RAFIATU ADUNNI OYELADE

Iyaloja of Mushin's pepper sellers who fed a neighbourhood and schooled sixty girls

Before the first call to prayer, the lamp at stall 14 in Mushin Market was already lit, and Alhaja Rafiatu Oyelade was already arguing happily with a lorry driver about the price of tatashe. For more than fifty years that was the rhythm of her life, and half of Lagos learned to season its stew by her measure.

Born in Abeokuta in 1948, Rafiatu was the fourth of nine children of a cloth dyer and his wife. She left school after primary six at Ansar-Ud-Deen so that her younger brothers could stay in class, and at nineteen she travelled to Lagos with one basket of dried pepper and an address written on a torn piece of paper. By 1970 she had her own stall, a husband in Alhaji Lateef Oyelade, and a reputation: she never cheated a scale and never turned a hungry child away.

Her fellow traders made her Iyaloja of the Mushin pepper sellers in 1992, and she held the title for twenty-seven years. She settled quarrels over stall boundaries, negotiated with the local government when levies rose, and quietly paid the school fees of more than sixty apprentice girls, each of whom was expected to learn to read, to count and to speak up for herself. 'A woman who can count,' she liked to say, 'is never cheated twice.'

She performed Hajj in 2004, and the photograph from Arafat stood on every shelf in her home. She loved ofada rice, old Fuji records, and the Friday evening hour when her grandchildren crowded onto her bed to hear the same three stories again. She died peacefully at home in January 2022, surrounded by her children, having spent her last week on the telephone reconciling two feuding traders.

She is survived by her sons and daughter, nineteen grandchildren, and a market that still keeps a lamp lit at stall 14.

“A woman who can count is never cheated twice.”