‘My glory days were at ABU’

You went to Oxford University to do a Phd in African Literature, but, very soon you were asked to move to the Anthropology department. Finally, you had to leave for Sheffield to do the Phd. Tell us about this. That period was fraught with all kinds of accidents. I got what was then called a […]

You went to Oxford University to do a Phd in African Literature, but, very soon you were asked to move to the Anthropology department. Finally, you had to leave for Sheffield to do the Phd. Tell us about this.

That period was fraught with all kinds of accidents. I got what was then called a Third World Scholarship. There were quite a number of scholarships. There was also the Rhodes scholarship. They were almost equivalent, kind of. My first accident was, of course, that South Africa would not give a passport. I was fortunate that I was actually able to get, through the offices of some friends, and through the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, travel documents. My next accident was Oxford itself. I was going to study, and I was admitted to the English department. What was still unresolved was my subject area. Of course, I was carrying my subject in my suitcases, because I was living with a lot of emerging writers, poets, in the context of the struggle in South Africa itself. People like Oswald Mtshali, were widely read in WAEC in Nigeria, Dennis Brutus and a lot of others. At last to my eternal dismay, Oxford looked once at my proposal, and decided that I was in fact, in the wrong department. I tried to figure out what that meant. The only meaning I could make out of it was that African Literature   did not belong to the Great Tradition of the English literary Tradition. This was soiling words like Literature, to even begin to think the English department could offer, a doctorate in African Literature. So, it was proposed that I should go to Anthropology, rather than English. For me that was not only demeaning, but a project in recolonising me. I absolutely could not take it. One of the fellows who I was going to work with, who had actually attracted me to Oxford, was part of the first generation of British critics to write intelligently, knowledgeably, and articulately on African Literature. This was the generation of people like Christopher Heywood, Arthur Ravenscroft and Michael Wade. There were quite a few and, he, Christopher Heywood, was offered a professorship at Sheffield, to go and start a facility there in modern African Literature. He was aware that I was unhappy with being shunted towards Anthropology, so he said if I would go along with him, he would be very pleased. So that’s how I ended up at Sheffield, and had to forgo becoming an Anthropologist, or a literary figure outrageously passing for an Anthropologist.

What did you research into at Sheffield?

I wrote on Black Consciousness Poets in South Africa. You might recall that especially after the African National Congress (ANC), the older liberation movements were outlawed in South Africa in 1960. There was a period during which there seemed to be almost a culture of fear in the African mind in South Africa, until the emergence of the student movement of my time, that consisted of people like Steve Biko, who will be the best known of that generation of writers, who then sprang up with the notion of black consciousness, which was really a process of reinjecting a sense of worthiness ,a sense of pride, a fighting spirit, away from that culture of fear which was becoming a dominant feature, and a great emphasis was placed by that movement on cultural emancipation, as a factor in decolonising the African mind. So a lot of poetry, theatre, the new novel, the new writers movement which swept through, and actually became quite a force around the Soweto uprising of 1976, was coming through them. So, I was very much interested, and I was a contributor to that process. But we had never sat back to, stand apart from what we were doing, to reflect upon our actions. Most of my life you will always find that I have been a contributor to, as well as a commentator on what was happening, back and forth. So, it was that I went back to that period from 1960 through to the mid 70s, into the Soweto students uprising. You may also be aware that besides being a commentator on them, I would write novels also about that period. The best novel being children of Soweto. I have enjoyed generally working through creativity, commentaries, literary-political theorisation, and all those aspects.

You were on exile for more than thirty years, whats the story of your life in exile?

It begins in my high school days in the 50s in South Africa, when the Apartheid government decided that they need to use the mind of the oppressed a little more effectively, and to deprive them as much as possible of any sound education, or any means towards emancipation. So they introduced what was called Bantu education. The real motive was spelt out by pronouncements by some of the white leaders of the time, that the African child must be taught at the beginning of his schooling, that there is no place for him or her in white South Africa.

In other words, they must perennially become hewers of wood, and drawers of water. It was really an education for servitude, and some of our parents, certainly the more middle-class parents, decided to withdraw their children from those schools in South Africa, the schools in what had been kept as protectorates, British protectorates, and therefore not part of greater South Africa.

These countries we would have known at the time as Basutoland, now Lesotho, and Swaziland, as Botswanaland protectorate, now Botswana and so on. The school system there was still very much what you would have found in Nigeria, and in the other colonies. In other words, colonial as it was, there had been no desire to water it, even further down as well. We wrote at that time the Cambridge Overseas or the General Certificate of Education. These were the days before WAEC. Our parents decided that we should go to school outside South Africa instead. These would have been the children of most of the leaders that most people would have associated with the liberation movements. Children of people like Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu, and Govan Mbeki.

All of these, alongside Mbeki’s children, went to study outside South Africa. It was actually in 1960 that I left South Africa. By 1963 South Africa had been kicked out of the British Commonwealth of nations. It had been part of the British Commonwealth. As revenge, it decided to create very strict border controls for South Africans moving in and out of those territories, unless they were going to work in the mines. But, otherwise, for people who were going to school, they refused that. You had to make a choice. Did you stay behind at home and forgo that education, or did you stick to your education, and forgo ever going back to South Africa? So that began our exile almost as teenagers.

After you complete your GCE, the South Africans stated that you won’t be admitted into a University in South Africa. You had to look for a University outside of South Africa. It’s a question of keep  them out  from even coming together with their counterparts in South Africa, and perhaps influencing them for  the worse. So ,from that point of view I went to what was then the University of Botswana, Lesotho and Swaziland ,as the three countries were now becoming independent themselves. I did my first degree there in the 60s. I was landlocked there for some time, because I had no passport, and couldn’t leave.

If you look at the map, Lesotho is completely landlocked. It wasn’t until, with the connivance of friends, that I could actually jump the fence and get into Botswana. Thats where I also started teaching in the University. I started, of course, in Lesotho. It was from Botswana that I went to the UK to do doctoral studies. I left in 1960, and visited South Africa in 1991.

What memories do you have of the 1991 visit to South Africa?

You know when you come to a completely new country, you have no real expectations. If you were made a correspondent to Sri Lanka, you might look up in a travelogue what Sri Lanka is like. But basically, you go to such a place like a blank page. But when you are going home, you have a certain imprinted image. If you have been away for ten years, your 5 year old brother will now be fifteen. So, for me, going back to South Africa, was problematic along these lines. I was looking for a South Africa that no longer existed. I was looking for that tree which used to define my playing territory, but it had been cut. There was a strain about it, and if I had not been a South African, it wouldn’t have existed. I was a misfit, in ways in which had I been a complete stranger, I might have been. I have lived in all kinds of places, in Lagos, Europe, you name it. I had never felt a stranger because my expectations were that I was just fresh in a new country, and I was taking it all in.

I remember waiting for my children, because I came before them. I only came with my five year old grandson. I wanted them to visit the places I had been trained at, to show them where my home was. When they subsequently arrived, I drove them to one of the areas of Johannesburg. That area had been wiped out. Africans had been pushed as far   away from there as possible, because they were too close to white residential areas. In very many ways I was coming home, but there was no longer a home to return to. That was the slight trauma I had to deal with. But most of it was just euphoria.

There was considerable euphoria in being able, finally, because none of us had ever expected, that Apartheid is going to be fought and defeated one day. That one day is a very long stretch, and when it happened, it generated a lot of euphoria. I went back initially, because I was going to do it in installments. I went back initially for two purposes: We had decided on hosting a conference of writers, both from within, as well as those who had worked from exile, to begin to share notes, and understand one another. So there was that concern. But, simultaneously, this was the month we had decided to start negotiating with the Apartheid government.

The ANC had to put together a team of researchers, to work with our principal negotiators. So I came in as part of that research facility, for what then became a Convention for a Democratic South Africa. But it wasn’t until two years later that I was summoned back again, to head this institution where Mandela, my father and a host of others, had been students. Fort Hare is probably the second oldest sub-Saharan University, after Sierra Leone. For East Central and Southern Africa, it was perhaps the only institution of higher learning you aspired to, and there won’t be many Universities like it. This is because in one generation it managed to produce the heads of state of five countries. This includes Mandela himself, and most of the leaders of the liberation struggle. The first president of Botswana was also at Fort Hare. The prime minister of Lesotho was a student there. He and my father did their masters together. Mugabe of Zimbabwe went to Fort Hare as well. He was my father’s student at a point. He actually came to visit me after my inauguration, because he said when he saw the name, he remembered that he had stayed at my home at some time. Even the first Attorney General under Kenyatta had studied at Fort Hare. It’s a very celebrated institution which Apartheid decided to target, and to target very directly. So, our notion as a liberation movement was that we needed to liberate institutions of that kind. The measure of our success in turning round the legacy of apartheid in South Africa, would be in terms of whether or not we could turn   round this institution that was a first class institution. It was decided that I go and begin that process of reclamation at Fort Hare.

Were there challenges before you at Fort Hare?

The challenges were immense, because in some respects, we deceive ourselves when we think about educational reconstruction, and I think there is a lesson somewhere in that respect for Nigeria. This is because it has to do with the development of the child from the pre–school period all the way. So, you can’t really attend to the University, without that entire feeder network that goes into doing that. So, we have to learn to produce people whose primary function will be to reconstruct the pipeline, including the fact that the teacher–educators themselves were probably in need of retraining, so considering that the process is like training the trainer. It is an exceedingly complex thing, and it was very frustrating to just intervene at the end stage of the process, without the realization that it was an entire network.

Also, we made the mistake of eliminating teacher colleges, such as you still have in Nigeria. I know when I was in Zaria, the teacher colleges were an important element of focusing on and producing graduates. We eliminated those, and shifted that process to the Universities, and that was singularly ill suited to the project. The other problem, of course, was that the entire school system had been socially re-engineered to service Apartheid, and offered no science, no mathematics to the African child. The typical African child, and therefore the teacher, study three languages, two of them European-English and Afrikaans. They did Bible Studies, perhaps carpentary, anything but what would be intellectually, and technologically empowering to the Third World. You couldn’t, in a single generation, turn around that process.

All I think we could do, and all I started to do, was to set up the right foundation, bearing in mind that the education of a child, basically, is a twelve year process. If they are already in the pipeline, perhaps we have to wait for the next generation. South Africa still suffers from the after-effect of Bantu education, and will for some time to come. That is very debilitating, because we are a very, very advanced technological state, but we cannot produce engineers. So the skills problem is going to come to South Africa, very, very considerably. The educational project is easily one of the most fundamental, and one of the most critical, in the context of our transition to a modern state. That is why I threw myself, and continue to throw myself headlong, into ways and means of achieving that, more effectively.

Can you recall some memorable events of your four year stay at the Ahmadu Bello University?

Those were my glory days, and I am not saying it because I am talking to you. I don’t think Nigeria, or ABU was employing me, as much as they wanted my wife. My wife was an agronomist. She has always been the one in demand. Nobody just wants a poet. I mean, what are you going to do with a poet? (laughter) So she was engaged to work for the National Animal Production Research Institute at Shika, Zaria. In the process they discovered that they had actually employed a woman who had an unemployed, and perhaps unemployable husband, and the whole difficulties of issuing visas and tickets, was such that at the end of the day they asked, could we perhaps employ him too. So, in this way I ended up a teacher in my own right at ABU. My wife worked principally with the Fulani and nomadic groups. Her field is grassland ecology. So we did have a sense of rural Nigeria, and I mean outside of the elite of the University. I worked in the department of English, which at that time had three sections.

We had specializations in literary studies, theatre and drama. I headed the literary aspect of it, but I also was interested in both language, and drama, as well. I saw my major mission in coming to Nigeria as staff development. I had seen the older Nigerians going on to get scholarships to America, and to Britain. Many of my own colleagues at ABU were Wisconsin educated, like Aderemi Bamikunle and Yakubu Nasidi. The others were British educated like David Ker, and so on. But I began to think what had been effective about my own education in the UK, and why couldn’t I offer something as qualitatively good,if not better in an African environment. I threw my entire weight behind a very vigorous staff development project.

I think I can say without exaggeration or fear of contradiction, that the entire English department, the younger ones after I came back, were almost without exception my students, whom I took from the Masters into their doctoral programme. People like Tanimu Abubakar, who is still at ABU, and Sani Abba Aliyu who, I learnt is back to ABU from Gombe University, and other people like Akosu, who was my contemporary. Those were my masters students, and my PhD students.

People like Ode Ogede who is now in the US, and Rachel Ewu in theater. I also had some students brought to me from Maiduguri. Salihu Bappa was in theatre, together with Jenkeri Okwori, and David Awam. In fact when I look back, I think that the amazing thing about my short stay in Zaria, was that I produced between fifteen to twenty masters and Phd students, and not just run of the mill work. We produced very serious research work. It showed that it was possible for an African institution to actually   be an effective institution. I had very committed colleagues, both expatriate and local. I think the choices ABU made of lecturers, were brilliant. People like John Haynes just lived for their students. There were other people in drama like Brian Crowe, who also just lived for his students.

Finally, one must pay homage to Aderemi Bamikunle, and a host of others who were exemplary in many ways. For me at the time, I saw ABU as the leading university at that period. I won’t even say in Nigeria, or in Africa. It was just the leading University, period. I was external examiner for a number of institutions in the north and in the south. These included Maiduguri, Sokoto, BUK, Ife, and Ibadan. I had a sense of these Universities. But the only truly Nigerian university for me, in terms of composition and federal mix was ABU. It was a wonderful time for me, professionally. It was a glorious time for my children, because part of the problem we had in the UK, quite apart from my own fiasco at Oxford, was how to raise our children in Africa. How to raise them in an appreciation of where they had come from.

So, coming back to West Africa, in particular, was important from the point of view of their socialisation. So much so that not only did they go to High School here, when we left my eldest daughter had completed her B.A in Special Education from Jos. We were insisting that, at least their first degree must be obtained from an African university. ABU at that time had a notorious faculty called FASS, the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. It was the seat bed of revolutionary intellectual activism, and there were active people like Bala Usman and Patrick Wilmot there. For a lot of us around the anti apartheid movement, including the students group YUSAN, that is Youths Solidarity for Southern Africa, what was holding us together was a radical notion of social change in Nigeria.

Thinking through this was also a growing up process for me. I had come to Nigeria, I must confess, as something of an essentialist. For me Africa was almost a country, and the world’s most complex continent. I had myself been miseducated about it. The closest that spoke to me on Africa, was the Africa of Negritude, which almost essentialised, romanticizes, and almost glorifies Africa, as well. Nigeria cured me of that romance, because the realities of Nigeria, are such that you cannot escape into any romantic non-entity. I started to challenge for myself, some of the inherited orthodoxies, I had actually come with to Nigeria. I can easily call the period my coming of age, intellectually.

What circumstances made you leave the ABU?

 I had to leave, unfortunately, around 1986.Part of the reason was my growing disillusionment with the political order in the country at the time. Unlike so many of my colleagues, I did not believe that military regimes were ever going to be an improvement on a civilian regime, that had nonetheless, been democratically elected. We had endless discussions about this. Sober ones, and not-so–sober ones at the ABU staff club. There were few who believed at that time that what Nigeria needed was a benevolent dictator. It didn’t connect with me.

My whole South African upbringing showed that nothing like that ever exists, nothing should be allowed to subvert the will of the people. My belief was affirmed here in two ways: First, at the University we had this seat bed of revolutionary activity. My students celebrated in 1986 the anniversary of the killing of Akintunde Ojo at the University of Ibadan. It was a new military dictatorship, and students were celebrating as they had always done in the past years. The authorities then sent in the police unit popularly called ‘kill and go, and all they did was, truly, to kill and go. I can remember the agony I felt at the number of some of my own students who had been wiped out during that protest. I remember a very objectionable statement, from one of the politicians at that time who said it wasn’t true that so many students had been killed in Zaria. I knew that the reports of the killings were true, but he stressed that ‘only two had been killed’. That was even more objectionable.

Why should two be ‘only two’, as well. So that deepened my own disillusionment. 1986 was the tenth anniversary of the Soweto Students uprising, and I was that year launching a novel  I had written on that uprising titled ‘Children of Soweto’, and marking  the tenth anniversary in the UK. So I went to the UK for this. This enabled me to do a lot of interviews with the BBC, and a number of other local and international stations. If you wanted any reliable information on Nigeria then, you listened to the BBC. Each time an interviewer realised that I had written about the South African student massacre, and I was living in Zaria, where a similar devastation on students had occurred, they wanted me to comment on how I felt as an African living there. I don’t dodge questions like those ones. For me, it was worse that what I thought was an African government, could turn against its children in the manner in which it had.

Also, there was the problem that the government had started to surreptitiously break the sanctions on South Africa, especially those on oil, and Bala Usman and Patrick Wilmot had kept tabs on them. Then we could give you the account to show that the military was going behind everyone, and making a killing out of this. We could have exposed this material, but even my own organisation felt that this is getting very, very dangerous for me. It was around that time that Patrick Wilmot was surreptitiously picked up, again surreptitiously. They were going to throw him out, and no one would have been the wiser for it. But then if it could happen to Wilmot, it could very well happen to me.That was when I had to leave Zaria with my family, to go and teach at Yale in the US.

You lectured in Creative Writing at ABU, what was the experience like at the time?

One of the things I taught at ABU was creative writing. Some of the most inspiring projects from my students were often in creative writing. Invariably, they will be by the women students. There were far more women students, than males. More women tend to read English than the males, for some reason. But I had a number of brilliant women writers such as Margaret Kassam, who would have been a lecturer by the time you (the reporter) got to the English department. There was also Hadiza Ampah.There were others such as Ayesha Imam, who was my favourite.There were quite a number. The women were easily outstanding story tellers, and one of the reasons, I discovered, was because they had a major story to tell, unlike the males. We have mainly said as much as what we were  ever going to say. But the women were yet to speak, the northern woman, in particular. Many of them refused point blank to even publish. In the north for a number of them, it was fear that the things they were writing about, they wouldn’t even want their closest relatives to read. It was the closest I had ever encountered to writing as theraphy.So they totally refused to publish. But I am convinced that the next great outburst of creativity in Nigeria will come from the women. The most ground breaking works won’t come from the Ben Okri’s, but rather these will issue from the emerging women writers. I think I have been proven correct, because you are not likely to find me reading some of the male writers. But with the women, I find that a story that must be told never forgives silence, and they have reached that stage now.