Editorial
He never married nor had biological children. Yet, he was a loving parent and revered mentor to a whole generation of young Nigerians, in the course of his job as principal, at Ajuwa Grammar School, Okeagbe-Akoko, now in Ondo State.
At the cradle, he came as an England-born Anglo-Italian hybrid: an English mother and Italian father; a British-Italian heritage that was somewhat an object of slight intra-European discrimination during the troubling World War 2 years (1939-1945), when he was but a minor.
At the grave, he ended as an authentic Nigerian hero, neither discriminating nor discriminated against but hugely celebrated. Indeed, an immensely grateful Okeagbe-Akoko community made him a chief; while much later, the Federal University, Oye Ekiti (FUOYE) honoured him with a doctoral degree, for his sterling educational service to Nigeria. Along the line, Garguilo learnt to speak Yoruba, which he confessed was a difficult language.
Want to write a simple epitaph on Guy Garguilo’s tombstone? “Love, service and humanity still pay — and this man was living testimony!” — even as the world, in which he lived, drifted towards less noble traits. Garguilo was a grand global citizen, in its noblest and purest form, devoid of cant, racism and crass mercantilism.
Chief Garguilo’s Africa pull came from a Mathematics teacher, back in England, who told him he was going to Nigeria to teach at Igbobi College, Lagos. The teacher told his pupil, then 15, that should he want to come to Africa too, he should write him. Fourteen years later, Garguilo did. The old teacher responded. One thing led to the other; and Garguilo himself soon became a Mathematics teacher, at the same Igbobi College, Lagos.
But the revered educationist would come fully into his own, when he joined Ajuwa Grammar School, Okeagbe in 1963, with the authorities back then threatening to close down the school, if it didn’t get a principal fast. On his side, Garguilo shunned the urban comfort of Lagos, for the rugged countryside of Akoko, in the northern Yoruba interior, because he loved nature, even if Okeagbe and environs back then lacked basic infrastructure: roads, electricity, water, etc.
But just as well, for Garguilo would join the league of iconic European principals to flower in the Nigerian educational plain, the other easily recalled name being the Revd. Father Dennis Joseph Slattery, an Irish Catholic priest and founder of St. Finbarr’s College, Lagos. Father Slattery held sway during St. Finbarr’s hegemony in the Lagos Principal’s Cup seasons of the 1970s.
But in his view of total education, of the heart, mind and hand, Garguilo was similar to another icon, the Revered Israel Oludotun Ransome-Kuti, who declared the three R’s — ‘Rithmetic, Reading and ‘Riting — inadequate, opting instead for a more robust and functional approach. Garguilo not only drilled his young charges in the intellect, he pushed them hard in sports (at one time, Okeagbe was supplying the bulk of Ondo State swimmers, at the Nigerian National Sports Festival), as well as in farming and vocational training.
Donald Alasodura, now the minister of state for Niger Delta, loses no time to ever rhapsodize a principal, who took him in as his own son, when modest family economy at home threatened his schooling. Thanks to Garguilo’s tough training and even tougher love, he qualified as a chartered accountant, after Okeagbe, without going to the university, at a very tender age. He would rise from an office assistant to a managing partner in his accounting firm, before retiring for a second vocation in politics.
Gbenga Omotoso, former editor of this paper and current Commissioner for Information and Strategy in Lagos State, is another Garguilo product. Hear him gush, to The Nation, about his old principal: “He paid my school fees up to secondary school certificate before he left for London, stayed for a while and came back to Nigeria. He was a rare human being,” he added. “He has nothing; even his father’s inheritance he spent it on the school and the students.”
But Alasoadura and Omotoso, two generations of ex-Okeagbes, are only two testimonies, out of thousand of pupils the late teacher greatly impacted. Aside from the bulk of pupils who found their intellectual niche, he helped not a few, not so intellectually gifted, to find their bearing in life.
It is testimony to this British-Italian’s pact with Okeagbe, Akoko, Nigeria, that though he died in England, after just four days of illness, his ash, after cremation, is back to be buried at his house on the rock, at the Ajuwa Grammar School, Okeagbe compound. He was both the iconic principal everyone toasted; and the Akoko chief everyone loved. At the arrival of his ashes, at the Murtala Muhammed International Airport, Lagos, his former pupils, now thriving leaders in their own right, staged a pleasant and touching solidarity rally.
The life and times of Chief Guy Garguilo is a lesson to contemporary Nigeria, with its wide and merry ways. Here was a foreigner who taught all the rubrics of love, duty and patriotism. How many Nigerians can boast of Garguilo’s contributions to the service and development of Nigeria?
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