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March 29, 2004
Reflections of a Catholic Boyhood
P.S.
University of Florida
Gainsville, Florida
March 29, 2004
I had a surprise guest Godwin Pius Nwajei. We shared a bunk bed at Saint George's Grammar School, Obinomba, Nigeria - an all-boys Catholic boarding school that I enrolled in January 1966. For years, Godwin has recounted to his daughter (a graduate student at the University of Florida) about a brilliant kid named Philip who fled his boarding school in April 1967 due to the Nigerian civil war. Since I did not return again to the boarding school, Godwin assumed that I died during the Nigeria-Biafra war in which one million lives were lost. Thirty-seven years later, his daughter called him and said "Dad, I found who you are looking for. He will be speaking on Monday in Gainesville campus."
In our first email invitation, I was asked to speak on any topic that is of interest to me. Yesterday, I discovered that I was supposed to speak on the value of education.
I shared my thoughts on the knowledge that is missing in the education you we received in schools.
I shared my thoughts on religious, cultural and scientific indoctrinations that take place in schools. K-12 schools in Africa were religious indoctrination centers and cultural propaganda machine.
It involves rejecting our past, and denying our roots. Africa’s K-12 schools – which are de facto religious indoctrination centers – are at the very center of it.
It involves turning our backs on our parents and our tribal elders as a valid source of wisdom and judgement. Our religious “indoctrination,” for that is what our school education amounted to, involved a total denial of anything “African” and need to come, naked, needy and ashamed, to try and embrace the white man’s culture
I was mis-educated. My teachers lied to me.
I was taught that Mungo Park discovered the River Niger. But I was not taught that a person of African descent was the first explorer to reach the North Pole.
I was taught that an Englishman named William Wilberforce lead the fight against slavery. But I was not taught that an Igbo man named Olaudah Equiano, wrote the most influential anti-slavery book.
In our Meet & Greet, I explained that:
"We have two types of knowledge: what you know and what you don’t know. What you don’t know is more important than what you know.Yes, what you know is important. But how you interpret the things you know is more important than what you know. A good education includes appreciating that what you don’t know may be more important than what you know."
In the Q & A, I explained that
- Sir John McPherson and Sir James Robertson were the Governors (Presidents) of Nigeria in 1954 (the year I was born).
- British West Africa includes Nigeria, Gambia, Sierra Leone, Gold Coast, Togoland, and Cameroons.
- The most common cars on the roads were the British Morris Minors and I listened to British pop icon Cliff Richard in the mid-1960s.
- Ninety-nine percent of my generation attended a missionary school; the Catholic Church, in particular, had a most profound influence on us.
- I only had eight years of in-classroom education before emigrating to the United States. In those eight years, I attended schools named Saint Patrick, Saint Anthony, Saint John, Saint Georges, and Christ the King. As you can infer from the names of these five schools, religion-centered institutions.
- Evening catechism was compulsory but a science fair projects were unheard. We devoted more time reading the Bible than a science encyclopedia.
We studied the Latin language which has been dead for a thousand years. That means no one knows for sure how the Latin language sounds. Latin experts guess how it sounds from inferences from Romance languages. Therefore, the Latin spoken in Roman Catholic Church rituals will be incomprehensible to Julius Caesar and his contemporaries.
Nonetheless, I have always wondered what it would be to time travel one thousand years backward to a Latin-speaking nation.
Would it sound something like this?
Di! Ecce hora! Uxor mea me necabit! [God, look at the time! My wife will kill me!]
Vah! Denuone Latine loquebar? Me ineptum. Interdum modo elabitur. [Oh! Was I speaking Latin again? Silly me. Sometimes it just sort of slips out.]
I explained that my renaming from "Chukwurah" to "Philip" was the first step taken to indoctrinate, de-Africanize and de-humanize me. In my formative years, the message was imprinted in me that the Judea-Christian tradition is superior to animism. Therefore, a good education includes understanding and accepting that the Western civilization is superior to African one. That legacy persists today, and a few weeks ago, a top Nigerian government official dismissed a teacher for wearing African clothes to school. African schools are anti-African and students are de-Africanized in their native land.
I remember my first day in a Catholic missionary school, in January 1960.
My mother 21-year-old mother only completed the third-grade before getting married at the age of 15. Being functionally illiterate, she assumed I will be getting an education.
When I walked into my first classroom, in 1960, my father assumed that I was getting an education.
My parents could not make the distinction between education and propaganda. Certainly, the renaming of an entire generation affects their collective perception of who they are, where they came from and where they are going.
It is thought control and the cultural equivalent of ethnic cleansing. It gave a few white missionary educators the power over 400 million black Christian coverts.
And it was not acceptable to be named after great minds like Albert Einstein or George Washington Carver. Nonetheless, I grew up having more in common with Einstein than with Saint Philip.
El Hajj Malik El Shabazz, known to most as Malcolm X, said that the greatest crime committed against 200 million Africans in the Diaspora was to take away their names. I explained that his four names --Malcolm Little, Detroit Red, Malcolm X, and el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz -- reflect the four stages of his life.
I said that Cassius Clay would have preferred the name Muhammad Ali on his birth certificate. That Lew Alcindor preferred Kareem Abdul Jabbar; Robert Poole preferred to be called Elijah Muhammed; and that Louis (Eugene) Walcott preferred to be called Louis Haleem Abdul Farrakhan.
My name “Chukwurah” was taken away from me at infancy and that was a crime. The name that was on my baptismal certificate superceded the name that was on my birth certificate. I said that I prefer a one word last name (Emeagwali). I am following precedents taken by Imhotep, Aristotle, Nebuchadnezzar, Cleopatra, Mohammed, Hannibal, Galileo, Michelangelo, Mozart, Shakespeare, Pelé, and Oprah.
While American Christians use the name on their birth certificate, Africans of the Christian faith most often use their second and baptismal name.
In the towns that I grew up in, all elementary and secondary schools were owned and operated by missionaries, and they set the rules and admission requirements.
I was born “Chukwurah,” but my school rejected my name and identity.
My name was associated with being a “heathen” and an “uncivilized savage” who needed to be “saved.”
I was instructed to drop my “heathen” name, Chukwurah, to denounce my ancestor worship and to deny their contribution to my identity.
I was forced to drop the God after whom I was named and to accept in his place a human as my paron saint.
I know millions of Africans with European names, but I do not know any European with an African name.
A good education is one that gives an individual a sense of identity.
Posted by emeagwali at March 29, 2004 08:33 AM
Comments
i love the article to be send to my email address.
Posted by: akinyemi at February 13, 2005 01:01 PM
really I feel very touched after reading these words.I m happy that there s an African ,a Nigerian then an Igbo man who s a true african ,who understands the values of our culture and who s proud to be a black. chapeau
Posted by: osita okoli at March 9, 2005 08:00 AM
Any man that is not proud of his color/race is not fit to live --- Kwame Nkurumah. It sickens my HEART when I see a Nigerian eating Amala, Eba (Garri) with forks and knives and a Chinese with their sticks. I agreed that we are mis-educated.
Posted by: Alimi, Babatunde 'Toyinbo at October 24, 2005 05:33 AM
