Wole Soyinka ~ ‘What Nigerian adults owe the young ones’

The issue, I understand, is the flaunting of
religious markers in public educational
institutions. Let me begin by confessing that I
envy the French to whom those choices have
only been recently thrust to the fore – they have
always been with us in Nigeria.
I also envy those to whom the issues are
straightforward, and permit of dogmatic
positions. In normal circumstances, perhaps I
would agree that it should be a non-issue. It is
tempting to simplify the debate by evoking the
nature of club membership – a public school has
certain rules, and if you wish to be a member, or
make use of its facilities, then you must conform
to those rules or seek alternatives elsewhere.
However, the world we inhabit has changed
vastly and dramatically over the past few
decades, and club rules – like race or sex
differentiated membership rules – are no longer
sacrosanct. In addition, the genie is out of the
bottle and the beasts of intolerance, suspicion
and polarisation stalk the streets. Dialogue is
mostly relegated to the status of a poor relation
of terror and intimidation, barely tolerated, often
mocked. Conscious of the fact that the present
dialogue is being conducted within such an
atmosphere, it may be helpful if I began with a
reference to my personal response when a
directly contrary policy was announced in my
own country, Nigeria, and not just recently. It
happened about twenty years ago, long before
the introduction of Sharia – the Islamic law – in
a number of states within the country.

After several decades of independence, during
which the issue of school uniforms in public
schools never emerged as a volatile social
problem, I was appalled when a Minister of
Education ordered that secondary school pupils
should be allowed to dress in a distinct fashion
that was favoured by their religious belonging.
What I experienced was, frankly, a deep sense of
revulsion at this insertion of a wedge of
difference among youth, at a period in their lives
when they should be saved from the separatist
imbecilities of the so-called adult world. My
response was visceral and instinctive, and I
realised that this move had savaged a deep held
social philosophy within me that I had always
taken for granted.
The contributive effects of upbringing to such a
reaction cannot be ruled out, so let me also
state my own background. The schools that I
attended – both primary and secondary –
observed the tradition of the school uniform. The
primary school was an Anglican missionary
school whose uniform – a khaki shirt, a pair of
shorts and bare feet – could not, by any stretch
of the imagination be attached to any religion –
from the traditional orisa worship of the Yoruba
to Zoroastrianism.
My secondary school – or High School as it is
known in some parts – was a boarding school.
On Sundays, Christian service was conducted in
the chapel while, on Fridays, Moslems gathered
for their devotion. On Saturdays, the Seventh Day
Adventists received an automatic exeat, went
into town for their version of the Christian
worship. Even Sunday devotion among the
Christians respected differences. Roman
Catholics as well as Pentecostal – known as the
aladura – went their own spiritual ways. In short,
although this school, a state owned school,
could be said to be basically oriented towards an
Anglican tradition, freedom of worship for every
pupil was not only guaranteed but structured
into the school’s routine.
The minister’s claim that the uniforms worn by
pupils in the various secondary schools were
‘christian’ was so specious that even a number
of his Moslems peers expressed deep skepticism
about his motives. Those motives are reflected
today in the deep social cleavages that have
become exacerbated over time, and now express
themselves in religious clashes of increasing
savagery.
The basic question for me is this: what does
adult society owe its younger generation in a
world that is so badly torn by differences?
Having observed alternative examples in practice,
and weighed them without the burden of
religious partisanship, I find the model of my
upbringing infinitely preferable to most others.
It proposes that, while the right of religious
worship, even in schools, should remain
sacrosanct, society profits in the long run from
severely muting the overt manifestation of
religion in places of public education. Now, I am
positioning myself here on a platform of principle,
not of details.
We may find that some religious augmentation of
a school’s dress code is not obtrusive, while
others violently blare forth! I associate myself,
basically, with a policy of creating the maximum
possible sense of oneness within the younger
generation. Allowance having been made for
differences on those days allocated to spiritual
exercises of choice, I see no harm done to the
young mind when it is thereafter bound with
others in routine expressions of a common
identity, and that includes, most prominently, the
school uniform.
If we may approach this issue obliquely and push
aside religion for the moment, I should add that I
hold the same view of schools where absolute
freedom of dress is permitted school pupils.
What that has meant is that children from
affluent homes can attend school in designer
clothing, forming associations distinguished by
an elitist consciousness, in contrast to the
farmers’ and workers’ children who can just
about scrape together the odd pieces of castoff
dressing from charity or second class clothing
markets.
A simplistic reading of the rights of children to
individual self-expression is responsible for this
takeover of the learning environment by fashion
parades, a sight that is so prevalent in countries
like the United States (U.S.). My objection to
this rests on the recognition that the modern
school is an equivalent of the age-grade culture
in traditional societies. There, the rites of
passage from one phase of social existence to
the next, are bound by rules that eliminate
exhibitionism, and that includes a strict dress (or
undress) code.
The purpose of this is to create common group
solidarity distinguished only by age and learning
aptitudes, enabling the pupil to imbibe not only a
formal education but the sense of place and
responsibilities within the overall community. At
the heart of this strategy is purposeful leveling.
This is the one place, in a child’s life, where the
child can see the other as a human equal, as,
very simply, another human being.
In a situation that involves a plurality of faiths, a
common dress code thus strikes me as a
medium of secular arbitration, a function that is
thereby vitiated by a blatant divergence from the
uniform. To revert for a moment to our own
Nigerian experience, the action of that minister of
Education in decreeing a duoform policy – as I
dubbed it at the time – in place of the uniform,
was a denial of a profound educational virtue in
the personality formation of our youth. That
equipment is a foundation block in the
acquisition of the concept of oneness, one that
does not interdict the celebration of the pupils’
faiths with their families at home, in places of
worship outside the school, and in religious
season.
Six to eight hours each day, five or six times a
week, in a basically undifferentiated
companionship of their age group, a period that
is interspersed with huge spaces of vacation
weeks during the year, strikes me as being not
too great a sacrifice for parents to make, and I
must stress that this ‘sacrifice’ is made, not by
the children, but by the parentage, the adult
stakeholders who are so obsessed with re-living
their lives, with all acquired insecurities and
prejudices, through their offspring.
That sacrifice, or danger, exists only in the
parental mind, since no child loses his or her
spiritual bearings simply from the removal or
addition of a piece of tissue or headgear from an
outfit for a few hours a day. Left alone, children
create their own world. They should be
encouraged to do so. They re-enter another
world on returning home and again, left alone,
harmonise both and others without any anguish.
In itself, this constitutes part of their educational
process, and makes their existence a richer one.
Learning includes cultivation of an adjustment
capability. I should add that I take this position
within the context of a situation where private
educational institutions – which include
missionary owned schools – are permitted. Such
schools are then free to decree their own modes
of dressing, but their curricula should also be
routinely vetted by the state – for reasons that I
hope, are obvious. Schools should never be
allowed to serve as an instructional field for the
curriculum of hate in the young mind.
Boko Haram did not happen overnight. If I
happen to believe that youths should be weaned
away from any sense of class distinction through
a display of affluence in school, it is only logical
that the more insidious demonstration of
religious difference should be equally
discouraged. ‘I am wealthier than you’, as an
attitude among youth earns our immediate
disapprobation. Even more binding an
institutional responsibility should be the
attenuation of all buntings that, today especially,
leave impressionable youth with the message: ‘I
am holier than thou.’
In the name of whatever deity – or none – that
we believe in, leave these youths alone! Subject
them to a uniform character formative discipline.
Don’t give them airs – spiritual or material –
and do not fight surrogate wars through their
vulnerable being. If there is an after-life of well-
deserved “weeping and gnashing of teeth” called
hell, it is surely reserved for those who foster a
mentality of separatism in humanity at an age
when the sense of oneness, of bonding, comes
instinctively, effortlessly, and selflessly.