chapter 12

Chapter Eleven: The Athens of the Forest

Ogbomosho – 1948

The dawn mist clung to the valleys of Ogbomosho like a white shroud, but inside the walls of the Baptist Theological Seminary, the air was already thick with the heat of intellectual combat. David, now an elder statesman of the mission, stood at the mahogany lectern. Before him sat a sea of young men—not just Yoruba, but Tiv from the Middle Belt, Efik from the coast, and even a handful of students from the Belgian Congo and Liberia.

"They ask us," David began, his voice echoing off the limestone walls, "how a people once scattered by the collapse of Old Oyo could build a wall of books that stretches across Africa. They ask how we, the children of the 'Recaptives,' became the masters of the scroll."

He gestured toward the portrait of Rev. Thomas Jefferson Bowen, the white missionary who had first arrived in Ogbomosho in 1855. "When the white men arrived, they brought the flintlock and the faith. But when the Ogbomosho man received that faith, he demanded the science. We did not wait for them to build us a temple of learning; we made ourselves the foundation."

As documented in historical records, the Baptist Theological Seminary in Ogbomoso (founded in 1898) was the first degree-awarding institution in Nigeria. It was the "reciprocation" of the white missionaries—a realization that the Yoruba intellectual hunger could no longer be satisfied by mere primary schooling.

Chapter Twelve: The Northern Bridge

The narrative flashes back to David’s middle years, during his "exotic" tenure in the Northern Emirates. The Yoruba missionaries were often the only ones allowed to bridge the gap between the British Residents and the Muslim Sultans.

In Kano, David had established the third great school of his career—a mission station that served the "Sabon Gari" (the stranger's quarters). Here, enrollment grew by 400% in a single decade. The "exotic experience" was one of cultural diplomacy; David wore the agbada of his fathers but spoke the Queen's English with a precision that intimidated the colonial officers.

"The white man thinks the North is his to guard," David told a young teacher from the Gold Coast. "But we are the ones who teach the clerks who run the railways. We are the ones who train the nurses in the dispensaries. Without the Yoruba schoolmaster, the colonial machine would seize and rust."

Chapter Thirteen: The