ktravula – a travelogue!

Browsing the archives for the Academic category.

Why The Interest in the Mother Tongue?

I wrote a guest post for the We The Humanities blog, on February 21, 2016, to commemorate the UNESCO International Mother Tongue Day 2016. I had participated as a curator on the twitter handle for the same collective this time last year.

Here is an excerpt from the piece:

The responses (and criticisms) I’ve always got point to the universality and inevitability of English (and French, and Mandarin, and any other foreign language but a local one), and their success in the world as a cultural vehicle, as the reason why we shouldn’t bother with our own languages since that is merely a quixotic adventure with no economic and pragmatic importance. As I shared with the audience during my curation week at We The Humanities, my experience teaching Yorùbá to eager and willing students at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, who paid good money to acquire a piece of knowledge that others in Nigeria take for granted, has convinced me otherwise – not just of the viability of the language and its cultural value but also of an otherwise sad reality that over many generations from now, Yorùbá students may have to travel to America to acquire the knowledge of the language.

Read the rest here on the We The Humanities blog.

American Corner to Screen Femi Amogunla’s “The Bargain”

As part of the United Nation’s The 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence, American Corner, the Nigerian Society for International Arts and Culture, Firm Media Production and Liveinibadan.com join the world to stand against gender-based violence.

The 16 Days of Activism is a yearly international campaign that runs from 25 November (International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women), to 10 December (Human Rights Day). The Bargain is apt to raise awareness about these issues because it chronicles a woman’s life, from childhood to adulthood.

“I think that film has power not only to inform but to transform. Many will see themselves in film characters and I think much more than whine about the abuse that happens in marriages, it is important to do something. This is my own little something,” says Amogunla Femi, the producer of the short film.

The film screening will be followed by a conversation on the many manifestations of violence against women in the society.

Venue: American Corner, Jericho, Ibadan

Time: 10am

Date: December 4, 2015

About The Bargain

The Bargain is a short film that chronicles the life of a Nigerian woman from childhood to adulthood. It shows the many manifestations of gender-based violence against her; this violence resonates with many Nigerian women. The film is about how the Nigerian woman negotiates her existence daily, the way she bargains with reality, with stereotypes. It is a call from one woman to another on the price they place on their lives, on their value. It also raises questions: what are the lessons women learn while paying this price? How much or with what will you trade your worth?

The Speakers

Dr. Olayinka Egbokhare teaches Communication and Language Arts at the Faculty of Arts, University of Ibadan. She is the author of the widely acclaimed novel Dazzling Mirage which was adapted for screen by Mainframe Productions.

Ifeoluwapo Adeniyi is an On-Air-Personality at SplashFm; she is also the author of On the Bank of the River which is on the longlist of the Etisalat Prize for Fiction, 2015. She loves literature and has a penchant for socio-economic and political issues.

Edem Ossai is a Lawyer, development practitioner and founder, MAYEIN (Mentors Assistance for Youths & Entrepreneurs Initiative). Edem received a Commonwealth prize in 2013 for her Essay on the role of women in leadership and entrepreneurship.

Abiade Abiola is a lawyer with an interest in women’s human rights, children’s rights, sexual and gender-based violence and alternative dispute resolution. She is also the founder of Human of Substance Empowerment Initiative.

Femi Amogunla is an award-winning multimedia artist who works with stories, photography and film. His poem My name, My Identity was curated, produced and performed as part of the 30 Nigeria House Project during the 2012 Olympics. In 2014, he was commissioned as one of the official photographers for the #VoteNotFight# campaign in Oyo State. His photography has also been featured in Kuramo Report.

When Femi is not writing or producing, he takes a shot at the world with photography. The Bargain is his first short film.

More Pictures from Strathmore

Here are more pictures from my talk and from the beautiful Strathmore School campus, featuring students, staff, a priest, open spaces, a classroom, buildings, the library, sports venues, and the famous East African acacia tree.

At Strathmore School, Nairobi

On Wednesday, October 14, 2015, I was a guest of the Strathmore School, a private school in a suburb of Nairobi called Lavington. It is a sister school to Whitesands School in Lagos where I currently work. They are both founded on a similar academic/religious philosophy, both cater to singular sex students, and both are day schools with members of staff, and students, from different religious and cultural backgrounds, and both offer the educational curriculum of the host countries. Strathmore is the first multiracial school in Kenya, founded in 1961 to bring together a young country towards a set goal of a more egalitarian future. Similar sister schools that cater to girl children are the Lagoon School in Lagos and the Kianda School in Nairobi. The name, according to the history of the school, comes from the Scottish word for valley, “strath”.

My visit to the school was engineered by my employers in Lagos as a way to share ideas between the two schools, giving me a chance to compare the students and school environment in the two cities, and finally to provide a chance to interact with the students especially on issues of career, talent, and passion. After all, I was visiting Kenya as a blogger finalist of a prestigious journalism award. Wouldn’t it be nice to give a talk to the students about how I got to where I am, how I’ve navigated my own life and vocations, and how they can also develop their talents and passions towards the future? I had looked forward to it all through my stay in Kenya, so finding myself on the campus a day before my departure was quite appropriately gratifying. It would have been equally nice, had there been enough time, to visit the Strathmore University which I’d also heard great things about. But it was located at a different part of town and time wasn’t sufficient.

The school surprised in the size of its campus, the school bus, the lush and extended vegetation, and the number of trophies won over the years for many athletic and swimming competitions, the relaxed confidence of the students, the huge and spacious library, but not very much else. The teaching environment, staff camaraderie, healthy eating cafeteria, voluntary mid-day Mass, boisterous, mischievous, but very confident students, and a range of teaching staff who love their work all reminds of Whitesands and the teaching and working culture there. Most of the differences are differences between Kenyan and Nigerian educational systems. In Kenya, for instance, the system is a 8-4-4 as opposed to our 6-6-4 system. In Kenya, the primary school lasts for eight years, although many people have been advocating for it to change. There’s one other notable difference though, which I’ll remember for a while: Swahili is taught as a subject, and is also used by students (and staff) in the school premises without raising any elitist eyebrows.

Strathmore School also combines the primary and the secondary schools, so students graduating from there only have the university ahead of them. Whitesands, however, is a purely secondary school, catering to just the six years of high school. This allows for a concentrated effort at students within a particular time in their lives. It probably explains the small space needed for all our activities in Lagos, while Strathmore spreads out over many acres of land. The land area accommodates two lawn tennis courts, a grass field wide enough to be divided into three separate standard football fields at any time, an indoor swimming pool, a religious shrine to the Holy Mary, and a number of administrative buildings, including classrooms, a chapel, and a hostel for university students who have nowhere else to stay in town. It also has an extensive parking lot where one can see two to three buses with the name “Strathmore School” written boldly on them, among other staff vehicles. It also has a bicycle rack for members of the administrative staff who want to use it.

My talk to the students went great. I spent some time first with the junior boys who charmed me with many of their curious questions about me, my family, my work, my school, Nigeria, and my language, among many others. Then, at 11am, the senior boys gathered for a talk that I’d put together, tracing the trajectory of my life’s work from early child curiosities to adulthood, Fulbright, writing, teaching, linguistics, and my future plans. Their questions were equally substantive, but also very engaging. They knew of Nollywood and wanted to know if it reflected Nigerian cultural attitudes, they wanted to know my opinion on political issues, they wanted me to share ideas of how to choose a career, they wanted to know more about my blog, photography, writing, etc, and at least one person wondered whether I played basketball. Even after the talk, before I was whisked away to Mass, a few more of them came to me to ask a few more things that bothered them as teenagers trying to navigate the world of career and vocation.

I left the premises of the school by 1pm after a lunch that was both filling and refreshing. One of the many topics I had broached with the students and staff was the benefit of creativity, passion, and persistence. I referred to our publication of students’ creative work called The Sail, and hope that something similar will take root at Strathmore at some point in the future. My experience with the boys show that not only are they capable of doing this and more, they are also willing to try. This, after all, is the most exciting, most creatively energetic, time of their lives when most life skills are first conceived, then honed as time goes on. For students brought up in the legacy of science education, most of them will eventually focus on science and technology. What I made clear however is how experience has shown us that you can be a writer or a creative person in spite of what you study in school.

I’ve now returned to Lagos, and here’s a sentence from an email I received from the principal of the school, a kind and warm host, Mr. John Muthiora, who had been my guest at the CNN gala, and whose help made my visit possible, and pleasant: “Your visit excited quite a bit of interest in writing among the boys and teachers alike.” I know, for a fact, that this is a heartwarming response that will delight me for a very long time to come.

Piorities, Budgets & Decline

The recurring theme in almost all of the academic departments I visited during my trip to the US is the lack of adequate funding. Seeming profligacy from politicians at the capital is forcing academic departments to make drastic changes to their programs, or at best Faustian bargains, because of a budget deficit and accumulating debts at the state level. From foreign language departments to English departments in universities, from the international programs office to elementary schools to high schools in the state, the problem is the same: “tough decisions” are being made by politicians, and teachers are bearing the brunt of it. In most cases, it’s teachers in liberal arts departments.

It’s not just cuts and layoffs, and this doesn’t seem to be a new problem. I remember once worrying about it here a while ago. Whenever money gets low, teachers usually become the easy punching bag, the lowest hanging fruit, the go-to pinata for all that’s wrong with the state. It’s not a uniquely American problem either, but let’s stay on topic. From what I’ve heard from Republican politicians from the mid-term elections in 2010 to date, teachers are all that is wrong with the country. They earn too much, according to politicians, they spend too much time in “teacher lounges”, and they indoctrinate children with “liberal ideology”. Therefore, they should be laid off, reduced of remuneration, and checked in every way possible, leading to horrible working environments.

Now, a couple of courses in my old university will probably be dropped, at some point in time, due to low enrolments this year. This makes me very upset. As far as the university administrations are concerned, low enrolments equal a lack of relevance of said course, leading to reduced funding. I guess it makes sense, if the university is seen as a money-making venture. The more students sign up for a class, the more money that class brings to the department (and the university). But maybe there is a way to see the university differently: as a place for all kinds of knowledge, requiring full and standard funding by the authorities, notwithstanding who is or isn’t showing up to register for them. For instance, I don’t see a whole lot of students trooping in to register for Yorùbá, or Latin, or Greek, or German/French every year, except by some divine intervention or a charismatic teacher. But should this stop an investment in those courses as regular fixture of the foreign language department? Not if we believe in knowledge as being power in itself.

The problem is not an Illinois problem alone either. In this news feature, Indiana is put on the spot for the amount of teachers that has fled the state in recent months due to poor conditions of service. What can I say? Maybe the United States is trying to outdo us in Nigeria by treating public teachers equally as poorly.

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