Road Companion to Democracy and Meritocracy: Further Essays from an African Perspective

6. The Sasse Motto Fide Quaerens Intellectum

47 6 The Sasse Motto Fide Quaerens Intellectum1 T he founding fathers of Sasse College, Cameroon’s premier secondary pedagogical institution, chose for its motto the scholastic maxim: fides quaerens intellectum (faith seeking understanding), symbolized on its emblem by the mitre and the book. This is not surprising. By 1939, most institutions of higher learning, especially in EUROPE, were still under the strong influence of scholasticism which, within the Catholic Church, remained the unquestioned official philosophy until the early sixties when the incomparable Pope John XXIII gave the world a jolt by throwing open the ventilation of an airtight edifice to let in a breath of fresh air in his aggiornarnento programme which sought to bring the church out of its medieval Weltanschauung and keep it abreast with modem times. Scholasticism as a philosophy may be understood as an ensemble of doctrines and theories elaborated in the Christian West between the 7th and 13th centuries A.D. and united by two main characteristics: a common language and methodology, on the one hand, and, on the other, submission to religious faith. Latin was the accepted international language throughout the Christian Middle Ages and the writings of the period can further be identified by their didactic methodology which consciously avoided the oratorical mode in favour of a more direct logical approach epitomized in the Aristotelian syllogism. Latin survived as a very important part of the curriculum in Sasse College until around 1964 when it was gently phased out. No Sasse student of my generation can easily forget someone like Father James Tol (MAHBU NGIRI! Shocking boy! Shocking plus plus! Go to Tiko and sell garri!), and the zeal and competence with which he taught Latin which he evidently considered the most important subject on the curriculum, partly and quite rightly, because of its indispensability in easily grasping English grammar and syntax. The very last set of Sasse students 48 Road Companion to Democracy and Meritocracy offered Latin at the Ordinary Level London G.C.E. in 1966. I was among these last remnants of the Latinists, the others being Michael Njume, Joseph Jumbam and Christopher Chukoyo. Using the Tolean foundation, we drudged through Virgil and Caesar’s Gallic Wars as an extra curricular activity with the very kind help of the meticulous Father Stumpel (Fr. Küng) Parenthetically, it must be remarked that the suppression of Latin from the curriculum, no matter what might be said in its favour, has shown its negative effect in the very poor grasp of English that is discernable even among our University graduates today. The initial suppression of the oratorical element in pedagogy also filtered from Sasse (the primus inter pares of our Colleges) to nearly all other secondary institutions in Anglophone Cameroon and has shown its effect, up to the present, in the paucity of literary talent and political astuteness among Cameroonian Anglophones vis-à-vis their francophone counterparts. Maybe that is controversial. In any case, the connection between sophistry, especially oratory, expediency and “success” in public life is one that has been well known since the time of Socrates through Machiavelli to the present. Scholasticism must be credited with giving precision to the distinction between the natural and the supernatural orders, between faith and reason. At the same time, it assumed the superiority of faith over reason, the supernatural over the natural, theology over philosophy. The fides always came before the intellectum just as the mitre stands above the book in the S.J.C. emblem. This legacy made it inevitable that priestly training would feature in the scheme of things; hence, the Holy Family Seminary which was part and parcel of Sasse College. Today some 23 SOBAN (Sasse Old Boys Association) priests are usually proudly listed, among them, bishops and archbishops. But this census loses sight of the fact that Bishop Rogan College, Soppo, is a direct offshoot of Sasse College and that priestly training has continued there. The scores who were “called but not chosen” must not also be forgotten, for here, like in the Olympics, there must be some credit for even merely competing. Many prominent SOBANS are ex-Seminarians. A golden jubilee is an occasion for a certain measure of justified glamourization and positive highlighting. It should also be a time for a certain measure of self-critical stock-taking. 49 The Sasse Motto Fide Quaerens Intellectum The underlying conception of education operative in Sasse and the other Colleges...