Nigeria, April 28 -- Professor Abimbola Adelakun left Ibadan, the city of Brown Roofs, to study and live a new life in Austin, the Bat City. Her next abode is now the Windy City, where she has accepted a prestigious offer at the University of Chicago. Let me take the story from the middle, as the beginning is too long.

It is unusual in American universities to be retained for a job where you obtained your PhD. This is to avoid the inbreeding common in Nigerian universities where many faculty graduated from the same department, compromising integrity, reproducing tired ideas, and halting the transitions to new intellectual orientations. In such a system, the older person becomes the most brilliant, the Baba of the Department. Your fate de...