Sent: Thursday, May 28, 2026 12:24 PM
Subject: Segun Osoba: Radical Marxist Scholar-Activist
Segun Osoba: Farewell to a radical scholar-activist
By : Guardian Nigeria
Date: 28 May 2026
Dr. Segun Osoba
By Adekeye Adebajo
Segun Osoba who recently died in Ijebu-Ode at the age of 91, was a radical Marxist historian who influenced a generation of scholar-activists. He attended Ijebu-Ode Grammar School (1947-1953), and studied History at University College Ibadan (1956-1959) on the eve of Nigeria’s political independence. He returned to his alma mater, Ijebu-Ode Grammar School, to teach for four years (1959-1963).
Undoubtedly, his life-changing experience was obtaining his doctorate in History at the prestigious Moscow State University (1963-1967), which entrenched his lifelong commitment to Marxist revolution. Osoba returned to Nigeria to teach History at Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, for 24 years until 1991. He was predeceased by his genial wife, Tokunbo, in 2010, and survived by his four children: Leke, Buki, Bunmi, and Yinka. They established the Osoba Prize for the best doctoral thesis in history or social sciences at the Obafemi Awolowo University in Ile-Ife to honour their father’s legacy.
Mentor and teacher
Osoba was affectionately called “the father figure of radicalism” in Ife. As his former student and colleague, renowned Nigerian historian, Toyin Falola, noted: “Under his influence, the University of Ife became a veritable breeding ground for a generation of trade unionists, civil society activists, lawyers, journalists and politicians.” Osoba loved to interact with younger scholars and activists, rejecting the often rigid social hierarchies of Nigerian society. Other mentees included human rights lawyers, Femi Falana and Abdul Mahmud, and Tell journalist, Dare Babarinsa.
As a teacher in Ife, Osoba made history come alive for his students through his political economy approach, encouraging them to debate and engage in empirically-based critical thinking that promoted an egalitarian society. He further urged his students to use history to understand contemporary events and to question idées fixes. Osoba’s “people’s history” focused on reinterpreting the past through assessing social forces rather than by adopting the more popular “Great Man Theory” of history. He uniquely criticised the 1324 hajj of the revered Mansa Musa, as having damaged the Malian empire through his ostentatious displays of wealth during the Emperor’s trans-Saharan pilgrimage in gold-laden caravans. The Marxist historian provocatively compared Musa’s extravagance to that of notorious Zairean dictator, Mobutu Sese Seko.
Even though Ife’s university structures had approved his professorship, Osoba was controversially denied promotion during the tenure of Vice-Chancellor and Ifa philosopher, Wande Abimbola (1982-1989). He thereafter refused to resubmit his application. Osoba retired from Ife at the age of just 56: well before his intellectual peak. He retreated to his ancestral small town of Ijebu-Ode frustrated by the infrastructural decay of the university amidst military-induced maladministration and the World Bank’s structural adjustment programmes that were decimating ivory towers across Africa. The Marxist historian complained that he did not want the ceiling of dilapidated lecture rooms to collapse over his head.
Social activist
Osoba was one of Nigeria’s earliest public intellectuals who sought to use radical scholarship to speak truth to power, slaughter sacred cows, smash shibboleths, expunge malfeasance from public life, and change society in favour of the impoverished masses. He was an unapologetically engaged Marxist scholar who sought to wage class struggle in order to achieve a fairer society. He helped to establish socialist cells and organised staff unions in universities across Nigeria in a bid to build a mass movement. Fellow comrades included Ola Oni in Ibadan, Eskor Toyo in Maiduguri and Calabar, Omafume Onoge in Jos, and Yusufu Bala Usman in Zaria. Osoba also greatly admired radical Afrobeat superstar, Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, with whom he once clashed during a heated debate at Ife.
He took great risks in challenging Nigeria’s repressive military governments between 1967 and 1998, suffering periods of detention. Two military autocrats – Generals Olusegun Obasanjo and Ibrahim Babangida – later singled him out as being among the country’s most effective social critics. Nominated to Nigeria’s Constitution Drafting Committee, Osoba famously submitted a 65-page Minority Report and Draft Constitution, co-authored with Yusufu Bala Usman, in 1976, in which they called for immunity to be lifted on presidents and state governors, and advocated a constitutionally guaranteed fairer society. The two scholars critiqued the final 1979 Constitution as an elite pact, and not a document of the masses to promote Nigeria’s socio-economic transformation. Their own minority report was not published until four decades later in 2019. Osoba went on to serve as chair of the Yusufu Bala Usman Institute until his death.
Scourge of the national bourgeoisie
Osoba’s ire was particularly reserved for what he described as Nigeria’s neo-colonial, comprador “national bourgeoisie” of military brass hats, mandarins, politicians, and entrepreneurs. He published two particularly influential essays, both in the Review of African Political Economy (ROAPE). The 1978 “The Deepening Crisis of the Nigerian National Bourgeousie” – which some would today describe as “vulgar Marxism” – cited Martiniquan scholar, Frantz Fanon’s description of this corpulent class as lacking a patriotic national consciousness, even as it collaborated with “foreign monopoly capitalist interests.”
Osoba urged this elite instead to seize control of the Nigerian economy, and work with the masses to establish an equitable socialist country. As he lyrically warned: “In urban centres the scandalously opulent and sanitised GRAs with their ‘millionaires’ belts’ and ten-car families are poised in a frightful confrontation with the vast, overcrowded, smelly and slummy ‘native’ cities where poverty, endemic diseases and crime reign supreme.” Osoba constantly castigated Nigeria’s avaricious ruling elite which he argued could not even ensure its own survival. But the soil for socialist revolution was not fertile in an ultra-capitalist Nigeria revelling in an unexpected oil boom from the 1970s.
While on a visit to Nigeria from England, Osoba handed me the manuscript of his second article “Corruption in Nigeria: Historical Perspectives,” to deliver to my Oxford supervisor, South African Marxist sociologist, Gavin Williams, who sent it on to ROAPE for review and publication in 1995. This essay was a scathing but sophisticated documentation of how kleptocracy became entrenched in Nigeria during British colonial rule, and then from Balewa to Babangida and Abacha. Osoba particularly saw the period of 1984 to 1995 as locust years of military misrule, bemoaning the fact that “corruption as a way of life has become pervasive and popularised in the Nigerian polity.”
Into the ancestral home
In 2023, a two-day conference was held in honour of Osoba at Tai Solarin University of Education in Ijebu-Ode titled “History and the Persistent Struggle: Social Change, Nation-Building, and Constitution-Making in Post-Independence Nigeria.” Academic, Siyan Oyeweso, noted at the conference about Osoba: “his strength is in the history of the oppressed and distressed people.” During Osoba’s 90th birthday celebration in Ijebu-Ode a year later, scholars and activists gathered from all corners of Nigeria to celebrate the nonagenarian. Two publications were prominently displayed at this event: Critical and Contentious Issues in the Modern and Contemporary History of Nigeria: Collected Writings of Samuel Olusegun Osoba; and Minority Report and Draft Constitution of Nigeria, 1976.
The ascetic Osoba’s final days were spent mostly at Ijebu-Ode Club (replicating his watering hole at Ife’s staff club) where he enjoyed intellectual debates and cold beer with intellectuals of diverse ideologies. He mostly avoided noisy social gatherings. I had met Osoba when I spent a year teaching in Ife during my National Youth Service. When I told him in 1989 that I had won the Rhodes scholarship to study at Oxford, he said to me without skipping a beat: “That thing is dripping with blood.” I did not think too much about it at the time, but the phrase stuck in my mind, instilling in me a responsibility to wage future anti-imperialist battles. Until he took his final breath, Osoba never surrendered his utopian vision of a “just society.”
Prof. Adebajo is a senior research fellow at the University of Pretoria’s Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship in South Africa.
Professor Adekeye Adebajo |
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Senior Research Fellow, Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship (CAS), University of Pretoria (UP), South Africa.
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