With the death on Monday, October 11, 2010, of Aliu Babatunde Fafunwa, Nigeria’s former Education Minister, I have lost a wonderful friend and scholar. I came to admire and learn from Fafunwa many years before I met him in flesh and blood. While in secondary school in 1978 I saw a copy of his A History of Western Education in Nigeria with my elder brother, and so went for it.
With the death on Monday, October 11, 2010, of Aliu Babatunde Fafunwa, Nigeria’s former Education Minister, I have lost a wonderful friend and scholar. I came to admire and learn from Fafunwa many years before I met him in flesh and blood. While in secondary school in 1978 I saw a copy of his A History of Western Education in Nigeria with my elder brother, and so went for it.
A bibliophile in those days with a deep interest in history, I began to devour the book and was fascinated by the lucid presentation and accessible language. We had been made to believe as high school students that outstanding professors were those whose every line must be like Wole Soyinka’s: a head cracker, the type the famous troika of African literary criticism would describe as arising out of wilful obscurantism. I learnt from these book concepts like formal and informal education, traditional African education, etc.
I was, therefore, over the moon when Emmanuel Obiechina, who had just left office abruptly as the Deputy Vice Chancellor of the University of Nigeria at Nsukka, revealed to me in a private discussion in 1984 that the institution was going to honour both Fafunwa and Mokwugo Okoye, the radical nationalist, prolific author and polyvalent intellectual, at a very special ceremony, on the occasion of the UNN silver jubilee in 1985. Obiechina, currently a scholar at Harvard University, spent considerable time speaking nostalgically about Fafunwa’s unrivalled influence as the first Dean of the Faculty of Education of the university who was destined to succeed Eni Njoku as the UNN vice chancellor. “The Nigerian civil war of 1967 to 1970 forced Fafunwa to the University of Ife”, bemoaned Obiechina. “You can imagine what it would have meant for national integration and unity if Fafunwa had become our second vice chancellor! Not even the planned honorary Doctor of Laws degree can make up for the loss”.
Fafunwa was a pan Nigerian of the finest hue, free of parochial encumbrances. Okey Ndibe’s marriage to his second daughter, Sheri—a woman with numerous virtues-- brought me pretty close to Fafunwa and I saw in him a citizen without vile. A Lagosian by birth who obtained a doctorate from New York University in 1958, he could have opted, on return to Nigeria, to teach at the University College in Ibadan, a big city, but opted for the new university located in Nsukka, a village by 1960 when the university was established. Fafunwa was a Zikist through and through. Up to the moment he breathed his last, he exhibited the sunshine philosophy in every conceivable manner, always believing and expecting the very best about Nigeria even in the face of overwhelming odds. He passionately asked Nigerians not to give up on their country, citing the example of the Philippines which solved its notorious electricity problem with the privatization of the state-owned utility and has been developing impressively since then. He was a true believer in the Nigerian possibility.
Fafunwa’s first son, Tunde, is married to someone from Owerri, Imo State, and his second son’s wife, Ifeoma, hails from Onitsha, Anambra State. Okey Ndibe, one of the noblest souls anywhere, is his son in law and an indigene of Amawbia, Anambra State. Madam Helen, an indigene of Asaba, Delta State, has been living with the Fafunwas since 1961, together with her family. Though a practising Muslim, Fafunwa enjoyed a blissful marriage to a white American Baptist, Doris, and the religious difference never got in their way, just as he never prevented Madam Helen from her boisterous practice of Catholicism, which entails daily mass attendance, regular recitation of the rosary, counselling, and wearing of big scapulars, chaplets, sacred images, etc.
Fafunwa never considered only the Ndibes of Amawbia his in laws but also Okey’s friends, who are just innumerable and from all kinds of backgrounds. Anytime Okey, a professor at both Trinity College in Connecticut and Brown University in Rhode Island, visits Nigeria, he always stays with the Fafunwas whose place in Victoria Island, Lagos, would daily be full of guests till early morning—all visiting Okey. Far from protesting, the Fafunwas enthusiastically and generously share their resources with the guests, most of whom complete strangers. Prof Fafunwa personally ensured that at least a fresh ram head was preserved for me during the annual Muslim festival requiring the slaughtering of animals and the sharing of the meat with various people as a mark of utter sacrifice to God. The ram head kept for me was for the “isi ewu” delicacy.
Fafunwa and his entire household are spectacularly deferential, despite their high achievements. This foremost educationist and winner of the Nigerian National Order of Merit, the country’s highest honour for intellectual achievement, scarcely called me by my first name but “High Chief”, to which I always responded “You will live long!”, thus causing him to burst into his characteristic Homeric and long laughter. I can’t remember him being angry, not even at the Nigerian condition which saw him rely more on a private power generator than on the state-owned power utility and which also saw him rely wholly on a private water well dug in his compound rather than the Lagos State Water Corporation which interestingly kept on sending him water bills regularly. We pray to see Professor Fafunwa in the world hereafter laughing heartily.
Adinuba is head of Discovery Public Affairs Consulting, Lagos.
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