Researching my Trinity Tale involved piecing together a jigsaw puzzle of anecdotes and incidents from these autobiographies and letters. But it seems what I thought were the edges were in fact the corners. Since Moses the first, it now appears there has been at least one Majekodunmi at Trinity per decade starting in the 1930s. I come from a very large family. Maybe there is even a Majekodunmi in Trinity today? How incredible if It proves to be that there are ten consecutive decades of Majekodunmis at Trinity! Standing on the same cobblestones where Moses and Dapo stood, the same cobblestones that they too wrote about, I made my decision to come to Trinity College when I was ten years old. For so long I have romanticized this recollection that now I reluctantly question it. And if you read my Trinity Tale, you’ll see that I am far less nostalgic than Moses, Bobo and Dapo about my four years attending college. Still, I’m so grateful to have their autobiographies and their letters. To write is to leave a legacy. Our name, written on a cobbled palimpsest. My invitation to contribute an essay to the fifth and final volume in the Trinity Tales series arrived whilst George Floyd was still breathing. The editors, Katie Dickson and Sorcha Pollack, explicitly sought out diverse voices and asked us for honesty. Since that invitation, ripples of racial reckoning and societal soul searching has sharpened the relevance of all the stories. Some readers of my Trinity Tale have expressed surprise that Nigerians didn’t first arrive in Ireland in the 90s. Others remarked on the irony that of all my ancestors, it is not the Irish lineage who has a history of attending the college – even though the Liberties is far closer to College Green than Abeokuta. I’m equally grateful to add my own words to the Majekodunmi legacy in this volume of Trinity Tales. The brief was to write with honesty. All my fellow writers met that brief with vulnerability and without nostalgia. Find out more about Trinity Tales
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