By Farooq Kperogi I’ve been living with a rather strange experience, and I wonder if anyone else has encountered something similar. A few y...
By Farooq Kperogi
I’ve been living with a rather strange experience, and I wonder if anyone else has encountered something similar.
A few years ago, someone reached out to me. He said he knew me well from my undergraduate days at Bayero University, Kano. He was two years my junior, but he described a fairly close relationship between us.
The problem is that I have no memory of him at all. His name doesn’t ring a bell, and I can’t recall ever interacting with anyone by that name.
Yet he remembers me with detailed, impressive vividness. He recounts specific stories, mutual connections and shared experiences that place me squarely in his narrative. We were, according to him, members of the same close-knit political and literary circles. He even describes himself as my protégé.
He later sent photos from his time at BUK, which confirm that he was indeed there when I was. Everything he says is plausible. Nothing he recalls is factually suspect.
He even once recalled a 1996 incident in my final year when I challenged (and embarrassed) a history professor who had, in my view, unfairly dressed down a visiting University of Michigan doctoral student after his paper at a symposium my friend Moses Ochonu organized as president of the Historical Student Society.
I was then intoxicated by Karl Marx and critical theory, and I found the professor’s critique of the visiting American scholar wanting. I did not hold back. Students hailed me. The professor had no comeback.
So, I knew the man was legit. Because I didn’t want to hurt his feelings, I have gone along with the assumption of shared memories. We interact on that basis, occasionally revisiting what he insists were moments we lived through together, which I have no reason to doubt.
Still, each exchange leaves me with a faint sense of unease, even a feeling of imposture, as though I am inhabiting a version of my past that I cannot access.
I have scrupulously searched and run down my memory lane to the maximum degree possible just to recover any trace of him. Nothing, absolutely nothing, comes back.
What makes this even more curious is that I have experienced the inverse. I tracked down a Ghanaian teacher with whom I shared what I remember as a warm and meaningful relationship nearly four decades ago. I remembered him clearly, but he did not remember me at all. I recounted my experience in a November 8, 2019, post titled “Never Tell a Past Student You Don't Remember Them.”
That contrast sharpens the strangeness of my current situation. In one case, I remember and am forgotten. In the other, I am remembered but cannot remember.
Has anyone else experienced anything like this?
This photo was taken on October 6, 1995, at BUK. If you laugh at me, your mouth will be contorted forever.😂
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