ON 14 December 1987, when we learnt that Dr Biodun Jeyifo had resigned from the University of Ife, the anger was palpable at the Murtala Muhammed Hall, the main hostel for postgraduate students. The next day, with long faces, O.J. Gochua, Femi Dunmade, Dapo Adeniyi, Dele Momodu, Femi Folorunso and I went to BJ’s home to have a conversation with him on his years at Ife. The Guardian newspaper, on 2 February 1988, published the first part of that interview titled “For Biodun Jeyifo, An Era Ends at Ile-Ife.” BJ spoke expansively about his love of literature; his intimacy with words; his reputation for being extremely impatient and rascally in his younger days; his audacity to challenge, on behalf of other less articulate and timid students, the principal of Ibadan Boys High School, an incident which ultimately led to his expulsion from that school in his final year. He talked about his student days at the University of Ibadan where he acted professionally on the first television station in Africa, the Western Nigerian Television Station (WNTV) and wrote for The Daily Sketch to enable him live comfortably on campus. He spoke glowingly of his membership of the Pyrate Confraternity, the Students’ Union of which he was the Public Relations Officer and the wonderful friends like Yemi and Sade Ogunbiyi, and Femi Osofisan that he made at UI where he also made a First Class in English–a rare feat at the time.

BJ also explained why he called it quits after ten years at the University of Ife. “The bare factual reason for my resignation,” he said, “is the refusal of the authorities to grant my application for an unpaid leave to enable me write a special study of Soyinka commissioned by Cambridge University Press. You see, I’ve just finished editing the collection of Soyinka’s essays since 1963 and need to move directly to the book commissioned by CUP, so the refusal of an application for leave, supported by my department, was a politically motivated way of forcing my resignation. But I must admit that the whole thing has come as a catalyst, prodding me to take a step I have been contemplating for the last two years but reluctant, unwilling to take. I don’t know what I will do next, but I look forward to a period of “free” time to read, think and write after the period of my present leave in the United States.” The collection of Soyinka’s essays that he talked about is the book titled Art, Dialogue and Outrage: Essays on Literature and Culture which was published in 1988 by New Horn Press. There were many reactions to that first part of the interview in support of BJ. Ben Tomoloju, the then Arts Editor of The Guardian, changed the title of the second part, published on 9 February 1988, to “Jeyifo’s Nunc Dimittis at Ile-Ife.” BJ’s exit was a big loss indeed. It was so depressing to see him leave. Bear in mind that the same University authorities had instigated Wole Soyinka’s resignation a year before he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1986.

Our beloved university which had a world-wide reputation for the quality of its teaching was fast degenerating into a citadel of pettiness. But BJ refused to be reduced by that pettiness. The book, Wole Soyinka: Politics, Poetics and Postcolonialism, on account of which he was forced to resign, was published in 2004 by Cambridge University Press and won the 2005 American Library Association’s prize for outstanding academic text. It is a rigorous study of Wole Soyinka’s plays, novels, poetry, memoirs and essays. His prose is generally incisive and lyrical. His voice calm and authoritative. There is a constant flow of coherent arguments and thought. Apart from Conversations with Soyinka, and Freedom and Complexity: Perspectives on Wole Soyinka, published by University Press of Mississippi and so many ground-breaking scholarly articles on African, Caribbean and African-American literatures, BJ has edited a Norton anthology called Modern African Drama. BookCraft has also published his book on Chinua Achebe titled Things Fall Apart, Things Fall Together. Now in retirement, he is working hard on his long-awaited memoir. Besides Ibadan and Ife, he has taught at Oberlin College, Cornell University, Harvard University, University of Peking and The Free University of Berlin. As a top scholar and academic, he has made other top scholars and academics possible, particularly in Cornell and Harvard where he spent more years and supervised more graduate students. He has produced so many critical thinkers who are holding their own in other fields. In 2018, during the tenure of Dr Yemi Ogunbiyi as Pro-Chancellor and Chairman of Council, he was conferred with honorary Doctor of Letters by the Obafemi Awolowo University.

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He told us in The Guardian interview that teaching was his real vocation. After earning his PhD in dramatic literature at New York University (NYU) in 1975, he only taught for two years at the University of Ibadan before he came down to the University of Ife where, for more than ten years, he matured into his role as a gifted teacher and had a steady sail and growth as a literary critic, public intellectual and committed labour unionist. His knowledge–both the breadth and depth of it–was always on full display in class. Time and time again, BJ would say, “Let me explain.” And one explanation would lead to other explanations, one development would suggest another, as he grappled with seemingly intractable ideas and some imponderables of life. One day, to drive home a point in class, he shared the story of the blind Russian woman, Rosa Kuleshova, who could identify colours and even read with her fingertips while blindfolded. BJ went beyond the materialist reading–a focus on the economic and social conditions of the production and reception of literature–in his teaching. He made subtlety, ambiguity and complexity easy to grasp. Bespectacled, intense, hard-working, ebullient, cultured, very driven, the fully bearded BJ in his mid-30s would often turn out in his khaki or adire shirts on jeans trousers with his pipe or Cuban cigars or both in his breast pockets.

Both inside and outside of classroom, he introduced us to the Western canon, meaning the significant texts in literature, the foundational philosophy and the influential art and music that shaped the culture of the West, even as the department gave a prime of place to the study of African literature and culture. A teacher of formidable intellectual ability, he would reference appropriate radical books in economics, political science, philosophy, social anthropology, history, and so on, as he taught. He was, to the best of my knowledge, the most erudite, brilliant and sincere of the literary theorists on the left in Africa at that time. He was a taskmaster of a teacher who would intentionally make a long list of books compulsory mainly to boost our radical questioning and critical thinking. BJ always taught, with new materials, graduate courses like Modes and Genres. The panache with which he discussed high culture in class was only matched by the ease and passion with which he regaled us with his knowledge of pop culture, most especially football, maybe because he was a terrific midfielder in his youth.

Most of the time, when BJ travelled abroad, he would buy two copies of a single title: one for his library at home, the other for his library in the office which his colleagues and graduate students could borrow. Some of those books never returned even though he kept a register of borrowers! BJ did not hector; he did not preach in class. If you want to have a feel of the tone he used, just read aloud in solitude his essay, “Literary Drama and the Search for a Popular Theatre in Nigeria,” published in his book, The Truthful Lie. The superb oral quality of the essay is the kind that BJ delivered. Moment by moment, felicitous words and carefully crafted phrases would filter through the silence of the lecture auditorium. When The Truthful Lie was published in 1985 by John La Rose’s New Beacon Books in London, we went to his office to congratulate him only to be confronted with a question by the author, “What do you make of ‘The Truthful – Lie’ part of the title?” As we sat down, trying to gather our thoughts, BJ calmly posed a rhetorical question: “What is imaginative literature if it is not a truthful-lie?” He agreed with Balzac, one of the finest French writers, that “Fiction is the secret history of nations.” As an interpreter, an explainer and a teacher, BJ frequently untangled the intricate web of fiction, broke the knot of its myths and mysteries and made its wonder come alive magnificently.

In December 1984, BJ called our attention to that month’s edition of South magazine in which the eccentric and highly talented Zimbabwean writer Dambudzo Marechera spoke about the great influence that Wole Soyinka and Christopher Okigbo had had on him because, according to Marechera, “within every word, within every phrase they use there is a gigantic experiment going on in the background.” Marechera was quoted to have also said that “for a writer to have a clear-cut goal usually diminishes from the artistic strength of the work.” This led, expectedly, to an open-ended debate on the works of Soyinka, Okigbo, Achebe and Ngugi wa Thiongo. Here was BJ, who was obviously enamoured of the writings of these authors, presiding over a passionate, if not rancorous, debate of student ideologues on both side of the divide. He thereafter assigned the task of giving a seminar on Modernism and Marechera to one of his graduate students, Dapo Olorunyomi. It was Olorunyomi’s brilliance and confidence at that departmental seminar that instantly drew me closer to him. The seminar culture across academic departments was very vibrant when we were at Ife. BJ would insist that his graduate students attend those seminars and he too would show up and participate actively in them. He drew a line between clear and clumsy expressions. He drew a line between straight and crooked thinking.

BJ was deeply involved in campus politics, supporting progressive causes all the way. Tough-minded, radical, adventurous and very creative, he would speak stirringly at the Sports Centre, Oduduwa Hall and other places, ending with solidarity songs, or the South African National Anthem. Remember that Nelson Mandela and his comrades were still in jail for life at the time because of their struggle against Apartheid. The anthem, then, particularly the solemn prayers in it, resonated with many of us. BJ would meticulously interrogate the oppressive system and connect the spirit of resistance in our country to the culture of resistance elsewhere in the same way that he connected the predatory nature of our country’s ruling elites to their despicable counterparts in the rest of the world. He would tell the gathering that power would never concede anything willingly; that without a carefully planned struggle there would be no victory. Although he invested a lot of time, energy and commitment in the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) when he was its first president between 1980 and 1982, he never missed any of our classes. He never did. His Volkswagen Beetle was a true people’s car, for he would cram five of us into the car after our tutorials at the Amphitheatre on Aristole’s Poetics and other Greek masters, and we would go to the old Buka for foods which he would pay for. BJ was generous with his money but he was very, very stingy with his grades.

He taught us how to see works of art in society and society in works of art. He shared with us the pleasure of listening to the music of Fela, Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, Bob Marley, B.B. King, Rex Lawson, Nina Simone, Roy Chicago, Jimi Hendrix, among others. He called our attention to the beauty in the works of Susanne Wenger, Muraina Oyelami, Twin Seven-Seven, Lamidi Fakeye, Agbo Folarin, Bruce Onabrakpeya, Obiora Udechukwu, Yusuf Grillo, Uche Okeke and others. He was endlessly delighted by the satiric strokes in a significant body of cartoons in Nigerian newspapers. I remember that he and Dr Kole Omotoso invited to Ife Bisi Ogunbadejo, who was then producing very fascinating cartoons in the London-based West Africa magazine. This gifted cartoonist spoke to a crowd of students at the Oduduwa Hall. Ogunbadejo was a man of few words, but he was eloquent in cartoons. After his talk, he drew with absolute ease on a black board, procured for that occasion, some biting cartoons on a major political issue of that day. It was a mesmerising master class.

Before our very eyes, BJ wrote for The Democratic Review, Positive Review, The African Guardian and The Guardian, using his name, or pseudonym, Bamako Jaji. It was only logical that he would teach Literature and Popular Media in addition to Marxist literary theory. After our years in Ife, he continued to write for The Guardian and much later The Nation. He has now collected a selection of his political and cultural journalism in two books titled Against the Predators’ Republic published by Carolina Academic Press, and Apostrophes to Friendship, Socialism and Democracypublished by BookCraft. You will discover on the pages of these books the enduring relevance of his thought. Well before these books, he had published By Popular Demand: The Yoruba Popular Travelling Theatre of Nigeria, and Contemporary Nigerian Literature: A Retrospective and Prospective Exploration. In the Perspectives on Nigerian Literature, the anthology of the best essays of The Guardian Literary Series, edited by Dr Yemi Ogunbiyi, BJ has the highest number of articles in the two volumes. The Ife Monographs on Literature and Criticisms Series which he edited with Dr B.M. Ibitokun and Dr Adebayo Williams, when he was head of department of Literature-in–English, published some original works of creative writings and criticisms. Indeed, it was in these Monographs that Niyi Osundare’s collection of poems, A Nib in the Pond, and his insightful essay, “The Writer as Righter,” were first published. BJ also wrote some plays. His Haba, Director! directed by Chuck Mike, was a convocation play at the University of Ife. I acted in his Anniversary which he directed. He wrote some poetry too. We witnessed the reverence with which he treated his mother, Madam Aduke, each time she visited. We witnessed the conviviality that accompanied the visits of Dr Eddie Madunagu, Dr Bene Madunagu, Dr Seinde Arigbede, Mrs Dunni Arigbede, Dr Femi Osofisan, Dr Niyi Osundare and a host of other friends. We witnessed the love he shared with Dr Sheila Walker, his African-American wife, and Okunola and Olalekan, their sons. And we later learnt of the strong ties between him and Ayoka, his daughter. We also witnessed some of BJ’s moments of anger when this tall and humorous man would choose ponderous silence, and a withering gaze to mask a growing outrage.

Since there was no written code of conduct compelling our teachers to have groundings with us, as Walter Rodney would say, where did they get the idea that animated their teaching philosophy and practice from? The following striking passage in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, by Paulo Freire, the Brazilian educator and Marxist Philosopher, provides an answer: “The problem-solving educator,” Freire says, “constantly re-forms his reflections in the reflections of the students. The students–no longer docile listeners–are now critical co-investigators in dialogue with their teachers. The teacher presents the material to the students for their consideration and re-considers her earlier considerations as the students express their own.” Published in 1971, Pedagogy of the Oppressed was a very influential book at the time. So: I believe that the humanising pedagogy of our teachers, especially that of BJ, must have been forged in its furnace. Our wonderful teachers were also amazing students at the same time. It is such an honour to call you our teacher, BJ. It is a privilege to call you our friend. We celebrate a genius. We celebrate a deep thinker. We celebrate a radical humanist. We celebrate a mentor of mentors. Happy birthday, BJ.

- - Ajibade, writer, journalist, is author of Jailed for Life and What a Country, and co-founder of TheNEWS, PM NEWS and TEMPO.

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