19th July, 2024
By Kunle Ajibade
BJ, as he is fondly and simply called, is Professor Emeritus of English at Cornell University and Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at Harvard University. He was the foundational National President of Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU). Apart from protesting the anti-people policies of General Ibrahim Babangida, the Union under him was not only better organised but was able to serve the interest of its members more effectively, largely because of the democratic nature of its decision-making and the honesty and total commitment of its leaders. BJ was a high-energy president of ASUU, driving all over Nigeria mostly in the dead of night for strategy meetings, yet he never missed any of his classes or rescheduled those classes at the Department of Literature-in-English, University of Ife.
For close to 50 years, he has had a distinguished teaching career at the universities of Ibadan, Ife, Oberlin College in Ohio and, as we have noted, Cornell and Harvard. BJ is an immensely gifted teacher. He was always at home with many subjects. For him, every idea was open to negotiation. There were often intense debates in his classes, which he deliberately provoked. He made his students think critically and deeply about literature and society, and a lot of other things in between. A keen listener who is always accessible and open, BJ brings the best out of people around him. Intelligence, empathy, hard work, respect, kindness and unwavering integrity come naturally to him. When he was head of department of Literature-in-English, after Professor Oyin Ogunba, he simply turned the department into an intellectual powerhouse with seminars and unfailing publication of journals. It was in one of these journals that his essay, “Soyinka Demythologized’’ was first published. It was also here that Niyi Osundare’s “The Writer as Righter” was first published.
As a Marxist literary theorist, BJ has made very significant contributions to post-colonial studies with groundbreaking articles like “In the Wake of Colonialism and Modernity,” “The Nature of Things: Arrested Decolonisation and Critical Theory,” “Chinua Achebe: The Resilience and Predicament of Obierika,” “On Eurocentric Critical Theory: Some Paradigms from Texts and Subtexts of Post-colonial Writing,” and “Determinations of Remembering: Post-colonial Fictional Genealogies of Colonialism in Africa.”
One of his former students, Professor Tejumola Olaniyan, argued persuasively when BJ turned 70 eight years ago, that “No other scholar, apart from Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha, is more attentive to the radically dispensed accents or strands of thinking the post-colonial the way BJ has done.” How true! How true! Professor Jeyifo’s arguments are powerful and exacting. His magisterial book, Wole Soyinka: Politics, Poetics and Post-colonialism offers an in-depth reading of Soyinka’s plays, novels and poetry. For me, one of the most interesting things about the book is that as BJ clarifies Soyinka’s complexity, his own renderings, in some parts of the book, also become complex. His prose in this book is incisive, gripping and lyrical. His voice is calm and authoritative. Published by Cambridge University Press, it was the winner of the American Library Association’s Outstanding Academic Texts.
BJ’s other books include Wole Soyinka: A Voice of Africa; Perspectives on Wole Soyinka: Freedom and Complexity; Conversations with Wole Soyinka; Modern African Drama; and a collection of essays in honour of Abiola Irele titled Africa in the World and the World in Africa which he edited. His essays on Chinua Achebe, Femi Osofisan, Niyi Osundare, Emmanuel Obiechina, Charles Nnolim, Dan Izevbaye and Abiola Irele are very outstanding. There are some theorists whose reputations are based on never to be understood widely. BJ is not one of those theorists. True, he has written some complex essays, but, generally, this author of The Truthful Lie: Essays in a Radical Sociology of African Drama; The Yoruba Popular Travelling Theatre of Nigeria; and Contemporary Nigerian Literature: A Retrospective and Prospective Exploration, writes lucidly.
As a columnist, he wrote diligently for The Guardian, The African Guardian using his name but wrote mostly for the Ibadan-based Daily Sketch in those days using Bamako Jaji. He wrote every Sunday for The Nation until recently. He is spending most of his time now to complete another book on Wole Soyinka and his memoirs. BJ brings to his journalism the same kind of tireless passion and a deep sense of responsibility which we normally associate with his academic exertions. In column after column, he affirms and reaffirms his commitment to robust, informed, uninhibited deliberations and debates on the economy, politics, religion, self-respect, human dignity and other issues. Time and experience have taught him to vigilantly anticipate his adversaries and antagonists in his interventions.
In a collection of his journalistic essays titled Against the Predators’ Republic: Political and Cultural Journalism, BJ endlessly interrogates Nigeria as an idea and a space, linking the predatory nature of many of its leaders to their counterparts in the rest of the world. His empathy for the poor, the dispossessed and the excluded is plainly explained, even as he remains critical of them. His diagnosis of what ails our country and what is wrong with the world and the solutions he offers and painstakingly describes are truly emancipatory. The new collection of his journalism titled Apostrophes to Friendship, Socialism and Democracy is predominantly a huge tribute to friendship and left-leaning possibilities. Curious, ruminative, irreverent, broadminded and respectful in his opinions, BJ historicises when he writes about people who were, or are still, in the struggle for the revolutionary transformation of our country. He does this partly to conscientise the younger ones who are willing to learn but who don’t inhabit this history. He wants them to know that they could stand on the shoulders of these heroes and inspiring ancestors in their quest for a dignified society.
BJ obviously cultivated very early in life what Primo Levi has described in his fascinating memoir, If This is a Man, as “a moderate and abstract sense of rebellion.’’ Consider the following two related stories of his rebellion. The first story is an excerpt from Yemi Ogunbiyi’s riveting memoir, The Road Never Forgets. Ogunbiyi, who was BJ’s junior by one year at Ibadan Boys High School (IBHS), and who was the Head Boy of his own set, writes: “As part of Nature Study, every student was allocated a portion of land to plant and tend flowers and plants in the junior forms.
Because of the constraints of space at the school, these were small ten by three feet beds. The flower beds would be inspected regularly as part of our Nature Study Practical class during the rainy seasons. Failure to properly tend and de-weed the flower beds attracted poor scores in Nature Study and a few strokes of the cane from Mr. Osunyejo. BJ hardly complied with Nature Study directives, and it didn’t matter how many strokes he received, he would flunk the next inspection! So, one day, some of us, admirers of his in the lower forms who were ever so sorry to see him get whipped so often, decided to help tend his flower bed for him as if he had done it himself. Then came the inspection day, and all that BJ needed to do was just show up. He didn’t show up and ended up getting whipped again.” Partly on account of that open rebellion many of his juniors and classmates admired him greatly. They also loved him for his rib-cracking jokes and his incredible capacity to speak both pidgin and Queen’s English fluently.
The second story is from a different source. And I wonder why Dr Yemi Ogunbiyi has left it out of his book. In 1964, when BJ was barely 18 years old, he and his classmates in form five at the same IBHS organised a successful protest that crippled the running of the school for a whole day. On the second day, the principal convoked a special assembly over those young rebels’ Charter of Demands. BJ was chosen by his classmates to present their grievances. As he spoke out so forcefully and eloquently, his classmates burst out chanting: BJ, fire on! BJ, fire on!! BJ, who was then a voracious reader, a prize-winning debater in that school, a great footballer (he was a talented midfielder) and a leader of the Christian Students Movement, simply went on and on, speaking truth to power. When he was done, the principal dismissed the gathering with a promise to look into their demands. And calm returned to the school.
Three weeks later, however, the principal, Mr Akintunde Laseinde, who was the organist at the St. James Cathedral in Ibadan, where the Jeyifo family worshipped, expelled the audacious speaker. BJ had to write his school certificate examinations from home, which he passed with flying colours. He also wrote his A/Level examinations as an external candidate. He forfeited his admission to Government College, Ibadan because Mr Laseinde spoke to the white principal of GCI about the rascality of the young man he was about to admit into his school. Stubborn as hell, BJ refused to go to any other school. Yethis A/Level results were among the best that year. He was then admitted to the Department of English, University of Ibadan, where he made a first class in 1970 despite his intense activism as a Public Relations Officer of the Students Union and Pyrate Confraternity. Since the founding of U.I. in 1948, only two students had attained that distinction: Molara Ogundipe-Leslie and Dan Izevbaye.
In his autobiography, Morning by Morning, Professor Ayo Banjo, former Vice-Chancellor of the University of Ibadan, who was one of BJ’s teachers in U.I., writes that the decision to reward BJ’s hard work with a first class was unanimous. U.I. then gave him a full scholarship to do his doctorate at New York University (NYU), which he completed on time in 1975. He read extensively here and participated in students’ protests. It was actually in New York City, specifically in Manhattan, the bastion of capitalism itself, that BJ became a clear-headed Marxist. Upon his return to Nigeria in 1975, he spent two years teaching in UI and planning a revolution in Odeomu with Eddie Madunagu, Seinde Arigbede and others before he was recruited by the University of Ife.
What else can I say? What else…?
Let me conclude with Theodor Adorno. This German philosopher and musicologist in his book, The Authoritarian Personality, says that “intolerance of ambiguity is the mark of an authoritarian person.” BJ is not intolerant of ambiguity as a person. He is not intolerant of ambiguity as an academic and as a teacher. And he is not intolerant of ambiguity as a public intellectual. Clearly, he holds very strong ideological positions, but he is not a dogmatic Marxist. I repeat: BJ is not a dogmatic Marxist. It shows in his capacious embrace and interrogation of multitudes and their meanings and significance. It shows most clearly in the sophistication of his brilliant, affecting and absorbing writings.
– Kunle Ajibade, executive editor/director of TheNEWS/P.M.NEWS, presented this introduction of Professor Biodun Jeyifo at the Agip Recital Hall, Muson Centre, in Lagos, at a symposium to mark the 90th birthday of Professor Wole Soyinka on 13 July 2024.
