IKÚ and Ademola Babalola: The Retirement from the University of Life
Toyin Falola
Jacob and Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities
and
University Distinguished Teaching Professor
The University of Texas at Austin
Pandemonium has crept into the city;
There is no elder again to put things right
The homestead has become empty;
The head has met its the untimely end
The cold hand of Death left me embittered
Breaking forcefully into our circle
Thwarting the puerile ignorance of twenty kids
And severing the bond of thirty elders
Death has taken away Ademola Babalola
It has broken a priceless cord
Leaving in place sores, aches and pains
What could ever fill this hiatus
Ademola is gone; my tongue turns sour
And my fears become open, unkempt wounds
For life has brutishly proved its brevity
Making funeral the end result of christening
The news of his death hit me hard, as if an invisible stone had been thrown at me by a malevolent spirit. Long after I received the message, I still remained in the same spot wondering if I had heard right and if someone was not trying to test my faith with a prank. They had told me that my longtime friend and confidant, whom everyone knew as Bablo, but whose real name is Ademola Babalola of the Sociology Department of the Obafemi Awolowo University, was no more and the world stood still. How could he die? How did he die? When did he die? Was he ----? In times like this, the mind grapples with the morbid message and processes it with equal and varying doses of shock, disbelief, denial, and eventually, sadness.
Bablo freely accepted ikú (death) as his new companion, voluntarily retiring from the University of Life, an end to work and troubles, a period to conclude a long sentence on the merits of labor, boldly dissolving time and space. I had wrongly assumed that the exit from life was arranged in alphabetical order, to first eliminating all those whose last names begin with A, before reaching B, so that after all the As are dead, Babalola could change his name to Atunbi or Atunda. No: Ikú's commas and periods tend to lead to the same inevitable faulty construction.
Death, but what have you done?!
For those of us whose livelihood is virtually a matter of producing words for the public, it is almost inconceivable to think that a day will come that one will not find the right words to express a deeply visceral experience of pain and loss such as this one. To say words fail me will be incorrect; instead I failed words because I struggle to string together enough evocative sentences to describe the acuteness of the pain of losing a friend like Babalola. His death touches me deeply and now all I do is to muddle through my thoughts on the incomprehensibility and the utter meaninglessness of life, and how it all ends without a fair warning. One day we are full of such life and such energy that it seems we will blossom perennially like plants at the riverside. Then Death comes like a fierce desert wind and we are no more.
How could he die?
Babalola was my friend, as close to me as the ribs in my skeleton. I have known him for more than 30 years and in various capacities. I was his unofficial supervisor during his PhD years in the 1980s, and after his doctorate was done, we became colleagues. We developed a friendship and bonded over the years so much that we were always together anytime I was in Nigeria. He described me as his mentor to everyone although I viewed our relationship more as a companionship of like-minded fellows. We shared the same room as we traversed academic conferences, social functions, public lectures, and other similar circuits together. In all our years as friends and companions, we have argued over history, sociology, theories, philosophy, African developmental agendas, and virtually every conceivable academic debate. We disagreed and agreed, it was all part of the joys of friendship. Over time, we have learned from each other's point of view, and we have been jointly cynical. As colleagues, we had happy times. Even the times that were joyless, we confronted together with both bacchanal fortitude and philosophical resignation.
We were friends
According to the Yoruba people, when death strikes one's colleague, it reminds one of one's mortality. That is the moment we are forcefully reminded that death is the looming fate that we were all cursed with when we were brought into this world without our permission. We cannot escape Death. Death will get us. Death is meant to get us. They say when Death got to the great Babalawo diviner, it left everyone wondering if maybe he did not understand his Ifa enough. When death got to the powerful herbalist, we asked why he did not concoct enough herbs to ward it off. No propitiation or human resolve can withstand the force of Death's will. Death has got to my friend, Babalola. It left me wordless. Death has not only reminded me of my own mortality, it has sent me clutching at every memory with him, so I can preserve them in my mind forever. I want to remember all the times we spent together: the loaded exchanges of glances, the pregnant smiles, the mirthful times we broke out with rambunctious laughter, the sober moods when silences were as meaningful as words. Now, grappling with the reality that I will never see him again, I want to cryogenically preserve every moment so he can live forever in my mind.
In April this year, I was at Pretoria when Babalola sent me a working draft of his mini autobiography. The working title is, Where There Is the Will There Would Be a Way to Success. An Ethno-Biography of The Academic Growth and Development of Professor Solomon Ademola Babalola. I promptly killed the mission behind it, creating a miscarriage to a developing thought process.
The document is still at its early stages and now, still struck by the shock of the news of his death, I reach for the document and spread it out on my computer. In the wake of his death, the material is imbued with a vastly different meaning for me that when he first sent it. I pore over every word, searching for context clues that may suggest to me that he had a premonition of his death and that he left a message for us.
Listen to his self-presentation in the draft:
I wish to present to you who I am, my fortuitous and tortuous progression in academics ….my engaging life experience is worth recounting to be studied and understood. This is to enrich other people's understanding of life generally and let them know what it takes to engage the nasty, brutish and short life the world can be.
After dedicating years of his life to a career that studies the societies and how humans interact within them, Babalola, in his autobiography, declared his own life too was worth studying and be understood as an academic subject. Like a photographer who has spent a whole life capturing people through his lens, he finally turns the camera on himself and takes a selfie. Babalola's selfie is his unfinished ethno-biographical account that recounts the many challenges he faced in the world of academia and its brutal politics.
I deserved to be studied and understood… I deserve to be listed on the Guinness book of records. I am indeed a phenomenon to be studied and understood. The contradiction in my personality and how I resolve them has to be unraveled…
Those were Babalola's words and in my mind's eye, I see him beating his chest as he made the assertion that the life he has lived so far was worthy of academic exertions. In the draft material, Babalola took the pains to document his life—his birth and early years in Ghana, and later Nigeria where he would grow up in both northern and southern Nigeria. His autobiography took me through his painstaking efforts to better himself through education and the circuitous routes he followed through life to better the lowliness of his background. He bravely talked about his battles with health issues, and how, through the dark and challenging times that hit Nigerian universities, he literally used his hands to steady the ark. He definitely worked hard although he did not always receive the rewards he deserved.
Now, reading his autobiography posthumously, I wonder how to properly engage the sum of his life experiences so I honor the story he told. What are the things he left unsaid in his draft account? Did Babalola know he was going to die? What if he knew death was close by and this autobiography was an attempt to give some flesh to his CV he knew we would read when he was gone? What if he had a premonition of his death and his words were a frantic desperation to speak his truth so that even in death he could reach out to his audience like the blood of Abel crying out to God from beneath the earth? Can we ever do justice to his memory?
How does one say goodbye to a friend who has been a part of you?
Growing up in Ibadan, funerals were a pretty staple event and I watched many rituals of final departure. They almost all invariably end with the same words: O di igbere, o digbose! We waved goodbye to the dead but we did not consider death to be an event that ends everything. For the Yoruba people, death is in fact, a climax signaling the attainment of an elder status. A child that dies before an old person is thus considered older in that sense. Death might end a phase, but for Africans, it begins another one in the transcendental realm when one has joined one's ancestors. The space between birth and death, life, is a vast arena we are all offered a chance to infuse with a meaning. When we are done with our role, we quit this world and resume elsewhere. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once said, "Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present. Our life has no end in the way in which our visual field has no limits".
For Babalola, it's not a goodbye but a well done!
In the past few days since he died, I have thought it over: Babalola is not dead. Or, death does not end his life. Having lived his life on this plane of existence, this moving walkway called life is taking him to another destination, a transcendent one where he has earned his spot with those who have gone before him. His death is unbearably painful but we will take solace in the fact that he lived. To live is not merely to watch one's biological clock tick but to fill the unforgiving hours with their full worth of a long-distance run. While Babalola was alive, he had his fair share of challenges and struggles but he did not forget to live too. In his draft autobiography, he talked about how he reconciled life's vicissitudes with a stubbornness that must have confounded Life itself. He fought bravely and even if he did not always prevail, he was no weakling. He was right that his life deserved to be studied, because he was that much of an enigma. If it were possible to reach back to this world from the other side, I hope he hears me saying to him, for a brave and honorable journey, dear friend, well done! Sleep well.
Stop the clock. My faith in tomorrow is gone.
The University of Texas at Austin
http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
