How Many Books of Tai Solarin Have You Read?

I read books that challenge and inspire:

books that make one feel that life is worth living.

TAI SOLARIN, 1992

 TSO Coordinator Sulaiman Dave Bola-Babs and Yemi Shodimu of O Le Ku fame admire two of Tai Solarin's books on display at a Tai Solarin Memorial Lecture, Victoria Island, Lagos

“But why should I read Tai Solarin’s books at all?” you may ask. Here is Tai Solarin’s response, from the horse’s mouth: “My guess is that most people want to read about people who started poor and ended in affluence or greatness. This is because most of the people everywhere are poor. Or to put it in another way, most of the people everywhere are common men.

“The average reader would like to read about the life of the common man who ended uncommon. The common man who sweated and strained, body all aching and racked with pain, but who eventually made it by extracting himself with his own exertion from the crowd of the common men to the pinnacle, with so few up there and all of them uncommon. In our society in Nigeria, this is the class to which I belong. I started from down under and eventually rose not to affluence but to greatness.”

Writing a foreword to Education for Greatness 1: Selected Speeches of Dr. Tai Solarin, Nigeria’s former Minister of Education, Professor Babs Fafunwa, observed that “Tai’s fertile mind, like his writings, ranged over a broad variety of topics: nation-building, self-reliance, technology, science, culture, economic well-being, food production and human rights, just to mention a few. But all of Tai Solarin’s topics, both in speeches and articles in the national newspapers, dovetail into education.”

If you want to have education for personal and national greatness, your starting point may be an acquaintance with the 265 pages book Education for Greatness 1 with 48 colour pictures of Tai Solarin, Sheila Solarin, Corin Solarin, Tunde Solarin, Mayflower Junior School pupils, Mayflower School students, ex-Mays and Tai Solarin’s friends and associates, inter alia, plus variegated ideas and principles of education advocated for more than four decades in his own pristine words.

If you are in hurry to drink from the fountain of wisdom of the social crusader par excellence, your best bet is the 126 pages book or ebook titled Tai Solarin in a Nutshell: Immortal Quotes of Tai Solarin with a foreword by the former Vice Chancellor of the University of Benin, Professor Grace Alele-Williams.  According to her, “the book is an attempt to bring together in one book the philosophy of the man Tai Solarin. In particular, it describes what the man stood for. The book attempts to view the wide range of Tai Solarin's writings about the failures and, in some ways, what greatness Nigeria could attain as a nation.

“Tai Solarin was an educationist, a social critic and a reformer. He believed ardently in the power of education to transform Nigeria into an egalitarian society, a state in which Nigerians would enjoy the basic necessities and civil rights. These he saw as a right of every Nigerian to food, shelter, water, transportation, adequate health care facilities and education from birth to the tertiary level. He not only used every opportunity available to him to teach, lecture and discuss, he also often berated the authorities for the type of education available in the country, the missionary schools and the private proprietors. Tai not only criticised the government, he also practised what he taught by establishing his school.

“In all, Tai Solarin in a Nutshell: Immortal Quotes of Tai Solarin is not a book to be read in a hurry. Each nugget calls for deliberate thinking in order to re-examine policies, practices, governance, indiscipline, indulgence, malice and inadequacies in the nation. This book is, therefore, capable of galvanizing its readers to re-examine Tai Solarin's life and works in order to examine not only our schools and colleges today but also governance and the role the educated can play in transforming our country for good.”

Those are glimpses into just two of the 36-plus books on Dr. Tai Solarin and Mayflower School. If you are interested in benefiting from the 11 books authored by the social critic and 25-plus publications by other scholars on him and his philosophy of life, simply call 0803-365-3110 right now to avail yourself of the books and ebooks on him and his existential ideology cum national and international ethos.

Even the former military president of Nigeria could not resist the persuasive power and logic inherent in the sterling thoughts of irrepressible change agent as admitted in his 2012 interview with the Leadership newspaper, “I was an avid reader of late Dr. Tai Solarin when I was in secondary school. There was his column, ‘Thinking With You’. I grew up to know that even the whites teaching us at that time loved to read him, because there was a lot of sense in what he said.”

My personal sentiment about Dr. Tai Solarin was my discovering the genius in him in 1984 after reading his A Message for Young Nigerians good nine years before the former Attorney-General of the Federation and Minister of Justice of Nigeria, Dr. Olu Onagoruwa, detected same in 1993 when he averred, “Dr. Tai Solarin and I share the same ideals and ideology of equity and social justice, with an unalterable belief in the rule of law and preservation of the dignity of man. Like all great men of unusual vision, Tai Solarin approximates to Mahatma Gandhi, Karl Marx, John Dewey, etc. in selflessness and self-denial. However, I feel confounded that his logical mind finds no place for religion and the Creator who created his genius.”

If you want to start enjoying the genius of Tai Solarin in the next few hours, simply call 0909-177-3366 right now to avail yourself of the two books above or the following ebooks on your laptop or desktop:

Education for Greatness 1: Selected Speeches of Dr. Tai Solarin
Tai Solarin in a Nutshell: Immortal Quotes of Tai Solarin

No Witches, No Angels: My Credo

Our Grammar School Must Go
Sheila: A Lady of Courage.

How many books of Tai Solarin have you read?