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Book Review

Oseloka Obaze*

selonnes@aol.com

Saturday 22 November 2003

The Shining Ones

(The Umuahia School Days of Obinna Okoye)

Chike Momah

(ISBN: 978 030 8377; Ibadan, Nigeria: University Press PLC, 2003; pp. 343; Price, $10.00)

(To purchase a copy or get information on this book email: Chikem@aol.com or unipress@skannet.com )

“The Shining Ones is captivating, brilliantly textured and an easy read.”

Nostalgia is a powerful aphrodisiac.  And in many of life’s most cherished memories, nothing is left but the weight of nostalgia of a living existence.  And truly, Chike Momah has imbibed nostalgia in a sufficient enough dose to whet his appetite to relive and reengage in this gripping reminiscence and total recall of his schooldays at Government College Umuahia, in The Shining Ones.  Although unstated in any form, Momah unarguably adopts a looking glass-self by assuming the persona of the narrator and protagonist, Obinna Okoye, who certainly is one of the “shining ones.”  The intimate and picturesque descriptive details of Government Collegem Umuahia –“the most beautiful place on God’s earth” -- are dead giveaways and unmistakable selling points, as well as a confirmation that Obinna Okoye’s sojourn there uncannily mirrors the author's own schooldays.

The Shining Ones begins quite reflexively and charmingly with the recitation of English poetic verses.  This brush with poetry presages the gripping story set in one of Nigeria’s hallowed grooves of academe, which Umuahia certainly was and still is.  Very few former students of well-regarded Nigeria high schools like Umuahia, C.K.C. Onitsha, Kings College, Lagos, or Loyola College, Ibadan could lay claim to having passed through the portals of those citadels without the knowledge and ability to recite Lord (Noel Gordon) Byron, John Keats, or William Yeats.  Nor for that matter, without being familiar with poignant lines from the works of William Shakespeare or lines from Homer’s Iliad.

In the 1940s, Government College Umuahia, the setting of The Shining Ones, was in the context of colonial Nigerian public schools, what Eton was to English publish schools.  It was indeed, one of the few non-parochial and highbrow schools fashioned in that mold, and deliberately situated in the halcyon countryside of Umudike, a suburbia of Umuahia Township.  Founded by a Briton,  Mr. Fisher, Government College Umuahia was in some sense, an offshoot of the renowned  Kings College, Lagos,  having acquired it pioneer students from there.  Like Eton and Kings College, it was run in the best tradition of the British education, albeit by the colonial masters and for the natives.

Although the alumni of other very good schools in Eastern Nigeria, if not the Nigeria as a whole, would readily contest the preeminence of Government College, Umuahia, the provenance of Umuahia’s pride of place has never been in doubt.  A snobbishly good school, its eminent ranking in the pecking order of elite Nigerian schools will forever rest on its products, their pedigree, accomplishments, and academic acclaim.  In such Umuahia alumni, we witness and behold real life prodigies and finished products like novelist Chinua Achebe and Vincent Ike, who respectively became literary celebrities.  On the flip side, however, the Umuahia acclaim obfuscates the eventual lot of those alumni, like the school’s pugnacious bully, Chima Nwanna and near sadists and tyrants like School Leader (Prefect) Godfrey Clarke.  Certainly, a handful of students who passed through Umuahia must have fallen through the cracks eventually.

The Shining Ones unfolds over the course of the pioneering high school years for Obinna Okoye and his schoolmates.  Anyone, who might have attended comparatively good high school in Nigeria would easily identify and enjoy this book.  This is a book solidly anchored on the everyday challenges and realities of studentship.  Through this book, Obinna Okoye, as well as the reader, perhaps more so, those who can still recall the joys and tribulations of boarding school days, become engaged in retrospective recall.  In the end they are left with a deep conviction that such hitherto innocuous high school days, represented the fleeting good old days.  Also looking back, most readers would recognize and therefore acknowledge that camaraderie as well as rivalry formed in high school, would for many endure into adulthood.  The camaraderie eventually blossomed into lifelong friendships of kindred spirits.  In fact, that a book with such an elusive theme, and which, essentially covers a five-year span in the prepubescent lives of Obinna Okoye and his schoolmates can command the rapt attentiveness of the reader, is in itself a feat.  But such feat is anchored on the bonding of youths, who were separated from their parents and thrust into a highly regimented atmosphere, and therefore forced to find succor, protection and esteem by bonding with likeminded students, who shared similar values and character.

As has been observed elsewhere, The Shining Ones “is a perfectly crafted prose that reminds every adult mind of the innocence, adventure, losses and regrets of childhood days.”  I concur.  There are also other morals that straddle and lace the entire story lines.  While high premium is placed on academics in Umuahia, students are firmly reminded that, turning out as a well-rounded citizens required familiarity, involvement and practice, if not dexterity in such mundane things like sports, manual labor and indeed farming.  Obinna Okoye drew, perhaps, the singular most important lesson about the ills of indolence not from the classroom, but from the poor yield of his school farm – a yield vastly proportional and commensurate to the miserly labor and skittish efforts he had put in.  In academics, those who shined were promoted ahead of their classmates, whilst those with less than stellar performance suffered the humiliation of demotion.

The ever-shifting plots of The Shining Ones apart, it is the cast of characters in this book that keeps the wheels spinning.  Mr. Walter Graves, the school Principal, was always politically correct, officious, and efficacious without being personally mean.  In the words of Obinna Okoye, he “loved to keep a little in reserve, rather than unwrap the whole package.”  This was true of his conduct, emotion, and administrative style.  His personal thinking, assuming there was a separating line between that and official thinking, was subsumed in his taciturnity.  A cast of his compatriots like Thomas Hunter, Mr. Eagleton, Mr. Knight, and Mr. Theodore aided him, not just in educating Nigerian boys in proper etiquette, but also injuriously in consigning their native Igbo language -- the so-called vernacular to the dustbin -- a linguistic retrogression that still haunts the Igbo.  The Nigerian teachers at the school – more of a lackluster political counterbalance - were left no choice but to kowtow.  The British masters also used their untrammeled authority to great effect in ensuring that the political thinking of those under their tutelage was in tandem with those of Crown.  Ditto their World War II sympathies.  Witness the observation, “This war against Hitler means so much to our British masters, they’ll do anything to win it, including making our people believe it is our war”.

Every high school has its share of obstinate students, vagrants, rumor mills, and shared secrets.  Even the best of the students, would occasionally fall foul of school rules.  Umuahia, during Obinna Okoye’s time was not different.  Also, the personal lives, idiosyncrasies of academic and non-academic staff often became fair game, especially when they proved less that decorous.  And such was the fate of Mr. Hunter, whose liking of Africans, “perhaps because he seems a good person at heart” went to the extremity, when he impregnated Cecilia, a native girl, and promptly absconded to mother England rather than face the music.  

Several events in the book give it an added fillip as well as a historical and humane flourish.  Two instances, both anecdotal, distinctly stand out.  In a school where discipline was of high premium, physical fights were by decree settled by formal pugilism.  And such was the fate of irascible bully and bete noire Chima Nwanna and Anthony Achara.  After the fight they became friends. Another non-academic lesson in civility.  It would take also a wicked sense of humor to arrange a novelty netball match between boys of GCU and the ladies of the Umuahia Women’s Training College (WTC).  This was a match only someone given to voyeurism or predisposed to watching cockfights would have sanctioned.  The Umuahians, of course, got mauled and walloped.  Their loss was a recompense for what they did.  What they did, in the hyperbolic words of their sports master, Mr. Pepple, “was to leave the ball and play the breasts instead.”  Ironically, this was a school that prided itself on its accomplishments in the games of cricket and hockey, quite unlike C.K.C. Onitsha, which “seemed to place a high premium on its soccer reputation.”  Certainly, as far as old school rivalry and acclaim goes, an all boys school being whooped by sassy dames in any sport, no matter how contrived or ethereal the distraction, is not the basis for claiming to be a primus inter pares.  This fact aside, many more anecdotal excursions into studentship and  life in the agricultural and rural sanctuary of Government College Umuahia, makes The Shining Ones a worthy effort and rich documentary and literary addition to the school’s acclaim and history.  

The Shining Ones is captivating, brilliantly textured and an easy read.  Momah through his lively writing and great dexterity in the use of straightforward prose thrills the reader with his story telling.  The all too familiar old school tales, are interwoven in a mesmerizing and succulent fugue worthy of Bach.  Superlative is one word that can best qualify the stories, the style and the gentle but forthright admix of handling nuances and delicate subjects such teenage pregnancy, or grown men being sometimes subjected to condescending froebelism of colonial British education officers.  Whereas the strength of the book incontestably is anchored on Momah’s super storytelling abilities, it is the book’s historical flourish that will captivate the reader.  This is a book you have to read to attest to the taste of the pudding being in the eating.

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