Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: Osofisan: BJ at 71

Nice overview. But I don’t see cinema listed, and perhaps poetry too? Anyway, cinema is in the ascendant as a tremendously successful arena for Nigerian creators, as had theatre been in the past.

ken

 

Kenneth Harrow

Dept of English and Film Studies

Michigan State University

619 Red Cedar Rd

East Lansing, MI 48824

517-803-8839

harrow@msu.edu

http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/

 

From: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju <toyin.adepoju@gmail.com>
Reply-To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Date: Wednesday 4 January 2017 at 13:19
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Cc: Yoruba Affairs <yorubaaffairs@googlegroups.com>, <okinbalaunko@yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: Osofisan: BJ at 71

 

I started following Biodun Jeyifo's career from his days writing for the Guardian, Nigeria, as one of the scholars contributing to the paper's literary series, from there to the news article 'Jeyifo's Nunc Dimmitis at Ile Ife', to his 'One Year in the First Instance' the last two articles being about his leaving then University of Ife for the West and the second being his summation on the exodus of African academics to the West, and from there to his publication career at Cornell, where he went to from Ife, regularly bringing out edited books on Soyinka, possibly  representing his research in preparation for his magnum opus, his book on Soyinka written solely by himself, after publication of which he was appointed professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard.

The works of his I have read most attentively are the Guardian essays, and the two most memorable ideas for me in those essays are his summation on rupture in the development of civilization as capable of enabling a higher stage of development, an idea developed by Louis Althusser, perhaps interpreting Marx, the latter himself adapting Hegel on dialectical development in history, if I am getting the terms right, an interpretation Jeyifo presented in response to Abiola Irele's "In Praise of Alienation", an essay systematizing an approach to the disruption enabled to their colonies  by Western colonialism.

Another idea of  his particularly memorable for me is his commentary on Soyinka's Madmen and Specialists, if I recall correctly the specific play, Jeyifo comparing the power of that play with Immanuel Kant's exposition in Critique of Judgement of creative activity fashioned by the human mind but which cannot be fully grasped by the mind. Soyinka's plays can truly demonstrate something strange, a form of ritual catharsis from reading Death and the Kings Horseman and a sense of participating in something partly inexplicable on reading Madmen and Specialists, at least that being my experience in reading those plays. Central to the relationship between human beings and art is the intimate character of the experience, re-configuring one's inner world.

I also enjoy Jeyifo's writing style, muscularly learned, bristling with multi-disciplinary references, the diction clearly that of a person high on the intoxication of knowledge and its verbal vehicles but flying in full control of the armory he marshals in the cognitive theatre, rolling on the page with the potency of a  tank at full speed.

Jeyifo represents the firmament of academic stars that defined the then University of Ife and Ibadan in their heyday as centres of African humanities scholarship, the generation after the Ulli Beier, Soyinka, Irele, Achebe and Okigbo generations in literature and cultural studies, , perhaps also co-terminus with the Tamuno, Kenneth Dike generation in history in the famous Ibadan school of history, the rise of the Bruce Onabrakpeya, Uche Okeke, Ssusanne Wenger generation in the fine arts, starting from the famous Zaria Rebels who laid the foundations for modern Nigerian art, all these being figures who were able to generate a relatively pan-African and global impact from working largely within Nigeria.

What is the situation today? What is the global impact and visibility on the world stage of scholars and artists working in Nigeria?

The latest achievers known to me operating at that level are represented by the work of Akinsola Akiwowo, whose work on indigenising sociology  while at the then University of Ife is referenced from Asia to the US and is a sine qua non in discussions on that subject, from what I have seen so far through Google. The others are represented by Nigerian visual artists, the most globally visible of whom is El Anatsui, the Ghanaian-Nigerian artist at University of Nsukka . I have read about one or two scientists working in Nigeria gaining visibility beyond Nigeria but I dont recall their names. In terms of the galvanization of a group of people, and across generations, in projecting an image of creativity beyond the land where they work, it has always been the arts that have done that for Africa. Science and technology in Africa do not seem to have reached that level yet.

In terms of science, one could include information technology and software development, and in that regard, one would have to factor in organizations like Andela, which, if I recall correctly, trains software engineers to work for international clients, becoming so successful they earned an investors visit from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg last year, an inspiring experience reflected in the visibility of pictures from that landmark experience on the Andela website. To what degree, however, may Nigeria's achievement in the sciences and technology demonstrate developments of new perspectives and approaches to subject, materials and challenges, a reformulative  trajectory readily evident in the country's achievement in the arts and humanities?

A significant number of African artists prominent in the West owe their distinctive aesthetic identity to their African cultural roots, two of these I am particularly interested in being the Nigerian-US  artist Victor Ekpuk who has distilled the Nigerian Cross River  Nsibidi aesthetic of the Ekpe esoteric order in  creating his own visual language and the Ghanaian- German artist Owusu-Ankomah who has taken off from his explorations of synergy between the male form and Ghanaian Adinkra symbolism in developing a unique visual world, projecting a cosmology in which the male form and various symbol universes intersect within a framework resonating with philosophy, spirituality  and science.

Without Ekpe and Nsibidi and his education at the then University of Ife where scholars like Rowland Abiodun and Moyo Okediji emphasized learning from classical African aesthetics, along with his exposure to the art and thought of the Cross River region where he grew up, Victor Ekpuk's achivement as it is currently known is not likely to exist. Something similar goes from Owusu-Ankomah and Adinkra,  a synthesis in which the influence of Italian artist Michelangelo Buonarroti's  idealized male figures, as attested to by Ankomah, is evident , but which is refashioned through the visual template and conceptual vision enabled by Adinkra.

To what degree are such Diaspora figures to be described as Nigerian, Ghanaian, US or German  artists or as Nigerian-US and Ghanaian-Germann artists? What are the implications of these figures working in the West, and along similar lines, Biodun Jeyifo's moving to Cornell, Irele to Ohio and later to Harvard and Toyin Falola, in history, from Ife to his present place at the University of Texas and of Moyo Okediji to the same University of Texas? Are these simply demonstrations of the migrant impulse that shapes humanity evident since most of us left Africa to form what are now non-African societies that shape the rest of the globe?

Right now, I am writing these reflections in Lagos, Nigeria. I have experienced two  power outages today. The first was in the morning, the second in the  evening. The first time it occurred, it broke my concentration at my work on the computer and I went to sleep in frustration. The second time I put on the generator which I am fortunate to be able to use in these circumstances. What would have been my fate if I did not have the use of a generator? State supplied electricity returned as I write this, reflecting the improvement of the section of Ikeja where I am over that evident in my recent visit to Ondo, in which power comes on for a few hours in the morning and at night. With the cost of buying and fueling generators, how are people coping with productivity seeing as this often involves  electricity for using modern equipment? What is the impact of this energy problem on sustainability and quality of scholarship in places where such resources are weak?

Abiola Irele eventually left Harvard for Kwara State University in Nigeria where he has been central to the founding of the journal the Savannah Review and where a research centre, if I recall correctly, has been founded in his name. Toyin Falola is a regular presence at Nigerian universities, in conferences, speeches and book donations.

My thought process were disturbed  by having to leave my writing to switch the power supply back to the national grid. So, I can't crest along with the flow of ideas without having to stop to think what I intend to write since the ideas often formulate  themselves almost automatically as I write. So, how do I conclude this?

thanks

toyin

 

 

On 4 January 2017 at 00:23, Cornelius Hamelberg <corneliushamelberg@gmail.com> wrote:

 

Missing from the great man's CV : In the Literary Conversation Series, Conversations with Wole Soyinka which he edited and which also contains an interview which he conducted with Soyinka, entitled “ Realms of Value in Literature Art”

On Wednesday, 4 January 2017 00:25:54 UTC+1, Toyin Falola wrote:

 A WASSAIL FOR THE WAYFARER:  BIODUN JEYIFO AT 71

FEMI OSOFISAN

 

1)

It is already a year ago, incredibly, that artists, writers, journalists, trade unionists and intellectuals gathered first at Ibadan, and then at Ife, to celebrate the 70^th birthday of prof Biodun Jeyifo, the Nigerian scholar at Harvard University, and one of the most profound and humane spirits of our time. In fact, the celebrations have virtually lasted the whole year long, as other friends and admirers from different parts of the world joined in, and the feasting moved from one continent to another. In a few days we will be gathering again, even if not as boisterously, for another anniversary. But, as someone asked me, who really is the man, and why this world-wide attention?

Much of course has been written, and many by eminent voices. He has been copiously serenaded by colleagues and former students. The words of loving and of respect in his honour will make a dignified tome of tributes. Naturally therefore, it has been a mystery to many that, as one of his closest friends, I have so far been noisily silent. It has been hard for me to explain that, for me, when friendship is deep, it is also largely mute. Words fail me when the subject is a cherished companion: they crawl out limp where I aim for the limpid, sloppy where I want them brisk and stimulating. Always, lucidity quavers; the uniqueness of the relationship finds me inarticulate, tongue-tied. So it has been with writing about my best friend. But it is time now to fight off this reticence before the next round of feasting begins…

 

2)

I admit of course that such taciturnity is difficult to understand in our clime. Most friendships here, as one can see, are built on gushing and egregious volubility. Many of our so-called friends seem possessed of egos that can be made secure only through loud and loquacious babbling. They seem convinced that the best way to assert their presence or their power is by filling the air with voracious trifle. They cannot stop talking; almost as if, if they closed their mouth for a second, they would collapse and expire. And therefore, instead of useful conversation or fruitful information, what you encounter repeatedly are monologues of unstoppable, torrential trash. When they claim to be your friend therefore, you must be instantly on the alert, because most of what our people refer to as “friendships” nowadays are little different from variants of mutual parasitism, and love has become something you earn because you advertise.

It is important to say this at the outset, in order to properly fix the context of my friendship with BJ. For unusually, in this noisy market of endless fustian, the strongest reason why our friendship has endured is this, that—I am looking for a way to best express it—it is built not essentially on what is spoken, but rather, on silence, on nuggets of unvoiced, introspective exchange.

BJ, many may not know, is essentially a loner, and loves to escape deeply into himself. To plumb such a personality therefore requires a kindred spirit since, as Awo once reminded us, “only the deep can call to the deep”. But if the solitary, as we know, are perpetually in danger of social estrangement, BJ, happily, is not. What rescues him from the eremite’s cloister is his passionate humaneness and reflex compassion. Let’s look at this a little more closely.

 

3)

First, who is he? Everybody, at his insistence, calls him BJ. Including total strangers and even youngsters not half the age of his last son. They all call him, simply, ‘BJ’, with the familiarity of siblings or of friends he’s known for years.  

All perfectly logical, you would say, for one who proudly defines himself as a Marxist-socialist. The simple cognomen attests to a voluntary rejection of the false hierarchies and hypocritical manners of both the traditional and bourgeois societies. It suggests the promise of easy accessibility to the bearer, of unhindered and spontaneous access (and therefore, gives the pride and pleasure of a surrogate kinship).

But does BJ have a phone then, to ease this promised access? If he does, what is the number? If you ring it, does he answer? And what’s his address on Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, etc., these new highways of rapid communication in the modern world?

Very few among these teeming admirers, I am sure, can answer these questions. They must be a scant number indeed that have ever seen BJ carrying, like all of us, this gadget we call a handset or mobile phone and which is universally considered nowadays to be almost as indispensable as the air we breathe.

But actually he does have one, I can say with authority. A crude and antiquated minuscule affair that was manufactured probably at the dawn of civilization, and which no self-respecting waste scavenger or even the lowest-paid cleaner would be caught with alive. (Well, let’s not exaggerate—maybe not the dawn of civilization, since mobile phones are a more recent affair; perhaps, more accurately, the dawn of the IT revolution, or somewhere pretty close to it, if you get what I mean.) BJ has a phone, but hardly uses it. And if it rings—as it does when it wants to give everybody a bad jolt—you will have to fish among assorted bric-à-brac to find it.

It is tempting to infer that BJ’s attitude to these modern inventions is that of absolute mistrust, if not pristine hostility, as I used to think. For instance, I can reveal it now to the public, without betraying a friendship, that it took me years to persuade BJ to start using a computer. As a professor at the famous Cornell university where he used to teach before being snatched by Harvard, BJ was duly allotted a desktop with all the necessary accessories by the authorities, as of right. But what was my pain on several occasions, when I passed by his home in those days of my somewhat frequent visits to the USA, to watch this computer sitting there on his table, completely idle, and staring at us with arrogant disdain. You can imagine my anguish—me, coming from a country where such items were at the time still a luxury, and where NEPA took the final decisions anyway whether you could use them or not—you can imagine my torment when I tried to get my brother to start using his computer to ease his work—and all in vain! Yet he would spend tens of dollars hiring some lucky woman to type his manuscripts! I would switch on the thing, slot in a disk, print out a sample, all to demonstrate to him how easy it all was—but my brother would not budge. And all I could do, to avenge myself, was seize a bottle from his fridge to wash down my frustration.

Then one day, to my astonishment, I arrived at Ithaca, only to see the man clicking away at the computer as if it had been manufactured in his bedroom, and he had been using it all his life! More amazing still, BJ’s competence on the computer nowadays has risen so high that he works completely and directly on the machine without even having to write his thoughts down first on paper. Now, that’s a skill that I still have not managed to acquire!  I have to work first in long-hand, write everything down, before I proceed to type it out. Then, to make corrections, I start on the same process again, scribbling laboriously with pen or pencil, before I move back to the computer again for the final copy. Needless to say, while I am still trudging this way along the old path, BJ has long completed work on his laptop, and moved off to other things! So the joke is now on me—the former dinosaur is the one now digging at me to get to grips with modernity!

 

4)

But his stupendous reversal, let me hasten to say, has nothing to do with any Pauline miracle, to disappoint the zealots. BJ did not undergo any sudden, spectacular transformation or conversion of faith. I was the one who had read him wrong. His initial aversion to these gadgets, far from being the outcome of some innate incapacity or an intrinsic dislike of modernity was, really, just an act of resistance to their universal and ubiquitous intrusiveness. It is an aversion shared by many of the older generation.

We complain, to the mockery of our children, that anywhere you go nowadays you will see everybody clutching one handset or another, or tapping away on it with serious concentration, unaware of or indifferent to the presence of others around. Or perhaps clutching the instrument to the ear and talking volubly to invisible interlocutors, like persons possessed by demons or in the final throes of derangement.

The mobile phone, in one word, has virtually turned all of us into lunatics. Laughing or quarrelling with people who are not there; communing with ghosts we do not see; feeding ourselves with a stream of assorted information without discrimination, and so on! Obviously this cannot be interpreted as freedom, as some “experts” erroneously insist, but a new kind of enslavement, a hypnotic spell in which all our hitherto cherished values are being systematically dismantled or made tragically contingent.

Still, the question of morality apart, the main problem with these new media and the instruments created to carry them, is their overweening nuisance value. Especially for people who are naturally introspective, and who cherish silence and solitude deeply, it is probably impossible to conceive of a greater adversary. That is where we come back to BJ. He keeps these modern gadgets at a distance because he is a man who guards his privacy jealously, with an almost fanatical zest.

 

5)

That statement will, I suspect, surprise not a few of his admirers. How, they will wonder, can a man who has been a ‘pyrate’, that is, a member of the reputedly libertine campus group, also be ‘private’?  Certainly the two homonyms are not synonymous. Or can someone be simultaneously open and closed? Vivacious at social parties, full of yarn and banter when he is in the spirit, not averse to the usual lark of belting out one mischievous song or another at naughty moments, BJ can come to seem like every other Nigerian socialite you know.

But that assessment would be terribly wrong. Just like it would be for most of the ‘pyrates’ in fact, who may be rascally on the outside but are governed, in their conduct, by a code of the strictest nobility.

It happens to be the case that, despite all this occasional conviviality, BJ is perhaps the most reclusive of all the people I know. He is the one most prone to brooding, to lapsing suddenly and without warning into a bout of prolonged and baffling silence. Worsened now by growing age, and by a long and slow convalescence, BJ’s mood can swing abruptly from the welcoming guffaw and warm embrace to frigid indifference, from effusive and affectionate cordiality to surly churlishness. After an hour of affable socializing., he can plunge into a week-long mood of perplexing incommunicability.

Such is my friend. On such occasions, when he turns incommunicado, the secret in fact is not to seek to pester him for explanations but simply to follow suit and clamp up yourself and share the silence. And, speaking for myself, how one then discovers the infinite self-fulfilment that these moments of inward retreat can bring!

BJ has spoken at some length before now of some of the common episodes in our lives, some of them hilarious, and some painful. What he has not mentioned however is the fact that both of us can be together for hours sometimes, without either of us uttering a single word. We can drive, as we often do especially when abroad, through miles and miles of forest or farmland, or take a walk along a lake or seashore, watching an afternoon mellow into gilded sunset, each of us silent by his solitary self, feeding on the alchemy of Nature’s regenerative rituals. But it is during those silences that we come to our closest bonding.

 

6)

BJ is an intensely, and you may even say, at times insufferably, private person.  But to understand that is to also understand why he seems to be affected by an incurable wanderlust.

To the lonely, travel is opium and introspection is their fuel. Those who are introspective always seem to need the expanded space of roads and seas and the open skies to make their turbulent imaginations soar to their fullest flight. The shy and the private must continually flee the homestead for the unfamiliarity of other places, in search of ‘friendship’ from the foreign and the exotic; for them, the daily domestic palls unbearably. But—and this is the problem they can never resolve—no sooner are they arrived somewhere than they must leave again. Fulfilment for them is relentlessly fragile, ever ephemeral.

So it is with my friend BJ. Ever restive, perennially on the move, he is one of those whose bottoms, as the Yoruba like to put it, have missed the bite of the family bedbug. Indeed, if he was to be given another cognomen today, the choice would fall on ‘Mr Restless’ with a capital ‘R’, or just simply ‘Àjàlá’, that notoriously incorrigible nomad of our recent history.

It is no wonder then that BJ is easily one of the most travelled of our generation, constantly jetting across borders and frontiers and never seeming to tire. Like some modern day Aladdin on a magic carpet. There is no continent now that he has not visited; and the list of countries that have hosted him is impressively long. The startling thing for me in all this is that, in the past decade at least, wherever or whenever his plane has landed, I have usually been there at the airport, among the welcoming team. Or vice versa.

Times without number in recent times we have found ourselves in the course of the same year living together in Beijing, where we teach a course on African literature that we initiated at the Peking university; then moving on to Berlin, where we have both been Visiting Fellows at the International Research Institute of the Freie University; then moving back to Nigeria before starting off again. In between these sojourns would be shorter journeys to the US or the UK, or Ghana, or India, or some other place, for conferences or lectures or leisure—the most memorable recently being the visit to Belgrade for my conferment with this year’s Thalia Prize. Not surprisingly therefore, because we often share the same office and the same apartment in these foreign places, our favourite argument is on who is the better cook. (I am, of course). That is why my name recurs so frequently in his writings, and why some call us siblings.

We talk like others do about politics, the state of the world and of our country; of mutual friends and our families; of treasured moments retrieved from the past and others we regret; of ongoing projects and future plans; and so on. We listen to music, visit the shops (when necessary, for BJ detests shopping), share ideas and laughter. Mostly however, what we share is silence.  Golden moments when only the occasional birdsong outside the window, or the rustle of leaves, brushes the air, and each of us is shut up within himself (I in the company of a Mozart or Beethoven or Tchaikovsky).…

 

7)

From his own account, his lust for travelling showed quite early in his life. In one of the weekly columns that he writes for The Nation newspaper, [ which is now included in the massive compilation of all his articles written between 2007 and 2013, and collectively published this year in the US under the title, Against the Predator’s Republic (APR)], BJ describes how, as a young teenage boy, he used to watch one of his peers disappear regularly from home without warning to anybody.  Without any particular destination, without a kobo in his pocket, the boy would just jump on board a train and go off, until he was discovered by some responsible adult or official, and escorted back home. Only to start off again after some indefinite interval, and despite the profuse sacrifices and ritual supplications by his distraught parents and relations. For BJ, however, the boy was a hero, and he was secretly fascinated by his escapades. But of course, he dared not even consider following the boy’s example, and any fancy he entertained in that direction had to be swiftly aborted. His father’s stern discipline ensured that he stayed home to finish his education.

Now that he can travel as he wants, it is as if he is trying to make up for lost time. A virtual globe-trotter, BJ will easily win the contest as an officer of the international jet-set (without, however, the famed business card or shopping bag). But you have to be really close to him to fathom that this compulsive peripatetic drive comes from an innate disposition to hoard his private self. It is what has spun his life into a dense web of itineraries, and a tapestry of textured introspection, meditation, and of course, erudition.

 

8)

It would seem anomalous then, at first sight, that, with all this penchant for solitude and meditation, BJ has not ended up a narcissist or secluded hermit. But the reason is simply that his heart is too large for that. His primary strength (or, weakness, depending on how you view it) is his capacious humaneness, a heart of gold so tender that it is almost a weakness. We his friends have finally concluded now, after years of intimate observation, that he is one of those gifted with inexhaustible compassion, a personal store of generosity so abundant that he must compulsively seek out, and respond to, anyone in need of help. BJ is one of the kind that cannot encounter misery and turn their back; or witness injustice and remain silent, feigning to be blind. The orphan, the widow, the jobless and the wounded—whoever turns up with tears and a begging bowl—is an immediate beneficiary, including the smart charlatan in camouflage.

Unfortunately however, on our continent, such persons who are so acutely sensitive to the suffering of others are doomed to have a busy wailing time. Because the authors of our people’s misery are powerful, and in positions of power, these caring philanthropists will sooner or later find themselves condemned to a career of conflict and unending agitation. If they are stubborn and not easily daunted, these self-elected saviours of the legion of the poor will become vulnerable targets before our vicious leaders and their armed, conniving agents.

It will be tedious to begin to catalogue again here all the tragedies that the bulk of our people experience daily, since they have been abundantly written about. We can just summarize the story by saying that, ever since the birth of our country in the early 20^th century under British colonialism, and especially even more severely since our gaining political independence in 1960, our people have not experienced any prolonged period of bliss. Every year, whether under military or civilian rulers, the few rich have continued to get richer, through brazen stealing and expropriation, while the poor grow ever more wretched.  

BJ was one of those who realized early in his career that if this exploitation of our people by their own leaders is to stop, then the people must be mobilized. Boldly he accepted to play an active role in this needed work of mobilization. And the first step naturally was to reconcile his own inner differences.

 

9)

The truth is that a potentially shattering antinomy lies between, on the one hand, a volition to escape into the shelter of open spaces— into the anonymity of road and sea and skies—culling from them an inebriating treasury of self-replenishing energies; and, on the other, a no less compulsive empathy for the plight of the downtrodden, plus the courage to take corrective action to mend it.

To resolve the contradiction, BJ took a cue from the fabled visionaries of myth and history—the long line of heroes that stretch from Ogun and Orunmila to Awo and Zik, Nkrumah and Cabral, Lenin and Mao and Castro, and others of their ilk, etc. He decided to align his wanderlust with political activism, linking his traveling bug with, as he himself puts it, “the great tasks of building a humane, just and egalitarian community in our country and our world” [APR: 546].

It was towards the actualization of this vision that BJ became a trade unionist. And in a sense, it was a measure of the success of this altruistic mission that his last birthday was not only an intriguing gathering of dreamers and activists, (plus even the random anarchist), but also that the celebration turned to be a festive masque between the living and the dead, between ghosts with dirges on their tongues, and others with resurgent anthems.

BJ’s most glorious moment, it is safe to conclude, must therefore be traced back to those days in the early 1980s when he headed the Academic Staff Union of the Universities (ASUU), the now famous (or notorious?) union of teachers in the tertiary institutions.

As the pioneer president, you can imagine that BJ had a tremendous challenge before him to mobilize his colleagues dispersed all over the vast nation in various towns. This was at a period too when the digital telephony was at its infancy, and the cell phone, being only recently invented, was unknown yet in the country.

The only option available to the fledgling Union then was to acquire a vehicle and send its officers by road to these various institutions. These agents would have to be dispatched from its secretariat at Ibadan to destinations as far away and scattered as Sokoto, Zaira and Maiduguri in the north, and Nsukka, Calabar and Port Harcourt in the south. It was therefore, as you can well imagine, a most ambitious and hazardous undertaking, given the vast distances that had to be covered, and the fact that our roads, as attested to by innumerable fatal accidents, were virtual death traps.

For BJ, the challenge was not even as straightforward however. In retrospect, I think the way it worked out in his mind was that it was more akin to the situation of our traditional societies in the distant past, when the people faced a dire crisis, and were rescued from desperation only through the intervention of a ritual scapegoat. 

To everyone’s surprise, therefore, BJ announced, like the sacred carrier of old, that he would be the Union’s lone emissary. Furthermore, he would drive himself on these journeys, and not take along the official driver that the Union had hired for the purpose. And finally, he would not allow the Union to purchase any other car to take him on the mission than a Volkswagen Beetle! A death wish, or an act of chivalrous grandeur?

Against all opposition, BJ stood his ground, thus reviving for us the ancient code of leadership as a pledge of honour, valour and self-sacrifice, the morality code that our societies have sadly long jettisoned. BJ not only survived, but succeeded too in welding the teachers into a formidable army against the rampaging soldiers that had taken power over the country. ASUU became more or less like a Party of Opposition, the only contrary voice that the military, despite its brutal and awesome powers, found it hard to completely suppress.

 

10)

BJ survived, but it was also on those perilous roads that he found contentment. For the first time, he could marry his lust for travel with his inclination for political engagement, on a mission that was dangerous all right, but which put his capacity for stealth and cunning, as well as his organizational skill, to the maximum test.

Many years afterwards, as he recaptures the experience, one can still catch the thrill of the adventure in his voice: “I drove myself everywhere in the country without the driver by my side… I went on short and very long trips endlessly, week after week, month after month. The call of the road, which is elemental, and seems like a force of nature, fused with the great tasks of political and ideological mobilization, themselves often volcanic and transcendental in their impulses and energies….” (APR: 544)

And he continues, instructively: “My love of travelling, my deep, subliminal response to the call of the road was thoroughly mediated by accountability to communities and interests much bigger than myself.” (APR: 546).

This is BJ for you. He plunged with all his soul into this struggle to free and feed the masses, and to reverse their long history of exploitation. It is a pity that thus far, for obvious reasons, the full story of that struggle has not been written, nor of BJ’s involvement with other radical groups. One day, hopefully, all will be revealed, and due homage paid. For as he repeatedly asserts in his Talakawa Liberation Couriers, “The traveller, if he or she is lucky, always returns home.”  

BJ’s most astute move, in my opinion, was to have led ASUU into a strategic alliance with the national labour movement, the NLC. He had read the situation correctly and seen that, without such affiliation a partisan organization like ASUU stood little chance against the formidable arsenal of the military establishment. Similarly, the labour organization too would continue to be frail and vulnerable unless it strengthened its intellectual capability in an alliance with the academic union.

As we all proudly recollect, this alliance did come about under BJ’s leadership, though, regrettably, it did not last long after him. But it is on the nation’s record that he is thus far the only ASUU official who has sat as a full member on the NLC’s Central Working Committee.

 

11)

Sadly, ASUU’s triumphant days ended rather quickly. They could not have lasted anyway. Inevitably the military had its way in the end, and conquered the universities, effectively deploying the twin weapons of pauperization and humiliation. The vocal intellectuals among us who opposed them and would not be silent, as well as the vulnerable ones, were forced into exile to save their lives; BJ among them.

Away from the homeland, not surprisingly, the contradictions which have dogged our steps all along escalated. My friend, being among the best in his calling, rose to the pinnacle of the profession, and became a professor at the prestigious Harvard university, an appointment that is the envy of scholars all over the world. But what an irony for a self-proclaimed Marxist! Can he be comfortable there, in Cambridge, faced every minute with the danger of being co-opted and compromised? Again, with Harvard famously known as one of the redoubtable bastions of white culture, and of capitalist triumphalism in the age of globalization, how will a stalwart, renowned Africanist fit in with other Faculty, except by sitting on one buttock? BJ conspicuously rejects the customary cultural choices of his peers—that is, the westernized elite—in his manner of dressing, and opts instead, in place of expensive suits and agbadas and galabiyas, for simple shirts and bubas of khaki or adire cloth, often in fact worn and threadbare. But is this just taste, or meekness, or a symbolic preference meant to demonstrate an unwavering identification with the poor and to pledge eternal loyalty to their cause? Or is it a kind of vicarious penance, an outward sign of the guilt BJ seems to carry in his heart for being successful among so many failures, for being fortunate where others have fallen abjectly, in spite of themselves, by the wayside? Sometimes, as I tell him in light rebuke, it is almost as if he is ashamed of his achievements.

 

12)

Among these achievements are the splendid essays he has written about our African authors, especially Chinua Achebe, J.-P. Clark, and Wole Soyinka. His unique insights, his lucidity and command of language (which we refer to laughingly as “igilango geesi”), and his scintillating powers of exegesis, have established BJ as perhaps the most informed and most distinguished figure now among the icons of our literary firmament. And it is why, until he has read a new work of mine and given his pass mark, I am never sure of its merit.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     

But still, in spite of the amazing brilliance of these works that established his reputation, his latest publication, Against the Predator’s Republic, which I have referred to above, may well turn out to be his magnum opus. Assembled from what were originally newspaper columns, and hence targeted at a popular audience, the collected articles are so varied and broad-ranging, so rich in assorted information, so diverse in style and content and commentary, that one cannot take them all in one reading. It is certainly a massive volume, with over 600 pages of close print, and so passionate in its missionary purpose is it that you can dip in at random, and pluck from any page a different treasure of knowledge and delight. Moving from plain prose to poetry, from dream to didactic analysis, from music to meditation to plain ratiocination, the author’s omniscient assurance reminds you of the best of Franz Fanon, in parts, and Walter Benjamin in others. Or of the book that Karl Marx, in collaboration with Jean-Paul Sartre, would have written if they lived together in our time. An encyclopaedia of sorts on the biography of our nation—covering history, sociology, economics, philosophy, and much more—it should be required reading and made a primary test of literacy for every citizen who claims to be educated. But all the same, the irony of all this is that the essays can only be said to be in the interest of the Talakawa, and not for their direct consumption. The register of discourse is patently pitched at a level much above the idiom of pedestrian patois; the rhetoric of a sophistication more lofty than the simple argot of popular conversations.  It is in fact, (perhaps to the author’s own disappointment?), a work of profound intellection, requiring not just sympathy with social causes alone, but also a certain level of consciousness to fully comprehend. The “dear compatriot” that the author continually addresses will unfortunately not be, I am afraid, the common man on the street.

 

13)

And there are still other paradoxes. When you think of BJ and several others like him that were forced into exile, and you take account of the luminous careers that they have forged there outside, you become even more bitter about the wastage of the military years. What kind of profligate country would have been content to lose to others the contributions of people like Abiola Irele, Toyin Falola, Michael Echeruo, Molara Ogundipe, Kole Omotoso, Niyi Osundare, Tanure Ojaide,  Akin Adesokan, Tejumola Olaniyan, Chika Onuigwe, Sefi Atta, Chimamanda Adichie, Teju Cole, and so on, and so on? Did I hear you exclaim? But these are just in the area of Literature alone. Now add the shining stars we hear about in the fields of Medicine, Business, Architecture, Aeronautics, Space Engineering, Computer Science, Information Technology, Fine Arts, etc.—when, in the homeland, and after squandering millions of dollars, we have not been able to develop enough capacity to feed ourselves, or generate electricity, or even fabricate toothpicks! Nor have we, after numerous wars and blood-shedding, been able to produce a political leadership of sufficiently stirring vision to shun venality, mediocrity, and corruption, and launch us forward to greatness.

For these reasons alone, biographies such as BJ’s are of signal import, for they stand as exemplary narratives for all of us, and in particular the young. They demonstrate for us not only how our past was sabotaged, but also, how our future can be salvaged. They show us the way to recuperating our lives from despair, and our children from hopelessness and defeatist nonchalance. It is probably too late now to lure our exiles to return, but we can at least persuade them not to turn their back completely on us. For they can help end this nightmare of history which seems to have condemned us to a fate of continuous anomy. They can join in the challenge of producing a new progressive elite, that will help give birth out of all our contradictions to a new and thriving nation.

 

14)

I salute you, BJ, activist intellectual and insatiable wanderer, on your coming to another milestone. As you so perspicaciously put it yourself, “The conditions on our roads mirror the conditions of the poverty, insecurity and despair that shape the lives of the great majority of our peoples everywhere in the land. For most Nigerians, the journey through our roads and highways is exactly like the journey they are compelled to make through life as they live out their allotted time on this earth...” (APR: 546)

The traveller, you assert, BJ, always returns home. But only if he or she is lucky. You and I, and our close friends, have been among the most fortunate on our journeys on the planet. It is not over yet. But let me re-assure you that, even if the victory has not been won, and may not be in our lifetime, the fight has been well worth it. Just one last word, however, for time is running out fast against us—If you put your mind to it, applying the same zeal with which you follow the tennis tournaments, you might just come to be a better cook after all! My free advice.

 

A happy birthday, my brother, my friend!

FEMI OSOFISAN. Dec 2016.

Toyin Falola

Department of History

The University of Texas at Austin

104 Inner Campus Drive

Austin, TX 78712-0220

USA

512 475 7224

512 475 7222 (fax)

http://sites.utexas.edu/yoruba-studies-review/

http://www.toyinfalola.com 

http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa  

http://groups.google.com/group/yorubaaffairs 

http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue   

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