"Aran to Africa, An Irishman's Unique Odyssey," by Pádraig O’Toole
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ISBN: 9781492248903
Pádraig O’Toole,
was born in 1938 on the Aran Island of Inis Mór. The eldest of seven children,
he had a carefree childhood, walking in bare feet to school until winter time
when he wore knitted socks and pampooties. He fished for supper, learned to manoeuver the currach, and helped his father make soil
for their potato crops by mixing clay, sand and seaweed. Embedded in his memory of childhood are
evenings of song and storytelling by a fire of dried dung, with his family
sitting ‘round on wooden kitchen stools. In time, his mother bought a bicycle, and then a radio that
operated on a large wet battery, which needed re-charging every few weeks. Pádraig’s task was to mount the battery
onto the bicycle and drive for miles into the village of Kilronan, where the
local policeman charged batteries for all the islanders with his small
generator.
The Irish
government of the day allocated a number of scholarships to give primary school
children access to teacher training colleges on the mainland. Gaining access to
such a scholarship was the only chance a child had for ongoing education, thus avoiding
the emigrant ship. Pádraig, who
neither spoke nor understood English, began a new adventure in Galway, where an
unkindly landlady referred to him as the “stupid little boy from Aran”.
With his
natural penchant for scholarship, he learned English and obtained consistently
high marks in secondary school. In his last term a “frail, sunburnt missionary”
in a long white cassock spoke to his class, telling of excitement and adventure
working in Africa. Pádraig applied
to join the Society of African Missions, and following his university studies, he
became a seminarian and an ordained priest, and set out in 1965 on a mission to
West Africa.
Free thinking Fr.
O’Toole never fell into step with the institutional Church’s requirement for
blind obedience. Far from being a
“cultural imperialist” and given that historically his own Irish language and
culture had been supplanted, he did not subscribe to the evangelical
number-crunching view of “harvesting souls for God”. His commitment to the
priesthood was about improving the world. In Nigeria, his teaching and community development led him
down many paths, from running mercy missions to hospital for a snake-bitten
villager and a birthing mother, to tending prisoners on Death Row, to designing
and building a combined currach -kayak to
navigate the Niger River .
At the start of
the Biafra war, Muslim officials urged the Emirs to establish secondary schools
to address the lack of literacy of its populace. The author accepted the challenge of moving to Lafiagi, a mosquito-infested
village with no water or electricity, to help set up a school. The best accommodation available
was the Emir’s ‘palace’ where the author, a celibate Catholic priest, lived
amongst the Emir’s harem of ten wives.
Fada, as he was known, was
considered a “good pagan” and he and the Emir enjoyed conversation over the
occasional bottle of Guinness “for medicinal purposes”.
There follow
colourful anecdotes of building
wells, and of a cow and goat falling into them, and stories of scorpions and
snakes, including one dreaded kind of spitting cobra known locally as “Good Bye
Tomorrow”. On leaving the Emir’s
palace for home leave, the author reflects that he saved no souls, nor planted
any crosses in the land. But on
top of a tall mango tree there hangs a crucifix, placed there by a playful pet
monkey.
A return to
Aran gave the author time to look out onto the ocean waves and realize that
certain ‘priestly virtues’ escaped him.
He was “still living in the jet stream of the missionary rocket, not yet
realizing that very soon, by the very laws of physics, if not spirituality,
(he’d) have to curve out of that orbit…” After a fortnight of walking the crags
he packed his bags mentally and prepared for a new chapter.
There were many
new chapters: he became a magazine
editor, a television producer, a doctoral student in Toronto, a teacher of IT
and Design Technology in England. He married Mary O’Hara, the internationally renowned singer
and harpist, and became her concert promoter around the world. After Mary retired from performing,
they spent six adventurous years working in Tanzania.
This is an account
of a life well lived, narrated as though around a fire, or over a neighbourly
garden fence. Sincere, intimate,
jocular and unaffected, this is indeed a Unique Odyssey, beginning and ending
on Inis Mór, a place of westerly gales, where breakers spit at the shore “in an
age-old love-hate feud of land and sea”.
By Susan Sweeney
Hermon
If you wish to listen an Irish language review of this book, listen to RTÉ radio's
Iris Aniar Máirtín Jaimsie Ó Flaithbheartaigh, colúnaí.
