—the story of a Government College Ibadan Class, 50 years after by Femi Olugbile
It is the turn of your class this year, this weekend, to play host to the annual celebration and old boys’ reunion of Government College, Ibadan. It is fifty years since you entered the school, and eighty seven years since the school came into being.
You had approached the date with mixed emotions. You are not exactly given to the ritual and chumminess of old boys celebrations, which, for some people, was a whole way of life. As a rule you find the backslapping camaraderie of people you remember not at all, or only vaguely, a mite irksome.
But this is a special event, even for you.
Fifty years!
It comes home to you, with a fleeting wash of emotion, as you watch your friend standing with the microphone in the middle of the hall, meandering his way with the sure hand of a seasoned driver taking a landrover across the crags and crevices of rough terrain, through the history of Government College, Ibadan. His story is waxing stronger as he progresses. The audience, a dinner crowd made up of the 1966 set, their wives – they call them ‘young girls’, their guests, and leaders and other members of the main Old Boys’ body here to celebrate with them, are sensing that something important is afoot – a unique experience everyone would remember for some time. There is a pin-drop silence.
The 1966 set, who are celebration today, may be called the set that enrolled the year Nigeria lost its innocence. You came into this College on 20th January, 1966. Five days after the first coup. Before the end of the year there would be another coup. Very soon a Civil War would start, dislocating the lives of many of your classmates…
Your school has produced many illustrious sons, the speaker is saying. Do you remember AdegokeAdelabu?
Everybody remembers AdelabuPenkelemess the colourful Ibadan politician who became something of a romantic hero among the populace, but sadly came to an early death in a road traffic accident.
He was in GCI, says the speaker. Spent only three years.Was always getting double promotion.
This is new information for you. You never knew Adelabu, scourge of the Action Group, gadfly to the adulatory supporters of the great ObafemiAwolowo, was your senior in school.
He was so brilliant nobody knew what to do with him.
Yes, you think. A candle that burned at both ends.
Your friend’s assignment at this event is to say a few words about Government College, Ibadan as a friend of the house, and to assay a cursory review of the 200 page book written by the class of 1966 to mark its golden anniversary.
The speaker confesses that preparation for his assignment has been done on the fly, literally. His review and comments are written on the back of a British Airways cabin menu, picked up and scribbled on midair as he returned hotfoot from an important trip to Chicago to join the celebration.
He tells other human angle rags to riches GCI stories that he witnessed. He had himself grown up in the old West, and many of the people he speaks about were his friends, or known to him personally. He had not himself attended Secondary School – his Scholarship had been rescinded as part of the persecution of his family for supporting the opponents of the Awoists. Unfazed, he had gone on to ‘Modern school’, become a cub reporter, cut his milk teeth on the job, including a spell of prison detention – like every reporter worth his salt, and gone on to become an internationally acclaimed Professor and scholar lecturing in ivy league institutions in Europe and America. Today he is a front-line thinker for the Awo tradition – a veritable 360 degree turn that once brought his poor father – the redoubtable JB Ekun of Gbongan fame, to tears. But that is another story – his own story, and today is not about his story but the GCI story.
AdegokeAdelabu was his father’s close friend and political associate.
There are other stories, such as the young man who finished Primary Six in Gbongan and passed his examinations with flying colours. Feeling at the end of his educational life, as his parents had no means to take him further, he started to hawk bread on the streets. One day, an oyinbo man, driving by, saw him in conversation with others and stopped.
What are you doing selling bread when you can speak such English?
The boy explained his situation.
The white man – he was DJ Bullock, the iconic Principal of Government College Ibadan, gave him some money and invited him to come to Apataganga for the entrance examination of the college the following Saturday. He would pass with ease, and go on to become a prominent Professor, lecturing at Howard University.
And what about the brilliant GCI student who did not come back from holiday because his father could no longer afford the money? It came to the attention of DJ, who kept a studious eye on his brood. He would have none of that. He personally went to his father’s farm to drag him back to school. Fast forward a few years. Another internationally acclaimed scholar.
The school, avers the reviewer, speaking off his British Airways menu, was like a beacon to all the youths who grew up in the South, and even farther afield.
The British – the colonial masters, clearly had in mind, in setting up such a school, to create a factory that would churn out proper, well rounded ‘squires’ of the English model, who would populate the middle class and provide leadership in the new nation. It was a system totally built on merit, and in the dormitory, as in the classroom, you could see the son of a carpenter from Ago Taylor – down the road, sitting – or sleeping next to the son of a millionaire businessman from Port Harcourt. It was the Nigerian Dream, put in a crucible, and set afire.
But there is a caveat. The school culture has helped to bring out the best among children who were already selected for being the best and the brightest. They have gone on to excel in The Arts, in Medicine, in Engineering, and other fields besides. Not to put too fine a point on it, no other secondary school in Nigeria has produced a Nobel laureate.
But, yes, there is a caveat. The school culture and training has been rigorously a-political. There are sports ranging from Cricket to Hockey and to Soccer and Athletics. There are clubs for Literature and Debate, as there are for Music. There is Drama – the GCI of old was reputed throughout the nation as having the finest tradition in Drama. But there is no club for Politics, no discussion of it before or among the young charges of the teachers. No lessons. No Association.
The upshot, concludes the speaker, confronting the crowd with an accusatory jutting forward of his chin, is that you have become famous doctors, lawyers, and engineers – technocrats, ruled over and dictated to by children who did not, or could not, pass your school’s entrance examination. Yes.
But the situation is even more dire than that, he goes on. The Government College Ibadan that is being celebrated is not the current physical reality, but a memory that resides only in the imagination of its Old Boys. From 1979, a sea-change swept away the old GCI, as the Bola Ige government of Oyo State embarked on a mission to ‘take down’ the ‘elite’ school. Additional ‘schools’ were built in its compound. Part of its land was parcelled out for other use. The boarding house system was effectively abolished, and the buildings went into disuse and decrepitude. From being the school for the best and the brightest from far and wide, it became a local, essentially day school for children in the Apata Ganga suburb of Ibadan. The admixture and cross-fertilisation of yore is gone. There is now no possibility of tear-jerking stories such as the story of the bread-seller from Gbongan who went on to become a Professor because DJB heard him speaking English with great proficiency.
This deliberate policy of ‘levelling down’ the elite schools was also implemented in Lagos State under the Jakande administration. New schools were built on the playing fields of old schools, and for a time, the best schools – the Igbobi Colleges and Maryland Comprehensives, became noisy factories without culture, and without soul. True – the progressive agenda in operation in the South West required that enrollment be cranked up so that every child got a shot at education and no one was left behind. But what about quality? What about culture? Why take out the playgrounds? Why kill old schools, instead of simply building new ones on fallow land? In sum, why ‘level down’, instead of ‘levelling up’? For people who got so much right, they got this one wrong!
Would Awo have approved? A training ground to turn out thinkers and technocrats to innovate and lead the drive for his bold vision for social development should be as much a part of his legacy as Free Primary Education, surely!
Every thinking society has a duty to determine what is best about itself, and groom its children towards these ideals. In that drive, a leadership based on innate merit has to be facilitated, irrespective of the ideology of the nation. Most of the political leadership of UK and USA come ultimately from a few institutions. It is said, for instance, that William Haig – who became head of the Conservative Party and almost made it to 10 Downing Street, was first identified as a talent while addressing a school Conservatives meeting at the age of eighteen. The best guarantee of egalitarianism is when children have places to aspire to, based on merit and hard work.
The speaker is winding up. You scrutinize his face closely through the powerful zoom lens of your Sony camera, which sees better than the naked eye. The dimples and contours give his face a look that is at once soft and hard. With him you always get the sense that under the placid exterior, there is a roiling volcano. Beneath the soft speech and cultured mannerism, there is a derring-do capable of putting everything in the world on the spin of a coin and damning the consequence.
But there is still hope, he says. Or perhaps he doesn’t say, and you are filling in for him. There is the emerging prospect of a public-private partnership between the old students of GCI and the government, with the ‘private’ component, supplied by the old students, providing the management and finance required to take the institution back to the old days of glory and give the future children a hope. Similar discussions are ongoing concerning other schools, including King’s College, Lagos.
He gets a standing ovation, does your friend, as he returns to his seat, clutching his British Airways menu. He is still jet-lagged from his travels, and has had precious little sleep in several days. On top of that his mission in Chicago had not been met with great success – his quarry, a big politician with whom he wanted a discussion for the advancement of The Cause, had eluded him. But all of that is in a day’s work, and there would be another day, another meeting. Earlier, over lunch, you had commiserated with him and given him a mild beer, ‘not enough to harm a fly’, for the stated purpose of ensuring his perspective is not skewed as he delivers his address. You had also, off-handedly, promised another beer for later.
The evening winds down on a high note. The food is good, the conversation is loud. The music is full of golden oldies.
It is close to midnight as you make to depart the venue, after endless rounds of photographs.
Your friend is waiting in ambush for you by the steps. His chin is jutting forward in a gesture that is at once benign and determined.
‘Where is the beer you promised me?’
It is not a question but a statement. You look helplessly beside you at the wife. She smiles in that way that she has, which says at once ‘It’s alright’ and ‘You’re on your own’.
You see her down the corridor and return to face your assignment, heading to the bar.
This time you order strong brew for him, hoping a combination of the unresolved jet lag and the ethanol will abbreviate the engagement.
With a clarity of sight that you can only get at a bar, you examine the reasons for the fact that colonial ‘missionary’ educationists such as DJ Bullock and Miss Groves of St Annes came in to teach generations of Nigerians for leadership with a script that included everything except a grooming in Political Thinking. Your friend’s theory is that they themselves, being of lower middle class origins, had not gone to Eton or Oxbridge, and could not give what they did not have. Your own theory is of a more sinister conspiratorial hue. Perhaps the colonial founders of Nigerian who midwifed the ‘marriage’ of the ‘poor husband’ North to the ‘rich wife’ South took pains to read the riot act to all colonial educators coming to these parts that while it was okay to breed professors of Medicine and Engineering, they should not stir the hornet’s nest by giving the children in these parts the idea that they could one day rule the land.
The conversation shifts to Aisha Buhari and her ‘cry for help’ – and the desperation that could lead a woman to share her ‘pillow talk’ with hundreds of millions of others. You agree it is a last-ditch move to save the ‘handshake across the Niger’. The public comment that ensued back and forth has missed the point by failing to see that the ploy worked, and the principal, within a few hours, was organizing a strategic meeting to try to get a grip back on the handshake.
Too little too late?
Your friend is worried.
So much hope had been kindled for the Nigeria project on this handshake.
Way past midnight, you see your friend begin to nod. The strong brew has worked.
You say your good nights.
It has really been a great celebration.
