The pity, however, is that these young men and women the Institute carries off every year to the States are some of the brightest products the few secondary grammer schools or senior high schools in the new countries of Africa have to offer the still fewer and newer home universities and colleges. Already, among African universities the cry is hoarse for a steady source of suitable student material that will keep them in constant supply. The situation therefore seems to be one of a lame dog being further crippled by the kind-hearted passer-by who wants to help him over the stile. The University of Ibadan, for example, has suffered this kind of awkward, unintentioned mauling at the hands of the American African Institute. My cousin at Princeton, for one, after a brilliant performance at his higher school certificate examination, had an open position at Ibadan to train as a medical doctor, the very kind of qualified men needed most in his Delta part of Nigeria. But what happened when it came to making the final choice? As a matter of fact, it seemed then there was not one to make. So overpowering and all-pervading was the siren call of America, that the young man, like several others who began the ­programme that year, fell for the offer, and so off he was swept to Princeton, the name of which he did not even know of at that time. Now he has taken a degree in chemistry, or is it biology? True, his is only a single case, but very likely representative of that first year, and indeed those following since. Who will ever know the true extent of such misdirections, the wandering astray, and the complete loss in the woods therefrom?

The danger and waste become greater still when guides and benefactors, as apparently these do-good American citizens and associations are, show little awareness of the problems involved, and worse still, refuse to admit their existence when they are pointed out to their all-seeing, radar, and X-ray eyes. And that they are most painstaking and conscientious over the welfare of each girl and boy they take across the seas to the States it would be churlish to deny for one moment. Wards each have a foster home and godparents. One boy I met made much of the fact that his white foster-mother kisses him every time he goes home to his adopted Another spoke of the care and effort his always took to arrange dates for him. One snag though, he admitted, and all of us there laughed long and loud, is that she would not have them a mixed affair! And there was the boy who said that the very thought of sitting through church services and retreats on Sundays spoiled for him the fun of going home to his otherwise very loving foster-family. These are all real problems, those of young people, and in a far-away place. That they are so well taken care of must in a large measure be the work and motherly solicitude of the American upper-middle class housewife, a common force on all such committees.

Other problems however, perhaps less personal, remain Unattended or simply ignored. Take that of post-graduate studies, which is the dream of the American student. It not only puts him in a class but he also needs his second degree or doctorate to expect a place on the faculty in most universities or even in corporations or the civil service outside. Because the various authorities and grant donors fully own up to their responsibilities of making money, men and equipment available for the task of staffing industry and society with higher cadres of personnel, the average intelligent American youth can expect to go beyond his bachelor’s degree as a matter of course.

Apparently, however, it is not so with the African student sponsored by educational organizations like the American African Institute. ‘What do you want to do graduate work for?’ they frown at applicants for extension of grants. ‘Africa needs first degree men, not scholars!’ As likely as not, the idea of hurrying home African graduates carries a lot of sense, since the poor old folks at home require instant basic services. But Africa also requires now the secondary ones. With careful planning and acceleration where the potential exists, it should be possible to combine both needs with profit for all. It seems therefore criminal negligence to deny students with aptitude, and call off their one opportunity to develop themselves fully first before going out to develop others. Further partly due to superior attitudes taken over by Africans from their imperial masters and partly in real recognition of the fact, the first American college degree in Africa is regarded even now with great suspicion. And in this probably unequal discrimination no distinction is made as between Harvard and Howard.

Indeed, Americans themselves subscribe and contribute to this. I once had an American graduate student in an English class repeat to me, almost apologetically, that he came down from Haverford in the State of Pennsylvania, and not Harvard! The special anxiety of African students in America must therefore be placed in proper perspective to be appreciated, None wants to return home with just the first diploma, and indeed they would be refused responsible appointments by their own governments today, as did the British colonial governments many years ago when they snubbed scholars like Dr Azikiwe and his ­American-educated contemporaries. This imperial relic has dug its roots so deep among public service boards in Nigeria, the story goes that even a young graduate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was passed over for a job since no expert there could place his qualifications!

But distinctions there certainly are, and these have to be insisted upon all the time, if the gates are not going to be sluiced and soiled water let through in a rush to flood everybody out. The programme for the mass placement of African students in colleges in the United States of ­America seems at the moment to be courting just this disaster. Those floating it, with all the good intentions in the world, are today increasing its area of participation. Consequently, the programme now flows over from the Ivy League colleges which began it to all sorts of colleges all across the United States. The idea of course is to increase output in the quickest possible time. In the drive towards quantity however the tendency towards a lowering in quality and standards cannot be regarded as a mere bugaboo. Not that anybody is saying the new expanding network of colleges to which students are now being drafted all lack proper accreditation. It is just that, as in the animal farm, some members prove more equal than others, and when all must eventually return to render equal service where distinction and discrimination are rife, it is only fair that right from the start opportunities are not made free to the exclusive advantage of one sector.

At this point, one may venture to question the courses of study many of these students find themselves pursuing. For instance, it can be safely asked what a Nigerian goes all the way to America to learn of the arts that he cannot readily do at a university back home. If he is a history man, and very possibly taking classes in the witch-hunt sessions of Boston during Colonial days, of what value and practical use can this be to him and his society? The acquiring of knowledge and a complete kit quick to reach for purposes of ­comparison and critical application is an essential aim of every true scholar, but of what relevance and use is the plucking of such lush leaves outside when the yam underground in the concession at home is there still to uproot? Without being parochial and short-sighted, one can at least try starting the practice of charity at home!

As with the arts so to some extent with the sciences. Here the real snag is not so much that a good physics laboratory in Lagos should satisfy the same basic teaching needs and conditions that obtain in New York and Moscow, as the more awkward, if less obtrusive one of students picking upskills and tricks for which there appears no immediate audience and provision at home. I knew of a young Nigerian engineer who went from Ohio to pursue a further course in plastics at Princeton. Naturally, he required some extra funds to realize this end. So he went straight to the Nigerian ambassador in Washington, who was gracious and kind enough to arrange for him an audience with the Premier of his region who happened then to be around in the US on one of those begging bouts officiously called economic missions abroad. ‘What do you want that for anyway?’ the Premier scolded him. ‘Yes, what is this you say you want an extension of scholarship for? Young man, there is no industry like that at home, and if I may let you into a secret nobody is planning one!’ The follow-up of this cordial meeting was an urgent trans-Atlantic summons a few days afterwards, ordering the young engineer to return home by the next plane.

But by far the most absurd of all the educational schemes for Africa now emanating from America and elsewhere appears to be that with which President Kennedy himself and his clan have direct and personal interests and connection. I do not mean the official Peace Corps programme which for all the selfish indirect gains the US Government expects to reap out of it at the expense of the Soviet Union, and which for all the callowness, bad-equipment and escapist tendencies of a good number of its draftees and volunteers, has proved itself an original, unique enterprise now crying to be applied to blighted sectors of the home front itself. The absurd schemes I have here in mind are those which, conceived in the mistaken notion of beginning at the grass-roots level, aim at attracting to America boys and girls still very much in their early formative years. In this misguided belief, wealthy American families, like that of the Kennedy clan, working in so-called partnership with African politicians, like Tom Mboya, ready to do anything for the education of their people, have actually in the last few years air-lifted hundreds of mere children from Kenya to attend high schools in the United States. Starting right from scratch, it is expected that these kids will pass through the special preparatory schools that are concomitant with the exclusive system into which they have been thrown like flies on to a spider’s web, and go on from there to even more selective colleges fed from these schools. For each child, this may take anything from ten to fifteen years of grooming so that by the time he is passed out fit to return home to serve his people he has become a better Yankee than a Kikuyu.

Instead of spending so much money and time on breeding a rank plant of alienation and waste, would it not pay more dividends to all if the public-spirited promoters behind these ventures provided part or whole of the money and men to open and staff new schools and colleges right in those countries needing development of their abundant raw material? The operation would certainly cost less in terms of effort and funds, and far from ill-preparing a select group for service, it should reach a greater number of the people and a much wider area of the country in which they live and die.

Incidentally, this is an approach that can well be adopted for the direct college projects both at the undergraduate and research levels. Five universities serving Nigeria’s 40 million people is not exactly excellent service. But when there appears lacking an adequate under-carriage of secondary schools to support that structure, and when this actually yields less than two thousand school leavers every year capable, as they say, of benefiting from a university education, then there is every cause to worry over the lure to the United States and to Europe of some of the best brains Nigeria has to offer her already starving universities.

Now to those who know all this there is a terrible irony. For only a few years ago, before the University of Ibadan was founded, everybody, bright and dull, once the funds and drive were there, went overseas to seek the Golden Fleece. But as soon as Ibadan got under way, it became evident that she was attracting to herself a growing majority of the best material available from the schools. Indeed, but for a few affluent ones, and some others who as a result of bad co-ordination and poor policy on the part of government still won bursaries to go abroad, Ibadan in a matter of a few years had come to absorb almost all of the best, so that there grew the rather cruel joke that those who still went abroad for courses available at home were rejects of Ibadan! But to return to our bright ones abroad now, I saw a fair sprinkling of these boys and girls at Princeton, Harvard, Barnard and Cornell. Now that the initial gloss has worn off, the general opinion among them was, ‘wouldn’t it have been wonderful to go to Ibadan and then perhaps come over here for research work!’ Boarding and tuition fees between these top US universities range in the 3,000 to 5,000 dollar bracket a year for a single student. This will more than take care of the entire course for the undergraduate at Ibadan, and in fact, for another or two others at Nsukka and Zaria.

In other words, if an American benefactor of Africa, like the American African Institute or the Kennedy Family Foundation, will raise all the money they are now doing and come into understanding with the African governments who pay only the passage fares to and fro for the students, all the vast resources now being lavished on a few abroad, who are getting increasingly fed up, can be put fully to use on the fallow, fertile field itself, and to the greatest advantage of everybody seeking proper cultivation of it.

And even on the research side, the land needs a closer examination if further exploiting of it is to bear fresh fruit. At Cornell and Toronto, for example, I discovered old friends and colleagues at home, doing their second degrees in English. It seemed however that quite apart from the theoretical and technical aspect of their course, which was training them to become university teachers, a good portion of the papers they had to offer were no further advance from the period and special papers they had done already for their first degrees. ‘What have you to offer at home? You people are only beginning to write. Here we are studying American Literature,’ one protested to me vigorously.

‘To do what with?’ I insisted.

‘To teach of course. Or do you disapprove of Emerson as a transcendentalist?’

‘You mean at home in Nigeria?’

‘Tell me where else.’

‘Well, I guess the right place to teach American Literature would be in US schools.’

‘Nonsense, and you a writer! Aren’t you being parochial?’

‘Oh, no; in point of fact I’d very much rather you went to Moscow or Tokyo.’ And I think I said something to the effect that English students like him were but poor products of sterile professors still propping up private outposts for themselves while the Empire was fast falling apart around everybody, and that it was the peculiar warped opinion of those initiated in this obsolescent school and cult to forget that oral literature has as much legitimate life as that hawked between two inscribed covers. My friend looked me up and down and asked whether I was just being facetious or plain jealous. I promptly denied the charge on both counts.

‘Then it is world comparative literature you must be thinking of?’ he mused wisely.

I said perhaps. By this time however we had attracted quite a lot of attention from indigenous students and faculty members shunting their various ways to and from the university library at Toronto.

‘Here,’ someone pulled me round; ‘why not come up to the Common Room, and then we can all discuss this over a cup of coffee? You are right in the middle of the street here, you know.’

And so we were. Our new friend and moderator, when he finally came into focus, turned out to be a postgraduate student from Bombay, and although he proved interesting at table and talked as sweetly of the international character of letters as he did bitterly of standards falling in his native India, the heat had gone out of us all there, so that the coffee went cold in my hands, and I was glad when someone reminded me of another engagement long since overdue.

Nor was it among English students alone that there was this vague sense of misdirection and drift, and the often attendant defensive stance, touchy and bristling at the least sign of attack. My host in Toronto, who was a history graduate from home, had completed his master’s degree with a study of how Australia had fulfilled the mandate the United Nations gave her over New Guinea. Now all set for his doctorate on some aspect of his own country’s political career, he finds he has either to go on flying down across the border to the Library of Congress in Washington which hasn’t got all the documents anyway, or come back home where the West African Pilot and Daily Times he needs so much for his material are published.

‘Haven’t I travelled some distance to arrive home!’ he laughed in his direct, open manner. ‘In the meantime,’ he added, ‘others from abroad are digging deep at home.’

‘Oh, no,’ I got infected by his laugh, ‘of course they aren’t; but don’t you dare come home and call them squatters!’

Truly, as Dr Johnson put it so well on another occasion, not so different from ours, the Scythians wandered abroad to make conquest of the world; meanwhile strangers were in occupation of Scythia.

8

Atop Capital Hill

On a Decision Day in January, members of the Parvin Fellowship Programme, appropriately led by their director Colonel Robert Van de Velde, paid a visit to the United States Supreme Court as personal guests of Associate Judge William O. Douglas. Characteristically, I had arrived late that Monday morning, although Mimi Crowell, as lovable a hostess as she was formidable and stimulating in talk, especially when establishing her claim that Americans are altruistic by nature, had taken the extra trouble of driving me into town herself. So, as I climbed the high steps to justice, official frowns lowered upon me. I had just enough time to check my topcoat before tailing the group, all on its best behaviour now, into the vast crowded hall of the Supreme Court of the United States of America.

Quite a number of attorneys from a sprinkling of states were getting enrolled that day and we had to sit through their long repetitious ceremony of oath-taking. That tedium plus the fact that there in the spacious precincts of the court were some of the surest nuclear blast shelters, not only in the Union but in all the universe, gave me such a settled and safe feeling at last that I had quite a job, without at all wanting to be disrespectful, of staying wide awake through the proceedings of the court, ultimate across the wide sweep of the land. My alarm therefore was great and genuine when a bull-dog faced usher or marshal lumbered up to where we Parvin people sat as a group and said throatily: ‘Stay awake there!’ But I need not have jumped out of my skin. ‘Yes, you, madam,’ the muscular arm of the law seized upon his quarry, ‘you stay awake or step out with me.’ It was Barbara, the Colonel’s own wife, sitting just next to me: I could not believe it. Naturally the lady tried protesting vocally and vigorously in the very democratic manner of her country but the marshal, in equal defence of the Constitution, hushed her down and then drew away to continue his beat. Meanwhile, too embarrassed to look Barbara in the face, I took up study of the sitting arrangement of the nine worthies on the rostrum.

Right in the centre sat Chief Justice Earl Warren. Immediately to his left and right were our own Justice Douglas and Justice Hugo L. Black, both of the so-called ‘liberal’ group of the Court, and next to them as if to restore the balance came the ‘conservatives’ Justice John M. Harlan and Justice Tom C. Clark. Others to the right were the ‘liberal’ Justice William J. Brennan Jnr and Justice Byron R. White whose voting role was still to emerge, while at the opposite end sat Justice Potter Stewart, often called the ‘pivotal’ man between the ‘liberal’ and the ‘conservative’ voting blocs of the Court, and last but by no means the least was Mr Justice Goldberg who was the replacement for Justice Felix Frankfurter, the much feared old interrogator of counsel, now retired. All fitted-out in gowns, they presented a fine group portrait of white in black, and as about half of them persistently swayed forward and back in their rocking chairs, just like the President at his news conferences, while their colleagues remained immobile in their solid seats of oak, I had the strange feeling of being before some frightening flank or phalanx, not quite advancing, not quite receding for any appreciable length of time, like waves upon the shore.

The Court handed down three decisions that morning, one agreeing with the claims of a Chinese American in California that the police in their investigations of a certain dope racket had trampled brutally on the man’s fundamental human rights as a citizen of the US. A second ruling, concerning two petrol dealers, one of whom had succumbed to cut-throat competition with the other in spite of concessions obtained direct from his refinery and suppliers, established the fact that all is fair in war as in love. And the third judgment that session, one of personal interest to me and other black people there, was the Court’s ruling in favour of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People to the effect that a party other than that directly aggrieved had every right under the Constitution of the United States to concern itself with seeking on behalf and in concert with the aggrieved a redress for the abuse of his rights as a citizen. This in its own way was a decision great enough to stand beside the famous Brown v. Board of Education of Topeca, Kansas desegregation decision in 1954, and the Baker v. Carr ruling in 1962, conceding voters their right to sue in federal courts if deprived of equal representation through state devices such as malapportionment.

An additional duty performed, among many others most onerous, by each Justice of the Court is a personal hearing of applications for bails and stays of various sentences. Justice Douglas, I was told, enjoyed the fine reputation of attracting the majority of these frantic, desperate calls for rescue directed at him, giving to each a most sympathetic hearing. At the close of the session, the old judge, as responsive as ever to calls by applicants of all sorts for his personal attention, took us of the Parvin Programme, over which he presides, into a reception room in his chambers where he treated us to cocktails. For a man of his age and position, the judge proved jaunty, spontaneous and communicative beyond belief. Glass in hand, he breezed among his guests from several lands, and being much travelled and read, showed himself at ease and home with each.

‘You are a writer, I hear,’ he cornered me. ‘Then we are of the same profession. Have you seen my new book?’

‘You mean America Challenged? I enjoyed reading it very much.’

‘Thank you; but that’s my old one. I meant the new book 1 have just brought out. I call it Manifesto for Democracy.’

‘No, I haven’t seen it yet.’

‘Then I must have a copy mailed to you immediately, all of you in fact.’

‘Is your book, Sir, a reply to the Communist Manifesto?’ my Polish friend Daniel Passent asked with a laugh.

‘Don’t ask me,’ the old judge winked an eye. ‘I’m holding brief for nobody, and making a reply to none either. But I believe there are positive virtues in the democratic way of life which nobody as yet has bothered to present in a manifesto the ordinary man can find winning and useful. And that’s all I have tried to do.’

Next the old judge graciously posed for a photograph with us, keeping everybody talking and laughing all the time so that the photographer did not have to say cheese to get his smiles. After which our host turned to all of us and apologised that he would unfortunately not be at lunch with us, since the President was giving Congress that afternoon his state-of-the-union message, and Supreme Court Justices, as honourable members of the tripartite power, had all to be there. But other distinguished colleagues of his, representative of the entire judicial structure of the United States, would be pleased to dine with us and answer any queries we cared to voice. If he could, he would love to come back and rejoin the group, but if not, then this must be his parting with us Parvin Fellows, although we would always stay together in the spirit of open communication that engendered the programme. It was only after the learned judge had left us that I noticed we had not had the benefit of being presented to his wife. ‘Where is Mrs Douglas?’ I asked in all innocence. ‘She suffered a bad accident recently and is still convalescing,’ Colonel Van de Velde and his wife answered in one soothing voice. Later I heard of talk about separation and divorce that the judge was to be married a third time, to a co-ed just graduated, and the wife was to be married for the second time, to a luminary of the Washington DC bar.

But to turn to those distinguished members of the American bench and bar present with us Parvins at that Douglas luncheon, I remember vividly the Chief Justice from the Circuit of Federal Appellate Courts, a judge at the Federal capital’s own district court who had the rare distinction of being a three-term Governor of Minnesota, a newly appointed federal attorney with the asset of being the son of Dean Acheson, then the talk of the town for throwing the British a few home truths, which they thought insults. There was another attorney who said he acted as a filter and strainer in the Office of the President, and a veteran lawyer who had represented the United States on a number of high-powered committees in the United Nations. I sat by this remarkable old gentleman. He had a creeping bore-through-the-other-man’s-body drawl that I still cannot track down now with any degree of precision as to his age or Yankee origin. And the Congo was a big bee in his bonnet, more bothering by its buzz than in its sting.

‘I still do not think it is right for the United Nations to coerce Tshombe into returning Katanga to the rest of the Congo,’ he told me for the umpteenth time.

‘Why?’ I blew my soup.

‘Because Tshombe and Katanga ought to be conceded their individual sovereign right of choice,’ he patiently explained to me.

‘Just as Abraham Lincoln should have allowed the Confederate States to back out of the Union?’ I blew my soup a trifle more.

‘That’s not a similar case at all,’ the old man dropped his spoon. ‘The United States was already one country –’