Re: Nigerian Universities (2) - by Obi Nwakanma
Mobolaji Aluko
Nigerian Universities (2)
By Obi Nwakanma
In the first installment of this essay, I tried to put in some context, the stages of the evolution of the Nigerian university using the history of the University of Ibadan as background.
My intention in drawing attention to the history of Ibadan was (a) to point to the level of thought necessary in developing a university, and (b) to show a pattern in that development of the disjunctures that have crippled the evolution of the idea of the university in Nigeria. The University College Ibadan was for fourteen years, a college, or campus of the University of London, and awarded the degree of the University of London.
Though Ibadan was the first university established in Nigeria – it was but a satellite of a colonial university. In other words, it was not self-governing. It became a full university with its own instruments only in 1962.
Its original mission was basically limited to providing the needs of the colonial administration, to train purely “English men” who would basically serve imperial purposes – those that Franz Fanon would describe as wearing “White masks” over “Black skins” – a reflection of the radical fissures in the identity and consciousness of the African indoctrinated or socialized under the empire.
Admission and recruitment to Ibadan was very selective and elitist. Ibadan graduates, small, in-bred and self-contained, lived in a sort of fantasy world of privilege and self-regard; closed-off and alienated from the rest of society in an oasis of prosperity and entitlement. It was as a result of these contradictions that Dr. Azikiwe offered his blistering critique of the mission and orientation of the Ibadan idea, describing the university as a “One Million dollar baby” in his column “Inside Stuff” in the West African Pilot.
The university Zik envisioned was different. In Azikiwe’s opinion, Ibadan’s model of elitism was unsustainable in a decolonizing nation in a hurry to develop and catch-up with the rest of the modern world. At that point in its history, Nigeria’s major problem was a very glaring need for highly trained technical and specialized manpower.
As a result of Azikiwe’s own ideas of the university, he pushed for the establishment of the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, passing the charter of the University through the Eastern Nigeria House in 1955. The University of Nigeria, Nsukka in other words was established in 1955, but it opened its gates for the first 280 students on October 7, 1960, just one week on the attainment of Nigeria’s independence from Great Britain.
Thus the University of Nigeria Nsukka became Nigeria’s first fully established university: that is, the first indigenous, independent degree-awarding university in Nigeria. Aside from Azikiwe, the next most important figure in the establishment of the University of Nigeria was Dr. I.U. Akpabio, minister for education in the government Azikiwe led in the East. Akpabio and Zik traveled around seeking funds across the world for the proper establishment of the University of Nigeria.
Nsukka was conceived as the “New Sankore” – a place where every global black intellectual, scientist, and social theorist might find a home in the modern era. That’s how come Dr. Eluemuno Chukwuemeka Blyden, Grandson of Dr. Edward Wilmot Blyden became the first orator of the university and Director of the Hansberry Institute of African Studies. Azikiwe’s plans for Nsukka were of course radically abridged, first with his removal as Chancellor of the University in 1966 by the military governor Odumegwu-Ojukwu who replaced him with Ado Bayero, Emir of Kano; and this was followed by the radical diminution of the university, from 1970, when it was taken over by the Federal government, at the end of the civil war.
As a matter of fact, UNN was nearly closed down, when on seeking their opinion on what to do with the university post-war, some western Nigerian intellectuals who ironically had taught at Nsukka before the war, advised Gowon to close down the University of Nigeria, and distribute its faculties and students to already existing universities at Ibadan, Ife, Lagos, ABU and the then newly established university in Benin. But this move was seriously resisted, and it took serious lobbying, and the intervention of the late Emir of Kano, Ado Bayero, as quondam Chancellor of the university to dissuade Gowon. Nsukka’s role in Biafra was pivotal.
For a while, Nsukka harbored the “returnee” intellectuals from Ibadan and Zaria, alongside the short-lived University of Technology, Port Harcourt, Nigeria’s first Technological University established by Ojukwu in 1966, with Dr. Kenneth Dike, who had resigned and fled from Ibadan as its first Vice-Chancellor. These universities became the fulcrum of Biafra’s war production and resistance.
The scientists that gathered in these two universities, experimented with energy, fashioned new weapons, calculated the ranges of Biafra’s rocketry and Missile production under the mathematician Ezeilo, Produced Rocket Fuel under Mang Ndukwe, Alchohol and Chemicals under Garrick Leton, and food production and preservation under Bede Okigbo, and so many more.
For the first time in postcolonial Africa, the relationship between the university, research, and social need found a terminus. And this was the mistake that the Federal government made after the civil war: it did not utilize the experience of Biafra and her war industry as the template for connecting national industrial production to a national university system.
The University of Technology, Port-Harcourt was dismantled. Nsukka itself became the perfect example of a more profound contradiction: it became an eagle that forgot how to fly. When you bring highly talented and egotistical men together with limited opportunities, the instinct for self-preservation and survival drives them ultimately to incoherence and self-destruction, particularly in the absence of visionary leadership.
The removal, and spiting of Professor Eni Njoku as the Vice-Chancellor of the university, and his replacement with the anglophile Professor Herbert Kodilinye, was a fatal mistake. Igbo intellectuals at the end of the war had also become very cynical. They had lost a war and a nation. And they did not find the new environment welcoming.
That’s precisely what happened with Nsukka: it became weighed down by post-war cynicism, and in-breeding; its growth was stunted by the kind of in-fighting ignited between Professor Kodilinye on one side, who wanted to restructure Nsukka to follow the Oxbridge collegiate model, and the opposition on one side of Achebe, Nzimiro, Eteng, Ikoku, and the entire Nsukkascope group. Nsukka did not survive that fight. The University of Nigeria, Nsukka suffered from the vicious and deadly petty rivalries that made intellectual and collegial life difficult and unproductive, and it has remained so. From a global university – the leading African university of the twentieth century as envisioned by Zik – Nsukka increasingly became a very provincial, Igbo university: the faculty, the administration, an overwhelming number of the students were Igbo. Great universities seek diversity.
As a matter of fact, self-respecting universities across the world hardly employ the students they trained at the Postgraduate schools, and only in few cases, when they have first proved themselves elsewhere. But one of the greatest tragedies of Nigerian universities is a deadly kind of “in-breeding.” There is something called the academic or intellectual tradition – a culture of the university. These have been destroyed in Nigeria. Nigerian universities have no culture. There is a certain savage impulsion that currently drives the universities. In the American university where I teach as Graduate Faculty, one of the greatest measures of success is to register with proof, how quickly within the given time of research, that the graduate student under your supervision completes their program and defends their ideas successfully.
In Nigeria, there is almost a maniacal, almost masochist pleasure in making students suffer. It is the mark of the power of university faculty to delay, subvert, deny, and destroy the prospects of students simply as a means of protecting one’s presumed territory, or asserting blind power. The problem is, over the years, the universities no longer attract quality faculty, whether in terms of junior faculty, or in terms of specialized faculty. The stock of the current academic staff in Nigerian universities is of very low quality.
There are still some good ones. Very few indeed who could pull their weight anywhere in the world, but I have read the writings of full Professors of English in Nigerian universities, including one, sadly, who is currently a Dean of the Faculty of Arts & Humanities, who submitted a review full of howlers, the kind that would make the devil of printers blush with embarrassment, to one of the international journals on which I serve as editor.
I was nearly decapitated not only by bad grammar, but also by the mediocre writing, and elementary-level thinking, that it struck me that this fellow should not be allowed in a classroom in a decent secondary school. But how did he earn an English honours, not to talk about becoming university faculty, then a full Professor and then Dean of the Humanities? That’s the conundrum.
(To be continued).
Rex Marinus
Mobolaji Aluko:
I chose not to respond to your earlier reaction to my first essay, because, frankly, I did not know exactly what you were on about! Ibadan - not Ife, not ABU - a university built by the Nigerian government has been turned into a provincial high school and a war booty, period. Now, I also do not know exactly what your quarrels are with my reference to Dr. Blyden at Nsukka. All the excerpts you referenced indicate exactly what I said in my column: that the Institute of African Studies in Nsukka had Dr. Blyden as its Director. The founding director was of course Professor Hansberry for whom that institute was named in 1962. Nsukka's far-reaching plans with that institute was totally abridged by the end of the war. So, what is your grouse? That I was not born when all that drama was playing out, yet I have to assert it? What else is new? Your fixation with my age is increasingly preposterous! What has age to do with the search that I embark on, to rouse the stones of history? At my current age, if I hadn't been shooting blanks earlier, I should be a grandfather now. So, you were ten in Nsukka, and you know it all. Well, the truth is that the Blydens are self-identified Igbo. As a matter of fact, Edward Wilmot Blyden himself, though he spent very little time in Nigeria, and lived mostly in Liberia and Sierra-Leone; and although he was born in the Caribbean Island of St. Thomas knew, and said himself, that he was born of Igbo parents. His obituary also noted that fact - that he was Igbo. He was one of the phalanx of the 19th century Igbo with networks in West Africa - like the Pratts in Gambia, the Taylors and Coles, among the many Saro-Igbo ( a lot of who are Krios today) in Liberia also. The first Igbo union was formed in fact in Gambia late in the 19th century. But many of these transnational Igbo also settled in the new coastal cities of Lagos, Calabar, Port-Harcourt, and in such missionary epicenters as Onitsha, Owerri, Bonny and so on. You had many self-identifying Saro-Igbo among the Lagos elite, and many of these families are still there - hybridized and so forth. Today, the families of the likes of Dr. Karefa-Smart, for instance, whom Zik made to come teach in Ibadan in the 1950s, are dispersed into many identities. It was Azikiwe in fact that gave Dr. Blyden II the name "Eluemuno", and Dr. Blyden in turn gave his own son, who later trained at Dartmouth, where he himself came after Nsukka, those two names also: Chukwuemeka Eluemuno Blyden. I do not know what therefore you're contending with. But it is, sir, your typical tendency for navel-gazing, that you'd choose to squirt sour grapes.
And you must know by now that I do not say what I do not verify, even though many of the things I write may be uncomfortable truths, that blow away your consoling mythologies. Yes, indeed, your own father, Dr. Sam Aluko, now that you want me to be upfront about it, was one of those who suggested the closure of Nsukka according to my sources. I chose not to mention names specifically in other to be charitable. And as you have pointed out, I was not there. Yet, I know these details. How come? My sources were far too involved in the politics of the re-opening of Nsukka to be ignored, or not to be taken seriously. Celestine Adigweneme, etc, may have gone to Ife with you in 1970, and yes indeed the likes of Professor H.O. Oluwasanmi at Ife were never as sanguine, but facts are facts. Perhaps in fact that suggestion to close down Nsukka was made to Gowon out of very practical considerations, the truth of it however, as it was related to me by at least three individuals who should know (and at three different occasions) makes me certain that it did happen. That is the rule of verification, if you've done professional journalism. There were many other factors that went into the strategic diminution of Nsukka's historic mission, and they are in part connected to the larger question of the diminution of the goals and mission of the Nigerian university. You do not contend with that. You contend with the fact that I had called Dr. Blyden, "Eluemuno," - in other words, I had claimed him for the Igbo, or that I had suggested that Nsukka was to be closed. I did not claim Dr. Blyden for the Igbo, he it was who claimed to be Igbo. And it was not I that claimed that Nsukka was to be closed, you yourself, have confirmed the fact in your own way. It was the same politics that made Dr. Augustine Njoku-Obi's discovery of the cholera vaccine such a contentious, one-sided debate in that era; or the fact that Ogbemudia's suggestion to bring together the "Biafran scientists" under one national program was shot down in the federal executive council by certain known people. The late Sam Ogbemudia himself made these facts known. It is the legacy of the kind of mad triumphalism, vicious rivalry, and short-sightedness that hobbled the Nigerian university. You do suggest that my assertions are "bland" - write your own with the "correct" facts in the public domain! And by the way, you may have noticed that my essay continues. I have much more to say.
Obi Nwakanma
Sent: Tuesday, October 10, 2017 5:41 AM
To: USAAfrica Dialogue
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: Nigerian Universities (2) - by Obi Nwakanma
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Mobolaji Aluko
Mobolaji Aluko:
I chose not to respond to your earlier reaction to my first essay, because, frankly, I did not know exactly what you were on about! Ibadan - not Ife, not ABU - a university built by the Nigerian government has been turned into a provincial high school and a war booty, period. Now, I also do not know exactly what your quarrels are with my reference to Dr. Blyden at Nsukka. All the excerpts you referenced indicate exactly what I said in my column: that the Institute of African Studies in Nsukka had Dr. Blyden as its Director. The founding director was of course Professor Hansberry for whom that institute was named in 1962. Nsukka's far-reaching plans with that institute was totally abridged by the end of the war. So, what is your grouse? That I was not born when all that drama was playing out, yet I have to assert it? What else is new? Your fixation with my age is increasingly preposterous! What has age to do with the search that I embark on, to rouse the stones of history? At my current age, if I hadn't been shooting blanks earlier, I should be a grandfather now. So, you were ten in Nsukka, and you know it all. Well, the truth is that the Blydens are self-identified Igbo. As a matter of fact, Edward Wilmot Blyden himself, though he spent very little time in Nigeria, and lived mostly in Liberia and Sierra-Leone; and although he was born in the Caribbean Island of St. Thomas knew, and said himself, that he was born of Igbo parents. His obituary also noted that fact - that he was Igbo. He was one of the phalanx of the 19th century Igbo with networks in West Africa - like the Pratts in Gambia, the Taylors and Coles, among the many Saro-Igbo ( a lot of who are Krios today) in Liberia also. The first Igbo union was formed in fact in Gambia late in the 19th century. But many of these transnational Igbo also settled in the new coastal cities of Lagos, Calabar, Port-Harcourt, and in such missionary epicenters as Onitsha, Owerri, Bonny and so on. You had many self-identifying Saro-Igbo among the Lagos elite, and many of these families are still there - hybridized and so forth. Today, the families of the likes of Dr. Karefa-Smart, for instance, whom Zik made to come teach in Ibadan in the 1950s, are dispersed into many identities. It was Azikiwe in fact that gave Dr. Blyden II the name "Eluemuno", and Dr. Blyden in turn gave his own son, who later trained at Dartmouth, where he himself came after Nsukka, those two names also: Chukwuemeka Eluemuno Blyden. I do not know what therefore you're contending with. But it is, sir, your typical tendency for navel-gazing, that you'd choose to squirt sour grapes.
And you must know by now that I do not say what I do not verify, even though many of the things I write may be uncomfortable truths, that blow away your consoling mythologies. Yes, indeed, your own father, Dr. Sam Aluko, now that you want me to be upfront about it, was one of those who suggested the closure of Nsukka according to my sources. I chose not to mention names specifically in other to be charitable. And as you have pointed out, I was not there. Yet, I know these details. How come? My sources were far too involved in the politics of the re-opening of Nsukka to be ignored, or not to be taken seriously. Celestine Adigweneme, etc, may have gone to Ife with you in 1970, and yes indeed the likes of Professor H.O. Oluwasanmi at Ife were never as sanguine, but facts are facts. Perhaps in fact that suggestion to close down Nsukka was made to Gowon out of very practical considerations, the truth of it however, as it was related to me by at least three individuals who should know (and at three different occasions) makes me certain that it did happen. That is the rule of verification, if you've done professional journalism. There were many other factors that went into the strategic diminution of Nsukka's historic mission, and they are in part connected to the larger question of the diminution of the goals and mission of the Nigerian university. You do not contend with that. You contend with the fact that I had called Dr. Blyden, "Eluemuno," - in other words, I had claimed him for the Igbo, or that I had suggested that Nsukka was to be closed. I did not claim Dr. Blyden for the Igbo, he it was who claimed to be Igbo. And it was not I that claimed that Nsukka was to be closed, you yourself, have confirmed the fact in your own way. It was the same politics that made Dr. Augustine Njoku-Obi's discovery of the cholera vaccine such a contentious, one-sided debate in that era; or the fact that Ogbemudia's suggestion to bring together the "Biafran scientists" under one national program was shot down in the federal executive council by certain known people. The late Sam Ogbemudia himself made these facts known. It is the legacy of the kind of mad triumphalism, vicious rivalry, and short-sightedness that hobbled the Nigerian university. You do suggest that my assertions are "bland" - write your own with the "correct" facts in the public domain! And by the way, you may have noticed that my essay continues. I have much more to say.
Obi Nwakanma
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Ibrahim Abdullah
Sent from my iPhone
Mobolaji Aluko
You might want to know that the Dr. Blyden you referenced only became Blyden after he graduated from Fourah Bay College. He was born after the legendary Blyden passed away; he could not have been his son. The claim that his mother was Blyden is just that: a claim!Hollis Lynch, Blyden's biographer, did not mention any sister that came to West Africa after Blyden was chased out of Liberia.
Sent from my iPhone
Mobolaji Aluko:
I chose not to respond to your earlier reaction to my first essay, because, frankly, I did not know exactly what you were on about! Ibadan - not Ife, not ABU - a university built by the Nigerian government has been turned into a provincial high school and a war booty, period. Now, I also do not know exactly what your quarrels are with my reference to Dr. Blyden at Nsukka. All the excerpts you referenced indicate exactly what I said in my column: that the Institute of African Studies in Nsukka had Dr. Blyden as its Director. The founding director was of course Professor Hansberry for whom that institute was named in 1962. Nsukka's far-reaching plans with that institute was totally abridged by the end of the war. So, what is your grouse? That I was not born when all that drama was playing out, yet I have to assert it? What else is new? Your fixation with my age is increasingly preposterous! What has age to do with the search that I embark on, to rouse the stones of history? At my current age, if I hadn't been shooting blanks earlier, I should be a grandfather now. So, you were ten in Nsukka, and you know it all. Well, the truth is that the Blydens are self-identified Igbo. As a matter of fact, Edward Wilmot Blyden himself, though he spent very little time in Nigeria, and lived mostly in Liberia and Sierra-Leone; and although he was born in the Caribbean Island of St. Thomas knew, and said himself, that he was born of Igbo parents. His obituary also noted that fact - that he was Igbo. He was one of the phalanx of the 19th century Igbo with networks in West Africa - like the Pratts in Gambia, the Taylors and Coles, among the many Saro-Igbo ( a lot of who are Krios today) in Liberia also. The first Igbo union was formed in fact in Gambia late in the 19th century. But many of these transnational Igbo also settled in the new coastal cities of Lagos, Calabar, Port-Harcourt, and in such missionary epicenters as Onitsha, Owerri, Bonny and so on. You had many self-identifying Saro-Igbo among the Lagos elite, and many of these families are still there - hybridized and so forth. Today, the families of the likes of Dr. Karefa-Smart, for instance, whom Zik made to come teach in Ibadan in the 1950s, are dispersed into many identities. It was Azikiwe in fact that gave Dr. Blyden II the name "Eluemuno", and Dr. Blyden in turn gave his own son, who later trained at Dartmouth, where he himself came after Nsukka, those two names also: Chukwuemeka Eluemuno Blyden. I do not know what therefore you're contending with. But it is, sir, your typical tendency for navel-gazing, that you'd choose to squirt sour grapes.
And you must know by now that I do not say what I do not verify, even though many of the things I write may be uncomfortable truths, that blow away your consoling mythologies. Yes, indeed, your own father, Dr. Sam Aluko, now that you want me to be upfront about it, was one of those who suggested the closure of Nsukka according to my sources. I chose not to mention names specifically in other to be charitable. And as you have pointed out, I was not there. Yet, I know these details. How come? My sources were far too involved in the politics of the re-opening of Nsukka to be ignored, or not to be taken seriously. Celestine Adigweneme, etc, may have gone to Ife with you in 1970, and yes indeed the likes of Professor H.O. Oluwasanmi at Ife were never as sanguine, but facts are facts. Perhaps in fact that suggestion to close down Nsukka was made to Gowon out of very practical considerations, the truth of it however, as it was related to me by at least three individuals who should know (and at three different occasions) makes me certain that it did happen. That is the rule of verification, if you've done professional journalism. There were many other factors that went into the strategic diminution of Nsukka's historic mission, and they are in part connected to the larger question of the diminution of the goals and mission of the Nigerian university. You do not contend with that. You contend with the fact that I had called Dr. Blyden, "Eluemuno," - in other words, I had claimed him for the Igbo, or that I had suggested that Nsukka was to be closed. I did not claim Dr. Blyden for the Igbo, he it was who claimed to be Igbo. And it was not I that claimed that Nsukka was to be closed, you yourself, have confirmed the fact in your own way. It was the same politics that made Dr. Augustine Njoku-Obi's discovery of the cholera vaccine such a contentious, one-sided debate in that era; or the fact that Ogbemudia's suggestion to bring together the "Biafran scientists" under one national program was shot down in the federal executive council by certain known people. The late Sam Ogbemudia himself made these facts known. It is the legacy of the kind of mad triumphalism, vicious rivalry, and short-sightedness that hobbled the Nigerian university. You do suggest that my assertions are "bland" - write your own with the "correct" facts in the public domain! And by the way, you may have noticed that my essay continues. I have much more to say.
Obi Nwakanma
From: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Mobolaji Aluko <alu...@gmail.com>
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Mobolaji Aluko
Rex Marinus
Mobolaji Aluko:
- Anybody who looks at the records at Nsukka will see at the very least that a Blyden, who at the every least, was a descendant of Edward Wilmot Blyden, was director of the Hansberry institute, which supports the key point of that part of my essay that Nsukka was conceived to accommodate a global African intellectual train. It is typical of you to leave the substance, and pursue the tail of the gecko! Since you learnt the words "irredentist" and "supermenchen" you have been deploying it ad nauseam, it no longer makes sense. And the real irony is, people know who the real irrendentist and "supermenchen" is, Bolaji Aluko. It is hardly Obi Nwakanma. I am Igbo, and in Igbo republican culture, "no man is superior to the other." I grew up on the ethos: "nke onye diiri ya" - the philosophy of toleration present in every democratic culture, that accepts that there is value in difference. Even if I want to be "supermenchen" - whatever that silly words is - I couldn't, because it is culturally alien to my worldview. Only feudal and monarchical cultures, consciously founded on the principle of a unique and singular "super man" can conceive of the world in the context of the "supermenchen." I just note all this to point to you guilt - the way you use inversion to deflect your actual, and unconscious self. The Igbo - absorbents of new cultures, in which as the "Mbari" principle shows, no gods are permanent, cannot be "supermenchen," Bolaji, and you need some real philosophical education to understand that. I know the words "irrendentism" and "supermenchen" tickles you with their - well - bombast.
- It is a uniquely Bolaji Aluko mind that can suggest that because one is not present at the time of an event, then they should not write about it with authority. In that case, you should dismantle the entire discipline of history and the historical method. You should have asked Kenneth Dike not to write about trade in the Niger delta, or R.C.C. Law not to write about the Owu wars, or Falola not to write anything at all. What riles you is the "authority" with which I approach these subjects. Well it comes with one important factor: I am authoritative. I made it my point to consciously interrogate some of those you call "self-selected group of biased individuals" - many of whom were your own father's colleagues too, but whom you dismiss very cavalierly, because as a ten-year old, in a primary school in Nsukka, you knew it all - better than those who ran the institution, and who were on the firing range in these events.
- Yes, indeed, it made no sense to suggest a close down of UNN. Yet it was clearly suggested. As a mater of fact, it was not only the likes of Dr. Aluko, Commander Spiff swore that Nsukka would reopen over his dead body! Esuene had to be convinced with the opening of a Calabar campus. It is the height of self-regard to insist that everybody else lies, except Aluko! And I did say very clearly, that the late Emir of Kano, Ado-Bayero was instrumental in lobbying for Nsukka. I did place charity where it is properly deserved. If those whom you accuse of lying acknowledged Bayero, why would they lie against Aluko?
- I will take it that it is me you call "juvenile" -and I'm amused by it; by the very churlishness of it. But I can assure you, whether I'm paid or not to write my "weekly" (and not episodic - and there again - one of your clichés) column, I do it with my
mind on the parable of the sower. The "Orbit" is like seed scattered in the fields. Some fall on stones. Some on arable soil. With you, I know where it lands. Meanwhile, feel free to keep stalking every line I write, with your laughable "supermenchen" story.
But my task is to unsettle your comfortable myths. And there, you too, have it
Sent: Tuesday, October 10, 2017 5:32 PM
To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: Nigerian Universities (2) - by Obi Nwakanma
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Cornelius Hamelberg
Keeping it very short:
It is both disrespectful and disingenuous to doubt the paternity of either Jesus of Nazareth or more concretely, Dr. Edward Wilmot Blyden III of the Pan-African dynasty. With regard to the former, I would say that such doubts whether biological or theological or merely historical, are sacrilegious.
So far, by far the best book yet written about Edward Wilmot Blyden is
“ Edward Wilmot Blyden 1832 – Pan- Negro Patriot – 1912 “ by Hollis R. Lynch ( unfortunately, I only have a( one) copy of this book.
This book can settle some of the current disputes in this forum, but it is not my function to do any finger-pointing right now.
I knew Dr. Edward Wilmot Blyden III briefly, chatted with him a few times - after he returned from the USSR where he had served as Sierra Leone’s ambassador. It was always a delight to chat with him because he was deliberately charismatic, knowing, witty and profound. The last time I talked to him, we discussed race-relations in the US – and we talked about Malcolm X and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King soon after the assassination of those African heroes.
I was much more acquainted with his son Babatunde Edward Blyden 1V who was president of the Excelsior Fraternity which I joined, introduced by Amir Bahloo a Kenya student of Economics, ( of Indian extraction) in September 1965) - a fraternity started by H.M. Lynch-Shyllon. Babatunde was an orator – he could sure talk: He was a man of vision and a man of principle. To my sorrow, when I visited his facebook page to wish him a happy birthday , I scrolled down and read someone saying “ even though you’re gone, you’re still my friend” and it was then that I found out that dear Babatunde had passed away a few months earlier. That’s what happens when you don’t keep in touch with your old buddies.
Babatunde Edward Blyden 1V’s daughter Dr. Olayinka Blyden is currently the Minister of Social Welfare, Gender and Children's Affairs
I have too much respect for V-C Aluko and I don’t want to get involved in this dispute , since I know that the Igbos also lay great claim to Edward Wilmot Blyden the progenitor, also said to be “the Father of Pan-Africanism” - and in this day and age of paternity suits, leaving this question unanswered : Who is the mother (of Pan-Africanism)? ( Ditto about Achebe being “the father” of the African novel (in Queen Elisabeth's English)
But Dr. Obi Nwakanma is right about the Igbo Creoles/ Krios. One of my best friends Samuel Archer-Davies is one such ( a Creole of Igbo extraction – his father was a Christian Minister) and by best friend I mean that he is the Godfather of my daughter Louise Cleopatra and was also my honoured guest at my wedding reception in 1969. Rodney ( Efa/ Samuel’s older brother) was a saint.)
Some strange things about Sierra Leone cornucopias: look at the Wikipedia entry Sierra Leone and to your utter amazement you will discover that Sierra Leone’s first indigenous Governor General
Sir Henry Josiah Lightfoot Boston is not even mentioned by whichever besserwisser it was that made that entry has probably never heard of him , let alone met him him or known him. There are of course some tribal people who didn’t like like him and still don’t like him. That’s the way it is, sometimes...
Cornelius Hamelberg
Mobolaji Aluko
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Cornelius Hamelberg
O O
V-C Aluko, in my humble estimation, and as far as I am acquainted with the matter your observations are impeccably correct Sir!
On Wednesday, 11 October 2017 07:08:02 UTC+2, Bolaji Aluko wrote:
CH:I have NEVER stated that there are no Creoles of Igbo extraction. I don't even argue that Blyden the First did not self-identify as Igbo. But Blyden III was born "Abiose" to a FATHER who was a Taylor, not a Blyden (his mother was a Blyden), his son Blyden IV is "Babatunde". whose daughter that you referred to is "Sylvia Olayinka Walmina Oreshola Blyden" See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sylvia_BlydenI claim that Abiose, Babatunde, Olayinka, and Oreshola are ALL Yoruba names, and point only in one direction, despite any alternative claims. And I am not talking about adults given honorary Igbo names by Zik (just eight years older that Blyden III) as alternative adoptive fathers! It is that misappropriation that I rail against. It is fraudulent to blandly make certain claims about one "Dr. Eluemuno Chukwuemeka Blyden" when his real name is "Edward Wilmot Abioseh Blyden-Taylor" aka Edward Wilmot Blyden III.And there you have it.Bolaji Aluko
On Tue, Oct 10, 2017 at 11:53 PM, Cornelius Hamelberg <cornelius...@gmail.com> wrote:
Keeping it very short:
It is both disrespectful and disingenuous to doubt the paternity of either Jesus of Nazareth or more concretely, Dr. Edward Wilmot Blyden III of the Pan-African dynasty. With regard to the former, I would say that such doubts whether biological or theological or merely historical, are sacrilegious.
So far, by far the best book yet written about Edward Wilmot Blyden is
“ Edward Wilmot Blyden 1832 – Pan- Negro Patriot – 1912 “ by Hollis R. Lynch ( unfortunately, I only have a( one) copy of this book.
This book can settle some of the current disputes in this forum, but it is not my function to do any finger-pointing right now.
I knew Dr. Edward Wilmot Blyden III briefly, chatted with him a few times - after he returned from the USSR where he had served as Sierra Leone’s ambassador. It was always a delight to chat with him because he was deliberately charismatic, knowing, witty and profound.. The last time I talked to him, we discussed race-relations in the US – and we talked about Malcolm X and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King soon after the assassination of those African heroes.
I was much more acquainted with his son Babatunde Edward Blyden 1V who was president of the Excelsior Fraternity which I joined, introduced by Amir Bahloo a Kenya student of Economics, ( of Indian extraction) in September 1965) - a fraternity started by H.M. Lynch-Shyllon. Babatunde was an orator – he could sure talk: He was a man of vision and a man of principle. To my sorrow, when I visited his facebook page to wish him a happy birthday , I scrolled down and read someone saying “ even though you’re gone, you’re still my friend” and it was then that I found out that dear Babatunde had passed away a few months earlier. That’s what happens when you don’t keep in touch with your old buddies.
Babatunde Edward Blyden 1V’s daughter Dr. Olayinka Blyden is currently the Minister of Social Welfare, Gender and Children's Affairs
I have too much respect for V-C Aluko and I don’t want to get involved in this dispute , since I know that the Igbos also lay great claim to Edward Wilmot Blyden the progenitor, also said to be “the Father of Pan-Africanism” - and in this day and age of paternity suits, leaving this question unanswered : Who is the mother (of Pan-Africanism)? ( Ditto about Achebe being “the father” of the African novel (in Queen Elisabeth's English)
But Dr. Obi Nwakanma is right about the Igbo Creoles/ Krios. One of my best friends Samuel Archer-Davies is one such ( a Creole of Igbo extraction – his father was a Christian Minister) and by best friend I mean that he is the Godfather of my daughter Louise Cleopatra and was also my honoured guest at my wedding reception in 1969. Rodney ( Efa/ Samuel’s older brother) was a saint.)
Some strange things about Sierra Leone cornucopias: look at the Wikipedia entry Sierra Leone and to your utter amazement you will discover that Sierra Leone’s first indigenous Governor General
Sir Henry Josiah Lightfoot Boston is not even mentioned by whichever besserwisser it was that made that entry has probably never heard of him , let alone met him him or known him. There are of course some tribal people who didn’t like like him and still don’t like him. That’s the way it is, sometimes...
On Tuesday, 10 October 2017 19:45:06 UTC+2, Ibrahim Abdullah wrote:
You might want to know that the Dr. Blyden you referenced only became Blyden after he graduated from Fourah Bay College. He was born after the legendary Blyden passed away; he could not have been his son. The claim that his mother was Blyden is just that: a claim!Hollis Lynch, Blyden's biographer, did not mention any sister that came to West Africa after Blyden was chased out of Liberia.
Sent from my iPhone
Mobolaji Aluko:
I chose not to respond to your earlier reaction to my first essay, because, frankly, I did not know exactly what you were on about! Ibadan - not Ife, not ABU - a university built by the Nigerian government has been turned into a provincial high school and a war booty, period. Now, I also do not know exactly what your quarrels are with my reference to Dr. Blyden at Nsukka. All the excerpts you referenced indicate exactly what I said in my column: that the Institute of African Studies in Nsukka had Dr. Blyden as its Director. The founding director was of course Professor Hansberry for whom that institute was named in 1962. Nsukka's far-reaching plans with that institute was totally abridged by the end of the war. So, what is your grouse? That I was not born when all that drama was playing out, yet I have to assert it? What else is new? Your fixation with my age is increasingly preposterous! What has age to do with the search that I embark on, to rouse the stones of history? At my current age, if I hadn't been shooting blanks earlier, I should be a grandfather now. So, you were ten in Nsukka, and you know it all. Well, the truth is that the Blydens are self-identified Igbo. As a matter of fact, Edward Wilmot Blyden himself, though he spent very little time in Nigeria, and lived mostly in Liberia and Sierra-Leone; and although he was born in the Caribbean Island of St. Thomas knew, and said himself, that he was born of Igbo parents. His obituary also noted that fact - that he was Igbo. He was one of the phalanx of the 19th century Igbo with networks in West Africa - like the Pratts in Gambia, the Taylors and Coles, among the many Saro-Igbo ( a lot of who are Krios today) in Liberia also. The first Igbo union was formed in fact in Gambia late in the 19th century. But many of these transnational Igbo also settled in the new coastal cities of Lagos, Calabar, Port-Harcourt, and in such missionary epicenters as Onitsha, Owerri, Bonny and so on. You had many self-identifying Saro-Igbo among the Lagos elite, and many of these families are still there - hybridized and so forth. Today, the families of the likes of Dr. Karefa-Smart, for instance, whom Zik made to come teach in Ibadan in the 1950s, are dispersed into many identities. It was Azikiwe in fact that gave Dr. Blyden II the name "Eluemuno", and Dr. Blyden in turn gave his own son, who later trained at Dartmouth, where he himself came after Nsukka, those two names also: Chukwuemeka Eluemuno Blyden. I do not know what therefore you're contending with. But it is, sir, your typical tendency for navel-gazing, that you'd choose to squirt sour grapes.
And you must know by now that I do not say what I do not verify, even though many of the things I write may be uncomfortable truths, that blow away your consoling mythologies. Yes, indeed, your own father, Dr. Sam Aluko, now that you want me to be upfront about it, was one of those who suggested the closure of Nsukka according to my sources. I chose not to mention names specifically in other to be charitable. And as you have pointed out, I was not there. Yet, I know these details. How come? My sources were far too involved in the politics of the re-opening of Nsukka to be ignored, or not to be taken seriously. Celestine Adigweneme, etc, may have gone to Ife with you in 1970, and yes indeed the likes of Professor H.O. Oluwasanmi at Ife were never as sanguine, but facts are facts. Perhaps in fact that suggestion to close down Nsukka was made to Gowon out of very practical considerations, the truth of it however, as it was related to me by at least three individuals who should know (and at three different occasions) makes me certain that it did happen. That is the rule of verification, if you've done professional journalism. There were many other factors that went into the strategic diminution of Nsukka's historic mission, and they are in part connected to the larger question of the diminution of the goals and mission of the Nigerian university. You do not contend with that. You contend with the fact that I had called Dr. Blyden, "Eluemuno," - in other words, I had claimed him for the Igbo, or that I had suggested that Nsukka was to be closed. I did not claim Dr. Blyden for the Igbo, he it was who claimed to be Igbo. And it was not I that claimed that Nsukka was to be closed, you yourself, have confirmed the fact in your own way. It was the same politics that made Dr. Augustine Njoku-Obi's discovery of the cholera vaccine such a contentious, one-sided debate in that era; or the fact that Ogbemudia's suggestion to bring together the "Biafran scientists" under one national program was shot down in the federal executive council by certain known people. The late Sam Ogbemudia himself made these facts known. It is the legacy of the kind of mad triumphalism, vicious rivalry, and short-sightedness that hobbled the Nigerian university. You do suggest that my assertions are "bland" - write your own with the "correct" facts in the public domain! And by the way, you may have noticed that my essay continues. I have much more to say.
Obi Nwakanma
From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Mobolaji Aluko <alu...@gmail.com>
Sent: Tuesday, October 10, 2017 5:41 AM
To: USAAfrica Dialogue
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: Nigerian Universities (2) - by Obi Nwakanma
Obi Nwakanma:
As you must have expected, I was waiting for the continuation of your "Universities" series, and as usual, you did not disappoint in continuing your hagiography after your first disastrous outing.
I will point out just two of such hagiographies:
1.. "That’s how come Dr. Eluemuno Chukwuemeka Blyden, Grandson of Dr. Edward Wilmot Blyden became the first orator of the university and Director of the Hansberry Institute of African Studies."
The Institute of African Studies of the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, came at a time “when the concept of African Studies as a means of consolidating the independence and building up the cultural identity of the new states of Africa was very much in vogue” (Afigbo, 1971:89). The idea for a graduate Institute of African Studies in the University of Nigeria was channeled towards research and was designed as a rallying point for “all men of colour who can trace their descent to the African continent no matter in what part of the world they now find their habitation”. (Afigbo, 1971:89). The establishment of the Hansberry College of African Studies in the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, was approved in September 1962 by the Governing Council of the University of Nigeria as a graduate Institution. The College was opened on September 23, 1963 with a four-day Seminar at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka campus, with the title, “The Emergence of African Political Thought.” This Seminar was attended by eminent scholars and authorities on African studies from many places in Nigeria and overseas. The keynote address was delivered by Professor William Leo Hansberry, an eminent Afro-American Historian and Africanist, whose name the college bears and who was designated its Director. The Hansberry College was renamed Hansberry Institute of African Studies in 1964. Prof. William Leo Hansberry had taught Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe and Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, two students who later became first indigenous Presidents of their countries, Nigeria and Ghana, respectively. As W.L. Hansberry, the Director, was not resident (but visiting Nsukka once in a while from the United States), his deputy, Professor Edward Wilmot Blyden III, an orator, Professor of Political Science and grandson of the famous Blyden, was made the acting director but later became the substantive director in 1964. (Onyeneke, 1984). Professor Blyden was a former Head of Department of Political Science in the University of Nigeria, Nsukka.
UNQUOTE
So again, I ask: Obi, who the heck is "Dr. Eluemuno Chukwuemeka Blyden, Grandson of Dr. Edward Wilmot Blyden"?
2. "As a matter of fact, UNN was nearly closed down, when on seeking their opinion on what to do with the university post-war, some western Nigerian intellectuals who ironically had taught at Nsukka before the war, advised Gowon to close down the University of Nigeria, and distribute its faculties and students to already existing universities at Ibadan, Ife, Lagos, ABU and the then newly established university in Benin. But this move was seriously resisted, and it took serious lobbying, and the intervention of the late Emir of Kano, Ado Bayero, as quondam Chancellor of the university to dissuade Gowon."
Obi, this is a howler not worth your integrity. The most prominent "western Nigerian intellectuals who ironically had taught at Nsukka before the war" unttl 1967 were:
(i) Dr. Sam Aluko, Head of Department of Economics
(ii) Prof.. Babs Fafunwa, of the Facultry of Education
(iii) Dr. Akinsola Akiwowo of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology
All three (now late, and hence unable to defend themselves) left Nsukka for the University of Ife just before the outbreak of war. For my father, it was a return. So Obi, of three persons, who are you accusing so blatantly -you did not even say "alleged" - of misadvising Gowon?
This is a lie froom the pits of hell that one sacaterbrained irredentist, trying to get my goats, wrote about my father about 10 years ago, and I pushed back at him strenuously, and he backed down. Now, ten years later, you are repeating it.
The fact of the matter was that many students of non-Eastern/non-Igbo origin had been placed in various universities when they left Biafra before the war, with many of them (in fact most) having graduated by the time the war ended in 1970. The generous reconciliation offer being made to the Igbo university students (trapped within Biafra, who had not given their lives in blood to the Biafran cause) after the war was that those who wished to CONTINUE their studies in those departments and faculties whose staff, equipment and buildings had been decimated during the war could do so in the EXISTING universities, while those who wished to return to UNN were free to do so, with the clear understanding that some rehabillation was necessary. To now interprete that as a request to CLOSE down UNN is most un-generous and grating.
Read what written here, for example:
QUOTE
Cornelius Hamelberg
Edward Wilmot Blyden’s savage treatment from the Mulattoes in Liberia makes for painful reading. Perhaps : This one incident ( among many other) is worth mentioning:
Page 49 of Hollis Lynch’s Biography of Edward Wilmot Blyden
“ The events leading to Blyden’s forcible departure from Liberia originated with the accession to the presidency in 1870 of Edward James Roye, “ a pure descendant of the Ibo tribe” , who had won the presidency from its incumbent, James Sprigg Payne, a mulatto, after one of the most fiercely contested election in Liberian history.” An American collage graduate, Roye had emigrated to Liberia in 1846, and as a shrewd trader and ship owner, had become one of the wealthiest men in the Negro Republic” ( Please , read on
Equally interesting :
The Pan-Negro Goal, Class and Colour Conflict in Liberia, 1862-71
Race Work in Sierra Leone 1871-3
“ Pure Negroes” only for Africa
Cornelius Hamelberg
That would be terrible Sir!
I am convinced that V-C Aluko’s integrity cannot be successfully assailed by just any whippersnapper
In the third paragraph, on page 3 of Hollis R. Lynch’s authoritative biography of Edward Wilmot Blyden ( Oxford University press, 1967) we read
“ It was the humiliating lot of the Negro as a human being which drove Edward Wilmot Blyden to becoming the greatest Negro champion of his race in the nineteenth century. Edward was born , the third of seven children , on 3 August 1832, on the then Danish West Indian Island of St. Thomas. “ OF Ebony hue” he later claimed to be of “ pure Negro” parentage from the Ibo tribe in Eastern Nigeria.. He was of relatively privileged birth, Both his parents were free and literate. His mother Judith was a school teacher, his father, Romeo, was a tailor. The family lived in the predominantly Jewish and English- speaking community in the capital - Charlotte-Amalie – and Edward romped with Jewish boys on Synagogue Hill, and later proudly pointed out that Judah P. Benjamin, 1811-84, the eminent American statesman and jurist , was born in the same neighbourhood. The Blydens attended the integrated Dutch Reformed Church, and young Edward went to the local primary school but also received private tuition from his mother” ( Edward Wilmot Blyden - Pan Negro Patriot - Hollis R. Lynch)
When it comes to interpersonal relationships - and that includes the sexual, as Hamlet put it,
“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy”
On Wednesday, 11 October 2017 19:04:40 UTC+2, O O wrote:
Rex Marinus
Sent: Wednesday, October 11, 2017 3:47 PM
To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: Nigerian Universities (2) - by Obi Nwakanma
Abolaji Adekeye
Such a day has come, O.O., and its face is Dr. Bolaji Aluko. What's quite impressive about Aluko is his capacity to really dissimulate, and his gifts better than Esu-Elegba's, for slipperiness! Now, note that his contention was no longer that the older Blyden was not Igbo, but that the later Blyden was misapproriated BLANDLY. His very words. Such BLANDishment - my own words - is unbecoming of one whose mission is to dispense with BLANDness. I had said that Nsukka was conceived as a place for global black and African scholar. Blyden was such an example. Bolaji's beef was that I had called Edward Wilmot Blyden III, "Elumuno Blyden." That Igbo name riled him to the point blasphemy. Blyden was Yoruba, period, because his name was "Abiose" and he descended from a "Taylor." Now which Taylor? There is a history of the Taylors of Sierra-Leone and Liberia who were Igbo, like the missionary J.C. Taylor. So, which Taylor was Blyden's father? Aluko does not say. He only read it on Wikipedia. And from that too, he imagines quite BLANDLY, I must say, that bearing Yoruba names therefore meant that the Blydens or the Taylors must be Yoruba. Nothing is wrong with that by the way, and the Blydens may just as well today, be more Yoruba than their Igbo ancestry.
But those of us who teach the Diaspora know that Liberia, Sierra-Leone, and the Gambia have created such a profound mix, that the name, "Abioseh" is now like "Smith." It does not signify ethnic identity. In fact, ethnic identity is so mixed in these places that almost no contemporary Sierra-Leonean can be differentiated to a single ethnicity. Even many who currently bear Yoruba names do so because Yoruba is by far more circulated. And the typical Igbo, always assimilating and dissimilating, will mix into the crowd so perfectly that his original identity would be moot or lost. This is the situation of the Blydens and the Taylors. They basically tell us about the fluidity of identity. But what is never in contention is that Edward Blyden III descended from Edward Blyden I, who was Igbo, and that the Taylors were prominent Igbo family in the 19th century and the early 20th in Sierra-Leone and Liberia, at least, irrespective of whatever else they've become today. That the Blyden's bear Yoruba names is quite typical of the Igbo, who have no qualms naming their children after cultures in which they assimilate. Zik afterall, named his children Chukwuma Bamidele, Chukwemeka Ayodele, Nwachukwu Abiodun - and they're still Zik's children. There are many Igbo who have Yoruba names. Even I, have a Yoruba name, which nobody else calls me except my mother, who calls me all by my five Latin, English, Igbo and Yoruba names, only when I piss her off. Yet, I'm still my father's son. Was Edward Blyden III a Bylden? Yes. Was he invited to Nsukka as part of Azikiwe's conception of his university? Yes. Is there a "Chukwuemeka Eluemuno Blyden"? Yes. So, Bolaji Aluko really, really has a case of intellectual conjunctivitis, because he sees only red when it comes to anything other than Yoruba. And he often mises the point, and this because he reads Wikipedia like the bible. Context thus often eludes him.Obi Nwakanma
From: 'O O' via USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Wednesday, October 11, 2017 3:47 PM
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Ibrahim Abdullah
Mobolaji Aluko
Such a day has come, O.O., and its face is Dr. Bolaji Aluko. What's quite impressive about Aluko is his capacity to really dissimulate, and his gifts better than Esu-Elegba's, for slipperiness! Now, note that his contention was no longer that the older Blyden was not Igbo, but that the later Blyden was misapproriated BLANDLY. His very words. Such BLANDishment - my own words - is unbecoming of one whose mission is to dispense with BLANDness. I had said that Nsukka was conceived as a place for global black and African scholar. Blyden was such an example. Bolaji's beef was that I had called Edward Wilmot Blyden III, "Elumuno Blyden." That Igbo name riled him to the point blasphemy. Blyden was Yoruba, period, because his name was "Abiose" and he descended from a "Taylor." Now which Taylor? There is a history of the Taylors of Sierra-Leone and Liberia who were Igbo, like the missionary J.C. Taylor. So, which Taylor was Blyden's father? Aluko does not say. He only read it on Wikipedia. And from that too, he imagines quite BLANDLY, I must say, that bearing Yoruba names therefore meant that the Blydens or the Taylors must be Yoruba. Nothing is wrong with that by the way, and the Blydens may just as well today, be more Yoruba than their Igbo ancestry.
But those of us who teach the Diaspora know that Liberia, Sierra-Leone, and the Gambia have created such a profound mix, that the name, "Abioseh" is now like "Smith." It does not signify ethnic identity. In fact, ethnic identity is so mixed in these places that almost no contemporary Sierra-Leonean can be differentiated to a single ethnicity. Even many who currently bear Yoruba names do so because Yoruba is by far more circulated. And the typical Igbo, always assimilating and dissimilating, will mix into the crowd so perfectly that his original identity would be moot or lost. This is the situation of the Blydens and the Taylors. They basically tell us about the fluidity of identity. But what is never in contention is that Edward Blyden III descended from Edward Blyden I, who was Igbo, and that the Taylors were prominent Igbo family in the 19th century and the early 20th in Sierra-Leone and Liberia, at least, irrespective of whatever else they've become today. That the Blyden's bear Yoruba names is quite typical of the Igbo, who have no qualms naming their children after cultures in which they assimilate. Zik afterall, named his children Chukwuma Bamidele, Chukwemeka Ayodele, Nwachukwu Abiodun - and they're still Zik's children. There are many Igbo who have Yoruba names. Even I, have a Yoruba name, which nobody else calls me except my mother, who calls me all by my five Latin, English, Igbo and Yoruba names, only when I piss her off. Yet, I'm still my father's son. Was Edward Blyden III a Bylden? Yes. Was he invited to Nsukka as part of Azikiwe's conception of his university? Yes. Is there a "Chukwuemeka Eluemuno Blyden"? Yes. So, Bolaji Aluko really, really has a case of intellectual conjunctivitis, because he sees only red when it comes to anything other than Yoruba. And he often mises the point, and this because he reads Wikipedia like the bible. Context thus often eludes him.Obi Nwakanma
From: 'O O' via USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Wednesday, October 11, 2017 3:47 PM
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Rex Marinus
Neither do I care, Bolaji Aluko, whether Blyden was "Abioseh" or "Abolaji" or "Abaribe," or even "Eluemuno," but that he was orator at UNN, and Director of the Institute of African studies, and that he was Blyden, grandson of Blyden I, whose symbolism in pan-Africanism fit into Azikiwe's concept of his university. Which was the real point of even mentioning Blyden! Nor do I in fact give a fiddler's fart what you call "super-Gobellian-Wetin-call": that's your province. And I wish I could write fiction, really, because that's a great thing to write! You can deflect your real grouse all you want, about Dr. Sam Aluko's advise to close down Nsukka, which is the real ant in your pants, and all the pointless, meaningless talk about whether Blyden was "Eluemuno" or "Abioseh" is just your chance to bloviate, and Goebelize, and "Supermenchen" and "BLANDish," and do all that Alujonjonkinjo stuff. Its old stuff and getting quite tiring. Its time to invent something fresher other than calling me "fiction writer" and whatnot, as if there is no truth even in fiction. And no, I do not think the Igbo were the greater number of ex-slaves in Liberia, Gambia or Sierra-Leone. I could never claim that. I did say that Yoruba had greater circulation. The hundred year civil war ensured a hefty supply of slaves and recaptives from the Bight of Benin among those that settled there. Ex-Igbo slaves did play some crucial part in the settling of Sierra-Leone, and in the return to Liberia, but I would never claim they were most of the settlers in these areas. So, no, you did not hear that from me. It is another one of your attempts to deflect.
Obi Nwakanma
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Mobolaji Aluko
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Toyin Falola
Ibrahim Abdullah
Sent from my iPhone
Cornelius Hamelberg
V-C Bolaji Aluko,
Elephants they say have good memories and so do some human beings such as the winners of the world memory championships
Spell his name backwards and you know where he comes from, originally. Posterity will judge some of the altercations between that upstart Obi and you, between Obi and my Baba Kadiri and I sincerely believe that they will not misjudge you - or not judge Baba Kadiri favourably when it comes to e.g. whether Biafra won that war or not and what were the terms of Biafra’s surrender.
As for some so called scholars, that’s all they do; “read books repeat quotations, draw conclusions on the wall”
The oral tradition, the horse's mouth is still alive and well, from much of which we have derived another source, wherever it may be found, wicked Wikipedia, a thousand and one buks by some crank or other , some directly copied therefrom, it’s called the printed word and up till today, there are some books, you’re not allowed to burn.
My friend told me that he had the marijuana and the matches ready, but couldn’t find any cigarette paper , so what do you think he did? So he tore off a page of the Holy Bible and rolled his joint. But that was before he became a Bible thumping Christian. I guess that today, if he ran out of paper, that’s what he would probably do one more time this time (God forbid) with some pages of the Holy Quran. And then likewise burn in Jahannam , and burn some joints there, forever and ever …
Yes indeed Sir, Edward Wilmot Blyden is really an intriguing nineteenth century, early twentieth century fellow and in many respects and aspects, in Pan-African terms, the grand old man was certainly ahead of his time. So was his early successor Jamaica’s most iconic Marcus Garvey and one of the bad ideas they had in common ( a product of their environments and bad experiences) was their loathing of ”miscegenation” as apparent in some of Garvey’s poetry. And therefore, understandably, especially before and after his horrendous experiences with the Mulattoes in Liberia - and I guess the slave master’s plantation children in the Caribbean, Blyden I ‘s emphasis – his boasting and preoccupation to the point of fixation on he himself being an advocate of “ Pure Negro”. Pure Negroism vs the “impure”
Had Blyden Number One arrived in Apartheid Pretoria instead of Africa’s first free Black Republic , headquartered in Monrovia, he would probably have changed the trajectory of history there too.
Historians are interested in sieving some gems of truth from the general insipid gossip of the age, much of it contained in the newspapers - whatever the media of the day , all that Literature - music, poetry – song - drama- Chidi – Obi, Steve Biko, Bertrand Russell, Nnamdi Azikiwe & Kanu…
When Blyden the First claims that he is/ was of Igbo stock, it should be interesting to know, when he made that claim and why. Perhaps, before the Igbos be-came one of “ the lost tribes of Israel” ?
Where I’m coming from right now: The first bad news I read this morning was about Sweden’s NMR and that “NMR’s ideology is built on the myth of a Jewish World Conspiracy and race biology” ( Source : EXPO
All the blogs in the Local have been closed down , so I’ll be starting another blog this time with a slightly different focus, very soon…
Respectfully,
Not GH
but
Cornelius
Toyin Falola
Ibrahim Abdullah
Sent from my iPhone
O O
Spies on Campus
How the CIA secretly exploits higher education
On the crisp autumn afternoon of November 26, 2007, a black car picked up Graham Spanier, then president of Pennsylvania State University, at Dulles International Airport and whisked him to CIA headquarters in Langley, Va. Using his identification card — embedded with a hologram and computer chip — he checked in at security and was greeted by the chief of staff of the National Resources Division, the CIA’s clandestine domestic service. They proceeded to a conference room, where about two dozen chiefs of station and other senior CIA intelligence officers awaited them.
Spanier was expecting to brief them on the work of the National Security Higher Education Advisory Board, an organization he chaired and had helped create, which fostered dialogue between intelligence agencies and universities. First, though, the CIA surprised him. In a brief ceremony, it presented him with the Warren Medal, said to be the agency’s highest honor for nonemployees.
The honor recognized Spanier’s dedication to alerting college administrators to the threat of human and cyberespionage, and to opening doors for the agency at campuses nationwide. A former family therapist and television talk-show host with an unruffled, empathetic manner and features — round face, white hair, blue eyes — reminiscent of Phil Donahue, Spanier soothed many an academic’s anxieties about dealing with the CIA and the FBI.
Since the intelligence agencies were going to meddle anyway, Spanier reasoned, they should do so with the knowledge and consent of college presidents. "My feeling was, If there’s a spy on my campus, a potential terrorist, or a visiting faculty member you believe is up to no good, I know you’ll be pursuing it," he told me in April 2016. "Here’s the deal. Rather than break into his office, come to me — I have top-secret clearance — show me your FISA [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] order, and I’ll have someone unlock the door.."
Spanier’s CIA medal, and a similar FBI award a year later, symbolized a reconciliation between the intelligence services and the academy. The relationship has come full circle: from chumminess in the 1940s and 1950s, to animosity during the Vietnam War and civil-rights era, and back to cooperation after the September 11, 2001, attacks.
Their unequal partnership, though, tilts toward the government. U.S. intelligence seized on the renewed goodwill, and the red carpet rolled out by Spanier and other university administrators, to expand not only its public presence on campus but also covert operations and sponsoring of secret research. Federal encroachment on academic prerogatives has met only token resistance.
The two cultures are antithetical: Academe is open and international, while intelligence services are clandestine and nationalistic. Still, after Islamic-fundamentalist terrorists toppled the World Trade Center, colleges became part of the national security apparatus. The new recruiting booths at meetings of academic associations were one telling indicator. The CIA began exhibiting at the annual convention of the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages in 2004, as did the FBI and National Security Agency around the same time. Since 2011 the FBI, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the NSA have participated on a panel at the Modern Language Association convention titled "Using Your Language Proficiency and Cultural Expertise in a Federal Government Career."
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While almost all Iarpa projects are unclassified, colleges increasingly carry out secret but lucrative government research at well-guarded facilities. Two years after the 9/11 attacks, the University of Maryland established a center that conducts classified research on language for the Pentagon and intelligence agencies. Edward Snowden worked there in 2005 as a security guard, eight years before he joined the government contractor Booz Allen Hamilton and leaked classified files on NSA surveillance.
The center is located off-campus. Like many universities, Maryland forbids secret research on campus, but its transparency stops at the far side of its neatly trimmed lawns.
Other universities have no such compunctions. "Classified research on campuses, once highly controversial, is making a comeback," VICE News reported in 2015. The National Security Agency in 2013 awarded $60 million to North Carolina State University, the largest research grant in the university’s history, to create an on-campus laboratory for data analysis. Virginia Tech established a private nonprofit corporation in December 2009 to perform classified work in intelligence, cybersecurity, and national security.. Two years later, the university planted its flag on prime intelligence-community turf. It opened a research center in Ballston, a neighborhood in Arlington, Va., across the Potomac River from Washington, brimming with CIA and Pentagon contractors. The center features facilities for, according to the university, "conducting sensitive research on behalf of the national security community."
Academe was present at the CIA’s creation. Its precursor, the Office of Strategic Services, founded in 1942, was "half cops-and-robbers and half faculty meeting," according to McGeorge Bundy, an intelligence officer during World War II and later national security adviser to the presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. The OSS was largely an Ivy League bastion. It attracted 13 Yale professors in its first year, along with 42 students from the university’s Class of 1943. A Yale assistant professor, under cover of acquiring manuscripts for the university library, became OSS chief in Istanbul.
Almost from its inception, the CIA cultivated foreign students, recognizing their value as informants and future government officials in their homelands. It learned about them not only through their professors but also through the CIA-funded National Student Association, the largest student group in the United States. With only 26,433 international students in the United States in 1950, less than 3 percent of today’s total, the CIA relied on the association to identify potential informants at home and abroad.
The agency, which supported the student association as a non-Communist alternative to Soviet-backed student organizations, meddled in the group’s election of officers and sent its activists, including the future feminist Gloria Steinem, to disrupt international youth festivals. "In the CIA, I finally found a group of people who understood how important it was to represent the diversity of our government’s ideas at Communist festivals," Steinem told Newsweek in 1967. "If I had the choice, I would do it again." With an assist from the CIA, the number of foreign students in the United States almost doubled from 1950 to 1960.
Then it all unraveled. Ramparts, a monthly magazine that opposed the Vietnam War, reported in 1966 that a Michigan State University program to train the South Vietnamese police had five CIA agents on its payroll. A year later, Ramparts revealed the CIA’s involvement in the National Student Association, stirring a national outcry. The Johnson administration responded by banning covert federal funding of "any of the nation’s educational or private voluntary organizations" — though not of their individual members or employees.
Privately, Johnson saw the hand of world Communism in both the Ramparts exposé and the antiwar protests, and ordered the CIA and FBI to prove it. FBI penetration and surveillance — including illegal wiretaps and warrantless searches — expanded under President Richard Nixon but failed to turn up evidence of foreign funding.The government’s crackdown on its campus critics, along with CIA blunders such as the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, in 1961, fractured the camaraderie between intelligence agencies and academe. In 1968 alone, there were 77 instances of picketing, sit-ins, and other student protests against CIA recruiters.
The disaffection was mutual. Just as Ivy League graduates began having doubts about joining the CIA, so older alumni who had devoted their careers to intelligence agencies bridled at the antiestablishment campus mood. "It is not true that universities rejected the intelligence community: that community rejected universities at least as early," the Yale historian Robin Winks wrote.
Hostility between the intelligence services and universities peaked with the 1976 report of the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, usually known as the Church Committee, after its chairman, Senator Frank Church of Idaho. In the most comprehensive investigation ever of U.S. intelligence agencies, the committee documented an appalling litany of abuses, some undertaken by presidential order and others rogue. The CIA, it found, had tested LSD and other drugs on prisoners and students; opened 215,820 letters passing through a New York City postal facility over two decades; and tried to assassinate the Cuban dictator Fidel Castro and other foreign leaders. The FBI, for its part, had harassed civil-rights and anti-Vietnam War protesters by wiretapping them and smearing them in anonymous letters to parents, neighbors, and employers.
The committee also exposed clandestine connections between the CIA and higher education. The agency was using "several hundred academics" at more than a hundred U.S. colleges for, among other purposes, "providing leads and, on occasion, making introductions for intelligence purposes," typically without anyone else on campus being "aware of the CIA link."
Bowing to the CIA’s insistence on protecting its agents, the committee didn’t name the professors or the colleges where they taught. Typically, the academics helped recruit foreign students. A professor would invite an international student — often from a Soviet-bloc country, or perhaps Iran — to his office to get acquainted. Flattered by the attention, the student would have no clue he was being assessed as a potential CIA informant. The professor would then arrange for the student to meet a wealthy "friend" in publishing or investing. The friend would buy the student dinner and pay him generously for an essay about his country or his research specialty.
Unaware he was being compromised, the grateful student would compose one well-compensated paper after another. By the time the professor’s friend admitted that he was a CIA agent, and asked him to spy, the student had little choice but to agree. He couldn’t report the overture to his own government, because his acceptance of CIA money would jeopardize his reputation in his homeland, if not his freedom.
Morton Halperin knew about this deception and found it "completely inappropriate." He intended to end it once and for all. The Church Committee’s report showed him the way.
From a bookshelf in his office at the Open Society Foundations in Washington, where he is a senior adviser, Halperin extracts the first volume of the committee report. He opens the thumb-worn paperback to a passage he had underlined 40 years before: "The Committee believes that it is the responsibility of private institutions and particularly the American academic community to set the professional and ethical standards of its members." That sentence sent him on a quest to persuade colleges to stand up to U.S. intelligence agencies and curb covert activity on their campuses. His mission would provoke an unprecedented confrontation between the CIA and the country’s most famous university. Its outcome would shape the relationship between U.S. intelligence and academe and still has repercussions today.
Halperin had Ivy League credentials as impeccable as any CIA recruit’s: a bachelor’s degree from Columbia and a Yale doctorate, followed by six years on the Harvard faculty. A former White House wunderkind who’d taken a top Pentagon post under President Johnson before turning 30 and then joined the National Security Council staff under President Nixon, Halperin had himself become a target of the government’s covert operations, largely because of his misgivings about the Vietnam War.. With the approval of his mentor, Henry Kissinger, then national-security adviser, the Nixon administration tapped Halperin’s home phone in 1969, suspecting him of leaking information about the secret bombing of Cambodia to reporters. It also placed him near the top of Nixon’s notorious "enemies list."
As director of the Center for National Security Studies, a project of the American Civil Liberties Union, Halperin had lobbied Congress to create the Church Committee. He attended its hearings and testified before it, urging a ban on clandestine operations because they bypass congressional and public oversight and are incompatible with democratic values.
Armed with the committee’s recommendation, he approached Harvard and asked it to set rules for secret CIA activity on campus. He expected that any restrictions placed by the nation’s most prominent university would spread throughout academe.
Harvard’s president, Derek Bok, appointed four sages to set standards. Their 1977 guidelines prohibited students and faculty members from undertaking "intelligence operations" for the CIA, although they could be debriefed about foreign travels after returning home. "The use of the academic profession and scholarly enterprises to provide a ‘cover’ for intelligence activities is likely to corrupt the academic process and lead to a loss of public respect for academic enterprises," they wrote.
Also forbidden was helping the CIA "in obtaining the unwitting services of another member of the Harvard community" — in other words, recruiting foreign students under false pretenses. To Bok and his advisers, this perverted the trust between professor and student on which higher education is built. Posing as a mentor, a professor might seek a foreign student’s views on international affairs, or ask about his financial situation, not to guide him but to help the CIA evaluate and enlist him. And, once it snared the student, the agency might ask him to break the laws of his home country — a request that Harvard couldn’t be a party to.
"Many of these students are highly vulnerable," Bok told the Senate in 1978. "They are frequently young and inexperienced, often short of funds and away from their homelands for the first time. Is it appropriate for faculty members, who supposedly are acting in the best interests of the students, to be part of a process of recruiting such students to engage in activities that may be hazardous and probably illegal under the laws of their home countries? I think not."
The Harvard committee acknowledged that its new rules made the CIA’s job harder. "This loss is one that a free society should be willing to suffer," it said.
If professors want to help the CIA, Turner argued in correspondence with Bok, it’s their right as American citizens. Harvard’s policy, he concluded, "deprives academics of all freedom of choice in relation to involvement in intelligence activities."
The CIA promulgated its own "Regulation on Relationships with the U.S. Academic Community," which remains in effect today. The one-page regulation ratified the status quo, permitting the agency to "enter into personal services contracts and other continuing relationships with individual full-time staff and faculty members." The CIA would "suggest" that the staff or faculty member alert a senior university official, "unless security considerations preclude such a disclosure or the individual objects."
Harvard and the CIA bickered with one eye on the audience they wanted to impress: the rest of academe. One university, no matter how prestigious, couldn’t stare down the CIA. But if other universities lined up behind Harvard, the agency would be hard-pressed to resist.
Halperin set out like Johnny Appleseed to sow the Harvard guidelines across the country. To his shock, the soil was barren. Other universities were reluctant to follow Harvard’s lead without documented evidence of covert CIA-faculty relationships, which the Church Committee had suppressed. University presidents wrote to the CIA, asking for particulars about cooperating faculty members, which the agency declined to provide. Some professors complained that Harvard’s rules would infringe on their academic freedom.
Only 10 colleges adopted Harvard’s policy even in diluted form.
Forty years later, Halperin remains perplexed. "I thought once Harvard did it, everybody else would follow," he says. "Nobody did. It was a big disappointment. If we had been able to make it the norm on major campuses, it would have had impact.. I was befuddled, bewildered, and frustrated. Finally, I just gave up."
The CIA moved to mend the breach with academe. In 1977 it started a "scholars-in-residence" program in which professors on sabbatical from their universities were given contracts to advise CIA analysts and made "privy to information that would never be available to them on campus." In 1985 the agency added an "officers-in-residence" component, which placed intelligence officers nearing retirement at universities at CIA expense.
The effectiveness of the officers-in-residence program was "very mixed," said the former CIA analyst Brian Latell, who ran it from 1994 to 1998. Before he took over, he said, "we were sending Dagwood Bumsteads who should have been forced into retirement." Some were just hanging around campus with nothing to do. Latell set standards; the officers must have advanced degrees and be allowed to teach. At its peak, the program had officers in residence at more than a dozen universities.
The CIA supplied not only teachers but also students, intervening in a cherished academic bailiwick: admissions. In some cases it arranged schooling for valuable foreign informants who were in danger and had to flee to the United States.
In other instances, the CIA compensated foreign agents by arranging their children’s or grandchildren’s admission to an American college and paying their tuition, typically through a front organization. "When you’re recruiting a foreigner, you look at, ‘What can I do for this guy?’ Sometimes a guy will say, ‘I want my daughter to go to a good American school,’ " says Gene Coyle, who went to Indiana University as a CIA officer in residence. He retired from the agency in 2006 and is now a professor of practice at Indiana.
"The answer may be, ‘We may be able to line her up with a scholarship from the Aardvark Society of Boston.’ Instead of giving Daddy cold hard cash, when he has to explain where he gets it, his daughter gets the Aardvark Society second-born scholarship for people from Uzbekistan."
While the CIA can pull strings at top universities when it needs to, some informants ask for less selective colleges. "We sent an awful lot of Arabs" to state universities in the Southwest, an ex-officer recalls. "They all wanted to study petroleum engineering. Those schools had a huge Arab population, and they fit right in."
Agenerational shift underlies the increasing ties between the intelligence community and academe. Baby-boomer professors who grew up protesting the CIA-aided misadventures of the 1960s began to retire, replaced by those shaped by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the first Gulf War, and 9/11. Younger faculty members are more likely to regard the collecting and sifting of intelligence as a vital tool for a nation under threat and a patriotic duty compatible with — even desirable for — academic research.
Barbara Walter considers it a public service to educate the CIA. The political scientist at the University of California at San Diego gives unpaid presentations at think tanks fronting for the agency, sometimes for audiences whose name tags carry only their first names. When CIA recruiters have visited UCSD, she has helped them organize daylong simulations of foreign-policy crises to measure graduate students’ analytic abilities — and even role-played a CIA official.
She’s aware that some older faculty colleagues frown on those activities. "My more senior colleagues would absolutely not be comfortable consulting with the CIA or intelligence agencies," she says. "Anybody who remembers or had exposure to the Vietnam War has this visceral reaction."
Graham Spanier was the exception to Walter’s dictum. The Vietnam War didn’t prejudice him against intelligence agencies. As an undergraduate and graduate student at Iowa State University, he told me, he had been an "establishment radical." Spanier, who had student and medical deferments and so didn’t serve in the war, led peaceful, law-abiding demonstrations against it but disapproved of confrontational tactics, such as taking over administration buildings. Once, when a march threatened to turn unruly, he borrowed a police loudspeaker to urge calm.
"I had the greatest respect for law enforcement," he said. "I was always in the forefront of change, but I believed in working through the system.. I wanted to be at the table, making change, rather than outside the building, yelling and having no effect."
As he advanced in his career, gaining a seat at the table of administrators who hammered out academic policy, he paid little heed to the Church Committee or to CIA and FBI activities. Then, in 1995, he was appointed president of Penn State. Because the university conducts classified research at its Applied Research Laboratory, Spanier needed a security clearance. While he was being vetted, he read newspaper accounts linking a University of South Florida professor, Sami Al-Arian, and an adjunct instructor, Ramadan Shallah, to Palestinian Islamic Jihad, an Iran-backed terrorist group. Spanier was struck by USF President Betty Castor’s lament that she’d had no idea of Al-Arian’s alleged fund-raising for terrorists and that the FBI had not given her "one iota" of information.
The soft-spoken Shallah had been named head of Islamic Jihad and vowed war against Israel. The director of the international-studies center at USF was quoted as saying, "We couldn’t be more surprised."
Spanier made his own vow: Never be surprised. As a university president, he thought, "I want to be the first to know, not the last."
He convened a meeting in his conference room of every government agency that might conduct an investigation at Penn State, from the FBI and CIA to the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (the university does Navy research) and state and local police departments. "What I said to them is, ‘If there is a significant national-security or law-enforcement issue on my campus, you can trust me. I understand the importance and sensitivity of such matters. I would like you to feel comfortable coming to me to talk about it, rather than sneaking around behind my back.’ "
They agreed to stay in touch. From then on, an FBI or CIA agent — usually both — would drop by once a month to brief him or ask his advice, typically about counterintelligence or cybersecurity issues involving foreign students or visitors. In 2002, David W. Szady became the FBI’s assistant director for counterintelligence. A quarter-century before, he had gone undercover at the University of Pittsburgh, posing as a chemist to befriend Soviet students. Now, like Spanier, he wanted to smooth relations between intelligence agencies and academe. Soon, FBI and CIA officials asked Spanier to expand the Penn State experiment nationwide.
The result was the National Security Higher Education Advisory Board (NSHEAB), established in 2005 with Spanier as its chairman. It consisted, then as now, of 20 to 25 university presidents and higher-education leaders, though some initially were nervous about their membership becoming public, fearing a campus backlash that never materialized. Spanier, conferring with the FBI and CIA, chose the members, primarily from prestigious research universities. At the FBI, Szady says, "nobody thought we could get it up and running," because academe was perceived as hostile turf.
Board members receive security clearances and go to FBI and CIA offices periodically for classified briefings. The agenda for an October 2013 meeting at FBI headquarters, for example, included the investigation of Edward Snowden for leaking classified National Security Agency documents; the Boston Marathon bombing; Russian threats to laboratories and research; and Department of Defense-funded students abroad "being aggressively targeted" by Iranian intelligence. Afterward the FBI hosted a dinner for board members at a gourmet Italian restaurant in downtown Washington.
"There’s a real tension between what the FBI and CIA want to do and our valid and necessary international openness," says one board member, Rice University’s president, David Leebron.. "But we don’t want to wake up one morning and find out that there are people on campus stealing our trade secrets or putting our country in danger. We might be uneasy bedfellows, but we’ve got to find an accommodation."
The FBI and Spanier reached an understanding that it would notify him or the board about investigations at U.S. universities. In return for being kept in the loop, Spanier opened doors for the FBI throughout academe. He gave FBI-sponsored seminars for administrators at MIT, Michigan State, Stanford, and other universities, as well as for national associations of higher-education trustees and lawyers. Many of them arrived at his talks "with a healthy degree of skepticism," he told me. Displaying his American Civil Liberties Union membership card to prove that he shared their devotion to academic freedom, Spanier would assure them that the FBI had changed since J. Edgar Hoover’s henchmen snooped in student files.
"Before anybody would do that, I would call the president," Spanier continued. "The presidents all knew me. They would take my call. … I would say, ‘Someone from the CIA would like to come. There’s no issue on your campus now’ — occasionally there was an issue; most often it was a get-acquainted meeting. Sometimes I would just give the first name. ‘Someone will call your assistant; it’s Bob.’ … That worked 100 percent of the time."
Spanier facilitated CIA introductions to the presidents of both Carnegie Mellon and Ohio State. A Pittsburgh-based CIA officer began visiting Jared Cohon, Carnegie Mellon’s president from 1997 to 2013, once or twice a year. "I know there was direct activity with selected faculty," Cohon says. "They were interested in what the faculty might have observed when they went to foreign conferences. My impression, what I heard from the CIA, was that it was more defensive than offensive. Trying to make sure those faculty weren’t recruited by a foreign power.
"I was uneasy about it, and I am uneasy," he adds. "I’m a kid of the ’60s, and I remember all the protests on campus. The idea of the CIA being on campus would have turned people crazy.. Things have changed dramatically in that regard."
Spanier frequently traveled abroad, visiting China, Cuba, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and other countries of interest to the CIA. On his return, the agency would debrief him. "I have been in the company of presidents, prime ministers, corporate chief executives, and eminent scientists," he told me. "That’s a level of life experience and exposure you don’t have as a case officer or even a State Department employee."
I asked if U.S. intelligence had ever instructed him to gather specific information — in other words, if he had ever acted as an intelligence agent. He smiled and said, "I can’t talk about it."
His lofty contacts enabled Spanier to steer federal research funds to universities in general and Penn State in particular. When Robert Gates, who as president of Texas A&M University had been Spanier’s "close colleague" on the higher-education-advisory board, became U.S. secretary of defense, in December 2006, they brainstormed about academe’s role in national defense. The result was the Pentagon-funded Minerva Initiative, which supports social-science research on regions of strategic importance to U.S. security.
At meetings with the CIA’s chief scientist or the head of the FBI’s science-and-technology branch, Spanier invariably asked, "What’s your greatest need?" He rarely heard the answer without thinking, We can do that at Penn State. Then he would approach the director of the appropriate Penn State laboratory, explain what the CIA or FBI wanted, and say, "Why don’t you go and talk to them?"
Spanier resigned as Penn State president in 2011 and as chairman of the National Security Higher Education Advisory Board soon afterward, during a firestorm over child sex abuse by Jerry Sandusky, a former assistant football coach. University trustees hired Louis Freeh to investigate. He and Spanier had been friendly for years. Freeh was FBI director when Spanier welcomed the bureau to Penn State. In 2005, Freeh inscribed a copy of his memoir, My FBI, to Spanier with "warm wishes and appreciation for your leadership, vision and integrity."
Freeh’s 2012 report portrayed Spanier quite differently. It accused him and others of concealing the child-sex-abuse allegations from trustees and authorities and exhibiting "a striking lack of empathy" for victims. Spanier denied the allegations and sued Freeh and Penn State separately, contending that they were scapegoating him. The university countersued. In March a jury convicted Spanier of one misdemeanor count of child endangerment for failing to report the abuse. In June he was sentenced to two months in jail, followed by at least two months of house arrest.
Thanks to Spanier, CIA and FBI agents could now stride onto campus through the main gate, with university presidents personally arranging their appointments with faculty members and students. But, except possibly at Penn State, they still slipped in through the back door whenever it suited them, ignoring their pact with Spanier that they would inform university leaders of their campus investigations.
For example, the FBI didn’t notify universities during the 2011 Arab Spring, when it questioned Libyan students nationwide, including Mohamed Farhat, a graduate student at Binghamton University, of the State University of New York.
"I’m a talkative guy," Farhat told me. "I am very truthful. I don’t like hiding." Married with three children — the eldest, a daughter, born in Libya, and two sons born in the United States — Farhat grew up in Zliten, a town about 100 miles east of Tripoli. He studied electrical engineering at a technical college, but it bored him, and he discovered that he had an aptitude for English. Within a few years he was teaching English at every level from middle school to college.
When Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, son of the dictator Muammar Gaddafi, decreed that the Libyan government would provide 5,000 scholarships for study abroad, Farhat seized the opportunity. He arrived in the United States in December 2008 and, after a year of English language study in Pittsburgh, enrolled at Binghamton.
As democratic uprisings sprouted throughout the Arab world in 2011, Farhat canceled his classes for the semester and joined cybergroups opposing the Gaddafi regime. There were about 1,500 Libyan students in the United States, and Farhat knew many of them. Soon friends began calling to let him know that the FBI had interviewed them, and that he, too, should expect a visit.A worried Farhat contacted Ellen Badger, then director of Binghamton’s international-students office. She was accustomed to rebuffing FBI inquiries. When a university admits a foreign student or visiting scholar, it issues him or her a document required for a visa. It transmits the same information electronically to the departments of State and Homeland Security, but not to the FBI, which, unlike the other two agencies, has no regulatory authority over this population. Unless the FBI had a subpoena, under the federal Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act she could provide only "directory information," which includes basic student data, such as dates of attendance, degrees and awards, and field of study.
"There was a clear understanding they [the FBI] were going to chat with me in the friendliest way and would be happy with any information I could give," Badger says. "I would respond in the friendliest way and give them nothing. That’s how the dance went."
She reassured Farhat: The FBI would probably come to her first, and she would take care of it. Instead, the FBI bypassed Badger. Because the CIA was "somewhat blind" regarding on-the-ground intelligence in Libya, the FBI had been assigned to question students about the situation there, one insider told me. Agents were instructed to interview Libyan students off-campus, without alerting professors or administrators. To protect informants from exposure, the bureau wanted to be as discreet as possible.
An agent knocked on the door of Farhat’s apartment in a three-story brick building west of campus, showed identification, and said he wanted to schedule a time to talk with him. It never occurred to Farhat to refuse.
"I have no idea about rights," he says. "This is not part of our culture. To me, the FBI are the ultimate power."
Two agents showed up on the appointed morning. They sat at his kitchen table and unfolded a black-and-white map of Libya, asking where he was from. It was the first of five visits from the FBI, each lasting more than an hour, over a period of two months. The same local agent came every time, accompanied by one of two agents with experience abroad; one spoke a little Arabic. At the initial interview, they explained that they wanted to make sure that he wasn’t threatening, or threatened by, any pro-Gaddafi Libyans.
That mission reflected the bureau’s concern that, since most Libyan students in the United States were on government scholarships, some might be loyal to Gaddafi — and planning acts of terror against the United States for supporting the revolution against him. That worry turned out to be misplaced. "The students hated Gaddafi," the insider recalled. "I don’t want to say it was a waste of time, but we satisfied ourselves that there was no threat from the Libyans."
The agents proceeded to their other purpose: gathering intelligence. They asked Farhat about Libyan society and customs and his life from secondary school on. What disturbed him most were the questions about his and his wife’s friends and relatives, from other Libyan students to his uncles in the military. The agents wanted names, email addresses, phone numbers. Because they told him that they knew his email address and Facebook affiliations, he coughed up his most-frequent contacts, figuring that the bureau could track them anyway.
By the fourth visit, Farhat says, "I was annoyed." The next time, he decided, would be the last. "I will tell them, ‘No more,’ " he promised himself. As it turned out, he never had to muster the courage to defy them, because on the fifth session they wrapped up, then never returned.
Farhat didn’t tell Badger about the agents until afterward. "My reaction was regret," she says. "What you want to do in a situation like this is make sure students are informed of their rights. They don’t have to answer any questions. They can decline a visit. They can set terms: ‘I want the director of the international office there.’ ‘I want a faculty member there.’ They have control.
"I never got to give that little speech."
Daniel Golden is the author of The Price of Admission (Crown, 2006). His new book is Spy Schools: How the CIA, FBI, and Foreign Intelligence Secretly Exploit America’s Universities (Henry Holt), from which this article is adapted.
GH:
1... "That’s how come Dr. Eluemuno Chukwuemeka Blyden, Grandson of Dr. Edward Wilmot Blyden became the first orator of the university and Director of the Hansberry Institute of African Studies."
The Institute of African Studies of the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, came at a time “when the concept of African Studies as a means of consolidating the independence and building up the cultural identity of the new states of Africa was very much in vogue” (Afigbo, 1971:89). The idea for a graduate Institute of African Studies in the University of Nigeria was channeled towards research and was designed as a rallying point for “all men of colour who can trace their descent to the African continent no matter in what part of the world they now find their habitation”. (Afigbo, 1971:89). The establishment of the Hansberry College of African Studies in the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, was approved in September 1962 by the Governing Council of the University of Nigeria as a graduate Institution. The College was opened on September 23, 1963 with a four-day Seminar at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka campus, with the title, “The Emergence of African Political Thought.” This Seminar was attended by eminent scholars and authorities on African studies from many places in Nigeria and overseas. The keynote address was delivered by Professor William Leo Hansberry, an eminent Afro-American Historian and Africanist, whose name the college bears and who was designated its Director. The Hansberry College was renamed Hansberry Institute of African Studies in 1964. Prof. William Leo Hansberry had taught Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe and Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, two students who later became first indigenous Presidents of their countries, Nigeria and Ghana, respectively. As W.L. Hansberry, the Director, was not resident (but visiting Nsukka once in a while from the United States), his deputy, Professor Edward Wilmot Blyden III, an orator, Professor of Political Science and grandson of the famous Blyden, was made the acting director but later became the substantive director in 1964. (Onyeneke, 1984). Professor Blyden was a former Head of Department of Political Science in the University of Nigeria, Nsukka.
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So again, I ask: Obi, who the heck is "Dr. Eluemuno Chukwuemeka Blyden, Grandson of Dr. Edward Wilmot Blyden"?
2. "As a matter of fact, UNN was nearly closed down, when on seeking their opinion on what to do with the university post-war, some western Nigerian intellectuals who ironically had taught at Nsukka before the war, advised Gowon to close down the University of Nigeria, and distribute its faculties and students to already existing universities at Ibadan, Ife, Lagos, ABU and the then newly established university in Benin. But this move was seriously resisted, and it took serious lobbying, and the intervention of the late Emir of Kano, Ado Bayero, as quondam Chancellor of the university to dissuade Gowon."
Obi, this is a howler not worth your integrity. The most prominent "western Nigerian intellectuals who ironically had taught at Nsukka before the war" unttl 1967 were:
(i) Dr. Sam Aluko, Head of Department of Economics
(ii) Prof... Babs Fafunwa, of the Facultry of Education
(iii) Dr. Akinsola Akiwowo of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology
All three (now late, and hence unable to defend themselves) left Nsukka for the University of Ife just before the outbreak of war. For my father, it was a return. So Obi, of three persons, who are you accusing so blatantly -you did not even say "alleged" - of misadvising Gowon?
This is a lie froom the pits of hell that one sacaterbrained irredentist, trying to get my goats, wrote about my father about 10 years ago, and I pushed back at him strenuously, and he backed down. Now, ten years later, you are repeating it.
The fact of the matter was that many students of non-Eastern/non-Igbo origin had been placed in various universities when they left Biafra before the war, with many of them (in fact most) having graduated by the time the war ended in 1970. The generous reconciliation offer being made to the Igbo university students (trapped within Biafra, who had not given their lives in blood to the Biafran cause) after the war was that those who wished to CONTINUE their studies in those departments and faculties whose staff, equipment and buildings had been decimated during the war could do so in the EXISTING universities, while those who wished to return to UNN were free to do so, with the clear understanding that some rehabillation was necessary. To now interprete that as a request to CLOSE down UNN is most un-generous and grating.
Read what written here, for example:
QUOTE
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