Writing

Maiduguri 1977-1979

Getting to Maiduguri took most of three days. From St. Louis, Missouri, to London via Chicago was one. I spent the night at a Heath Row hotel where they sold beer from machines. The next morning I left for Nigeria, changing planes in Frankfurt. The Frankfurt airport got boring after the first couple of hours’ wait. I got to Kano in the middle of the night. No one else got off the plane. They were going on to Lagos. I was tired, thirsty and hungry from exposure to the restrained hospitality of Nigeria Airways’ flight. No one was around. I prepared to spend the night in the seemingly chairless lounge and try to make my connection to Maiduguri in the morning. My bags had made it so far, but I now saw them as a nuisance. A man turned up, then another, airport officials or custodians of some sort. I realized right away that either their English was very different from mine or they were speaking another language that had a lot of English words in it. Anyway, they wouldn’t let me say in the airport, and loaded me into a taxi with all my luggage to go off into the fragrant Kano night.

We arrived at a “guest house”, an ill-equipped, run-down hotel in town. I was directed to an upstairs room, given some help with my bags, and left alone. It was very still in this dead of night. No water would come from the tap. The lights didn’t work. It took me a while to find the toilet down the hall. I didn’t think the driver had understood that I wanted him to come get me in the morning. Fear of missing my flight and prolonging my lostness kept me awake the rest of the night in the warm, vaguely noisy dark. At least I was lying down. When I judged it was fully enough morning to go downstairs to wait, I dragged my bags down in two trips and stood among them in the courtyard where I thought I had been dropped off after last night’s ride.

No one drove in. There were some people wandering around, none looking obviously official or even knowledgeable. They occasionally glanced at me curiously. My thirst was becoming the thing uppermost on my mind. I decided the driver was not going to show up, or not in time for me to make my flight. I asked one of the other guests or lounge lizards or whatever they were how to call a taxi, realizing suddenly that I had no Nigerian money. This individual looked at me as though I were an apparition and kept going in his original direction. But after a few minutes, the man who turned out to be the innkeeper came up to me and in comprehensible English asked me what I needed. (It turns out there are several varieties of English, from Pidgin to Oxfordian, and a few hundred African languages spoken in Nigeria.)

We did some dealing in dollars and naira. I didn’t have a lot of control over the rate of exchange, though I knew the naira was at that time worth about a dollar eighty. He got me a taxi by yelling out into the street. The two men loaded my bags, I loaded myself, and we made it to the airport in a flash of sun on metal hoods and a swirl of colored hats on men’s heads. The driver brought my bags into the terminal, where I entered a scene that more resembled the delights of Hieronymous Bosch than a busy international airport in a major city.

There were no discernible lines, which are ‘queues’ in Nigerian English, as in English English. I don’t know why they know the word at all, since there are no referents for it in Nigeria. People were literally crawling over one another to get to the ticket counter/bag check area. The people working at the one counter were behind a wire screen. Mine was the only white face in the room, and there were very few women. This uniqueness conferred no practical advantage. Here, strength, pushiness, and money counted. I could see individuals attempting to bribe the clerks, possibly successfully. I gradually forced forward through the mob, dragging as much of my load as I could with me, praying the remainder would still be remaining when I came back for it.

Perhaps the clerk anticipated an even fatter reward than usual from a foreigner. Maybe he thought I was cute, with my swollen eyes and rumpled clothes. In any event, he turned his eyes from the gentleman alternately pleading with him and chastising him for not selling him a place on the next plane. I shoved my ticket under the grate protecting the personnel from the importunate crowd, many other hands similarly full trying to do the same thing. He deigned to take and regard mine.

“This is not an okay ticket.”

“The Registrar of the University of Maiduguri sent me this ticket from Maiduguri to my home in the United States. It says this morning’s flight.”

“It does not say ‘okay’.”

“I don’t understand. I thought if I had a ticket, I had a reservation.”

“No. Anyone can buy a ticket. You must report to the ticket agent before the flight and he will write ‘okay’ on your ticket. Then you will have a reserved seat.”

“I arrived in the middle of the night. No one was here. Can you write ‘okay’ on it for me now?”

“That would not be proper. I don’t know.”

Something told me I should not waste time begging this buy to do his job or to help me. Officiousness swells in proportion to the pettiness of a bureaucrat or official. I told him how much I was looking forward to my teaching job at the new university, and asked him if he knew Dahiru Bobbo, the Registrar. The latter is a powerful position in the administrative pantheon. (This was a fact I didn’t have to mention, as it is the case at all Nigerian campuses.) His expression told me he had begun to wonder what usefulness I might have as a contact.

“I wanted to go on to university, but it is hard to get in.”

“I’ve heard it is very difficult to find a place.”

“Yes. Perhaps you could help me at Maiduguri.”

“Let me write down my name and address for you, and we will keep in touch.” I did, and as he was reciprocating on a second sheet, I hurried my still-remaining bags from the back of the mob up to the desk, and he laboriously filled out the check stubs, opened the baggage gate, and pulled them in. When he gave me his address and returned my ticket, it had ‘okay’ written on it, and there was a boarding pass. We thanked each other and smiled a lot. He gestured that I should go into the waiting room. Rarely has a small, hot, uncomfortably full, loud room seemed so much like paradise.

Getting on the plane started with a foot race. The other passengers were familiar with the routine, so hit the tarmac running when we were released from the little room by an agent. They don’t usually give assigned seats on local flights, and everyone knows it is quite easy to sell more tickets than there are spaces, so that you don’t want to be among the last to get on a plane. We had all watched enviously as a white-garbed elder man and his retinue of wives received preferential treatment and were permitted to board separately and in advance. (Later I would learn that such personages were to be referred to s Al Hajis, whether one knew if they had been to Mecca or not. Their privilege was derived from their pocketbooks.) I was impressed with the speed and agility of some Nigerians much older, heavier, and more loaded down than I, but I didn’t slow down to admire them and boarded well in the middle of the bunch.

Coffee was served to a few people in flight. While I was so thirsty that I could have drunk from the dog’s dish at that moment, hot coffee would not have been myh top choice, had I been given any. I asked if I could have some water, and the attendant shrugged and said, “Of course not. There isn’t any.”

This reply was so incredible, I didn’t think of asking how they had made the coffee without water until he had gone on to the next row. I drank the lifeless stuff I’d been given, reminding myself ‘new rules, new rules’. Until you can figure out what they are, don’t get smart. So far, though, it had seemed that I’d come to a land of no rules, no rules.

We got off the ancient prop plane in Maiduguri in mid-afternoon. It was supremely hot. There were no water fountains in the tiny terminal, but there was a vendor of snacks and soft drinks. The only kind of the latter he happened to have was Maltex, a local favorite which I had never tasted before and hope never to again. It is like sweet dark beer or stout. It was, however, cold and wet. I think I had four of them before realizing the flavor was making me gag.

After waiting forever for the bags to come out (and, amazingly, they all did), I looked around for transportation. No one from the university seemed to be there to meet me. I had half expected it, from the formal tone of the letter awarding me my post and from my awareness of the importance of courtesy and position in West Africa. It turned out the University of Maiduguri had no fleet of vehicles, nor any car at anyone’s disposal at any time. The Registrar and the Vice Chancellor, when he was there, had personal drivers and cars paid for by the government. These were not for picking up faculty arriving at the airport, unless she happened to be your mistress.

I picked one of the taxi drivers demanding to render me service, and he loaded my weary bags into the trunk. The aiport is located outside town on the desolate road to Kano. Some small distance before one enters the town of Maiduguri, there is suddenly a profusion of green – the great winged-bean tree always full of cattle egrets due to the closenss of pasture, then towering neem trees marching past one another into town. The university is on the other side of town on Bama Road; the only main intersection before it is Baga Road, meandering north-south to Bama’s east-west. Maiduguri was a blur of ramshackle housing and shops, empty stretches, no noticeable downtown or city buildings. Nor would I ever find much of a center to it, other than the market, even though it is the capital of Borno State.

The campus was deserted. It was about four in the afternoon. We drove aimlessly around. It didn’t look much like a university, just a dirt path and lot, a few decrepit buildings. The driver did not know where to look for someone who would know what to do with me. Neither did I. Finally we found a human being moving around. It was Brahima, the Registrar’s secretary, a very good one to have found. After he was paid, the taxi driver asked me to take his picture, probably thinking my camera was a Polaroid. He said he would come see me to get the photo sometime, but I still have it.

Brahima took me in his car to the best hotel in town, the Lake Chad, where I would stay, it turned out, until my house was ready. He said there were other teaching staff there or on their way, likewise awaiting accommodation on campus. Brahima was very solicitous, the first of many Nigerian men whose graciousness would turn to relentless pressure for any form of social contact from my company to sexual favors to marriage. On this first day in his country, I was grateful for his help and courtesy. He looked official in his pressed outfit, white shirt with epaulets and pleated front and creased white slacks. Only his gaze, his eyes following divergent paths, marred his clean-cut appearance. In West Africa, visual handicaps and deformities are visibly a hundredfold more common than in any parts of the United States I have been in. Brahima’s wall eye had not prevented him from attaining the educational level and connections requisite for his current position, a valued, skilled job with a solid future. It didn’t inhibit his romantic impulses, either.

That night, after a rest and shower, I met him for dinner at the hotel. Then we drank beer in the lounge and listened to music. Major hotels in Nigeria usually offer a dual menu; Nigerian dish and English dish. You take your pick. I found out right away that my preference would be for the Nigerian at least ninety percent of the time, not because they didn’t know how to prepare English food or couldn’t obtain it (many of the ingredients are the same), but because next to Nigerian cuisine, British and American cooking are insipid, juiceless. Eventually, I found the same principle to apply to music and beer, as well: the imported varieties were just not as interesting.

The Military Government of Nigeria, then headed by General Olusegun Obasanjo, had recently expanded the public university system to nineteen campuses. The universities at Kbadan and Ife, Lagos, Ahmadu Bello University in Zaria, and Bayero University in Kano, remain the system’s jewels, but the vast generation of Nigerian youth born in the late 1950s and early 1960s (after independence) who had managed to scramble their way through secondary school had overwhelmed these and the other established undergraduate institutions. The late ‘70s, when I arrived to teach, saw an unprecedented demand for places in college. Thus, Maiduguri, Port Harcourt, Sokoto, Jos, and elsewhere saw the creation of new campuses. The University of Maiduguri was founded on the site of a regional technical and arts school, which was simply swallowed up in the process. Each of Nigeria’s constituent states then was to have a university. Maiduguri was the capital of Borno State, a large northern state located strategically in relation to the neighboring countries of Chad, Niger, and Cameroon. The political expedient of siting a campus in the governmental seat of each state did nothing to palliate a persistent problem in Nigerian internal relations: the greater numbers of youths qualified for university education emerging from southern districts in relation to northern ones, a by-product of great colonial impact on the south. Despite efforts to spread thin the population of southern students around the country’s campuses, to identify and encourage talented northerners as much as possible to attend university, and to represent every action and person as Nigerian first, regional, religious or ethnic second, the disparity in numbers and quality of preparation of the student body was painfully evident at Maiduguri and all campuses. The same could be said of the imbalance between men and women students – it was greater, in fact – but since this difference was unlikely to lead to civil war or even civil suit, the government paid it no attention.

This was my first full-time teaching position. I had just completed my doctorate. I considered myself fortunate to have a job in my field, given the surfeit of Ph.D.s in my generation of anthropologists. I was pleased to be back in Africa, though I had wondered as to the possible negative effect it could have on my career to be out of the U.S. academic job market for two or more years. The tremendous importance to me of my time in Senegal, both personally and professionally, had left me feeling a need to try to reciprocate. If I hadn’t the opportunity of contributing to the well-being of the Senegalese I had known, then I would give something to other Africans. All I had was my degree and whatever expertise it represented.

I was considerably better prepared than most fledgling Ph.D.s for the circumstances I would find at Maiduguri. However, it was a daunting environment, even for someone in my profession, accustomed to marginal situations. Doctoral programs in most scholarly fields do not train graduate students in teaching methods, anyway, let alone tell them how to teach in a foreign country. The new university had no catalogue, nor established curriculum. The roster of departments was roughly that decreed by British-Nigerian tradition, and the government had proceeded to staff them. The pool of Nigerian scholars was insufficient to fill all the new positions, so they had to look elsewhere: everywhere else, in fact. There were teaching personnel there from Poland, the Soviet Union, England, Sweden, Ireland, Trinidad-Tobago, Jamaica, Zaire, Ghana, Germany, Switzerland, Hong Kong. I was the only American at first, though I was told there had been another American woman who’d left after three weeks, unable to cope. Later, there would be a few others. The majority of instructional staff was nonetheless Nigerian, and the administrative staff were entirely so at the time.

The library resembled my high school library, except that it did not have as many volumes, and those it contained were piled rather than filed. There were no scholarly periodicals that I could see. If there was a classification system, a cryptographer rather than a librarian would be needed to decipher it. There was the usual range of classrooms, from cavernous halls to middle-sized rooms, except that there were no seminar rooms. The classrooms were equipped with blackboards. The furniture was old and broken. In some cases, doors and windows were also broken. The desert moved in every night, no matter how often the custodians swept, so when I had 7:00 or other early morning clawsses, we left our tracks in the sand on the floor when we entered the room, which meant that the difference between being indoors and outdoors was indefinite. When it was the harmattan season, the wind blew the desert into our ears and nostrils. There was no air conditioning. The electricity was frequently off, anyway. When the lights went out during an evening class, students were known to berate lecurers who were unable to continue speaking without their notes. “Lectu’ no de fo’ head!” – pidgin for, “The lecture isn’t in his/her head.” (She doesn’t really know the material.)

The office of the Department of Social Sciences, Management and Law, my department, was one room with a mimeograph machine and a secretary/clerk we shared with other units. This Hausa man mainly ran the mimeo and ran errands. There was little telephone use to speak of, nor much in the way of files. The head of the department, a Polish woman named Barbara Bartoszewicz, was a sociologist. Her English was execrable. I was the only anthropologist. I was also the only non-Pole who ever tried to say her last name. The curriculum was dominated by sociology, the other social sciences besides anthro having been placed into their own departments (Economics, Political Science). The configuration was to change during my tenure there, but it never made any disciplinary sense. Administration of the department consisted of frequent, interminable meetings often not attended by its head. These meetings concerned faculty course and room assignments, scheduling, hours of class and tutorial, office hours (though no one observed any), and a litany of complaints about the university, other departments, individual students, staff or faculty, and people’s personal difficulties and desires. We always seemed to start from zero and cover the same territory, never reaching a secure enough place to begin from the next time.

My office and office mate(s) changed asymptotically. No one office was much better appointed than another, though some locations were preferable to others. This was the second year of operation of the university qua university, so those faculty members who’d been there since the beginning had managed to accumulate a few scholarly materials and records. In general, however, there was little of this in evidence in their offices. People kept their personal libraries at home. Most of the offices were so ill-equipped as to have no filing cabinets or bookshelves, in any case. I certainly had very little with me, though I had had the sense to stuff my bags with as many books and notes as they could hold, rather than with clothing or other supplies I could obtain in Nigeria. So changing offices was not the ordeal it usually is in an academic environment. There was a typewriter available to me most of the time, mainly because not very many faculty or staff knew how to use it. Once the others learned of my typing skill, not to mention my generous nature, I had continually to fend off pleas to apply it to their work.

The identity of my office mate was a larger issue. My male colleagues could be classified as follows: a. those who secretly or openly wanted me to get in bed with them, b. those who wanted me to do their work for them, including typing, thinking, organizing, writing, or political maneuvering, c. those who wanted me to be their “sister” to whom they could confide their nasty or silly doings with the “girls” (women students). In the case of the Europeans, there was an additional category, d. those who wanted to whine about how awful Nigeria was and make venomous remarks about the Nigerians, from their maids to their students and associates. Even those few Europeans who became sexually involved with local men or women could not conceal their bigotry. What was truly amazing was that, in most cases, their situation in Nigeria was heavenly compared to what they had back home in Poland or Hungary. Here, there was no Party or secret police keeping track of their every word and movement. Here, they could buy staples and even some luxuries without waiting in a three-hour queue. Here, they could have a car and travel wherever they liked. They could join the Maiduguri Club and get loaded every night, if they liked. Most of them did that.

The women I knew included my department head, mentioned above, a Polish economist whose English was even worse than Barbara’s, a Nigerian sociologist from Calabar who became a friend, one or two faculty wives, and the ten or eleven students who were in some of my classes. I was eventually to form my closest female friendship with my student assistant, Julia Hamalai. My first residence was a house I shared with the economist, Teresa Heda. We communicated in French a good deal of the time because we couldn’t understand each other using English. Students came to complain to me frequently about her language problems. They had enough trouble with my American accent at first (and I with their Nigerian ones)! I couldn’t imagine how she could ever have thought she could actually teach in a language she couldn’t use effectively enough to buy bread.

Teresa and I got along fine. Her friends were all European professionals living in the town or European university people. They sometimes included me in their parties or conversations, but they were so racist I didn’t enjoy being around them. There were enough Poles in the area that Teresa and Barbara had lots of opportunities to speak their language; when they got together at the house, I’d usually slip out after a while so they wouldn’t feel they had to speak English. Some of the Europeans seemed starved for companionship and discussion. Perhaps they spent so much time with such a tiny circle of white friends that they were actually lonely and in need of stimulation. One man in particular, a Hungarian physician who later treated my first attack of malaria, wanted so badly to talk that he would follow me around the house as I tried to escape his company, even into my bedroom, talking and talking. Sometimes this would be at one o’clock in the morning, after their party, and he would be drunk, still drinking and smoking like a volcano, but I nev er thought he was in my bedroom for any purpose other than to talk. Teresa might have passed out or gone out, leaving me alone. I could be sitting on the bed in my nightgown, openly reading and yawning and looking at my watch, and he would be yawing back and forth, gesticulating with his cigarette and drink, talking. Janiscz (Yanish) liked to tell long, tedious stories in his weird English about the stupidity, venality, and carelessness of all the Nigerian staff at the private hospital where he worked in town. Some of these stories were truly terrifying, but most were boring and exaggerated like the man himself.

The approaches to pedagogy and to the administrative activities entailed by it are different in Nigeria from those we are used to in the U.S.A. Of course, they are different in England and France and Japan and Germany, too, but somehow the Nigerian ones seemed more different. Many features are at first recognizable, so you think you know what you’re dealing with. Grades are percentile, for instance. Students graduate with firsts and seconds, etc., as in Britain. That was vaguely familiar. The instructor stands in front of the class, who are sitting. Instructors are ranked into grades of Lecturer, Reader, and Professor – still understandable, if different. Students are evaluated through exams. Okay, I can do that.
Power, in its relative and absolute forms, is a theme in all university contexts with which I am familiar. At Maiduguri, it was the central theme. I have mentioned the extent of authority held by the Registrar – over admissions, faculty affairs, budgeting and financial planning, physical plant and resources, and, perhaps least important of all, registration of students and keeping of their records. Student inscription in courses was not the complicated affair it has become at giant universities in the U.S. It literally could not have been, because there wasn’t a computer or Xerox machine on campus. There may have been none in the town, or in all of northern Nigeria, though it was the late seventies. The airlines didn’t have them; they seemed to maintain no data at all by any means. Government offices didn’t have them. Utility offices didn’t have them.

In any case, I do not know how the Registrar’s authority expanded from what would normally be considered its proper domain to include the routine activities of all other elements of campus and extraordinary events such as hiring and firing. Heads of departments and deans of faculties (the equivalent of our school or college) were also treated with feudal obsequiousness y their subordinates. There was a great deal of competition for resources, which were of course scarce, up to and including allegiances with peers or inferiors and associations with females. The administration and its staff were constantly pitted in a power struggle with the faculty, as is the case at American universities. In Nigeria, however, the administration represents the federal government, which has the power to order its employees to teach what and how it wants, to confine them to campus or institute curfews in emergencies, and so on. This may not sound like a serious problem to you, nor an infringement of a basic liberty, but in the context of military rule of a conflict-, inequity- and debt-ridden society, it becomes one. That is to say, emergencies are routine. Specifically, during my stint at Maiduguri, there were two serious civil disturbances emanating from the universities. They were reactions to conditions or events outside campus, and led to student strikes, university closure, and lengthy hostilities. The associated violence and stupidity that rises out of fear still haunt me. The strikes were the lightning rod through which all the tensions at play in the university passed, and as they are the focus of this essay, I will return to them shortly.

Scheduling classes seemed to be a matter of serendipity rather than regularity. Courses could start and end almost any time during the semester, as long as the exam was held at the time specified during exam week. You could meet your class as few or as many hours during a given week as you liked, as long as the students ended up with the right number of hours of class and tutorial per credit hour. I never understood why anyone would want to do things this way, especially in an atmosphere of micro-management of most of the detail of people’s lives and with an administrative hierarchy heavily loaded with control freaks. Perhaps time and timing were not considered significant enough for the administration to want to regulate. Perhaps this was another arcane British custom, one reflecting the effort of the bourgeoisie schooling alongside the sons of the landed gentry to imitate the leisurely approach of the latter to life.
Exams themselves were rigidly scheduled at the beginning of each term, and the examination question papers were expected to be turned in to the administration sometime during the second week, to be locked up in the vault. The officer responsible for this procedure, Mrs. Adebisi, was inflexible as to the date of this collection, which seemed to me absurd, in light of the processual nature of university teaching. I was the only one who thought of it in this way, however, and hence was wrong. The other faculty regarded it as natural that one should know early on in any given course exactly what the students would get from it, down to the last period punctuating their notebooks. Classroom interactions or outside research or personal input from students could not be permitted to influence the content or order of lectures, which were the core of the course, perhaps the whole apple. Some instructors assigned few or no texts or readings; they read or recited their lectures and expected the students to learn them more or less by heart. Answers to essay questions I received frequently contained after page of memorized lecture notes, and students were surprised when I downgraded them for it. Creative, critical, or independent thought were believed to develop from a firm foundation of rote imprinting of the instructor’s delivered statements. Thus, faculty were also assumed to know to the last syllable what they were going to say in class throughout the quarter. Any substantive changes one made during a course would be dearly paid for by the students, unless one presciently included them in the exam paper.

Another striking assumption underlying the administration of exams in this way was that there would be no emergencies emanting from extra-curricular sources to truncate or otherwise alter the teaching/learning experience. This might be a good assumption in other milieux, but not in West Africa in the modern period. In fact, the likelihood of a disruption of the federal government itself was pretty high, and if such a disruption took place, it would affect everything the military government was in control of, which was nearly everything. The physical environment of the university was equally unstable – water and power outages were common, and, though these rarely shut down offices or class meetings, they prevented students from studying, made people sick and exhausted, and caused instructors to miss class because they were at the appropriate utility office futilely begging some bureaucrat to turn their pipes or power back on. I prepared many a lecture by candlelight, sweating and swatting mosquitoes in my unwashed clothing, the steamy air thick with toilet stench. Then there were natural disasters, such as locust invasions and rainy-season floods that interfered with movement. Of course, people were constantly sick and indisposed from the ever-present malaria, hepatitis, conjunctivitis, tooth and gum disease, amoebic dysentery, other parasite-caused diarrhea, and so on. Infrequent outbreaks of cholera and encephalitis sent the student health center into a frenzy of vaccination, their supply of vaccine usually running out long before the supply of patients. This was not the full set of student health problems. Their living conditions in the dormitories were unhygienic. Like their American counterparts, Nigerian students’ knowledge of precautions against pregnancy or sexually transmitted diseases was nil, so those few who were able to be sexually active sometimes contracted diseases or experienced unwanted pregnancies. One of my students nearly bled to death from a self-induced abortion.

Threats to the comfort and security of many of the students derived from the social relations and history of the community and region. The long-established hegemony of the Husa and Fulani nations throughout the northern region, and of the Kanuri civilization in the eatern part of it where Maiduguri is, led eventually to the prevalence of these languages in commerce, politics, and society. Northerners not ethnic Hausas, Fulanis, or Kanuris, and whose mother tongues were something else, nonetheless spoke at least Hausa as a second language and usually one or both of the others, too. The minority ethnies still hold their own in their original territories, but grumblingly accede to the cultural dominance of the more powerful groups. The handful of Christians in the north use the Arabic word to address and refer to their Christian God, Allah, unconsciously attesting to the entrenchment of Islam in their lives, as well as in those of Muslims. This history and pattern of relations makes southern Nigerians foreigners in their own country when they are in the north. Northerners sometimes even address or refer to southern Nigerians as bature, meaning ‘English speaker’ or more generally, ‘European’, in Hausa, or nasara, in Kanuri, a similar designation.

Southern men students could expect there to be the occasional incident when they were shopping or socializing in the town, an incident involving a husband, father, or brother suspicious of all strange men, especially non-Muslims. I heard many stories of southern men beaten by gangs of father, brothers, cousins of townswomen they had gazed upon a moment too long or too fervently. We heard of attacks on southerners by groups of local men for no apparent reason. The civil war of 1967 (the failed Biafran secession movement) and related pogroms against Ibos in the north are still fresh in most people’s minds, even those who were children at the time. Sporadic religiously-motivated violence in the area has not dulled the memory of inter-ethnic conflict. Southerners are handicapped by not speaking Hausa, Fulani or Kanuri, unless they give up some of their study time to learn. (My Hausa got to be much better than that of the majority of my southern students.) This was a serious practical disadvantage: they were often left out of conversations, they could be cheated at the market, they might not be able to communicate with custodians, taxi drivers, prostitutes, or other providers of services.

Given these circumstances, it was difficult for me to see how anyone intended to administer a university, let alone do so with such hide-bound adherence to the received tradition of rules and restrictions. Nevertheless, students matriculated, attended clasws regularly, sat for exams, and were graded accordingly. It was the way in which they were graded that surprised me, at least until I got used to it. A final grade of seventy percent represented something like an A plus; grades in the fifties and forties were routinely awarded, thirties were common, and not passing. Students frequently complained to me that their professors, especially the Nigerians, did not want to “help” them. One young man described the situation thus: once a Nigerian gets to the top of the house, he kicks the ladder out from behind him so no one else can follow.

I cannot compare the two student strikes to each other, nor to anything else in my experience. Each was a uniquely horrific event, with its own specific determinants and effects. While I had seen plenty of violence in Senegal – mostly domestic, street and bush fighting, and mob justice for thieves – and seen or participated in anti-war and civil rights demonstrations in the U.S. that the police or National Guard used violence to contain, I had never known up close the terrifying violence a state can unleash upon its citizens. It seemed like war.

In April of 1978, the Federal Government raised the price of meals in the student cafeterias throughout the university system. Despite Nigeria’s income from sales of crude petroleum, forest products, other raw materials, and agricultural commodities, the state was behind in its payments on the debt it owes to lender nations like the U.S., the World Bank, the African Development Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and heavily over-invested in construction and ‘development’ projects. Imports of everything from industrial machinery, household goods and furniture, electronics, clothing, food (even staples that Nigerians used to provide for themselves), consumer items such as pre-recorded cassettes, cigarettes and alcohol, to luxury automobiles (all automobiles, in fact) far out-weighed the oil revenues, especially if you figured in the salaries, side benefits, and chiseling of the ruling elite. Everyone talked about how money was siphoned off at every stage of the petroleum production process by anyone having authority over any of it – into Swiss bank accounts, real estate purchases (often overseas), local accounts, palatial residence, and Eton educations. (Of course, the ultimate owners of the process itself – the cartel or conglomerate that owns the rigs, the oil companies, the refineries, the distribution monopoly – were not Nigerian, so their riches were not regarded as illegitimately got, even though the oil-bearing land or sea was not theirs.) The military rulers of the moment and their sycophants were described as “taking their turn to chop” (‘eat’ in Pidgin). That is, coups were instigated not by a revolutionary fervor but by the fear on the part of junior officers that by the time they got to be generals, the spoils would be gone.

Education was said to be universal and free in Nigeria, including higher education, if you were qualified. That meant the student paid no tuition, only fees and expenses. This would be a wonderful deal to the average American student who was able to pass the qualifying exams. In Nigeria, however, most high school students who are college-bound grow up in large families with limited incomes. Students from villages are accuswtomed to studying after their work in field, forge, fishery or family is done. Even middle-class urban families find it hard to spare a child to university, harder still to pay the fees and expenses. If that child must attend school at a distant campus, the family must pay the additional cost of transportation. A fee raise of so much as a kobo (two cents) caries the cost of education beyond the capability of the family, in many cases. The average Nigerian household spends all of their income on necessities, with nothing left over for emergencies or luxuries. Lunch money is serious business for people in such circumstances.

So, the cost of eating in the cafeterias went up. The initial concerted outcry diminished to a series of squeals and squawks on various campuses as the anguished and rebellious students pondered what to do. Protest is not safe in a country governed by the military, but the national student association began to organize and raise their voices. At Maiduguri, the officers of the student governing organization tried to keep in touch with their counterparts on other campuses and with the national officers, which was difficult, considering the dilapidated state of the telephone system in that part of the country, the deteriorating finances of the students themselves, and their lack of access to information. There were meetings all the time, some hushed, some loud and angry. Occasionally faculty were brought in on the discussions, more often not, since faculty were generally categorized as flacks for the administration, and, of course, the administration was the government. And the government was the army.

Classes went on, but the students had begun to talk of a general strike. Even Maiduguri, backwater campus that it was, seemed to tremble like an animal anticipating an earthquake. There were small demonstrations elsewhere, then larger ones, as the students grew angrier and bolder. Until the Lagos protest, there was no violence. When the students marched through Lagos, the army met them and opened fire. One boy (I use the terminology of the time and place, in which any unmarried person of whatever age is still a girl or boy) was killed and several students injured. I don’t know whether any soldiers were harmed by the rocks and sticks the students were throwing.

The students’ reaction to this event was a mixture of fear and fury. Mostly, they had not realized their lives would be at stake in this struggle over a few naira, which, so far as they could see, meant nothing to the central government and everything to them and their families. The Nigerian Student Association called for a strike: students were not to go to class, nor permit any resistors to attend. The student president and, I think, one of their other officers were detained in the capital, with no charge or bail. Every campus chapter protested; some parents and a few other citizens declaimed the government’s course of action, but there was no open criticism of the government in the press or public forums. University officialdom supported the government’s use of force. The faculty were commanded to continue teaching, students threatened with expulsion if they did not return to class. Waiting was the worst part.

During most of the long siege, I was still living in the house I shared with Teresa on campus. I had engaged Julia Hamalai, a political science major, as a research assistant; she came highly recommended by other students and faculty, had the requisite language skills and knowledge of the local area, and was a thoroughly nice person. We were just beginning to organize my research project on the language acquisition and socialization pattern of Hausa children. I was training her in interviewing techniques, speech elicitation, use of tape recorders and mikes, and the transcription form I wanted her to use (a modified version of the International Phonetic Alphabet). Later, we would code the data she had transcribed. For now, it was enough that she understand a little of the methodology, the objectives and the issues connected with this kind of research. She spent a lot of time at the house, sometimes working late enough that she or I didn’t want her to have to go back to the dorm, so she would spend the night.

When the strike was first called, I didn’t realize how serious the situation was going to get. Probably no one did. But the government would not make any concession to the students’ demand that the fee raise be rescinded, nor would the students give up their determination to be conciliated. The weather was changing, the winter’s harmattan retreating, that choking lung-full of sand, not beach sand, caressed by waves, but desert grit, pounded and flung by wind against rock on its way to your nasal passages. Before the first rains, it would get very hot. I had to discard my “spring theory” of revolution, which may have been appropriate for students in Paris in May, but could not possibly apply to the sahel of West Africa, where spring is not invigorating or rejuvenating, merely an exchange of one kind of heat for another.

We instructors continued to show up for our classes, sit for a while with the one or two students who stubbornly or courageously came, braving the insults of their striking classmates. A few of us who were close to the students and grieved their losses tried to prevail with the administration to intercede with the central government. This got us into a lot of trouble. The Department of Social Sciences, Management and Law, my department, was the most radical department, arguing with the Vice-Chancellor at the interminable meetings he called to find out what we knew and enlist our help in tricking, frightening or punishing the students so that they would go back to school. Our department head said nothing at these meetings, but Rosie Ekpenyong, my sociologist friend, and Igun, Louden, and I all spoke out against the heavy-handed terrorism the military called rule, of which the university administration approved. Whenever I spoke, I was reminded sternly or sarcastically of my foreigner status by the administrators, as though that in itself rendered suspicious anything I did or said. The Vice-Chancellor simply insulted or berated the others, depending on his mood.
The strike did not last long because the government announced it was shutting down the universities until the students stopped their protest and agreed to return to class. At first, I thought this was a form of capitulation, what the students had been trying to provoke, but I was wrong. Shutting down campus meant clearing the students out and closing the doors behind them. To do this, army troop transports were driven through the main gate and parked. I was working at home on the campus grounds with Julia when this event took place, and we heard commotion from the direction of the main campus that drew us outside. We ran toward the noise. I watched from a distance as armed soldiers climbed out of the trucks and began marching on the rapidly forming but badly disorganized gaggle of boys with sticks who opposed them. I hurried Julia back to the house, the sounds of shots cracking the glassy sky into shards of a sun that seemed too brightly out of place.

One of my students was already in the house, having run ahead of the rest, Dedan Lot. He literally cowered in a chair in my living room, looking young and frail in his hand-me-down slacks from a much larger brother. He gracefully apologized for having entered in my absence, and added something to the effect that he wasn’t one of the bold and brave ones to go up against bullets with stones. I said, “Of course not, you don’t have to do that,” or some such inanity, but he obviously believed he was letting his fellows down. He was not the only one who tried to escape. Several others drifted into the house, and we could see students running in all directions as the military swept them from the dorms and open areas.

Most of them had nowhere to go. The closure of the university meant they had to go home, but this was not necessarily as painless as it might be for you or me. Driven from their rooms on campus, they had few alternatives; local accommodations were very limited, relatively costly – and for how long? Some could stay with friends in town. Those from towns nearby could get rides. Those from farther away would have to spend money on train or car, money that had been destined for that very expense at the end of the academic year and which would not now be available should they have the chance of returning to finish the term. It became difficult to find transportation at all. The train station was clogged for days.

Dedan finally left, later that day, to head for his village a few hours’ drive away, still in the north. He probably walked. The others went their ways. I was there with Julia. I don’t know where Teresa was; the student strike had been one long party for her, though we were supposed to stick close to campus and to pretend to show up for class. Julia said she did not want to go home to Mubi, that she wanted to stay and help me with my research. The eldest of eight, and female, her life when at home consisted of a great deal of cooking, child care, marketing and other errands, elderly relative care, washing, and cleaning. Her parents were wonderful people, having encouraged her to get as much schooling as she could handle, but they were not well off. I often pictured her as a young schoolgirl, studying late at night or early in the morning by a candle or lantern, carefully turning pages so as not to disturb sleeping siblings. She was certainly a reader, dedicating all her time to romance novels and historical fiction when she wasn’t reading course materials. The serious, brilliant young woman I knew was probably destined to be married to a much older relative or townsman of her father, an educated ornament in a prosperous household, where she would do a little less work than most Nigerian wives and perhaps have some control over the number of her children.

I made a big mistake. I went to see the Registrar to tell him Julia would be staying with me during the hiatus, however long. Dahiru Bobbo was a large man, imposing in his white robes, with massive features and a loud, crisp voice.
“You cannot do that,” he said baldly, after we had dispensed with the formulaic Hausa greetings.

“Why not?”

“The students are to be vacated from the grounds of the university, without exception.”

“But she will be in my house under my supervision.”

“It is not your house.” Mr. Bobbo did not bother to be confusingly indirect, in the manner of many Nigerians when arguing a point.

“I do not understand. I know I’m just renting the house from the university, but Julia is helping me with some research I’m doing independently,” I stammered.

“That is not the point. You are disobeying an administrative and governmental edict. You are very ill-advised to pursue this matter any further.” We went over the same territory a few more times. I may have said something to the effect that not only did the students have no rights in their own country, but the faculty had none either. He said something about foreign subversives and asked if I was working for the C.I.A. This was not funny for me to hear; not only had he got my politics completely wrong, but intelligence operatives try to recruit anthropologists fairly often, sometimes successfully, and it always ruins the anthropologists’ reputations with their colleagues, most of whom find secretive political machinations in other people’s countries despicable.

Basically, it ended when he threw me out of his office. I was so angry tears came to my eyes, and I walked back to the house in a stupor of fury. Julia was not surprised when I told her what had happened. She also didn’t think Bobbo or anyone else would bother to check on what I did next, confident that no faculty underling would oppose them, so I did nothing. She remained. It may have been their arrogance that left her there untampered with, but I think it could also have been the case that my significance and that of our quarrel were smaller in Mr. Bobbo’s mind than in my own, and he forgot about me two minutes after I walked out of his crepuscular office, be-gloomed by other crises, other personalities.

The days dragged on into the pre-summer heat. The campus had b een emptied of life, except for what little of it went on in faculty and staff quarters and in the administration building. My friends and associates were bored out of their minds, especially since we were in theory observing a curfew and a restriction to town. Many would have liked to use this unexpected break for tourism, visiting family elsewhere, or travel to obtain things locally unavailable. Julia and I, sometimes accompanied by my boyfriend Atano Osima (“Duke”), carried on with our research, I studied Hausa, and once a handful of us sneaked out of town for a trip to Lake Chad and the hamlet of Baga. We chedked in with the police when we got to Baga, which is a smart thing to do in any Nigerian border town, and as we were leaving, a couple of police dragged in a wild-eyed boy who looked to be thirteen or fourteen. They said something to the sergeant we’d been talking to, and hauled him behind the counter and started beating and kicking him viciously on the grubby floor where he cowered trying to protect his head. I wanted to do something, but my friends pulled me out, his terrified screams of agony following us to the Land Rover that would take us to the shore of the lake. We didn’t know if he’d been accused of theft, perhaps, or if he was one of the many refugees pouring out of war-plagued Chad and opportunity-less Niger and Cameroon. I didn’t think any of the likely crimes he could have committed should have earned him the punishment of being beaten to death.

In the interim, negotiations took place between student representatives and the military government. The students’ position was unchanged, though, as they considered the possibility of not completing this year of school and having to repeat it or never finish their degrees, their willingness to cling to it eroded. Eventually, the government announced it would open the universities to all who would sign an oath renouncing their previous actions and swearing no more to resist the edict or refuse to attend class. Students began to slink back to campus, and we were given a date on which to resume classes. The term was extended a month, into July, so our summer vacations were truncated. Even so, many hours of class had been lost that could not be recouped, and we all began tearing at our syllabi and lecture notes like jackals at the lion’s kill.

Julia stayed with me, at the house I shared with Teresa, and moved with me to Gwangé District when my house in town was finally ready in the early summer. Duke and some of the other Nigerian faculty had already done the same, when the university had made available to them houses it had acquired in town for precisely that purpose. Few of the Europeans wanted to live in town; it was too African. The rent was extremely reasonable, and I got a big, new Muslim-style house, which is to say it had a main house with two bedrooms, bathroom, living room, garage, and kitchen next to the back porch, then backed into a walled compound or yard beyond which was another gated wall leading to four bedrooms opening onto a walk and ending up at an enclosed latrine and shower; these little rooms were called “boys’ quarters” or “wives’ rooms” depending on whether the speaker was referring to the typical colonial or the typical Muslim situation of the householder. Julia moved into one of these rooms, then Ahmadu, a young Gambian man I had befriended who helped me with the yard, and then two of my students, both men I liked and trusted. One of them, William Park, works in the Nigerian Consulate in London today, and we are in touch by correspondence. The house was equipped with plumbing and electric wiring; occasionally, these even worked to bring water and electricity to us. Desert mice and town rats made their way in under the doors.

The students were utterly demoralized by the failure of their experiment in civil protest. They grudgingly signed the oath and tried to make sense of the course materials they’d received so long ago. I know where some of them got the money to make it back to school: from me and a few other sympathetic, non-poor people, but the rest must have had to do some deep digging and humble begging for funds. The strike was a disaster for them and their families.
The following year’s disturbance was far worse. It started with the national college entrance examinations. These resulted in far fewer placements for applicants from the north than from the south; the pool of the latter was larger, but northern people felt discriminated against anyway, and perhaps they had been. In a sense, all tests are discriminatory and institutionalize minor pre-existing differences in any diverse population. The first reactive disruption was at Ahmadu Bello University in Kano. It purported to be a question of governance. A group of Muslim students, offended by the supposed use of alcohol at a fraternity house where a more-or-less public student function was being held, were reported to have started a fire at the home of a dean who had proclaimed the presence of beer innocent. Much of the house burned down. No one was injured. The apparently unrelated incident sparked a general conflagration of fighting between groups of Muslim and non-Muslim students at northern campuses and a series of complaints regarding the prevalence of non-Muslim standards and values in the behavior codes of Nigerian universities, such as the acceptance of forbidden alcohol.

Legal and juridical issues were blazing hot at that time. The Nigerian assembly was trying to formalize its new constitution, loosely a mixture of American constitutional and English common law, mortared in the alembic of African democratic socialist language. The absence of theocratic rhetoric, more specifically Islamic precept, was regarded by most Muslims and perhaps northerners in general as a denigration of the value of the shari’a system of courts, which had been in place for hundreds of years in some areas. Any other form of judiciary was considered alien, its imposition imperial, and the impending effect was incendiary. Southerners, on the other hand, feared the justice of the shari’a, and believed Islamic magistrates should have no jurisdiction over them, even if they happened to be living, working, or passing through a predominantly Muslim community. The incipient war over the constitution versus the shari’a would be eagerly waged by them, as well. Could there be a nation of two laws, mutually hostile to one another? Thus, the superficially simple matter of governance of university student social rules, that is to say, who determines what they shall be, was intertwined with larger problems.

The conflation of these inflammatory issues led to violence on campus after campus. At Maiduguri, the radical northerners went on strike, following the example of other university Muslim groups. They proceeded to influence the other students to take their side, by use of force. Students armed with canes, sticks, and knives patrolled outside classrooms to prevent others from coming to class. Even a female student was caned by a group of guys as she tried to leave the women’s dormitory compound, which was fenced off from the men’s. There were plenty of dissenters among the northern and Muslim students, who disagreed with the philosophical position that the standards of a locality should dictate those of an institution within it and/or with the methods of enforcement their comrades were using. Most of the students were terrified and worried that, as the situation escalated on the national level, the government would take a punitive position toward all. If there were any personal enmities involved, I was unaware of them. These students had been on friendly terms in and out of class up to the day the strike was called. They attended the same club meetings and parties, at least some of the Muslim students happily drinking beer alongside the non-Muslims. The latter seemed to sympathize with the northern complaint of under-representation. They seemed to respect each other’s religious duties and attitudes.

My house became a refugee camp, first for students who’d been chased by others and were afraid to go back to their rooms, then for any who had nowhere to go when the government closed the campuses again. Willie Park’s girlfriend more or less moved in with him. Idok Udofia, my other student in residence, and Amadu Njie both had a series of guests and roommates. Julia’s friend Caro stayed with her for quite some time. One or two people were sleeping on my couch or living room floor for some ten days. It placed heavy demands on the water, but since hardly any was coming through the pipes, I had more people available to haul it in from elsewhere. They took care of their cooking, though I suspect Julia and the other women were exploited. Willie sang the Nigerian national anthem every morning as he washed from a bucket on his porch, his voice quivering with emotion. He was most certainly contemplating the dissolution of his beloved country. Theirs was the first generation to grow up under independence, to feel pride in being citizens of an African nation important in size and wealth and cultural vigor, and to see this new and bright, forward-looking self-image dissipate in the hot wind of conflict must have been shattering. Their dreams of unity, without which there could be no prosperity or peaceful future, were fading away.

It never occurred to me not to take the students in, or help any of them who asked. Because of this, I came in for a lot of criticism from my superiors and some of my friends and colleagues. Duke and Rosie, my closest Nigerian friends, shared my disgust with the government and administration’s failure to intervene in the student uprising in any pro-active manner, in effect tolerating the violence, then with their decision simply to shut down the operation. Rosie and Duke also spoke out whenever people were voicing their sentiments. But their homes were not shelters for students put to flight. Many people pointed out to me that this was not my country and none of my business. Nigerian faculty couldn’t just pack and leave at the end of their current contract; they would have to live with the consequences of whatever actions they took. For this reason, several of them formerly regarded as allies by the students, chose to speak against the students’ having any say at all in directing the course of events. They pictured them as children incapable of reason or even of righteous indignation.

The sensation of being in danger all the time was oppressive. The people in the “boys’ quarters” were afraid of being attacked or rounded up, afraid of going to the market or elsewhere in town, afraid of missing any more school. I constantly worried about what to do, having without a thought committed myself to taking action in my capacity as a member of a community of people I cared about, but I wasn’t sure what was the best thing to do. I wondered what riht and wrong meant in this context, tried to find some ethical principles to apply to a mixed-up world. It had taken me a long time to realize that, among all the unequally distributed characteristics of human beings – money, beauty, health, wit – there are a few that have been passed out to us even-handedly across all populations: viciousness and stupidity, and also goodness and loving kindness. What brings one or the other out openly into moments of conduct is in our circumstances and in the people around us. The Hausa and Kanuri people that I knew in northern Nigeria were basically justice-loving, gentle people who cared about their neighbors, whether they were Christians, foreigners, adulterers or even suspected witches. The brutality of their lives and history had brutalized them. I didn’t know how to think about this or what to do about it. I did not feel like an outsider, a mere onlooker who had no role, stake, or sense of involvement in local matters. So I had to make choices among courses of action, inaction not included, regardless of what Teresa or anyone else might say about the folly of risking my position or my safety – “for nothing”, in her words. It was not for nothing. It was for other people who meant something to me and whose lives were important in their own right.

Fighting had perforce ceased at all campuses. When I spoke to northern student leaders or those who had committed any sort of violence or vandalism, they seemed chastened and at a loss to explain themselves. They were still infuriated by the university system’s unresponsiveness to their problems and inattention to any input other than the government’s, concerning alternative solutions. The few southern students who were still in town, other than those at my house, were subdued in their fear and anger. As time dragged by with the university closed, my plans for returning home by early summer began to be jeopardized. I knew my parents would be worried about me. Mail took three weeks or more to get from the U.S. to Maiduguri. Hardly anyone had a telephone in their home, and it probably wouldn’t have worked if they had. The phones at the telephone company office downtown were in constant use, but you were lucky if you could even get through to Lagos, let alone another country. I literally could not reach my family to tell them I would not be coming home when they expected me. We faculty were, of course, confined to the local environs because of the strike and closure. Nonetheless, I decided to risk leaving so I could make that call.

Duke and I drove to Maroua, Cameroon. The French, we were told, had put in a cable from that country to Paris, whence a trunk call could be placed to the U.S. It was the rainy season, so most of the roads were flooded. The long, unpaved route across the border looked like an inland sea alongside which were lorries, automobiles, animal wagons, and other vehicles that had gotten stuck or stranded, the larger transports looking ever so much like dinosaurs mired in the tar pits. By then, I had had enough experience of the rainy season not to be deterred by the oceans that had replaced the roads. I used to stop before trying to cross them, which more or less guaranteed that I wouldn’t have enough momentum to carry me across deep or sticky patches, hence getting dug into the stinking water and unfathomable filth beneath. Pushing your car out of such muck required a feat of mind greater than of strength. On this hasty, risky trip no flood or mud could hold me back. My VW bug flew over the lakes going and coming. My even greater fortune was that there was no downpour that day to drive through, blind.

Placing the call was another matter. It took three hours of waiting to schedule the call, routing it, and waiting for Them to put it through. I talked to operators at several exchanges, going from Camerounais French to Parisian to English to American as we worked our way west. Finally the connection was made. The phone in Chesterfield, Missouri, was ringing, some ten hours earlier in time on that same day. The ringing stopped, as though someone had picked up, but I couldn’t hear anything. I was yelling into the receiver I held. “Mom! Dad! Hello, hello!” It was quiet in the Maroua telephone office, no one using the other extensions for once. The invisible but imaginable end of the line was eerily quiet, too, with static and background noise like a tiny patter in the distance. I prayed I was getting through as I explained I could not come home on schedule because of the strike, that mail was not moving reliably, that I was alright and would get in touch as soon as possible. I had to trust that the system of links between us had carried my voice to them, even if it had not worked in the other direction.

The experience spooked me badly. To have been in connection with my parents but not to hear their voices was depressing and frightening. My dear friend Duke was with me, as always, yet I still felt isolated and alone. We limped back to Maiduguri.

Eventually, the students gave up their idea of local rule and democratic decision-making in the academy. They swore to make no more trouble if the government would allow them to complete their year’s studies. There was no sense of triumph among southern students that their northern peers had been beaten, their cause lost. All were tired and chastened. The word ‘waste’ had taken on new meaning for me; beyond time and resources, human will and conviction had been wasted. Oddly, the most vivid recollection I have of that long, tedious waiting period was of one of my students’ means of passing the time.

Obukohwo Obovwodevwia was a man in his mid-twenties. I ran into him in the student compound as I was helping some of his comrades evacuate it when the military shut the place down. He was sitting outside on a chair, absorbed in a book.

“What are you reading, Obukohwo?” (My conquest of his name, first and last, was a source of ceaseless mirth to all.)

He didn’t want to show me. “Nothing, sorry, Doctor.”

His buddy Joseph, from whom he was inseparable, elbowed him and said, “Go ahead. She is alright.”

It was a sex manual. He had it open to a double-page spread of drawn male and female figures in various positions. He or someone had made a mark next to the one of the woman leaning on a chair, the man approaching her from behind. It was neither vulgar nor erotic, merely instructive. The idea of this stolid fellow, only five or six-years younger than I, learning about sex from a picture book was hilarious.

“You are studying this for a course?”

“No, just for practice.” I knew perfectly well he would be practicing his moves alone, that is prospects for putting his practice into action were practically nil, and that his wife-to-be at such time as he might have the money and position to marry her was probably now an elementary school pupil under the hawklike eye of her elders.

The dormitory yard where we talked looked like a battlefield. There was loud arguing, the sounds of people in a hurry and afraid. But here sat Obukohwo, surrounded by his few possessions, anticipating the applications of passion to some future lover’s delight, believing what he had learned in university, that knowledge could replace experience. The ruin of his and my personal lives and the insanity of society at large had yielded to the banality of our common humanity: sex. It goes on no matter what.

Writing