Outside it is 37 degrees, the air conditioners blow at full speed inside. Hundreds of people gathered here, in an event hall in Nigerian Ibadan, to say goodbye to one of the striking figures in the national literary world. A man who live ‘chief‘Musted and now honored with important royal symbols of the Yoruba, the largest ethnic group in southwestern Nigeria. A man also with a little Nigerian name: Joop Berkhout.
He was not a big name in the Netherlands itself. He had been gone there for sixty years. But in Nigeria, Berkhout’s death is big news at the age of 94. All national TV channels and newspapers pay attention to the various ‘De Witte Nigerian’. President Tinubu sent an official condolence message. “Although he came from the Netherlands, his heart belonged to Nigeria,” said the head of state. On the stage in Ibadan, an envoy of a Yoruba monarch, the Ooni of IFE, speaks warm words about Chief Berkhout, flanked by a palace servant with a large, glittering scepter.
Berkhout, born in Amsterdam in 1930, belonged to the group of Dutch people who emigrated after the Second World War. With only his high school diploma in his pocket, he started in shipping. Via Bahrain, Tanzania and Zambia he ended up in Nigeria in 1966. Then he had already switched to a completely different industry: the publishing house. In it he established his name in Nigeria, as a shrewd businessman with a passion for books.
Book trade
Of the hundreds of attendees at the memorial service in Berkhout’s hometown Ibadan, the vast traditional city about a hundred kilometers north of Metropool Lagos, a large part is somehow connected to that publisher, poet, publisher or editor. Because whether you were the neighbor, a literature student he bumped into at a book fair or a journalist who interviewed him, if he had the impression that you had talent and he could use you for his company, he introduced you to the book trade .
“Joop Berkhout was for the Nigerian publishing world what Penicillin was for health care,” says Prince Dotun Oleyade, commissioner of information from the state of Oyo of which Ibadan is the capital, after the farewell service. The Dignitaris worked for Berkhout for three years in the late 1980s.
At that time, his Spectrum LTD publishing house was a household name in Nigeria. School children saw the name on their study books. In addition, Spectrum was a publisher of large literary names such as Nobel Prize winner Wole Soyinka and Chimamanda Ngoza Adichie, the later literary superstar who would quote Beyoncé in one of her songs, whose first book spectrum published. And former presidents Obasanjo and Buhari invariably called Berkhout ‘My Author‘, because their autobiographies came to him.
Chief was married to the publishing house, and expected the same from his employees
The Dutchman introduced many Nigerian in the publishing profession. But he was not an easy employer, his former employees agree. “He was extremely demanding. Chief was married to the publishing house, and expected the same from his employees, “Bankole Olayebi remembers, who worked for him in the 1980s. Your family and your weekends did not mean anything to him, he says: “He could call the work in the middle of the night and assumed that you were ready for him.”
Olayebi kept it full of him for four years, and then left to start a still successful publishing house, bookcraft Ltd. “Berkhout always reminded me that he had made me. ‘I Made Him Successfull“He said. And he was right. He was my mentor and a friend. “
Photo Taiwo Arifayan
White man in Nigeria
Also in post-colonial Nigeria, white people still have an advantage and Berkhout enjoyed the exceptional position he had as a white man in Nigeria. He showed off his chief title he received from his friend the Ooni in 1990 – even though he did not speak a word of Yoruba, nor any other Nigerian language. “He had influential friends throughout the country, partly because of his cordiality, but also because of the color of his skin,” says Commissioner Oleye.
He not only used that white privilege for his own gain. For example, it was in Berkhouts’s house in Ibadan where after the Biafra Civil War (1967-1970) the leaders of the two fronts, Gowon and Ojukwu, shake hands again for the first time, a historic moment in Nigerian history. And when in 2014 the Ministry of Finance announced an import tax of 35 percent on books, which would have been the death stitch for the Nigerian publishing house, it was Berkhout and a fellow publisher who successfully mobilized the book world to stop that. Berkhout was given ministers without an appointment by walking in deadly and pretending he heard there. “He was sometimes insufferable. But he managed, “says Oleye.
Berkhout was the best ambassador that the Netherlands ever had in Nigeria
Chief Joop does not seem to be coming to the hommages. While the Ibadan City Chorale gives an English hymn between a few farewell speeches, Funso Adegbola Ige scrolls through the dozens of photos on her mobile of herself with Joop Berkhout. He was good friends with her father, lawyer and politician Bola Ige who became a victim of a never -resolved political murder in 2001. “My father and he were peers and Uncle Joop Found it his job to keep an eye on us after his death. “We are family,” he said. “
After a long zipper Nigerian speakers, the Dutch Consul General Michel Deelen, who has been in diplomatic service since 1999, is on the pulpit. He calls Berkhout a good friend and “the best ambassador that the Netherlands ever had” in Nigeria. “He had excellent connections and was respected. He has done a lot for Dutch-Nigerian relations, “says Deelen” prior to the farewell service.
Berkhout may have a Nigerian passport, he was not blind to the shortcomings of the country, the consul continues. “He always spoke out against corruption. He raised that with the president if necessary. ” According to many people, he did that with a directness adjacent to boneness.
Absent father
The celebration ends at seven in the evening, an hour later than planned. The two hosts thank those present. They are Berkhout’s oldest sons Frans (63) and Ernest Berkhout (62), dressed in traditional clothing, for which the tailor came to measure their measurements the night before.
You didn’t hear Berkhout about his private life often. He married in 1960, but his wife could not ground in Nigeria. They still tried it together in London, but Nigeria attracted too much to the man and he left his family in the United Kingdom to get back to work in West Africa. That departure eventually led to a divorce. His four children grew up with a largely absent father, Frans says: “When we saw him, he was mainly the man of the beautiful stories. And for the grandchildren the special grandfather who was a traditional chief in Nigeria. “
“A king without a successor,” Frans describes his father. Berkhout would have liked a successor, but none of his children were interested and he never managed to prepare anyone for the role. But the more than two thousand books that he published and the many people he inspired and published inspire a lasting legacy to the country to which he was so devoted.
