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Voice from
America
“Nothing in the world is more dangerous
than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.” – Martin Luther
King Jr.
Cold morning, the air feels like damp wool in my nostrils. I am
afraid I’ve caught the flu, although my nose is not running and I
haven’t begun coughing. I squeezed the sides of my ribs, feeling for
a kind of lump or pain. I feel nothing, normal.
My mind whips up a scene from Eliot’s Journey of the Magi, the
Iowans say it may get bitingly cold in the coming weeks, but I may
not be around to see my first snow; much as I would have liked to
see snowflakes drifting down from the sky, like the breath of God; I
can’t, because this is as much chill I can put up with.
I think of camels and turbaned men, and then picture myself sitting
in the sofa with my gracious wife; my lovely daughter lying serenely
across my lap. I’m beginning to think, just for a change perhaps, we
may spend Christmas at the picturesque Obudu Cattle Ranch, among the
undulating plains and solid mountains and swirling mist, when the
savory aroma of coffee wafting over the sidewalks shifts my mind
back to reality.
It is Thursday, August 28, 2008, I steep into the library. No, I
step into the University of Iowa Library , fondly called the U of I
Libraries, and two feelings drench me almost at the same time. The
first feeling is warm; it makes my jaw drop in amazement. The next
feeling blows coldly over me: it churns my stomach in sadness.
For a moment, while my fellow writers walk gaily through the
glass-door entrance, I stay behind, surveying the towering height
and expansive girth of the granite-and-steel fortress sitting
imperiously on 137,500 square feet of earth.
I’ve heard the clichéd joke about everything being big in the United
States : roads, cars, appliances, clothing, burgers and even candles
(made in America ) are bigger than what you would ordinarily find in
other countries. Take my beloved Nigeria for instance; I have come
to notice that a candle keeps getting thinner every day you went out
to buy one, as the power situation worsens continuously. In the good
old days, if ever we experienced one, candles were fat like the end
of a baseball bat. As a child I liked the feel it had in my hand.
You could light a candle and it took days before it melted away. Of
course, blackout was a rarity then.
Everything looks big in America, I have been forewarned.
Yet the sight of this 153-year-old magnificent architectural pearl
does not reduce the goose bumps crawling over my arms and neck. I
shake my head. I hurry after the group as the two bibliographers
welcome the international writers and then lead us round the cool
ambience of abundant books and resources.
We come to a section that serves as a hold for Government Documents
and Special Collections.
I pause.
Something else has caught my eye.
I turn, retrace my steps a pace or two.
I look at the books. Then I reach out a hand and lift a hardback
volume leaning ponderously on a shelf, and it is not the leafy scent
of paper I smell. No, it is the resolve dripping from the pores of
great men and women hunched over the table; ancestors who slain
ignorance on the altar of pages that I smell. It is the odor of the
ageless spirits that built a flourishing civilization that tickles
my nostrils.
As I flip through the delicate pages, I sense a presence not unlike
the supernatural. Centuries-old. I think something whispers off the
pages.
A voice?
I try to catch the ancient whisper pulsing through the vein of
words, by peering hard at the mellow page, but it eludes me as Tarek
Eltayeb, the multitalented Sudanese-born-in Egypt-Austrian writer,
calls out my name and disrupts my trance.
Again, I dash after the group as they climb the stairs to the fourth
floor which preserves a rich diversity of literature.
The informal tour exposes me to the magnitude of activities the
Library manages. Its services comprise course reserves, interlibrary
loan and document delivery, reference and library instruction,
technology and multimedia circulation, distance education, cultural
center liaisons, and scholarly communications.
It is revealing to note that libraries have transcended their
traditional roles: they are now multifaceted and innovative. I am
speechless a moment as the realization sinks in. Modern libraries
are no longer limited to serving reading and reference/research
purposes. Interestingly, they did not abandon their traditional
services in this rapid e-Age; they only modified technologically.
Thus, the typical American university library is fully
electronic-based. E-journals, e-books. E-library?
This is not the case in Nigeria . We have a heartbreaking story; our
libraries are in stark disrepair. Like abandoned shrines. Like razed
homestead.
Downstairs, on the last floor, we look into the neat,
largely-computerized sections. I see gigantic white tubes hanging
from the ceilings, and one of the bibliographers tells me the tubes
suck air out of the building, so the books do not get damp, because
of the summer floods that swept through some significant areas of
Iowa City ; the tubes act as humidifiers or whatever.
Really, I did not catch his explanation because he spoke in rapid
drawl, almost like he rapped, but I nod, not wishing to appear
muddled.
We are told the section is the Digital Library. Contains more than
100,000 digital objects — photographs, maps, sound recordings and
documents — from libraries and archives of the University of Iowa
and its partnering institutions. It also includes faculty research
collections and bibliographic tools (holdings information for some
library materials that are not otherwise accessible through the
online catalog). Digital collections are coordinated by Digital
Library Services, which manages the preservation, delivery, and
structure of UI Libraries’ digital content.
Library digitalization, I mouth out. Metadata. Digitizing research
and instructional materials. I close my eyes but I can not convert
images, text, audio and video into digital content. What I see are
the cracks, cobwebs, molds and dust-balls on the ceilings of a poor
library in my rich state. One late afternoon, I had gone there to
hide among books, but the week before, a building had collapsed in
Lagos , crushing twenty people or more, and I’d slunk away, for fear
that a similar thing may happen and I would groan beneath a pile of
rubble. Dead among books.
The group moves on, led by the female bibliographer. I can’t recall
her name, but it sounds like a word out of Shelley’s Arethusa. The
male bibliographer, a hulking figure in saffron shirt and cream
chinos, has been called off. The tiled floor glistens in front of me
that I long to bend down and run my fingers over a square of marble
stone.
She points out how to use the InfoHawk Catalog and Database features
on a computer, and I grin. I wonder at once what Professor Steve
Okecha, the erudite scholar and poet, would say just browsing the
shelves. He schooled in prestigious universities, so this may come
as no surprise.
Then I remember his recently published book. Provoking as well as
insightful. The title: The Nigerian University : An Ivory Tower With
Neither Ivory nor Tower. The author happens to be my friend. Reading
the book made my heart twists itself.
It is distressing to note that poor countries like Niger , Burkina
Faso , Lesotho , Liberia and The Gambia spend much more on education
than Nigeria . Most of the African countries are striving hard to
allocate the 26 percent of their annual budget on education, as
recommended by UNESCO.
Giants are not swayed by semantic; Nigeria is a head-strong giant.
She will not spend more than seven per cent on education, it seems.
Professor Okecha makes every true son of the land to express chagrin
at the insensitivity of the federal government and its refusal to
heed to home-grown advice of increasing the annual budgetary
allocation, if our education system is to be revamped.
But we are a nation obsessed with erecting a massive defense
industry, amassing munitions, missiles, rockets, bombs and
fighter-planes, when we are not even at war. Some would argue that
the militants in the Niger Delta are spoiling for war, let’s
exterminate the locusts.
I remember the racket that ensued when a Nigerian envoy was caught
with 2.27 million dollars in cash at the international airport in
New Delhi , by Indian authorities. I remember the past president
spending millions of dollars to acquire more military hardware. I
remember dear Britain offering to upgrade our defense structure (how
magnanimous. I would rather have wished they had offered to upgrade
my alma mater and a couple of others), and I remember this and more,
disheartened that nobody could think of building defense against
corruption.
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