ktravula – a travelogue!

At Lufasi Park, Lekki

There happens to be another place in Lagos, it turns out, other than the LCC that I’ve complained a lot about, and Inagbe Resorts, which I’ve strongly recommended, where one can experience nature in a relaxing environment either with a family picnic or a mere nature stroll around trees, green grass, animals, silence, and a clean fresh air. It’s an eco-park, one of the few in the country, where one can also interact with animals at close quarters. For those interested, it’s also a place to observe birds, particularly the bald eagle.

I was there on Good Friday, last week.

Sitting on about twenty acres of land, according to our guide, the Lufasi Park boasts of more than just a touristy venue for fun and games, but also a scenic and serene environment for relaxation and exercise. It’s name, Lufasi, is an acronym for Lagos Urban Forest and Animal Sanctuary Initiative.

The part about it being an animal sanctuary caught my attention. The idea of a place where rescued animals are taken care of seemed, for a moment, pretty foreign. I live, after all, in a country where stray dogs are caught, kept in small uncomfortable crates, transported over many kilometres, and sold for meat. This place not only has huge living areas for their rescued animals, the interaction of the minders and the animals also show how dedicated to the purpose the whole crew is. One of the monkeys, rescued from the forest as a baby, had developed such an emotional bond with one of its minders that it protested loudly whenever anyone came too close to her.

Except you were a little baby, that is.

Other animals in the premises were a tortoise that is over twenty years old, a civet cat, some baboons and a chimp, two donkeys, and three horses. There were also goats, sheep, and rabbits, housed in different parts of the park. Altogether, they give an idea of an idyllic setting where one can spend a nice time away from the bustles of Lagos and its earnest humans.

The “Ekki” trees in this park (botanical name: Liphira alata, also called “red ironwood”) are said to be the rarest of their kind left in the country and in the world, threatened by habitat loss.

The nature walk through the park takes under thirty minutes, through well-labelled routes, well-constructed walkways and a decent environment with clean air. The trail ends at the foot of a tree, the red iron wood, said to be the oldest in the park and one of the oldest in the country.

From here, the traveller can decide to keep going into the undergrowth, meandering through the remaining part of the Lekki forests towards to the ocean. Or, if he’s with his wife and two year-old kid, make his way back in time for lunch and some table tennis.

Along the way to and from the end point are ponds which, we were told, are being set up for fish farming and other future irrigation plans.

What else can I say that these pictures haven’t already said? The Lufasi Park is a great addition to the Lagos landscape, and a brilliant effort at conservation and animal sheltering and care. This is a laudable project of which we need even many more.

I’ll certainly be coming back soon. My son, certainly.

You can read more about the park on their website and on their twitter account.

On Khafi’s Video Blog

I spent some time, while in London a couple of weeks ago, on the video channel of Khafi Kareem, a brilliant multilingual video blogger who lives and works in the city. We talked about a number of things including our work at YorubaName.com. The video was published yesterday. See below.

You can see more videos on her YouTube channel calledÂ A Cup of Khafi

A Night in Wales: Pursuing The “English Not”

The curious linguist in me was on high alert during my tour of the Ysgol Glantaf Welsh-medium School in Cardiff where every subject but English itself is taught in Welsh. I spotted, quite early, that the word Ysgol in the name referred to “school” and was pronounced almost the same way (thanks to my guide Jeremy); that “alright” was used a lot in the classes, perhaps because of a lack of a common Welsh equivalent that could do the job better; and – as was called to my attention while at Radio Cymru – the word “lot” remained the same in English as in Welsh, to the consternation of many conservative Welsh speakers concerned about the dilution of the language. I picked up a few more new knowledge: the “f” sound is pronounced as “v” so “Glantaf” is actually [glantav], and whenever “d” is doubled as “dd”, the sound is the voiced dental fricative, as we have in “those” and “them”. And finally, to my delight, I realised that “Cymru”, the native word for “Wales” is pronounced more like “Camry.”

Walking around a few classes I was privileged to attend as an observer, one of the questions I put to the students was what language they would prefer to learn in if they had a choice. The overwhelming response was “Welsh”. This came not just from native Welsh students but also from students of English-speaking homes. “Why?” I followed up, now genuinely curious as to whether this was just a way to impress this visitor from Nigeria. One of the reasons I remember is that “it is easy to read and spell. The sounds correspond more to the spelling.” I remember this because it refers to one of the famous complaints about the nature of English, but also because it made me acknowledge the role of accessibility in the assessment of a language as a tool for learning. As a Nigerian with a life-long tussle with the English language and a fairly competent grasp of its grammar, the claim of a one-to-one correspondence between the spelling of Welsh and its pronunciation is a little curious (See: “Cymru” above), but the enthusiasm of the student was hard to ignore.

In the end, the idea of a thriving culture of mother tongue education in a language not English – in a British country, no less – impressed me more than anything else I came across in my ten days in Britain. From the days of the Treachery of the Blue Books to the period of the Welsh Not, the country of Wales seems to be back on its footing on the way to a truly vibrant cultural identity. See what happened when one British journalist mistakenly spited Welsh-medium education through a carelessly worded phrase!

In Nigeria, the policy of mother tongue education is scoffed at with one common argument, notable in its emptiness when applied to the Welsh example: “Using the mother tongue to educate a child in a country of so many languages will lead to a fractured and disunited country in the future, a drawback to true national development.” Well, the United Kingdom almost got fractured last year, and the Welsh weren’t the culprit! Scotland, which spearheaded the move, isn’t as big on its indigenous language use (with less than 2% of its population speaking Scottish Gaelic), and perhaps even fewer speaking Scots as a first language. Wikipedia says none of these languages has formal recognition nor is used as a medium of instruction in Scottish schools. So, there goes the argument for language as the only means of national integration!

I note, with sadness, the absence of any school in Nigeria today where any Nigerian language is used as a medium of instruction from start to finish. Nowhere where Physics, Chemistry, Mathematics, or any other technical discipline is taught in a Nigerian language. Could that have contributed to the 70.67% failure rate of English and Mathematics at last year’s year-end results? Your guess is as good as mine. But we have ourselves to blame for not looking for new ways to change a system that is obviously not working as expected. What is education, after all, if not a means of empowering the child?

A Night in Wales: Of Bilingualism in Britain

For a long time, my idea of a British Education, from the safe distance of post-colonial Nigeria, always came through the lens of English language. After all, there is a reason colonialism itself was conducted through the language, and why – over the many years after colonialism – we over here have yet to arrive at any other consensus language with which to conduct government and other communicative business. This changed in one day, last week, which I spent traveling around Cardiff, the Welsh capital, in company of Jeremy Grange, a reporter for the BBC on whose invitation I had arrived at the city to meet with a few people, and understand the development and use of Welsh as not just a medium of instruction and a language of governance, but also a language of education through which the small country has found and is expressing its individual identity in that entity called Great Britain.

From the bilingual signs at the Cardiff Central train station, the visitor is welcomed into the city with a reality that although this is still part of Britain, an old empire that once ran the globe with one language (and plenty boots on the ground), one was entering into another realm where the role of English is at best complementary. And not only were the bilingual signs everywhere, the first language on each sign was always Welsh, followed by English. For a foreigner coming from a place where – even with its over 521 languages – one would be hard pressed to find a bilingual sign on the streets, it was quite easy to be shocked and disoriented. This, as the mind reminds over and over, was part of the Great Britain. Yet one is asked to contemplate bilingualism as a normal fact of life.

Not too long ago, in the eighties Nigeria when I was growing up, it was commonplace to be punished in the schools for speaking in one’s native language within the school premises – a fact I realised, to my surprise, was once the case in Wales too in the 19th and early 20th Century. Referred to as the Welsh Not, wooden signs were placed on the necks of students who used the mother tongue within the school premises. This was transferred among the erring students until the end of the day when the last student with the sign on their neck got punished. In my 80s Nigeria, ALL the students who spoke Yorùbá (in my case) were punished, and this was done with the support of most parents. I’ve mentioned in many write-ups (see Speaking the Machine in this Farafina Issue) about how my father’s dramatic intervention in my classroom one day changed my perception of this policy and set me on this current path. But not many parents pushed back. The result today is a generation of people to whom the mother tongue is at best a tolerable nuisance and at worst a hinderance to their career success.

My day in Wales took me first to the Radio Cymru (and Radio Wales), which both broadcast to mostly Welsh audiences. The former does fully in Welsh, and I was able to meet a producer and some presenters, and to also listen in on a live show. The latter broadcasts in English to the same audience. I then went to a Welsh-medium high school Ysgol Gyfun Gymraeg Glantaf which is one of the largest of such schools in the country. It was a great time interacting with the students, both in classroom environments and at lunch with the principal, learning about their motivations, their experiences with the Welsh medium (especially those from English-speaking homes), and their hopes for the future. It was a wonderful and enlightening experience. In the evening, I had lunch with Jon Gower, a notable writer in the Welsh and English languages whose work and years of experience had a lot to teach me about the role of the mother tongue in asserting a cultural identity. I intend to write more about these experiences, in detail, in coming days.

For Túndé Kèláni at 68!

There’s probably nothing I can say about him today that hasn’t been said better by others, or that I haven’t said before on this blog. His work over many decades represent a significant guiding light to the little work I (and many others) do in defence of African languages and culture. Through filmmaking, he has helped place African culture on the global map, but more importantly, given us an alternative and authentic portrayal of ourselves (to ourselves and to the world). He is restless, dedicated, hardworking, meticulous, thorough, and he knows what he is doing.

The journey for me with his work started with Ó Le Kú (the film portrayal of the novel by Akínwùmí Ìṣọ̀lá which renewed my interest in the University of Ìbàdàn as a place of study), then Kòṣeégbé, and then Thunderbolt/Mágùn which premiered while I was an undergraduate at UI: a beautiful film of a cultural contact, trust, and repercussions. And then there was Ṣaworoidẹ, which embodied a nation’s pain and provided needed catharsis for a turbulent political time. There have been many more, like Yellow Card, and Agogo Èèwọ̀ and Campus Queen. Through his Mainframe Òpómúléró film house, he has challenged us, and led us, and surprised us, and guided us.

In those movies and more, TK as he is fondly called continues to define and redefine what it means to be an African filmmaker. More than the quality of his cinematography, dialogue, setting, and plot is his painstaking attention to casting. Through his work, we discovered the talents of actors like Lárìndé Akinlẹ̀yẹ (of blessed memory), Kúnlé Afọláyan, Kafilat Káfidípẹ̀, Lala Akindójú, among many others, placing them in roles where their artistic talents were best utilised in the furtherance of the story. His latest movie is an adaptation of a novel by Ọláyínká Egbokhare, dealing with an issue that can’t be discussed enough: sickle cell. He has also worked in drama (Lànkẹ́ Ọ̀mu, Yèèpà, among others).

He turns 68 today, Babátúndé Kèlání, a veteran movie director and producer, Ìkòyí ẹ̀ṣọ́ abì pelemọ l’ójú ogun. I wish him a happy birthday, and many more years in pursuit of African excellence in filmmaking.

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