Little room to talk

As a founder of one of the fraternities like Pyrates, Buccaneer and Black Axe when he was a student at the University of Ibadan in the 1960s and now safely ensconced with a visiting professorship in violent America, Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka has little room to talk about the secret cults terrorising tertiary institutions in Nigeria (EyeWitness, THES, September 3).

I have had first-hand experience of cults - the only dark side of an otherwise fascinating, life-changing period in my life. As a Briton with a Leverhulme study abroad studentship, I was a full-time student reading for my history doctorate at the University of Ibadan between 1990 and 1996.

I spent all but the last few months of a five-and a-half-year stay on the UI campus. Secret cult people made me and my wife decide that the risks of staying there were too great and so we moved elsewhere. I have witnessed the horror of lifeless bodies of cult victims dumped outside the vice-chancellor's office. Almost as bad were the 3am cultic trysts with their hollers and chants on the periphery of campus.

Straight after the coup that brought Sanni Abacha to power, the UI student body went to the neighbouring polytechnic directly to the south to ask for a joint rally to demand Abacha reinstate MKO Abiola, the annulled winner of the 1993 democratic election, as rightful president.

At the polytechnic, some students had their fingernails pulled out with pliers. That night, five students (including UI's student union secretary-general, "Specky") died in a blood bath of machetes and pistol shots on the shared boundary between the two institutions. With their headbands and black and red dress, some of the alleged perpetrators even walked openly round campus the next morning. The disgust of the main body of UI students was evident at Specky's funeral with the longest ever silent march around campus before he was buried in the university graveyard.

In more recent times at UI, secret cult people killed two students before last Christmas, while the head security guard perished a couple of months ago.

Simon Heap

International NGO Training and Research Centre (INTRAC), Oxford