A former President of the Nigerian Institute of Management (NIM), Prof. Olukunle Iyanda, has recounted how an American family asked him if he fought lions to get his tribal marks.
He explained that the incident happened in the state of Iowa, United States, while he was a student of New York University in the 1960s.
Prof Iyanda, who is a former Rector of the Polytechnic of Ibadan, disclosed this in an interview published by Saturday Punch.
He said:
It was fascinating to see another country outside Africa because I had earlier travelled to Ghana but I had not been to Europe until 1966. I gained admission to New York University. I was fascinated but I was there on a purpose. I was also able to see London because we travelled through the United Kingdom. It was an exciting trip. It was not strange for them to see a black man because New York was a cosmopolitan area also, people like the late Babs Fafunwa, the former Minister of Education, passed through that school. Quite a lot of black people passed through the school. New York also had quite a number of African-Americans especially in places like Harlem.
As for my tribal marks, nobody took notice of it and I was hardly aware of the fact that I had tribal marks. I do not think anybody noticed until I went to Iowa. The United States Agency for International Development had a policy that all their students should be sent across the US in December to live with American families and interact. I was a guest of a family in Iowa and they were the first to ask me what the marks represented. The myth at the time was that Africans lived with lions, so they were asking me if I fought with lions to have the marks. I told them that it was a mark that was peculiar to my place of birth but the custom has since died. My father stopped marking his children’s cheeks from 1948, so those that were born after me did not have tribal marks.
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