Free Thought in Nigeria

"The moment we all become gentlemen, this country is dead," says Nigerian Schoolmaster Tai Solarin. As founder of the Mayflower School in Ikenne, Western Nigeria, he is dedicated to destroying the educated Nigerian's British-bred notion that the ideal product of education is a black gentleman in a white collar.

When his first 70 boys arrived five years ago, Solarin told them to start building the school with their own hands. They were startled, but Solarin's infectious enthusiasm got them hewing and hauling. From a one-room hut, Mayflower by last week had grown to 35 white-washed buildings with 400 primary and secondarystudents. *

Headmaster Solarin, who is about 40 (he does not know his exact age), grew up in a family of Methodists. He taught in mission schools, flew as a navigator in the R.A.F. in World War II, earned de grees at the universities of Manchester and London. Soon after he returned home in 1952 with an English wife, Solarin was in trouble. As principal of a boys' secondary school, he was expected to cane boys for failure to attend church. He refused and quit his job.

With the Pilgrims in mind, Solarin hied off to the bush to start Mayflower School. Until the boys finished the first housing, the Solarins slept on the schoolroom floor and the boys on the school porch. Since then each new class has built its own dormitory. Also blossoming is academic quality: Mayflower is one of the few schools in Nigeria that make biology, chemistry and physics compulsory. And now the students include girls--an innovation in Nigeria, where women rarely go beyond primary school.

Mayflower is luring not only students--last fall it had 2,400 applicants for 70 places--but also eager foreign helpers. Now on hand are a New Zealand woman teacher of English and French, a young Philadelphia metallurgist who showed up with his wife last fall to teach physics, and a Peace Corps teacher of chemistry and biology. David Schmidt, a Swiss farmer, got so fascinated with Mayflower three years ago that he rented his farm, packed up his wife and four children, now works from sunup to sundown -- without pay -- making bricks. "When they saw Mr. Schmidt take off his shirt and go to work," recalls happy Headmaster Solarin, "the boys were staggered."

Solarin is sure that his helpers' work is not in vain. "Our mission is clear," says he. "It's to foster absolute freedom of thought in Nigeria. And we don't intend to turn out any gentlemen."

* Out of more than 3,200,000 such students in Nigeria (pop. 36 million), Africa's best-schooled new nation.

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