Whoso neglects learning in his youth, loses the past and is dead forever.” Euripides
We cannot avoid our past, and what fires our memories are incidents of childhood and adolescence. Those were the formative years when energies abounded and rippled with raw activities, minds were malleable, idealism gaped with errors. We had imagination without judgment and strength unseasoned with guile. It calls to mind the Chinese proverb, “when I was young I never had the ex perience; when I was old I never had the strength.”
We recast the world in the miniatures of our daily dreams. The world was about the scent of the next meal, the classroom hectoring bully, and the football game yesterday when we scored or fluffed a penalty shot, or the coruscating Sunday suit. It was also the love of mother that haunted sometimes like rebuke and the overarching shadow of father that chastened like love.
Home intertwined with school, but in the last analysis, we were men and women in the mould of what parents and teachers imparted. This article is paean to teachers, and it is inspired by a recent inquiry about Ekiti State education. I discovered that many of the teachers who have kicked against the teacher test launched by Governor Kayode Fayemi paid to have their wards in private schools.
With their own pockets and parental powers, they have vetoed out the public school. It is a vote of no confidence in themselves. It is a surrender to institutional decay. It is a cynical rejection of progress for the collective but triumph for individual greed. It is the ultimate tribute to primitive capitalism in an ironic bulwark against talent.
Above all, they gave a verdict of failure to themselves even without taking the tests. The tests came to public attention first in Kwara State when former Governor Bukola Saraki’s move exposed teachers who should have surrendered to tutorials from their students. Some students turned out to be better than their teachers, an absurdist echo of Fela’s teacher don’t teach me nonsense. Other states have done same, one of which is Yuguda’s Bauchi State.
Teachers are important. So also are parents. Education researches identify two critical factors in education. One is parental background. The other one is teachers. The parent plays a critical role because parents spend more time in a child’s life, especially from age zero to eight, according to the findings of Sigmund Freud. The parents show example by way of either stressing the importance of reading, or value of success through schools.
Parents can, by irony, also make children good at school. Some children have been drawn to education by the stark poverty of their parents or lack of finesse or sophistication by comparison to what they see around them.
My father, Moses, always told his children that education was the only thing he owed them. He told me stories about how his power of sight diminished. It was, as he narrated, because his stepmothers denied him access to lamps and his father seemed impotent about that injustice. He hid in the kitchen when all had slept and read by the faint illuminations of expiring pieces of firewood.
He was his own hero and his own prophet. As a hero, he triumphed with little resources. As a prophet, he saw that education provided his only escape out of the poverty that loomed ahead. He often related to vignettes from Chief Obafemi Awolowo’s autobiography, My Early Life, because it reminded him of his own struggles. Some parents have gone into debts to pay for their children’s schooling. No regrets about that.
Governments do not have as much power to influence parental attitudes and pressures as they have in schools. Other than give the tools, the suitable classrooms and all the necessary infrastructure, the focus is inevitably on teacher quality. Why have some Nigerian students, with apparently inferior tools and classroom conditions, gone ahead to best their fellow students in Europe and North America? Much credit must go to their teachers, beginning from their primary schools.
If you had the kind of primary school teacher I had in Methodist School, Oke Ado, Ibadan, you won’t have problems with your tenses. Mrs. Sonoiki’s voice still rings in my ears today. Stern, thorough and a disciplinarian, Mrs. Sonoiki reeled out the tenses, what was acceptable and what was forbidden. And we understood the principle. In Government College, Ughelli, how can I forget the charismatic Principal Demas Akpore and how he taught poetry? His class was on Leopold Senghor’s poems that still dance in my head today. It was only once he taught my class and it seemed he taught me forever.
Mr. Esareture and Mr. Adeyan brought history to life in the way they dramatised the lives and heroics of dead men. I can see Esareture even today as he summarised in a few sentences the history of Sierra-Leone. I see Adeyan dab across the blackboard gesticulating about the Niger Delta city states. These two men made me study history as my major at Ife.
My epiphany about literature was lit on a television screen by Professor Theo Vincent. In those days, he reviewed books every Sunday afternoon for about ten minutes. His covered a wide sweep from African to European to American books. It was from him I understood the whys and hows of literature. He provided me with the background to understand literature that was expanded by the classes I took at Ife under able teachers like Biodun Jeyifo, Tess Onwueme, Ropo Sekoni, Adebayo Williams and Chima Anyadike.
We had a small television set then, only a little bigger than a transistor radio. But my father knew that all was to be quiet at home every Sunday for my ritual date with the bearded literary apparition on television. My insight into history was enriched by two men: Professor Femi Omosini and Professor B.O Oloruntimehin. Omosini, in his shirt and trouser, bearing no notes, taught European history as though he was dictating. We went to his class as to a concert. He was a model of the teacher who entertained rather than an entertainer who taught. Professor Oloruntimehin, more sombre, broke history down with gusto. It was as though he was solving riddles. Each sentence enlightened and his insights haunted us.
Without these teachers I would not have met the enriching atmosphere of the Newswatch magazine of old under the trio of Ray Ekpu, Dan Agbese and Yakubu Mohammed. From Ray I learned how to bring imagination to journalism, generating stories and excavating perspectives. From Dan, I learned how to turn dreary sentences into journalistic beauty. From Yakubu, I learned how to pay attention to details.
Governor Fayemi understands all these and that is why he sometimes echoes the point that his Christ School, Ado Ekiti, which stood shoulder high with the best in the country now lags behind because its teacher content has depleted.
We learn every day, but when we first learn helps us unlearn a lot of distortion. My great journalistic hero today is Roger Rosenblatt, whose style and breadth I have taken after. But without the background of those who taught me, I don’t think I would have met Rosenblatt, or written this essay today.
Babatope at 70
For those of us who knew Ebenezer Babatope in his hey days as Ebino Topsy, we did not envisage that this is what he would be at 70. For me, it was not Ebino Topsy who turned 70 recently, it was Ebenezer Babatope. Ebino Topsy was the devoted Awoist, feisty with ideological clarity, planted on the left, unsparing in his barb at Awo’s opponents, a stout progressive. But it is an irony that Ebino Topsy was dumped by Ebenezer Babatope. To paraphrase Poet Wordsworth, the child is the father of the man. Babatope is the apostate, Ebino Topsy the faithful and son. Ebino Topsy could not be a PDP chieftain weeping publicly. Awo must also have wept in his grave over this show of capital apostasy. Happy birthday!
