I cannot remember a book that I have read in the last decade with more excitement, speed and, paradoxically, concentration, than this recently published autobiographical memoir of Professor Emeritus Ayo Banjo, one of the two or three of my favorite teachers throughout my education from primary school to postgraduate level. Indeed, I was so thrilled to get a copy of the book that I finished reading it in about half a day with only two breaks between when I started and when I completed my reading of the book. The reason for this is uncomplicated: I and my classmates in the Honours English set of 1967 at UI, all 65 of us, always felt endlessly curious about this teacher of ours whose charisma was deliberately non-charismatic, whose star power or appeal was absolutely without exhibitionist stardom. He was/is always impeccable in the solid good taste of his dressing, whether of Western or Nigerian/Yoruba clothing; but “loud” or “psychedelic” he never was/is in his sartorial culture. He was far from being aloof or distant in both person-to-person and group settings and was, as a matter of fact, welcoming and outgoing in a quiet, slightly reserved way. But to us his students, it did seem as if nothing could perturb his composure, nothing could erase or decrease his infinite reserves of equanimity.
These thoughts were in my mind as I started reading his new book, together with questions for which I hoped the book would provide valuable answers: What was Ayo Banjo as a primary school pupil, a secondary school student and a university undergraduate? Did he ever get in trouble with parents, teachers, older sibling, cousins and other relatives? What sort of pranks did he get away with, or at least tried to pull off but did not quite succeed? Did he ever break school regulations about class attendance, punctuality, submission of homework or assigned essays? Well, if he himself did none of these things, what were his attitudes and relationships to school or classmates who did such things? Surely, he didn’t always have all the attributes of the revered, omoluabi educator for which he is now justly famous?
It is both remarkable and at the same time strangely unremarkable that Morning by Morning provides no answers, indeed no clues to answers to any of these questions. Going by the contents of the book, it seems that our teacher did not play any of the pranks in which most of us, indeed most pupils and students at all times and in all places, love to gratify our/their baser instincts. True enough, with many of his schoolmates, our teacher did, at one stage, develop a craving for roasted “ire”, known in the English language as crickets. Yes, the winged, flying field grass creature that is a cousin to grasshoppers, with his schoolmates, our teacher loved to eat it roasted, salted and downed with gari soaked in water and sweetened with sugar. He loved ballroom dancing and lawn tennis. And he apparently loved being part of the school musical band as both a drummer and a singer. In the church choir, he went through all the vocal registers successfully until finally settling on bass. And most notable of all, he was the soccer goalkeeper of his secondary school, the famous Igbobi College, and seemed to have shown some wizardry in his ability to keep goals scored by opposing teams to a minimum, a feat matched by his reputation as wicket-keeper in the school’s cricket team. That is all that conformed with universal norms and practices of schoolboy and youth culture in the experience of our teacher and you must admit that it is a lot. Still, I looked and looked for something more “impressive” in tolerable deviancy than a passion for consuming roasted crickets in our teacher’s school days; alas, I found nothing close to it, not suspension and most certainly not expulsion! Which is why by the time that I got through the first five chapters of the ten-chapter book and the narrative had moved beyond the early years, I finally realized, with disappointment and some frustration, that Morning by Morning would not supply any answers, any clues to whether or not our beloved teacher did any of the risky things and experienced any of the encounters with danger that many pupils and young people at one time or another did.
At that stage in my reading of the book, I paused to reflect on my initial expectations from the book and my apparent concentration, not on what the book was saying, but aspects of life and experience it had left out. My reflection led me to a startling discovery: the book is not the usual autobiography of the life and times, the triumphs and the disappointments, the expected and the unexpected developments in the experience of the first-person writer; it is a moral and spiritual odyssey of a man who seemed destined, right from birth, to be a great figure in the intellectual life of his country on the condition that his focus on the important, positive aspects of life must never waver. In the event, he did go on to become one of the great educators in our country’s intellectual history. On this basis, I discovered that the book is remarkable not for what it doesn’t say or leaves out but how it narrates fateful, traumatizing or unpleasant events both in the life of the author and the larger or epic scale of the collective experience of Nigeria and, indeed, of Africa.
I made this discovery of the book’s inner, motive force halfway through my reading. Permit me to express this discovery as simply as possible: all the negative or unhappy things that the author experienced in his personal life and in the collective existence of his nation and continent are encountered with an uncommon stoicism; and they are narrated with equally uncommon understatement. Here is a selected list of such events and experiences: the early loss of his mother; the loss of his beloved wife just as the couple was looking forward to a well-deserved enjoyment of their retirement; the collective traumas of the crises that led to the Nigeria-Biafra war, just as the author was returning to the country after his sojourn abroad in pursuit of his educational goals.
Here is another amazing expression of this unwavering stoicism in the face of great loss and reversal: throughout the book, the author impresses the reader with the sustaining closeness between himself and his elder brother, the renowned medical practitioner, Dr. Bayo Banjo; yet, no account is ever given in the book of what had to have been the emotional blow that the death of this cherished sibling must have caused the author. At some point in the narrative we are simply told that he had passed away. In this manner, what we take away from the book is the author’s celebration of the life that he shared with his brother, not the eventual and inevitable loss caused by his brother’s death. This point is generalized to a basic character trait in the author’s personality as eloquently expressed in Professor Dan Izevbaye’s brilliant Foreword to the book in the following words:
“Given Banjo’s warm memories of his childhood, including the excellence of his primary and secondary school education, the reader is left to infer that the goodness of the narrator in Morning by Morning is inbred, and that his beholder’s eye bathes new places and people in goodness and integrity, and leaves things that way until experience directs differently; that his candour is as present at these encounters as his courtesy.
This defining aspect that Professor Izevbaye is expressing here about what we can call Ayo Banjo’s credo can be put in a morally and spiritually neutral formulation: until anyone shows that he or she is not what they claim to be or that things are not what they are claimed to be, give individuals, people and even institutions the benefit of the doubt. More assertively and positively, this is what it means: goodness, decency, beauty, truth and integrity exist in this world, in its peoples and their institutions; we must do everything to preserve and extend the operation and benefits of these virtues. Ordinarily, this is quite a daunting proposition to sell; it becomes even more challenging when what you are trying to “sell” is an unapologetically meritocratic tradition of thought about higher education that is so old that it seems to be doomed in the modern world. I will come to this issue at the end of this review; for now, I wish to discuss perhaps the most astonishing, perhaps even bizarre occurrence in the book and the way the author deals with it as an indication of the moral and psychological stakes involved in Professor Emeritus Banjo’s conception of his authorial subjectivity and identity in Morning by Morning.
For what he considered a simple and harmless lark, a white principal of the author\s famous secondary school, Igbobi College, arranged a performance to welcome another white, missionary educator who was arriving to replace him as principal. The performance was based on one of the most racist and colonialist myths of unalterable African savagery. What exactly did this entail? Simply this: the Igbobi College students were costumed as “savages” stoking the fire underneath a boiling cauldron into which they would mime the act of throwing their newly arrived replacement principal.as soon as he stepped into the school compound, their intention being as clear as daylight. All in play, of course.
Except that a bitter, raging controversy erupted over this enactment. Now, the absolutely remarkable thing about the author’s narration of this controversy is the undoubted scrupulousness of his effort to be fair to the two sides in the controversy: the outraged African nationalists on one side and, on the other side, the defenders of the harmless intention of the principal who was behind the enactment. In other words, the author recognized and identified with the outraged Nigerian/African nationalists; on the other hand and on the basis of the inspirational, indeed visionary work of the two white missionary educators at Igbobi College, he was willing to accommodate their fundamental good intentions as custodians of the excellence of Igbobi College’s reputation as one of the best schools in Nigeria, comparable to the best schools in their own country.
I would suggest that this reading provides us with a key to understanding the challenge faced by the author in his vigorous defense of merit and meritocracy in this book. As I see the matter, in the first half of the book, the author’s celebration of meritocratic values and achievements is so robust, so compelling that he finds it relatively easy to deploy the celebration in defense of the cultural and ethical faux pas like his principal’s staging of the racist and colonialist spectacle. But in the second half of the book, meritocracy becomes not only fragile, it seems constantly on the verge of being totally wiped out of the country’s cultural and intellectual present and posterity. Permit me to put this proposition, this reading in another formulation: in the first three chapters of the book including parts of the fourth chapter, the author’s evocation of the excellent education that he received at Igbobi College, together with invocation of famous Nigerians who also attended elite schools like Igbobi is so relentless and convincing that one is simply swept along. I kid you not: I have never encountered in any other book the scale of the author’s parade of professors, lawyers, doctors, scientists, diplomats, bankers, venture capitalists, insurance brokers and others in the elite professions who went to these best schools in Nigeria.
But by the time that we get to the second half of the book, this parade has all but ended and both excellence in the schools and universities and their meritocratic extensions into society have almost disappeared as a measurable quality and quantity. To his credit, the author rises to the challenge of justifying and sustaining merit and meritocracy in the face of this enormously changed historical context. This why, this second half of the book has, in my opinion, some of the sharpest and most eloquent thoughts and insights concerning the case for both individual and institutional reforms for education in our country – minus meritocracy, of course.
Biodun Jeyifo
bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu
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