The Nigerian Heart of Joop Berkhout

Ooni Olubuse II began to cough, and the people around him in the palace beat their chest, including the Dutchman by my side, dressed in a white agbádá and wearing a string of red coral beads around his neck. Everyone but me, the Dutch writer visiting Nigeria for the first time and still oblivious to Yoruba traditions. It was 2009. The Dutchman in traditional attire who had invited me to see his friend, the now late Ooni of Ife, Oba Okunade Sijuwade Olubuse II, was Chief Joop Berkhout. Earlier this year, on 10 February 2025, he passed away aged 94 in Ibadan, where he’d lived for over half a century.

WINTER OF HUNGER

In the Netherlands, his country of birth, not many knew of Berkhout, but his passing made headlines and TV news in Nigeria. Even President Bola Tinubu sent a letter of condolence. ‘Though he hailed from the Netherlands, his heart belonged wholly to Nigeria,’ it read. And yet how could this salesman from the low countries with only a high school diploma become the ‘doyen of Nigerian publishing’, as some of his obituaries claimed?

Berkhout was born in Amsterdam in 1930. He was ten years old when the Second World War reached the Netherlands. The German occupation made a lasting impression on the boy. The last winter before its liberation, the Dutch North experienced a famine that became known as the winter of hunger, which killed over 20,000 people. His mother would send little Joop (pronounced ‘yope’) to the soup kitchen with a bucket to fetch food for the family, and with his siblings he used to go out to steal fence wood to burn in the stove when temperatures went below zero.