By Sunny Awhefeada
Time does fly! The last five years brought this reality to me. I cannot now say whether this reality is a post-COVID-19 phenomenon or not. Somehow, after the menace of COVID-19, everything, including time, in my thinking became fleet-footed. Time has been flying and so do our age and lives. When the world crawled out of the doldrums of 2020 a lot of phenomena that changed our lives reared their heads for good or bad. We suddenly realized that there was so much to be done and that there was no time. Despite the deployment of technologies that enabled virtual engagements in almost every sphere of human endeavor, we found out that our schedule became chaotic. We got swarmed with work and demands and life even assumed further complexities. There are times we looked back to see how we lived and survived before 2020. The world is ageing, but getting younger. This paradox also reflects in humanity. We are ageing, but getting younger. When I look around and I see older folks attaining three score and ten on earth, they look young and sprightly and one could easily place them around the fifty-something bracket. This has also been the case to (of?) many of those who have climbed the “fifth floor” as they look quite good for occupants of the “third floor” of life. Some years ago, we looked at those attaining fifty years of age as old people. Not anymore! What changed? This is despite the harrowing economic condition and falling life expectancy. Paradox!
I have in the last one week carried the above thoughts in my heart on realizing that my distinguished senior and avuncular colleague, Professor Macaulay Mowarin, had attained the celebrated three score and ten and was expected to bow out of active university service. He did tell me about his impending retirement last year, but looking at him and having known him since 2001, I couldn’t come to terms with the fact that someday he would turn seventy and retire. To me and many of us, both events came too soon. Professor Mowarin was seventy years this March, precisely on the 27th of March! But looking at him I am unable to say that he is “seventy years old”, but “seventy years young!” (implying you are also/equally ‘unable to say he is seventy years young’ – check sentence construction) I have looked back reliving my earliest encounters with him in the last months of 2001, to draw differences (what type or manner of differences, not specified-appears as if referring to your encounters rather than his physique and character) between then and now, but could find none. His gentle gait and strides, calm visage and reassuring smile, his wit and sharp intellect remain almost as they were when first I saw him twenty-four years ago! Those twenty-four years appear like twenty-four days! Time really does fly. What changed is that he has over the years become a maestro of syntax and contact linguistics, a virtuoso whose many scholarly interventions now offer succor to knowledge seeking folks across the globe.
I played back my mind’s tape and recalled how he took me under his wings when I resumed as a subaltern lecturer at Abraka. I practically knew nobody at Abraka, but Macaulay or Mowarin or MM as he was fondly called (comma before the next word and after ‘him)depending on who was calling him offered me a space in his office. The university was then an evolving institution and office accommodation was a problem. He offered me profoundly sincere advice a young academic needed to navigate an academic terrain. He was to facilitate my getting an accommodation of my own and we became neighbours. He fretted over my well-being and on many occasions offered me food even without my asking. His family lived in Sapele and whenever he was around in Abraka, we would stay outside talking late into the night. He taught me the ropes and through him I came to know the university and Abraka in no time. Coming from the University of Ibadan, our common alma mater he, alongside Professor G. G. Darah and Professor Sam Ukala, quite early in my career, was a strong factor that helped me to consolidate “the Ibadan academic character”. But for him I probably could have been swept away by extraneous un-academic factors. When I got married in 2003, I had to seek accommodation in Ughelli, but that didn’t affect our relationship. He was to become a restraining and moderating influence when academic tyranny threatened the department and I insisted on maintaining “ the Ibadan academic character” that a university was not a barracks and that there was no place for magisterial submissions that cannot be challenged.
A turning point in our department was when he became its acting head in 2006. It was a great moment of respite as the regimental atmosphere that suffocated colleagues gave way to a refreshing order where the cold lifeless prints in books transformed into alluring warmth and opened the apertures of academic freedom. The new lease of academic experience that flourished under his headship marked the watershed of whatever subsequent heads of department built upon including yours sincerely. The postgraduate programme under him took on a new impetus and the department produced its first PhD graduates. He dismantled the inhibitive hiccups that made promotion a herculean task. What has come to become the academic character of the department began to take shape under his stewardship. The students experienced efflorescence and this manifested in the upbeat character of the Creative Writers Workshop and the magazine Abraka Voices which they coordinated and ran. Despite his reassuring and constructive attitude, he was too gentle and didn’t bark and so there were times we took him for granted.
Professor Macaulay Mowarin took degrees in English from Ilorin and Ibadan before settling down to a calling as a university don at the Delta State University, Abraka, in 1994. He ranked as a pioneer in many ways. Self-effacing and inoculated against university politics, Professor Mowarin worked assiduously and helped in consolidating the academic status of the Department of English and Literary Studies at Abraka having taught there for thirty-one years. His phenomenal contribution to scholarship is attested to by his insightful studies on Nigerian English, especially pidgin, where he offered incontestable theoretical insights which have become constant reference points across the world. Interestingly, Professor Mowarin discovered a hobby horse as he recently embraced the art of novel writing. He now has two phenomenal novels to his name. At seventy, Professor Mowarin has made the biblical landmark of lifespan. He is a husband, father and grandfather. The rigours of syntax, the fluctuating essence of semantics and the baffling implications of stylistics have not made him a hard faced don! Despite suffering an injustice that denied him promotion he held no grudges and was exemplarily duty in Abraka’s vineyard of knowledge. He remains avuncular, simple and warmly welcoming. Despite what Nigeria has done to us all, he takes life in his strides with philosophical equanimity. Could this be the reason why he is seventy years young and not seventy years old?
At seventy, Professor Mowarin has made his mark as a teacher, mentor, researcher and scholar. This is not surprising having undergone tutelage in the hands of legendary Professor Ayo Banjo who supervised his doctoral thesis at Ibadan. As he takes leave of the Ivory Tower, Professor Mowarin shall be missed. In fact, he is already being missed. My postgraduate students who, unable to meet submission deadlines, would go and drag him to plead on their behalf would now have to look elsewhere. Such is life. Many of us, colleagues, would miss his wise counsels and golden opinions during meetings and his moderating influence at the point of taking decisions. As he retires, those of us he is leaving in the system have come to realize that time is ticking for us all. We aspire to share in his lot as he retires in good health and sound mind. Here is wishing him happy birthday and congratulating him on the attainment. May the next chapter of his life be more beautiful and more enchanting!
