“Tu das epulis accumbere divom”

(“You made it possible for us to feast with the gods”)

 

A Tribute to Dr. G. C. Akabogu, Principal of GSSA, 1962 to 1970, excerpted and adapted from the keynote address delivered at the inaugural Convention of GSSAAA in Orlando Florida, USA on December 1, 2007.

 

Thank you Dr. Eze David Uche, and Mr. Leonard Ozoemena for organizing this convention and for inviting me to give the keynote address.

 

Fellow old boys of Government Secondary School Afikpo:

 

“Fear God, honor the king”.

 

That biblical injunction is the motto of our alma mater.

I will start with the “Fear God” part and ask that we please rise for a short prayer.

 

Heavenly Father, may Thy blessing rest upon Thy children now.

Let the words of our mouth and the meditation of our hearts

be always acceptable in Thy sight

O God our strength and our Redeemer. Amen.

 

“Arma virumque cano”

These three words form the first words of the opening line of the Aeneid of Virgil arguably one of the greatest works of literature. The literal translation of that line is “I sing about arms and a man” Our great Latin teachers including Mr. Ihenacho, Mr. Erumaka and Dr. Akabogu himself would insist on the idiomatic translation which is “My tale is about a man and a war”.

 

It is fitting that I should now paraphrase the opening line of Virgil’s Aeneid in opening my tribute to a great Latin scholar and say:

 

“Amorem virumque cano”

 

Translated idiomatically, this means “My remarks will be about a man and his love for his life’s work” The man is none other than our legendary principal, Dr. George Chukwuneke Akabogu.

 

When I think of GSSA, I think of Akabogu. For Akabogu was GSSA. When I think of G. C. Akabogu., I am reminded of one line in that Catholic Latin song “Ecce sacerdos magnus” (=”Behold the high priest”) that is sung to usher in the Bishop ceremoniously into the Cathedral for special masses. The line is: “Non est inventus similis illi” which means “A man like him has never been found.” He was truly one of a kind.

 

Dr. Akabogu was arguably the single most important person in the history of GSSA. Whether or not you were there when he was principal – and I know that most of us were not – whether or not you were there, he influenced you. His influence reverberated down the years. It is hard to believe that he is no longer with us. For he was the kind of person you never imagined would die. He was so full of life.

 

At this point I wish to ask that we all rise for a minute of silence in honor of this great man.

 

One minute of silence.

 

Thank you. Please get seated.

 

A little bit of history.

 

Dr. Akabogu came to GSSA under rather inauspicious circumstances. The year was 1962. Nigeria had just completed one heady year of unfettered self rule. Our principal was Mr. D.G. Marriott. Sir (Dr.)  Francis Akanu Ibiam was the Governor of Eastern Nigeria. Dr. Michael Iheonukara Okpara was the Premier. A man by the name of John F. Kennedy was President of the United States.

It was February. As prescribed by school tradition at the time, tail cutting had come and gone. Hatching of the “oins” had also been done. Though we could not have known it then, this would be the last time these 2 events would occur for the rest of the decade. Suffice it to say that everything seemed to be going according to routine that February.

 

Suddenly it happened! Our principal was summoned to Enugu, the capital of Eastern Nigeria. The next thing we knew he was fired! Dismissed! Asked to vacate the school in a matter of hours and to leave the country. The reason? He had failed to have the students line the road, as a sign of respect, as the Governor drove by the school on his way to Unwana, his hometown.

 

The sudden turn of events hit us like a ton of bricks. We really liked our principal, the Englishman Mr. D. G. Marriott whom we called “Utah” probably because he was a very tall and lanky man and seemed to have difficulty fighting gravity and keeping his back straight when he stood or walked. We did not like what happened to our principal. To make a long story short, our youthful exuberance and immaturity got the better of us. We showed our displeasure by rioting. One student painted over the inscription “Ibiam House” in front of Ibiam House and in its place painted “Marriott House”. Some students went to the nearby D.O’s quarters and trashed it. One master was overheard by some students apparently gloating that “The big man has been sacked”. The students stoned him until he ran for dear life and sought refuge inside a nearby house.

 

To say that the Ministry of Education was very unhappy with us is an understatement. They looked for someone who could get control of the situation promptly. They found their man in Mr. G.C. AKABOGU. At the time he was teaching Latin at Government College, Umuahia.

 

The moment he arrived at – some would say “swooped down on” – GSSA, there was never any doubt again about who was in charge. He had swooped down in his VW beetle (license plate EU 82) (later to be replaced by a Peugeot 404. He always drove fast and with verve – with the dash and panache of a wannabe race car driver – but always with his seat belt duly fastened. He was one of the very few people who wore their seat belts in Nigeria then.

Figure 1: Dr. G.C. Akabogu (seated; center) and the GSSA teaching staff, 1965

 

He saw us as a bunch of unruly and misguided teenagers. It was his duty to bring us into line.

 

As soon as he arrived, he asserted his authority and imposed total control immediately.

And who will forget those early days. On several occasions, the bell (he called it the “tucson”) would ring at odd times interrupting classes and summoning the entire school to the Assembly Hall. Invariably the lecture was about “DISCIPLINE”. And when you heard the way he pronounced that word, you were sure there was a letter “z” stuck somewhere in the middle. And it sounded like a weapon, a knife or something, that was thrust in your direction. On his very first morning assembly, he had warned us that if we did not shape up, “I will pursue you with thunder and lightning”. I will never forget the cold and deliberate earnestness with which he said those words. The word “lightning” seemed to start with two or three L’s since his tongue appeared to linger a little longer on his palate as he pronounced it. And of course you did not doubt that he meant every single one of those words. At least we believed him because he acted as if he meant what he said. We were just getting introduced to him – and beginning a new chapter in our lives and in the life of our school. It would be quite a ride.

 

Always a man of action, he never seemed to stay still or quiet. He seemed to be at all places at all times. He was always directing somebody or something.

 

I recall my first encounter with him. It was during the Athletic Season of 1962. Of course he was there in the main field. As he was observing one athletic event, he called on me to run an errand – to tell a master at the other end of the field something. I was in class 2 then. After he gave me my instructions and I said “Yes Sir”, he pushed me so hard that I nearly fell headlong. Of course he was simply launching me like you launch a rocket giving me a little boost, his nonverbal way to communicate to me that I should run and bring him back a report in no time.

 

At night he prowled the campus looking for those violating lightsout. On one occasion he came to Section D in Charles Low House well after lights out apparently attracted by the light and sound coming from the storage room. Senior boys were “cockroaching”. Of course he never went anywhere or did anything quietly or with stealth (leave that to the Vice Principal). As soon as the tell-tale cadence of his footsteps and walking stick announced his approach, the light went off and the place went dead. He knocked on the door. No response. He knocked again. No response. He was livid.  “If you don’t open this door today, George Akabogu will tell you all whom he is tomorrow morning” he yelled. In Igbo! Except for the “tomorrow morning” which he said in English apparently for emphasis. As I would later learn as his last School Captain, when something or someone made him really angry or when he wanted to drive home a point, he would revert to Igbo. When angry or when he wanted to project extra resolve, he would threaten you by referring to himself in the third person as if “George Akabogu”, the more fearsome alter ego – the real “akataka” – was held by a leash somewhere around the corner, raring to be let loose to rain fire and brimstone on the offender.

.

 

When he spoke, you could never say that you did not know or understand what he said. He spoke so “cll-e-ar-lly”. I remember his performance during Saturday morning parades in particular. He would give offending students called out for detention a verbal dressing down before the entire school. As you watched him speak, you could see the mouth, framed by the mustache, hard at work, sculpting the words and then launching them forth. As they rolled out of his mouth, the words had a well-chiseled clarity and crispness, each syllable respecting its neighbor’s borders. And he launched them forth. Like missiles.  And if you were their target, they landed on you with what seemed to be a physical force and left you downcast and reeling. “Do you know what is call-ed con-for-mi-ty to ru-u- le-s?” he would shout at the errant student as he called him out before the entire school. “Come a-o-u-t-u” he would yell. Another boy might be rebuked for “Ba- n – gi-ng- ng on the school pi-a-no-o!” Being on detention carried a real stigma because of this public tongue lashing, this verbal assault.

 

He was always firm without being harsh. He told you what to do “nolens, volens” (= like it or not) as he would say. And he was there to see that you were doing it. It was his way or face the consequence.

 

He was no respecter of persons. He was characteristically blunt and forthright. You always knew where he stood and he told you that to your face no matter who you were. On one memorable occasion, looking out of his office window, and seeing a Nigerian master walking hand in hand with a female expatriate teacher he shouted the masters name and yelled at the top of his lungs: “Stop marry-in-ng in publii-kii!” not minding that boys in the library would hear and did hear him. After an encounter with him, one hapless expatriate master famously protested within earshot of students: “Please, Mr. Principal, please, don’t insult me. Your behavior, I don’t like” Once in a session with senior boys he described how he told off an expatriate, one of the rearguard holdovers of colonialism. He described what he had told the man and then, to drive home the point, said: “I told him this in his office. What will he do to me?” Except that the second sentence was said in Igbo with hand gestures that communicated that he regarded the man with utter contempt and was totally indifferent to consequences. The unspoken predicate was that the man in question had been neutered by political developments: Nigeriahad achieved independence from Britain. During the war, I visited him a number of times at Uli Airstrip while he was in charge. I recall his encounter one early morning with one returnee who had arrived the previous night apparently from Britain via Lisbon, Portugal. Apparently the man wanted Major Akabogu to do something for him and thought he could browbeat him into doing what he wanted. I watched intently in bemusement as the man spoke his best English, with the proper affectation of Englishness to match. He talked about “all the privations” he had suffered traveling through Portugal… “blah blah blah”. Major Akabogu listened quietly and heard him out. When the man was through, he responded in Igbo: “Speak all this your big English as much as you like. I have told you what I have told you. I will not do it” And that was the end of it.

 

But he was also really kind and caring. He cared enough to know the name of every boy in the school. He took an interest in everything the students did. If his boys were involved in any activity, there too you would find him, be it on the playground or, unobtrusively, in the classroom standing at the back observing quietly. And his bark was much worse than his bite. Despite all his threats upon his arrival in 1962, behind the scenes, he made sure that no more than just one student was expelled for the disturbances.

 

As time went on, he quickly found out that such severe measures as wielding thunder and lightning to bend us to his will would not be necessary. Having been persuaded that we were not the bad boys he had thought we were, that we were in fact eager to face our studies and to do his bidding, he turned his attention and his prodigious energy to remaking his school.

 

He quickly prohibited the bullying and other gratuitous physical abuse of class one boys mostly by class 2 boys, a practice that was condoned as part of school tradition. Also from then on there would also be no more tail cutting and no more hatching. My set was the last to have their tails cut.

 

He promptly saw to it that the school had a more reliable source of water. And this was a very big deal since before him, water was a very precious and scarce commodity on campus and novices spent most of their time fetching water for senior boys. Water now began to run from the taps in the dormitories and labs.

 

When he wanted something, he was relentless. He once told me that he would go to Enugu and to press the point, he reverted to Igbo and said that he would “light a fire under the bottom of the PWD people” to get them to get going with some of his plans to put up a building – a lab or something- at GSSA. He put up new buildings including labs and dormitories. He made sure the labs were well equipped. He expanded the library and made sure that it had lots of books on all kinds of subjects, most of them of general interest.

 

Meanwhile he was looking for and assembling the best teachers he could find. And we really had excellent teachers. The Vice principal, Mr. Wilson made Chemistry fun. “Unwound” (Mr. Orji) taught Mathematics in a way that made it enjoyable and appealing. Mr. Bassey whom we called “Mantissa” made us love Maths. He was hilariously funny, often absent mindedly rubbing his face with chalk as he talked about differentiation and integration or simply about how “the log of a number is made up of 2 parts – the characteristic and – [you guessed it] – the mantissa”. (Those were the days of when “log tables” which were neither logs nor tables held sway. Calculators were not invented yet.) Mr. S. B. Ogbonna, Mr. Onyeaghala and Mr. Nwigwe were very highly regarded English teachers. Mr. Akusoba taught Chemistry, Mr. Ifezulike Physics.

 

Mr. Bellgam was a rather colorful character and one of our favorites. He taught English and History. He never deemed it sufficient to express a thought in just one way. He would usually offer several ways to express the same thought. And he would utter them in rapid succession. Once in a lesson on the Roman Empire, he started with a barely audible “Boys we’ll talk today about the end of the Roman Empire” Pause. Then suddenly in a loud voice that made some boys startle: “I mean the destruction, the disruption, the decay, the downfall… the DECLINE ….of the Roman Empire!”, he rattled off – as fast as his mouth was able to keep up with his brain. Then he stood up and walked to the window and started looking outside – very quietly and seemingly lost in thought oblivious to the class watching and waiting in anticipation. Then suddenly, he turned around and yelled: “The FALL of the Roman Empire!” Whenever he encountered what he called “good English” he would stop to savor the moment. He was literally in rapture and would seem to be rejoicing openly, his legs and thighs oscillating from side to side, arms outstretched and resting on his desk on either side of the book, his torso and head leaning backward as he read “good English”. His enthusiasm was infectious.

 

There were also the Indian masters. Mr. Vancheeswaran taught Zoology; Mr. Patel also taught Zoology and was dubbed “zoo man” by the Higher School boys. Mr. Matthews, the avuncular Physics teacher, was one of the best teachers I have known. The other Mr. Mathews taught Zoology. Mr. Bellard and Mr. Budruck also taught Physics while the Parkistani, Mr. Khan, taught Chemistry. Mr. Bellard would remind us endlessly that “Phyjiks is not so eajy …. Remember!.” The Englishman, Mr. Parcy with his signature beard (hence the nickname “Aji ododo”), taught Biology. There were several others. Virtually all members of the faculty were university graduates. They all worked hard to make their subjects interesting.

 

The school was a thoroughly vibrant environment for learning. We also taught each other informally.  I recall the routine in my class. Whenever there was unstructured time, someone would throw a challenge to the entire class. This might be to prove a proposition in Geometry, some formula or identity in Trigonometry or to solve a really difficult Physics problem. “Difficult”, that is, in the mind of the challenger. The whole class would go into a frenzy to see who would solve the problem first. Suddenly someone – Tete Mbuk, Reuben Okafor, Jeremiah Osuwah, Levi Ezeife, Eke Ukwa or Richard Akpan. or some other person – would yell “Cheap, cheap” to signal that he had solved the problem and had found it “cheap” or quite easy to thoroughly deflate the ego of the challenger. This individual would then swagger to the blackboard to unravel the problem. For the challenger, the ultimate triumph came if no one could solve the problem in which case the challenger would swagger to the board and show everyone how it was done. Of course for the challenger, the trick was to pose a problem so difficult that either no one else could figure out the solution or it would take a really long time before someone figured out the solution. The greatest embarrassment on the part of the challenger was to have several students yell “Cheap, cheap” not long after the problem was presented.

 

Presiding over it all was Mr. Akabogu, later to become Dr. Akabogu.

 

At a time when the attitude of the average Nigerian civil servant to work was marked by indifference and a desire to do the least possible, his attitude was the exact opposite. It was one of total commitment to his job with a passion that was transparently effortless for you could see that it was matched by such excitement, joy in and love for what he was doing that to him it was not really work. He was having fun – enjoying himself while hard at work.

 

His attitude towards his job; his approach to it could not be described by such words as “devoted” or dedicated”. It was more than  that. Those words cannot account for the effortless passion, the total immersion in the job and the manner in which he was clearly enjoying it. As far as we could tell he worked all the time! He seemed to be in all places at all times. He looked into everything. During dinner on Sundays he would often come to the Dinning Hall at times accompanied by his sidekick, the Vice Principal. He would quietly go around the tables talking quietly to this or that boy – it was one of the only few times he seemed to be quiet – without yelling at this or that boy calling him by name. And it was one of the few times you saw him wearing a pair of trousers rather than his signature white shorts.

 

He was truly a man on a mission. He had a vision which was to make GSSA not only the best in Nigeria but one of the best in the world. His goal was to give his boys the best secondary school education in the world and to prepare them for life outside the confines of the school. To him, education was more than simply book learning. It also included a multidimensional development of the totality of the person. To this end, he not only demanded that we study hard. He also demanded with the same earnestness that we play hard and give it our best. Every student was required to participate in all sports. And he was always there to make sure that this was the case. On P.E. days he showed up in the dormitories pretty early and noisily stampeded everyone out to the field yelling each boy’s name as they ran by him. Of course he knew the name of every one of his boys. When he took over the School Soccer team as coach, the team performed superlatively. An epic achievement was defeating Government College Umuahia (which always viewed GSSA as an upstart even if a worthy rival) 6-0. Of course Dr. Akabogu made sure that the whole world knew about it with the words “Umuahia no match for Afikpo” in major newspapers in the East. He refereed soccer matches between our school and other schools. He insisted that we participate in extracurricular activities too by joining various intramural societies. These included the Debating Society, the Dramatic Society, Science Society, Cultural society, Geographical society, the Photographic society to name a few. Importantly, he saw to the establishment of a cadet unit at GSSA thus further enriching our lives.

 

During his tenure as principal, GSSA was the best secondary school in Eastern Nigeria. And of course anybody who was somebody wanted his sons there. We had many students who were children of Ministers and other VIP’s. He also made GSSA an international school. There were students like Hilton Sinyangwe (a soccer star) from Tanzania; Samuel Chichindua from apartheid South Africa (or was it South West Africa, later Namibia); John Garang from the Sudan; Tetevi and Eliot Wilson from Ghana or Togo; Iyassu Gutama from Ethiopia; Manga F. from the Cameroons; M’tanduafrom racist Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe); and others whose names I have forgotten from the Congo (2 students) etc.

 

The Speech Day provided a fitting exclamation point that marked the end of the school year. The capstone of the events of the entire year, it was an occasion of pomp and pageantry – a chance to showcase the school. The masters were all dressed formally in academic gowns. The guest speaker was usually a prominent person. At the last Speech Day in November 1966, the guest speaker was Professor Kenneth Onwuka Dike, the (first indigenous) Vice Chancellor of the University of Ibadan. There were demonstrations in the workshops and laboratories by students as guests – the elite of Eastern Nigeria – filed by in rapt attention pausing from time to time to ask the students questions. The main event was in the Assembly Hall and included the speech of the guest speaker, the award of prizes for academic and other achievements, the presentation of tankards (the symbols of office) to the new house captains and finally to the new school captain to mark the beginning of their tenure and of a new era.

 

His tenure as principal though relatively short, lasting just 5 years, was transformative for he presided over a veritable golden age of the school. It was one brief shining moment. The school not only grew in size under him but also in quality and surpassed rivals in academics and sports and became the school of first choice. We have all benefited from his influence whether or not we were there when he was there because his influence and the tone he set rippled down the years. He had set a benchmark of excellence in all spheres of school life by which all future GSSA principals would be measured and judged.

 

Then war came.

 

During the war, His Excellency, General Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu, the leader of Biafra (who had visited the school as Governor for the first and only time in early 1966) put him, now the ever dependable and indefatigable Major George C. Akabogu, in charge of Biafra’s life line, Uli Airport. During the day the airstrip was bombed by Nigerian war planes to render it unusable by the “relief” and arms planes that arrived at night after running the gauntlet of Nigerian fighters which the Biafran pilots gave the call name, “Genocide”. Major Akabogu made sure that as soon as it became sufficiently dark the bomb craters were filled up and the air strip smoothed out and made usable again.

 

Following the war, when it was no longer possible for him to be principal of GSSA, thanks to postwar politics, in characteristic fashion, he went back to school and hit the books and earned a doctorate. At one point after his doctorate, he was a media figure being one of the erudite discussants in a TV program, “Philosophy and Life”.

 

He became the Supreme Knight of the Knights of St. Mulumba, an elite organization of Catholic laity. As its leader, in characteristic fashion, he raised the international profile of that organization and even had an audience with His Holiness Pope John Paul II with whom he took a photograph.

 

What, you may ask, did he achieve? Look around you. You and I are his achievement. He had a lot to do with where we have been after Afikpo and where we are today. Look where our old boys have been and who they are today. Mention the universities they attended and in many cases, you will be talking about the greatest institutions of higher education in the English speaking world. Today the vast majority of us are doctors, engineers, architects, businessmen, professors, scientists and educators etc etc. One of us was the Commisioner for Health for our entire country. The late John Garangwas the Vice-President of  Sudan.

 

Whether we know it or not and whether or not we acknowledge it, the indisputable fact is that we are all indebted to this man. Today he is with God. We look up to him. And in the words of Virgil we say to him in the language he taught:

 

“Tu das epulis accumbere divom”. (“You made it possible for us to feast with the gods.”) We thank you from the bottom of our hearts. Sleep in peace you magnificent human being.

 

We must not forget that we are the heirs of this great man. The question then is: Are we worthy of this heritage? I say to you that we must not fall short. We must not disappoint.

 

How do we honor this man who had such a large influence on our lives? I believe that the greatest honor we can do him is to perpetuate the work he was doing. Alas from what we now know the state of GSSA today is to put it mildly and delicately, simply deplorable. It is not what he would have envisioned or what we would have predicted or wished.

 

Why do we care?

 

We care because we all feel a strong bond and attachment to this remote and tranquil corner of planet earth girded on one side by a rock formation that seemed to be a geologic symbol of the solid foundation being laid there for future life. The years we spent there were arguably the most important of our lives. These were crucial formative years.We lived there for 5 or 7 years or in some cases 2 years and during that time we saw and interacted with one another and with our teachers more than we did with members of our own families. In a sense we were a family. That place nurtured our intellect. It inculcated in us proper codes of conduct and fostered a sense of decency and decorum. We arrived there as little boys unsure of ourselves and left as confident young men able to take on the challenges of the outside world. The place is part of  who we are. It truly defines us. We are therefore very much indebted to that particular patch of planet earth. As the inimitable Mr. Bellgam would say. This was the origin, the source, the wellspring, the fountainhead, the very cradle of our success. Thus we care because we owe our success in large part to that particular place.We also care because we want this particular place that nurtured us intellectually, spiritually and physically to continue to be the wellspring of success for future generations of Nigerians.

 

How then do we show that we care and thereby honor and memorialize Dr. Akabogu? I believe that the best way is to resuscitate GSSA and ensure that she continues to produce future doctors, lawyers, judges, engineers, professors, scientists, educators, business men, clergymen, entrepreneurs, industrialists, pastors and priests and leaders in various fields and spheres of life. Today the task may seem daunting but the goal is clear. Like Dr. Akabogu, we, his heirs, must be people with a vision and a mission. Our mission must be to restore our alma mater to its former glory, to restore it to its former status as the best secondary school in Nigeria.

 

The task is daunting but together we can accomplish a lot. More than we know. I do not doubt that there is the will.

 

Every year around this time the universities and other higher institutions we attended appeal to us for donations. We think nothing of donating hundreds and perhaps even thousands of dollars to these institutions. And this is perfectly justified. It is entirely reasonable that we give something back by supporting the institutions that helped make us what we are. But I ask you today to also remember GSSA. Save a good portion of the money you would have donated to these institutions and donate it to our alma mater. Give our school priority because her needs are greater. And please let no one say or think that it is none of his business and that Ebonyi State should take care of their school. Yes it is indeed the responsibility of Ebonyi State to maintain its schools especially an iconic one like GSSA – a jewel and a national treasure. But if Ebonyistate has failed in its responsibility and, for whatever reason, does not see fit to rebuild and maintain GSSA, it is our business to do so. It is our duty to do so. And there is no question that we have the capacity to do so.

 

I hereby call on this organization to commit itself towards the goal of raising at least 100 million naira a year for a total of at least one billion naira in the next 10 years. We will spend every kobo of that money on GSSA to make her once again the best in the world.

We will renovate the buildings and if necessary put up new buildings. We will thoroughly modernize the place. We will equip the labs, and stock up the library with books. We will provide equipment for sports and recreation. We will offer scholarships to deserving but indigent students. We will provide computers and audiovisual aids as necessary.

 

Will it be difficult?. Yes, of course. Everything that is worthwhile is difficult. But if we have the will, we will achieve this goal together.

 

This is the greatest honor we can do to our legendary principal, Dr. G. C. Akabogu.

 

This is my call to action.

 

Thank you and may God bless you. And may God bless the school we all love.

 

Obi Nwasokwa, M.D., Ph.D., FACC

Keynote Speaker

The Inaugural Convention of GSSAAA, Orlando Florida, December 1, 2007.

 

(PS Dr. G.C. Akabogu died on May 14, 1996.  Interestingly Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe (Zik) died just 3 days earlier on May 11, 1996. May their souls rest in perfect peace)