My lovely two of a kind teachers

When destiny brought him to Ede, then in old Oyo state, little did he realise he had come to cultivate and seal a most enduring bond with fate encompassing the totality of his life through family and career. Young David had a most inviting sartorial taste that students found awesome. His slim-fit shirts always sat on his pretty frame with utmost convenience.

David ensured his matching shirt and trousers combined well with his stiletto shoes of the era. His marches from one edge of the blackboard to the other radiated authority filled with fashion. To what else would you appropriate your attention when you had a captain in front of you with the capacity to fly you around the world in 40 minutes? How?

Unmistakably urbane and feminine voice-bearing David Oladeji came to Ede Muslim Grammar School to teach geography. He taught me human geography. You must come to his class with your manually drawn world map each time his class held. And then the tour would begin. Oladeji rammed all the geographically important regions of the world into our local heads; from the Ruhr region in the then-USSR to the Appalachians and the Prairies of North America. Our darling Oladeji’s Prairies was to echo to me and a former schoolmate, Dr S O Ibraheem, who later became and retired recently as an investment banker in the US.

It was during my first visit to that country in 1998. Dr Ibraheem was at that time an academic on the staff of Penn State University.  He had obtained a first-class degree from the University of Ibadan and got his master’s degree from the same university before proceeding to the US where he later bagged his PhD. Ibraheem is a tireless adventurist to beat any day. So, I had gone to him on a visit from my New York base. Incidentally, my visit coincided with the time he had just gotten a new job with Goldman Sachs, an industry leader. He therefore needed to do special shopping preparatory to assuming his new position in the bank.

No one could do meticulous and shrewd shopping better than my brother and friend in God’s own country. We therefore dedicated a whole day to exploring the best shopping centres starting with the globally renowned labels to their respective factory outlets. Not long after we set out from State College towards Philadelphia and New Jersey I think, our secondary school knowledge of geography suddenly unleashed in our conversation: “Musibau, this entire vast stretch of the green hilly region we have here are the Prairies o /Ehn, that Oladeji man…you would think he was born here…he taught with passion… well, o de kuku ko ere re../ How?/ He took one of our best girls nah/ Really? /He married Suebat, the ebony black Adenle girl/ Tell me! But that guy would go places o.”

Oladeji has since conquered the world, to our delight.

We all appreciated the fact that Oladeji taught with passion. You would think he had a PhD. Oladeji later started his PhD and I suddenly discovered that when met him at UI and he told me. Somehow, I assumed he was pursuing his PhD in geography. Oga had switched to psychology I learnt years later when his professorship was announced and some of us celebrated that as our own. He married our sister, so he’s become our own.  Oladeji is today a professor of psychology at Obafemi Awolowo University Ile Ife, formerly the University of Ife.

The same University of Ife produced my history teacher and lifelong hero, Siyan Oyeweso. Here is the man you can never hurt, ever triumphant and relentlessly progressing with whatever the task at hand may be even as he urges on everyone else with his recurrent verbal gesture of ma jaye ori e. 

Like Oladeji, Oyeweso just began cutting his scholarly teeth when he taught me as a 100-level student at the University of Ilorin in 1982. He had just obtained his first degree, second class upper, missing first class by whiskers. Even at that level of academic attainment, Oyeweso took his career so seriously early in life that he left no one in doubt about his high level of preparedness for his classes.

Siyan never held any note to read out to us for lectures, yet led our classes with as much proficiency as the only professor in the department, Ade Obayemi, would. Little wonder, Baba Oye, as we hailed him campus-wide, was a darling of his intellectual fans; the students. And many of the young of those days have grown. Beyond producing several PhD scholars and professors, one of Oyeweso’s early students is a sitting vice-chancellor of a federal university in Nigeria.

Incidentally, Oyeweso is as intellectually endowed as he is sartorially conscious living up to the pedigree of our town of Ede proclaiming us ajilala oso, aii f’ojo gbogbo dara bi egbin. As if in deference to some commandment, Oyeweso always ensured complete dressing of complete agbada or jacket with a good tie to match. Our girls were always all over him.

I actually didn’t know that I shared the same birthplace with Oyeweso until the general elections of 1983. Like a bolt from the blues, my teacher showed up at the polling booth where I was serving as FEDECO-appointed poll orderly. Voting over for him, he took me home for lunch and so reinforced a lifelong relationship.  Oyeweso singlehandedly facilitated my re-entry into academia to become a scholar at LASU where he spent more than two decades before venturing further to co-found the Osun State University.

Time is a trickster. So much water, as they say, had passed under the bridge through the years. Like Oyeweso, Oladeji too had had his career blessed beyond what is even obvious to us as his in-laws. His former student, now the executive governor of Osun state, Senator Ademola Adeleke, appointed him as a member of the governing council of Osun State University thus becoming the employer of my revered Professor Oyeweso. In like manner, as perhaps deserving of an in-law that Prof Oyeweso is to Oladeji, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu has appointed Oyeweso the chair of the governing council of Obafemi Awolowo University, thus becoming the employer of our in-law too.

The lives of academics are probably the most interesting.  They smack of boundless seminality especially if genuinely cultivated and sustained.  This is what is manifesting through generations in the lives of my darling brother and hero Professor Siyan Oyeweso and my ageless brother-in-law and most inspiring teacher, Professor David Oladeji.

On this occasion of Teachers Day in 2024, I pray for  Allah’s ceaseless favours for you and all of my formal and informal teachers till date.

Happy Teachers Day!

Tunde Akanni is an associate professor of journalism at LASU. Connect with him on X: @AkintundeAkanni