When I first came across the expression: Do not envy my success in life, we all have twenty-four hours a day, I never knew it could turn out to have such a meaning that could use the comprised reality in time to explain the complete make of success, especially its rate match to and subsequent graduation from the enviable level to the intimidating, then the highly intimidating one.
Of course, we are repeated warned in Islam: Don’t envy one another! Yet some successes are so enviable that they make one feel helplessly intimidated even as one wonders whether some actually have 24 hours a day.
Indeed, to realize that some people achieve so much within a relatively short time gives the defeatist mental ride into the mere impossibilities.
Take a ready example in the personality of the week, Professor Kamal Aliyu, a man who is a true personification of success.
He was born in Kano, and had his early education at Gidan Makama and the School for Arabic Studies (SAS), Kano. He later studied at the universities of Bayero and Edinburgh, Scotland where he had two Masters degrees and a PhD. He reached the pinnacle of his career after becoming a Processor in Applied Linguistics.
Apparently, the only specialist in Kano who has attained that level in the area, Professor Kamal has written two books – English all the Way, to improve undergraduate English through reading and writing, and Language for Academic Purposes, to do the same for graduate students.
Perhaps the most prolific English writer in northern Nigeria, he has an anthology each of poetry and prose and is currently writing the tenth chapter of his tenth novel, which he hopes to finish by the end of the year. Among the nine novels, the second, Fire in My Backyard, won the ANA/Chevron Prize in 2005.
One other triumph of the writer is persuading students in Kano and beyond to turn deaf ears to arguments about the existence of a “Nigerian English” for being unrealistic, unsubstantiated, diversionary and lacking, not only a dictionary, but, must significantly, a book of grammar.
Its enthusiasts have thus failed to improve secondary-students English above the current 20% in WAEC and NECO by not teaching Standard English.
Transition: 80% of Kano students couldn’t secure admission in any university in Nigeria! As a solution from a proponent of Standard English, Professor Kamal will soon stage a book presentation of all his works to be graced by Governor Rabi’u Musa Kwankwaso, whose education reform plans have that objective in its agenda.
The idea is that English is not well taught in the medieval Grammer Translation Method, which is still applied in Kano schools, but it is best taught by way of extensive reading and classroom interaction, which the writer stresses in his writing.
The reading is suitably done with books partly written on the students’ cultural background (all the novels are set in Kano and are about the Hausa/Fulani) and partly with literate fiction written by native speakers of the language.
All that students need is the freedom to speak the language in the classroom in groups, rather than be lectured by the teacher on and on because he or she believes (falsely!) that they are experts and (very ruinously!) that their students have empty minds that the deluded teachers can fill with knowledge.
Finally, Professor Aliyu Kamal argues that if students were to consider the English language as their friend and cultivate the habit of reading at least a novel a week, they can easily have the confidence to speak that language out of the classroom and pass their WAEC and NECO exams with flying colours.
Since 1983, Professor Kamal has been teaching language and linguistics at the Bayero University, Kano, including a period spent at the Edinburgh University, in pursuit of postgraduate studies.
Other than Hausa Boy, he has written the following novels: Hausaland (a young Fulani herdsman comes out in search of cattle); Silence and a Smile (love and marriage despite all odds); The Blaming Soul (a young executive tries to lead a life free of corruption and bereft of dispensable culturalism); Fire in My Backyard (a friend of the environment sets out to stop the tide of desert encroachment in Kano), Portrait of a Patron ( landowner leads a life of piety but fails to persuade his incorrigible neighbour from following suit); A Possible World (an ethicist young man devotes his energy to fight people’s strict adherence to dispensable cultural antics), Hausa Girl (a young girl braves the disapproval of the community and becomes an actress) and Computer Shutdown (a collection of short stories).
His articles on reading and writing in ESL have appeared in The FAIS Journal, The Journal of General Studies, Kakaki, Kano Studies, Tambari and WAJLLC.
He is married with children, including a set of 1.5 twins.
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