Let’s start from the very beginning. As a young man in Nigeria how did you end up leaving Nigeria the first time?

Well, I come from what you might describe as an upper middle class family. My father was an education officer, my mother was also, by the standard of those days, she was quite brilliant and went to school. So, it was pretty obvious that they wanted their children to have a university education, preferably abroad. Because when I was growing up in the fifties we had just one university in Nigeria and my dad was a believer in getting his children exposed because I came from a family background filled with books and music. My father was into politics. Although he was in education he was aware of what was going on in the world. And he felt like I’d be better exposed, better prepared for life if I had my university education abroad.

What did abroad at the time mean?

Abroad meant mostly England. That's very interesting in the sense that when Nigerians who went to America ... were considered to have had an inferior education based on the British prejudice that their system, especially their university system, was superior to that of those who were training in America. So those who were training in America for a long time, right up until the seventies, suffered this indignation. You know, that "oh you went to America, American universities are not that good." And then you had that other extreme. The Nigerians who benefited from the policy of what was then the Eastern Bloc. Nigerians who went to Russia, Czechoslovakia and the Eastern Bloc countries. So, in that sense they were rated lower than the American trained people. So abroad for the elite, or for those who thought they knew better, was England.

Do you remember this coming out of colonialism? Give me like a memory of yours that for you indicated the end of colonialism.

Unfortunately I was not here when Nigeria became independent. I left Nigeria December 1959, January 1960. And independence came October. But I can't say that we felt a transfer of guards. I happened to have attended a school called Kings College Lagos. It was like modeled after the public schools in England. And we had a cadet corps. The idea was to groom us to go into the army to replace the British officers. And I remember that just before independence we're, you know, high school students, had this confidence and I remember we were on a march and a British officer on a horse rode into us, I was inflamed. I went back and I reported him to the principles and I said it was ungentlemanly because you know, in other words we were very very confident. We were aware of the world, you know, the dynamics of world policy. We are very aware of Apartheid, we are very much aware of Ethiopia because Ethiopia was in the forefront of —you know Nkrumah was our model, our hero. The idea of Pan-Africanism, the idea of an African force and between him and later Egypt, Ethiopia was where the first Pan- African, or what became Pan-African organisation, took place before they went to Liberia at which point Nigeria joined them.

How did it come about? Did your father say, "You're going this year to study there?" like, what was the process of you leaving and where did you go?

When we were in high school, the vogue was to apply for a federal government scholarship. Which meant that you know, Nigeria needed manpower. I'm talking about the late 1950s, early 1960s in all spheres of life. Medicine, law, you name it. And we were encouraged to apply for federal government scholarships. Now I am proud to say

that I went for the interview and I was awarded a federal government scholarship to study medicine, of all things in London. The idea was to go to one of the medical schools in London.

So my father now said to me, because when you got a scholarship in those days you had to sign a bond. Which meant that after your education you would come back and work for the federal government for five years. In other words, to pay off your scholarship. So, my dad said to me, "I know you, you have a wandering spirit. I don't think it would be fair to have you, to bind you up with this provision that you must work for the government. Don't worry, I'll sponsor your education." And I’m proud to say that he literally gave up a lot. Luxury, he didn't buy new clothes, to make sure he sponsored my education in England.

You studied in England, which years and how did you transition from England to America?

I studied in England from 1960 to 1963 and was at Kings College on the Strand. Supposed to read medicine, somewhere along the line I stopped at doing a degree in Pharmacology. America had always fascinated me.