One of the stories my uncle told me with enduring scope in my life was that aye pe meji (life has its duplicate). The way he tells the story is that as we do here, so they are doing in our duplicate world. The guy was interested in things extra-terrestrial, my uncle the youngest of my mother’s brothers.
What was the purpose of the duality of human existence, I wanted to know. He bid me be-seated and not be impatient. Did I know what the Babalawo told Igbin and her Suitor unbeknown to either of them. The Babalawo said: ‘I’m not in a hurry and nothing is pushing me onward to hurry up. The Snail and her Suitor did finally meet and their matter coincided and they agreed to live together forever.’
I sat there and waited and Omoyajowo never told the rest of the story. He passed on. His papers, few as they were, did not complete the story, just exercises in conjuring.
When I married to an island of shrinking land possibilities, I got to know the other side of the universe uncle spoke so much about. One was the fact that the earth was getting warmer. At first, I believed that the consequences are only on earth. The water level gets higher and so much part of the precious land of the island was lost. Yet, we needed to look at the deep and how the forest down there in the deep was also dying.
A large map of the world told me that it was not only their world that was being destroyed by the devilry of climate warming. All around the world in South Africa, around North Africa. Like the trees, so also, were the animals peculiar to their environment. For instance, the multi-starred starfish of the deep.
The Sunflower starfish has as much as 28 to 32 legs beginning with five and adding more as it aged until it reaches the age of 32 feet and five feet circumference.
This fish is also one of the fastest on land. It is described as eating anything on the earth floor. It was consuming about 30 per cent of earth-warming microbes capable of doing harm to the earth.
“The disease seems to be associated with raised water temperatures in some places,” says the document. The destruction of this Sunflower also destroyed the trees of the deep.
Have we visited our university syllabus in recent times? Especially, the science programmes? Are there new subjects on the menu? I don’t know. If anybody knows let him tell me. Do we have students training to be sea deep divers? Because around the world, it is these specialists who are learning about these sea animals in order to know how to protect them and the deep forest environment they inhabit.
Our science programmes ignore the exploration of space. It does not care about the science behind new technologies where even children are being taught how to make their robots, create robots in their turn at the age of seven! The achievement of AI (artificial intelligence) is incredible. Our studies will have to go beyond building boards for solving immediate low-level solutions to low-level problems.
The problems that surround us ought to be the dictators of our academic concerns. Instead of asking our sons and daughters to study law and medicine let them plunge into deep space study as well as deep-sea study. In these ways, we will begin to participate in the study of our immediate problems.
Small and medium economies are beginning to participate in space exploration. They are at the same time looking into the sea around them. Therein lies the future of our Sciences.
It is a fact that our new private universities are investing heavily in medicine and engineering. But many of them are religious-based. This might prevent them from liberating themselves from the clutches of religious limitations. A religious limitation that prevents the use of vaccines cannot encourage the study and invention of vaccines.
There is a university in the Middle East that links degree graduation with the ownership of a company along with their degree. This profoundly affected me when I read about this development of universities in other parts of our world. Whatever those developers of the syllabus of the university were thinking of, they were not thinking of the problems of yesterday.
A few days ago, Bangladesh began a series of advertisements priding itself on all the things that developing countries used to be ashamed of. Bangladesh was where food for the world was being grown, where clothes being worn by the world was being sown, where ambition was impossible before it was realized. This means that Nigeria must re-think its purpose in life.
So, if deforestation is taking place in the deep, how do we deal with it as well as dealing with deforestation on Earth? We must stop cutting trees for wood. Rather, we must plant new trees in millions to ensure that we do not deforest our jungles on Earth. Once we are conscious of deforestation on earth, we would be reminded of deforestation in the deepest seas. We would also remember the animals that dwell there. Each thought would lead to another and before long, we would be counted among not the thinking world but the re-thinking world.
According to the social media in Nigeria, according to those who follow it, nothing pains Nigerians more than the lack of attention to the development of Nigeria. Even the development that is being developed in the country, little attention is paid to it. What about the car industry in the eastern region? What about Peace Air from the southeast?
My uncle was serious about the purpose of the duality of our world. We can hope to be conscious of that purpose. We can always remind ourselves that we would consciously deal with both worlds at the same time. That way, our thinking will be multiple purposes. We would remind ourselves of the deepest sea concern and deepest space concern.
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