The strange case of Ruona Agbroko

Written by Ruona Agbroko
Monday, 08 March 2010 10:27
Lesley. Anton. Margaret. Franz....Lesley. Anton. Margaret. Franz. Lesley...
I would stand in front of the full-length mirror in my hotel room in Sandton and chant these names repeatedly for days before I resumed classes at Wits. Even my reflection thought I had gone bonkers. Still, months later, I struggle with the strangeness of having to call my lecturers by name.


Back home in Nigeria, we would ask around, from fellow students or check door labels for the proper title of a lecturer before daring to see him/her.


Woe betide you if you called a professor a doctor, or said “Mrs” instead of “Doctor Mrs.”


Often you got sent out without being heard, or had to endure a lecture on when the lecturer in question came about their doctorate. Some of us paid for our 'mistake' by having to keep a straight face during long-winded tales of how lecturers' parents toiled, how they went to the UK or some other foreign country to school in the 60s, and how our parents hadn't even met then, much less given a thought to conceiving us; mere tadpoles now endowed with sufficient guts to call them by a lesser title.

Fast-forward to Wits, and I found myself asking Margaret on orientation day; “Please...are you a doctor or...?”


“What has that got to do with anything?” her twinkling eyes stared back, amused.

“I just needed to know what to call you, as...”

“Oh, forget that! Call me Margaret,” she burst out laughing.

All of which was followed by Lesley telling me nicely to stop calling her 'Ma'am' a few minutes later.

There's more.

I am not sure the origins of this practice, but anytime you saw a lecturer, you were to run over, curtsey or bow, as normal in greeting, and take their bags.

Being the oddball that I am, I only helped lecturers who were either nice, or really had too much to carry.

Fast-forward to Wits, and Barbara, my sub-editing lecturer must have thought I wanted to mug her when I instinctively reached for one of her bags.
When I offer to help her share stuff around the class so she doesn't have to zig-zag her way through the length of the room, she nicely says it's a form of exercise. It doesn't stop me asking her the very next time.
Because it is what it is.

For all my cosmopolitan-ness, I dare not call my parents by name, and only do so when I write about them, or behind their back, often when they have not fulfilled their role as life-long ATMs.
The same goes for relatives, regardless of whether you can locate their place on the family chain or not.

I think all of that forms the colourful fabric of being African.
I still find myself curtseying as I greet, I am still amazed that we can email our lecturers with tidbits and details of our coursework. Still tense when I have to knock on a lecturer's door, chat with them or yes...have to call them by name.


Which is why the small mirror in my narrow room at International House must still put up with a daily image of me, toothbrush in hand, hair tied back, chanting; “Lesley. Anton. Margaret. Franz....Lesley. Anton. Margaret. Franz. Lesley...”



*Agbroko is the 2010 Niall Fitzgerald scholar doing her Honours degree in Journalism and Media Studies at the University of the Witswatersrand (Wits), Johanneburg, South Africa. She writes this column for www.vuvuzela.org.za, the website for Wits' journalism department.