INTERVIEW:Rotimi Adebari's one-year term as mayor of Portlaoise ends later this month. He has blazed a trail for Africans in Ireland and most of the citizens of the town have supported him all the way. So what has it been like being Ireland's first black mayor? And where will it end for this man on a mission to make a contribution? asks Ruadhan MacCormaic
IT'S A time-consuming business, being Rotimi Adebari. A few weeks after he took over as mayor of Portlaoise last June, with the council's inbox spilling over and staff at the civic office doubling as phone operators, a colleague took him aside one day and asked: "Rotimi, how are you going to manage all this?"
Over the next year he would give more than 500 interviews, mostly to foreign media, acquainting readers of the Taipei Times, Le Mondeand Timemagazine with the workings of the nine-member town council in Portlaoise. He would lose 5kg in weight and acquire a well-honed skill for engaging oratory by bringing his story to parish halls and community centres across the State and beyond.
Before long, people had started to refer to him by his first name. He tells of waiting for a friend in the rain near the Shelbourne Hotel in Dublin one evening, and how in that five minutes three strangers approached him to say hello. "You wouldn't be Rotimi?" they asked. The office of mayor doesn't come with a desk-space or a secretary, so he would end up spending much of his day on the road or on the phone, and before long he fell into the habit of replying to e-mails at 3am, when the family were sleeping. "Daddy, why can't you tell them you don't want to be mayor any more?" one of his young sons asked in December. "We never see you." Add to all that the weight of perpetual speech-making, photo-taking, ribbon-cutting, plaque-unveiling, name-lending, ear-bending and flesh-pressing, under which every politician must labour, and he must have wondered if being the first black mayor in Ireland may be the busiest part-time job a man could find.
These are the final weeks of his term, and on this sunny Wednesday morning it's just after 10am when he strides purposefully into the parish hall in Portlaoise, adjusting his chain over an immaculate navy suit, a silver anti-racism badge pinned to his lapel. A dozen members of the Knockmay women's group are waiting in the meeting room, and he makes a point of greeting each one warmly. "Hello, Esther, nice to see you. It's very warm, isn't it." Since setting up in January, the women's group has been meeting here three mornings a week for courses in leadership, drug awareness and jewellery-making. There are 14 members - most single mothers, all unemployed. This morning all the talk is of Knockmay, a network of block-grey council estates where the local features of note include high unemployment, a drugs problem and a thriving petty crime scene. The council is working on a major development project for the estates, to include shops, a crèche and a play area, and the women have called in the mayor to tell him they want their say.
The walls of the meeting room are aglow with their own paintings, each one a rendering of their feelings towards their estate, and a series of bullet-point wish-lists they have drafted together. There's a large diagram that places Knockmay in the middle, and emerging from it the six words: dump, kip, junkies, gurriers, robbers, scum.
One of the residents, Emma, has her name on a painting that juxtaposes her take on Knockmay with her view of the rest of town. On the left, filling half the page, is a grey rubbish bin bigger than a two-storey house. On the right, six elegant houses, sunlit and serene, with tall trees and children playing on an expansive green space. The piece is labelled "Our Dreams". "That's how we feel at the moment," Emma explains. "It's a bin."
Further along the wall there's a painting of a timebomb, and then another with a blood- spattered wall and what look like red droplets streaking down the page.
"What's this one?" asks the mayor, his head tilted sideways slightly.
"Getting anything done on the estate is like bashing your head against a wall," he is told.
Banter passes easily between them, and you see that any tension there was in the room earlier has slipped away unnoticed. When Adebari stands alongside Majeed Oladeinde, a man to whom he bears very little resemblance apart from being black and having closely-cropped hair, one of the women yells: "Are ye sure yer not rela'ed?" They collapse in laughter, and so does the mayor. They take a group photograph, then individual shots with the dignitary in their midst. Everyone wants to try on the chain, and he is happy to oblige.
Later, after Rotimi has dropped one of the women off at the hospital to visit her ill child and we drive on towards Knockmay, he doesn't wait for the question. "Of course, the authorities have failed them, but it has happened in many places, not just Portlaoise."
What delights him is their spirit, their vigour. He reminds you of his parting words to the group that morning. They should be proud of their achievement, he said, and remind themselves that on their own they are silent, but "as a group, you have a voice. It must be frustrating at times, but stick with it. Keep going." Stick with it. Keep going.
Rotimi Adebari was born in 1964 in Oke Odan, a town in Ogun state in southwestern Nigeria, and studied economics at the University of Benin before taking up a sales and marketing job with a television station. A Christian, he first came to Ireland in 2000, and though his application for asylum on the grounds of religious persecution was unsuccessful, he was granted residence because of his Irish-born child. The first year in Portlaoise was spent applying for jobs he never got. As the months passed and a paper tower of courteous rejections began to form, he widened his trawl - beyond Portlaoise, beyond the county, beyond the sales niche in which 10 years of experience gave him all the ticked boxes he thought he'd need. And still nothing.
Adebari once told me he remembers that year as the worst he has lived: he would sit at home, wracked with guilt that he couldn't provide for his wife Ronke and their three boys, Damilare, Opeayo and Ireayo (his youngest, a girl named Temilayo, was born two years ago).
He questioned himself and the choices he'd made. Had they done the right thing? How would they manage if . . .? Above all, he was bored. At one point he offered to wash cars at the local car park, but even that approach was rebuffed. "And I can remember the guy saying to me: 'Rotimi, I have no problem with you, but we've been told to be very cautious with the Nigerians'.
"The straw that broke the camel's back in my job search was when this employer said to me they [ would] prefer a local. I said: 'Hang on, how do you define local?' They said: 'Local as in local.'"
Adebari laughs at the recollection and the innocence it evokes: he thought all they wanted was some proof that he lived in the area. "I was trying to say to them that I saw myself as a local: I had lived here for two years at the time, and I was well integrated into the local community. At the end of the day, I got a letter in the post. 'We're sorry. We'll keep your application on file.' So that was the last straw, and that was the moment I sat back and thought, come on, maybe you have to start educating the people out there that this country has changed."
He immersed himself in the local community. In 2002 he set up Súil, a support group for the unemployed, and got together with some fellow immigrants to start an anti-litter campaign in the locality. ("We would go around picking up litter.") He also began his own intercultural consultancy, Optimum Point, to train schools, companies and other bodies in how to deal with their new-found diversity, and completed a master's degree in intercultural studies at DCU. He even landed his own weekly radio show - Respecting Difference - which still goes out on the local station every Saturday night.
Portlaoise's first citizen rarely refers to himself as a politician - he prefers "community representative" - and is alive to the irony of a man, who started out with such an aversion to this line of work, ending up wearing a ceremonial chain. "I remember during my college days, my political science lecturer, he used to say to us that if you want to know the name that people call you behind your back, go into politics," he says. "Go into politics and they will say it straight to your face."
And yet he has a romantic's belief in the nobility of the work, and an unshakeable faith in the potential of words. He delights in the mayor's role and talking endlessly of the privilege and the honour. He can be an enthralling speaker, adept at pacing and eye-contact, his rhetoric a cross-cultural blend that is rooted in Irish political idiom ("the fact of the matter") but allowed to soar by a delivery that owes as much to the altar as the stump. There's a fondness for rhetorical questions and open-ended, ambiguous exhortations that he lets hang in the space between sentences. Invariably, he'll leave the crowd by throwing down a challenge: think about this, ask yourselves that.
Martin Amis once observed of fin de règne Tony Blair that he was like a jukebox - you punch in the number you want and the turntable selects your disc - and after a decade in power he had hundreds of these discs to suit every occasion. Like all politicians, Adebari does much the same thing. You could see it on a tour of an impressive new herbal medicine school in Portlaoise recently, when he spent 40 minutes effortlessly soaking up the ins-and-outs of leaves, weeds and their medicinal properties: colt's foot, stinging nettles, dandelion (great for the kidneys, also good in a salad).
He admired the building - "Do you rent this from Brian?" - and marvelled at the iridology equipment. At one point, the conversation turned to the previous night's Primetime programme about a hospital superbug. "Anyway, that's a very negative thought," someone said, a little jarringly, before steering the conversation back to something a little more positive: herbs. He didn't blink. "Do you know how many herbalists we have in the midlands?" he wondered later.
Adebari spent a lot of time mulling over whether to contest the local election back in 2004 and, in the end, he says it was with the second generation of immigrants in mind that he decided to run. "I thought, if I am giving out that I'm being treated this way, that I am not being accepted, the question I should be asking myself is, what effort am I making to give back to this community myself? What do I leave behind for the generations behind me?" He ran under the slogan "The reality of our future", with a logo comprising a handshake between a black man and a white man.
In general, the response at the doors was encouraging. Doors were slammed in his face and he had his manifesto shoved straight back at him. But even white Irish candidates got that. Most people were encouraging, often promising him their number one or, if that was already gone, then a scratch somewhere down the line.
Adebari never tires of telling people how honoured he has felt this past year, how humbling an experience it has been. But even if this incorrigible optimist is loathe to discuss it, there has also been a price to pay. Apart from the physical toll, his day job with the consultancy has suffered. He also seems to have mixed feelings about his celebrity, and it rankles that some see him as fair game for a kick. Last autumn, a newspaper ran a story alleging that Adebari had worked as an underground driver in London before coming to Ireland and claiming asylum. He denied it. Why, he asked, would he have left such a well-paid, respectable job to come to Ireland to live on the meagre asylum seekers' allowance for all those years, and start all over again? "I took a deep breath and thought, what's going on here?" he recalls of the day the journalist called.
And then there are those who resent a black man being in his position, and who get in touch to let him know. There have been abusive calls, e-mails, the odd jibe on the street. Last July, the Ceann Comhairle, John O'Donoghue, hosted a lunch for Rotimi and his wife. On his way out the gates of Leinster House that day, he got the first abusive call from a man who would make a habit of phoning every few days, yelling obscenities down the line.
At first he tried to talk to the man, to bring him around, until those close to him told him it wasn't worth it. You sense it bothers him more than he would like to admit. "Well, life continues. We have to live with such things. It does happen."
We're sitting outside a café on the main street in Portlaoise, and he has just been approached for the fourth time in 20 minutes. "Tom, how are you doing?" - "Ah, Rotimi. Keeping busy?" - "I missed you at the parish centre this morning." - "Oh, yes. Great group." - "Are you back in the tennis club? I have to join."
"But you've seen how many people come and say 'hi' to me here," he says when the man has continued on his way.
In the windswept car park of the Red Cow Hotel the next Saturday morning, after he had addressed a meeting of the Lions Club, Adebari let me listen to a message that was left on his phone the day before. The man had called from a British number and spoke with a Northern accent. His message - that the mayor wasn't wanted and should go home - was delivered in the vilest terms anyone could muster. For the first time, Adebari called the police after this one. "But I don't let it wear me out or bog me down. That is there. We just keep hoping that, one day, we will all be able to see one another as human beings."
Before his speeches Adebari likes to introduce himself as a "Laois man", but he knows how his views on so much of Irish life are informed by the values of his upbringing, or by the experience of being an émigré in a strange land. The finest speech I saw him give was before an audience in Áras Chrónáin in Clondalkin, Dublin, to mark Africa Day last month. The event, organised by the Clondalkin Partnership, took place on one of the wettest, coldest mornings of the month and half the guests arrived soaked to the bone. The chill had thoroughly infiltrated the hall and a community garda, who was one of the first to arrive, sat with her arms folded, staring at her feet.
But gradually the place filled up and the crowd, with Africans in the majority, were treated to three excellent speakers, an electrifying musical performance by Bini, a local African culture group, and a generous buffet of traditional African food.
In his speech, delivered without a script as usual, Adebari drew on his own childhood, his move to Ireland and his exile's view of Africa to expound on questions of diaspora, identity and belonging. "I am African," he told the hall. "I am proud to be African. But a lot of the time when I look back at that continent, I ask myself so many questions." He talks of "the continent that has failed us all in one way or another", a place so endowed with resources, so rich with people and potential, and yet so commonly in despair. "So the question I'm asking myself is: what are we celebrating?"
He turns to the heady days of the early 1960s, when the Organisation of African Unity was established in Ethiopia, nationalist movements were gaining ground and the air was thick with possibility. He remembers sitting by his small radio at home in Oke Odan in 1980, then a final year secondary school student, listening to the announcement of Zimbabwe's newly gained independence, and how thrilling it seemed even from his far-off vantage point.
Look at Zimbabwe now, he continues, or Sudan or Congo or Somalia. What of Kenya, supposedly the most stable country in Africa? South Africa? "I turned the TV on last week and the tears were rolling from my eyes at what I saw. When are we ever going to have peace on this continent? People hacking people down, killing people, stuffing petrol in people's mouths and setting them ablaze. What is it we want to celebrate?" The garda at the back has unfolded her arms and is staring rapt at the stage.
Instead of celebrating Africa, Adebari believes, "we, the diaspora", should be asking ourselves what we can do for the continent. Just like the Irish, who emigrated to the US, Britain and Canada, left and then lent their expertise to Ireland, how can we put our exile to use? "Even if you're a cleaner here in Ireland, you should be asking yourself, what part can I play?"
In closing, he puts it to his audience that there could be no more exciting place to be than in Ireland today. "There's a Chinese proverb: one generation plants a tree, another generation enjoys the shade. As Africans here, let's see ourselves as the first generation of migrants here. We want to leave our feet on the sand of time here in Ireland, and one of the ways to do that is to engage with the host community. We want to plant a tree so that our children coming behind can have a shelter to enjoy." The woman beside me, an African in her early 40s, whispers the word "shelter" to herself absent-mindedly, as if rolling her tongue around a new taste. The room erupts in applause.
Rotimi Adebari's one-year term as mayor will come to an end at the town council's agm later this month, when he will relinquish the chain of office and wait for the old rhythms of daily life to reassert themselves again. Inevitably, all the big political parties have been in touch, asking him to sign on the dotted line, but all of that can wait for another day. "Never say never" is the stock response. For now, the priority is to revive his consultancy and make up for the time he has spent away from his family. He feels more of a Laois man than ever, and plans to fill out the citizenship form some time soon. "I'll be proud to call myself an Irishman," he says.
Perhaps in a quieter moment, he might also think of the man who turned him down for a job only six years ago because he wasn't local enough, and to whom, in a sense, he now owes quite a lot. "I hope that employer is reading about what I am doing in politics now. Maybe he'll be able to sit back now and say to himself, 'maybe we blew it that time. Maybe it's a mistake we made. That guy is actually local.'"