*Bamidele Johnson.
I recently saw a post on X by a man who wrote about a female primary school mate to whom he had been very close. They lost touch after leaving primary school, but the memory of the girl remained in his head.
Over the years, he asked a few of their primary school mates if they knew where she was. Nobody did.
Then, 16 years later, someone created a WhatsApp platform for their old class set. The first person he asked about was his female friend. He was told she was on the platform and was promptly tagged in the response.
With unfettered excitement, he typed, “Aminaaaaa.”
Crickets. He tagged her. She asked who he was.
“My body come down. Iku ma pa reunion ni,” he wrote.
I laughed, then felt a familiar pain. I have faced a similar embarrassment more than a dozen times. It is one of the less advertised punishments for having a good head for names, faces and childhood details.
You carry around an absurdly well-indexed archive of people and events, complete with addresses, family members, nicknames, peculiar habits and incidents that happened well over 40 years ago, only to discover that the people who were there with you have deleted the file.
The most profound of mine involved a guy to whom I was very close in primary school. About 15 years ago, I typed his name into the Facebook search bar, the same way I found many mates. It produced two results, one with a middle name. The photographs were of the same person.
It was my friend. I combusted with joy. I immediately began preparing myself for some mad catch-up. I sent him a friend request. He ignored it.
After a few days, I sent him a private message asking if he went to my primary school.
He said he did. I told him I was his friend. He read the message and did not reply.
At this point, I assumed the man needed some assistance from the dusty recesses of his memory, so I started supplying clues. I told him he had two brothers, John and Roland, who were also in the school. I reminded him that they lived at Ososami in Baba Solesi’s house close to Bendel Line. I told him his father was a policeman who drove a Peugeot 404.
Nothing.
I reminded him that he used to draw a lot. Frankly, he reproduced almost perfectly all the Marvel Comics characters in those days.
I saw from his profile that he was now an art professor in the United States, so this detail seemed particularly useful. I thought the boy who could reproduce Marvel characters with precision would remember the boy who had watched him do it.
Still nothing.
As a last throw of the dice, and by then desperate to prove that I had not invented an entire childhood, I reluctantly reminded him that he had an appendicectomy in primary three. I also reminded him that he walked on his toes.
His reply nearly knocked me off my chair.
Every single detail was correct, he said. But he did not remember me. Neither did he remember anything the primary school.
Stupefying. I felt heat rise to my face behind my laptop.
Which kind thing be dis?
I gave up. I told a few primary school mates I was in touch with at the time and almost everybody remembered him.
The irony was almost cruel. I had retained a detailed memory of a chap who had apparently retained no memory of me. I have had similar experiences with other people. Some were especially painful because the relationships were not casual. These were people with whom I had spent considerable amounts of time. We had played together, talked together, gone places together, shared mischief and occupied the same little universe for years.
Yet, years later, I would mention something that seemed to me so obvious that it required no explanation, only to be met with a blank stare. For a long time, I took these things personally. I do not anymore. Memory is a strange and rather arrogant creature. We tend to imagine it as a filing cabinet in the head, where every important event is properly labelled and stored, ready to be retrieved whenever required. It is nothing like that. Human memory is selective, reconstructive and profoundly unreliable.
It does not preserve our lives like a video recorder. It simply keeps fragments, associations, emotions and details that happen to survive repeated retrieval and allows a frightening amount of the rest to disappear. There is also the uncomfortable truth that two people can experience the same period of their lives and assign completely different importance to it.
What becomes a landmark in one person’s memory may be background noise in another’s. You may have been inseparable from someone for three years and remember almost everything about those years because that period became important to the story you subsequently told yourself about your life.
The other person may have moved through the same period, absorbed a completely different set of experiences and gradually overwritten much of it with what came later. Repetition also matters. Memories that are repeatedly recalled tend to become easier to retrieve. This creates an interesting advantage for people like me who are apparently cursed with an unhealthy interest in the past. Every time I tell somebody about something that happened in primary school, I reinforce the memory. Every time I identify an old schoolmate by name, remember where he lived or recount some ridiculous thing we did together, I am effectively reopening the file.
The other person may not have opened his file in 40 years. Why would it remain fresh? There is also the problem of interference. New memories compete with old ones. Life keeps happening. Secondary school, university, jobs, marriage, children, friends, disappointments, triumphs, illnesses, relocations, bills, political madness and the daily business of staying alive all pile themselves on top of childhood.
Some memories become harder to retrieve simply because the brain has accumulated an enormous quantity of newer material.
Then there is the peculiar way memory is tied to context. You may remember somebody perfectly when you see them in the environment in which you knew them, wearing the clothes they used to wear and surrounded by people from that period. Take the person out of that context and put him on Facebook 30 years later with a completely different face, profession, hairstyle and life story, and the brain may not make the connection.
This is why reunions can be such dangerous exercises in emotional optimism. You remember people as children. They remember themselves, if at all, through whatever version of their childhood survived. You see the 10-year-old hiding inside the 50-year-old. They see a stranger asking them to recognise a face that has spent four decades changing.
There is another thing we rarely appreciate. People do not remember relationships in equal detail simply because they participated in them together.
Memory is shaped by attention. One person may have been paying close attention to the friendship, while the other was preoccupied with family problems, academic struggles, another friendship, an illness, a crush or something else entirely.
The event happened to both of them. It did not necessarily occupy the same amount of mental real estate. Some people also have a much stronger autobiographical memory than others. There are people who can tell you what they ate on a particular Tuesday in 1987, who sat beside them in class and what colour shirt somebody wore. Others can barely remember what they did last Tuesday. Neither necessarily has any special affection or hostility towards the people involved. Their brains simply do not preserve and retrieve personal history in the same way.
Age can make this more pronounced. As we grow older, retrieval can become slower and memories that are not frequently revisited can become increasingly difficult to access. That does not mean that the memory has been completely erased. Sometimes a name, photograph, smell, location or random detail can suddenly unlock something that appeared to have vanished.
This is why I have learnt not to interpret somebody’s failure to remember me as proof that I was insignificant to them. It may simply mean that I occupied a different shelf in their mental library.
These days, I do not bother myself too much when somebody from the past does not remember me.
I see people from my secondary school and university days who do not remember me and, frankly, some of them still shock me.
Those from secondary school surprise me more because I was not obscure. I was a real scamp and gave people a lot of hell. I was hardly the sort of person who should have vanished from the historical record without a trace.
So each time I see people who do not remember me, I ask if their memory has been affected.
Those from the university also surprise me because the interaction is much more recent. Surely something from thirty-something years ago should have survived when something from primary school has not.
Apparently not.
I have even learnt to distrust the names some people call me on Facebook.
When some of them call me BJ, I know immediately that their memory is fading. Nobody who knew me called me that in the university. BT or BTJ was what I was called then. BJ belongs to another era.
The funny thing about memory is that we imagine that because something was important to us, it must have been equally important to everybody who shared it with us. Our memories are not communal property. We each leave the same event carrying different souvenirs.
Some people carry the whole photograph. Some carry a face. Othere remember the joke but not who told it.
There are those who remember the house, but not who lived there. A remember the scar, but not the accident.
Some remember everything except you.
Also, there are people like me, walking around with the entire primary school register, seating arrangement, family tree and Peugeot 404 tattooed into our heads. It is both a gift and a nuisance.
I was with Babajide Kolade-otitoju some 20 years ago at a Mobil petrol station in Ogba. We were at the pump when a guy who went to the University of Ilorin with him jumped out of his car and started yelling, “Jyd, Jyd, Jyd.”
My friend, who has the most dire head for names and faces, did not remember the guy from his university. He just kept saying, “Ekun, Ekun.”
I knew he did not remember him. The two of them swapped numbers. As we were leaving, I asked him in jest if the guy was an animal or why he was calling him Ekun. He said he could not remember him. I told him not to save the number with Ekun, which, in Yoruba, means tiger.
That encounter with Otitoju belongs here because it offers the perfect counterpoint to my own problem. I remember too much. He remembers too little. I carry people from the past as if they were permanent residents of my head, while he was standing beside a man who had recognised him instantly and could not even retrieve the man’s name.
Between us, we probably represent the two extremes of memory-the person who keeps reopening every old file and the person whose files appear to have been mislaid.