Work Arrived Before Adulthood
Before I understood careers, titles or salaries, I understood that a household survived because people used their hands.
Morning did not begin with a question about whether I felt ready. It arrived with akamu to sell, water to fetch, food to prepare, school to attend and another task waiting after the bell.
Work was not introduced as a special programme for character development. It was woven into the day.
Some responsibilities were appropriate contributions to family life. Others were heavier than childhood should ideally carry. I do not romanticise hardship merely because I learned from it.
Still, those early duties placed four lasting lessons inside me: respect time, keep the measure honest, protect the dignity of labour and know the limits beyond which responsibility becomes harm.
Those lessons belong together. Time without measure becomes haste. Measure without dignity can become control. Dignity without limits can be used to praise exhaustion. Limits without responsibility can become avoidance.
Long before adulthood asked what I could become, work had begun asking whether I could be trusted.
Before the Bell: Time
I often woke before the birds.
The kerosene lantern hissed while Nene shaped thick slices of akamu with hands that knew their measure without a cup or scale.
Press. Turn. Slice. Set.
The wide metal tray filled with quiet white portions. A folded cloth ring was placed on my head, and I bent slightly so the weight could settle.
“Knock well. Greet well. Don’t talk like a parrot,” Nene said.
Then came the commercial rule that was also moral education: “If anyone owes, keep it in your mind. Business is memory.”
I moved from compound to compound before school, greeting before selling, waiting without becoming rude and folding coins into the knot at my waist. There was no shouting. A knock, a greeting and patience were part of the transaction.
The tray became lighter. The sky became brighter. The school bell moved closer.
I returned, accounted for the money, rinsed my feet, changed into uniform and ran. Often one slice came home—not as failure, but as the household’s refusal to treat complete sell-out as the only measure of a good morning.
Time was not an abstract resource. It was the distance between the last customer and the second bell.
That lesson followed me into classrooms, offices, courtrooms and public service. Preparation before a meeting, arriving with the relevant file and returning a promised response are adult forms of the same discipline.
Time is not always compassionate; people need rest, flexibility and grace. Yet reliability often begins with one question: What is depending on me, and when must it be done?
Honest Measure: Memory and Money
Selling small portions taught me that trust lives in details.
A slice could not become smaller because a customer was distracted. A debt could not disappear because no receipt had been written. Change had to return correctly.
In one scene, the carpenter paid fifty kobo more than the price of the akpu. I noticed the difference and offered it back.
He told me to keep it. I carried it home not as a clever gain, but as a transaction that needed explanation.
Nene did not call it luck. She said, “This one has a name. Gratitude. We keep it because it knows our door.”
The distinction mattered. Money obtained through honesty could enter the household without bringing shame behind it.
Work taught me that arithmetic is moral before it is mathematical.
A correct total matters because another person’s trust is inside it.
Years later, law and public service asked the same question in different language: Does the record match what actually happened?
Integrity is often the decision to keep the measure exact when nobody nearby appears to be counting.
Dignity and Trustworthy Completion
After school, another tray waited—this time akpu.
The afternoon was hotter and more public. In the novelised scene, a classmate mocked me for hawking after school and for carrying the bowl on my head.
The embarrassment was real.
Children understand status before they understand economics. We learn early which work people praise, hide or use as a weapon against others.
A woman answered the mockery with a practical truth: “When hunger comes, it does not ask for your English. It asks who brought food.”
A household needed food, soap, salt and school materials. The work had dignity because it was honest, necessary and performed with care.
The palm-kernel race added another lesson. My siblings and I each received a basin, and competition quickly encouraged shortcuts.
Nene weighed the basins before judging. One portion, she said, was “boasting with another person’s labour.” Then she sent us back to begin properly.
“Better to finish well than to finish loud.”
The lesson was not against speed. It was against speed that borrows another person’s effort, hides unfinished work or damages the result.
A rushed report, careless contract or impressive result built on hidden labour may look complete before it is trustworthy.
Completion includes truth about how the result was achieved.
The shame belongs to exploitation and contempt—not to the person carrying out lawful, honest work.
Head, Hand and Humane Limits
School did not represent freedom from work. It introduced another kind of work.
The hands that balanced a tray held a pencil. The memory that kept customer debts stored spelling and arithmetic. On Handiwork Friday, we made brooms, tied garden vines and learned not to collect more material than we could finish.
The work of the head and the work of the hand shook hands properly.
That matters because societies sometimes treat intellectual labour as superior to manual labour.
Knowledge without practical care can become detached. Physical effort without access to education can become a cage.
Children need both useful responsibility and protected time for education, safety, rest, play and imagination.
Age-appropriate chores and supervised contribution can teach competence and cooperation. Exploitation is different.
A child should not be placed in dangerous traffic, exposed to abuse, denied schooling, forced to carry adult financial responsibility or taught that rest is a moral failure.
Poverty often leaves families with choices that are not truly free. Acknowledging that reality does not justify every burden it creates.
The lesson is not that hardship is good for children. It is that work should help a child grow; it should not consume the childhood from which growth is meant to come.
When the Work Changed Clothes
Years later, sitting at a legal desk or standing in court, I sometimes remembered the tray.
The connection was practical, not sentimental.
A legal file also required balance. A client’s account had to be remembered accurately. A deadline had to be respected. An argument could not borrow facts that did not belong to it.
A professional reputation, like a household name in the market, was built transaction by transaction.
The law did not erase the girl who hawked akamu. It gave her early disciplines another vocabulary.
Time became procedure.
Measure became evidence.
Memory became record.
Honesty became professional duty.
Service became public responsibility.
Even the old lesson about finishing well returned: a file is not complete merely because every page is present. The work must be accurate, fair, properly credited and capable of surviving scrutiny.
The work changed clothes. The underlying questions remained: Can your word be trusted? Can your hands finish what they begin? Can another person safely rely on your account?
A Work-and-Dignity Audit
Consider the work that formed you—paid or unpaid, visible or hidden:
1. What did I learn about time and reliability?
2. Which task taught me accuracy, measure or accountability?
3. Did work strengthen my dignity, or was I taught to feel ashamed of it?
4. Which responsibilities were appropriate, and which were too heavy for my age or capacity?
5. Whose unpaid labour supported my education, career or household?
6. Have I confused speed with trustworthy completion?
7. Do the people who work for or around me receive respect, fair expectations and proper credit?
8. What boundary would prevent responsibility from becoming exploitation?
9. What early lesson still serves me, and what harmful lesson must I release?
The purpose is not to praise every burden. It is to identify what built competence, name what caused harm and choose more humane ways of carrying responsibility forward.
Let Work Build Without Breaking
Work can teach time, patience, measure, service, courage, humility and the quiet pride of completing something useful.
It can also exhaust, exploit and silence.
Wisdom lies in refusing to confuse the lesson with the injury.
I honour the women who taught me to greet properly, account for every coin, finish what I began and leave one portion for the person who arrived late.
I also believe children deserve adults and institutions willing to protect what properly belongs to childhood.
The goal is not to raise children who fear effort. It is to raise human beings who understand dignity, responsibility and limits—and who do not require another person’s depletion as proof of commitment.
Before adulthood, work taught me that hands can become trustworthy.
Adulthood taught me that trustworthy hands must also know when a burden is unjust, when help is needed and when another person deserves relief.
Let work build skill.
Let it build character.
Let it build community.
But never let it break the person whose labour makes the day possible.
