Teaching in Nigeria

This month's blog post is written by CU member Robin Attfield. Robin has had many interesting adventures during his lifetime and in this post explores his time teaching in Nigeria. Robin is a Quaker who also attends Unitarian services and serves on our committee. We have many different people with diverse backgrounds and beliefs coming to Unitarian services, Robin is one example of this diversity.

In the autumn of 1972, my family and I flew to Nigeria, for me to teach Philosophy there for a year. I was then 30. Besides other courses, I was to teach Logic. One problem was that no one had ever taught Logic to me, but that was solved when I read through the textbook that I was told that they used.

Another problem was that no one managed to tell me which edition was available to the students. So I travelled out with colour-coded notes suitable for using either the second, the third or the fourth edition. It proved to be the third.

A further problem was that the Logic class were low on morale, because my predecessor had been unwilling to use any textbook at all, and several students had failed the exam. (In fact my first job was to mark the re-sit examination!) So the new students needed some kind of stimulus, encouragement, or both.

What I decided to do was to give a lecture on ‘What Logic Isn’t’, and to talk about rhetoric, and making inferior arguments appear to be winning ones. There were 120 students, mostly Humanities students, but some of them trainee police or probation officers. They came along prepared to give me a hearing, maybe for the first class only. I projected my voice, introduced myself, talked about oratory, made a joke or two, and all seemed to be going well.

The lecture concluded with me reading out the speech of Mark Antony, given at Caesar’s funeral, as imagined by William Shakespeare. You may remember it; the opening line is: ‘Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears.’

This was heard in respectful silence, but as I warmed to Antony’s words (‘For Brutus is an honourable man’, etc.) a kind of dull murmuring was to be heard. I had no idea what this was, but ploughed on regardless.

By the time I reached ‘If you have tears, prepare to shed them now’, the murmuring had become a soft chorus of supportive voices. There was no reason for that to prevent me finishing the extract, and so I proceeded as before.

That brought me eventually to ‘Whilst bloody treason flourish’d over us’, words that I heard myself declaim forcefully and defiantly. At that point the chorus of voices became a unified roar, rather like a united statement from everyone present. And at that point the lecture finished, and we all began to leave.

Whatever had happened? It was later explained to me that Nigerian ‘A-level’ students were in those days still expected to memorise passages of Shakespeare, and that this was one of the passages the students had learned by heart. That is what enabled them all to join in. (In Britain, such rote-learning was by then rarer, but it had been commonplace some twenty years earlier still.)

But it also meant that my lecture was accidentally a ‘hit’, and that the news went round the campus that there was an exciting new lecturer of the Logic course, even though I had not said anything about Logic yet. By the time I met my colleagues the next day, a Greek colleague, Ariadne Koumari-Sanford, had heard about all this (as had the others, both black and white), and assured me that I would be a great success, and was so already.

And so it went on, as I taught Logic with large and ample gestures right through to the summer of 1973.

Robin Attfield, written in April 2024