In 2012, more than 10,000 Nigerians competed for the prestigious Fulbright Foreign Language Teaching Assistant Fellowship. Only seven were selected. Among them was Abiodun Sulaimon Banire, a young journalist and cultural advocate from Lagos, whose posting to New York University (NYU) became not only a personal milestone but a year-long experiment in cultural exchange, language teaching, and national representation.
The Fulbright Programme, established in 1946 by U.S. Senator J. William Fulbright, is one of the world’s most prestigious international exchange initiatives. It aims to promote mutual understanding through education, research, and cultural engagement. Selection is highly competitive, with thousands of applicants worldwide but only a small number chosen each year. Recipients are recognized not only for academic excellence but also for leadership potential and their ability to serve as cultural ambassadors. For Nigerian scholars, it offers a platform to advance professionally while sharing the country’s intellectual and cultural richness abroad.
When Banire landed in New York in early 2013, he assumed his job would be to support a senior professor. Instead, the Chair of NYU’s Department of Social and Cultural Analysis welcomed him with unexpected news. “With your profile and ranking, you’re here to teach, not to shadow,” she told him. It was both daunting and liberating. He would carry Nigeria into the classroom on his own shoulders.
On his first day of teaching, Banire began with a simple greeting: “Ẹ káàárọ̀,” good morning in Yorùbá. The students echoed him hesitantly, the tones rising and falling like a new instrument in untrained hands. Over the weeks, the hesitation gave way to rhythm. Lessons on verb conjugation unfolded into conversations about etiquette, community, and respect. Proverbs became windows into African philosophy: “Ọmọ tó mọyà, á mọ̀we” (“A child who learns courage also learns wisdom”). Syntax lessons were paired with drumming patterns, showing that language, like music, has its own rhythm.
“It was important to me that students didn’t just learn words,” Banire said. “They had to feel the culture behind them.”
Food became another tool of instruction. The first-ever Yoruba Culinary Arts Workshop at NYU saw students pounding yam, stirring egusi soup, and laughing through the unfamiliar motions of handling a pestle and mortar. “Food doesn’t need translation,” he smiled. “Once they tasted Yoruba, they wanted to know more.”
Building community beyond the classroom
But Banire’s ambition extended beyond language lessons. Partnering with the Yoruba Cultural Institute in New York, he organised African Night, an evening of drumming, singing, dance, and storytelling that filled an NYU auditorium with colour and sound. Professional performers shared the stage with students, creating an atmosphere that one attendee described as “the first time African culture stepped out of a textbook and started breathing.”
Later that year, Banire curated NYU’s first Nigerian Cultural Week, a sprawling series of exhibitions, readings, and performances. Students encountered Nigerian literature through the works of Chinua Achebe, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Wole Soyinka. Musicians and DJs brought juju and Afrobeats to campus halls, transforming academic space into a festival of sound. Visual artists filled galleries with photographs and canvases capturing Lagos’ energy and contradictions.
The events were not spectacles but conversations. One evening paired a Nigerian historian with a Brooklyn-born poet to read each other’s cities, Lagos and Harlem, as parallel texts. Another explored the kinship between Yoruba praise poetry and African-American spirituals, tracing lines of resilience across the Atlantic.
Impact on students
The effect on students was measurable. For the first time in five years, Yoruba II was oversubscribed and ran into a second semester. Evaluations praised his “excellent pedagogy” and “creative teaching style.”
One student, an African-American graduate researcher, found in Banire’s class more than academic fulfilment. With his guidance, she applied for and won a Fulbright-Hays grant to continue advanced Yoruba study in Nigeria. “That was one of my proudest moments,” Banire reflected. “It showed me that a year of greetings, grammar, and culture could spark lifelong scholarship.”
The department chair later commended Banire’s “professional and creative approach,” citing his cultural events as models of enrichment that “greatly expanded the students’ experience.” For a young Nigerian fellow far from home, it was a validation that his experiment in cultural diplomacy had succeeded.
Nigeria in New York
Beyond the campus, Banire discovered the breadth of New York’s Nigerian community. By the early 2010s, tens of thousands of Nigerians lived across the city, their presence felt in church congregations, weekend schools, and open-air markets in Brooklyn and Queens. Yoruba thrived not only in academic settings but in storefront churches and family-owned restaurants. “Ẹ kú ìròlé,” good evening, could open doors in Flatbush as easily as in Ibadan.
Banire tapped into this ecosystem, inviting local pastors to discuss Yoruba hymnbooks, chefs to unpack the cultural layers of pepper soup, and artists to talk with African-American students about kinship across oceans. The result was a teaching style that connected NYU’s classrooms to the wider city, grounding theory in lived experience.
A counter-narrative to headlines
Banire’s timing was significant. Back home, international headlines about Nigeria were dominated by Boko Haram’s insurgency and kidnappings. In New York, he found himself repeatedly asked to explain Nigeria beyond its crises. He responded with context, telling stories of humour, resilience, and creativity that rarely made global news.
“I wanted people to see Nigeria beyond the crisis,” he explained. “Yes, we have our struggles, but we are also ideas, survival, and culture.”
He delivered guest lectures on Nigerian media and politics, participated in panel discussions at NYU’s Africa House, and engaged diaspora youth groups on the power of language to preserve memory and identity. For African-American students in particular, Yoruba became more than a subject. It was a tool of self-discovery, a way to stitch personal identity to ancestral history.
A transformational year
When the fellowship ended, Banire returned to Nigeria with a renewed conviction. The experience, he said, had been transformational. “It gave me the conviction that our languages, our stories, our culture belong on the global stage,” he reflected. “And it gave me the determination to keep telling them.”
A lasting legacy
Back in Lagos, Banire’s name has begun circulating not just as a journalist but as a cultural ambassador. Former students continue to email him, sharing how Yoruba proverbs still guide their research or how Nigerian music now fill their playlists.
