Toke Makinwa is made of sterner stuff than most women – scratch that – stronger than most people. And that’s not about the content of her much talked about memoir On Becoming (at least not yet).
She has been mocked, ridiculed and vilified for everything from her complexion to her occasional fashion faux pas to her on-air accent and her tempestuous marriage. All of these she has borne with remarkable resolve.
If any of those comments hurt her, she never showed it, not publicly. She never lashed out at ‘haters’ as many celebrities tend to do, and she always smiled. So the many opinions on her recently released memoir were not shocking. I dare say even she expected them.
However, it wasn’t a secret what the content would be. Even though the title inferred that it was about the process of becoming the woman she is now, the topic of her marriage was a very juicy one and some of us had guesstimated that it would mostly be about the non-Yoruba demon that had plagued her as reported in the media.
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Therefore it wasn’t a surprise when it came out and save for 23 pages or so, the entirety of 122-page book was about she and ex-husband Maje Ayida.
Now this writer is no expert on love and marriages, so he cannot say with pompous arrogance (like majority of the impromptu critics that have dissected the book since it came out on Sunday) that Toke was either wrong or foolish by sticking with the man, who according to her has hurt her terribly in the last 10 years.
But at the same time I have been in the world long enough to realize that there is almost never one side to a story; there’s at least three sides. Thus, I cannot make definitive comments on what went wrong in a marriage that I know nothing about, apart from the ‘exclusives’ and ‘scoops’ reported in the media.
They say all is fair in love and war, so if her husband that she married has a child by another woman (regardless of their history), it’s only fair that she deals with that pain in whatever way she chooses.
But Ms. Makinwa seems so focused on eviscerating Maje that either she or her ghostwriter(s) unknowingly or otherwise left a few gaps in the fantastic tale.
On page 14, she writes about the tragic fire that killed her mother. No child should witness her parent burning to death like she did. It’s a horrifying thought, let alone sight and my heart bled as I read it.
But did Toke inadvertently reveal her mother’s negligence or was it bad storytelling? It is troubling that a young mother with four small children in the house, would discover a gas leak on Friday and leave it in the kitchen until Monday!
The first thought that would have occurred to her (I presume) is to remove the leaking cylinder from the flat. Put it behind the fence, under the staircase, anywhere but the kitchen where she or her maid would be striking matches to light a kerosene stove for two entire days.
Again, I do not know how it was done in Abuja in 1992, but I know how gas was procured in Ibadan where I grew up: you took your cylinder to a petrol station to fill. If there was no way to contact ‘the gas people’ over the weekend, surely her mother would take it back on Saturday morning. Except if gas stations were a rarity in Abuja.
Even then, it would be extremely negligent of her to leave it in the house. I doubt that Toke would deliberately choose to malign the memory of her sweet mother that way, so I will chalk it up as her own bad storytelling.
The bad storytelling continues on page 28 when she met Maje after her first boyfriend broke up with her. She walked in on him with another girl and he told her, ‘I think we should start seeing other people.’
Flip over to page 39 when Maje broke up with her for the first time, six months into their relationship. His words were, ‘I can’t deal with these questions. I need some time. I think we should take a break.’ What were the odds of both men breaking up with her in almost exactly the same words?
At best it is cliché that often plagues people when they’re giving an abridged version of a gist. That brevity is unseen when it comes to divulging everything that transpired between she and Maje, including the stark difference between the spiritually mature Toke who is the classy, long-suffering wife, and the shock jock that describes her husband’s refusal to impregnate her as ‘he refused to come in me’. That sounds more suited for ‘Nackson‘ than an uplifting story of a powerful woman. Pastor Adeboye, who she casually namedrops on page 109, will shudder.
What Toke has done with On Becoming is seizing the narrative. As seen with the Tiwa Savage expose after her own marriage broke down, it’s not common for women in this part of the world to tell their story that candidly in the media.
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Toke is not stupid. She has been dragged to hell for months on end through the whole marriage rollercoaster. Changing the course of the conversation the way she has done is smart. It bears the hallmark of genius when you consider that whilst the aforementioned Tiwa Savage gave her own telemundo-like story away in one 45-minute video, Toke Makinwa packed hers in the well publicized $10 book.
No charity organization was invited to the book launch, no percentages of earnings have been promised to any organization that helps broken women who Toke says she’s sure her book will help. Not that she has to, but it would have made it more plausible as a authentic memoir, a complete story of Toke’s becoming.
This is a compilation of salacious gist that Toke is smart enough to profit from rather than leave to the comment sections of blogs and Instagram posts. It could very well have been titled ‘My Years of Suffering at the Hands of Maje Ayida’. In the dramatic world of entertainment where Toke operates (as do I), the sordid sells. Sleaze sells. The sleazier, the better – and she knows it.
On Becoming is a carefully curated piece of literature that is designed to elicit the exact reactions it is generating now: sympathy from similarly scorned women, dismissal from other women and men who think she’s complicit by sticking ceaselessly with an unrepentant cheat, the bully of a man she married, and most importantly, a sold out book. Well played Ms. Makinwa. Very well played.
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