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Augustine of Hippo, an early Christian theologian and philosopher whose writings influenced the development of Western Christianity and philosophy, reputedly said, “The world is a book, and those who do not travel read only a page.”
The Igbo of South-eastern Nigeria echo Saint Augustine’s words in another way – they simply ascribe greater wisdom to the man who travels than the man with grey hair.
The wisdom in the above words cannot easily be contradicted. There is indeed so much to be gained through travel. Travel can widen one’s horizon. It can give fresh insight and understanding into how others live and by so doing shatter preconceived prejudices and stereotypes, paving way for greater world peace and harmony. It’s like studying other peoples’ histories and cultures, but it is much more than that; it is experiencing other peoples’ cultures firsthand. If a traveller keeps an open mind, he or she can acquire new knowledge and learn new ways of doing old things.
A good traveller is essentially a knowledge-seeker, a learner. He is much like Bantu in Maik Nwosu’sAlpha Song, who, not satiated with his wanderings to New York and to almost all the islands in the world – Montego Bay, Tahiti, Zanzibar – goes off again to Monrovia, to the desert, to New York, and back to Lagos. At one point he tells Taneba that he has been “to find the heart of the ocean” – wherever that is.
That Nigerians are widely-travelled is not debatable, and it didn’t start today. R. J. Harrison Church bears this out in his 1957 book West Africa: A Study of the Environment and Man’s Use of It, where he asserted that some 20,000 Ibo people “are employed in Fernando Po”. Today, there is a joke that if you go to any part of the world and don’t find a Nigerian, your surest bet is to leave the place immediately because there is no life there.
And widely-travelled Nigerians know how to make a show of it. They treat it as some kind of academic or professional qualification that must be flaunted. “He’s a widely-travelled man” is a common line in people’s profiles. Some would even gladly list the places they’ve been to in their curriculum vitae if only employers would indulge them. Imagine a CV that has ‘Places Been To’ as a sub-head and goes on to list Uzbekistan, Kazhastan, Kafanchan, Casablanca, Czechoslovakia, Uruguay, Paraguay, Island of Patmos, and Alammuo.
There’s a particular friend of mine who is in the habit of saying whenever anything untoward happens around him: “No, this kind of thing can’t happen in America.” Then, unsolicited, he would go into a trance and, in that half-asleep-half-awake state, annoy you with insipid tales about his travels. “The last time I was in Moscow”, “When I went to Jo’burg”, “The first time I landed at Heathrow” – the words would just fly out of his mouth like watery faeces from the anus of a diarrhoea patient.
But while they make a show of where they’ve been to, widely-travelled Nigerians hardly live out what they’ve learnt in those places. Do they really learn anything? I doubt, because if they do, it doesn’t show in any way, except in their fake, forced oyinbo accent. More pathetic is that behind that facade of borrowed accent lie unpardonable grammatical blunders. But we can let that pass.
I’ve often been concerned that Nigerians, including political leaders, travel to places where things work, enjoy the good things there, behave well, obey laws, only to come back to the country and return to their old ways. They like to brag about international best practices, yet they can’t even keep faith with local best practices.
In a February 2016 interview with Prof Pat Utomi shortly before his 60th birthday, I raised the issue and he told me that the problem, unfortunately, was that we have people who preach something but think others should live it, so long as they themselves can manage the easy gains.
He shared the story of how on Easter Sunday of 2013 he had flown to London in the company of some “Nigerian big men” who were heading to Washington for an EXIM Bank workshop on either power or something else. Five or six Nigerian governors were among them.
According to him, inside Murtala Mohammed Airport in Lagos where they were all gathered in front of the British Airways lounge, all the “big men” had their coterie of aides following them everywhere and constituting nuisance.
“Then the plane landed in London and they all carried their briefcases and walked like normal human beings. As we entered the elevator, I kind of looked at them and laughed and said, ‘See all of you, see how normal you all are behaving now.’ So why can’t we be normal everywhere? Why can’t we?”
For him, the crux of the matter is the indiscipline of the Nigerian elite. “Until the Nigerian elite develop discipline, we won’t make progress,” he said.
We can see this indiscipline clearly demonstrated in President Muhammadu Buhari’s recurrent overseas medical trip, despite allocating N2.8 billion to State House Clinic in the 2016 budget. Worse, this is coming at a time of economic recession, when foreign reserves are down and everyone, businesses as well as individuals, is lamenting about foreign exchange scarcity; at a time the government is preaching #BuyNaijaToGrowTheNaira. And this was the same man who pledged during his campaign that he would discourage medical tourism abroad.
We would even be assuaged if we know that the president would return to Nigeria and think of how to equip our hospitals, or even State House Clinic, to the standard that obtains in the London hospital that he runs off to every time he has a headache, but we know that can only happen in our dream.
So, dear widely-travelled Nigerian, if your wide travels bring us no good, if the knowledge you’ve garnered from your journeys cannot be put to use to turn things around and make Nigeria a better place, please do keep the tales to yourself. That’s the essence of what Teiresias, in Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, tells Oedipus: “When wisdom brings no profit, to be wise is to suffer.”
