Since my teens, my father spent time advising me on my choice of profession. At a young age, I had the mind to study law. I joined the debating society at school as a preparatory step. In my last two years in school, I was the number one choice to represent my school in inter-school debates. It happened that in 1953, during the masquerade party in our town of Abeokuta, a city in Nigeria, a trucker ran over a masquerade. The accident occurred at a T-junction where our house was located. The accident victim was pronounced dead on her arrival at the hospital. It was a Sunday night.
The driver retained the services of my brother, who was a practicing lawyer in Lagos, but he came home for the weekend. It just so happened that the case came before my father on Monday. To my horror, he was ruled out for technical reasons the next day. Technical bases my foot; we all witnessed the commotion that greeted the manslaughter event. I challenged my brother to explain why a guilty party should be allowed to get away with it. He proudly told me that the victim was not identified at the scene of the accident as a mask usually covered the face in a masquerade. The prosecution was unable to establish the identity of the accident victim in court. Therefore, he took the opportunity to claim that his client had no case to answer to.
Two things disturbed me. I accused, even slightly, my father and brother of partisanship or favoritism. Both denied anything of the sort. Second, he couldn’t understand why a guilty person should go unpunished. However, the legal minds told me that until proven, he was not guilty. The effect on my life was immediate. If that were part of the things a lawyer would be paid to do, I wouldn’t want to become one.
My choice of profession changed to medicine. I decided to be a surgeon. The Cambridge School Certificate Examination biology syllabus at the time called for a student to dissect a frog, study and draw the internal organs. I approached the period with excited anticipation. This was about three years after I left the legal profession. Frog was in good supply. So you went to your frog. During the class, I considered it cruel to apply chloroform to knock out the frog. A classmate did it for me. With the frog still visibly breathing, I nailed the ends of all four limbs to the board, bottoms up. Using the surgical blade, I cut open the frog’s belly. As he did so, blood dripped. I couldn’t bear it. I ran out and was unable to submit any reports. That put an end to my ambition to become a surgeon. I immediately looked at the doctors with a heavy heart, wondering how they had the nerve to cut up human beings.
At the end of my second year in high school, I privately passed the algebra and geometry syllabi for the Cambridge exam. When I was still at school, I flirted with making a career out of chemistry; but I considered it not mathematical enough. After leaving school, I studied engineering as suggested to me in the Science School. The endless engineering drawings put me off. I settled for physics because I found it more challenging than simply applying formulas to solve problems.
