Foreword 3 Chapter 1: You Can Become Whatever You Choose To Be 4 Chapter 2: What Name Do You Bear?

9 Chapter 3: Belief in Juju and Witchcraft 14 Chapter 4: Education without Religion 20 Chapter 5: Morality and Religion 25 Chapter 6: How to be A Writer 30 Chapter 7: May Your Road Be Rough 35 Chapter 8: How we teach Morality in Mayflower School 38 Chapter 9: Leadership 44 Chapter 10: Look before You Leap! 54 Chapter 11: Do I Believe in God? 57 Chapter 12: My Last Detention: Any Lesson learnt? 61 2

F FFFFo oooor rrrre eeeew wwwwo oooor rrrrd dddd I have specially written these essays for young and ambitious Nigerians. You do not have to read these essays to win tile objects of your ambitions but you must read some parallels to them, written by other authors. If,| however, such other alternative essays do not come your way, the reading of the topics here is a MUST in your life, more so because very, very few people -they must be supermen and women -ever win the objects of their ambitions without starting with a springboard of the knowledge gained by reading what other people have written. Knowledge is not gained by intuition. We are, all of us, borrowers or, if you like, robbers, of one another's thoughts and ideas. Once we have borrowed or stolen such ideas, however, we enrich them, fertilize them and they become richer for our own use. Every bit of knowledge used by any one man or woman is a hybrid, it being a mixture or enlargement or enrichment of the basic idea underlying the grand, new find. You need these essays, therefore, as your own springboard, as an up-coming, young, and curious person. Several of the illustrations used in these essays are biographical. And, I think

that is how it should be. The Ijesas say, ,,,, A i so fun eni ti mefa pe, e mo mo i bi.(You dont tell the woman who has reared six children of her own that she is ignorant in child raising! ). I would prefer to listen to the comments of a man with two wives on the evils of polygamy than listen to the comments of a chronic bachelor on the same subject. T TTTTa aaaai iiii S SSSSo ooool lllla aaaar rrrri iiiin nnnn Eleyele Police Barracks, October 1974 3

C CCCCH HHHHA AAAAP PPPPT TTTTE EEEER RRRR O OOOON NNNNE EEEE Y YYYYo oooou uuuu C CCCCa aaaan nnnn B BBBBe eeeec cccco oooom mmmme eeee W WWWWh hhhha

aaaat tttte eeeev vvvve eeeer rrrr Y YYYYo oooou uuuu C CCCCh hhhho ooooo oooos sssse eeee T TTTTo oooo B BBBBe eeee This is a very difficult idea for young Nigerians to accept, for, our religious leaders din into the ears of the school children all the time that there is nothing they can do without god blessing the Idea. If that were so, how would we know that something we want to do has been approved by God? Kneel down and pray and listen to the still small voice? Go to the priest and ask him to intercede on our behalf? It does not matter which way we take, the answer is always in favour of the less hazardous route. Let me give you an example. When 1 was in standard six at Otapete Wesley School, bless, the Rev. G.S. Treleaven, the Methodist Minister and Superintendent of Schools, went home on leave and from Somerset in England, sent a postcard to me . There was a picture of a tree seemingly falling across the road, but a few cars were, nevertheless, passing on the road with the tree on top of them. Mr Treleaven wrote a few words to clarify the situation. The tree, he explained, was not falling across the road, but was growing across it. It had been so for many years. The picture was very fascinating and 1 swore to myself I would be there in Somerset some day to have a look. A decade later, in 1942, my chance came. The Second World War was on and Nigerian volunteers were wanted in the Royal Air Force. I jumped at the idea. If 1 could get into the Royal Air Force and have my training in England, I should be able to take some time off and visit Somerset and see that tree that was growing, and not falling, in the road!

I have always been a misanthrope -my mind to me a kingdom is. But I felt there was too much at stake in this. If I was going to die, I could, at least, ask for the ideas of some of my friends. All my friends were Moslems and Christians. Every one of them declared it was too hazardous. God would not permit anybody like me to go and die a cannon fodder, in a senseless European war. It was understandable. 4

None of them would like to have a hand in seeing me go, as they were sure, to commit suicide. I had a girl-friend too. I did not give her enough chance to tell me what she thought of the idea. I started telling her all the conceivable opportunities that lay in the post-war years which would be ours to crop immeasurably. The only person whose assent I terribly needed was my mother, who, a year before, had just lost a daughter -my elder sister. Mother, I called on getting up on the morning of the day I had come to get her clearance, I am going a UK to join the R.A.F. and I'm sure I'd come back alive. There was a pause that seemed eternity to me and mother's voice came out, soft and un-emotional:As long as you know you are leaving me behind, it should be you who should bury me'. Thank you Mother, I said. The deal was made. A few hours later, I was on my way to Lagos, resolved a do all I could to win a place among the five that were to be selected. We were 500 competing to go. Had my girlfriend and my mother Joined forces with all else, would I have gone? Of course, I would have, I certainly would not mind hurting the feelings of all my prayerful friends, it would have hurt me hurting the feelings of my girlfriend. It would have hurt me more still hurting the feelings of my 70-year-old mother. But neither would have blurred the edge of my ambition to join the R.A F. and visit Somerset. Call the ambition what you will -vain, tinsel, ridiculous. It was, nevertheless, a young man's ambition. I set my face, like a flint, to get to England and in May 1942, I had made it! A few months later, I wrote to Mr. W.H Mann, a Methodist Accountant, who had worked for several in Lagos and whose home I knew was in somerset. He invited me to pass a Saturday night with him. On Sunday morning I sat beside him in a car which he drove, and his ten-yearold son sitting behind.

It was a lovely November morning, the sun beaming through the leafless trees. Suddenly, Mr Mann called, Tai, look!' There was the tree seemingly falling across the road, and we slowly, very slowly, passed under it, on the beautiful Somerset road below! Man and his indomitable will to do or die! I picked up this next story from, How Never To Be Tired, a book I bought in New York in 1944. I write off record and so I cannot quote author and publisher. A carpenter was engaged to do some repair work in a courtroom. He worked energetically and finished the work. He inspected everywhere and felt highly gratified with the work of his own hands. He was on his own and walked slowly to the judge's chair. He planted himself on it and looked round. He had an uncanny feeling -a mixture of loy and sorrow. He could easily have been a Judge himself. He was quite intelligent and did very well at school. He wondered what those special merits were which the judge had and he did not. Couldn't he yet become one? He was stung by righteous indignation. He hurriedly packed up hts tools and went home. The very following day he started reading for law. In a few years he had passed all the necessary examinations and had become a lawyer. One day, a few years later, the door opened and as he stepped into the court, everybody east rising up. He sat down and looked round. He was sitting down on the chair he had worked on and he was just looking at all other items of furniture which, just over a decade before, he was working on as a carpenter. Had he gone round asking his friends and neighbours whether they thought he would make a better carpenter than a judge, or whether they thought he might have became a mason or an electrician ,if he had tried to set his sail to catch their winds, he would never have become anything. When I see the number of adolescents doing everything they can do to be absorbed into schools that are already over-full and wouldn't like them, I always ask why these young men and women dont pick up the courage to stay home and work indefatigably after working hours to win the academic merits they need to get along with? Many young Nigerians don't want to do that. They do not want to do it because they are afraid. They are afraid of venture. They are afraid to dare. And yet they are well acquainted with the saying no venture, no gain. But to us, it is easier said than done. 6

We started to battle in Molusi College, Ijebu-Igbo, when the boys were so sure that they were destined to become whatever fate had in store for them.

1 told them they were silly. Why should they go to school at all if they could become engineers and lawyers and big businessmen without their stir? Why didn't they ask fate what they were going to become and they could, henceforth, go to bed after each meal and wait until their professions were ripe for fate to dole out to them? One of them answered and said, As fingers were not all of the same length, so fate had willed that some of us would be big men and some, small men'. I said they were wrong. 'The lengths of the fingers depended on how they were put together, and I put mine together, all equal, turning towards me, my hollowed palm! The exercise invoked a terrific ovation. We ended the day's debate a week later with the latest song I specially composed for the topic: We can become Whatever we choose to be: No kings, no lords, no knaves can say us nay: For we believe that man is a potential doctor, Or lawyer or crook, Or dwarf or giant, Whichever he sets his mind to be. We shall be giants, and therefore we shall Work, and work, and work and work Even if we must work our fingers to the bone, So may it be! Four generations of students in Molusi College have sung it and, today, eighteen generations of students have sung it in Mayflower School. I have received letters from past students from Washington D.C. as well as from London, past students who, today, are knowledgeable enough to ask me to eat my words for the cheat which I had laid thick on them in their formative years. But no. 7

All their letters are full of praise. All of them are realising in their lives, the truism in the words of a song they swallowed excitedly whilst the debate lasted. A few years back a Mayflower school girl said she now believed that one could become whatever one chose to be but she couldn't get over the idea that she could if the parents were not in favour of what a student wanted to become. To prove her wrong I gave the example of a boy whose fees in our school were not paid by the brother as the parents were too poor to pay them. When, however, the boy was in his fourth year, the brother told him that as soon as the boy left school, he would team up with the brother in the profession the brother was engaged in. The boy was upset and pleaded with the brother that he would not like to do what his brother was doing. The boy returned to school the following term with no fees. The brother would not pay them.

More than that, the boy removed his shirt to show the marks that were still fresh from caning that he got on his back from his brother who was ready to beat him to submission. What would he do? He was far from being a poor student. He was in the second of the three streams in his class. If, I told him, he would work harder and move up to the first stream, continue to behave very well at school, be ready to stay behind in the holidays to work on the farms, he would be working his way through collegeas the Americans would say. He moved up to the first stream, became a much better officer (was our our Chief Steward), was so well talked about by staff and spent most of the rest of his holidays working for school. He was going to become an engineer. He has not become one yet but he is on a sure path to becoming one. Certainly, parental antagonism needs not create a mortal barrier on the path of a dedicated and hard-working student who is ready to sacrifice everything else for the course he or she is pursuing. 8

C CCCCH HHHHA AAAAP PPPPT TTTTE EEEER RRRR T TTTTW WWWWO OOOO W WWWWh hhhha aaaat tttt N NNNNa aaaam mmmme eeee D DDDDo oooo Y YYYYo oooou uuuu B BBBBe eeeea aaaar rrrr? ???? I made up this list from a late copy of one of our morning papers:

Richard, Allen, Anthony, Victor, Emmanuel, Paulina, Nuruddeen, Nueen, Joseph, Kamoru, Edward, Francisca, Rasaki, Razzaac, Wahab, Wahabi, Waheeb, Wazeez, Kareem, Jim, Rafiu, Nureni, Doris, Alex, Phillip, Philip, Ignatius, Christianah, Augustine, Antonia, Kamildeen, Stella, Lauretta, Solomon, Theresa, Marquis, Kingsley, Gregory, Billy, Rachel, Akeem, Caroline, Ernest, Judith, Abdul, Abudu, Bakare, Bakri, Bakre, Quadri, Care, Patience. From across the Niger, we can really add startling few-: Ignatius, Abel, Dominicus,Donates,Innocent,Pius,Darius, Hepleth,Philemon,Hopeful,Patience,Johannine,Japhet,Mab el, Fleming,Wellington, Domingo, Magnus. We were going to pay a lured carpenter for his services to school and I asked for his name. 'Kulodu', he said. We wrote it down as we would by Yoruba name and I told him it was difficult for me to apprehend it. Was it Yoruba or Hausa or biblical or Ibo name, or what? He would not hke to contribute to such a debate. I could ask anybody in Ikenne town and they would tell me Kulodu was his name. Kulodu', I thought again. It was his baptismal name, he complemented. His name was C CCCCL LLLLA AAAAU UUUUD DDDDE EEEE. How did he come by this absolutely indigestible emblem which, as an illiterate, he just did not know how to call? A visit to the Ikoyi cemetery would shock any sincere citizen of this country as he moves from one grave-stone to the other to see the names they carry: 'Wellngton-Jacunha'. Dixie-Tomlinson. Danderius-Domingo. 9

And these, in their days, were borne by forefront Nigerian, in the services of the country as lawyers or doctors or businessmen!

When I hear Tolstoy, I know the bearer is a Russian. When somebody calls Ho Chi Minh, I expect to see a South-east Asian man answering to the name. When, in Britain, I hear Lloyd Jones, I expect a Welshman to answer to the name. When somebody calls, Otto Schmidt, l expect to hear a German answer. But here in Nigeria, when you hear Alfred Alphonso, you do not know who is going to answer to the name. A German, a Danish, a Dutch answering to it would not embarrass anybody, but would in our context, be a Nigerian! The Nigerian ls the world's lost man. The man who has lost his own identity and is looking anywhere else on earth to attach himself (or herself) to somebody else who, in history, was important to gain significance. It is essential we dig a bit deeper and see when things started to fall apart for, certainly, when people like Mungo Park and Clapperton came to us, they met us still bearing our indigenous names which, though, to them might sound ridiculous but were, to us, very meaningful. Rev. Samuel Ajayi Crowther must have started us all off on this new path to national quandary. He must have got the name Samuel, when he got baptized by missionaries who probably found that his first name, Ajayi, was somewhat difficult to recall quickly. Crowther, through reading, accepted the innovation in the new name, for not only would it remind him, with every call, that he was now a Christian, it was just as advantageous to the Europeans, apparently some clever Englishmen ,as Samuel was so easy for them to recall. As to the name Crowther, young Ajayi probably did not know his father's surname. The Yorubas only bear first names. Young Ajayi probably told this to the white missionaries who knew people only by their family names. A humourous one among them might have suggested his own surname, which young Ajayi very obsequiously assumed. Or he might have got it, as did all the African slaves crossing into America, by assuming the names of the bosses on whose farms they worked. A second wave of these very heterogenous and meaningless names must have reached us through Liberia where the returning Africans now Americanised and distinguished themselves under the tag Americo-Liberians, brought these names, particularly the pedantic ones, to terrify and lord things over people who had simple and straightforward African names. 10

Sierra Leone had its own share, too. All the Mama Sarros then in Lagos were distinguished by their inability to pronounce the letter r and were famous with their fabulous names, invariably in compound forms, Mrs. Dongo-Jantazzo, or Mrs.Catherine Bandexter-Magnus. These names, sounding so ponderously, charmed Nigerians whose names, generally, were invariably disyllabic -Ojo, Bayo, Dense, 'Bade. The lure was great and when the missionaries trooped in and told them that

being baptised automatically compelled them to jettison their pagans names, it was hell really let loose. If any part of this country was thus badly dehumanized with name-bearing, it was the Igbo-speaking area of the country. It is difficult to find anybody in that part of the country today whose family names have not been, contaminated, adulterated and bastardized by this delusion. The very fact that even in Lagos, Roman Catholicism still frowns at new adherents being baptized with African names only points to how far Nigeria yet is from its goal of national identification. The Roman church wouldn't breathe out anything of such foul odour in Congo Kinshasa. General Mobutu who, with his wife and whole nation has jettisoned the Roman name, has pointed the only way to national integrity to countries like Nigeria whose speeds are yet tragically pedestrian. Femi and Dotun Oyewole, both Christian gentlemen, proudly and publicly commended Chief J. O. Ajiibola for putting his foot down many years ago on the question of which names the twin brothers were to bear for their baptism. They shall be Femi and Dotun', Chief Ajibola sort of ordered. But for him, these gallant Nigerians might be sweating uncomfortably today under the luminous yokes of Jeremiah and Hosea for what the dead yesterday would have called Christian names. What is the cure today? This is not a matter of fighting against Christianity in this country. It has its own time to die a natural death. What we are concerned with right now is that knowledgeable adult citizens of this country should help save our young boys and girls who have been sadddled with these names from the embarrassment of having to carry them to adulthood. Every year, before my students enter for the School Certtificate examination, I talk to them. Those of them whose Christian or Moslem parents are fanatical about what foreign names these children should bear should let the names be. 11

In all other cases it is in their own interest that they noiselessly drop all foreign names they bear before they put the first foot forward in entering into public examinations. What names they go in by are henceforth glued to them for the rest of their lives. The subsequent changes many people effect through the columns of the newspapers do not touch the certificates already acquired with unhappy names on them. They will be names one has to defend as many times as the certificates are referred to in the future. From the same issue of the newspaper I lifted the earlier names from, I am submitting yet another catalogue: Olufunke Odunaike, Babatunde Bankole,

Olugbemisola Adeyemi, Wemimo Oladimeji, adefunlayo lam Adeloye, Adesina Idowu, Modupe Aderibigbe, Ogunjobi Oluyinka, Morounranti adedayo, Adekunle Aiyegbajeje, Jaguna Abiodun, Modupeola Dada, Enitan Osinubi, Ogungbemidele Olusola, Aladejana Ayodele, Iyabo Fakoye, Folashade Akin tola, Oluwatoyin Ladele. And to end it all, a few from the other side of the Niger Ngozi, Arinze, Nwafor Orizu, Okeleke Nzeogwu, Mbonu Ojike,Nnamdi Azikiwe. Perhaps the most significant today is that of Dr Akanu Ibiam. Dr Ibiam threw away not only Sir' but also the so-called Christian first name. In this respect he is the boldest of living Nigerians. These names, in every case, are significant. They are royal. Take Israel's example. About the first thing that the Jews from anywhere in the worlds do on returning to the homeland, Israel, is to Hebraize their names. Shazar, the third Israeli President was Rubashov, apparently Russian. David Green became David Ben-Gurion: Isaac Shimshelevitz became Ishak Bem-zvi. An exception to the common practice is Israels first president, who remained Chaim Weizmann. The Nigerian that is worth his salt does not carry funny names like Winterbottom, Thornbust, Horseshoe. There is a Nigerian with the name Adolf Hitler. He will be almost lynched within twenty-four hours of arriving in Holland and his name being publicly known. Today, Nigerians who go for foreign names, no matter for whatever reason, excepting where either parent is non-Nigerian, are only showing how stupid they are. Carriers of foreign names will not simply be considered amphibians. 12

Amphibians live in the water and alternate with living on land with no obvious signs of discomfiture. Rather they are amblystoma -a creature that is found on the land but yet not so sure whether or not it has left the water for good! They are men and women of two worlds, but belonging to neither. 13

C CCCCH HHHHA AAAAP PPPPT

TTTTE EEEER RRRR T TTTTH HHHHR RRRRE EEEEE EEEE B BBBBe eeeel lllli iiiie eeeef ffff i iiiin nnnn J JJJJu uuuuj jjjju uuuu a aaaan nnnnd dddd W WWWWi iiiit ttttc cccch hhhhc ccccr rrrra aaaaf fffft tttt A classmate of mine died several years ago. Only a couple of years back, (1973) did somebody who knew him intimately tell me that as he lay dying, he went on repeating over and over again that it was his mother who was sucking his life-blood and that people should take notice that whenever he died it was his mother who succeeded in killing him. If anybody had asked me in our Wesley College days, I could have told the enquirer that I did not expect that classmate of mine to live long. He was so shriven. His chest was so small. He was not even straight. Somewhere, deep inside him, it was obvious that something was cock-eyed for were he to be biologically bisected from the head, the divider would hardly reach the bottom of the neck before it comes straight out completely missing the spine! Even at 16 or 17 which he was then, he looked and behaved like a 50-year old man. And he was a true, perhaps it would be better to say: an exaggerated picture of his mother. She must have been, as are a good many people in our country, a victim of age-long starvation, whatever might be some other disease congenitally hooked to their family. As he lay dying after turning 40, the jujumen were so sure he was being done to

death by his mother. And my friend vociferously told her so. Nobody yet: as far as I know, has got the time to start on some research work if only to correct the heads of the new generations of Nigerians, that belief in witchcraft is, perhaps the most militant aggressor against our national march to progress and absorbtion into the rest of sane humanity. Before 1942, there must have been in my own family and in our extended families, ten young adolescents that got swept off by early death. There were Obajimi and Ireyemi, my two elder sisters; there were Sanya, and a brother, two cousins: there was Mrs R.A. Keleko, a niece and, at least, six others more. I knew the cause of the death of three of them. Obajimi, Ireyemi and Sanya died of tuberculosis. Obajimi who, I understand, was three years older than Kehinde and me did not pass her Standard Six but was engaged as a nurse in a private hospital in Iagos where she was paid 12/6d a month. Her rent for the room she occupied was 5/-a month. That was in 1939. She regularly sent 1/6d a month to our mother at home. When I visited her, the only time I did it, she offered me 2/6d which I refused to accept from her. 14

Was she no more my elder sister and therefore not capable of offering me a gift, sometime? She demanded. I sobbed, bit my lips, and accepted the gift. Even if we we assume that she probably did not send any money to our mother that month, she would still have to accommodate all her purchases of food, toiletry requirements and what else you thought, into the dimensions of 12/6d less 7/6d for that month. When l suddenly heard that she was ill and tuberculosis was suspected, I prepared myself for the worst. She lingered on for another year and when life completely drained out she died in my arms at Ijebu-Ode in 1941. My sister, Ireyemi, did not fare any better. She was so much older than I and I regarded her more as my mother than as a sister. The only time l ever remember visiting her was when she lived at Branco Street, an obscure street somewhere behind the Old Massey Street Hospital, Lagos. I have seen homes with the minutest of windows, but 1 had never seen one with no windows at all. Sister Ireyemi's had none. She got the only daylight from the new, very popular see thru' corrugated roofing sheet. But the one above us was so darkened with age and smoke that Ireyemi had to light a lamp to see in the room even in the day-time. Looking back I just cannot remember anybody ever telling me what my sister Ireyemi did. She must have lived something of a loose life. She read up to Standard 3 or 4, but I still remember she did not like school. She would accompany Kehinde and me to the portals of St. James' school, Iperu and she always cleverly retreated into the unknown neighbourhood. Shortly after I got to the United Kingdom in 1942, news reached me that she

was dead. She was another victim of tuberculosis, a direct result of pseudoexistence in the Nigeria of the forties, as it is of many more today. The other youngsters we lost in the family died under the same conditions, but the household of Solana (my maternal grandfather) would not believe that these juvenile dead were victims of conditions that we, who outlive them, have luckily escaped. Just before I went abroad in 1942, I heard my own twin sister call our mother a witch. She (our mother) had slaughtered all the other adolescents in the family and my kehinde would not like to get eaten by our witch of a mother! If our mother-and she was such a tempestuous woman -had jumped up and declared she was, indeed, a witch, and that she was truly responsible for the deaths of these other youngsters, she could, in certain parts of our country, have been stoned to death ! Such cheap deaths abound in our country today. And all such daughters of the innocent hammer into the minds of the new breeds the deep-rooted belief in witchcraft in this country. 15

It is difficult to say where to start the juju essay. All that can best be done is for me to give a few instances of my relationship with the possessors. Sometimes in 1957 or '58, I was travelling in our second-hand American Chevrolet, from Molusi College ljebu-lgbo. to see my mother at Iperu. On reaching the first of the several bridges that lead to Okun-Owa, I saw a troop of men in shocking dresses, carrying pots and wooden bowls full of juju. one of the pots was shooting out flames. The bridge was taped off with a tinsel barrier of palm fronds. The leader-his face tattooed in white and red colours demanded 2/-from me. 1 didn't like being forced to give money and , as I said I would not give it, I instinctively wound up the glass on the door. The man angrily hit the up-turned end of the goats short horn that he held in his left hand against the car. He swore that I would not return from my journey and he beat the car's vast bonnet a few times. As I revved up, he jumped out of the road and I broke the palm fronds with the car bonnet, crossed the bridge and sped home to see my mother. Mother was expecting me and had prepared a sumptuous meal ready but I was too angry to sit down. I had a myth to explode. I did not dare tell my mother I had just been freshly cursed buy the Onimosan (the celebrated juju men), but I told her I only ran in to keep my word. I would be seeing her another day. I rode straight back, but went on telling myself I could not afford to have an accident , or I would have lost a good point. When I got back there, these men had gone. When I told my boys in Molusi College what I had just gone through, they only looked at me suspiciously. One of them told me later what most of them thought-I had been bathed, at birth, in some special water, superficially prepared by my father to protect me from any future eventualities and mishaps! On two occasions in Mayflower School, we had juju cases.

The first one was brought by Oyefuga in our third year. Oyefuga was always the first boy in class and at Bedtime, one Sunday night he came to me, his eyes popping out, with a knotted up juju in his hand. He lay on his bed, he reported, and when he found it uncomfortable he got up to investigate. Somebody had sneaked the juju into his bed when he was not around. I was sitting at my office table. I opened the top drawer with a lock in it, asked him to drop the juju. I then asked him to take away the key. He was to bring back the key the following morning, just before the assembly, as I would talk about the tira (the juju piece) before the boys and girls. At the assembly, I asked who the boy was who put the juju under Oyefuga's sheet. Of course, nobody would own up. What was the juju to do? To paralyse his limbs? Stop his brain from further good work? Kill the boy? I was ready; I 16

told the boys and girls, to get the result on me that was expected from Oyefuga. I was prepared to die for Oyefuga, if the juju was going to kill him. I stepped down from my perch, and asked all the students to stand around me. I took up my pen-knife and cut through the mass of thread and paper until I reached the black-looking powder inside. I bared my arms (they were actually bare as I always wore short-sleeved shirts) and I chose the left arm. I told the students that if the preparation was only meant to paralyse the part alerted I could over the left arm for should I offer the right, I would have to start learning how to use the left arm and our school work would suffer. I therefore held the paper container with my right hand and poured the juju on the bared left arm loudly asking for whatever was to happen to Oyefuga to happen to me. Some of the girls were already groaning and squirmishing. As I dismissed the boys and girls I told them that if they did not see me any more they could be sure I had died for one of them because I loved them all so much. As they silently headed for their classrooms, I went straight to our bathroom and had a good wash of the arm with a rich rub of soap. I had no time to send some of the charcoal-looking black stuff to the University College, Ibadan for analysis. The verdict might have been along my own guess charcoal! Poor Nigeria. We are in terror, even of our own shadows. Compound any rubbish together and wrap it in some awesome containers and Nigeria would shiver in its shoes. Even the theoretical chemists would not even ask to see what the thing is and whether an exposure to analysis in the laboratory might help. The second case of juju in Mayflower School was somewhat like the first one. It was several years after Oyefuga's case. A boy came and reported that another boy had got some juju ready for his physical elimination. That the juju was hidden somewhere in his dormitory. I asked him to call the Senior Prefect and the two of them, together with the 'would-be-killer' came back with the juju. The owner accepted ownership, but he did not mean to did anybody with it. It was only to terrorize.

We carefully sorted the lot out -a small gourd filled with jet-black powder (possibly charcoal again) a ram's horn tilled with local black soap on which a parrot's red feather was planted. There were a few other small items. I declared all void after casually putting them to pieces with a fork and knife and we got its photograph taken -a photograph that got published with the year's Winslow. There was yet a third case of juju which a boy found embedded in the middle of his mattress. How did he know it was there? 17

He spread the mattress out in the sun and as he was feeling it he was sure there was a lump which must have been put there by a boy who did not like him. The boy must have done it on a Saturday or the other day when he, the owner, got permission to go home. He had been feeling awful of late. Now he knew why. It was the juju in his mattress. As usual I got the juju opened in the assembly, got the black dust thrown out and we found there was some Arabic script for cover. We sent the script to the University of Ibadan and it was discovered it was a prayer for the boy. In the meantime the mother came in. She had put it in. The prayer was for the boy's safety and she paid the tira man by the nose to get the special juju made! The only juju we found with the girls was in the form of a leather strip whose wearer was to carry round her waist. I found it hanging in one of the girls' dormitories when the classes were in progress. I took it to my house and to the assembly the following morning. Who among the girls, is the owner of this?' I asked, raising up the igbadi (waist juju). No girl would answer. As usual I cut through the swollen part of it, examined the black powdery cut through the whole length of the sewn strip to make sure there were no more hidden juju and I asked for the punishment on whoever treated such a juju to scorn to fall on me. None came. But our little experiments did not, for most of the students, torpedo the idea that it was all a fake. Believing in juju and believing in God or in Allah are all relative. The one who says God can do everything does not stand on a loftier pedestal than the man who says the juju can as well. The only difference between the Christian and the juju believer is that the former does not encumber himself with dirty and smelly concoctions.

As long as there are believers in Christianity and Islam, so will there be believers in juju and in witchcraft. They are all relations, the one not being superior to the other. Throughout the world people have deserted one god for another. Susan Wenger of Osogbo was a Christian. She is now a high priest of a Yoruba god with all its groves and secret places and juju and all. 18

Many Nigerians are Moslems and Christians today, after having bidden goodbye to juju. Most Nigerians however, bow to both houses. They are Christians and too, staunch believers in juju, hoping that physical and moral salvation must come from the one or the other and from whichever it does come, they'd be beneficiaries! People like me who have dismissed God and the juju from their lives are very few the world over, and are very courageous. But most people are timid: they want to get something to lean on to just as the drunken man needs the street lamp post for his physical support. The most comfortable Nigerian Christian is probably, the one in the Roman Catholic Church because he continues to get those little images which are the hallmark of the juju groves in the church, together with the catchwords and sing-songs which are reminisent of the incantations that go with the juju possessor. Be you, therefore, a Christian or a Moslem, or a juju man, or a witch or a wizard, you are no better, one than the other, and the one who points a finger or scorn at the other is, himself (or herself) the most contemptible of the lot. 19

C CCCCH HHHHA AAAAP PPPPT TTTTE EEEER RRRR F FFFFO OOOOU UUUUR RRRR E EEEEd ddddu uuuuc cccca aaaat tttti iiiio oooon

nnnn w wwwwi iiiit tttth hhhho oooou uuuut tttt R RRRRe eeeel lllli iiiig ggggi iiiio oooon nnnn This piece is not going to contain any of the sophisticated definitions of education or of religion. It is going to be a matter of comparing and trying to see things that work. Today, everywhere in the country, there is the general cry for education. Everybody must be educated. No nation can afford to leave any of its members uneducated. We have been doing more. We have, all along, been comparing the type of education we had yesterday with what we are getting today. Or to put in the words of those of us who are hot on this topic -we have been comparing what passed for education yesterday with the education we are getting today. We do not stop there either. Most of us are complaining bitterly with the quality of education we are getting today and, therefore, wanting to see the new Nigeria equipped with living education, with education that works. We line out at the front of us the new societies. We want to pan ways with the British tradition of education. We see plenty we can borrow from American education; we are charmed with what education has done for the Soviet Union within a matter of half a century. But we are somewhat skeptical about Russian education; we are a bit suspicious of it because of the possibility of that education getting a veneer of communism sandwiched into it. We have just returned, 101 of us, from a visit to Mao tse Tung's China with its 800,000,000 people, a quarter of humanity on our planet. We are stunned by what education has done in the lives of so many people in a quarter of a century. We are therefore, angry and rightly so, that there seems to be nothing happening to our society with the ever-increasing, in millions of naira, cost in our education. More primary schools; more technical schools; more colleges of technologies; more universities. In spite of theses nothing has happened. What we have succeeded in doing is reproducing in ever-increasing numbers, young men and women with qualities of education that are identical with ours. These are now fading that the national cake that was rich in sharing whist the British were here only a couple of decades ago was becoming so minute with

so many more qualifying to share in it, more so that it has hardly grown as compared with the leaps and bounds in growth that the prospective sharers have bad. 20

Result? Grab! Universal grab! Those in whose hands the communal property is kept, hack off as much as they could and the chunks that accidentally fall off are fought for and won by the rule of might is right' around the middle of the pyramid. Those at the base of the pyramid who only smell the luscious cake go into any extent of savagery and sabotage to dislodge whoever could be dislodged to lop off from them whatever there is left of the chunks they have arrested as such chunks ricochet on their way down from the top of the pyramid. Highway robbery; arson, man's inhumanity to man on a scale unprecedented in the history of this country abound everywhere today. The army is to be retoothed. the police force is being strengthened quintuple. everything is being done to curb the ever-swelling (rising) arm of hooliganism and desperadoism in the country. But we are already finding we are not winning that way. It is like endeavouring to arrest the Congo entering during its flood into the Atlantic Ocean. In the words of Dr. James stalker, when all has Been done that could be done, the hungry hearts of men are hungry still'. It is here, for once, that people start to wonder how much good there is in the content of the education we are getting. Instead of standing a bit aside and giving our-selves opportunity to seriously study what is really absent from the education we are forcing down the 1 voracious throats of our kids, we keep closer, thus making our vision dimmer, and, with our blinkers on, pronounce un-equivocally that it is education with religion that is the answer to our national problem. We are so sure of this. So fanatically sure of it that we are not even ready to listen to anybody who, in a philosophic mood, wants to express a doubt, let alone express a note of dissent. Whilst we are ranting to the world that it is education with religion we want, we do not even ask ourselves whether what we are getting right now is education without religion. As a teacher and one who is acquainted with a few facts and figures on Nigerian education during the past quarter of a century, I declare that, as far as I know, all the educational institutions of this country teach religion. All of them, except one, Mayflower School, Ikenne. It would therefore be dishonest for anybody to tell us that the education that is being given in Nigeria today has no religion in it. What is true is actually in the reverse -that this country has far too much of formal religion in its education. Nigeria may not know how to supply good water to its villages; it may not know

21

how to give light to its rural areas; Nigeria may not care a hoot about town planning, or house designing for its citizens. Nigeria may not know how to govern itself as it has never been blessed by selfless and benevolent leadership. Nigeria may not know how to work as its engineer and doctor and judge and priest could be found in all-night parties. In the Soviet Unions all social activities like cinemas and dances and celebrations stop at 11.30 p.m But one thing Nigeria knows best. Religion. Whatever does not work, therefore in Nigeria, the Nigerian thinks that the first thing to do is to inject religion, like lubricating oil, into the machinery. For the entire country we have yet under 40% of our children in school. The figure for the north is yet under 10%. The literate population for Nigeria is certainly well under 10%. If with this shockingly low literacy for our country, we are so much in social difficulties and we are now aware that the Soviet Union and more so, new China, have no such difficulties, will it not be wise for us to ask what tricks they played to get their more favourable results? That, to anybody, will make sense. Let us pick up only one of our several examples and tell why the education in China works. It starts with the leadership; with the leadership of the nation. Mao says every strand of education must work; it must have a practical relationship to everyday life. If it does not, it is not education. More than that, Mao himself now 82, still works two hours a day for some time in the harvest season to demonstrate to his quarter of humanity that their only salvation is work. He does not encase himself'in an Ivory tower and pontificate on the essence of the importance of work to every Chinese in the nation. In his book, On The Tiger's Back, written about twelve years ago, John Hevy, a Ghanian who failed to make good as a student in a Chinese university, spat on the idea that everybody should work in China. He was shocked that the people faithfully accepted Mao's leadership that all should work and he ridiculed the Chinese students who tried to augment their meagre ration by turning all their university lawns into potato farms which were faithfully worked in their own private hours. What we only want to show here is the fact that transparently honest leadership is accorded with transparently honest followership. The honest leader works and he is imitated by possibly lukewarm or even dishonest followership which, with continued beacon light from leadership 22

scores, soon, too, excited and honest and possibly more still fanatical followership. The relationship is universal and there is no nation that has a fuller measure of it than any other nation. That is number one reason why the education in China works. The second reason, and this is a rider of the first. Mao Tse Tung on his own could not have changed the whole of his 800 million people. His cadre of disciples have themselves been imbued with the sense of honesty and hardihood and dedication that the personality of the leader generated. They knew that the leader was no chameleon. When anything was shared, they had seen that the leader took the least. When food ran short, they had seen it was the leader who did without. When there was danger, they had seen it was the leader who was exposed to the worst battle field. They had, therefore, learnt to trust him completely and they, tllernsdves, therefore, had metamorphosed into the new material that the leader proffered. It is this cadre of disciples as intermediary leaders who, in turns direct the people on what to do. ne maple, too, could read through these intermediary leaders who are directly ruling over them. They know the leaders are transparently honest and they too, as the people become contaminated by assimilation into this new way of life. That is how we get the new China-honest: hard-working and devoted to the cause which the leader points to -national self emancipation. The education of the new China has no religion in it at all. What it has, as that of the Soviet Union, is a philosophy of life. When, only like yesterday, China was ruled by the 'God-fearing' Chiang Kai Shek who, instead of facing the stark realities of life took all the national troubles to his chapel, China was as corrupt, or possibly more so, than we are today. The leader, Chiang, lied to the intermediary leaders and in turn, the intermediary leaders lied to the generality of the people. The people knew they were being deceived and tey responded in kind. They knelt down with Chiang and his intermediary leaders and when asked to close their eyes, they kept an eye open. The Chinese corruption during Chiang's time was total. The leader was corrupt and so the corruption ran through the whole gamut of the society. When the corrupt leader was ousted, and a new honest and incorruptible one took over a total change ran through China. All we need, therefore, now is application. Give us working leadership. Give us incorruptible leader who would breathe his personality into the intermediate or intermediary leaders. These in turn would breathe their faith and honesty into 23

the laity and this country would be forever cured of our seemingly leprous disease of corruption. To teach any religion in our schools is to try to deceive the people by

suggesting that the cure to our national ills lies elsewhere other than in our own hands. This would be incorrect as time story of China has richly amplified. Education without religion is like a cup of tea without sugar' is a farce, therefore. Virtually the whole of teenage Europe and America does not accept sugar in their tea. The girls in particular, because they don't want to be fat. Should you, as a host, insist that the tea you offer should be taken with sugar, you would be a queer host and most of your guests might beg to leave! And the Chinese who, incidentally gave tea to the world, do not drink it, themselves, with sugar. If as a guest you ask for sugar whilst you are participating in Chinese tea-drinking, you would be, politely, but firmly refused it. 24

C CCCCH HHHHA AAAAP PPPPT TTTTE EEEER RRRR F FFFFI IIIIV VVVVE EEEE M MMMMo oooor rrrra aaaal lllli iiiit tttty yyyy a aaaan nnnnd dddd R RRRRe eeeel lllli iiiig ggggi iiiio oooon nnnn I am a man of simple faith. When I was much younger and I had my first opportunity of tasting beer I was shocked at how many people relished it so much with such a terribly bitter taste. In an RAF station in Great Britain, you could as an Airman, have beer virtually free and I felt I should take that unique

opportunity to get used to the unwelcome taste. It simply would not go down and I lost a few of the friends who considered my non-drinking habit unsociable. I have tasted every type of alcoholic drinks, including vodka both in Britain and in Moscow. I found them all distasteful. Should any consumers of these bottles of bitterness tell me I had been missing a lot of good things, they have to define for me the type of good things I had been so missing. Many young Englishmen told me those days that with a bit of drink they could make friends much more freely, whereas I make my best of friends when my mind is most lucid, that is, all my waking moments except when tired or hungry. In other words, there is nothing a beer quaffer gains which I do not gain twice over, including the savings I have made by not visiting liquor shops. To what I have written above, you could add the habit of smoking. When I see labourers and carpenters and bricklayers smoking Varsity' or Premier', and 'Prince' or 'Malboro', and occasionally bragging with the fact that they smoke same brand of cigarettes as do judges or doctors, I pity them. If they smoke same cigarettes or cigars as do these eminent men, they, themselves, must be eminent, they think. They could be eminent, of course, in service, but not in cigarette smoking. Most people smoke in vanity. I simply do not know how to cultivate such vanities. What is humanity's gain from cigarette smoking? Enhancement of lung cancer, perhaps some say, and certainly yes, say others. What do I gain, personally? Some of the money I have spent over the years in the education of under-privileged children could only have been from my practice of teetotalism and unfriendliness with Christopher Columbus's smoke screen. Now I come nearer home. On 25th December, 1979, I attended a programme of Xmas Concert by the Apostolic Faith and Orchestra at Ijebu Ode. Perhaps I should add here quickly, lest people start wondering whether Tai Solarin had started looking for the Lord he had dissociated himself from for the past 30 years, that I went to the concert simply and solely to enjoy the music, My going there had nothing to do with the salvation of my soul. My soul needs no salvation outside myself. 25

I am the master of my fate and captain of my soul. The year before, in 1978, the gentleman who brought the invitation card to my wife and me specially pleaded for my presence at the rendition. I did not go. The succeeding year, however, it was the same man. ''I'here were going to be Haydn, Mozart Handel. Did I not enjoy good musk? he asked and pleaded once again that I be there. I did, and I really enjoyed it. At the end of the programme, however, the Rev. D.G. Osokoya, the Apostolic Faith leader at ljebu Ode, spoke. When he was young, he drank, he smoked

and he fought and did so many other terrible things. Later he stopped doing them all. Rev. Osokoya put his overcome of all these habits and vices at the foot of god Almighty, whereas it did not occur to me to look for any external aid for my overcome of same temptations, In fact, to me, it was a walk-over affair. It does not take me any strains to waive off what I would rather not have a snip of in my life. I cannot think of any of my friends of any age who could challenge the claim I make above. And if there are any, would they write to me through the publishers of this book and say so. My journey through Christendom has been, through-out my life, an experience of shock at the amount of talk, talk, talk, or as people say these days, at the amount of jaw, jaw, jaw. During my school days the east week of each new year was a week of prayer. No school. All the churches in town took a day each after the first Sunday in the year. Only the catholic church stood out. I have always considered it the super church that did not mix anything with the lesser church. Monday was, shall we say, for the Methodists, Tuesday, for the Anglicans. Wednesdays for the Church of the Lord. Thursday, for the Cherubims and seraphims and Friday, for the Presbyterians. I never failed to wonder why this God needed so much appeasement. We were always on our knees. We were always begging.We all became professional beggars! Europe cleared my head of all the woolliness within a year of my arrival into it. For time first time I was able to hear people talk of the existence and nonexistence of the deity. Hyde Park Corner virtually came my own church every 26

Sunday. I listened to the Catholic, the Church of England, the Communist, the Quakers, the What-have-you's. For the first time I was able to reconstruct myself and find a solid footing for the way I behaved. I found that all my behaviour up to now had been founded on a faith I could not define: a faith in one's sells a faith in truth; a faith in doing and not in jaw-jawing. Within a short time, all that my teachers had taught me of god making the world in seven days; of Adam and Eve being the first human beings on earth; of the flood; of the purge from the Garden of Eden -evaporated from my mind like the mist before the morning sun. Taking to fervid reading of modern men like G.B. Shaw j.B. Priestly, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Harold laski G.D.H. Cole, Gilbert Murray, H.G. Wells, Robert Ingersoll, Charles Bradlaugh, Pandit Nehru, Lin Yu Tan, Thomas

Paine -I came to the irrevocable conclusion that if I had a chance of serving again in Nigerian it was going to be total service to man, the greatest embodiment of nature': handiwork. lt was wrong of Mr. Kayode Osiyejo (Nigerian Tribune, Feb. 15th, 1980) to suggest that I and all the other men he mentioned with the background of orthodox, religious educations were unconsciously doing what was planted into us in our formative years. Whereas to act as we do, people like us are obliged to torpedo the obsolescent beliefs we were born with and reared in, and fed on, to reconstruct ourselves. Josef Stalin was earmarked for priesthood by his parents. Nehru's upbringing diverged by 180 degrees from the pious religious course that his father and motherland, India, charted out for him. The Soviet Union is more than half a century old. Those who run the country today are all, except a few men that are under ten in numbers children of the revolution with no pious religious obfuscation behind them. China is only a little over three decades old, but if you, as, a guest leave your hotel room with all your money and glamorous western gadgets spread in our room when you go out on sight-seeing, you will come back to find your room cleaned out for the day I and every item of your luggage, including your money arranged carefully were for you. Like to try that in any Nigerian hotel? And you must remember that every Nigerian hotel is worked by men and women who are moslems and christians. Most readers who read my column regularly would remember a story I have told at least twice before of an English tourist who left Pakistan with a towel he lid inadvertency carried from his last hotel. 27

On leaving his first hotel in China, he showed the towel into a corner in his room. By the time he finished checking out at the reception desk the young man who was in charge of his room ran after him, Our honoured guest, you have left this towel behind in your room', he breathed out audibly. The guest grinned ruefully and collected it, but tried in two other Chinese hotels to jettison the unwanted towel but he could not! The new philosophy that binds the nation to total honesty is practised meticulously by the rulers of the country themselves. Not one of the 'hands' running these hotels had any religious education. they were not given any. They only carry out what their leaders in words and in action have said should be done. We want to repeat that this re-orientation and rebirth took place in complete absence of any religious preachings done to anybody in a country with more than ten times of our own population. lf you have a ruler who, fifteen years before, when he first ruled, received a sum of 60,000 which he paid into four bank accounts, in cash and on same day, and the serial numbers of the currency notes corresponded with those collected by the government contracting firm 48 hours earlier, would you expect such a national leader to help to rear a new breed of Nigerians that are

clean in their habits? If you have a set of rulers who killed cows to feed the electorate at campaign rallies and gave thousands of naira to local men for their own keep, and fill the small pockets of the townspeople to win them to your party, would you think those rulers can impart any moral lessons to the nation after winning the election? Those who are screaming off heads today and asking that religion must be taught in plenty along with other subjects forget that there was not a single Nigerian before 1956 who received no religion with his education in this country. Between 500 and 600 armed robbers were bound to the stake and shot during the almost 14 years of military rule. There was not a single one of these 1 condemned men who was not a Christian or a muslim. They are dead today because they were not educated enough as their comperes were who did all their thieving with the tip of their pens. Were many of the men in our parliament and ministries today not educated, they would have been condemned to death and shot for committing the same offence only by trickery. How, therefore, could anybody expect the common men of today to be honest under the government with so many men of dishonour! it would seem that the more religion you have , the worse you behave. H.G. Wells put it so aptly the more you have of people who could forgive sins, the more you get of people who are ready to confess! 28

What it really amounts to is that it does not matter the intensity of the religious education you have, it slips off you as does water over time duck's back, if those precepts have no examples in the lives of those proclaiming tile theories. On their own, therefore, all theories in morals are dead theories. For twenty years in Mayflower School, there was no religion taught in that secular school. But this much I got to know over the years -that if there were twenty applicants from twenty different schools looking for a job, the Ex-May (as the graduates from Mayflower school are known) would get, if not the first place, certainly the second. On my leaving Mayflower School in 1976, the Ex-Mays called a meeting of their own representatives and the new principal, Mr. Odubanjo and I were also invited. One special request these Ex-Mays implored the new principal was to keep up the secular atmosphere of the school. these are young men and women who, on leaving school and comparing themselves with others fed on the chaff which religiosity is, are convinced that they are miles ahead of their contemporaries. I was moved almost to tears by the expression of that wish. I picked up this text From Lamps of Anthropology by John Murphy three decades ago. I still hold tenaciously to its tenet: One had almost called outworn'' but put this aside because the thing that is outworn is regarded as done with, and usually disappears altogether. The things we have outgrown on the other hand are part of us now, as childhood and youth are organised into our physical, mental and moral framework. Thus theories in science, philosophy and religion, if they have any substance at all, are only outgrown and wrought into

the living body of the new truth'. 29

C CCCCH HHHHA AAAAP PPPPT TTTTE EEEER RRRR S SSSSI IIIIX XXXX H HHHHo oooow wwww t tttto oooo B BBBBe eeee a aaaa W WWWWr rrrri iiiit tttte eeeer rrrr There is not a single year during the past 25 years when I did not get two or three letters from young men wanting to know what to do to become acceptable writers for our daily papers. My answer through the years has been the same: if you want to write you must read. Anybody who declares he is stung with an irresistible urge to write, but whey at the same time, does not read could only have been stung by a false urge. It is necessary that one possesses mastery over whatever language one wants to communicate in. And the best method of acquiring mastery in a language, any language, is reading as many as possible of books written in that language. Today, the greatest cry from all our schools is that the standard of English has plummeted to the lowest level it can possible reach. Many teachers, particularly those whom themselves, were raised on grammar books, therefore, believe that the only thing the schools should do is to return to the good old days of solid grounding in grammars and, in this case, English grammar. Reasonable as this argument may seem, the fact remains that an English child reared in a family where good English is spoken will speak flawless English, even though nobody has ever told him there is something that goes by the

name English grammar. English Grammar could be described as the bony skeleton on which an English speaker pours the vocabulary, just as the bricklayer pour concrete to fill the crevices and assume a lovely, acceptable shape. It seems a paradox, however, that one could command a high degree of exactitude in English grammar and yet not be able to write good English. Whereas, as illustrated above one would rise to eminence in his mastery of English language without sitting down for a single day to pore on the question of syntax or etymology of the English language. I have a good example of the first case, that is, of somebody having a good knowledge of English grammar but who never assumed mastery of English language. When I did my teacher training course many years ago, there were only eight of us in the class. The best of us in English grammar was so good that he occasion-ally called the attention of our English teacher, whose mother tongue was English, to flaws in the teacher's English! When we took the final year examination, we all passed English -except one. The one who failed was that same student who was, in English grammar, the best in the class! Why did he fail? He failed English because he ' spent so much time learning the rules of the language that he had no time left to read the language itself. 30

What we are trying to stress here, therefore, is that he who goes all out and reads enormously has all the possibilities of standing shoulder higher in the use of the language -English in our case -than the more seemingly serious student who grinds on painfully learning only the grammar of the language. Sir Winston Churchill confirmed this in his My Early Life. He was simply too lazy or too indifferent to learn Latin. He concentrated all his emeries on reading English so that the time came when he found himself writing essays not only for the other students in his class, but also for students in the higher forms! He got a kick out of the commendations these other students received from their form masters in English. These examples show very clearly, therefore, that he who wants to write good English must not only read good English but must also read plenty of books in good English. One more example of people who read plenty of books. An American teacher of English language in Mayflower School once called my attention to a class two boy whose English he considered very good. He thought the boy's English was as good as that of many students whose essays he had read in the top class, of the out-going students. I called the boy and asked him a few questions. When he was in primary four, he remembered buying the Daily Times, almost every morning, and reading through practically everything inside it be-cause he did not want to waste his money. His father was illiterate but his elder brother who was literate and working in Lagos, left some books in his book-shelf at home. He read every book in that bookshelf before he left school in primary

six. He was a brilliant student, very versatile, very questioning. He did as ably in mathematics and the sciences as much as he did in English language. in his fifth and final year in school the maturity of his English language was such that he could have effectively written editorials for any of our daily papers and nobody would suspect he was yet to take his papers for the School Cert! Mr. Kunle Ogunde is the young man. He is studying engineering in the United States, (1980). My guess is that he would return only to become a Cyprian Ekwensi who deserted his practice of pharmacy for journalism and novel writing. The number one ingredient for good writing, therefore, we repeat, is good reading. 31

Many a young man has asked me, too, what am I to read? Tastes differ, but most people love stories. My own love for stories has never been dimmed with the years. I prefer biographies, particularly autobiographies to fiction. In fiction, you probably could tell much more, but under a cover. Reading a novel to me seems like looking at a masquerade. I prefer to see who is talking under the veal. But I presume most people take to reading novels and action because there are many more of them than there are of biographies and autobiographies. Then there is the volume of reading. How much reading does the average Nigerian do? l have met university-bred men who, ten years after leaving university have not got ten books other than of their professional studies in their libraries. Our teachers, be they in the primary school or the secondary, never teach their children to read. They do not teach their children to read because they themselves were never taught to read. In the early sixties, a local Education Officer in Remo made a list of books for primary classes 4, 5 and 6 to read. Most of the books listed for primary 4 had between forty and thirty pages. There were about thirty books to be read by primary 4 and about forty for primary classes 5 and 6. But the local Education Officer did more. He enjoined every primary 4, 5 and 6 teacher to read the books that his children were asked to read. That injunction shocked the teachers and, when I heard of the programme, four of the primary school teacher had resigned! They must have been frightened to death for being asked, at their age, to read so many books. They were probably sure they would go mad if they did! H.G. Wells in his autobiography casually referred to his own father as one who probably never read any more than sixty books in his life-time. Many primary and secondary teachers, many civil servants, including some permanent secretaries, most of the members of our Houses of Assembly, of the Senate, and of Representatives, never read books outside the fields of their own professions -if they have professions that make them read at all -in a lifetime.

Against this situation you could put an English boy or girl of ten. That is, of the age just before going to the secondary school. From the age of eight he has been reading about a book a week. In the fifty-two weeks that make a year, he will have read in the four years that comprise the ages eight to eleven, 208 books. Such children from academic homes read 500 to 1,000 books before they enter secondary schools. You would easily agree that there is a vast difference between the reading habit of the Englishman and that of the Nigerian. But the Nigerian who intends to 32

write has no option. He must read. Reading gives him the vocabulary to express himself and lift the horizon of his knowledge immeasurably. He must be versatile in the coverage of his reading. In this respect he cannot be too expansive. I will give you an example. A few years back, I was at Chief Awolowo's January lst party for all and sundry. It was about 3 p.m. when he was talking to his son-in-law, a medical practitioner. The Chief asked the young man what had happened to the skeleton that he, the Chief asked the young doctor to procure for him. The doctor told the Chief he had ruled out the question of a new purchase. The Chief could have the doctor's which he, the doctor, would not need for some time. The Chief protested. He preferred to have his own for keeps. He would not like to borrow one which could be taken away from him at a time he night happen to be busy with it. When the doctor lefts I asked chief Awolowo what he was trying to do with a human skeleton. lf he studied the skeleton almost as exhaustively as did a doctor, he, as a lawyer, would be in the position to ask very meaningful questions in court from a doctor who was giving a verdict in cases having to do with accidents or postmortem findings! The wider, therefore, a prospective writer reads, the more armed he becomes for the most stimulating art of writing. Many people want to write as does Wole Soyinka or G.B. Shaw. One thing you must remember is, that everybody is unique. There is only one Wole Soyinka just as there was only one G.B. Shaw. But if you fall in love with the way they write, what you should do is to read all, or virtually all, that Wole or G.B. ever wrote. To do that successfully is to be elevated to the plane from which these men operate. I love H.G. Wells's writing. When, in 1946, I read his last book Mind at the End of its Tether, I simply could not make an anything out of it. It was written on a pedestal too lofty for my understanding, even after I had read it over six times.

A few months later, I sat down to take the 'Mature Matric' to get into the university. One question in the English language paper was book review. We were to review a book we had just read and pass comments. I chose to review Mind at the End of lt's Tether. I confessed the fact that I had read it six times -it was under sixty pages -but that I yet had not been able 33

to imbibe all that the author wanted to share with his readers. I wondered whether Mr Wells was being too angry with the rest of the world or simply too contemptuous of the lot of man. I was surprised many months later, when reading the reviews of several English periodicals, how many of them shared my views! But I return to the main question -can you write as does a favourite author? The best you can do is to read him hard, and you will find that he will lubricate your own writing and make yours richer than you can ever dream of I learnt up lots of chunks from my favourite author. You seem to think sometimes, that he has described a situation in the choicest of words. I don't think there is any harm in your consuming the passage in the beautiful language your favourite author seems to have chosen to describe the scene. Mr Wells, describing one of his university lecturers who died suddenly wrote , a lecture theatre full of impatient under-graduate students, is the least likely of any audiences to detect the presence of failing health. His husky voice strained against our insurgent hum. Thirty four years ago I thought it was beautiful language. I still think it is. Up to now, I have not said a word about schools of journalism. It is good I would say, particularly for the faint heart. It will put the stamp of authority behind the unsure student. It will point to your weakness and to the merits of world acclaimed writers. But if you choose not to read, no school of journalism could make a writer out of you. At whatever time you start as a writer, to send your manuscript out for publication, you are most likely to be disappointed by finding newspapers returning your work, the best you have put forth, as being unacceptable. The editor regrets he cannot make use of your materials and it is, therefore, returned with thanks, is a pill that churns the inside of many a new writer. Henceforth it is persistence you need. Between 1952 and 1959, I must have sent as many as thirty-six manuscripts to the Daily Times. Quite a number of them were returned as described above, and most of them were simply unacknowledged. When, eventually, the Daily times started to publish me, I sent in quite a few of the earlier articles that were rejected. They were published unedited! Once, you are accepted as a writer, both by the publishing agents and the public, you will occupy a respectable throne in their minds but only as long as you continue to read, rejuvenate your ideas and stance, all along, the moment you stop the one or the other, you get de-throned. Finis.

34

C CCCCH HHHHA AAAAP PPPPT TTTTE EEEER RRRR S SSSSE EEEEV VVVVE EEEEN NNNN M MMMMa aaaay yyyy Y YYYYo oooou uuuur rrrr R RRRRo ooooa aaaad dddd B BBBBe eeee R RRRRo oooou uuuug ggggh hhhh I am not cursing you; I am wishing you what I wish myself every year. I therefore repeat, may you have a hard time this year; may there be plenty of troubles for you this year! If you are not so sure what you should say back, why not just say, same to you'? I ask for no more. Our successes are conditioned by the amount of risk we are ready to take. Quite recently, I visited a local farmer about three miles from where I live. He could not have been more than fifty-five, but he said he was already too old to farm vigorously.. He still suffered, he said, from the physical energy he displayed as a farmer in his younger days. Around his hut were two pepper bushes. There were kokoyams growing round him. There were snail shells which had given him meat. There must have been more around the banana trees I saw. He hardly ever went to town to buy things. He was selfl-sufficient, the car or the bus, the television or the telephone, the news-paper, Vietnam or Red China were nothing to him. He had no ambitions whatsoever, he told me. I am not so sure if you are already envious of him, but were we all to revert to

such a life. we would be practically driven back to cave-dwelling. On the other hand, try to put yourself in the position of the Russian or the American astronaut. Any moment now the count 3, 2, 1, is going to go, and you are going to be shot into the atmosphere and soon you will be whirling round our earth at the speed of six miles per second. If you get so fired into the atmosphere and you forget what to do to ensure return to earth, one of the things that might happen to you is that you could become forever a satellite, going round the earth until you die of starvation and even then your dead body would continue the gyration! When, therefore, you are being dressed up and padded to be shot into the sky, you know only too well that you are going on the roughest road man has ever trodden. The Americans and Russians who have gone were armed with the great belief that they would come back. But I cannot believe that they did not have some slight foreboding on the contingency of their nonreturn. It is their courage for going in spite of these apprehensions that makes the world hail them so loudly today. The big fish is never caught in shallow waters. You have to go into the open sea for it. The biggest businessmen make decisions with lightning speed and carry them out with equal celerity. They do not dare delay or dally. Time would pass them by if they did. The biggest successes are preceded by the greatest of heart-burnings. You should read the stories of the bomber pilots of World War II. The Russian pilot, the German pilot, the American or the British pilot 35

suffered exactly the same physical and mental tension the night before a raid on enemy territory. There were no alternative routes for those who most genuinely believed in victory for their side. You cannot make omelettes without breaking eggs; throughout the world there is no paean without pain. Jawaharlal Nehru has put it so well. I am paraphrasing him. He wants to meet his troubles in a frontal attack. He wants to see himself tossed into the aperture between the two horns of the bull. Being there, he determines he is going to win and, therefore such a fight requires all his faculties. When my sisters and I were young and we slept on our small mats round our mother, she always woke up at 6 a.m. for morning prayers. She always said prayers on our behalf but always ended with some-thing like this: 'May we not enter into any dangers or get into any difficulties this day'. It took me almost thirty years to dislodge the cankerworm in our mother's sentiments. I found, by hard experience, that all that is noble and laudable was to be achieved only through difficulties and trials and tears and dangers. There are no other roads. If I was born into a royal family and should one day become a constitutional king, I am inclined to think I should go crazy. How could I, from day to day go

on smiling and nodding approval at some-body else's successes for an entire life-time? When Edward the Eighth (late Duke of Windsor) was a young, sprightly Prince of wales, he went to Canada and shook so many hands that his right arm nearly got pulled out of its socket! it went into a sling and he shook hands thenceforth with his left hand! It would appear he was trying his utmost to make a serious job out of downright sinecurism. Life, if it is going to be abundant, must leave plenty of hills and vales. It must have plenty of sunshine and rough weather. It must be rich in obfuscation and perspicacity. It must be packed with days of danger and apprehension. When I walk into the dry but certainly cool morning air of every january 1st, I wish myself plenty of tears and of laughter; plenty of happiness and unhappiness, plenty of failures and successes, plenty of abuse and praise. It is impossible to win ultimately without a rich measure of intermixture in such a menu. Life would be worthless without the lot. We do not achieve much in this country because we are all so scared of taking risks. We all want the smooth and well-paved roads. While the reason the Americans and others succeeded so well is that they took such great risks. 36

If; therefore, you are out in this New Year, to win any target you have set for yourself please accept my prayers and your elixir -May your road be rough! 37

C CCCCH HHHHA AAAAP PPPPT TTTTE EEEER RRRR EIGHT H HHHHo oooow wwww W WWWWe eeee T TTTTe eeeea aaaac cccch hhhh M MMMMo oooor rrrra

aaaal lllli iiiit tttty yyyy i iiiin nnnn M MMMMa aaaay yyyyf ffffl llllo oooow wwwwe eeeer rrrr S SSSSc cccch hhhho ooooo ooool llll We must start by defining morality. What is morality? My answer is a very short one. Morality means good behaviour. No more and no less. The young man who is a hard worker, is punctual at his desk, does not dodge his work or cleverly ignore what a colleague shuns, carries a happy, lively face, walks as if he possesses every inch of himself does not boast or shout as a member of a team, is to me, a person of good behaviour. And we can say he is morally good. Morality has nothing whatsoever to do with religion, or what will happen to you hereafter. As I do not believe in the existence of heaven or hell myself, it is impossible for me to be painting the direction to any other person. And that exercise, even if it is not a useless one, is not the duty of a school, any school, to make a responsibility of. More than anywhere else, Nigeria happens to be the place where nobody in his right mind should be talking of the wrath of God -whoever that Ologomugomu is -to an audience of youngsters who are so clearly aware of the rapacity, the shamelessness in vagabondage, the daylight plunder and corruption in its quintessence practised by the very person who admonishes an audience of Nigerian teenagers. 'Action speaks louder than words', is what our belief is in Mayflower School. We do whatever we want the students to do. But I must qualify the use of the word, 'we'. Some visitors have asked if all other teachers, for example, believe in the philosophy of the school. We (Sheila and I) would be foolish to expect incoming members of our staff to even know what the school stands for, let alone accept it.

Every school has a mottos and so do we, ours -'Knowledge is Light', but we know that most schools don't go beyond that branding. It is a tag, or a name, that you call a dog and the dog answers to it, but as far as the dog is concerned, it wouldn't have made any difference what name you call it -Short Tail, Boastful, Jumpy. Let us start with one of the strands of our beliefs. Work. 38

All shall work in Mayflower School means, head-master and all students. After all, it is he who says in a decent society there shall be no parasites. Be you a fifth year or a first year student, all shall work embraces all in that sense. A teacher who volunteers to lead a class of boys and girls on an assignment of work is expected to stand by and encourage the students who are to do the work. We let him (or her) do what, had he taken appointment in any other school, that is, what he would be doing. But he soon finds that we (Sheila and I) are as deep in the work as are the students. Our new teachers generally get initiated into participation on projects like house building. 'Decking' a house, for example. You soon fmd that every teacher who has come to 'supervise' has got his (or her) own head-pan or bucket. When I was released just after midnight to go and have a few hours sleep in preparation for a lecture I was to give the following day in Shagamu, virtually all the other teachers sweated it out all night long slugging heavy bucketfuls of mixed cement up the stairs on to the new floor. Once a teacher gets so initiated into the works he joins in as often as he pleases -it is not, we would want to repeat, obligatory for any of our teachers to participate in our physical work projects. He does so out of his own volition. We have had teachers who stayed on the staff for five years and never participatory whereas we have been blessed with others who happily joined us with the idea of participation. As far as the students are concerned, exceptions are rare. In all cases exceptions are obvious cases for which no participants would grumble. Right now we have two blind boys in the school. We cannot ask them to go to the field to cut grass or to the pepper plantation to pick pepper. But these two boys during the last corn harvest shelled more corn than any other two students. Every day of the week except Tuesdays and Thursdays, we have the Workers' Brigade made up of two students from each of the twenty streams in classes one to four. We do not involve the fifth year class in this particular programme and so we allowed the students there to concentrate on the last leg of their academic work for, after all, no matter what we do in the school, we are still a part of the country and our student will not be taken into be universities

because they are good plumbers, or electricians, or carpenters, or poultry or rabbitry keepers. Those forty students referred to above are distributed over the normal day's school chores -Kitchen Front, Cuisine Front, Gari Making Front, Bakery Front, Agric Front, Building Front, Admin. Building Front, Brooms Making 39

Front and such other social responsibilities where labour is needed for the day. Those students don't go to classes at all, whatever the subjects being taught Maths, Chemistry, French, Biology. or what you will. They eat their meals same time as do the school bricklayers and carpenters and agric workers. It is actually these professionals under whom the students work and it is they who report on the work of the students allocated to their own areas for the day. Let me take just one Front and describe what it does. The Kitchen Front. The membership of this Front is made up, generally, of girls. The leader reports to me personally the previous night when the allocations are made and I talk to her on the big responsibility entrusted into her hands. There are over 1,000 students for whom she has to cater. Every nook and corner of our dining hall -the largest of all such halls in any Nigerian secondary school -should be clean and the table tops and floors cleaned of all food dropping. She is in charge of five or six other girls. They do not cook we have paid cooks for that job, but they help in food distribution, (to which, at meal times, special Food officers in class five are added), washing up and supplying of bowls and plates as food is being served. The big bowls from which food has just been emptied are scrubbed. The cups and plates or the cups and bowls, are scrubbed. Even if the girls cannot shine the plates and the bowls, the cups at least, are always specially washed. We may as well state here that every student washes up his own bowl, plate and cup after each meal. The system is there and it works marvellously. Breakfast is usually served, eaten and washing-up done by all our students under forty minutes and so no student is ever tied down to the unhappy druiggery of washing up for three or four hours whilst the other students are in the classes. Now I go back to the Kitchen Front girls. All the items of work done after breakfast are again repeated after lunch, and would again be repeated after supper. It is at the washing -up time in which all the students participate that it is most interesting watching the Kitchen Front girls at work. The Chief Steward (a class five boy) is the supreme commander. He stands at a vantage point and tells the students to scrape their bowls and plates clean of food before washing them and also keeps his eyes on those who have just washed up and admonishes them, 'drain your bowls', and you find the students trooping out from the washing-up place to the rinsing Two of the Kitchen

Front girls are at the bowl and plate racks. The first girl stacking up the bowls, 40

face downwards and storing them away. The girl in charge of the girls is doing something slightly different. She keeps an eagle eye on the plates being slotted into the grooves she has prepared for them. It is like a planning belt and she is prompt in correcting the position of a wrongly slotted plate. I cannot help thinking, any time I stand by and watch these operations, that some day, some of these operators, in whatever area of the Kitchen Front, will come back to school and watch the new generations, and burst into tears of joy for having gone through the mint sometime before. By 6.30 pm. the Kitchen Front girls who are usually the last to finish the day's work, are through. They might go and have a bath or a wash and must be ready with the rest of be students, to be at the night prep at 7.00 p.m. All the Workers' Brigade members for the day now have the opportunity of asking their classmates what lessons they had had for the day. Tuesdays and Thursdays are specially left out to allow teachers conduct tests when all students would be in class. Any teachers who, even then, could not fix up a test for either of these two days are still free to do so, between 7:00 and 9.00 p.m. as all our students live in. Apart from the Workers' Brigade arrangement we have just described, the normal physical work for all students takes place on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays between 4.00 p.m., 4.45 p.m. Again, Tuesdays and Thursdays are Society Days when as an electrician, or a plumber, or a shoe repairer or a field Agric Worker, or a squash maker (our grape-fruits are, right now crashing down the branches this year, I write this mid October), peanut butter maker, stone picker, sand digger, clothes lines maker, you go and operate in your Society. There are, this year, as many as forty six societies, and most of these societies have got staff members spearheading them. A short while ago, an American teacher was in the gari making society. On Saturday morning during the dry months -and agric programmes do not press too heavily -all our 1,000 students are out on the football field at 6.15 in the morning for a 45-minute drill parade. The only time we can honestly say the students have got for themselves between getting up at 5.30 a.m and 9.30 p.m when they go to bed is 6.20 p.m to 6.50 p.m, which is regarded as Silent Reading period when all students, in the dry months, sit themselves down on the open Physical Jerks Field and read or simply lie down and go to sleep or just relax. What any observer would notice in the description made above is that the students are kept busy. To this, G.B. Shaw has richly contributed -give a person health and plenty to do, and you don't have to ask him whether he is happy or not'. 41

This has proved true in our case. We are not trying to suggest that we have therefore got an ideal society but we are sure of the fact that our problems as compared with what we hear of other schools, have been mercifully few. Once a week on Wednesdays, a member of the staff gives a 5-minute talk on any subject of his choice.Topic must be secular. The time is about 6.30 in the morning. For Six-day week except that Wednesday, a class five student makes a minute speech which he (or she) should have prepared over several weeks. To make sure that he does, Sheila or I listen to him the night before. If his preparation has been poor, or shallow or puerile, we refuse him the chance to speak and we give him some guideline on the subject. The students are free to choose their subjects. It is the delivery we are after and we give them great encouragement to make the most of this opportunity as a springboard for future, public speaking. I still remember the excellent speeches given five years ago by three boys who were classmates and were specially good -Kunle ogunde, Ajala and Olunu. Each of them his taken eight weeks at least to prepare the minute talk! On Sunday, there is the Community Gathering, an idea I worked on, for the first time, twenty-two years before in Molusi College. It lasted 45 minutes. It still does. It is obligatory to all students. We all meet at 8.15 am. in the school hall. We sing from the 'Merry Mayflower', a school song book that fattens with the years, with newly composed songs adding to those of past years. For four years in Molusi College, I conducted it on my own. Here in Mayflower School, we share. Once again only interested members of the staff who think they can make use of a 45-minute discussion with the students participate. Once again it is all down-to-earth secular subjects. I have talked on Abraham Lincoln, Azikiwe, Jawaharlal Nehru, Empire State Building; on deeds of courage as that of Blondein the celebrated rope walker. All of us, participants, concentrate on what makes man great. And we have supporting songs of which this is one: We can become whatever we choose to be, No kings, no lords, no knaves can say us nay, For we believe that man is a potential doctor or Lawyer, or crook, or dwarf, or giant, Whichever he sets his mind to be: We shall be giants 42

And therefore we shall work and work and work and work, Even if we must work our fingers to the bone..

So may it be! Or William Ernest Henley's 1. Out of the night that covers me Black as the pit from pole to pole, I thank whatever gods may be For my unconquerable soul. 2. In the fell clutch of circumstance I have not winced nor cried aloud, Under the bludgeoning of chance, My head is bloody, but unbowed. 3. Beyond this place of wrath and tears, Looms but the horror of the shade And yet the menace of the years, Finds, and shall find, me un-afraid 4. It matters not how strait the gate How charged with punishments the scroll, I am the master of my fate; I am the captain of my soul. Every boy and every girl in the school know Abrabam Lincoln's Gettysburg speech by heart. We encourage them to think on these noble sayings and noble deeds. These are the things that make great men and great women. It is impossible to be exhaustive on a subject like this, but these strands of universal truth in practical life, we have been trying to raise our students on. How very successful we have been is yet too early to judge but we want to put on record the fact that I have come across employers of labour who have given our ex-students preference in the labour market and they say they have no regrets in doing so. Adding up of exam marks and grading them and filling up the report sheets for the parents, are all done by the students. There are hardly ever any errors. when there are, they are not deliberately made. The teachers only sign their columns and the principal gives his verdict. How do we teach morality in Mayflower School? That is how. 43

C CCCCH HHHHA AAAAP PPPPT TTTTE EEEER RRRR N NNNNI

IIIIN NNNNE EEEE L LLLLe eeeea aaaad dddde eeeer rrrrs ssssh hhhhi iiiip pppp What is leadership? Leadership means suffering. The few absolute monarchs there are left on our planet are rulers over the most primitive and the most un-informed of men. The old Aga Khan, thick and man-mountain, celebrating his birthday by collecting from the poor millions that were his worshippers, his weight in gold is now a thing of the past. Those were the times when there were as many kings and queens as there were countries in Europe. They were rich and powerful monarchs. Louis XIV once crowed; L'etat c'est moi-I am the State: Charles I of England snapped: 'the word of the king, that is from God'. Whilst the poor in England scavenged from the dustbins to get something to eat, Queen Elizabeth I of ' England engaged French cooks to produce for her royal banquets, meals that were matchless in Europe. Special meat was cooked in six different ways -boiled, roasted, steamed, . . . When the axe started to fall, the speed was great. oliver Cromwell promised that the King's head would be axed -with the crown on it! Today, there are fewer than six monarchs in all Europe. They are all constitutional monarchs. The British monarch has lasted this long', wrote H.G. Wells, because the crown was worn more as a cap than as a crown'. All that one could say to further amplify the situation today is that the British crown when it appears worn as a crown at all sits absolutely impotently on the monarch's brow. 'God save the King' is no more palatable to most people and that must have driven E. Eliot into composing the people's anthem: When wilt thou save the people? O God of mercy when? The people, Lord, the people, Not thrones and crowns but men

God save the people, thine they are Thy children as thine angels clear, Save them from bondage and despair 44

God save the people! Henceforth, people wanting to climb to leadership found they had to sweat for it. The leader was no more to be venerated as is the queen bee, for no reasons whatsoever. He was to lead and share in full measure the agonies of the people if he aspired to lead. Napoleon was the last to go to bed in his army. And he was always the first to get up. He even went to the extent of saying he slept at will. In other words, he dismissed sleep when there was no time for it. But never denied it to any of his soldiers. History has shown that it is the leader who lives an abstemious life that continues to lead. The leader who leaves the common man to his penury whilst he lives in an ivory tower and in opulence does not last. At least not from 19th century. Russia's Catherine II cannot repeat herself in any county again today. Let us take some sampling from world leaders of repute. Perhaps the most renowned of the last century was Attaturk of Turkey. Kemal Attaturk was a rebel from childhood. He was involved in a big quarrel at school and was expelled. At 17 he joined the army. He was brilliant and quickly took to the army discipline as does the duck to water. He passed out leading his class with a big margin between him and the next lad. When the other youngsters went out after duty hours for wine and women, Kemal went to the library and read. At 21 Kemal was, perhaps the best read in the Turkish army. The more read, the more repellent he found the state of affairs in the country and his friends were found only among those who saw things from the same perspective as himself. In the first rebellion he was involved in, he escaped with the skin of his teeth because the hierarchy found him so young and so good a soldier. But dedicated men like him don't change in any country. Henceforth he was to find himself in confrontation with the powers that were and he never shirked his avowed duty to fight for the only thing he loved-his country -until he toppled the decadent monarchy and lashed his feudal country into modernity. He tore the veil (purdah) from the women's face; he tore off the; obstructive time-honoured gown from the men's: backs and compelled them to don the Western dress. He threw out the Arabic script that was so shackling the path of the country's progress and introduced the Latin script. He lashed against orthodoxy and conservatism. People who held to the past with staunch fanaticism groaned under Attaturk's lash, but even these knew he was, himself one of them. He was doing what he demanded from them. In a land where the aristocrat had palaces and a harem of women he, the quintessence of what the

country stood for, had nothing. In a single lifetime of unalloyed dedication and 45

devotion, he raised his country from feudalism to modernity. His allies were few and far between, but he believed in what he was doing. And so did his people. He was an oasis in a vastness of arid desert. He succeeded because he was firm; he was incorruptible; he was honest. He did not preach one thing to his people and practise something else. He lived a sterling example of the deed he asked the people to accept. Kemal Attaturk got for his country, Turkey, a new nation because he stood shoulder higher in the attributes that national leaders incorruptibilioty, dedication, steel-hardness, straight-edgedness. And he ruthlessly dealt with any of his lieutenants who veered or backed from the iron-0cast straight path of honesty and devotedness that all lovers of Turkey must tread. How about Gandhi. There was only one thing wrong with Gandhi. He wanted all Indians to go to church or mosque, whereas, quoting Beverly Nicols (Verdict on India), these people wanted to go with humanist Nehru to the factory. Gandhi was everything that a leader should be except -and it is a big exceptthat he wanted his 500,000,000 fellow Indians to sit cross-legged and spin yarn and when they were tired alternate with worship. Gandhi was honest, he was devoted: he owned no property and today, there is, on permanent exhibition, the properties that Gandhi owned a $1.00 pocket watch whichwas over 30 years old when Gandhi died, a pair of poorly rimmed glasses which the entire world knew with him, a rickety stick he walked with, and a pair of sandals. Fellow Indians even disturbed his cremation. They quickly put out the fire so that stubs of his bones could be salvaged and they were salvaged and taken home as the relic of a man who lived totally for his people and humanity. If any human being is actuallyworshipped today, that man is Chairman Mao. Some 800,000,000 fellow Chinese hold, in their pockets, the red book containing selected pieces from his voluminous speeches. With Mao Tse Tung, perhaps we should go a bit into biography. For 20 years he fought it out with Generallissmo Chiang Kai Shek, the leader of the constitutionally established government. Mao was everything that Chiang was not. Mao was communist, Chiang was capitalist. Mao was terrestrial, Chiang was celestial and sacerdotal. It was impossible for them, therefore, to agree. But the people's coffer were in the hands of Chiang whilst the same people's minds were with Mao. The battle of the hegemony had started. The real jihad was already born. 46

Mao trapped into a corner in the south-east of the country found that his national base to wrench the country from Chiang lay way up in the north-west corner. He lacked the material things to fight with, i.e. money and machine guns. These Chiang had in abundance. What Mao had immeasurably was the people's trust, the people's belief in him. A rough idea of tile route to their ultimate goal was charted out. It was 6,000 miles long. Neither Mao nor anybody else knew how long it was going to take. No vehicular means of transport. Everybody was to walk. When they totted up the heads of the aspirants, there were 90,000 of them. They had next to nothing for food; they were to live on the land they marched through but they must make sure they did not hurt tile people they hoped to save ultimately. The journey had started. It was like the foraging ants on the move. The route they were already on was perhaps the worst of its type in the world yawning ravines, wild forests, venomous vermins, trackless deserts. They expected infinite surprises from the Kuomin-Tang (Chiang Kai Shek's armies. The weapons they hoped to fight with and which they did get to use were those wrenched from the Kuomin-Tang forces. The tortuous trails of men and women pressed on, hiding themselves most of the day and doing the uncharted route by night. Of course all villagers were very sympathetic. They advised and corrected the route all along. The villagers entertained them and gave them packets of food for several days ahead along the route. Stories of what actually happened all along the journey abound in records today. It suffices us here to narrate only one. Getting into a village one evening, the hungry traveller's eyes popped out on seeing huge fishes swimming unafraid in the nearby river. Before Mao knew what was happening, hundreds of the fishes had been caught and cooked and a steaming bowl was sent in for Comrade Mao. It was then Mao suddenly guessed what must have happened. His men had plundered the village. Mao we were told, burst into tears. If that was what the marchers were going to continue doing, how could they, potential saviours of the mass of the people, get the people's mandate? Could they be any better than the debauched government they were trying to throw out? The message had gone through and there was silence and regret everywhere. It was the villagers themselves who saved the situation by going to Mao and assuring him that it was they, the villagers, who gave the fishes to the marchers. Even then Mao was the last to eat the food so provided. We were further told that when food ran short on being divided up, Mao was the first to give whatever might have been apportioned to him to some other member of the marchers who too, had had no share. He would only eat when he was sure everybody else had eaten. 47

On that route Mao's wife died. His own health faltered several times and he had to be carried in a hammock on occasions, but his weary eyes were fixed only on the spot where the march was to end. It was the longest journey in recorded history and Undertaken by the largest number of men and comers. When a whole year rolled by, the destination was reached.

A quick head count was made. There were 7,000 of them. Sometime later, the count was repeated and there now were 2,|000 who had made the journey, 70,000 of them had gone down en route. A good many who were old or infirm found new homes along the route. Mao, however, and the core of the men who form the leaders of today stuck it out. They have, therefore, been welded together by a bond of friendship that is stronger than any others in the history of man. It is hunger, starvation, deprivation, adversity that weld men together. Not good times and parties and cut-throat competition in the accumulation of property. Today, Chairman Mao has built a modern nation free, independent and contented. But Chairman Mao and his lieutenants yet have no property. They live in official homes and would, on retirement, be allocated humble homes to be run by the state until their chapters, in human calculation, close. That is why the rulers of modern china, Mao and all, are revered, revered by a big chunk of humanity 800 million people that the Chinese are. Perhaps we might as well see Chiang Kai Shek through. All the time he fought it out with Chairman Mao, he had America behind him. Mao Tse Tung was godless and that was a primitive idea to America. Chiang was a Christian, and so he was a civilised man. He was a Methodist Christian. When reports came to Chiang that certain areas were suffering from hunger or pestilence, he would take his Bible and go to the Methodist Church that was always built handy for him, to pray to solve the national problem. The oftener the reports from the different sufferng areas, the oftener he visited the chapel to take the people's case specially to God for solution. There was only one thing he had a solution for. The inflation. The situation was such that there were no more banks capable of solving the nation's fiscal problems. Chiang therefore, had his own minting machine in operation all the time to pay the army and have enough for his own domestic needs. But paper and such other requirements for minting were running out. The end had come. Chiang Kai Shek and his faithfulf ollowers -every regiment no matter how foul, will have its obsequious followers -hopped across the strait 48

into Taiwan where, today, he still is ,praying in the local methodist Church for the day when he would be able to go back to the mainland, reconquer it and re-establish a government that was cast overboard a quarter of a century ago. America which saw him into Taiwan, and propped him and his debauched government has now seen fit to jettison him and to have gone, somewhat shame-faced but in downright honesty, to Chairman Mao and his mighty 800 million.

We want to close the story of the leadership of China here by repeating that Chiang Kai Shek went down because his was a government that milked the people. Mao Tse Tung's government is there today because it is made up of dedicated men and women who own no Mercedes Benz, no super houses, no bank accounts, but leaders who live only for one reason -for service to their fellow men. J JJJJa aaaaw wwwwa aaaah hhhha aaaar rrrrl lllla aaaal llll N NNNNe eeeeh hhhhr rrrru uuuu Reading several years ago Lipson's Economic History Of England, a was surprised to find that the men who gave money or bread to begging jobless men were men who, any time in the future, might themselves be jobless, too. How could one account for a man of the quality of Jawaharlal Nehru fighting and later, dying for our earth's most wretched men that thronged India? It seems inexplicable. Nehru belonged to the aristocracy. His father was a very prosperous lawyer who could afford, and did give his son, the most expensive education that no prosperous English man could surpass. Nehru went to Harrow and topped it with Cambridge, coming out with flying colours. His generation of young men hated the British rule of their motherland, which they determined they were going to break. Whereas anybody who knew and saw the establishment they were swearing to displace would wonder whether they were out of their minds. Just before Nehru's time, in 1925, the late Duke of Windsor, then the Prince ofWales said, on stepping into Bombay and the Indian Army crashing out 'God Save The King', that, had anybody told him that a generation later, India would have walked out of the British Empire, he would have taken the man for a lunatic. Majestic and fabulous as India was, as the finest jewel of the British Empire. One man outside Gandhi was responsible for the plucking off of this subcontinent from the old empire. That man was Nehru. It is, as already said, a paradox that somebody of the quality of Nehru who had nothing personally to gain by the liberation of India was the one who fought 49

most fanatically for it. Having won it, he could have reverted, if he so chose, to live the way he was brought up. History had taught him that if it was his wish to rule India, he must come down to earth, forget the splendour which he inherited from his father and live as near to the people as possible. A year before Nehru died, I was in India. As he lay convalescing, notices were put on the fences begging the people to put no more fresh garlands of flowers on the garden fences. It was the very poor that were doing this. It was they buying flowers from the money that was not even enough for them to buy food with. But they knew what they were doing. They were trying to say in a small way their 'thank you' to a man who gave his entire life to their service. Whilst the Viceroy whom he threw out was on a salary that was higher than that of the President of the United States of America, Nehru used a big axe and felled the whole of the bureaucratic establishment that was fleecing the entire country. He put his own salary at 2,000 a year, a flea bite of what his predecessor filched from the nation's treasury. When India became independent in 1947, Nehru, within 48 hours of the proclamation of independence, stopped the importation of as many as 200 items of goods into India. Textiles, cars, radios, clocks and watches, all foods, needles and threads. When he was challenged by textile kings why he should stop textile importation, Nehru retorted that if India could not produce enough textile to cover itself, let it go naked! India never went naked. The whole nation woke up and worked. There has not been importation of cars into India since 1947, and the taxi i saw in use in that country in 1964 would not be touched by anybody in Lagos. India, driven to the wall in its yearning to use new cars had to manufacture its own. There were, in 1964, two brands of cars being produced in India. The Ambassador was one them. It is something reminiscent of the Ford Minor. It was this car that the Prime Minister of some 500,000,000 rode in for the rest of his life. Till todays in India, no Minister, State or Federal, rides in a Mercedes car. There is just one more thing in Nehru's leadership we have not touched on. Nehru visited in Kashmir a notable temple. The whole of India stood still. But not India alone. The whole of the West, notably, Europe and America, got hooked to the international telecommunication. History had no record of any person of note ever visiting that temple and emerging without pointing to an animal of some bulk to sacrifice. 50

Nehru went round, admiring all the things that prominent men and women before him had admired and when he felt he had satisfied his curiosities stepped out on to the door-step. ne rest of the world stood still. The men who

sold beautiful sacrificial animals vied with one another as they shoved and slugged one another, holding up this and pulling out that for Nehru to make his pick from. 'I make no sacrifice but for humanity', softly said Nehru as he stepped out of the temple and into the open air. Put Jawaharlal Nehru against Chiang Kai Shek as he hobbled in and out of the chapel, thus offerng stones to the multi-million Chinese who asked him for bread. Chiang pales into insignificance, completely enveloped by the honesty and candour of immortal Nehru. Such claptrap tiradiddle peddled by pseudnational leaders could so confound the unwary. I wrote these lines on Wednesday October 16, 1964, a public holiday: 'Men who are at the helm of our national affairs vie with one another in prayers or exhortations to prayers so that Allah, the only computer brain working on our national problems, might come and do the trick. The same Allah is to see to our getting peace.' The back page of the Daily Sketch for same day commands, LET US PRAY FOR STABILITY'. And yet we are all aware of the fact that if we all ignore the injunctions, we will be no worse tomorrow mornings. People's heads are already popping up and down, the moment anybody mentions what the content of education is in our new UPE. For, no matter what you teach the kids, if you haven't taught religion, you have taught nothing. Nehru governed the sub-continent of India with no reference to religion. The U.N.O. has no Godhead; but: get the world's little men bundled back into the back, woods from which they come, they cow down the only informed or misinformed with the soporific concoction ,j of education-cum-religion being our only salvation! We have digressed a little bit but it is a very useful digression. We are still on the question ofleadership and have just jettisoned Chiang Kai Shek as a nonentity whom chance has made a figurehead and he accepted it in an apparent fit of absent-mindedness. We must now come nearer home. Right now in two countries of black Africa, the world is asking if, in these last two places, things wouldn't fall apart as well. The first of the two countries is Tanzania. Dr. Julius Nyerere is already proving that Europe and America are not necessarily the only places where law and 51

order could reign. Leadership in Tanzania must accept responsibility. You couldn't, with the cloak of a leader on, enrich yourself-at the expense of your fellowmen or the State. Mrs Nyerere who had two farms had to sell one to somebody who had none. The President lives in a modest house which he built with a bank loan. He and

his ministers dress very simply in the button-up coat style. Tanzania is still poor, but the poor peasants know that their leaders do not suck up for their own private gains the wealth of the whole nation. There are no outlandish parties or posh cars anywhere. The Ujaama is deepening its roots and the common men look forward to a more glorious tomorrow. Our second choice of country is Guinea. Sekou Toure has shocked the Nigerians he met with his down-to-earth simplicity. There is nothing to distinguish his house in the suburb from any of the other houses. He asks you what you want for a drink and he gets up, opens his fridge, which is conveniently placed, and serves you. He goes round the town in a Volkswagen and stops to shake hands with children. There is no swagger, no outriders, no mournful sirens to make you shake in your shoes. Your car is not wrecked for you are not required to get out of the road. Nothing is greater in leadership than the followership feeling that it is not inferior to its leadership. The Chinese have gone a bit further on this line in that, today, officers do not show their ranks on their tunics. Be you a lieutenant or major or brigadier or major-general, you are supposed to show by the way you comport yourself-what rank you are in the army. Like Tanzania, Guinea is, too a poor country. But it could not have been the poverty that pointed the way of good behaviour to the leaders. We think not. It is a matter of philosophy. There are poorer African countries than Tanzania or Guinea but because of ignorant leadership you get what we are getting in most of the black countries today. When I visited Addis Ababa in 1971, I told friends on my return that there was only one thing wrong with Ethiopia: its monarchy! It was otiose, backward-looking, anachronistic. The Emperor lived whilst the Ethiopians existed. You could go back twenty feet away from the main street, Churchill Avenue, in the centre of the city, and you found yourself in real squalor. Over 100,000 died in the drought, but as far as the Emperor was concerned, it was impossible. People all over the world saw a few pictures of the Emperor throwing a few pennies to the beggars who were strong enough to go out whilst he passed. It was. like white-washing the cemetery to make it look nice to those who were not too hungry to see! the old Emperor, the king of Kings, the Lord of Lords, the Lion of judah, had 52

reigned for 42 years, but each succeeding year was a retrograde step that led into a yawning ditch filled with the throes of his own making, and into which he has now disappeared, lock, stock and barrel, leaving not a wrack behind. What is leadership? Leadership means suffering, is exemplified, in its quintessence, in the life of Mao Tse Tung. 53

C CCCCH HHHHA AAAAP PPPPT TTTTE EEEER RRRR T TTTTE EEEEN NNNN L LLLLo ooooo ooook kkkk B BBBBe eeeef ffffo oooor rrrre eeee Y YYYYo oooou uuuu L LLLLe eeeea aaaap pppp! !!!! I do not. Hetty Green, the American multi-millionaire of the last century never did, either. She bought any commodity that money could buy and kept it away in the nooks and crevices of her storage spaces and waited. Whilst she bought, most financialists like her tried to advise her against the unwisdom of the purchase of several of the commodities. . But Hetty was as stubborn as the mule. She had chosen her course and no side talks, which she took all advice for, would make her budge or change her mind. Invariably however, Hetty came on top, finding herself-having to sell at prices, sometimes ten times the original cost of things she had stacked away for years. The American famous Wall Street as well as its counterparts in most of the capitalist countries of Europe are jammed full not with courteous men and women who would choose to go and sleep over their ideas before they act but those who, like Napoleon, are ready to make decisions with lighting speed and carry them out with equal celerity. Whilst the English Stock Exchange is on operation many Americans are hooked to it on the telephone to make deals. Telephones at N2.00 a minute is expensive enough, but we would never know how many Americans keep on such telephones for as long as two hours when Stock Exchange operation rages. When, as it is hoped soon, two way television

service of same scene becomes possible, sellers and buyers at the Stock Exchange and their patrons across the world would be watched by the rest of the world as they make bids and millions of dollars and pounds change hands. Look before you leap? Not at the Stock Exchange or at Wall Street Kingdom, or you get thrown out, almost literally, from the market. . Life is full of adventures and, in fact, you don't really enjoy life or occasionally feel you are a hero unless you have occasions to shut your eyes and leap without giving a thought to its possible, most devastating consequences. The gambler who stalks the casino with the entire pay packet of N100 in his pocket does not tell us he hates his wife and four precious children whom he adores. Rather, he gets himself screwed to the idea that his N100 would fish out from the over-stocked deep waters of the gamble pool several thousands more, and he might be going back home with a whole block of flats he will have won! In real life situation, great acts of courage coupled with a stubborn refusal to look before taking the plunge, more often than not, bring bounteous harvests. 54

A sick American mother lay with her bed facing into the beautiful garden near the family garage, outside which, that Sunday morning, the family car was being over-hauled by step-father and son. Suddenly, the jerk snapped and the car pinned down the prostrate body of the 17-year old step-son who groaned in acute pain, with his legs shooting out wildly in all directions. Step-father dropped the tools his hand and shuffled awkwardly towards the garage to look for the second jerk, a much less efficient one, the location of which he was not quite sure of Mother, ill and racked in pain, sat up in bed and looked, drawn taut, at her son's groaning body. She got up-she hadn't done so for several days -and staggered towards the car. Standing astride her son and right against the car, she went down, took hold of the massive two tonner and heaved it up, up enough to release her son who scrambled out. Mother fell backwards, unconscious and had to be taken to the hospital. Father looked round for the correct tool to use for the job. He was stepfather. Mother; she was no stepmother. She was mother and so her outlook was different. She just leapt. Look before you leap is a dangerous menu for any young man wanting to carve a niche for himself in life. My own life is full of several leaps without a moment's look. When we were to start our school, the Ministry of Education, through its mouth-piece, Mr. Childe, an Englishman who vaunted that his long experience had even him all the knowledge about African education, said we could not start a school with anything short of N8,000. The G.O. had said so and experience every-where had shown it was so. We had onlv N1,800 and we damned all his predictions and started. Three times we had a ministerial official who walked into the school and. advised us do pack the prematurely meditated programme up. Three times we declined to do so. A reverend gentleman joined him in predicting that the school couldn't live for three months, more so that its founders had no faith in God

who only could do things. We ignored him too. In whatever way we look at it today, we are convinced that Nigeria has proclaimed us victors. One more example and I am through. I certainly was not expecting to make a name for myself with my two bottles of Ogogoro. I simply hated the fact that fellow Nigerians were being rushed to court and jailed for producing and drinking their own brew. The law did not say that he who was found drinking it had broken the law. Being in possession of it, as I was, was criminal. Had I stopped to give a thought to the number of years I would linger in jail if i was found guilty, I would have flinched, and the release of the ogogoro from its unjustified detention would have been 55

indefinitely postponed. This topic is not to encourage a young man to go and sit for an examination for which he has not prepared very seriously. Neither does it suggest that anybody could start digging the foundation of a N100,000 house if all he has is N100! No ambitious and courageous young man (or woman) could afford to look before he leaps. Beverley Nicols in his Women and Children Last, has beautifully clinched the idea: 'if you look before you leap, you will go on looking, and looking, and looking...into nothingness'. 56

C CCCCH HHHHA AAAAP PPPPT TTTTE EEEER RRRR E EEEEL LLLLE EEEEV VVVVE EEEEN NNNN D DDDDo oooo I IIII B

BBBBe eeeel lllli iiiie eeeev vvvve eeee I IIIIn nnnn G GGGGo ooood dddd? ???? No, I do not. Most people do not, either, but it is easier and more convenient to agree with the majority to say placidly, there is God'. It is a common saying in Nigeria today that you could go all out and practise the worst of atrocities in this country. Steal the money from the common kitty; steal the people's land; shoot the innocent and rape any number of defenceless girls. If you are arraigned before the court you could stand up and swear it is not true, and end up by declaring that God is your witness. You go and acquire the services of lawyers, of really good lawyers-as long as you can pay their bills which to such crooks are not a problem -and you could emerge from the court free and innocent and could even get your adversaries to pay the cost you have run in acquiring the counsel for your defence. On emerging from the court, at least in Nigeria, all your friends and admirers -they usually turn out in colossal numbers to filch from your loot -flock to the court to carry you home. You thank them all and fix a day for the thanksgiving service and the church would be full to capacity. Several clergymen, invited or not, would fill the altar, and the one specially selected to preach the sermon, would tell the packed church how wondtrful the work of the omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscent God is. He never leaves his people to suffer. In the end His people always come on top, and His people's enemies are left in the lurch and eventually go to Hades where there are weeping and gnashing of teeth. It is all God's work', the preacher would say, and the people would complete the odium, 'and it is marvellous in our eyes'. Then follows the giving of the offerings. After waves and waves of offerings, givers have gone to the altar and offered their offerings, the clergyman would now say, 'all the friends of our God-saved man to come forward to the altar'. The whole church stands up and throng towards the microscopic altar and several men help to collect the offerings from the smiling and sweating friends. May the lord accept your offerings; may the Lord bless the purse from which they have come; may the Lord look down with His gracious eyes on you each time, now and always. The people troop back to their seats and thus the church closes, but not until

the minister has informed the vast crowd of worshippers that dinner is waiting for all of them in the new house the big man has just built. 57

Whoever in Nigeria, is on the winning side, is God's man, no matter what debauchednery that man has practised on the naive or the innocent. That God, even if he does exist, is a sham of a God. Had the Germans won the 1914-18 war, let alone the 1939-45, they would have done exactly what the British did after each war. Listen to this: 'the monarchy-lest there be any doubt about the way in which the war to end war had ended -went, in state, through the beflagged streets of London, unashamed amidst a blaze of uniforms, and a great blare of military music, to thank our dear old Anglican Trinity, who had been, it seems, in control throughout, from St. Paul's Cathedral'. Those were H.G. Wells' comments on the Thanks-giving British people at the end of the First World War. In South Africa, the white minorities go to church every Sunday, to thank the All-powerful Majesty, for giving them, the 4-million white, the brains and the brains to perpetually lord over their governorship over the ignorant l2-million black majority. God in his unperturbable aloofness, sits (or stands, or feels) for ever there, in callous indifference and total unperturbedness whilst these atrocities are being per-citrated. Give me a thousandth of the power attributed to God and I would change the whole of our planet into a congenial garden for all its inhabitants. An innocent child crawls from under the tree where its mother leaves it and it hits, for the fun of it, a venomous snake that strikes back as it passes by. The child screams for the hurt and mother, toiling away on the farm, runs in to see the snake disappearing into the bushe. in one hour, child is dead. Is that God's love for all children being epitomised? In 1964/5, a colossal thunder struck a church building and eleven children, boys and girls were directly hit and died in the then East Central State. Was it God's love been amplified? Look back at the history of hurricanes that have hit the littorals of Mexico and the U.S.A. drowning thousands of humanity, or of the monsoon floods in India and Pakistan, enveloping all the lowlands and drowning thousands of the poor inhabitants. All God's work and marvellous in our eyes? Faithful apologists have, of course, got good reasons for such happenings. God's ways are unfathomable to us little men. Such hand-outs are only acceptable to morons which most men, religiously speaking, are. 58

Then the godly people would ask, 'What do you think of the earth itself alongside other plants; the perfect arrangement, the regular occurrence of day and night and of the seasons. How come they? I don't know, is my answer, and if the manufacturer-other than an evolution -is a being, God, what does he gain by my acknowledging him if he is unmoved by whichever attitude I take? And if; as we all appreciate these days, time is so short that a good many of us want to put in more work in our waking hours, why wasting any part of it hatdoffing to somebody who couldn't care a hoot about our doing so? Perhaps where man is most tender in his attitude is what happens to him at death. He accepts that when the tree dies It it turns into earth again. When we use some for firewood, we accelerate the speed of its returning to earth. When an ant dies, it, of course, goes into the earth and disintegrates into it, enriching it as do all vegetable matters, becoming compost and turning up as very rich earth again. When the lion or the elephant dies, man agrees that same thing happens. Now immediately we take it right home and ask what happens to him, man, at death, he goes into sixes and sevens. He only goes to sleep waiting for the judgment day to come when all men will be resurrected! It is so comforting thinking that way. It is so convenient. One does not feel too bad with such a feeling. Then what happens to man in areas of our earth when the aged is eaten? Will part of him eaten be magnetised to whichever of him buried? What happens to the Indians (Gandhi and Nehru for example) who get cremated? The smart believers in resurrection then say it is the soul that matters. It is that that is goingt o be resurrected in the last day. When is the last day? To the Jews, it is yet to come. Certainly I read somewhere, of a group of Europeans who were waiting somewhere in Europe for the end of the world to come. To them, it probably has now come. If man ever becomes scatter-brained, the evidence is best recognised when he tries to figure out what happens to him at death. His mental kink at this speculation is so related to his vanity when he runs away from logic and starts looking for a more glorious haven for himself than he figures out for the ant or the lizard or the rhinoceros at death. Throughout the world, the people who know best about the existence of God are almost always the least educated. The nearest to illiteracy you are, the more fanatical you are about your belief in God. The May flower School today with its almost 2,000 student population would have been impossible to get built in a place where Allah does everything whereas the founders of Mayflower pointedly ask God to remove his obstructive fingers from the whole business. I am a man of simple faith. If you say this is fire, I do not touch it for I know it burns. When you show me the red pepper, I do not rub it into my nostrils for it hurts. lf you say this water is deep, I do not, as a non-swimmer, jump into it 59

as I don't want to drown. When you say show me God, apologists sometimes tell you, you are God. But I tell them I am no God.

God, to people of my sort, is a soporific phantom, tossed round by people who have nothing to do, but procuring the belief in God to tantalise the working hours of such other millions of people who, too, have nothing to do. I am a humanist. Man is the noblest of all living things. I live to serve him totally, particularly the human child, and die in his service. That is the substance of my belief. That is my credo. 60

C CCCCH HHHHA AAAAP PPPPT TTTTE EEEER RRRR T TTTTW WWWWE EEEEL LLLLV VVVVE EEEE M MMMMy yyyy L LLLLa aaaas sssst tttt d dddde eeeet tttte eeeen nnnnt tttti iiiio oooon nnnn: :::: A AAAAn nnnny yyyy L LLLLe eeees sssss sssso oooon nnnn L LLLLe

eeeea aaaar rrrrn nnnnt tttt? ???? Many. I would like to unfold them one by one. Any man wanting, on behalf of Nigeria, to put up a one-man demonstration will be greatly disillusioned if he reckons with the fact that he might whip up public sympathy and support. Those who will solidly support you are naturally those who share your view and are ready to say so openly. For them to say so openly means they have got courage. What many Nigerians lack is courage. It is, therefore, the few who have courage that would speak up and stand by you. Many more who share your views, but as they are not so sure what you are going to get for making your view heard when nobody else would air theirs prefer to leave you to stew in your own juice. Let me quote somebody else's experience: 'One afternoon in Lagos, somebody said to me, 'if I were you, I should leave your house'. When I asked why, he said, 'the troops are looking for you'. I was not a criminal, I had done nothing. Eventually I did leave and sought refuge in a friend's house with my family. Yet for a week, I still did not believe -I simply thought that things had temporarily got out of hand -it would be all had. After a week, I decided to send my family home, and as we were doing this the people were jeering and saying, ' let them (the Ibos) go, food will be cheaper in Lagos . . . ' We expected to hear something from the intellectuals, from our friends' or something like that . . . That kind of experience is so powerful; to me it is something I could not possibly forget. (Chinua Achebe being quoted by John De St. Jore: Nigerian Civil War, page 101). I'd give you another example. A certain Dr X rooked people all over the place. When I got to know about it, I came all out and called public attention to it. I got to know of a woman whom he tried to rape in the consulting room. I went to the woman and asked about the case. It was true, but hers was not the only case in Shagamu. Why did i pick on her? Didn't I know of other cases? But what did it matter if i picked on her. All i wanted to do was to stop this man from using his special position to do any further pilage. No, she would not like to go forward to say it in court. The whole of Shagamu would be making fun of her! she said. It is the same undertow in the two cases listed above. In the first case if a thousand non-lbos rose up, like a man at that crucial hour, and protested against soldiers prying round and plucking individuals up, the story would have been different. 61

Also, if the woman I referred to above came happily forward and helped out with a list of others she knew, Dr X would have been rounded up by law long ago and his debauchery arrested. Now i go to my own case. In the hearts of so

many other Nigerians, they did not think I was essentially wrong but why did I dare say it! Four of our national papers furtively mentioned it once or twice and they then suddenly stopped as if somebody issued out a threat against their further allusion to the issue. It was only the Nigerian Tribune which went all out and hammered on consistently and, on October 22nd, came out with a full dressed editorial, a philippic, which, certainly everybody took notice of. It all started, you would remember, with the subject that made the discussion of any other issues, in the meantime, irrelevant. One would have thought that our national papers, in truly and honestly ventilating public opinion, would go in concert and pound at the truth and wait for the powers that were to do their damnedest. Or, could not a paper, after the usual courteous preamble submit that with yet two years ahead of us, throw it out as a challenge that the civilians should try their hands again? Would it not be possible for us to hail on a few hand-picked civilians with ostensible clean records and ask them to think out a solution? Couldn't we start with even getting all the present and past Federal and State Commissioners to sit together and come out with a solution? Certainly, there is no country, at any point of time, that is barren in the material for political leadership. 'of the soldiers of lights, writes the historian H.A.L. Fisher, 'no country has a monopoly'. Another paper might attack the question from another point of view. And yet another paper another way, until we get all our national papers contributing to the great and noble debate. The army never said the subject was not open to discussion. It would be wrong for the army to say that any time. the british army, when we were still a subject people, could issue such a command, but certainly such would be improper for a government composed of indigenous Nigerians. But if the army did think the subject was not open to a debate, all the papers that had written on it might be asked to fold up, or at least stop publication for some time. That would have been a good thing for Nigeria. The Nigerian press would have added much more than an inch to its stature. Rather they all fawned and licked the traditional boots 'and censored themselves', to use the words of John De St. Jore of the Nigerian Press, 'into a state of grovelling sycophancy'. Even if there had been no allies whatsoever, there must be some Nigerians who should be ready to speak up in circumstances when there seems to be universal trepidation and unwillingness to put a case we all know and feel should be put. After all, ours is a corrective government. It was not the laity that erred last time; it was the civilian government. But that government has now had, or 62

would soon be having, its ten years of suspension. It was not the British who, in their gracious mercy, surrendered the government to us. We demanded it. If we were to be ripe enough to take over the government when we did, we would have to wait until we assumed the ripeness of the banana. Human ripeness could only be tested in experiment and in nothing else. 63