title for that edition was ‘A Nigger at Eton’. Dillibe Onyeama’s picture was on the cover. I read it back to back, gleaned clinically, and I never suffered memory failure concerning what I read about him and his circumstances. Importantly, the name stuck to my memory.
Whereas as a student leader and activist I had reasons to meet Nwankwo as I ‘toured’ the campuses with my comrades because we had ideological bonding with Nwankwo. Nwankwo was a great ideologue of his location in the ideological spectrum, and I loved him and shared some of his views about remaking Nigeria. May God continue to rest his soul.
Later he insisted that I should have some money from this relationship, so he would send and offered discounts to me and tell me how much to remit to his account but I always remitted the total value. He was so pleased by our relationship and in one of the orders I placed last year, he responded in appreciation: “Omoniyi, Bless you and yours in abundance.
The PRINCE OF MALI was about the West African slave trade. Balewa captured the catastrophic relics and scars that inhuman trade left on its trails, just as he depicts the shameless act of those involved in the nefarious activities that spanned 400 years, and disreputably enriched lots of people, many of them supposed leaders of their people. Nothing can be crueler than selling your own people, nay anybody, in exchange for riches or some other articles of materiality.
I am told severally that people are usually registered to study at Eton on the day they are born, or certainly long before they are due to commence actual study. It was a prestigious school but clearly discriminatory. Onyeama had written his traumatic experience in the school. The account was published in 1972 in the book, ‘Nigger at Eton’; and re-published based on Onyeama’s original essay under a new title, ‘A Black Boy at Eton’, by Penguin in 2022.