[Pius72]

Moses:

Thanks for sharing your dilemmas but let's clear a few misconceptions. Your piece on Bongos Ikwue is a mass appeal, popular audience article that no audience in Africa - whether Kenyan audience o or Gambian audience o - should have difficulty with. It is not jargony academese and it beats me that anyone would describe it as such - including you. I know your prose when it is addressed to strictly academic audiences. In fact you and Farooq are among my own models in terms of how to switch from mode to mode without losing one's signature. The second misconception here is you imply - unwittingly I think - that colleagues in Nigerian universities are less theoretical, less jargony, and hence more connected to streets of Oturkpo in terms of their prose. That is not true, Moses. Don't they send you their papers to assess? Don't you serve as assessor for Nigerian peer-reviewed journals? Don't you read the op-eds of home-based academics and public intellectuals? How are we different from Odia for instance? As for our colleagues in Nigerian Univesities, their references may be dated because of lack of access to current material but certainly their prose is neither less theoretical nor jargony. In fact, sometimes I find theirs a tad jargony than ours because they are under pressure to publish in international journals and to prove that they command the faddish prose we are running away from here. In essence, the alienation you are discussing here is not peculiar to Nigerian academics abroad. It is the eternal dilemma and damnation of academia- how to retrace it steps back to the street. How to reconnect with the idioms of the people without losing its sophistication. This dilemma affects colleagues in Ibadan just as it affects you. The response to this in my own field for instance is the growth of popular culture as a legitimate field of inquiry. That is why I can go to Nigeria to study the culture of paraga and burukutu joints. A third part of the problem that you failed to address is that we are in the age of intellectual laziness where folks prefer fast-foodish prose. When you were in secondary school, your teachers and parents gave you a dictionary culture. You remember that Oxford dico that we had to have with us always? You were socialized into checking up every new word you encountered in your textbooks, magazines or newspapers. That was part of one's education. Now you have a new generation that wears anti-intellectualism like a badge of honour. The instinct to check and inquire is no longer there. At the first unknown word - someone once emailed to abuse me for using a big word like 'pedestrian' in an essay of mine he was reading ! - they begin to abuse and insult you. In our days, you checked each word you didn't know and you thanked the author quietly for enriching your vocabulary and expanding your world. This laziness of the new generation is of course not peculiarly Nigerian. After all, no one can match the anti-intellectualism of American youth. We teach them and marvel at their ignorance. I've just sent this off-the-cuff. I should have more to say when you respond. You piece is too rich to be exhausted in one post!

Pius