Tai Solarin was an educationist and philosopher, whose interesting
and sometimes controversial views often found heir way, like the
passage below, onto pages of newspapers...
May your road be rough!
I am not cursing you; I am wishing you what I wish myself every year.
I therefore repeat, may you have a hard time this year, may there be
plenty of troubles for you this year! If you are not so sure what you
should say back, why not just say, ‘Same to you’? I ask for no more.
Our
successes are conditioned by the amount of risk we are ready to take.
Earlier on today I visited a local farmer about three miles from where I
live. He could not have been more than fifty-five, but he said he was
already too old to farm vigorously. He still suffered, he said, from the
physical energy he displayed as a farmer in his younger days. Around
his hut were two pepper bushes. There were kokoyams growing round him.
There were snail shells which had given him meat. There must have been
more around the banana trees I saw. He hardly ever went to town to buy
things. He was self-sufficient. The car or the bus, the television or
the telephone, the newspaper, Vietnam or Red China were nothing to him.
He had no ambitions whatsoever, he told me. I am not sure if you are
already envious of him, but were we all to revert to such a life, we
would be practically driven back to cave dwelling. On the other hand,
try to put yourself into the position of the Russian or the America
astronaut. Any moment now the count, 3, 2, 1, is going to go, and you
are going to be shot into the atmosphere and soon you will be whirling
round our earth at the speed of six miles per second. If you get so
fired into the atmosphere and you forget what to do to ensure return to
earth, one of the things that might happen to you is that you could
become forever satellite, going round the earth until you die of
starvation and even then your body would continue the gyration!
When,
therefore, you are being dressed up and padded to be shot into the sky,
you know only too well that you are going on the roughest road man had
ever trodden. The Americans and Russians who have gone were armed with
the great belief that they would come back. But I cannot believe that
they did not have some slight foreboding on the contingency of their
non-return. It is their courage for going in spite of these
apprehensions that makes the world hail them so loudly today.
The
big fish is never caught in shallow waters. You have to go into the
open sea for it. The biggest businessmen make decisions with lighting
speed and carry them out with equal celerity. They do not dare delay or
dally. Time would pass them by if they did. The biggest successes are
preceded by the greatest of heart-burnings. You should read the stories
of the bomber pilots of World War II. The Russian pilot, the German
pilot, the American or the British pilot suffered exactly the same
physical and mental tension the night before a raid on enemy territory.
There were no alternative routes for those who most genuinely believed
in victory for their side.
You cannot make omelettes
without breaking eggs, throughout the world, there is no paean without
pain. Jawaharlal Nehru has put it so well. I am paraphrasing him. He
wants to meet his troubles in a frontal attack. He wants to see himself
tossed into the aperture between the two horns of the bull. Being there,
he determines he is going to win and, therefore, such a fight requires
all his faculties.
When my sisters and I were young and
we slept on our small mats round our mother, she always woke up at
6a.m. for morning prayers. She always said prayers on our behalf but
always ended with something like this: ‘May we not enter into any
dangers or get into any difficulties this day.’ It took me almost thirty
years to dislodge the canker-worm in our mother’s sentiments. I found,
by hard experience, that all that is noble and laudable was to be
achieved only through difficulties and trials and tears and dangers.
There are no other roads.
If I was born into a royal family and
should one day become a constitutional king, I am inclined to think I
should go crazy. How could I, from day to day, go on smiling and nodding
approval at somebody else’s successes for an entire lifetime? When
Edward the Eighth (now Duke of Windsor) was a young, sprightly Prince of
Wales, he went to Canada and shook so many hands that his right arm
nearly got pulled out of its socket. It went into a sling and he shook
hands thenceforth with his left hand. It would appear he was trying his
utmost to make a serious job out of downright sinecurism.
Life,
if it is going to be abundant, must have plenty of hills and vales. It
must have plenty of sunshine and rough weather. It must be rich in
obfuscation and perspicacity. It must be packed with days of danger and
of apprehension.
When I walk into the dry but certainly
cool morning air of every January 1st, I wish myself plenty of tears
and of laughter, plenty of happiness and unhappiness, plenty of failures
and successes. Plenty of abuse and praise. It is impossible to win
ultimately without a rich measure of intermixture in such a menu. Life
would be worthless without the lot. We do not achieve much in this
country because we are all so scared of taking risks. We all want the
smooth and well-paved roads. While the reason the Americans and others
succeeded so well is that they took such great risks.
If,
therefore, you are out in this New Year 1964, to win any target you
have set for yourself, please accept my prayers and your elixir. May
your road be rough!
Tai Solarin (1922-1994) was one
of Nigeria’s foremost social activists his legacy includes the famous
Mayflower School, Ikenne and Mollusi College Ijebu-Ode. This article was
published in Daily Times Newspaper of January 1st, 1964.
