ktravula – a travelogue!

A Tribute to Friendship & A Great Session

Chris and I seem to have  come a long way. We met after one of my first classes in the Fall semester, and even the first chance meeting was auspicious from the start. He has inquired how and where I had learnt to speak in English. Now, only a few weeks to my departure, I look at him and wonder how much fun we’ve had and how much I’ll miss the good times we shared from Missouri to Illinois, meeting different kinds of people from different parts of the world. What I’d miss the most are our weekly rendezvous as Starbucks sometimes in company of a few new friends, and sometimes alone, sharing wonders of the world. He’s an uncommon American – not that I have known many Americans on a personal level – but because he has an open-minded approach to the world. Could it be because he’s widely travelled, to Europe and to Mexico, or because being a descendant of immigrant German and Irish settlers, he already appreciates the benefits of diversity? I should marry him, and then both of us would be Nigerians and Americans at the same time :D.

At today’s last class which ends my teaching this semester, and – oh, this session too, there was a singing presentation that was attended by the journalists from the Alestle campus newspaper who asked me almost all questions under the sun. The song the students sang were Ise Agbe N’Ise Ile Wa, Ki Loo Le Se Olurun Mi, Osuba Re Ree O and one more which was a total surprise to me – an American remix of the Ise Agbe song. They had learnt and rehearsed the songs with the help of a student tutor who is a Yoruba student of a different department, and today, I was listening to the songs for the first time from my students, much impressed. I’ve got their permission to put it on YouTube and I will do so in a few hours.

What was emotional for me was reading their perception of the class in a final paper, and how it fit or surpassed their expectation for the semester when they signed up for it. Like it happened last semester, most of them had signed up for the class without a knowledge of what awaited them on the other side. What made them wait till the end, they said, was that their interest was sustained, and for that I’m happy. I hope the next professor of the subject is as lucky as me to have so many fun students as I did, and to have a great one year learning and sharing different experiences of the American life.

A Tribute to Friendship & A Great Session was published on April 20th, 2010, with the tags , , , , , under the Academic, Fun category. There are currently 1 comment on this article so far.

The Yoruba Talking Drum

I made this video during the cultural awareness week on the campus of the University of Ibadan in May 2009. The talking drum is a uniquely Yoruba percussion instrument that is peculiar because of its ability to mimic tonal patterns of actual human speech. In this video, I tried to engage the drummer in a little competition of abilities; he on the skill of drumming, and I on the skill of discerning. Enjoy.

I showed it to students in class today, along with some music videos of Lagbaja, once again to illustrate the blend of tradition and modernity in Nigerian contemporary music. I had a reaction to his appearance almost in a similar form to the one I had the first time I showed him in class. My students are supposedly aware of the concept of the masquerade, but apparently, not in this particular shape and form. Let me get back to you after the Mardi Gras, and I’ll let you know what I learn about how American masquerades really look like. I’m guessing that they are not as elaborate, or as “scary”. We also learnt about the concept of Abiku, how different it is from the scientifically verifiable child mortality, and how many children often used it as a weapon against abusive parents.

The Yoruba Talking Drum was published on February 9th, 2010, with the tags , , , , , , , under the Academic, adventures, Art, Fun, Observations category. There are currently 2 comments on this article so far.

Short Observations from Class

  • Most students tended to make hasty generalizations from what they read. The book A Mouth Sweeter Than Salt had very many interesting stories from the perspective of the then young and uneducated Toyin Falola and his upbringing, but most who read it tended to think that his story was true for everyone else, e.g. people not remembering their date of birth. This happened last semester as well. Maybe we should bring Chimamanda back.
  • Americans wrote the shortened form of the English word for mother as “Mom” instead of “Mum” as I have been used to. I didn’t know this before. I’ve always written it as Mum, until someone from class gently corrected me after I wrote it on the blackboard. Then I gently corrected her too, and voiced my reluctance to ever adapt to American English. They found it amusing.
  • One of my students said on Monday after submitting an assignment to write a summary of the life of Wole Soyinka that his mother had met the Nigerian Nobel Laureatte once before, and found him to be brilliant. “Cool,” I said.
  • Many students used Yoruban whenever they used Yoruba as an adjective in an English sentence, rather than the usual Yoruba, e.g Yoruban boy, Yoruban culture, instead of Yoruba culture. Yoruba boy etc. I noticed this in the scripts of my Fall semester students last year as well. Do British English people make this generalization as well?

Short Observations from Class was published on January 27th, 2010, with the tags , , , , , under the Academic, adventures, Fun category. There are currently 7 comments on this article so far.