As History and Geography bounce back

The great Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana probably had Nigeria in mind when he said, “Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Education authorities in Nigeria who lightly did away with History and Geography from the basic and senior secondary school curriculum many years ago are condemned to bring them back […]

The great Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana probably had Nigeria in mind when he said, “Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Education authorities in Nigeria who lightly did away with History and Geography from the basic and senior secondary school curriculum many years ago are condemned to bring them back under a new minister. Geography made a surreptitious re-entry some years ago and last week, a week after Minister of Education Malam Adamu Adamu banished the hated post-UME examination from the scene, the Nigeria Educational Research Council’s boss said History, too, is about to bounce back.
Nigeria’s education authorities literally did away with the past when they relegated the teaching of history in the school curriculum. Although many people speak about “removing” History from the curriculum, it was not actually removed, merely relegated. According to a former executive secretary of the Nigeria Educational Research Council, this was done at the time Nigeria adopted the 6-3-3-4 system, which he said necessitated the merging of many school subjects. History, Geography and Government were then merged into a new subject called Social Studies, which emphasises current issues over past ones.
When it was first announced that History and Geography had been relegated in the curriculum Dr Yusuf Bala Usman said, “Without History and Geography, you do not know who you are or where you are.” Relegation of History and Geography to the educational back benches had an immediate impact on Nigerian society as several groups cropped up that went about political agitation totally oblivious of the historical truth. I think a ready example of this is Mr. Nnamdi Kanu and his Indigenous Peoples of Biafra [IPOB] movement. They were able to rally many South Eastern kids to the cause by painting Biafra as an Eldorado. I just wondered, did Kanu read Eddie Iroh’s trilogy Forty Eight Guns for the General, Toads of War and Siren in the Night, Nelson Ottah’s Rebels Against Rebels, Dr Bernard Odogwu’s No Place to Hide: Crises and Conflicts in Biafra; Chukwuemeka Ike’s Sunset at Dawn, Elechi Amadi’s Sunset in Biafra, Chinua Achebe’s Girls at War or Cyprian Ekwensi’s Survive the Peace? If he did, he wouldn’t be thinking of Biafra as Utopia.
Not only IPOB; today’s advocates of “true federalism” paint a picture of the First Republic as a federalist Eldorado. Sure our First Republic leaders were great men and women, compared to what we came to have in later days but then, there was a lot of disenchantment at the time from political radicals, from ethnic minorities, students and even some major tribes, setting the stage for the Republic’s violent downfall.
In 2000AD when I was editor of New Nigerian, I tried to convince an elder statesman to grant me an interview on his life. He asked me why I wanted to hear about his life and I said, unwisely, that we wanted our readers to know the mistakes that were made in the past so that we will not make the same mistakes again. I must have annoyed him with that remark; maybe it sounded to him as if I said their generation made many mistakes. He immediately stood up and swore that he will not grant me an interview. He yelled, “Everyone should go and make his own mistakes and learn from them!”
Geez! Imagine a world where every generation has to repeat the same mistakes and discover everything anew for itself. Our History teacher taught us in Form 1 that the early man discovered how to make fire by accident. Initially he waited until bush fire roasted wild animals before he dined on them but one day, while he [or she] was cracking two stones to make a tool, he accidentally started a fire. It was one of the biggest leaps in human history. Imagine if every generation must wait to accidentally discover how to make fire.
Our Form 1 History teacher Mr. Awe, who had an NCE, taught history with great passion. He taught about the Ghana, Songhai, Mali, Kebbi and Kanem Borno empires and the Sokoto Caliphate. Mr. Awe was at his best discussing Mansa Musa of Mali; he said, unforgettably, that the price of gold in Cairo was very low for ten years after Mansa Musa passed through the city on his way to Mecca.
Later on we had an Indian History teacher, Mr Sharma who taught the subject without passion. He taught us about West African civilisations straight from the textbook, “Mende, Loko, Susu and Shabror.” He listlessly dictated the motives of the First World War’s top participants one by one. He said, “Austria/Hungary: Serbia has to be destroyed if Austria-Hungary is to remain a single unit. She wanted a short war, knowing that she will be destroyed in a long one.” Up until today I cannot make sense out of that statement. Mr. Sharma also taught us that the First World War was caused by the assassination of the Austrian Crown Prince, Archduke Franz Ferdinand. I think it was more complicated than that. Not all History teachers were as diligent as Mr. Awe. Dr. Abdurrahman Umar’s History teacher in the old North Eastern State once said in class, “Mansa Musa died in 1327. How he died, do not ask Mr. Ayodele because I was not there!”
There was this long NAN story last year about stakeholders calling for the reintroduction of History in the curriculum. However, two students interviewed by the NAN reporter said they do not like History because it has too many dates that students have to cram. They prefer to cram GSM phone numbers. Which reminds me; in the 1980s when I was teaching, a university final year student presented a seminar paper in which he said Christopher Columbus landed in America in 1942. I asked him if there was anything wrong with that date. He looked at it for several minutes and said, “There is nothing wrong with the date. I saw it in a textbook.” He couldn’t have. In 1942 millions of American troops were pouring into Europe, North Africa and Asia to fight in World War Two. He meant 1492 but probably due to the student phobia for dates, he shaved nearly 500 years off North American history.
Dr. Yusuf Bala Usman was entirely correct that without Geography, one does not know where he is. How do you know if your father’s house is standing on a sedimentary, metamorphic or igneous rock? How do you know if the cloud you are looking at is a stratus, cumulus or stratocumulus? If you have never heard of weathering and erosion, how can you know how a boulder of rock behind your house got there? Or why the face of Zuma rock recently peeled off after a million years in place? In the heydays of Geography, map reading was compulsory and a student had to plot the vertical exaggeration of a relief profile from a contour map. 
My favourite part of Geography was economic and regional geography and my favourite book was Goh Cheng Leong’s. Our teacher, another Indian called Mr. Gupta, took us on a classroom tour of many regions including Manchuria, Tasmania, the Kuznetsk Basin [Kuzbas] and Donetsk Basin [Donbas] of the old Soviet Union, as well as the West African savannah, North American prairie, Russian steppe, South African veldt and the Argentine pampas.
One picture in Goh Cheng Leong’s textbook that I never forgot was of some American farmers standing with rifles over a heap of cattle carcasses. The caption said, “Shooting calves to protest meat prices in the United States.” The picture confused me no end; how can anyone shoot his own cow? What will a Fulani herdsman say to the idea of shooting his own calves in order to increase the price of meat at Diko market?  Maybe with the impending return of History and Geography as core subjects in the school curriculum, Nigerians will finally begin to remember who we are and where we are.