“We” seem to be unable to get out of the excitement about Gem Akele’s wedding last Saturday, manifesting, for instance, in the insistence that pictures of the husband were missing from the initial story of the wedding in Intervention. Perhaps, the infatuation of the witnesses to history as unfolded by the National Association of Nigerian Student, (NANS) from the early eighties to the mid-1990s justifies the excitement in the survival of the daughter of one of the most active cadres of that experiment in radical nationalism.
Here then are two appearances of the husband and his beau along with the original story.
The National Association of Nigerian Students, (NANS) was a game changer in radical democratic politics in Nigeria. As early as the early 1980s, it had concluded that those ruling Nigeria were going to run the country aground. And it published this position in a booklet which nobody took note of. Instead, successive military regimes pursued its cadres through arbitrary management of the university system. The results are some of the embarrassing features manifesting about the university system in Nigeria today.
It was all part of it on May 13 and 14th, 2022 when the traditional and Christian wedding took place
More faces at the very symbolic event
The resistance politics to this culture of authoritarianism consumed many cadres, directly and indirectly. One of such cadres was Anselm Akele. He was a fantastic cadre of the student movement, never tired of undertaking diverse assignments and the trips associated with that. And he never stopped smiling, no matter how tense the situation might be. Then he died.
But before his death, he produced a daughter. And, in one imaginative flash, he called her Gem. And Gem grew up to be a gem, in body and soul, as guided by a dedicated mother. All the student activists might not have been at the wedding but it is doubtful if any other wedding enjoyed the symbolism hers did in that circuit. It is one wedding that will gladden many hearts.
There might be thus no more fitting end to her wedding as captured in the few pictures in this report than the catch phrase of our Pentecostal brothers when they say, “It is well”!
