Rotimi Johnson - later Rotimi Sankore - was my high school classmate at the very prestigious Government College Umuahia. We were of the "Class of '78". That is, we were of the class admitted into the College in September, 1978.
The Government College Umuahia tends to count its alumni from the year of entry, and not from the year of graduation. And so, Rotimi and I left Umuahia, after the May/June exams of 1983. We were generally polymaths at Umuahia. The boys were very talented. Cream of the cream. Elite of their own classes at the primary schools.
They were generally selected to Umuahia after a very tough admission exam and interviews series, from among those who had passed the very competitive State Common Entrance exams with the highest grade aggregates 28-32, and from those who took the FGC exams, but did not like where they were posted. They came to the Umuahia interview.
Some were weeded. Some were retained. Those who came in, and stayed were toughened by the experience, because Umuahia ran on the Spartan ethos.
Quick movements. The "big Ben" - the college bell that rang from the belfries at the AD Blocks - woke everybody at 5:30 am. Then, the quick drawing of the waters from what we generally called the "Merrow Stream," just down the road, outside of the Third Gate and the police Post for the school.
Then the cold bath at Six - the worse for you in the Harmattan term. Many boys had in fact to apply their body creams liberally to affect a shine, so that they do not take that godawful bath. But it unfailingly showed in their collars.
The showers had run dry because the reticulated pipes that connected them to the water main of the Water Corporation, and to the House bathrooms and laundries, had been cut during the city road construction by the French construction company, Fougerolle. Then the garden duties/house work. Each House at Umuahia kept a well-tended House garden: the lawns were kept green and level; the flowers nurtured with care, and the paths brushed, while the hedges were sculpted to perfection.
The state of the House gardens often earned or lost points for a House during the weekly Inspection and Parade. So they were kept pristine with pagan commitment. Soon after House work was breakfast at 7:00 - Ovuike bread and eggs, with the worst tea ever brewed on God's earth; sometimes it was corn gruel, or the very occasional weevil-infested quaker oats, which had to be fortified with extra milk before it could go down the gullets, with Akara and eggs. The worse was that you had to eat on the move, or at the ring of the bell, turn your ration to the bin, and move to Assembly.
Then the classes. Then Tea Break, or what our College Principal, J.E. Nworgu, used to call "the Elevenses" - at 11:00. Then lunch. Then siesta. Then prep. Then the games at the Lower Fields to earn your "standards." Then the matchet parade every Friday for Labor. Then, the frenzy of activities, starting with the House meetings in the various House Common Rooms after Friday's dinner, leading to Inspection and Parade, with the array of the Houses flying their colors at the Parade ground on Saturday morning. It was all highly regulated.
Very military. Umuahia tasked not only your mind, but also your limbs. We had to live by our wits to avoid the brutal consequences of breaking the rules. Boys who came to Umuahia, not knowing how to make their own beds every morning, or how to "wolf down" their food quickly, either went AWOL or went hungry. Many became what we called "Block dozers."
I did once sleep with my blankets and a torch at the College Orchards, awakened just before dawn by what seemed like the cry of a baby. It happened to have been the cry of the Galagos, nocturnal primates that we called "Bush babies" in Umuahia. But I found myself reciting the "Hail Mary, full of grace..." and many boys did not survive the drill. Like Uzoma Ijere, whose father, Professor Martin Ijere, former Commissioner for Cooperatives and Trade in East Central State, and later for Agriculture, when Imo state was created in 1976, and who was Dean of Agriculture at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, withdrew him after two years at Umuahia, at the fierce urgings of Uzoma's Swiss mother.
Or the San Francisco based, Nigerian Filmmaker, Lisbon Okafor, whose famous politician father, Chief RBK Okafor also withdrew him, after two years at Umuahia, and sent him off to FGC Kano, where he had a much better time. Lisbon still hates Umuahia. He learnt nothing from there! But not Rotimi Johnson, who was in his House, Cozens. He was tough and resilient. Brilliant, despite his rather pugnacious looks.
But he was no pugilist. He was actually, quite a gentleman. He was just stocky, and lumbering, and even ungainly with those large, owl-like eyes. Rotimi tended to be quiet and reserved. He was at Umuahia, already very well read. He liked the comics. He had a very good collection of the Combat series. Rotimi was one of the Lagos boys in Umuahia, and for the first two years at Umuahia, he generally kept his head down.
He would arrive by air at the Airport in Port Harcourt, and by end of term, he would be driven to the Port Harcourt Airport at Omagwa, and back to Lagos. It was just in, and out. Then suddenly, in the third form, by some happenstance, he discovered that he had relations and a grandmother just down the road in Oboro, a village just by the National Root Crops Research Institute in Umudike.
By this time, his father, Jimmy Johnson, who acted the famous character, Okoro, in the National TV series, Village Headmaster, had been appointed Director of the Imo State Laison office in Lagos. Mr. Johnson would come to a routine meeting at Owerri from Lagos, and would swing by to see his son at Umuahia, and make the quick turnaround back to Owerri ostensibly to catch the next flight out to Lagos. He would not go to his ancestral home in Oboro, very close by the Government College, to see his mother. Rotimi did not know he had a grandmother nearby. Then he found his grandmother by happenstance, who dotted on him. It changed his life.
From that moment, he became more outgoing. More sure-footed and socially active. He was no longer as reserved. Indeed, in our fourth form, Rotimi was one of twenty-one boys, among them Vincent Onyirimba, Tony Ogbonna, I'm not quite sure now if CVC Ihekweazu, these days a Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN) was among them, but there was surely the now also late Johhny Aguiyi-Ironsi, whom we all called "Ironside," last son of General JTU Aguiyi Ironsi, Nigeria's first military Head of State, who were suspended by the principal, the redoubtable James Nworgu, JP, for "breaking bounds."
They had sneaked off one Saturday night to go night-clubbing in town, at Shamrock, a famous city nightclub in Umuahia. Rather than return to Lagos, Rotimi chose to spend the two weeks of his suspension with his grandmother in Oboro. I'm not sure if I can swear to it, but this might have been among the factors for his rather Freudian relationship with his father. It had all the makings of an Oedipal complex. They became estranged. We left school in 1983, the last cadre that saw the 2nd Republic, and quite arguably, the best of Nigeria.
The coup of December 31, 1983 changed us, and changed Nigeria almost permanently. We had all gone our different ways, but Rotimi's father as it turned out, was in the news, entangled in the legal question of $50,000 money transfer to Sam Mbakwe's daughter in the United States, through the Imo State Laison Office in Lagos. The end of the Second Republic was especially tough for Jimmy Johnson, and he lashed out in desperate ways.
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It certainly did affect his relationship with his son, Rotimi, and possibly altered both his moral and intellectual trajectories. The next time I saw Rotimi, I was already out of the University, and working as a journalist in Lagos. He was making waves at the University of Ibadan, where he was actively involved in Students Union politics. I came once to the SUB on the campus of Ibadan with my friend, the also now late Harry Garuba, and there was Rotimi.
Our interactions were brief, and hurried. He was no longer Johnson, he was now, "Sankore." He had, in a very critical sense, erased his father, assumed the very large historical and consequential name, Sankore, as homage to one of Africa's Medieval centers of learning - the Sankore Madrasa - founded by Mansa Musa. There was also a street by that name on the Campus of Ibadan. It was Rotimi's most important act of both disavowal and self-renewal. It was a resolution of the struggle with his past.
He was heading off, he said, to some meeting on campus. Rotimi Sankore was active, and he was triggered by the politics of that day. He took very courageous part at the commanding heights of the struggle for the enthronement of democracy and good governance in Nigeria.
After Ibadan, he pursued a career in journalism. As everyone now can attest, Rotimi Sankore became a thorough-going craftsman of the pen, among the best of my generation, whose analytical skills was beyond compare.
But above all, he gave moral weight to the search for a new nation which he believed in very fervently. His death last week from cancer, truly diminishes us, and takes from our ranks, a principled and fervent advocate for the highest, common good. But Rotimi can deservedly rest now, because he was consequential.
