Post date: Aug 10, 2014 3:52:46 AM
17 June 1964
My apologies for this lapse in correspondence. However, Nigeria has been deep in a general strike involving all government employees—including postal. So for two weeks no mail. Even now mail from May has not come. Meanwhile I have stayed home past weekend as petrol prices have risen. I’m out of cash now, and must get to bank in Umuahia this weekend.
I went to Ife Grammar School for a meeting at which we discussed recommended equipment for schools just starting chemistry. The present lists are full of trash and expensive, traditional glassware. Also designing lab furniture. Trying to make the cost an absolute minimum and utility maximum. Gov’t requires separate labs for chem, biology, physics; even in schools of 300 students.
I have also been designing a house for graduate tutor with the offer to build it for Ikoku if he will pay for materials and get me student helpers. I can build a two-bedroom house with 1100 sq ft of floor and 240 sq ft of lower windows for less than $1,000. But I am sure he won’t agree. The Roman Fathers are building a church—very nice design. It will have a gallery, etc.
On Tuesday and again tomorrow we learn Nsibiri—the pictographic language of the Aro people. They used, and still use, it to communicate between villages and with Aros from far-off villages who were agents for the long juju. So far the characters have been quite personal—bridegroom, wife, adulterer, divorce, death, punishment, mourning sister, brother to a sister, chief, attempting to deflate a boaster, foreman of diggers, judge, etc. We saw a few more advanced symbols which are still too much coupled with juju to let us know them. Birth, puberty, age groups, and other work activities must have their symbols, too. The Aros had many colonies abroad for the purpose of slave trading and, since the trading was (at east ostensibly) tied to the juju, they had to communicate with each other. We have only started on this, and there is no telling how much we will be able to learn, but this is the first evidence of a written language in West Africa—or black Africa, for that matter. All these symbols are sort of diagrams of actions—there is Nsibiri which is acted out, also. The man acted each one out as he taught them to us. There is a definite stereotype action for each symbol.
I got a letter from Dave Dahl and Glenn White asking me to join them in their organ-building concern [Olympic Organ Builders]. I would like that—if I could contribute something to the company. As now, I could only contribute brains and labor. What I really want to do is study organ building in Germany for one or two years, then go back to University of Washington and finish an MS in chemistry. I really feel I don’t have the temperament for years of concerted lab research on a narrow subject.
The strike affected us almost nil. No mail, price of kerosene and petrol rose, no meat one market-day. But in the towns the airlines, railways, telephones, gov’t offices, banks, and big businesses closed. There were beatings and demonstrations. In Lagos the teachers refused to strike and a few were beaten. It all started over a long delay and many postponements of the issue of a committee report on wages. Then the gov’t refused to accept it, as it would cost them more than they had in the treasury and the big men refused to take a pay cut.
Our holidays are school holidays—about 13 weeks of school then a holiday. Next weekend is mid-term (most schools get an entire week). Our next big holiday will be in August. I may spend it in Calabar working on a pipe organ there. I go to town tomorrow—out of picket money again. I have managed the last month on about $30, including several trips. At this rate I will be able to buy a new Honda (motorcycle in August. On Sunday I go to a village to learn about the music.
Ach! My latest dreams are of building a live steam model locomotive—30” long, run on 3 1/2” gauge track. Crazy.