By Moses Ochonu.
Recently, I was having a conversation with my friend Farooq Kperogi and I was formally congratulating him on his promotion to the rank of Full Professor.
He said to me “Moses, you know this is a routine promotion but our people are blowing it way out of proportion.” I replied that, to him it may be a routine, expected elevation but that to the thousands of Nigerians who revere and look up to him, and certainly to his family, it is a big effing deal, to paraphrase President Joe Biden.
I then told him that for his extended family especially, this was huge, and that he should not try to tamp down their joy and celebration. Our families live vicariously through us, they identify with our success, and our accomplishment both inspire and confer on them pride and bragging rights. They live through us, and our success motivates and fills them with a sense that they’re connected to a lineage and a family with a person of distinction. You cannot discount the symbolic and inspirational value of this.
I told Farooq that he was now community property, that his success does not belong to him alone but also to his family and his hometown. He would be doing them unintended disservice if he tried to either discourage them from celebrating his accomplishment or tried to diminish the accomplishment itself. It is not every day that a member of their family and a son of theirs gets promoted to Professor in an American university, and so they deserve to wear that as a badge of honor if they choose to.
I told Farooq that this was not about him but about his relatives, so he should put his modesty and unease aside and let them have their moment and bask in the accomplishments of their brother and by extension their own accomplishment. I told him that his success had an inspirational and affirmative effect on them, which is something positive.
Farooq concurred with me. Not only that, he said the case of his uncle was particularly illustrative of the point. He said his uncle, his father’s younger brother, insists on calling him “Prof” nowadays even though he is much older than him. He has tried to explain to him that it is awkward, given the fact that this man witnessed his birth and helped raise him. “Prof” and other titular honorifics are for people outside, not family, and certainly not a much older uncle, Farooq told his uncle. His uncle refused to budge. When he kept trying to get his uncle to stop the formality of calling him “Prof” his uncle figuratively sat him down and gave him a brilliant lecture on why he would continue to call him “prof.”
His uncle’s logic was as philosophically African as it was compelling. Essentially, he argued that all along he had rooted for his nephew to succeed and get to the pinnacle of the academic career and longed for the day when, like other people, he could boast of a Professor in his family and could bask in his nephew being a professor. One of his lifelong aspirations was to be able to call one of his own “prof.” Now that that dream of his had come true, how could Farooq try to deprive him of the proud satisfaction of using that title to refer to him? He concluded that he was not stupid, that he knew that Farooq was much younger and that ordinarily he should call him by his name, but that Farooq’s accomplishment had rendered that cultural practice moot and made a new form of cultural interaction necessary. Farooq, he said, should allow him this one joy.
This story reaffirmed my position and Farooq and I agreed that, in our circles, success is a collective property to be shared and enjoyed communally. We are modest folks averse to vulgar celebration, bragging, and showy, exhibitionist declarations of personal accomplishments, but it is not for us to determine how our folks relate to or what they do with our accomplishments.
Farooq had not even told his family in Nigeria about his promotion, so when some of them saw it trending on social media, they were disappointed and told him so. He had not told them because he saw the promotion as a routine event in the life of a scholar. Not so for his relatives, who saw a star shining from their lineage and wanted to both share in the brightness and announce it.
As Farooq and I talked more about the inspirational and communal significations of individual accomplishments in the African cultural milieu, we recalled the successful relatives we were proud to be associated with and related to, despite the fact that some of them did not even know that we existed. For us, as children, it was not about interacting with these relatives but simply having them as examples of what was possible to achieve for someone from our extended family.
I recalled the particular case of a banker uncle of mine (uncle in the African sense of uncle), who had schooled abroad and had returned to take up a senior management position in a prominent bank. I had very little interaction with him, but just the thought of knowing him and being related to him filed me with both pride and belief.
Please do not own your success alone. Realize that when you get to a certain point in life, your accomplishments are no longer just your own. You and your accomplishments are now community property. Try to make peace with that reality.
Moses Ochonu