The prostate is a walnut-shaped gland located at the base of the bladder." he said.

You hear these kinda things in med school and you get more confused than you were before the class began.

How exactly is a walnut shaped? What is a walnut even? Is it the name of a motorcycle part?

So, you begin the gruelling process of finding out what a walnut is, then how it is shaped, then comparing it to the pictures of the prostate you find in your atlas.

Or this one:

"The typical caput medusae appearance of portal hypertension on the abdomen.."

What on earth is caput medusae? Is it a new Latin prayer?

This one annoyed me like what-are-you-talking-about:

"The Anchovy sauce appearance of the pus of amoebic liver abscess.."

Please, gini bu Anchovy sauce?
What does it look like?

*

Ladies and gentlemen, our topic today is "What on earth is Anchovy sauce? The bane of lingering western influence on African education."

Permit me to begin by stating very clearly that education should never be a remote, distant concept; something you have to stretch so hard to reach.
But, if you were educated in Africa, I say with every authority in my lungs that that was your experience. Your education was difficult.

You started by learning that A is for Apple.
Apple.
A fruit that is not indigenous to your environment.
So, before the influx of Apple importation into say Nigeria, you had no idea what an apple looked like, except from your colour books.
So, you were socialised into associating education with something remote, something that was brought to you, something you do not own, could not lay claim to, could not understand, except by the kind gestures of the people who brought it to you.

As a child, orange was coloured green.
Yes, Nigerian orange is green, or at most yellow.
How something that is obviously green was associated with a different colour, confused me.
I mean, the fruit orange is green. Of that bit I am sure.
How does the colour orange differ from the fruit orange? Are they not meant to be related?
Friends, I remained confused till I came to England couple of years ago. That was when I realised that oyibo orange is indeed orange �.

So, education for me was what the white man brought. Not what I could own as part of my history and heritage.

In medical school, it became worse.
You pick a textbook of Anatomy and spend six hours on one page.
I am not joking. Ask any medic around you. Last's anatomy makes you wonder what is wrong with you.
The concepts are so foreign, so distant, so western.
But you must learn them, unless you wanna fail.

Ladies and gentlemen, I dare say that this is a huge part of what is wrong with African education.
We typically do not bring the concepts home.
What is the African word for Kilowatts? Any language at all?

This, people of God, influences the way we see ourselves on the global stage.
We blend, we do not engage. We agree, we do not argue. Because, "Oyibo knows better".
This vestige of colonisation has to be seriously looked into and in fact, done away with.

"I'm so scared." my friend said to me when we attended a world conference couple of years ago.
"How do you do it, Confidence? You are so bold and self-assured. I can't even speak. I feel I will say something stupid."

Sad. Isn't it?

Perhaps the intimidation we feel when we sit at international conference tables would have been non-existent if we were told at kindergarten that A is for Akamu, or Akpu or Agidi; if we were taught to own our own education, and not merely see it as a white man's idea.

Perhaps, I would have found medical school less traumatic, had I been taught that the prostrate is shaped like two Udara seeds conjoined in the middle. (I got to see a Walnut for the first time couple of years ago).

Caput medusae would have been fine if I was told the Greek mythology behind the name. How Medusa's hair turned into snakes when she opened Pandora's box and the rest of it.

But, I will never forgive the Anchovy sauce. My professor should have just told me that the pus of amoebic liver abscess has the appearance of burnt Gbegiri.

As for my little girl, A is for Ada.
I have no idea whether Apple is still a fruit or a device.
They keep changing these things.

Thank you for reading.

||Inspired by Chika Ezeanya-Esiobu||