The Learner

Muhammad Muhsin Ibrahim muhsin2008@gmail.com  @muhsin234 After exchanging greetings, a boy of about 17 to 19 years asked me, “You are Mal. Mubarak’s younger brother, huh?” I answered in the affirmative. “Greet him for me”. I said okay and called it a day. Unbeknownst to me, that was only the beginning; he kept asking me to deliver the same message until one day I had had enough and warned him off. The lad is my brother’s student in college, as he told me. He likely meets with him every day, while I have not seen him for over a year, as I have been outside Nigeria since June 2013. Whatever, he doesn’t care; I am his friend on Facebook and the younger (and  junior ) brother of his fave lecturer, hence the right person for his ‘delivery services’. Many others will ask you to be friends and, upon acceptance, leave you a thankful message on your timeline or in your inbox. Forget the mostly disquieting English used for the message; I am against linguistic imperial...

Muhammad Muhsin Ibrahim Bayero University, Kano muhsin2008@gmail.com A few other selected students in my college and I were, for the first time, introduced to the Internet as a reward for acing exams of the previous term in 2003. It was a thrilling experience for all of us. I joined Facebook 2 or 3 years later, in 2005/2006, when it was still in its childhood.  I had just started tertiary studies then. That was a particular point in my life; I longed so much for education, to learn the English language and to interact with intellectuals. The few popular social networking websites at the time were Yahoo! Messenger, Meebo , and hi5 . The latter was more of a hit, so I patronised it above the rest. Not long after, the star of Facebook shone up, and many people migrated to the latest vogue. I followed the bandwagon. However, I deactivated my Facebook account after a while for mainly two reasons. First, it was steadily withering my commitment to my favourite sites, which...

Muhammad Muhsin Ibrahim muhsin2008@gmail.com @muhsin234 (Twitter) “It looks foreign”, my Indian friends so often tell me while describing how scenic and highly developed a particular place is. It happened first while my wife and I were touring the capital, New Delhi, last winter. We were entering the subway system called the ‘metro’ when my friend, guiding us, said we would feel as if in a foreign country down there. It didn’t dawn on me then until I heard the same expressions time and again from more friends. They obviously forget that everywhere is foreign to me, as I am a foreigner , a Nigerian. My country is thousands of miles away. However, each time the incident occurs, it reminds me of a similar preconceived notion of foreign superiority back in Nigeria . In the same vein, Nigerians would quickly boast that their particular possession was made abroad, not in Nigeria ! Pragmatically speaking, the whole concept of “Ƙasar Waje” as we call a foreign country in my loca...