One of the ways I bond with my children is telling them stories. From when they were toddlers even
till now, we all look forward to our story telling sessions. From the hilarious tortoise stories, we have
metamorphosed into more mature stories – our national history, contemporary international politics
and sundry stuff. One of the stories they like listening to is the story of how I used to have fun on
campus during convocations. Read on….
My lovely niece is an undergraduate in one of the highbrow private universities in the SW. I give her
a call once in a while to check on her and recently, I called late in the evening. She told me she was
hungry and had yet to have dinner. I was scandalised. “How come, on convocation day?”, I asked,
‘cos I knew that day was convocation in her school, wondering how she could ever go hungry on a
day like this. “How do you mean?”, she wondered in return. So I told her the story.
When I was an undergraduate, we looked forward to convocation days. In Unilag in those days, we
could have 3 days of convocation, with the last day reserved for the ‘overgraduates’, as we called
them. We woke up on convocation days to the bubble and frenzy on campus, hardly able to sleep
from an excitement comparable to that which kids feel during Christmas. Reason was obvious: those
days were not only largely lecture-free and packed with a lot of fun activities, they were – and this
was the pith and substance of our excitement – days of freelance ‘wakkis’ where students went on
an eating spree and competed in varying dimensions of gluttony and immoderation and, back in our
rooms at dusk, we compared notes and boasted about our exploits. These were some of the things I
shared with my niece, which I will continue in Part 2 tomorrow, because of space constraint.

#ParentingonmyMind

#NostalgicMemories