Iree

Zacchaeus Aderemi Omotayo was born in Iree, a town in what is now Osun State, in 1952. His father was Pa Daniel Tayo; his mother, Esther Lolounpe Omotayo. He was the kind of child who made teachers sit up.

As a Primary 6 pupil he competed in an inter-school academic competition against other schools in the area and answered most of the questions correctly. The organizers were impressed enough to offer him early admission into grammar school without completing Primary 6, provided his parents agreed.

The early admission never happened. Serious problems at home arose at exactly that time. He remained in Primary 6, and the turmoil affected his concentration in ways he would not fully understand until years later. He dropped sharply in class standing. The bright boy who had impressed the examiners began to look, on paper, like an ordinary student.

He refused to stay there. At Modern School, he set about recovering. Every holiday, while his classmates organized group study sessions he believed would become distractions, he studied alone. He worked through three years of material before each new term. The improvement was dramatic enough that teachers questioned it openly. He told them he had always been a good student before his home life changed.

He would carry the memory of that period into adulthood, not as a wound but as a lesson. He understood something about what family conflict does to children that many parents never learn: that the damage is real and often invisible to the people causing it. That understanding shaped the kind of father he became.