My hobby is cooking – Award winning Nigerian female scientist

Weekly Trust: At what point in your life did you decide to become a scientist?Prof Fransesca Nneka Okeke: As in my early days, I’ve been curious about science without actually knowing that I was treading on the path of science because in my elementary school days, I still remember, I would come out and look […]

Weekly Trust: At what point in your life did you decide to become a scientist?
Prof Fransesca Nneka Okeke: As in my early days, I’ve been curious about science without actually knowing that I was treading on the path of science because in my elementary school days, I still remember, I would come out and look on to the sky, and when we all as children saw the plane, I kept asking question ‘why should an air -plane move in an empty space without falling back?’
I went into the class, I remember, I asked my teacher this question but he kept telling me ‘l don’t have the answer, when you secure admission into secondary school, may be, you will get an answer.’ I also asked why is it that I sometimes see the sky turn blue and sometimes white but nobody gave me the answer. And it kept coming into my mind.  As soon as I got admission into secondary school, I still remembered, and I said ‘teacher’ – that was in my first year in secondary school – ‘can you give me answer to this question?’ He said ‘you can ask your question’. And I said: ‘Why is the plane going in the air without falling back?’ And he would now tell me please when you get to Physics in class three, you can ask your physics teacher.
When I got to class three, I didn’t waste  time to ask one of my Physics teachers – I still remember Mr. Okolie – ‘Sir, I know I’ve been asking this question right from my childhood in elementary school; why is the sky blue sometimes and then white? And why is it that the plane is flying without falling back?’ He laughed and said ‘you are very curious. The plane is flying without falling because of the law we call Archimedes Principle but I’m not going to teach you that in class three but when you get to class four but it is for Principles of Physics, by a man called Archimedes, a physicist, a great scientist.’ I said ‘ok,thank you, sir. Now, I know that it is somebody who made it possible for the plane to fly in the air.’ And then he told me also that the principle that explains the turning of the sky to blue and white is also in light, a branch of physics. And within me I said, ‘ah, it means that this physics is almost everything.’ However, I didn’t think deeply about that but I know that my late father mentored me because he would teach me mathematics ahead of class so that when we have mathematics class, as the Algebra or Geometry teacher would ask questions and I just quote him “Do you people understand?” and almost everybody would say ‘no, teacher’; and a voice would say ‘yes’ and it was me. Then the teacher would say come and solve it for them and I would be so happy. I would take the chalk and I would almost be dancing on the board.
And then each time he came in, after some few teachings, he would not even ask do you understand but he would say Francesca come and solve it for them; it kept me on. When I got home, I would say ‘papa, do you know that those problems you solved, I was the only person that got them in class?’ I was solving for the class; that made me love mathematics. And then the class members would rally round me after school and say tell us how you did it; how did you understand it?  But I would be laughing and they always called me ‘Maths-Maths-Adico,’ that means Mathematics and Additional Maths. That made me not to slack back because I didn’t want to be disgraced.
With such background and interest, when we started physics, I quickly saw that physics is almost mathematics and I now saw that the love I had for mathematics metamorphosed into physics. But initially, my father, Chief Patrick Okoye, thought that I was going to study Medicine, and I agreed with him. But when I finished my school certificate, I made ‘A1’ in Physics, ‘A1’ in Mathematics and then I was posted to a secondary school to teach as auxiliary teacher. I wasn’t a trained teacher then, and I was posted to Nkpor Girls’ Secondary School in 1973 where I taught physics. The funny thing then was that the class they gave me to teach physics was class five and some of the students were older than I was because it was almost immediately after the civil war.
WT: How did you combine family with your scientific studies?
Okeke: I said I’ve been mentoring girls, young women. But you have to be determined. You have to be focused. If you are not focused and determined, then you can’t make it. Of course, I still remember even in our undergraduate time, those people who thought they had all the time to themselves, they didn’t do well. But for me I have to take care of my family and any little bit of time that I had, I valued it because I would always be thinking no, they were reading and had gone far, not knowing that they have time for other irrelevant matters. But the little time I had I could keep awake but that did not even stop my family because I had to share the time; this is the time for my studies,this is the time I looked into the domestic matters of the family, even though I had house helps and my mother also occasionally came in to help by staying with them, that gave me enough encouragement because my kids were younger. And then I did not playor joke with their education. If they were given assignments, I had to join them and finish them and went back to my own studies. And that is why I am proud to say that I have six children. The first one is a medical doctor with his family now. The second daughter is a pharmacist now with a family. The third child is a boy, he is a pharmacist too. The fourth is a girl and a pharmacist too. Then the fifth is an electronics engineer. Then the last one is a physicist. So my study in science did not affect my family adversely.
Did you influence their choice of career?
Okeke: No. I did not. Even in the final year, my son – that is in the secondary school – he was the senior prefect; deputy senior prefect in SS2; senior prefect in the last stage. He will not even wait for the driver to take him to school, once he finished his work, off he went. So he made six ‘A’ ones in his Senior Secondary School Certificate Examination and also made 290-something in JAMB then. We were in Japan then. So they all got their admissions and read their courses perfectly well. I didn’t influence their choices.
What is the relationship betweenyou and your students like?
Okeke: We have mutual interaction, and it is like a family; I always even tell them in the class, we work like a family please. If you think that you know this matter and the other person knows another thing, so try to share your ideas because is in sharing that you find out your mistakes. So we work as a perfect family. We don’t have room for protocol. Just knock and say ‘mummy are you here?’ The students call me mummy and I will say, yes, ‘I’m here.’ I learnt it abroad. There should be no protocol, telling the students, ‘do you know I’m a professor?’ and so what? That is the way I am. We interact and that is why when you come to the class, it looks like my group is larger. So people think I work for some of them; I don’t work for anybody but I direct them in a way that is friendly and cordial; that is all we need here.
Is there an experience you may regard as remaining indelible on your mind?
Okeke: May be the experience I had when I knew that my research was growing and growing faster than I even thought and as I said, I have travelled to so many places but it was in Japan actually that – not because I was given the working instruments but that is part of it because you can’t go into the farm without hoe or cutlass; in Nigeria, we were working in a very hard way and that was the only way, punching calculators, having sleepless nights. But in Japan when I was now given computers to work with and the analysis was so fast.
In fact, the first time I did my analysis using mat-lab, I said could it be true that something I could have done in three months, I am doing in a day? Each time I remember that I feel like I am in heaven but I haven’t been to heaven, oh but I know joy and happiness filled my mind. While in Japan, I even wrote to one of my friends and said before I come back, I must have published more than six papers. She wrote back and said what am I doing, doing analysis, reading and publishing? In fact, it was so exciting in Japan. It was an exciting moment indeed and that was how my research started growing. While in Japan, I started planning what I would do when I come back to Nigeria. The Japanese you are working with are so open-minded and simple, so why can’t I replicate that character in my country?
Can you tell us what your typical day is like?
Okeke: When I get up, I am a Catholic, I go to morning Mass the day I can. The day I can’t, I call the family and we pray together. Then after praying, we have our morning meal, which I will supervise; up till now I don’t know what it means to say cook the food without me supervising – though I have people that stay with me, but I don’t allow them to finish and I will have to go and supervise them, and they will dish up this thing and we eat. If you had watched the Cable Network News, they asked me what is your hobby, and I said cooking. And they said okay, if cooking is your hobby, we will allow you cook something and then dish out. In that CNN documentary I was dishing out food to everybody around me but that is my hobby really. In the afternoon, if my husband is around, maximum 2:00 or 1:30pm, I will go back to give him lunch even when I was adean of the faculty or even when I was the head of department, I willbe looking at the time; I will go and serve him the food because I don’t have my children with me again and then we eat and then again we come back to the office. And may be in the evening he can go to play table tennis. If I have any place to go probably most likely at the weekends,as for weekdays, if there is no pressing need, I come back to the office because there are so many things I want to sort out. And I don’t have a secretary; I’m a secretary to myself. I do everything myself. So that is my day and then in the night I go back, pray and sleep.
Why don’t you have a secretary?
Okeke:  If they give me I wouldn’t say no. I need a secretary but since I am very strong now, I can be doing it; if I have money to pay a secretary because if you have a secretary you have to use your money to pay the person’s salary.
As a scientist, what is your greatest source of inspiration?
Okeke: Publishing, getting new ideas, discovering something that is new; it inspires me most. I could remember when I came back from Japan and I had a publication which they sent to me, and I nearly fell from the staircase when I was jumping to go and announce to my husband that I received a publication that they have accepted this my paper in Geophysical Survey, a very powerful journal. So such a thing gives me much joy.There was a paper I published in Earth Planet Science in Japan; that was in 1999. But when I came back in 2000, after some few months, I got a letter back from an old Prof. R.G. Rastogi, a very prominent professor in our area of science, and he queried our publication. And they sent it to me and there was this criticism he raised in nine points on my publication.
Was it objective, constructive criticism?
Okeke: No, not objective and not constructive criticism. It was not constructive at all; it was destructive. He was just busy cancelling what we said we discovered. So they sent it to me, the nine points he raised. The publisher sent it to me with a letter in which he said: ‘Francesca, these are the criticisms raised by Prof.Rastogi, if you go through it and you think you can answer the query; send it back to us and we will send it to another reviewer, and we will publish the two side by side,’that is Prof. Rastogi’s criticism and my defence, otherwise… you know what it means. I then travelled to Enugu and installed internet in my computer and started working on the problem.
Did you see that as a challenge?
Okeke: Of course, it was a big challenge. If he succeeds, it means withdrawing our paper and it was an insult and you know what that means. So I read one, two, three, four points; even the first, second and third points he raised, I said thank God, I will have to dismiss this old professor because we made some conclusions at the eleven hour universal time while it was at a local time; that one disqualified him. He also said we didn’t read the work of somebody we should have seen but that work we read and we referenced it. So I started one by one to the last point and dismissed everything and sent back the mail to them. I was so happy because he was in a hurry; what he said we said wasn’t what we said, and I said go to this page what you are referring to has been explained. And I still maintain that it is due to see induction. So I didn’t hear from them for a long time that I travelled to Brazil and from Brazil I wrote to them that I’ve been waiting toget the reaction to my answer to the queries. They wrote me back through my email and said ‘sorry we have published it long ago, you won.’ That was a very exciting moment as I started announcing it to everybody. And I asked them to please send me the journal. And they sent it. This is it here on my book shelf. (She turns and points at the journal) I didn’t know that when your paper is being criticised, it is getting more weight. Do you know that thing was part of the things that made me win this award? And that sea induction because of the abnormalities we noticed, after three years, there was that tsunami due to sea disturbance and that is what we are saying. You know the white people will never agree that you the black man has done it; they will be wanting a way to say that they were the ones that did it. But I’m still waiting for them because I was the first person to point out that sea induction – and other abnormalities could cause what we now know as tsunami. I was the first person to point it out and it was after three years that the tsunami occurred.
Would you say you have lived a fulfilled life?
Okeke: I am but I will be more fulfilled when I have an observatory. Right now I am fulfilled because not many people even reached to the stage I am now, so if I say I’m not fulfilled, I think I will be annoying my God. I am fulfilled seeing my students all over, PhDs, professors, so I’m fulfilled. When I see my family moving the way they are moving now, I feel fulfilled. I am a very happy person academically and family-wise; so why shouldn’t I say that I am fulfilled?
How was growing up like for you?
Okeke: When I started secondary school; let me be frank, I started in my father’s school, Washington Memorial Grammar School, Onitsha just one year after, and the civil war broke out. Then we went home as refugees to our hometown,Oraukwu, Idemili North local government area of Anambra State. Then my father, being a philanthropist, he loved education to the point that he had two cars, and he sold one to send us to school. The school was then an Anglican school with private teachers, some families organised their children and hired teachers to teach us; they said they didn’t want their children to stop schooling. Thereafter, Christ the King College, Onitsha, brought part of CKC to Oraukwu and then labelled it CKC Oraukwu and quickly he transferred us to that school and so we did not lose any year. Then after the war, I went to Queen of Rosary College Onitsha where I finished.
In essence, what does the award given to you in France mean to you?
Okeke: It means everything to me. Like I have been elected Fellow Africa Academy of Science; Academy of Science is the highest organisation in academics. I am Fellow Nigeria Academy of Science. I am Fellow Japanese Society for Promotion of Science. I am Fellow  Nigeria Institute of Physics but I am a laureate which supersedes everything, a laureate of L’OREAL UNESCO Award, that is in the whole world, they selected five women as the best scientists and they called it  Award for Women in Science, and  that my own is L’OREAL UNESCO Award for Women in Science for the Physical Sciences. So it means everything to me because it is not only that it is a prestigious award but the fact that the jury members came from all over the world, and I think only one came from Africa. Every other member came from Canada, US, Japan and many places. They don’t know you but they look at your works, and you don’t apply for the award. It is people that see your works on theinternet that can write you. They wrote me and said we need to see more of your work; send us this, send us that material, and I didn’t know where they were going. Then I sent all my publications to them and they said select the best 15 of my publications and send to us; I did that. So as it progressed, they later on said we need two referees from you and I sent them the referees and they wrote them. And that was it; I didn’t know the whole thing was for the award. And they now said, we are nominating you to contest for the L’Oreal UNESCO Award and they zoned it into five – the Arab country, the European country, the US, then the Africa and Arab. So out of these five continents, they will select one person from each continent. So in Arab and Africa, they selected me as the best. Then they selected one person in Japan, one from Brazil, one from US and one from UK; so five women in the entire world that were given this L’Oreal UNESCOaward. And when we landed in France, we had to defend our work in the presence of Academy of France, real academic people. Tell them what you have done; they would ask you questions for over one and half hours and you have to defend it.