USA Africa Dialogue Series - Call for Book Manuscript Proposals: Bloomsbury Series on Africa

Dear all,

 

This is to warmly invite proposals for book manuscripts to be published in our Bloomsbury book series on "Africa: Past, Present & Prospects." This series has published many successful books and, while we welcome all proposals that fall within the remit of our series' focus, we are especially keen to facilitate and promote the work of early-career scholars and Africa-based scholars.

 

More information:

The series description is pasted below.

Visit our series website here. 

Feel free to share the attached flyer with your colleagues, doctoral students and professional associates.

 

Contact us with any questions or to discuss potential proposals: 

Series editors: Olajumoke Yacob-Haliso, olaj@brandeis.edu & Toyin Falola, toyinfalola@austin.utexas.edu; 

Bloomsbury editor: Sydney.Williams@bloomsbury.com

 

Thanks,

Ola

 

Olajumoke Yacob-Haliso.

___________________________________________

Africa: Past, Present & Prospects

This series collates and curates studies of Africa in its multivalent local, regional, and global contexts. It aims fundamentally to capture in one series historical, contemporary and multidisciplinary studies which analyze the dynamics of the African predicament from deeply theoretical perspectives while marshalling empirical data to describe, explain, and predict trends in continuities and change in Africa and in African studies. The books published in this series represents the multiplicity of voices, local and global in relation to African futures. It not only represents diversity, but also provides a platform for convergence of outstanding research that will enliven debates about the future of Africa, while also advancing theory and informing policy making. Preference is given to studies that deliberately link the past with the present and advances knowledge about various African nations by extending the range, breadth, depth, types and sources of data and information existing and emerging about these countries. The platform created proceeds from the assumption that there is no singular 'African experience', nor is it possible to, in any way, homogenize the identities, histories, spaces and lives of African people. This series seeks to engage in the broader conversations about African futures in specific ways. It will foreground: how the African past connects with the future; the causes and courses of the current predicament of African underdevelopment and de-development; the connections and disconnections between the experiences of various African countries; bilateral and multilateral relations including sub-regional and regional movements and institutions in which African states play key roles and which determine political and economic outcomes for various other nations; comparative studies which shed light on the extraversion of the continent, as well as issues related to globalization, the African diaspora and the disciplinary and transdisciplinary frames for studying these pan-African elements of African Studies; and multiple frames and methodologies for understanding these issues. We welcome proposals for this series. To discuss potential book proposals, please contact the series editors.

Series Editors: Toyin Falola (The University of Texas, Austin) and Olajumoke Yacob-Haliso (Brandeis University)

Advisory Board: Alexius Amtaika, Rhodes University, South Africa, June Bam Hutchison, University of Cape Town, South Africa, Gloria Emeagwali, Central Connecticut State University, USA, Bonny Ibhawoh, McMaster University, Canada, Alice J. Kang, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, USA , Henry B. Lovejoy, University of Colorado, Boulder, USA, Peace A. Medie, University of Ghana at Legon, Ghana, Fatima Sadiqi, University of Fez, Morocco, Mobolanle Ebunoluwa Sotunsa, Babcock University, Nigeria, Tim Stapleton, University of Calgary, Canada, Aribidesi Usman, Arizona State University, USA

 

 

 

_______

Olajumoke Yacob-Haliso, PhD

Dept. of African and African American Studies (AAAS),

Brandeis University,

415 South St, MS 092

Waltham, MA 02453.

Ph: 781.736.2027 

 

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USA Africa Dialogue Series - Dr. Segun Osoba: The Intellectual Who Kept the Faith, By Toyin Falola

Dr. Segun Osoba: The Intellectual Who Kept the Faith, By Toyin Falola
https://toyinfalolanetwork.org/dr-segun-osoba-the-intellectual-who-kept-the-faith/

Adebayo Ajadi

Assistant Brand Manager,

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Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Osoba

Perhaps, nothing wrong with RADICAL thinking as long it AIN’T an ism. For example, I believe in SCIENCE, BUT I don’t believe in SCIENTism; the latter means dogmatism. Marxism AIN’T an answer. Marx (an ex-Hegelian) simply turned Hegelianism into Marxism. Marx (an influential and mesmerizing “philosopher”/“economist”/“sociologist” apparently failed but famous in each of these disciplines in question. His rhetoric very powerful/seductive but very misleading. In graduate school and during independent studies especially at the doctoral and postdoctoral levels, my childhood heroes (such as Che Guevara, who met death in Bolivia) and Tai Solarin, the beloved “capitalist”/proprietor of his OWN school) started to bore me intensively. Phenomenology via “mereology” (what I call “mereotics” won me over. I became intensively interested in Saussure’s “deconstructive” linguistics which enabled me to encounter or question Derrida more energetically. I see Derrida’s deconstruction as a one trick pony but very useful…. Abstract math, my other love …. May all who die (who for better or worse) lived more or less creatively) rest in peace. Oohay Oohay Oohay

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On Saturday, May 16, 2026, 3:45 PM, 'Michael Afolayan' via USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> wrote:

Wow, this is such a great reflection on a life completely devoted to serving humanity. Even as non-students of history, none of us would fail to notice the colossal presence of the "radical" public intellectual we all called "Dr. Segun Osoba" on the campus of Great Ife of the 1970s - the age of true renaissance in a Nigerian academia. With the likes of Osoba, Olorode, Jeifo, Darah, Elujoba, the campus was saturated with radical thinkers cum marxist scholars. It enriched the culture and atmosphere of the campus life. No doubt, Prof. Osoba has left a vacuum that cannot be filled in the life of our nation. May his legacy outlive him. Thanks for the write-up, Prof. Jibrin Ibrahim!

MOA

On Saturday, May 16, 2026 at 08:26:15 AM EDT, Jibrin Ibrahim <jibrinibrahim891@gmail.com> wrote:

Celebrating a Mentor: Comrade Segun Osoba

Jibrin Ibrahim, Deepening Democracy Column, Daily Trust, 15th May 2026

Yesterday, we lost a comrade, mentor, friend and teacher, Dr Ṣẹ́gun

Ọṣọbá. He was a patriot and socialist who was deeply committed to

Nigeria. He was 92 years old and passed on peacefully at his Ijẹbu-Ode

residence yesterday morning. I last met Dr Osoba in 2015 when I

attended his 80th birthday celebration in Ijebu Ode in 2015. Dr.

Osoba, not the former governor of Ogun State, had his career teaching

History at the University of Ife, and devoted his life to training and

the motivating generations of progressive students into radical

politics. To mark  his 80th birthday, the Coalition for a New Nigeria

organised a debate on the theme, “The Struggle for a New Nigerian

Society: Retrospect and Prospects”. In his controversial book My

Watch, General Obasanjo had described Segun Osoba as the late (sic)

sincere social critique. Sincere he was, quiet too after his

retirement but very much alive at that time until his time came

yesterday.

The celebration was an exciting opportunity for reflections on his

contributions to building a progressive Nigeria. Trust comrade Osoba

to spoil a party. He refused to cut his birthday cake. He explained he

had never celebrated his birthday nor cut a cake throughout his life

and he will not change at eighty. There is nothing in a birthday he

explained, it’s just another day in your life, which will end in

death. We cut the cake and ate it anyway, but could not dare sing

“Happy Birthday.” Comrade Osoba is best known for the minority report

he and Dr. Bala Usman wrote as part of the 49 “wise men” of the

Constitution Drafting Committee charged by General Murtala Mohammed to

write a new constitution for Nigeria in 1975/76. I recall that as

students, we had tried to launch the minority Constitution in Sabon

Gari, Zaria but we were tear-gassed and beaten up by the police for

supporting the “wrong” draft constitution.

Segun Osoba was a 1959 graduate of the University of Ibadan and

obtained a UNESCO fellowship to do his doctorate at the Moscow State

University. He taught at Ife from 1967 to 1991 and was one of the

first to popularise Marxist methodology thus helping to make Ife one

of the first hubs of radical thinking and student unionism in the

Nigeria of the 1970s and 1980s. I was a frequent visitor to Ife at

that time and greatly benefitted from his mentorship.

As Femi Falana explained at the event, most of his “students”, like

him, were not usually registered for his formal courses but were young

people bored to death by their own teachers, and who would audit

Osoba’s classes and public debates for critical analysis and

inspiration. Those of us who benefitted from his mentorship have

enormous respect for his knowledge, humility, total devotion to

scholarship and above all his contempt for Nigeria’s successive

decadent ruling classes. The decadence of the ruling classes was based

essentially on their focus on using power for individual profit

thereby setting the process of the development of mega corruption.

The keynote address at the workshop was given by Professor Toye

Olorode who reviewed the great difficulties the Nigerian progressive

movement has had in creating opportunities to transform Nigeria for

the better. The revolutionary path has not worked because of the

difficulties of establishing an effective vanguard party to galvanise

the struggle and create traction for change. The revolutionaries who

decided to take the short court of joining bourgeois politics ended up

as turn coats who betrayed our ideals he lamented. Olorode appreciated

the fact that Osoba always opposed the short cut path to revolutionary

change and devoted his life to improving ideological clarity.

Segun Osoba is respected as a sharp historian and social scientist who

carried out profound analysis of changing social structure and classes

in Nigeria. Rather than mouth the struggle between the proletariat and

the bourgeoisie as reproduced in Marxist theory, he studied the real

social structure in Nigerian society and provided context to emergent

class forces. He did not mouth Marxism by rote, he understood the

methodology and used it to analyse his society. He always inspired his

students to believe that intellectual work has a purpose, to improve

the lives and livelihoods of the masses. He has a good sense of humour

and in his days in Ife often held court in the staff club exposing,

castigating and ridiculing Nigeria’s decadent ruling class.

As my good friend Prof Ibrahim Abdallah has argued, we remain blessed

as students of Nigerian political economy to have read Osoba’s three

key interconnected essays: “Ideological Trends in the Nigerian

National Liberation Movement”; “The Nigerian Power Elite, 1952-65”;

and “The Deepening Crisis of the Nigerian National Bourgeoisie.” They

paint an excellent portrait of how the Nigerian ruling class derailed

and failed to follow a pathway that could have lead nationhood,

emancipation and development. These three essays appeared in Ibadan;

African Social Studies: A Radical Reader; and Review of African

Political Economy. They were basic reading in a lot of the courses I

taught in Ahmadu Bello University.

In his response to friends and comrades at the Ijebu Ode 80th

anniversary event, Dr Segun Osoba drew attention to the legacy of

substandard education, corrupt civil service and oppressive security

apparatus that the British left for Nigeria. The Nigerian power elite

that took over from the British was too focused on primitive

accumulation and in fighting, and only worsened the political culture

they inherited from the British. It is therefore not surprising that

we currently have an excessive level of superstitious belief among

Nigerians. One example he gave was that in 2011, many of those who

voted for Goodluck Jonathan did so with the superstitious belief that

by so doing, Goodluck will spread to Nigerian voters. Today, most

Nigerians are shell shocked by the terrible choice they made in 2011,

he explained. For Dr. Osoba, excessive belief in the spiritual is

blocking the critical faculties of Nigerians and making the promotion

of progressive politics very difficult. Many of the comrades at the

meeting are ageing but it was good to see so many friends who have

struggled virtually all their lives to create a better Nigeria and

leave their country better than they found it. There are fewer such

people among the younger generation and in a sense,  this is the real

challenge of contemporary Nigeria. Too many among the young are

focused on the very narrow domain of crass materialism. They lack the

idealism and passion that is so important in motivating society for

progressive change.

Long live comrade Segun Osoba. I commiserate with his family,

community, comrades, students, friends, and colleagues. May his life

continue to be a blessing for the Nigeria he loved so passionately.

Professor Jibrin Ibrahim

Senior Fellow

Centre for Democracy and Development, Abuja

Follow me on twitter @jibrinibrahim17

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