Sent from my iPhone
--Mobolaji Aluko:
I chose not to respond to your earlier reaction to my first essay, because, frankly, I did not know exactly what you were on about! Ibadan - not Ife, not ABU - a university built by the Nigerian government has been turned into a provincial high school and a war booty, period. Now, I also do not know exactly what your quarrels are with my reference to Dr. Blyden at Nsukka. All the excerpts you referenced indicate exactly what I said in my column: that the Institute of African Studies in Nsukka had Dr. Blyden as its Director. The founding director was of course Professor Hansberry for whom that institute was named in 1962. Nsukka's far-reaching plans with that institute was totally abridged by the end of the war. So, what is your grouse? That I was not born when all that drama was playing out, yet I have to assert it? What else is new? Your fixation with my age is increasingly preposterous! What has age to do with the search that I embark on, to rouse the stones of history? At my current age, if I hadn't been shooting blanks earlier, I should be a grandfather now. So, you were ten in Nsukka, and you know it all. Well, the truth is that the Blydens are self-identified Igbo. As a matter of fact, Edward Wilmot Blyden himself, though he spent very little time in Nigeria, and lived mostly in Liberia and Sierra-Leone; and although he was born in the Caribbean Island of St. Thomas knew, and said himself, that he was born of Igbo parents. His obituary also noted that fact - that he was Igbo. He was one of the phalanx of the 19th century Igbo with networks in West Africa - like the Pratts in Gambia, the Taylors and Coles, among the many Saro-Igbo ( a lot of who are Krios today) in Liberia also. The first Igbo union was formed in fact in Gambia late in the 19th century. But many of these transnational Igbo also settled in the new coastal cities of Lagos, Calabar, Port-Harcourt, and in such missionary epicenters as Onitsha, Owerri, Bonny and so on. You had many self-identifying Saro-Igbo among the Lagos elite, and many of these families are still there - hybridized and so forth. Today, the families of the likes of Dr. Karefa-Smart, for instance, whom Zik made to come teach in Ibadan in the 1950s, are dispersed into many identities. It was Azikiwe in fact that gave Dr. Blyden II the name "Eluemuno", and Dr. Blyden in turn gave his own son, who later trained at Dartmouth, where he himself came after Nsukka, those two names also: Chukwuemeka Eluemuno Blyden. I do not know what therefore you're contending with. But it is, sir, your typical tendency for navel-gazing, that you'd choose to squirt sour grapes.
And you must know by now that I do not say what I do not verify, even though many of the things I write may be uncomfortable truths, that blow away your consoling mythologies. Yes, indeed, your own father, Dr. Sam Aluko, now that you want me to be upfront about it, was one of those who suggested the closure of Nsukka according to my sources. I chose not to mention names specifically in other to be charitable. And as you have pointed out, I was not there. Yet, I know these details. How come? My sources were far too involved in the politics of the re-opening of Nsukka to be ignored, or not to be taken seriously. Celestine Adigweneme, etc, may have gone to Ife with you in 1970, and yes indeed the likes of Professor H.O. Oluwasanmi at Ife were never as sanguine, but facts are facts. Perhaps in fact that suggestion to close down Nsukka was made to Gowon out of very practical considerations, the truth of it however, as it was related to me by at least three individuals who should know (and at three different occasions) makes me certain that it did happen. That is the rule of verification, if you've done professional journalism. There were many other factors that went into the strategic diminution of Nsukka's historic mission, and they are in part connected to the larger question of the diminution of the goals and mission of the Nigerian university. You do not contend with that. You contend with the fact that I had called Dr. Blyden, "Eluemuno," - in other words, I had claimed him for the Igbo, or that I had suggested that Nsukka was to be closed. I did not claim Dr. Blyden for the Igbo, he it was who claimed to be Igbo. And it was not I that claimed that Nsukka was to be closed, you yourself, have confirmed the fact in your own way. It was the same politics that made Dr. Augustine Njoku-Obi's discovery of the cholera vaccine such a contentious, one-sided debate in that era; or the fact that Ogbemudia's suggestion to bring together the "Biafran scientists" under one national program was shot down in the federal executive council by certain known people. The late Sam Ogbemudia himself made these facts known. It is the legacy of the kind of mad triumphalism, vicious rivalry, and short-sightedness that hobbled the Nigerian university. You do suggest that my assertions are "bland" - write your own with the "correct" facts in the public domain! And by the way, you may have noticed that my essay continues. I have much more to say.
Obi Nwakanma
From: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Mobolaji Aluko <alukome@gmail.com>
Sent: Tuesday, October 10, 2017 5:41 AM
To: USAAfrica Dialogue
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: Nigerian Universities (2) - by Obi Nwakanma--
Obi Nwakanma:
As you must have expected, I was waiting for the continuation of your "Universities" series, and as usual, you did not disappoint in continuing your hagiography after your first disastrous outing.
I will point out just two of such hagiographies:1. "That's how come Dr. Eluemuno Chukwuemeka Blyden, Grandson of Dr. Edward Wilmot Blyden became the first orator of the university and Director of the Hansberry Institute of African Studies."
Obi, who the heck is "Dr. Eluemuno Chukwuemeka Blyden, Grandson of Dr. Edward Wilmot Blyden"? Who now have you clothed in Igbo-name borrowed robes? Are you referring to "Dr. Edward Wilmot Blyden III" - and you now suddenly presume that there was a "Dr. Edward Wilmot Blyden II" and :"Dr. Wilmot Blyden I"?
First, let me tell you this: I knew Dr Blyden III, and his son (Bai-Bureh) was my classmate and friend in 1965 at the University of Nigeria Primary School at age 10! Furthermore, while Dr. Blyden III was in the Political Science Department, my father Dr. Sam Aluko, was head of the Economics Department, coleagues both. (To rub it in, you were not born then!)
Secondly, according to his Wikipedia page,
QUOTE
Edward Wilmot Blyden III was born Edward Wilmot Abioseh Blyden-Taylor on 19 May 1918, to Isa Cleopatra Blyden and Joseph Ravensburg Taylor in the "Baimbrace" neighbourhood of Freetown.
UNQUOTE
Thus his father was a Taylora and it was his mother who was a Blyden. Do you see that "Abioseh?" That is a Yoruba name - Abiose, which means "born on Sunday" - and like 50-70% of Sierra Leoneans who trace their roots to Yoruba-land, Blyden !
Now there was no "Edward Wilmot Blyden II". In fact, his mother (Isa Cleopatra Blyden) was the daughter of Edward Wilmot Blyden, a West Indian who migrated to Liberia but also lived in Sierra Leone where Isa Cleopatra was born (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Wilmot_Blyden) and became famous in both colonies (Liberia and Sierra Leone). So "Blyden III" dropped his "Taylor", appropriated the full names of his famous grandfather, and added the grand "III" to it!
As to "Eluemuno", I do not know where you got that one from, unless you were referring to one of Blyden III's children:
QUOTe
Edward Blyden was married to Dr. Amelia Elizabeth Blyden (née Kendrick), a retired professor. They have eight children: Edward Walter Babatunde Blyden, a businessman; Isa Jeanette Blyden, a Russian philologist and freelance radio journalist; Bai-Bureh Kendrick Blyden, a Power engineer and engineering consultant; Dr. Fenda Aminata Akiwumi, an assistant professor of environmental geographer and hydrogeologist; Henrietta Cleopatra Blyden, an ESL teacher and freelance writer; Dr. Eluemuno Richard Blyden, a biotechnologist, business-owner and Adviser to the Government of Sierra Leone; Edward Katib Blyden, of ChefBlyden.com; and Dr. Nemata Amelia Blyden-Bickersteth, an Associate Professor of African and African Diasporan History at George Washington University.
UNQUOTE
Or maybe he was secretly re-christened with Igbo names?
And do you see the name Bai-Bureh? That was my classmate fifty-two years ago!!
Finally, we may want to consult this page of the Institute of African Studies of UNN:
QUOTE
http://ias.unn.edu.ng/history/
The Institute of African Studies of the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, came at a time "when the concept of African Studies as a means of consolidating the independence and building up the cultural identity of the new states of Africa was very much in vogue" (Afigbo, 1971:89). The idea for a graduate Institute of African Studies in the University of Nigeria was channeled towards research and was designed as a rallying point for "all men of colour who can trace their descent to the African continent no matter in what part of the world they now find their habitation". (Afigbo, 1971:89). The establishment of the Hansberry College of African Studies in the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, was approved in September 1962 by the Governing Council of the University of Nigeria as a graduate Institution. The College was opened on September 23, 1963 with a four-day Seminar at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka campus, with the title, "The Emergence of African Political Thought." This Seminar was attended by eminent scholars and authorities on African studies from many places in Nigeria and overseas. The keynote address was delivered by Professor William Leo Hansberry, an eminent Afro-American Historian and Africanist, whose name the college bears and who was designated its Director. The Hansberry College was renamed Hansberry Institute of African Studies in 1964. Prof. William Leo Hansberry had taught Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe and Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, two students who later became first indigenous Presidents of their countries, Nigeria and Ghana, respectively. As W.L. Hansberry, the Director, was not resident (but visiting Nsukka once in a while from the United States), his deputy, Professor Edward Wilmot Blyden III, an orator, Professor of Political Science and grandson of the famous Blyden, was made the acting director but later became the substantive director in 1964. (Onyeneke, 1984). Professor Blyden was a former Head of Department of Political Science in the University of Nigeria, Nsukka.
UNQUOTE
So again, I ask: Obi, who the heck is "Dr. Eluemuno Chukwuemeka Blyden, Grandson of Dr. Edward Wilmot Blyden"?
2. "As a matter of fact, UNN was nearly closed down, when on seeking their opinion on what to do with the university post-war, some western Nigerian intellectuals who ironically had taught at Nsukka before the war, advised Gowon to close down the University of Nigeria, and distribute its faculties and students to already existing universities at Ibadan, Ife, Lagos, ABU and the then newly established university in Benin. But this move was seriously resisted, and it took serious lobbying, and the intervention of the late Emir of Kano, Ado Bayero, as quondam Chancellor of the university to dissuade Gowon."
Obi, this is a howler not worth your integrity. The most prominent "western Nigerian intellectuals who ironically had taught at Nsukka before the war" unttl 1967 were:
(i) Dr. Sam Aluko, Head of Department of Economics(ii) Prof. Babs Fafunwa, of the Facultry of Education(iii) Dr. Akinsola Akiwowo of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology
All three (now late, and hence unable to defend themselves) left Nsukka for the University of Ife just before the outbreak of war. For my father, it was a return. So Obi, of three persons, who are you accusing so blatantly -you did not even say "alleged" - of misadvising Gowon?
This is a lie froom the pits of hell that one sacaterbrained irredentist, trying to get my goats, wrote about my father about 10 years ago, and I pushed back at him strenuously, and he backed down. Now, ten years later, you are repeating it.
The fact of the matter was that many students of non-Eastern/non-Igbo origin had been placed in various universities when they left Biafra before the war, with many of them (in fact most) having graduated by the time the war ended in 1970. The generous reconciliation offer being made to the Igbo university students (trapped within Biafra, who had not given their lives in blood to the Biafran cause) after the war was that those who wished to CONTINUE their studies in those departments and faculties whose staff, equipment and buildings had been decimated during the war could do so in the EXISTING universities, while those who wished to return to UNN were free to do so, with the clear understanding that some rehabillation was necessary. To now interprete that as a request to CLOSE down UNN is most un-generous and grating.
Read what written here, for example:
QUOTE
http://ias.unn.edu.ng/history/
Happenings in this first phase also included the empowering of the Institute of African Studies in 1963 to be a school for post-graduate research for the degree of Masters. It was to prepare and present candidates for post-graduate degrees in African Studies, on its own right. This programme was expanded by the Senate of the University on April 12, 1967 beyond Masters Degree by research to include Masters Degree by course work. The Institute followed this up by developing and advertising its post-graduate coursework programme. The Senate confirmation of its approval for the full teaching programme was given on July 21, 1970, after the Nigerian Civil War. In the 1970/71 session, failure to implement the programme was due to the poor state of equipment of the various departments of the University (e.g. history, geography etc) which were to be intimately involved in the programme. Again, rehabilitation after the civil war had not gone far enough.
UNQUOTE
In fact, at Ife at least, where my mother was the Admission Officer during that period and Prof. Oluwasanmi was VC, students were admiitted into courses without having to show original qualifiation papers. Some of my Chemical Engineering classmates of 1971 (Okonkowo, Okafor, Adigweme and Okagbue) took advantage of that concession, as well as Nwammuo, Anozie and Ozokwelu of the 1970 class of Chemical Engineering, one year before mine.
So you need to be more charitable, Obi Nwkaanam.
As to the many other bland statements that you made about the Nigerian university system, I will let others take you up on those.
And there you have it.
Bolaji Aluko
VANGUARD
Nigerian Universities (2)
By Obi Nwakanma
In the first installment of this essay, I tried to put in some context, the stages of the evolution of the Nigerian university using the history of the University of Ibadan as background.
My intention in drawing attention to the history of Ibadan was (a) to point to the level of thought necessary in developing a university, and (b) to show a pattern in that development of the disjunctures that have crippled the evolution of the idea of the university in Nigeria. The University College Ibadan was for fourteen years, a college, or campus of the University of London, and awarded the degree of the University of London.
Though Ibadan was the first university established in Nigeria – it was but a satellite of a colonial university. In other words, it was not self-governing. It became a full university with its own instruments only in 1962.
Its original mission was basically limited to providing the needs of the colonial administration, to train purely "English men" who would basically serve imperial purposes – those that Franz Fanon would describe as wearing "White masks" over "Black skins" – a reflection of the radical fissures in the identity and consciousness of the African indoctrinated or socialized under the empire.
Admission and recruitment to Ibadan was very selective and elitist. Ibadan graduates, small, in-bred and self-contained, lived in a sort of fantasy world of privilege and self-regard; closed-off and alienated from the rest of society in an oasis of prosperity and entitlement. It was as a result of these contradictions that Dr. Azikiwe offered his blistering critique of the mission and orientation of the Ibadan idea, describing the university as a "One Million dollar baby" in his column "Inside Stuff" in the West African Pilot.
The university Zik envisioned was different. In Azikiwe's opinion, Ibadan's model of elitism was unsustainable in a decolonizing nation in a hurry to develop and catch-up with the rest of the modern world. At that point in its history, Nigeria's major problem was a very glaring need for highly trained technical and specialized manpower.
As a result of Azikiwe's own ideas of the university, he pushed for the establishment of the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, passing the charter of the University through the Eastern Nigeria House in 1955. The University of Nigeria, Nsukka in other words was established in 1955, but it opened its gates for the first 280 students on October 7, 1960, just one week on the attainment of Nigeria's independence from Great Britain.
Thus the University of Nigeria Nsukka became Nigeria's first fully established university: that is, the first indigenous, independent degree-awarding university in Nigeria. Aside from Azikiwe, the next most important figure in the establishment of the University of Nigeria was Dr. I.U. Akpabio, minister for education in the government Azikiwe led in the East. Akpabio and Zik traveled around seeking funds across the world for the proper establishment of the University of Nigeria.
Nsukka was conceived as the "New Sankore" – a place where every global black intellectual, scientist, and social theorist might find a home in the modern era. That's how come Dr. Eluemuno Chukwuemeka Blyden, Grandson of Dr. Edward Wilmot Blyden became the first orator of the university and Director of the Hansberry Institute of African Studies. Azikiwe's plans for Nsukka were of course radically abridged, first with his removal as Chancellor of the University in 1966 by the military governor Odumegwu-Ojukwu who replaced him with Ado Bayero, Emir of Kano; and this was followed by the radical diminution of the university, from 1970, when it was taken over by the Federal government, at the end of the civil war.
As a matter of fact, UNN was nearly closed down, when on seeking their opinion on what to do with the university post-war, some western Nigerian intellectuals who ironically had taught at Nsukka before the war, advised Gowon to close down the University of Nigeria, and distribute its faculties and students to already existing universities at Ibadan, Ife, Lagos, ABU and the then newly established university in Benin. But this move was seriously resisted, and it took serious lobbying, and the intervention of the late Emir of Kano, Ado Bayero, as quondam Chancellor of the university to dissuade Gowon. Nsukka's role in Biafra was pivotal.
For a while, Nsukka harbored the "returnee" intellectuals from Ibadan and Zaria, alongside the short-lived University of Technology, Port Harcourt, Nigeria's first Technological University established by Ojukwu in 1966, with Dr. Kenneth Dike, who had resigned and fled from Ibadan as its first Vice-Chancellor. These universities became the fulcrum of Biafra's war production and resistance.
The scientists that gathered in these two universities, experimented with energy, fashioned new weapons, calculated the ranges of Biafra's rocketry and Missile production under the mathematician Ezeilo, Produced Rocket Fuel under Mang Ndukwe, Alchohol and Chemicals under Garrick Leton, and food production and preservation under Bede Okigbo, and so many more.
For the first time in postcolonial Africa, the relationship between the university, research, and social need found a terminus. And this was the mistake that the Federal government made after the civil war: it did not utilize the experience of Biafra and her war industry as the template for connecting national industrial production to a national university system.
The University of Technology, Port-Harcourt was dismantled. Nsukka itself became the perfect example of a more profound contradiction: it became an eagle that forgot how to fly. When you bring highly talented and egotistical men together with limited opportunities, the instinct for self-preservation and survival drives them ultimately to incoherence and self-destruction, particularly in the absence of visionary leadership.
The removal, and spiting of Professor Eni Njoku as the Vice-Chancellor of the university, and his replacement with the anglophile Professor Herbert Kodilinye, was a fatal mistake. Igbo intellectuals at the end of the war had also become very cynical. They had lost a war and a nation. And they did not find the new environment welcoming.
That's precisely what happened with Nsukka: it became weighed down by post-war cynicism, and in-breeding; its growth was stunted by the kind of in-fighting ignited between Professor Kodilinye on one side, who wanted to restructure Nsukka to follow the Oxbridge collegiate model, and the opposition on one side of Achebe, Nzimiro, Eteng, Ikoku, and the entire Nsukkascope group. Nsukka did not survive that fight. The University of Nigeria, Nsukka suffered from the vicious and deadly petty rivalries that made intellectual and collegial life difficult and unproductive, and it has remained so. From a global university – the leading African university of the twentieth century as envisioned by Zik – Nsukka increasingly became a very provincial, Igbo university: the faculty, the administration, an overwhelming number of the students were Igbo. Great universities seek diversity.
As a matter of fact, self-respecting universities across the world hardly employ the students they trained at the Postgraduate schools, and only in few cases, when they have first proved themselves elsewhere. But one of the greatest tragedies of Nigerian universities is a deadly kind of "in-breeding." There is something called the academic or intellectual tradition – a culture of the university. These have been destroyed in Nigeria. Nigerian universities have no culture. There is a certain savage impulsion that currently drives the universities. In the American university where I teach as Graduate Faculty, one of the greatest measures of success is to register with proof, how quickly within the given time of research, that the graduate student under your supervision completes their program and defends their ideas successfully.
In Nigeria, there is almost a maniacal, almost masochist pleasure in making students suffer. It is the mark of the power of university faculty to delay, subvert, deny, and destroy the prospects of students simply as a means of protecting one's presumed territory, or asserting blind power. The problem is, over the years, the universities no longer attract quality faculty, whether in terms of junior faculty, or in terms of specialized faculty. The stock of the current academic staff in Nigerian universities is of very low quality.
There are still some good ones. Very few indeed who could pull their weight anywhere in the world, but I have read the writings of full Professors of English in Nigerian universities, including one, sadly, who is currently a Dean of the Faculty of Arts & Humanities, who submitted a review full of howlers, the kind that would make the devil of printers blush with embarrassment, to one of the international journals on which I serve as editor.
I was nearly decapitated not only by bad grammar, but also by the mediocre writing, and elementary-level thinking, that it struck me that this fellow should not be allowed in a classroom in a decent secondary school. But how did he earn an English honours, not to talk about becoming university faculty, then a full Professor and then Dean of the Humanities? That's the conundrum.
(To be continued).
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