carry the activism streak in them.

Joe and Yinka complimented each other, professionally and romantically. They did not allow marriage to rob each other of their dreams. They embedded themselves and gained a reputation as activists who did not shy from leading a cause and getting close to the action scene. It was this audacity that led them to where their love story was birthed – behind bars.