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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 May 2015
It doesn't matter really what you teach; it is the spirit. I think that the best teachers in Ibadan, in Umuahia, seemed to be formed by that spirit. They weren't teaching us African literature. If we had relied on them to teach us how to become Africans we would never have got started. They taught us English literature; they taught us what they knew. And a good student could take off from there.
(Chinua Achebe, quoted in Wren, 1990)Government College, Umuahia recruited some of the very best pupils in Nigeria and the British Cameroons. Nevertheless, their European teachers were concerned about their fluency in English. In Eastern Nigerian primary schools, teaching took place mainly in the vernacular. Village boys barely spoke any English outside the school. Consequently, the authorities of the Umuahia Government College spent the first year after the relocation laying the ground for advanced instruction leading to the Cambridge School Certificate Examination. The learning objectives of the official English syllabus for 1943–44 were ‘to use the English language simply and soundly: get rid as far as possible of the faults of previous bad teaching (this occupies much time and persistent effort): to develop clear thinking and clear expression: to speak smoothly and correctly: to gain a desire for private reading’. At Umuahia, students were required to speak English at all times. Form I students found this strict prohibition of pidgin and the vernacular challenging, if not downright impracticable. Many ended up contravening the rule in the first weeks and were punished for it. In his ‘Reminiscences of GCU in the Forties’, Chike Momah recalls his first encounter with the ‘No-Vernacular Rule’ and the life-long effects of the suppression of indigenous languages at Government College:
Quite early, my elder brother administered something of a shock to me. One day I was chatting with him. Then I became aware that he was not responding as he should have been doing. Instead he had his arms akimbo and was looking at me with a very disapproving expression on his face. I stopped and only then he said: ‘I don't understand what you're saying’ – or words to that effect.
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