He was a spectacle. He is still a spectacle. But that spectacle is about to vanish forever from the University of Ibadan (UI). He is Pius Omole, a lecturer in the Communication and Language Arts Department of the university, who just retired on Tuesday.
UI students, particularly those in the Faculty of Arts, Tedder Hall and surrounding areas, could not but notice a hippy-like don who though parked a red Ford Mustang in his official quarters, cycled round the campus with his famous bandana. That was in the 1980s.
In the post-2000 era, he has slowed down, somewhat. The bandana is gone, rued with a bashful smile, by the one who once proudly donned it, on account of its age and his inability to get a fitting replacement. So has the bicycle. The young rebel of yore is older and less agile.
But his hippy culture, with its rebellion against the status quo, still frowns at the conventional car in which a don of his status must cruise. So, exit the bicycle, enter the bike. Whereas the Omole of the 1980s cycled around the campus, the Omole of 2013 biked around.
“I came to Ibadan International School (ISI) for my higher school certificate after finishing at King’s College, Lagos (KC),” he drawled, rolling his tongue in his throat in his inimitable way, his eyes a sparkle of excitement yet dead serious as he explained his first contact with the hippy culture that has clung to him like a cloak.
“I was attracted by the sheer number of Americans in ISI between 1965 and 1966. So, I preferred to do my sixth form in ISI,” he explained. “Within that time, I had discovered American culture and I wanted to be very American. At ISI, I had all the Americanisation I could ever dream of.
“I got to know about the hippies through rock music. Ever since, I’ve followed the hippies, even though the hippies as a group have died. Only individual hippies remain.”
But while ISI gifted him the hippy culture which set him apart from others, KC gave him the anti-establishment shove that drove him UI’s way. The new Universidad de Navarra (University of Navarra), Pamplona, Spain BA Spanish Literature (1973) and MA Contemporary Black Literature (1975) graduate had returned in 1976 to his old school, at former Race Course, Lagos Island, to hunt for a teaching job.
He recalled his days at KC with no less pride and excitement: “I was in King’s College from 1960 to 1964. We were called the ‘Independence Generation’ because it was in our first year that Nigeria had independence, and all the performances [to mark the event] were done at Race Course, right in front of us. So, we had all that stuck in our head. But it’s a disillusion today. We all looked forward to a Nigeria that was going to be great.”
Omole looked pained and forlorn as he related his KC days with his job hunting at his old school. As he was making his way to the principal’s office, he happened on a most amazing sight. An enraged military officer was literally flexing his muscles, threatening to “deal” with somebody. That person, as it turned out, was a KC teacher who had had the temerity to discipline one of his pupils: the son of the soldier! Omole was shocked to his bones.
“To hear a soldier brag that he was going to teach a teacher a lesson!” he exclaimed. “I returned to Ibadan. I didn’t bother to see the principal.”
That singular incident drove him back to UI, where he was not exactly a stranger. His father, Stephen, was a catering staff, way back to the earliest days of the university at its temporary site at Eleyele. He later became a steward in Mellanby Hall, one of the university’s first-generation halls of residence, the others being Tedder, Kuti, Sultan Bello and, of course, Queen Elizabeth, the pioneer female residential hall.
In fact, Omole Senior befriended Tekena Tamuno, in his student days. Tamuno, later a professor of History, would become the university’s vice chancellor.
“Tamuno was very nice to us,” the junior Omole recalled. “My father would take us to go visit him. I was in primary school.”
The anti-establishment streak in Omole reckoned at least no parent would come threatening a lecturer at the university. Universities were for adults. His first port of call was the English Department. But they would take no chances on him, since his degree was in Spanish Literature. Neither would Foreign Languages. The department’s bent was Russian, not Spanish, since the Ajaokuta Steel Mill was in the works, and it would need local Russian translators to relate with Russian technical partners of the project.
In the end, he birthed in Language Arts (now Communication and Language Arts) where he spent all his academic life. That was in 1977. Sure enough, no parent came to bear down on lecturers at UI, but the hippy nature of Omole soon rebelled against the academia’s core cultures: the natural progression to take a PhD and position yourself for promotion, the ultimate being the professorship; and the publish-or-be-damned credo. The rebel in the don won’t be bothered by the two.
But why not a PhD?
“Remember I told you the hippies didn’t like the establishment? One of the ways was to ‘drop out’ of the establishment. The expression ‘drop put’ became very much prominent during the hippie time in the 1960s. So, you drop out of school, then you go to San Francisco or other places to find the beauty of life: love, flowers and perhaps children,” he explained as a general prelude.
“But if the hippies were passionate about particular skills, about a particular intellectual interest, they would go into that passion. But they don’t want the accolades that go with it like getting a PhD to show that they’ve reached the pinnacle of a particular aspect of intellectual work. So,” he shrugged, “I didn’t (get a PhD). I didn’t want to do that.”
So, it was a rebel decision?
“It was,” he admitted, “though it’s like shooting myself in the foot because I work in the university and I know a lot of young professors here that I taught. If I published the way people published, then it wouldn’t have mattered so much.”
Why didn’t you publish?
“I published what I liked about Soyinka; and I think I can still publish some things about Soyinka when I have more time. But I felt that if the system would look at the publications rather than count the publications, it might have been fairer …”
But wouldn’t that be changing the rule? You knew the rule of scholarship: you published or be damned?
“Yes, I know that!”
And how has it been now being damned?
“It’s only my ability to consume! I can’t consume very much. I can’t buy a jeep like my mates. Incidentally, I don’t even like jeeps. But I use my limited financial resources to fund my passions. All I know is I tried to do my job very well. I tried to teach very well.”
On that, the writer can confirm, as his former student from 1982 to 1985. Indeed, it is tribute to Omole’s genius that the Techniques of Creative Prose class back then understood Soyinka’s The Interpreters. He boiled it down as a modernist classic, with influences of cinematography, instead of an ancient tale, in the traditional novel, that moved from point A to Z.
The Interpreters, he insisted, was a cohabitation of varied plots, held together by the author’s creative thread, often as thin as the spider’s web!
Omole stamped that class with his unconventional thinking when, for their semester examination, he herded the puny class in his flat on Dyke Road, and told them to write a creative story; infusing all the creative techniques he had taught them: description, dialogue, narration, flashback, foreshadowing, pace, etc; all in a spade of three hours!
He indeed did his work well. “Show the story,” he would cry, for the umpteenth time, “don’t tell the story!”
And on Soyinka, he was really passionate. The Interpreters was his teaching bible, for his creative prose class. On the 1986 Nobel Prize for Literature winner, Omole has written many academic articles, viz: “Ese Ifa in Wole Soyinka’s Poetry: The Example of the First Movement of Idanre, Review of English and Literary Studies, Vol. 4. No. 1 (1987); “Wole Soyinka’s Fictional Double in John Gringer’s The Retreat From Yetunda,” Review of English and Literary Studies, Vol. 4, No. 2 (1987); “The Influence of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice on Wole Soyinka’s Interpreters”, Journal of Behavioural Research, Vol. 3, No. 2 (1989); “Wole Soyinka’s Filmic Idiom in Blues for a Prodigal”, in H. Ekwuazi, ed., Studies in Film and Television (1989); “Wole Soyinka’s Isara: The Democratisation of a Traditional African”, L. A. Thompson, ed., African Link Books (1994), to mention a few.
But Soyinka is not his only passion. When Omole said he invested his limited financial resources in his passions, he was painting the portrait of the arts don as a “failed” scientist. He thought he was fleeing from the sciences because he could not cope with advanced mathematics. That truncated his initial dream to read Microbiology. So, he changed to read Spanish Literature at Navarra, Pamplona. The don thought he had left science for good. But science refused to leave him.
He explained: “In ISI, I did Biology, Chemistry and Physics, and I thought that you could do biological sciences in the university without ever seeing Maths again. But as it turned out, I had to forego my scientific interest,” he revealed.
“But no! In my practical life, my hobbies are scientific. I built engines for cars and now I build engines for motorcycles because now I can’t lift a car engine.
“I like building engines. Maybe if you come to my place, you will see the relics of my mechanical interest,” he reiterated, his half smile soaked with pleasure.
“I actually know enough electronics to teach practical electronics in a polytechnic or technical college, if they won’t start asking for certificate,” he declared. “I know mechanics in Ibadan too. I work mainly on BMW engines; and then the spare parts are very much there at Agodi gate (a popular market in Ibadan), where I am much known as Engineer!”
That is the Town. But the Gown is much more sceptical and circumspect and well, cynical. That was the long and short of the brutal shutdown of Omole’s attempt to teach practical engine to engineering students in UI’s Faculty of Technology.
He was fiddling with one of his engines one day in the early 1980s when Yomi Obidi walked by his apartment on Dyke Road, abutting the Faculty of Arts. Obidi had just joined the Technology Faculty, a new engineering academic, headhunted from Canada. Obidi was excited at a fellow academic working an engine; and while introducing himself, volunteered that he read aircraft engineering in Canada. They started off discussing and comparing aircraft engines to car engines.
Doubly excited that an arts don was building an engine, Obidi wondered if Omole would be kind enough, the next Monday, to come introduce his students to the practicality of the engine. An excited Omole grabbed the chance. In no time, he had packed a BMW engine. “It is very light because it is made of aluminium,” he said.
The resource person was literally firing from all cylinders, introducing the students to internal combustion in engines. The students were game enough. Obidi himself beamed with an approving smile. All was well until the head of Mechanical Engineering Department passed by the corridor, peeped at what was happening and beckoned Obidi to see him.
Obidi went out. But before he came in again, the paradise was lost. The HOD disapproved of a stray wannabe from the arts profaning the mighty portals of engineering. He was even more censorious of poor Obidi, who should know better than acquiesce to such intellectual poison!
