Renaissance?

Emmanuela Mayaki, 10, just got recruited as after-school teacher, for her peers in coding. Her employers are Southfield Primary School, in Coventry, England. Emmanuela, after starting to learn computer coding at seven, has a slew of basic diplomas in that field. While learning to earn higher diplomas, she would meanwhile teach her peers.

Tanitoluwa Adewunmi, virtually homeless, is a Nigerian refugee in the United States. He was eight in 2019, when he won, in his age category, the New York State chess championship. Though he lived in a temporary Manhattan shack with her parents, and once came home crying because her mates derided his homelessness, he won that championship after only one year of introduction to chess. Now, he has set his sight to being the youngest chess grandmaster in the world.

Now, Mariam Ayolola Kaka, another Nigerian teen, student of Olabisi Onabanjo University International School, Ago-Iwoye, Ogun State, has won a global art competition, named “Fight for Freedom”, which featured some 4, 000 entries from 44 countries.

According to the contest organisers, Never Such Innocence, a U.K. charity,  Mariam’s entry, “Nostalgic Salutation for  Fallen Heroes”: the drawing of an amputated veteran saluting his fallen colleagues at a military cemetery, trumped all 4, 000 entries.

Mariam’s work, with the other entries, drew fulsome praise from British Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, who was to have hosted the winners in London on June 17, but for the COVID-19 pandemic, which has shrunk global travels.

“You show me that, as we mark 75 years since the Second World War,” PM Johnson enthused, “young people are paying far more attention than many would give credit for … You show me,” he continued, “that you care about the impact of conflict, and I’ve thought long and hard about how you can use your voices to unite communities and nations.”

Indeed, Mariam’s feat is remarkable for at least two reasons. Of three Nigerian young achievers cited in this editorial, she is based at home, in a public school, though of a privileged university hue. With the Harlem foreign experience of Tanitoluwa, the budding chess grandmaster, Mariam is proving a hostile environment need not be a barrier to creativity and excellence. So, home or abroad, motivated Nigerian youths can always excel.

Then, aside from the artistic strokes, the depth of thinking that went into conceptualising her entry. She had drawn a soldier facing a graveyard, saluting with his left arm. But her mum corrected her, saying soldiers never saluted with their left arm. Mariam went researching, and found that to be true — except, of course, something terrible had happened to that right arm.

That finding pumped up in her the creative juice, to reduce the saluting soldier to a one-armed veteran, amputated at the elbow.  That deepened the pathos of supreme sacrifice by service (wo)men, so Motherland could live! That marked art at its introspective depth — and best!

Mariam herself said she got her inspiration from tragic stories from the 2nd World War (1939-1945), in which millions perished in and outside the battle front. She also scoured the Nigerian Armed Forces yearly remembrance, a ritual that every January 15 honours the memory of Nigerian fallen veterans, both in the Civil War (1967-1970), and other foreign combats.

Mariam’s acute anti-war sensitivity, though in real life, cuts the diametric opposite to the tragic teen characters in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, school teens that descended into savages, after crash-landing in a wood.

Golding’s debut 1954 novel, using the horrors of the 2nd World War, violently revised the optimism of R. M. Ballantyne’s 1857 novel, The Coral Island, which gave impressions that Man was more rational, and less destructive.

Indeed, it’s a grand irony that where some adults, local or international, stoke ethnic and racial tensions to promote conflicts for self and political gains, Mariam and fellow teens outed with strong anti-conflict sensitivity. Perhaps the globe is in for a more rational generation, when these teens grow up and become policymakers?  That would be welcome renaissance, in global peace and reason.

But back to Mariam’s native Nigeria. Art is one area our governments and their policies have been a bit negligent, despite the general clamour for science and IT for global competitiveness. Still, art is a bastion of beauty, dreams and creativity; and there certainly is a niche for art-science-IT crossover, as the late Steve Jobs proved, with his Apple range of computer products.

Mariam earned attention, on own steam based on the excellence of her win, not because she is daughter of a former deputy governor of Ogun State. That should be the pathway to  renascent Nigeria, from the present “wasted generation” — to borrow that popular phrase, from our own WS.