For BJ, from Birthday Tribute to Prosaic Dirge

By Olu Obafemi

I wrote a tribute for Emeritus Professor Biodun Jeyifo to mark his 80th birthday titled “BJ at the Portals of the Octogenarian Season.” However, I did not share it, not even with him as I had thought that the organizers of the Colloquium, the Wole Soyinka Investigative Journalism,  would publish the proceedings of the January 5 event so I can make my tribute an entry to the book. In the process of waiting for that expectation,  the unexpected happened. BJ passed on to  the land beyond, where no one had ever gone and returned, except Jesus Christ. Now, a birthday tribute has transmogrified into a prosaic dirge, as you will find below. But in the entrails of the actual birthday event, I had sent three short messages to the celebrated African literary theorist, Marxist revolutionary ideologue and practitioner,  whose output most defines and shapes the tenor, trope and character of the critical parlance of African literature and its global receptivity. To my consternation, BJ  made the  memorable responses to my short tributes, which I will share after the gestated tribute below.

It is difficult for me to pontify the exact nexus of my encounter with Emeritus Professor Biodun Jeyifo: a man who we now fondly, and endearingly, simply call BJ – some derive its meaning from his current name Biodun Jeyifo; older  and more intimate others derived the acronym from his pseudonym, Bamako Jaji. From the literary ideological and political spheres of his enduring sojourn, I studied him from a distance through his engagements as a literary scholar from Ibadan to Ife, where he had been at the head of  the pioneering body of Marxist criticism, theory and decolonization.

In 1978, I had been fortunately requested to write (at the instance of my doctoral thesis  supervisor, Professor Martin Banham, who had since at the beginning of,  or shortly before,  the Nigerian Civil War in 1967, returned from the School of Drama, Ibadan, where he had been Deputy Director to Geoffrey Axworthy in England,  established the Workshop Theatre section of the School of English at the University of Leeds and the “yearly review of West Africa”) for the Journal  of  Commonwealth Literatures, 1978.  The original commissioned writer of that annual piece was my late teacher and mentor, Professor Kolawole Ogungbesan, who had passed on earlier in the year. I had taken a research trip to Nigeria to interview several writers and practitioners of the Nigerian Theatre from 1945 to 1977 for my thesis. I had gone to Ibadan to interact with the radical playwright Femi Osofisan and dramatist Bode Sowande. It was during that trip that I met Biodun Jeyifo in the office of his  bosom  friend ( as I later realized), Dr. Femi Osofisan. Between them, I picked the basic information I needed for an aspect of my review on radical perspectives, the emerging alternative voice of the younger generation of writers and literary scholars in Nigeria. I must say that that encounter was brief but impressionable. BJ was both austere-looking and disarmingly humorous – a contradictory mien that you will find in the study life of BJ years after and to date. The name and works became more dominant in the revolutionising project of Nigerian literary studies and scholarship, one which will essentially shift focus from the hegemonic Eurocentric  and bourgeois ideological format of African literary studies  to a radical, dialectical/ sociological framework and social practice that since then evolved.

On my return to Nigeria after my doctoral work in 1981, I was swept off my feet by the wave and thrust of radical unionism that was raging across some campuses in Nigeria, especially Ife, Benin, Calabar and Zaria,  and emerging in Ilorin.  My contact with the then  Dr Ropo Sekoni and Dr Tunde Oduleye left me with no choice but to join the emerging radical group at the University of Ilorin. I became the secretary, and a year later in 1983, the Chairman of the Ilorin  Chapter of the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU). All roads began to lead to Ife, where BJ, along with Drs Segun Osoba, Olorode, Awopetu, Fasina, and co, where the heartthrob of ASUU largely sojourned, with critical extensions in Calabar,  Zaria, Lagos, and so on. It was  a restless and volatile period in the life of ASUU and BJ led the movement as its pioneer President. It was also a hectic life  on the road on endless trips across the country. Comrade Jeyifo led and drove by example in his Volkswagen  Beetle and the rest of us mobilised our private cars for the journeys through the Sahel savannah in the north and the Mangrove forests belt of the south of Nigeria. There were no terrorists or bandits then as they now dominate our roads and forests, but it took the heart of a lion that lived in President Jeyifo as he drove, always alone, in his car on these long journeys, seeking a just society and a creditable academia for Nigeria. This was also  in the middle of military dictatorship with their hostile  misgovernance and their hounds pursuing us on account of their irreverent charge that we were  teaching what we were not paid to teach, to which BJ  found a counter- factual rhetorical strategy in the texts of Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, Ngugi wa Thiong’o and so on; writings which enunciated the growing African cultural  autonomy and authentic identity retrieval in high contextual  tensions with the western forms and colonial hegemonies of western humanistic studies.

At the heart of this evolving anti- colonial and anti-class struggle, literature, philosophy  and history were instrumented by Jeyifo and other radical scholars in the classroom, and  in the ‘ battlefield of  waging proletariat struggle and mass  conscientization. Jeyifo was leading/ engaging  farmers, communes, movements outside the classroom.  His leadership of ASUU through negotiations of conditions of wages and welfare, revitalization of decadent academia infrastructure and curriculum established a genuine non-violent opposition to obtuse bourgeois misrule in Nigeria.

There is already ample chronicle of Professor Jeyifo’s leadership/engagements in ASUU and the Nigeria Labour Congress’s (NLC’s) political struggle and activism in terms of conscientization and  protestations/strikes against military rule in the ‘70s and ‘80s on which priority and active alignment was with egalitarian and equality advocacy for the masses. BJ pursued this revolutionary ideal with oblational zest.

Adequate attention has been paid, [but needed to be amplified by his students], such as Chidi Amuta, Kunle Ajibade. Tejumola Olaniyan, Dapo Olorunyomi and so on, as manifest in the 80th birthday Colloquium spearheaded by his former, votives and credible students. Jeyifo’s mentorship and nurturing of radical scholarship, broadening the base of  Marxist scholarship and radical thought in the classroom and outside needs to be more robustly chronicled. Post Ife and Nigeria, in Cornell and Harvard, his later life engagements outside the shores of Nigeria, BJ continued to disseminate radical knowledge and  the ideas/ideals of postcolonial consciousness, as an avowed critic of the predominance of global capitalism and neoliberalism that globalization represented. He and his non-African colleagues embarked on the teaching of proletarian texts of African, Latin American and Caribbean texts within the conventional walls and in correctional spaces in the Diaspora. This engagement was his preoccupation alongside his colleagues, carried on zestfully,  relentlessly, voluntarily and without remuneration.

BJ was at some point responding to the challenge of the density and even obscurantism of his delivery and communication strategy of a literature meant to conscientize popular audience. Part of his response to the essence of breaking down his leftist instruction manual was his recourse to journalism, a more immediate and more mass oriented medium.

His input for decades as a columnist, provides urgent responses to social decadence where gestation of formal academic dispersion was slow. His simplified, still profound columns in the Guardian and The Nation, two frontline print journalism spaces in  Nigeria for decades,  bore testimony to his uninhibited commitment to the project of lending his voice to the business of liberating the talakawa, proletariat and peasantry, long suppressed by insensitive political dysfunctional governance in Nigeria.

Although he set out to promote popular consciousness and mass awareness through his objective critical engagement of literature and language,  there is no doubt that his commitment to deploying the intersection and interconnection of literature, politics and social justice, exemplified by the literary texts of major writers like Wole Soyinka, in whose works he is easily the most authoritative critical voice, remains unsurpassed. But it must be stated, as he ages gracefully on, that his tools of literary discourse engagement were not limited to his mammoth study of the literary corpus of the pristine black Nobel Laureate. Space will not permit any extensive labour on this subject. Suffice to mention here that his unapologetic pursuit of Marxist revolutionary thought sank a deep root in the  epistemological construct and knowledge systems of Africa as we found in his study of, not just Soyinka, but Achebe, Ngugi, Sembene Ousmane, Ata Ama Aidoo, and the leftist writings of literary artists of his own generation like the radical dramatist, Osofisan and the poetic revolutionary environmentalism, to borrow BJ’ s own denotation of Niyi Osundare and Tanure Ojaide. To boot, even in the works of older writers which his radical perspective criticized for their tragic mythopoetic and fatalism, BJ’s profound search found him digging deep into the proto-revolutionary consciousness and potentials in their works. Essays like “ The Class Hidden War” on Soyinka’s  “The Road” and discernible intra-class contradictions in Achebe’ s Arrow of God, have taken the novelist’s vision beyond the schism between the colonized and the colonizer. The protagonist, Chief Priest Ezeulu, at the height of power vault took sides, inadvertently against his own people. Biodun Jeyifo found possibilities even in tragedy bound works like “Death and the King’s s Horseman” and “Arrow of God” and many other liberal creations for revolutionary aspirations and imagination. This, I believe, is the explanation for the suggestion that as he grew older, BJ found greater tolerance, even accommodating sympathies for works and authors he was avowedly opposed to. No defence is needed for our fresh octogenarian. He has eased more assuredly and assuring beyond the portals of 80, much more easily than he did 10 years ago, when he was not ready to take any impulsive action that would prevent him from attaining the age of the septuagenarians. There is time yet to hit the keyboards and churn out fresh explications of the value of literature as a revolutionary art which will continue to shape our consciousness towards a collective identity founded on transformed societies. He will yet, to be sure reveal literature, more than ever before, as a site of struggle, exposing social decadence, social injustice and unjustness, oppressive governance and lead us to a path of national and continental reconstruction. He will still distil from old and modern/ contemporary scripts the ongoing value of fashioning an authentic African  from out of the jungle of repressive and suffocating  western expression with the possible emergence of an authentic canon and aesthetics of alternative literature for reconstructing a socially transformed society.

On a sober note, and as the literary  critical forerunner, Emeritus Professor Dan Izevbaye said a decade ago on BJ at 70, it is a great marvel that the multidimensional personality in BJ as a theorist, revolutionary, activist, seminal public intellectual, humanist, inviolable teacher and social being was still on his feet at 70. It is a great positive wonder that Biodun  Jeyifo  is now more confidently,  less superstitiously walking the earth, our earth, at 80. Dear elder, Egbon and Comrade BJ, see you here in another decade. Happy Birthday,  the latest octogenarian, Biodun Jeyifo.

And then, this… February 11: Obituaries, even as we savour the incredible legacies that you have left for Nigeria, Africa and the world.

Below are the last exchanges between me and BJ during and around his birthday:

Olu Obafemi: My health is not very good right now, and since the past few weeks. I will painfully miss the physical event but will certainly join virtually. It is a great event for all of us your friends, and we look ahead to the intellectual menu that will adorn the arrival of our great leader as he arrives at the portals of the Octogenarian House. This comes, not with the trepidation shrouded in superstition of possible non-arrival a decade ago, which kept you off the road in the final stretch to age 70, but with the belief and certitude of a wizened sage. Congratulations in advance my brother.

BJ: Deeply appreciated! Afara ko nii ja leyin mi and iwo no ati FO yio gun oke agba, l’ola Olodumare!

Olu Obafemi: A worthy accolade by a sincere mentee/ friend. Thank you immensely, dear BJ, for sharing this luminously couched Tribute by Chidi Amuta for you on this very humbling occasion of your 80th birthday. One can hardly anticipate, not to talk of receiving, such a genuinely felt and passionately rendered accolade to an enduring teacher and mentor. An accomplished scholar and Marxist literary scholar, public intellectual himself, the totality of Chidi’s appreciation of your tutorship, mentorship and parenthood is an instructive lesson that must gladden, even the heart of a modest, unassuming, self- effacing but inimitable standout revolutionary theorist, revolutionist practitioner and  colossus that you are and exemplify. Tomorrow is already here and you must savour its arrival after all these years of class  struggle, proletarian activism,  humanism and aegis of mass conscientization. Garlands of this ilk remain forever your unsolicited reward. Happy birthday, revered friend, trailblazer in the world of community and humane struggle, as we dare to look forward to another assured decade, at least! Aseyi’ s’amodun

Olu Obafemi: Congratulations on a hugely successful celebration of life at 80, during which you were greatly honoured by your  students and many of your colleagues. Femi and I joined online. I was there from 9am till 2.40 pm when I ran out of data and couldn’t reload. Ígba odun, odun kan ni o.

BJ: Olu, melo lafe wi, melo lafe so?!! Emi nikan tan! You opened such a vast oceanic flood of exquisite panegyric in three separate birthday messages!!! How can I hope to match THAT except to thank you for giving me time to practice for my “retaliation” a few years from now! So, I promise: Emi ti g’oke odo k’afara to ja; afara ‘oni ja leyin mi o!

This then is the last word from BJ to me, full of hope, a generous spirit, confident in the continuity of life with the continuity of existence and an assured future where the bridge of life will be built across generation.

It remains for me to join the children , family, nuclear and global, as well as the community of friends, in celebrating  the inimitable life of BJ, the indomitable revolutionary artist/activist/great philosophical thinker, media and public intellectual, an uncompromised humanist, humane personage and a great parent and friend.

Adieu, dear BJ.

•Obafemi is Emeritus Professor of English, University of Ilorin.