Jacob Ade Ajayi, another great teller of stories, trying to understand things as they are to the degree that the human mind can understand facts of the past, from the history school of the University of Ibadan, evokes for me a glorious era in Nigerian academia, a time of exceptional luminosity, something I have heard and read about like tales from a mythic age.
"a member of the Ibadan school, a group of scholars interested in introducing African perspectives to African history and focusing on the internal historical forces that shaped African lives.
Ade Ajayi favours the use of historical continuity more often than focusing on events only as powerful agents of change that can move the basic foundations of cultures and mould them into new ones.
Instead, he sees many critical events in African life, sometimes as weathering episodes which still leave some parts of the core of Africans intact. He also employs a less passionate style in his works, especially in his early writings, using subtle criticism of controversial issues of the times'-Wikipedia on Ade Ajayi
An acolyte from that era, carrying with him the embers of that force, stoking it afresh in new lands, dramatizes, in terms of a meditation on being and becoming, the impact on him of this great pioneer -Toyin Falola on Ade Ajayi in In Praise of Greatness:
"Jacob Festus Ade Ajayi
1929–2014
Our Foundation , Our Mainframe , and Our Roof
... an eminent historian, a public intellectual, a celebrated educator, a famous administrator, and a devout Christian. Patient and attentive, he listened ... when many people were deaf,and he looked while many were blind.
...
Truly urbane and cosmopolitan in speech and appearance,he was always polite, measured, and rational. He was not opposed
to alternative opinions, and did not even challenge the firebrand orientation of some of us in the 1980s. Never did he discourage dissenting opinions nor penalize critics. While he recognized authority and the privileges associated with it, he was careful never to abuse either.
...
Death reveals the geography of one's influence, the landscape of one's contacts, the environs of one's being, the memory of one's history, and the fragmentation of one's wholeness into its component strands. While death may be profoundly final in terms of a state of physical relocation; yet it can be expansive in the creation of a new being who instigates a set of new
narratives.
The dead no longer register their physicality, including the emotions of the living. However, perhaps the dead even feel much better than the living, who knows?
...
Fellowship is a communion of fellow minds, but its leadership requires the creation of a moral center, uncommon talent, erudition, and impeccable integrity.
...
A worldview that accepts physical disappearance but celebrates memory and spiritual connections helps mediate the engagement with death. Ajayi's insights, recorded in texts, will offer us a fillip to our famished souls.
...
An ancestor does not die. He is alive. We will always see him as alive, as we require no imagination to re-read his works, to see his warmth and laughter,to remember his embrace, and his ever-positive words of encouragement.
His history will always be with us, a history of a place that was defined to include you and me. We cannot convert this place into one of sorrow, as this would not follow the true spirit of our Baba. We cannot create bodies of pain, as Baba gave us an everlasting love. Our hearts cannot keep anguish, as our Baba taught all of us joy. Baba has left his heart behind, to go to a better home.
Wherever he may be now, you all should know that the doors and windows to his abode are open. Today and tomorrow, he looks at you, he gazes at me, he listens to us, and all what Baba can see in Nigeria is hope.
He is not dead. He rejoins the earth, to which we must pay homage to receive him...
He cannot die. The tumult of life is different from the history of life. For a heart so large, in clouds and sun, rain and thunder, Baba will always be here.
His heart, large and compassionate, will continue to beat in the presence of millions of people:
Death, captured in a box
suspended in mid-air
Slowly ascends upward to land on a rock
too far to see.
The phantom is bold.
.....
His inspirational words are constant reminders of life, not death. In addition,he will continue to exude the promise of our convictions, regardless of his location in the firmament"
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