The Jefferson Memorial in St. Louis comprises of more than just the Gateway Arch. Beneath the large steel architectural wonder that is the Arch is the Odyssey Theatre and the Museum of Westward Expansion. It was in the theatre where we saw the movie of the recreated account of the Lewis and Clark expedition. The Museum of Westward Expansion has real-life replicas of things used during the expedition, things obtained from the native Indians, guns, carriages, animals, maps, and animated robots dressed and speaking like the characters they represent.
The way the Indians lost their land to the invading Europeans was a rather curious one – quite similar to the African experience. The white Americans approached them with a prepared text from the President, informing the awed natives that their land now belonged to an entity called the United States of America, and that more white people would soon come to displace them, and settle them in new places. To seal the “treaty”, the natives were given silver and gold coins that were said to represent coming in peace. The truth of the matter however was that the natives didn’t understand what the invaders were saying. All they wanted was to live in peace, so they agreed to everything without making sense of it. They probably thought that their guests were just going to settle among them in peace. Big mistake. By the time they realized it, it was too late. The land belonged to someone else, and they had to go elsewhere hungry, homeless and dispersed from their environment and means of livelihood. How messed up is that?
The African experience was different only in the fact that we were not totally annihilated, and after a while, the land was given back – except of course in places like South Africa, Kenya, Zimbabwe and some parts of southern Africa. The Native American Indians were not so lucky. It must have been the presence of malaria that made Africa such an uninhabitable place for the “visitors”, that after about a hundred years of exploitation, the invaders were as willing to go away as the Africans were willing to have them leave. But here is the similarity: artifacts, mineral resources, labour and artworks belonging to the great kingdoms were – mostly forcibly – taken over and given to the King, the State or the President as the case may be. It ceased to belong to the original owners from the time they however unwittingly agreed to accept the new folks into their midst.
Real, real curious, that word: civilization and enlightenment. If you asked the people of the great old kingdom of Benin, they would gladly give back (European) “civilization” to have back the original casts of their famous artworks now residing in the British Museum in London or the people of Egypt the great bust of their famous kings now resting in German museums. It’s a time like this when this saying rings most true: “As long as the deer family is unable able tell its story, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.” – an old African saying.
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Exactly one year ago today, I had taken a much-needed trip to my old secondary school in Ibadan with a friend from Germany, and received, along with a certain exhilaration of returning to the compound after eleven years, a baptism of heartbreak at the level of the school’s undeserved decrepitude. The desks were bad and disfigured. The structures were falling apart and the school looked like it could use if just a little management. Going back down memory lane, I realized that it seemed to have always been that bad, but schooling there, we cared more about dealing with our academics and making good grades, than caring about how nice the structures looked, or how less than perfect they were compared to the other schools we knew. Thinking about it now, I also realize that we were not that much different from many of the state-run high schools all around the state and the country both in management, educational standard and aesthetics. There is something inherently slack about the way public schools are run in Nigeria. Education is free but not qualitative. It is definitely not worth the long term traumatic and demeaning effect of a poorly gained education. We will never be able to successfully measure how much of the bad management of structures and academic system from such schools have contributed to the continued slide of Nigeria on the list of civilized places in the world – if it was ever on the list in the first place.
Now, this is usually the first question that comes to my mind when I look at the structures of public schools in Nigeria today. I mean physical structures now, and not because it’s more important than curriculum or the total academic system, but because aesthetics is the first condition of sane, healthy learning. The question is: with the enormity of Nigeria’s billion dollar incomes from oil every year, why does education have to be underfunded? I can never get my head around this. As at today, the educational system is in a shambles. And from what I know, it has not always been like this. The people at the leadership positions went through a very organised system that catered for their educational, emotional, physical and even spiritual needs. They got scholarships. They travelled wide, and many of them studied abroad on the bill of the government which at the time was not even this rich. The case seems now like that of the selfish man who destroys a bridge as soon as he gets across it, so as to prevent others. In the universities today, research is almost non-existent, due to underfunding. Most of the students in the department of computer science either don’t have personal computers, or can’t use it within the campus because the University authorities believe that they overload the electricity supply. I couldn’t use a computer in my university for a long time because of this ridiculous argument. The country of Kenya is not half as rich as Nigeria, yet it seems to have a better attitude to education than Nigeria does. I can’t explain it. I don’t understand it. The more I think about it, the angrier I get, so I think I’ll stop here.
During my secondary school days, we always had to bring our own desks from home – made by whichever carpenters our parents chose. The school would not provide the desks. And for security, we also had to bring chains and locks to keep the desks and chairs fastened together so that they don’t get stolen, as they always inevitably did, sometimes even with the chains on them. I had a particularly peculiar misfortune of having always to go around the school looking for my chair or desk at the begining of every week. Someone was bound to have taken them for a ride out of our classrooms because they didn’t have doors. Some times, the search takes me all around the school, and I can’t count how many classes I missed because I was busy so early in the morning trying to locate my desk. I started writing my name on them, but one day, I discovered that writing my name with paint didn’t help at all. In fact, it made matters worse because the recurrent thief also happened to share my name and surname, as I discovered.
I did not grow up with computers around me. I am definitely not a first generation internet user. Much of the first creative things I wrote in my life were in long hand on rough sheets of paper, and later on an abandoned typewriter in my father’s lounge. Today there are kids growing up who probably never spent a day without getting on the computer. Whether they are smarter or more efficient than us is beyond me, but I do know that there is some kind of thrill in my current adaptation to a 24hour electronic cycle. The book is dead, I’ve heard, incredulously, and yesterday when I tried to read the current edition of Time magazine in print, I found a certain kind of lazy resistance, and some unexplainable wonder that they still make paper editions of those in this age of the internet. It must be why I spend so much time trying to to finish reading a book of just 300 pages. There’s definitely a sort of taking over by the internet, and I’m surprised to be on the train, considering that my first email address was just ten years ago.
Whenever I tell my American friends that I’ve been here for only two months, they immediately ask for my opinion on everything I’ve seen and experienced. And, instead of going with a previously standard response of “Oh it’s nothing. Except for the cold, it’s not much different here from where I’m from,” I now have to go into a long discussion on my very many notable observations, wonder, amazement, dread, lonesomeness and all, just to avoid a long stare or an awkward moment of uncomfortable silence that have now begun to attend any seemingly self-confident response. “It’s okay to feel lonely at times, and miss home, you know.” My classmate had said to me once, and he’s right. I should desist from this present stoic, often impersonal response to this distance, and really break down into my true status as a lost stranger in a distant land. Maybe only then can I find another part of myself necessary for the true experience of travelling. The problem is, it’s not working out for me. I wonder if there’s anything wrong with that.