Paradoxical Homelessness from Cambridge to Lagos : Cambridge, CRASSH Research and the Concept of an Academic Centre
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Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Jan 12, 2018, 11:46:24 AM1/12/18
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Paradoxical Homelessness from Cambridge to Lagos
Cambridge, CRASSH Research and the Concept of an Academic Centre Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems
"Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge"
The Wonder Behind the Glass : CRASSH in Action
A group of people seated convivially at a table where light food is visible as they chat. The atmosphere is earnest but relaxed. A sense of order is projected by their physical positioning within a carefully organized space in which a fairly large shelf full of books suggests a scholarly environment. Their neat clothes and body language demonstrate a self conscious discipline. The ambience of the building and the larger space within which it is located amplify the associations of their quietly intense activity as it proceeds against the background of the orderly and varied movement of people on foot outside the sheet of glass through which you are looking, no sound penetrating beyond that sheet. A sense of high civilization is projected by the scene beyond the glass, an expression of the distinctive sapiental essence that the human being contributes to life on earth, the capacity for reflection, for speech, the orientation towards dialogue through which human reflexivity, the critical engagement with one's processes of awareness, is reinforced through oscillation between the individual mind and other minds operating, to some degree, at a wavelength that facilitates such intercourse.
The elegant people behind the sheet of glass may be participants in the weekly CRASSH [ Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities ] Fellows Work in Progress Seminar Series at the University of Cambridge, that room being used for that purpose, among others. The person looking through that sheet of glass, myself, was a then homeless immigrant who had come to England to study, had expended tens of thousands of pounds in the process, a small fortune anywhere in the world, but, as was gradually dawning on him, with the aid of that scene across the window and what it represented about other contexts across the university, was entering into an experience beyond his anticipation, and which, without the expenditure of more money for fees at the astronomical rates foreign students were charged relative to home students, was entering into the climatic point of his journey in this land across the seas, six hours by flight and across various immigration protocols from his native Nigeria.
I had become homeless partly because I had opened a research centre in the nearby village of Histon, using my own library, but had not been able to sustain the rent, not having a significant plan for that in the first place, operating on the intoxicating fumes of a vision I had nurtured for more than a decade and even partially achieved while in Nigeria, the execution of this dream in England leading to an economic vacuum in which I could not pay for the office where the centre was located or a place to live. I became a person for whom the open sky was his roof and the four directions of space his home.
Paradoxically, I was at last positioned to grasp the implications of my choice of living in Cambridge on account of my admiration for the magnificent physical spaces of its university as expressing a great ancient heritage, but a choice I did not know how to maximize until I was forced out of my comfort zone through the unintended consequences of my own actions.
Reverberations from my earlier daily practice of the Hindu Sri Devi Khadgamala Stotram ritual in hour of the Goddess Tripurausundari, embodiment of the fire of passion that enflames erotic forces from sex to the hunger for knowledge, in my yearning to move beyond what I understood as the then stagnant state of my life. I did move, but in a manner both painful and liberating, disruptive and ultimately reconstitutive in a manner unanticipated, its recastings still ongoing even now, the ultimate destination unanticipatable in its fullness. Next time, I shall approach Tripurasundari with more care, recognising the need to limit disruption as growth occurs, as far as that is valid in a human beings efforts to relate with a cosmic identity, if such do exist beyond our faith and can truly shape our lives.
CRASSH is a fantastic research centre in a great university, Cambridge.Certain
things are almost beyond linguistic powers of description and
assessment. Cambridge university and CRASSH are among those things. I am
overwhelmed by emotion in trying to describe my experience of those
institutions.
For me, Cambridge is a version of heaven.
I hope to experience other academic centres, along with those I have already lived in in Nigeria and England, and compare them with the wonder that is Cambridge.
What is an academic centre?
An academic centre is a community significantly developed for the cultivation of scholarly knowledge in relation to an institution or institutions devoted to that task.
The entire City of Cambridge has been mobilized in the development of an academic centre. This mobilizations consists of a conurbation of bookshops, libraries, public lectures and museums, at the centre of which are the awesome resources and the constant buzz of the extremely busy academic life of the University of Cambridge, a significant number of which enablements are accessible to the public who have no affiliation with the university except the fact of living in Cambridge.
It was when I was homeless in Cambridge that I experienced the splendour of that city for the first time in years of living there. Being homeless in that city in the absolute sense of having no roof over my head, nowhere of my own to sleep, sleeping on park benches which one had to compete for with other homeless people, on restaurant chairs after closing hours, in churches in the name of praying, in the gym in the name of meditating in a quiet corner, having only occasional money for food, transport or clothes and being limited in computer use to public computers in libraries and the homeless people's home, Jimmy's, that proved a lifeline one Christmas and New Year by providing shelter, food, clothes, companionship and computer services for the weeks I stayed there, turned out to be one of the richest experiences of my life
and the climax of my educational journey in England consisting of years of postgraduate education in two universities and self directed research
fulfilling dreams I had long nurtured but had not been able to achieve, as well as a particularly strategic point in my total educational experience of which my entire life's journey is the most expansive expression.
My circumstances freed me from self imposed chaining to my own computer, self created imprisonment in my large library covering sophisticated texts in various disciplines, liberated me from confinement to the vast yet limiting spaces of the World Wide Web accessed through 24/7 computer access in the comfort of my own home and office.Like a person who had long realized he needed to drink water daily but
had never had the experience, could sense the presence of water like an
animal in a desert but had not been able to access an adequate flow,
I had at last stumbled on
an opportunity that now meant I could
drink adequate water daily for the first time in my life.
For the first time I was encountering the institutional enablement
for a
n
educational ideal I am still struggling to grasp- the ability to
access significantly the culture of learning represented by the
mainstream educational system while operating outside its institutional
structuration, freeing one to experiment with cognitive and even
scholarly strategies and imperatives beyond the character of the
mainstream system.
Universities seem to be increasingly placing material for their courses online and providing free films and podcasts of lectures but none of these can replace the living human presence.
Having been compelled to keep all my belongings in storage, I now had the paradoxical freedom of exploring Cambridge as a matrix of survival and learning, having gained freedom from responsibilities of living a settled life that reinforced my disinclination to interact significantly with other people or operate significantly outside my domestic comfort zone, ensconced in the artificial universe composed of walls laced with symbols of various systems of thought and thick with books calling to vistas waiting to be explored, like Isaac Newton's ocean of truth that lay all undiscovered before him, as he, a child in the face of the immensity of knowledge represented by the vast ocean, collected pebbles on the seashore, as the natural philosopher and father of modern science described himself.
If a homeless, little monied person, an illegal immigrant who needed to be wary of being deported if his status was discovered by the ubiquitous police force in a political culture working hard against illegal immigration, a person who through a strategic mistake had slipped through the cracks of legality into the shadow world of those who walk cautiously in daylight in recognition of their fundamental difference from others whose presence is approved by law, a person without any affiliation with any institution, not a student of its famous university-Cambridge, of its other university-Anglia Ruskin or of the numerous English language and university preparatory schools soaking up immigrants desperate to immerse themselves in the city's rich cultural universe, a person who was not working in any formal capacity and had no consistent income, a person on the margins of society, a person largely invisible to the country's regulatory authorities, a person thus without access to most of the country's rich medical, housing and unemployment and other social services, could not only survive for months in Cambridge by legally utilizing the resources of the city and thrive intellectually and spiritually through access to its mind blowing academic culture and its sublime spiritual universe embodied by its great churches and chapels and their quietly vigorous life, then clearly such an environment, in various ways, represents a high level of civilization in spite of the problematic immigration policies of the country in which that environment is embedded. A place where human dignity is highly empowered, where access to humanity's distillation of the meaning of existence represented by the culture of learning, worship and wonder is wonderfully developed.
I am writing this in a six room two storey house of three expansive living rooms and a large dining room in Ikeja, Lagos, the commercial capital of Nigeria. Every room has an air conditioner . The room I eventually rented in Cambridge after the period of homelessness I described is perhaps a little bigger than the hut in a small corner of the garden of this house. Three of the rooms in th
is
house can engulf that Cambridge room three or four times. Everywhere I go I am chauffeur driven. Around this house in Ikeja are other massive houses, a good number of them even bigger than this one. Not far from here, one palatial home has a small hotel in its premises and a garden so rich it could count as a national asset.I find myself, however, comparing these Ikeja palaces with my little Cambridge room in terms of their relative value. There is no public library within any near distance to the Ikeja house. The only libraries I have seen in my journeys in Lagos mainland and island are few, widely dispersed. No booksellers within walking or even motorable range of my Ikeja house. Most booksellers I have seen so far in Lagos sell mainly basic Pentecostal Christian literature, some self help books and books by some Nigerian public figures although I am told there is a rich bookshop in Victoria Island called Lantana and the inestimable Jazz Hole, music and bookstore and its sister Glendora bookshop are still operating
,
I expect. To see museums one has to travel to Victoria Island. We have a large generator for the frequent gaps in electricity supply from the national grid. I am informed that possession of such a generator is a mark of affluence, a status symbol, but I am appalled at the time, effort and money required to keep it fueled and the noise it makes along with other generators in the estate. The Ikeja
C
ity M
all demonstrates the rich goods and elegant order of Cambridge's Lion Yard but the Lion Yard has a powerful public, freely accessible library that gives meaning, for me, to the entire location, a feature absent at the Ikeja mall and its version of the much touted Shoprite, equivalent to a medium sized version of England's ubiquitous TESCO stores. What is the point of eating, of clothing, of electronic devices and of the engagement in all the paraphernalia of human life represented by shopping malls without the reflective facilitation enabled by libraries? How does one make sense of the perplexities of life without a dialogue with the distilled knowledge demonstrated by a culture of books of serious non-fiction and quality fiction and poetry? Can digital books replace physical libraries? No. A three dimensional creature of the level of human sentience needs embodied environments for maximal learning. Virtual environments can at best complement those of the physical world.
None of these conditions is new to me. I was born in Nigeria, reached adulthood there, did a BA and postgraduate studies there and worked there as a university lecturer before I traveled to England. In my earlier time in Nigeria, I was not as comfortable as l am now in Lagos. In a sense, though, I am still and yet not the same person who left Nigeria for England years ago. I am back in my ancestral country but in a sense I have become homeless again. I am like a person who woke from bed to find he had only been dreaming about Paradise, and was not really there, having only inhabited it for a short time in a vivid dream. The way back to that other world is not readily gained, meanwhile the world he is now compelled to live in has lost most of its significance for him as a place of location.
What is the value of a luxurious house and a comfortable, privileged lifestyle in a place where is a weak library and weak bookselling culture, little access to books to expand the mind, very few parks for relaxation, and widely dispersed at that, no cultural centres such as museums unless the few accessible after traveling a long distance?
Is a smaller house in a place like Cambridge not ultimately more valuable for a person like myself than a mansion in Nigeria? Would going from place to place on foot or bicycle in Cambridge, or bus or train outside the city, not be more valuable than being chauffeur driven even in a luxury car in Nigeria? Except for the presence of family in Nigeria I am not able to see anything about the country in relation to myself that would make my being a wealthy person in Nigeria of equal value to living at an average material level in Cambridge.
Keywords evoking my Cambridge experience:
Academic community- a group of people working together in the pursuit of critically examined, organized knowledge
Knowledge rain- it falls daily, bathing you in the effervescence of various disciplines and forms of knowledge- ways of arriving at knowledge, from imagination to ratiocinative thought, adapted from Paul Hirst's " Liberal Education and the Forms of Knowledge" in his Knowledge and the Curriculum[ a book I bought from the impressive collection St. Joseph's church bookshop, Benin-city before I travelled to England].
Mountaintop experience - like Moses' vision on mount Sinai of a divine presence in the burning bush that identified Itself as 'I Am that I Am' , only this time what emerges is the gradually coruscating convergence of cognitive possibilities consummated in the fire of mind.
'the maturation of phenomena is an outcome of a slow burning process... fire is essential for the changing of things from their raw inaccessible
qualities to a ripe state of richness and healing [leading to ]
Ripeness (ukuvuthwa)...an outcome of slow burning characteristic of the
cosmic process."- Mazisi Kunene, intro to his Anthem of the Decades.
an acme of the globally dominant Western educational system
intersections across the arts, humanities, social sciences and sciences
academic holidays- visiting a place for the purpose of learning-Cambridge offers many incentives for that at no extra cost beyond traveling to and living in Cambridge
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: CRASSH, University of Cambridge <enqu...@crassh.cam.ac.uk>
Date: 23 October 2017 at 11:37
Subject: What's on at CRASSH, 23 – 29 Oct
To: toyin <toyin....@gmail.com>
From: CRASSH, University of Cambridge <enqu...@crassh.cam.ac.uk>
Date: 23 October 2017 at 11:37
Subject: What's on at CRASSH, 23 – 29 Oct
To: toyin <toyin....@gmail.com>
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Toyin Falola
Jan 12, 2018, 1:37:29 PM1/12/18
to usaafric...@googlegroups.com, tvol...@gmail.com
Dear sir:
What an amazing essay. This is a must read. Too rich in experience and knowledge.
I must confess I heard about your homelessness in Cambridge. Someone even said the library had to do one or two things about you. Another person said I should talk to you to relocate back to Nigeria. I never did as I had not met you and I thought it was sheer arrogance for me to call and give that kind of advice.
What you have described with regard to Ikeja is true. I actually know the place where you are talking about as I occasional stay at Cest Moi (I am not sure I get this spelling right). The reason why I stay at Ikeja is that I can walk to do my morning exercise. I observed similar things.
To the theory: elite behavior. How we organize spaces and the values that drive them are connected to how the leading elite in a community think, what they desire and what they aspire to. Unless you change that elite behavior the space itself won’t change.
TF
From:
dialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju <toyin....@gmail.com>
Reply-To: dialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Date: Friday, January 12, 2018 at 3:43 PM
To: dialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>, "tvol...@gmail.com" <tvol...@gmail.com>
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Paradoxical Homelessness from Cambridge to Lagos : Cambridge, CRASSH Research and the Concept of an Academic Centre
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Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Jan 12, 2018, 3:38:09 PM1/12/18
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Thanks Prof. Falola. The person saying something about a library might have mistaken me for someone else.
On libraries. Thinking about Cambridge libraries makes me speechless. Every 10 or 30 mins walk form a group of houses you have a library.
The library problem is all over Lagos, including the elite VI. Its horrible.I suspect its a general Nigerian problem.
toyin
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Emeagwali, Gloria (History)
Jan 12, 2018, 11:19:01 PM1/12/18
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Speaking about Cambridge, here is a forthcoming book review I did for Choice. That Cambridge University could produce
racist so-called intellectuals, parading as scholars, shows the fundamentally skewed nature of intellectual activity in that over-rated town.
Toyin, you should not compare a university town to a commercial city. I can point to several UK cities outside of Cambridge that are bereft of libraries and museums and are as dry as dust and dismal, lacking vitality
and soul. Compare them to your Lagos, if you may. Why did so many Brits pack their bags and run out of the country - to set up shop in borrowed lands for several centuries, never to return?
You happen to long after campus life, and that is fine but self-contained campuses are artificial bubbles and not the real world. Pinch yourself and wake up to reality.
GE
....................................................
XX-XXXX
DT20
CIP
Iliffe, John. Africans: the history of a continent. 3rd ed. Cambridge, 2017. 402p bibl index (African studies, 137) ISBN 9781107198326, $99.00; ISBN 9781316648124 pbk, $25.99; ISBN 9781108195881
ebook, $21.00.
Professor Gloria Emeagwali
Professor of History
History Department
History Department
Central Connecticut State University
Gloria Emeagwali's Documentaries on
Africa and the African Diaspora
8608322815 Phone
8608322804 Fax
From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju <toyin....@gmail.com>
Sent: Friday, January 12, 2018 10:43 AM
To: usaafricadialogue; tvol...@gmail.com
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Paradoxical Homelessness from Cambridge to Lagos : Cambridge, CRASSH Research and the Concept of an Academic Centre
Sent: Friday, January 12, 2018 10:43 AM
To: usaafricadialogue; tvol...@gmail.com
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Paradoxical Homelessness from Cambridge to Lagos : Cambridge, CRASSH Research and the Concept of an Academic Centre
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfric...@googlegroups.com
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Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Jan 13, 2018, 3:25:41 PM1/13/18
to usaafricadialogue
Dear Gloria,
Thanks.
Please forgive this long response. I need to think these things through and make a record of my thoughts.
Cambridge is not overrated. Far from it.
Comparing London and Cambridge as University Cities
I have studied in various universities in and lived in different parts of London, which is both a university and a commercial city. I have lived in Canterbury, which is a university city, a university I attended. I have lived in Birmingham, the biggest English city after London, and which also has a university, perhaps more than one. Compared to these environments, even to the cultural capital represented by the proximity between the various colleges of the University of London in the city centre, SOAS, UCL, and Birckbeck, to such global cultural landmarks as the British Museum and the not too far away British Library, the National Portrait Gallery and others, including the dispersed presence of other colleges of the university across the city, such as Imperial, and the scope of bookshops and libraries in London, along with many other cultural nexi, if there is such a word, and impressive parks, I doubt if the quality of life in London as a whole, in the middlebrow North Finchley where I lived, in the lowbrow Hackney where I have spent significant time, and other, highbrow zones which I have at least visited, is superior to the quality of life in Cambridge across all sectors of the latter city.
Secondly, all the constituent universities of the University of London, taken together, from UCL, to SOAS to Imperial, to the London School of Economics, these being the most famous of these constituents, might not equal what I describe as the development, to a high level of vertical and horizontal networks of learning by the University of Cambridge, amplified by other institutions in Cambridge.
Vertical learning networks consist in processes enabling transmissions of knowledge and
skill between people at different levels of the academic hierarchy in the university.
What seems to be working for Cambridge university and some other institutions there is that they have, in equal measure, vision, ability and means, means perhaps not being as readily accessible elsewhere, even in England,for various reasons.
Comparing Selected Research Centres in the University of London and the University of Cambridge
I met at SOAS and UCL, both universities I studied at, a superb Arts and Humanities Research Council centre for Asian and African Studies, rich with regular conferences hosting contributors from different arts of the world. It was shut down after some years since its funding had expired. I used to attend the very diversely rich Leeds university CONGRESS/CATH conferences, which also shut down after some time as the funding for the AHRC centre that supported it come to an end, although the centre's work continues on a reduced scale through CentreCath. Cambridge's CRASSH,Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities, however, seems funded in perpetuity, has expanded its physical space and conference and seminar offerings from its earlier days and is so robust it can be described as a mini-research university, describing itself as one of "the
world’s largest interdisciplinary research institutions[running] a programme of
research development of over 300 events a year".
SOAS developed the Centre for Cultural, Literary and Postcolonial Studies (CCLPS), one of its more exciting initiatives being "Approaches to World Literature: Questions of Critical Methods Beyond Eurocentrism" and the CCLPS Critical Forum, one of its goals being "outlining the Agency of non-European critical traditions [ by] making these traditions available in translation and in debate and bringing them] into genuine debate with western theory and critical methods", SOAS also developing a BA World Philosophies program, "developed to promote philosophical dialogue between ‘East’ and ‘West’[through exposure] to both European and non-European intellectual
systems, engaging with Kant and Confucius, Aquinas and Appiah and
building dialogues between diverse wisdom traditions". The more recent Cambridge initiative on decolonizing the curriculum demonstrates that university has caught a similar vision, and from a small reading group, which I witnessed at its inception, is now enabled by CRASSH resources and is giving rich, public whole day seminars with speakers drawn from Cambridge and other universities.
Horizontal Learning Networks Between University and City in Cambridge and London
UCL has rich sciences, humanities and social science faculties. Imperial is a global science and technology powerhouse. SOAS is a central destination for studies on Asia and Africa. Birckbeck seems particularly strong in philosophy. All these being universities in the University of London cluster. My experience at the University of London, however, though not recent,suggests that as of that time, this composition of universities had not reached, to the level of Cambridge, the synergy between various disciplines in terms of working with staff and the public to develop and project to the world the unified complexity of the knowledge the university and the global academic system is developing.
This projection is carried out in Cambridge not only through Cambridge University's elaborate public seminar and conference schedule conducted by numerous departments, faculties, research centres, colleges and student bodies and the university central body, actively pursued by various unaffiliated organizations using university and non-university resources, such as the and the Wesleyan Church, both of which hold regular public lectures on the intersection of science and religion, with speakers at the cutting edge of various scientific disciplines drawn from various universities within and outside the UK, along with the Round Church lectures, centred on areas of intersection of culture and Christianity.
This daily, year round network of connections between the highest levels of research and social activity, from Cambridge and around the world, from quantum computing to talks by former heads of state on social and economic issues, are climaxed by the Cambridge Arts and Humanities festival and the Cambridge Science Festival, taking place at different times annually and consisting of presentations within and outside the university, of research and developments in various fields, in which members of the public also participate in showcasing their ideas and initiatives.
I took advantage of these enablements as a person who had no affiliation with the university and, like others, was not required to pay anything for these activities, the fee paying initiatives being very few. A good number of these occasions also provided free food at different levels of elaborateness, for attendees.
That connection between university and city is what I describe as horizontal connection, the creation of networks of knowledge dissemination from university to city, and to a degree, knowledge sharing between city and university. The volume and consistency of these initiatives at Cambridge implies vision, ability and means, a concentration of intellectual, social and economic capital applied to driving what Nimi Wariboko in The Charismatic City, describes as the communion quotient of a city, its ability to create connections between people across various demographies.
Cambridge seemed to me to be also very good at training its academics, as represented by the various training programs and institutional support provided for them.
That is what I
describe as a vertical knowledge connection, creating transmissions of knowledge and
skill between people at different levels of the academic hierarchy.
One can add to this
summation the central university library, one of the richest in the world, which anybody can join and use, the city's public library network, its various bookselling centres, providing academic to non-academic
books, all these accessed easily on account of the spatial concentration
of the city, facilitating movement by bicycle or on foot.
It might have taken Cambridge centuries to reach this level, as suggested by the conflicts between the university and other inhabitants after the founding scholars of what would become Cambridge University migrated there from Oxford, following problems in that first university in England. These tensions are not wholly gone, as suggested by the complaint that the high rents charged by the university, described as owning most of the city, make it hard for businesses to survive, with a number of bookshops, my favorite kind of shop, closing due to challenges from both rents and from the growing digital reading culture.
Tensions Between the University of Cambridge and the City of Cambridge and Inadequacies in the City's Knowledge Network
These closures meant, that by December 2017, when last I was there, Cambridge did not have any bookshop
dedicated to sophisticated Christian texts, such as in theology, one
of my interests.The only bookshop in
this field I met there, the RSPCA shop, had been shut down. As of the same period,
Cambridge also did not have any bookshop dedicated to Western
Esotericism and new Western religions such as Paganism, another interest
of mine and a central but largely marginalized current in Western
civilization, until the flowering its scholarly and practitioner
activity in this field in relatively recent years. The only bookshop in
this field I met there was shut down. Cambridge booksellers rarely stock texts in this field, with
Cambridge UP's flagship bookshop on Trinity Street coming closest to that
in their volumes of Richard Westfall's Never at Rest: A Life of Isaac Newton
and his abridgement of that book, Newton being the most famous exponent of the adaptation of Western esoteric thought to building the foundations of modern science, an orientation Westfall examines at length, with Rob Ilfe providing a more up to date presentation in Newton: A Very Short Introduction, an Oxford UP series sold by Heffers in Cambridge.
Thus, in a city where the Reformation has been central,and where Newton worked, one could not stroll into a shop dedicated to the Christian and esoteric cultures represented by Newton, at their most powerful, the ability to acquire books being central to developing a knowledge culture and such a culture being critical to the transmission of knowledge and skill represented by the development of civilization.The Christian bookshops in Cambridge at that time what may be described as stocking mid-level literature, inspiring, but limited in enabling access to the cognitive wealth of Christian culture. St. Leo's bookshop at Ikeja, however specializes in such books at the most sophisticated and impacful levels of the Catholic and Protestant traditions while the city is rich in bookshops selling the mid level texts of the kind in the Cambridge Christian bookshops, but the Western philosophical texts at St. Leos are not readily visible at other shops in Lagos, while they are readily found in Cambridge but the texts on African philosophy at St. Leo's were nt visible in Cambridge shops, which hardly stock books published in Africa.
Benin-City as a Cognitive Matrix
I studied and was a lecturer at the University of Benin and traversed the entire city in my cognitive quests, Benin being another city enabled for pervasive learning by its traditional organizational structure, through its pervasive shrine locations, these being nexus of spiritual and historical significance, as well as a concentration of experts in classical Benin thought, this classical system amplified by its newer Western style educational institutions and rich book selling culture. My essay "Cosmological Permutations : Joseph Ohomina’s Ifa Philosophy and the Quest for the Unity of Being" describes my learning from Benin babalawo, adept in the esoteric knowledge of Ifa, Joseph Ohomina.
I also worked in Benin at different times as a TV program guest over a number of episodes, a teacher in two secondary schools and a private examination preparation scheme, a taxi driver and a construction site labourer, so I would not describe myself as fixated on campus life. I am simply moved at my first experience of an academic community, and one operating in an academic centre, these being ideals pursued by other institutions and locations I had experienced before my encounter with Cambridge but where the potency of these ideas had not affected me as it did with my Cambridge experience.
Sources of the Strength of Cambridge
The University of Cambridge's strength and the amplification of this through its relationship with the city may be seen as due to the sustaining and development of its resources and strategies across centuries, being centuries older than even UCL, the oldest of the University of
London's constituent universities and the first English university after Oxford and Cambridge. London has huge potential for perhaps going far beyond the kind of synergy achieved by Cambridge, on account of London's massive university systems and its magnificent economic systems but that would take a lot of determined visionary planning, long term operational activity and consistent economic investment.
Part of Cambridge's strength is the sustaining and development of its resources and strategies, in relation to the city, over centuries, Cambridge being many centuries older than UCL, the oldest of the University of
London's constituent universities and the first English university after Oxford and Cambridge. Each of Cambridge's colleges may also
be seen as a mini university, this collective, along with a similar
collective of colleges at Oxford, representing economic force unrivaled
by all other English universities taken together, according to a report, Trinity College, alone, for example, describing as building Science Park, a magnificently landscaped location that is a central initiative in England's efforts to adapt the US Silicon Valley model, initiated by Stanford and representing the world's greatest incubator of technology companies.
The
same report describes the economic strength of Oxford and Cambridge is
nowhere near near that of some US universities, particularly those in
the Ivy League, although beyond economic power in and f itself is the
question of how well it is used in evoking the best of human potential.
In terms of racism at Cambridge, various students have highlighted examples of this. The university is often described in England as meaninglessly elitist, its admissions procedures titled towards class demographic that is enabled to access its arcane standards, these standards being a narrow picture of human possibility to which most schools in the country do not have access. Interacting with Nigerians, other Africans and Asians at undergraduate and postgraduate levels in Cambridge, however, people coming there from Nigeria and outside, I observed a pattern of absolutely determined people. I wrote up my survey of the admissions criteria from the various colleges gained through interviewing admissions officers in a number of colleges, "Cambridge University Admissions: Empirical and Non-Empirical Assessments".
From: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju <toyin....@gmail.com>
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