The Beautiful Tree

by James Tooley

  But what about Africa? Would I find the same things there? One of the first countries I visited for the research was Nigeria. I’d called universities and think tanks across sub-Saharan Africa, asking for research partners to help me in my work. The proposal from the University of Ibadan, Nigeria’s premier university, in association with a Lagos-based think tank, the Institute for Public Policy Analysis, seemed particularly interesting. I couldn’t wait to visit, to see whether I would also find private schools for the poor in that country.

  3. A Puff of Logic, Nigeria

  The Nigerian Ex-Chief Inspector

  I first met Dennis Okoro in July 2003 at an education and development conference in London. Dennis was recently retired as chief inspector of schools for the Nigerian federal government. He was a charming, warm man with a soft, lilting voice and shiny bald head, who looked very much younger than his 67 years. Over a beer, I told him that I wanted to research private schools in poor areas of Lagos. He dismissed this idea straightaway: “There are no private schools for the poor. In Nigeria, private schools are only for the elite.” The only problem here was that a month before, I visited Nigeria to meet with the University of Ibadan team; we went into the slums of Lagos and found private schools—everywhere, just as in India. (I’d been really excited by my find. The Ibadan team had been very surprised; they had been skeptical about finding any schools like the ones I’d found in India, and had in fact agreed to the research because they knew they would find very little. Now after our preliminary visits, we’d signed a contract and they were ready to get started on the detailed research.) It was a difficult situation to handle. One wants to be respectful of elders; above all, one doesn’t want to appear arrogant—“I’m saying I know your country, educationally speaking, better than you do, although you were chief education inspector for 10 years, and I’ve only visited once.”

  So I pussyfooted around the issue: “I’ve found private schools in the slums of Hyderabad, won’t they also be in Lagos?” No, he was adamant: “You might find some charities helping out, but no private schools. Public schools are for the poor.” Sensing my disappointment, he then hit on the solution: “Ah! It’s a problem of definition. In your country, you call your elite private schools ‘public’ schools, but our public schools are government schools. So it’s a matter of terminology. They’re not private, but government schools in the slums.” Quod erat demonstrandum. For Mr. Okoro, the puzzle of these oxymoronic private schools for the poor “promptly vanished in a puff of logic.” Steeped in our quaint British terminology, I’d been told that these schools I’d come across in the slums were “public” schools, and had assumed that this meant private schools. Elementary, my dear Watson.

  I could see that there was no convincing him. I’d seen for myself something in his country and in other places too. He said they definitely weren’t there, not in Nigeria and, by implication, not in any other country. So I dropped the issue and we went on to other matters, and further beers.

  Makoko

  A week after my conversation with Dennis Okoro, I was in a taxicab winding slowly through snarled traffic over the low, sweeping highway viaduct to Lagos Island and then to Victoria Island. I peered through the window, as so many visitors must do, at the shantytown sprawling out into the waters below. Wood huts on stilts stretched into the lagoon until they met the line of high pylons, where they abruptly stopped. Young men punted dugouts, skillfully maneuvering their long poles over and into the water; women paddled canoes full of produce down into the narrow canals between the raised houses; teenage boys stood on rocks in the water and cast their fine nets; large wooden boats, some with outboard motors, carried men out below the highway and beyond. Across the top of the shantytown was a thin drifting smog, giving all a surreal veneer, a dystopian Venice. Thompson Ayodele, the director of the Institute of Public Policy Analysis in Lagos, who had responded to my invitation to conduct the research and organized the University of Ibadan team, told me, “That’s Makoko.” This was exactly the kind of place that I wanted to visit, to find private schools. “You won’t find private schools there!” he laughed, outraged at the idea. In any case, he added, “Too dangerous.” In fact, he’d never visited, but said that it definitely wasn’t safe for outsiders to venture. “There’s no police there, anything goes,” he said, with a finality that he felt should have been the end of the matter.

  The battered black Mercedes—a typical taxi from the budget hotel—crawled across Third Mainland Bridge into congested Herbert Macaulay Street and turned sharply into Makoko Street. It was the national holiday, October 1, 2003. Nigeria was celebrating its 43rd year of independence—if celebrating could be inferred from the breast-beating opinion pieces about widespread corruption in the national newspapers that I’d scanned at the hotel. I was in Lagos training the University of Ibadan team who would be collecting data on the proportion of students in public and private schools and to learn as much as possible about the nature of the low-cost private schools and how they compare with their public counterparts. Thompson and his team had decided we should focus on Lagos State only, for all the research indicators they’d read suggested it had problems enough to make it worth exploring in detail. An official report said that Lagos State, with 15 million people making it the sixth-largest global city, was “faced with a grave urban crisis,” with over half the population living in poverty. They’d selected three “local government areas” for study, one randomly chosen from each of the three senatorial districts making up Lagos State. And they’d used official data to classify areas as “poor” or “nonpoor,” with the former featuring overcrowded housing with poor drainage, poor sanitation, and lack of potable water, and prone to occasional flooding. I was only interested in finding out what was going on in these “poor” areas.1

  My University of Ibadan team was led by Dr. Olanreyan Olaniyan (known to everyone as Lanre), a quiet, unassuming but gifted young economist, with a hugely warm and pleasing personality. He had recruited 40 graduate students from the education and economics faculties at the university. Following the methods developed in India, we trained them to go out and search for all the primary and secondary schools in the selected areas. Lanre had found government lists of public and recognized private schools, but we told the researchers they were on their own as far as unrecognized private schools were concerned. We told them to comb every street and alleyway in the urban areas, visit every village and settlement in the rural surrounding areas, looking for private schools. Be warned, we said, they won’t necessarily have signboards advertising their existence: in Nigeria, there is a hefty tax on signboards, so school owners often prefer to go without. Consequently, they’d have to use their ingenuity and do detective work.

  We instructed the researchers to call unannounced on the school and briefly interview the school manager or principal. Afterward, they were to ask if they could do a brief, unannounced tour of the school to look at what was going on in one classroom, and to check on school facilities. We’d role-played with our team to show them how to gain access to the schools by convincing school managers that it was worthwhile giving us their time. And then we’d taken the researchers out to some poor districts that we’d already reconnoitered to see whether they would find all the schools we had found, and to ensure that their interviews and observations matched what we had already found.

  Finally, we were ready to go. But then came the national holiday, and there was only one place that I wanted to go to see for myself: Makoko. My taxi drove past fine, gated communities, outside of which security guards lazily dozed, down a reasonable suburban paved road. There was a water tap outside one of the iron gates; surrounding it, a dozen or so women and children waited their turn to fill up their assorted plastic buckets and metal bowls. Driving farther, we saw women sitting with baskets of tomatoes and peppers, yams and chilies, crowding the narrowing street. Makoko Street became Apollo Street; as it did, bustling market stalls now left barely enough space for one car to travel. As we mov
ed slowly forward, people crowded around the car, letting us pass, but only just. Men sitting on doorsteps started calling, “Oyinbo” (white man). Children playfully joined in the chorus: “Oyinbo, oyinbo, oyinbo!”

  My driver passed the rough metal gates at the entrance to two parallel and starkly imposing four-story concrete buildings. The signs indicated that this was, or rather, these were, the public primary schools, for, it transpired, there were three public schools here on the same site. The driver motioned to stop, but I told him to continue. He looked apprehensive and puzzled—“I thought we were coming to see the schools?”—but he didn’t want to lose face, so he drove on. Over a canal, where hundreds of dugouts were tied loosely together, we ventured into a street so narrowed by the market traders that we had to inch forward, carefully parting the crowds as we moved. “Oyinbo,” shouted the children; “Oyinbo,” crowed the old men. “Mr. White,” called out one young woman, looking up from dousing her small boy with a bucket of soapy water.

  The paved road ended at a speed bump; beyond was just a track so muddy that it was impassable for our vehicle. My driver and I left the car there, in the safe hands of some friendly young men who had descended on us as soon as we stopped (who later, of course, demanded large, and accepted after protracted and angry negotiations smaller, sums of naira—the local currency—for their care). We picked our way carefully. The street was flooded from the previous night’s rains. The open sewers along either side had spilled out into the road; I followed my driver, squelching my way from one side of the street to the other, avoiding the worst excesses of slime and mud, human excrement, and piled rubbish. But there was no way one could avoid it altogether. A young boy squatted in front of me, defecating in front of his home on an old newspaper; when he had finished, his mother collected the paper and threw it into the stinking drain.

  I asked some teenage boys sitting on the low wall outside a general store if they knew of any private schools here. They said they did (my driver translating to ensure they had properly understood) and became my guides. We followed them as they moved carelessly along the planks that crossed the sewer; I moved cautiously. Down a narrow alleyway, we followed, past stinking fish markets where women worked, gutting and preparing the latest catch. And then there were the wood huts I had seen from the highway—made of flat timbers, with slivers of planks sunk into the black waters below. Beside the huts were raised, rickety wooden walkways out over the water and alongside the narrow canals. The boys moved easily; I moved slowly, testing my weight on each plank before I proceeded. Below was filthy black “water,” swirling furiously in places, bubbling with some unknown organic matter. A pig wallowing in the stinking water looked up lazily as we passed. And a growing group of children joined us, playfully touching me, and shouting, “Oyinbo.”

  At a narrow bridge across the dark canal, our guides negotiated with a young man in a canoe. And after some deliberations, we climbed down into it; the water looked even less inviting the closer we were to it. We glided down a narrow canal between the wood shacks and out into a wider waterway, a young boy effortlessly punting us. In the wider canal, women paddled by in their canoes full of produce—tomatoes and rape, spinach and yams, dried crayfish and larger fish. One canoe contained only water buckets; another had packets of cookies and soft drinks. A pied kingfisher flew by and balanced on a pole, looking for its prey in the murky waters. We glided past churches on stilts and stores on stilts, a thatched-roof building with “restaurant and bar” proudly displayed, but no schools. Finally, we maneuvered expertly down into another narrow canal—where were these boys taking me? Of course I was a bit nervous; I self-consciously felt my wallet in my trouser pocket, bulging with a month’s supply of dollars, there being no ATMs in Lagos (somehow I had thought it would be safer here than in the budget hotel); I’d better be a bit careful. I gingerly climbed out of the canoe and up onto the wood platform, where a dozen or so children were sitting, all now giggling at me in their midst. An old man, naked apart from tiny brown shorts, swatted at the children with a long cane, and they darted away, squealing with a mixture of pain and delight, only to return again moments later to crowd around me. I asked them their names. One tiny girl in a brilliantly clean pink dress—time and time again, I was brought to wonder how people’s clothes could be kept so clean with so much filth around—told me her name was Sandra. She smiled beautifully and held on to me: “So where do you go to school?” “KPS,” she said, and all around chanted, “KPS.” What does that stand for? She cried out, “Kennedy Private School”—or at least that’s what I thought I heard. I had found my first private school in the shantytown of Makoko. And suddenly it seemed that the teenage boys knew exactly where they were taking me. Would Sandra show me her school?

  Down the gangplanks again, I moved more confidently now, above the black water swirling with mysterious life forms, the children accompanying me, holding my hand, telling me to be careful as I walk over plank sections that were rotten or falling apart. And there it was: a pink plastered building, with faded pictures of children’s toys and animals, and the name of the school, not “Kennedy” but “Ken Ade” Private School emblazoned across the top of the wall.

  It was closed for the national holiday, and the proprietor was officiating at a function some distance away; but that didn’t ruin my excitement. One of the fishermen who had come with me had the proprietor’s cell phone number; it was out of range at the moment, but this could be the way to find him later. After a while, my guides wanted to return, feeling uneasy there; and although everyone seemed friendly enough, I followed them back along Apollo Street, reluctantly, but satisfied that I had found my first private school in Makoko.

  The proprietor of Ken Ade Private School, Mr. Bawo Sabo Elieu Ayeseminikan (“Call me BSE,” he told me when I eventually got through on the phone, which is somehow easier to remember) met me at the end of the muddy track when I returned a few days later, by the speed bump where the paved road ends. There was no holiday this time, but a national strike, with protests against a gasoline price hike promised around the country. At the hotel, the atmosphere at breakfast had been like a summer camp: all the workers had stayed away, partly in fear of intimidation; one besuited manager made scrambled eggs, and there were instant coffee, tea bags, and an urn of hot water so we could make our own beverages. I offered to do the dishes to show my solidarity with the management. No one must leave the hotel, I was told. It was likely to be dangerous across the city.

  But I was anxious to get back to Makoko. On the phone, BSE told me that there should be no problem getting around in Makoko that day—he dismissed my fears and emboldened me. Finding a car that was willing to take me there was another matter, but eventually one driver agreed, and it was a dream driving swiftly through the uncharacteristically empty streets; he too clearly wanted to leave me at the public school—gates firmly locked shut on this day of strikes—on the outskirts of Makoko when it dawned on him where I wanted to go.

  I followed BSE to his school. Inside the pink building, it was dark and very hot. Three classrooms were cordoned off with wooden partitions, while a fourth classroom was in a separate room behind; children sat at wood desks, while young teachers energetically taught. There was no strike in this or, it turned out, any of the other private schools in Makoko. We sat in his tiny office, while outside someone rigged up a generator and the fan began to whir. I wasn’t sure if I’d rather have had the sultry heat or the deafening noise. Children crowded around the office: “Do you want to see the white man?” joked BSE. Some of the braver ones touched my hair; others shook my hand. He pointed out Sandra in one of the classrooms, and she hid her face, beaming shyly as I greeted her, the girl who had led me to this school.

  BSE had three sites for Ken Ade Private School: the youngest children were housed in his church hall a few hundred yards up the road, learning on wood benches in front of blackboards; the middle children were in the pink building—actually the finest building in all of Makoko. And his eldest p
upils were in a nearby building made of planks nailed to posts that supported a tin roof. (This building later burned down in the Great Fire of Makoko on December 6, 2004. Everyone you meet will give you the precise date, indeed precise dates are given for most key events.) BSE took me to see a site he had bought, so that he didn’t have to be victim to landlords anymore and could invest in a school that he knew would always be his. He wanted to move one of his three schools to this site, and even build a junior secondary school. We walked down filthy, narrow alleyways, through water and mud, stepping delicately on the rocks and sodden sandbags that were placed there. In the open sewer were tiny fishes. The new site was partially flooded, but large enough for his dream school, with decrepit tin shacks on one side (I was surprised to see that a family lived in them) and beautiful purple flowers growing in the mud. We passed women smoking tiny crayfish, crammed on a thin mesh over a smoldering fire; one gathered handfuls and offered them to me to taste; I knew I shouldn’t—for health reasons—but knew I should—to keep face with my new host. I chewed gingerly on one; it tasted surprisingly sweet; she stuffed the remainder into a plastic bag for me to take.

  BSE had himself set up the school on April 16, 1990. He had started, like many, in a very small way, with a few children, with parents paying daily fees when they could afford to do so. Now he has about 200 children, from nursery school to sixth grade. The fees are about 2,200 naira ($17) per term, or about $4 per month, but 25 children attend for free. “If a child is orphaned, what can I do? I can’t send her away,” he tells me. His motives for setting up the school seemed to be a mixture of philanthropy and commerce—yes, he needed work and saw that there was demand for private schooling on the part of parents disillusioned with the state schools. But his heart also went out to the children in his community and from his church—how could he help them better themselves? There were the public schools at the end of the road, three schools on the same site—we both chuckled at this. How could anyone but a bureaucrat think of that? They weren’t too far away, only about a kilometer from where he established his school, but even so, the distance may have been a problem for some of the parents. They particularly didn’t want their girls going down those crowded streets where abductors might lurk. But mainly it was the educational standards in the public school that made parents want an alternative. When they encouraged BSE to set up the school nearly 15 years earlier, parents knew that the teachers were frequently on strike—in fairness to the teachers, protesting about nonpayment of their salaries.