Whose heart was soft;
He also feared the Lord.)
But I was spared that. I suppose I imbibed adequate amounts of religion at home from the daily portions of the Bible we read at prayer time every morning and every night.
The Second World War began just as I was finishing my second year in primary school, that is, in Standard Two. The rest of my primary education happened against its distant background. But it got close one morning when two white people and their assistants came to our school and conscripted our art teacher.
I think we were loyal to Britain and did what we could to help. I remember the campaign to increase the production of palm kernels for the war effort. Our headmaster told us that every kernel we collected in the bush would buy a nail for Hitler’s coffin. As the war continued, supplies for home and school became more and more scarce. Salt was severely rationed, and disappeared from the open market.
We soldiered along, singing “Rule, Britannia!,” but the really popular song was “Germany Is Falling”:
Germany is falling, falling, falling
Germany is falling to rise no more.
If you are going to Germany before me
Germany is falling to rise no more
Tell Hitler I’m not coming there
Germany is falling to rise no more.
If you are going to Italy before me
Tell Mussolini I’m not coming there.
If you are going to Japan before me
Tell Hirohito I’m not coming there.
The enemy list concluded, you moved on to friends whom you were naturally prepared to visit:
If you are going to England before me
Tell Churchill I am coming there.
If you are going to America before me
Tell Roosevelt I am coming there.
If you are going to Russia before me
Tell Stalin I am coming there.
If you are going to China before me
Tell Chiang Kai-shek I am coming there.
If you are going to Abyssinia before me
Tell Haile Selassie I am coming there.
Sung lustily in an arrangement for cantor and chorus, “Germany Is Falling” was as stirring as “Onward, Christian Soldiers” and other evangelical war songs.
I had two choices for secondary school—the very popular Dennis Memorial Grammar School, a C.M.S. institution in Onitsha, or Government College, Umuahia, much farther away and much less known to me. My elder brother John, a teacher who had taken me to live with him in my last year of primary school, decided I should go to Umuahia. It was not the decision I would have made myself. But John turned out to be, as usual, absolutely right.
I don’t know what prompted the British colonial administration in Nigeria in the decade following the end of the First World War to set up two first-class boarding schools for boys in Nigeria, one at Ibadan and the other at Umuahia. The arguments, whatever they were, must be fascinating, but I have not been privileged to read them. Howbeit, an extraordinary English cleric, Robert Fisher, was appointed the founding principal of Government College Umuahia, and the school opened its doors in 1929. By the time Fisher retired eight years later, Umuahia was a byword in Nigeria for excellence.