This is a great celebration and appreciation of the life of Prof. Gabriel Olusanya that offers a bouquet of excellent achievements to the Great One to carry home. I wish that we celebrated our heroes when they were alive so that they would hear our songs of praise and commendations for making this unequal world liveable and enjoyable. Our deep condolences to Prof. Olusanya's family and community. RIP Prof.
PROFESSOR GABRIEL OLAKUNLE OLUSANYA
Versatile historian, administrator and public intellectual, who had a social conscience and built bridges straddling disciplinary boundaries and generations of scholars.
Gabriel Olakunle Olusanya, who died on February 26, 2012, aged 76, was a generous, good and kind man, and a great scholar. He combined path-breaking scholarship with active engagement in public affairs, to the end of his life, despite failing and debilitating health. He was a radical Pan-African scholar, of a progressive bent, who saw in progressive scholarship a potent weapon for democracy and development. Although preoccupied and concerned with Africa and the character of the scholarship about, and in Africa, he did so, the cultured and urbane cosmopolitan that he was, as part of a broad-based and larger humanistic preoccupation with enriching and bringing diversity, from an Afrocentric and third world perspective, to bear on scholarship as a global industry. He had a strong sense of solidarity, reflected in his consistent advocacy for the amelioration of their plight, with the weak and the vulnerable in society.
A prolific writer, with a measured, reasoned, and typically didactic argumentative style, Gabriel Olusanya opposed inflexible attachment to dogma, as his guiding principle. It was not that he doubted the need or necessity for dogma, or saw no value in it. But for him, the force, justification and the utilitarian value of dogma must rest on the persuasiveness of its interpretation, as a practical guide to action, grounded on logic and reason in the Socratic tradition, not on its infallibility. He believed, in this respect, that scholarship must necessarily be open-ended, for, in his view, this would always be the way to its development and accretion.
Gabriel Olusanya, therefore, believed that the intellectual clerisy and any other clerisy for that matter, must not abuse their vantage position of authority and privilege to impose orthodoxy or to harass or victimize those who hold dissenting opinions, or who offer interpretations or findings that seemed to be uncommon, 'out of the way,' or idiosyncratic to the clerisy. His approach to history was, therefore, that context was important; that historical generalizations had their inherent limitations; and that in studying society, the historian must take into account "background" economic, political and sociological factors, "specificities" defined and imposed by culture and ethical values, without violating the canonical rules of scholarship. Gabriel Olusanya condemned, from this perspective, the culture of philistinism and silence that had, in recent years, eroded freedom in the country and especially academic freedom within the country's university system, replacing independent thinking with the sycophantic adoration and unconscionable adulation of public authorities, who were abusing their fiduciary positions with impunity.
This perspective on history led Gabriel Olusanya to gravitate towards the social sciences and to embrace the unity, symbiosis of the humanities, law and social sciences in the service of Africa's democracy and development. In this respect, although he agreed with Professor Claude Ake that, "…history is the future of the social sciences," he added that the social sciences are also the future of history. He shared the view ascribed by Claude Ake not only to Oakeshott that, "…history does not merely deal with the past…We know the past only in so far as we dissociate it from its pastness, assimilate it to the present and make it a part of a present reality…the past varies with the present, rests upon the present, is the present," but also to Croce that, "all history is contemporary history.""
This approach to History was clear in Gabriel Olusanya's authoritative articles, in the highly regarded Journal of Modern African Studies [JMAS], on neglected aspects of Nigerian nationalism: "The Zikist Movement: A Study of Political Radicalism, 1946-1950" [JMAS, Vol. 4, No. 3, 1966], and "The Role of Ex-Servicemen in Nigerian Politics, 1946-1950," [JMAS, Vol.VI,(2), 1968]. It also informed his magisterial, The Second World War and Politics in Nigeria, 1939-1953; The Evolution of the Nigerian Civil Service, 1861-1960: The Problems of Nigerianization; The West African Students' Union and the Politics of Decolonization, 1952-1958; and "Political Awakening in the North: A Re-Interpretation," and his biographical studies of a number of Nigerian nationalists.
Gabriel Olusanya was a quintessential public intellectual, who brought his remarkable intellect and the force of his scholarship with missionary zeal to bear on his disquisitions on public affairs and public policy, focusing, in the last three decades of his life, with gusto and unfailing assiduity, on the political and socioeconomic environment of scholarship in the country. He anchored his public intellectual role on the belief that the study of history in post-independent Africa should move beyond the rehabilitation of African History, as a respectable field of study in its own right, in debunking the thesis of Eurocentric scholars, such as the late Regius Professor of History at the University of Oxford, Professor Hugh Trevor-Roper, that the History of Africa is the History of Europeans in Africa.
Gabriel Olusanya believed that African historians should begin to cast critical searchlight on the need for another type of decolonization in postcolonial Africa, notably the challenge of relevance posed by the complex nature of the crisis of democracy and development in Africa, and the "fundamental contradictions" it spawned with grave implications for scholarship and the broader intertwined question of accountability, citizenship and political centralization, on the continent.
The apparent failure of the discipline of History in Nigeria to offer such a searchlight, to offer to the country the mirror of what it should be but is not, led Gabriel Olusanya to gravitate towards radical but progressive African intellectuals in the social sciences, who were not only offering critiques of the descent into authoritarian rule in Africa but also analyzing the fragility of Africa's political economies arising from the structural inequities of the world system from multidisciplinary perspectives.
In doing this and seeking a foothold in other disciplines than History, Gabriel Olusanya embraced both a narrow and a broader view of intellectual responsibility. Regarding the narrow view, Gabriel Olusanya was unrelenting in criticizing our public authorities within and outside the university system for creating conditions that were inimical to academic freedom and to the unfettered pursuit of the intellectual vocation and scholarship in the country. He attributed this both to the commoditization of the intellectual vocation and the massification of university education in the country, both of which contributed largely to the betrayal of the intellectual vocation by undermining and subverting it. On the broader view, which sees intellectual responsibility as "essentially identical with political involvement, with coming out of 'laboratories and libraries…," Gabriel Olusanya used the opportunities offered by public lectures, such as his 1995 Obafemi Awolowo Foundation Lecture, We Build in Vain, and his Memoirs of a Disillusioned Patriot, to inveigh against the politics of immorality, which had deepened anti-democratic tendencies and trends in the country, producing and consolidating a kleptocratic plutocracy.
The significance of Gabriel Olusanya's public intellectual role was two-fold. First, he was a fearless public intellectual, who studiously distanced himself from our political class, all of whom, regardless of party affiliations, he found culpable accomplices in the rapacious rape of the country. Secondly, rather than build a culture of personality and hero-worship around himself, he sought and encouraged collective forums to articulate contrary, essentially anti-mainstream and anti-establishment views on democracy and development through professional associations, such as the African Association of Political Science, which he served as Vice President (Anglophone Africa). and where he worked as a foot soldier for democracy and development alongside Claude Ake (Nigeria), Okwudiba Nnoli (Nigeria), Dani Nabudere (Uganda), Ginyera Pinycwa (Uganda), Helmi Sharawy (Egypt), Eglal Rafaat (Egypt), Abdoulayi Bathily (Senegal), Emmanuel Hansen (Ghana), Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja (Zaire/Democratic Republic of the Congo), Ibbo Mandaza (Zimbabwe), Peter Ayang' Nyong'o (Kenya), Peter Agbor-Tabi (Cameroon), and Rwekaza Mukandala (Tanzania). It was in this context that, serving as a role model, benefactor, and mentor, the Great Leader, he nurtured, encouraged and immersed himself in networks of younger African social scientists for reproducing progressive scholars and as platforms for articulating and disseminating alternative views of democracy and development in Africa to Eurocentric ones.
The tribute to Gabriel Olakunle Olusanya must be that he was a committed and fearless public intellectual and a versatile scholar, who spoke the truth to power. He had a social conscience founded on Christian love and a humanistic ethics. He built bridges that endure still, straddling disciplinary boundaries and generations of scholars. He cared and worked for Nigeria tirelessly, as a patriot, and for Africa, as a Pan-Africanist.
The following epigram from Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks, which he embraced fully, might as well be Professor Gabriel Olakunle Olusanya's epitaph:
"I cannot dissociate myself from the future that is proposed for my brother. Every one of my acts commits me as a man. Every one of my silences, every one of my cowardices reveals me as a man… The passivity that is to be seen in troubled periods of history is to be regarded as a default on that obligation."
May 5, 2012
Department of History
The University of Texas at Austin
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