Death of a teacher

Death of an old man, we are told, is like a whole library in flames. When a teacher dies, what image does it evoke in the mind of the pupil? It is like a whole world of knowledge consumed in a volcanic eruption. It becomes even more devastating when the departed is not just a teacher but a friend, a mentor and a staunch believer in the promise latent in the future of the pupil. You meet them at every bus-stop of life.
There are no bad teachers- they all teach something positive (even if unconsciously) that ultimately shapes the us the world sees...But some clearly stand out- and we remember them at every pause, at every reboot and restart of the journey of life.

They always leave a mark, indelible (even omnipresent) in the sands of the impressionable mind. They are “waters rushed on golden sands.” They are changers of lives. Or more appropriately put, they are helpers of destinies... What marks them out is not the number of their degrees but significantly, the depth and breadth of their humanity and the deep emotional feelings their potters have for the images coming out of their matrix. Rousseau noted that a man is valuable or good not because of his position, station in life or because of his education, rather “value is to be sought inside- in the man’s emotional core.”

My Obafemi Awolowo University English Studies class of 1990 lost a teacher August 14 this year. Our paths crossed as we streamed with innocence into Ife in 1986- and this teacher, with a colleague, also breezed back into the campus from University of Nottingham, United Kingdom, brand new PhD holders. Those two were immediate excellent advertisements for scholarship in those early days of our orientation. They exuded so much confidence in the certificates they came with that the Jambites in their care easily got bonded with them. Dele Femi Akindele was not the run-off-the-mill teacher that taught as a matter of duty. He brought passion and compassion into his work and these were exactly what upped his worth and estimation in the eyes of his students.z In the unforgettable four years the anvil breathed life into its work subjects, Akindele made no pretence about it that he was not relating with students—he was engaged in a life-long journey of friendship with partners. He was hired to teach English grammar and Sociolinguistics but he added career counselling to his almost interminable tutoring of the willing student in his care: “You must get the best out of this department and go out to get the best from the world,” he would tell his students. Closure of schools to him was capable of altering destinies and he spoke loudly to us to work against the system that made school shut-down inevitable. And he remained so close to all of us till we left last week of September 1990. But if you thought his mentoring ended with the graduation of his students, you would be wrong. The ones he could locate physically, he sought out and continued the bonding till he had to get out of the suffocating air of Nigeria’s economic (and intellectual) space in 1994. Tiny, little Lesotho gained Nigeria’s loss as the National University of Lesotho took him and gave what giant Nigeria denied its own. From then on, Akindele’s pace in scholarship increased. In the short years he moved from Lesotho to Namibia and finally found his place in Botswana where his rose blossomed and ...took the final exit.

As he lived his life of voluntary exile, he must have continuously wondered why Nigeria chose the path of decay. The universities were shut for the most part of his last years in Nigeria because the ruling military saw no reason university teachers should not be contented with their poverty and the decay of the universities. The system that time would tragically order brand new cars for army officers while the ivory towers got grounded. Quite intriguing, as Akindele took his final journey home August 31, the universities were shut—just as he left them. It was as if nothing had happened in those intervening years between his exile living and his death in exile. His spirit came home to meet a badly damaged university system. There are no more soldiers marching on the eyes of the ivory tower. In their stead are politicians—ill tutored and wrongly weaned to know that the road to the future is education. Ably assisted by their peacock technocrats with voodoo economics, they are too sure of the rightness of the wrong direction they face. As we speak, it matters little to the minders of the nation if universities are forever shut as long as the road to 2015 is not blocked...

I still do not know what agent of death killed my teacher. But I know that Nigeria kills teachers. I have been around for some time to mourn quite a number. There was Sesan Ajayi (PhD). There was Niyi Oladeji (PhD). On each occasion of the rites of final passage, I knew that what died was not the man in shrouds, what was buried were the seeds the system killed in the womb of the nation’s future...
Good teachers live forever in the minds of their students. In a 2006 e-mail to me after I rediscovered him, Akindele expressed great surprise that his

students sought him out, subverting the distance in time and of Southern Africa: “Many thanks for your mail. It is good to know that some of you still remember me despite the long lapse in communication. I have been out of Nigeria since 1994, first in Lesotho, second in Namibia and now at the University of Botswana. I became a Professor of English and Linguistics TEN years ago at the National University of Lesotho.

My last visit home was in 2002 even though all my kids are schooling in Nigeria. The first one graduated from Babcock University a year ago. He read Computer Science. The last two are at Covenant University.

I am glad you are making progress in your career. I will try and see you when I come home in June this year.

All the best,

Professor Dele Femi Akindele”.

We never met again-just as he did not meet a functional, running public university system on his final journey home last month. Nigeria, sure, kills its future.