The Thing Caught in Nte’s Trap: the Mega-Crises of Education in Nigeria and Africa

Being Text of the presentation by Prof Biodun Jeyifo, Professor of Comparative literature and of African and African American Studies Harvard University, at the 14th Annual Wole Soyinka Lecture, Abuja, August 3, 2011

First song:

Canaan in the Galilee
Canaan in the Galilee
Canaan in the Galilee
Where Jesus turn water into’gogoro!  

Second song:

I look high, high, high
I look low, low, low
I look high, high, high
I look low, low, low
I look high, high, high
To see anything good
But all I see is a seadog!

It is a great honor and a distinct pleasure for me to have been invited to give the 14th Annual Wole Soyinka Lecture of the National Association of Seadogs (NAS). I have not been active in NAS; indeed, I am neither conversant, nor up-to-date with the activities of NAS. Nonetheless, I am a salt-coated, tsunami-beaten seadog at heart! My experience on the Jolly Rogers 1 Deck as a seadog remains one of the most memorable and gratifying aspects of my life as an undergraduate at the University of Ibadan in the late 1960s. It is on account of this fact that I chose to start my lecture with those two rousing pyratical songs so as to invoke the spirit of our “sayles” in those days which now seem as if they belong to another lifetime.  

We had great, soul-stirring fun in the Pyrates Confraternity of that age and I shall forever remain grateful for that experience. It was wholesome, tension and stress reducing fun, and for this reason it was a great psychological tonic for the rigours of academic life and the crises that normally come with the transition from late teens to young adulthood.  Some of our activities and pranks were no doubt silly and our publication, “The Bug”, was not exactly of the highest standards of undergraduate journalism. The articles it published did not always reflect discerning cultural taste and sometimes the social etiquette underlying these articles was questionable in maturity. But we were not sadists, not psychopaths or sociopaths. And most definitely, we were not cultists! We did not wantonly destroy human life and we terrorized nobody - neither our own members nor our lubbish colleagues. As a matter of fact, we were not entirely unaware of our shortcomings and this is why some of our critical and satirical firepower was directed at ourselves. This self-directed satirical practice is what you get in the second of the two songs with which I opened this lecture: “I look high, high, high to see anything good/But all I see is a seadog!”

I am sure that everyone among my listeners this morning knows why I am making these vigorous assertions about the wholesomeness of the quintessential pyratical experience of those bygone days. “Pyracy” on the campuses of our universities and polytechnics has fallen into terribly bad ways, so much so that pyracy as my generation and the generations before us knew it and experienced it finally left the campuses in 1984, seemingly for good. This was as much a momentous as it was also a portentous development and I shall return to this issue later in this talk. For now consider this fact: even though Pyracy, in its old vintage form and under the aegis of the NAS, left the campuses in the mid-1980s, there is still a widely held and deliberately promoted view that the roots of the violent, cultic and sociopathic “pyracy” that remained on our campuses were there in the beginning. In other words, this view holds that from its inception in the old University College of Ibadan, “pyracy” in the Nigerian university system was always already incipiently devilish and satanic. The greatest “authority” for this view is none other than Long John Silver, one of the legendary Original Seven that founded the Pyrates Confraternity.  This Long John Silver is of course none other than Professor Emeritus of Physics, Olumuyiwa Awe, Founder and Pastor of the Fullness of Christ Evangelical Ministry [FOCEM].