Nothing is more challenging than being a pioneer. Nothing is even more fulfilling than making a success of the adventure. Professor Ayo Bamgbose, who turned 90 in January, is a rare example of that breed of humans.
He was celebrated deservedly not only among the esteemed circle of academics and his family, but also by the nation, as evidenced by the warm felicitations from the president, Muhammadu Buhari. The Yoruba World Centre devoted an evening to him where the mellifluous combo of drumrolls and incantatory poetry serenaded his legacy and profile in the tribe, and consequently the African race.
Prof. Bamgbose is one of a few surviving ground breakers of the Nigerian story. His is in the field of linguistics. He is the first Nigerian to focus his energies and a dynamic imagination to an essential field in mining what it takes to be African in the area of language.
After graduating as a grade II teacher, his restless quest for knowledge enrolled him as a student at the University of Ibadan, where he bagged his first degree in linguistics. That set him off as a lone wolf in the linguistic bush of African inquiry.
That has made him the first African to obtain a PHD in linguistics, the first to lecture it in a Nigerian university, and its first professor of the subject. He started to teach it as a lecturer in 1963, and five years later he had acquired a professorship. He was the first honorary member, the linguistic Society of America, first African president of the International Association of World Englishes, first African to be honoured as second vice president of the Permanent International Committee of Linguists, first and foundation president of the Assembly of Academicians of the African Academy of Languages. He was the sole and first recipient of the Nigerian National Order of Merit.
This is a gift to the country and the black race that he did not turn up lawyer as he had dreamed as a teacher when he saw Rotimi Williams as a model. He does not regret it today because there are many lawyers, and he has the distinction of being the pioneer of an essential study of the African, especially Yoruba identity.
He has published a number of pioneer studies in books and journals around the world, and he has travelled to evangelise the essence of Yoruba linguistics, whether in phonology, morphology or syntax, at once essentialising and universalising the assets of the Yoruba and African linguistics. It is because of this that the renowned academic, Professor Eyamba Bokamba, called him the dean of African linguistics.
He has written some sober books that not only look at the entrails of language but also their ethnography and politics. Some of the books include, the Grammar of Yoruba, Fonologi ati Girama, Orthographies of Nigerian Languages that looks at Efik, Hausa, Igbo and Yoruba, Language and the Nation, Language and Exclusion. He has also written some 130 papers and chapters in books.
He has not only done that, he is credited as being the first light in the setting up of linguistics departments across the country, and parts of Africa. He has been a visiting professor to the University of Hamburg in Germany, also to the university of Leipzig, fellow to Clare Hall, Cambridge University, George A. Miller visiting professor at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
Professor Bamgbose attains his ninth decade still dispensing knowledge and representing the need to indigenise the African glory. He has contributed immensely to the concept of Nigerian Language policy, which continues to be a little contentious given our many voices. His perspective that the three major languages be exercised as the beacons for all will elicit nationalist resistance from the so-called minorities who have a right to assert their own identities as Africans have asserted theirs on the global stage.