Category: Life – The Midweek Magazine

On July 2, Africa lost one of its foremost literary scholars and critics, a former visiting Professor of African and African-American Studies and of Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard University, Prof. Francis Abiola Irele. He died in the United States. He was 81. In this tribute, scholars recall their memories of the literary icon, Assistant Editor (Arts)  OZOLUA UHAKHEME reports.

United States-based poet, dramatist and essayist Prof. Niyi Osundare, like most of his colleagues in Nigeria and the Diaspora is sad over the death of Prof Francis Abiola Irele.

Prof Niyi Osundare is among the big fans and admirers of the late Irele. Osundare said Irele gave  him the initial break by publishing his first book on poems, I Sing of Change, which Irele rechristened as Songs of Marketplace.

Osundare recalled: “That name stuck, and the moniker, ‘Poet of the Marketplace’ was born – with Irele as Francis the Baptist. Thus, Irele was not only there at the beginning of my literary-creative journey; he was vitally instrumental in giving my fledgling dream a name, and shaping the trajectory of a life career…There goes Abiola Irele, the doer and enabler. Admirably cosmopolitan and  inspiringly literate, Irele was a man and scholar constantly re-inventing himself and his ideas, an ageless humanist with an astounding combination of youthful energy and the seasoned wisdom that comes with age. We will sorely miss his fertile, encyclopedic mind, his stupendous zest for life, his powerfully resonant voice, his infectious passion for music, wine, and enlightened company.”

 

Abiola Irele: Adieu to a magnificent, lovely man

 

Prof. Femi Osofisan, Kwara State University, Malete

 

It just doesn’t seem the right moment for him to go. But then when exactly is the right moment for death? When is the loss of a cherished one ever acceptable or less painful to those left behind? Abiola Irele was (was!!) one of those who should never have left, but live on forever.

No, it is hard to concede to death the loss of such a magnificent, lovely man as Abiola Irele.

Several glowing accolades have been written since the news of his demise broke out this week, but I doubt if any of the words we write will ever successfully capture the comprehensive robustness of the man’s life or personality, or the profound grief that his abrupt exit has left in our heart.

For me, the personal loss is immeasurable. He had been a teacher, then friend and mentor, patron and publisher, and many other pleasurable things. In our earlier days, many years ago, we had even become ardent drinking partners, adventurously traversing the thirsty roads between Ibadan and Cotonou, Lomé and Accra, Abidjan and Dakar, where some bars and bottles must still remember us.

It was his name I knew first before I met him.

He was already a towering figure in the French and Francophone intellectual circles but based outside the country when I started my academic career. But then, to my great pleasure, he was announced one day as one of my co-supervisors by the University Senate at Ibadan.

Subsequently, shortly afterwards, he came visiting to Présence Africaine in Paris, and our first meeting occurred on a memorable day at the Latin Quarter.

He came looking like one of the habitués of the city’s once-celebrated salons, handsome, elegant, urbane, and endowed with an immediately noticeable degree of personal charm. He had a seductive presence that one associated with media showbiz, and not normally with the academic profession; from the very first minute, he put me completely at ease.

In the course of time, I would also come into the spell of his other irresistible assets, such as his infectious sense of humour and his open, conspicuous love for living—for life at the raw, for wine and for song. So, teacher and student, master and apprentice with kindred spirits, we bonded strongly and it has been ever since for me an endlessly enriching relationship.

There could never be a dull moment in his company.

But Irele’s apparently flippant exterior, his buoyant cultivation of the manners of the bon vivant, was a deceptive guise. It masked a deep inner core of acute, insightful intelligence, which demanded no less perspicacity from his interlocutors and companions. Whenever he began to talk, not a few were discomfited, or mesmerized, by the extensive sweep of his knowledge and erudition, and the sheer beauty of his elocution. I learnt a lot at his feet.

Irele was suave and cultured, polyvalent and cosmopolitan; he was blessed with lithe and nimble feet for dancing, an ear for languages, and a voice for mellifluous song. He was at home with the old masters in philosophy and literature just as much as he was abreast of the most recent schools and movements. He was also an eager patron of talent, always seeking out young seeds to help nurse into efflorescence. Very much a Renaissance man indeed, he shared, with the late  Stanley Macebuh, many of the qualities we associate with wisdom, polish and refinement.

For all of these, Irele was of course not perfect. No man ever is. He could be maddeningly petulant at times, just like a child. And on other occasions his brittle temper could flare into quite unnecessary conflagration. But I can testify that those occasions were never frequent nor prolonged, nor deliberately nasty, out of intention to harm. In any case, as we know now with great men, these are inevitable weaknesses we must all learn to endure in the end, in compensation for the ineffable beneficences of their genius.

Oh Egbon, I am swamped by memories of you and of the times we spent together; there are so many things to remember. But let me end now with this one which I believe says a lot about the impact one unwittingly leaves on others. This was the scene I witnessed some months ago in Ilorin, when I arrived at your house, and found some workers—gardeners, drivers, house helps, etc.—gathered around your windows, peeping inside, all in apparent troubled anxiety.

Alarmed, fearing the worst, I hurried forward see what was amiss, only to discover that they had all been drawn there by what they thought was a bizarre spectacle going on inside—a strange cacophony of unintelligible sounds issuing out from loudspeakers, and an obviously possessed Prof Irele bellowing away in accompaniment, in total oblivion of the rest of the world!

Well, I finally got you to lower the volume of the Puccini you were playing and open the door. As you emerged, the workers fled back in respectful haste, henceforth eternally awed by this obviously disguised onisegun in their midst, caught in the throes of some unknown ritual.

Egbon, Olohun-iyo, are you still singing your songs?

Goodbye then. We will continue to struggle on, till we too are summoned. But the world has grown more lonely now in the silence of your voice. Goodbye.

 

“Goodnight Sir “

 

Dean, School of Humanity, Redeemer University,

Prof Ahmed Yerima:

 

“I met Prof. Abiola Irele at the Kwara State University (KWASU) when he was my Provost. He was the last missing part of the puzzle of my professional career. I had up to that time met all the literary greats, except him. He was a tall and huge man. And immediately, I liked him. I found that he had heard a little about me and my plays, and when he called me by first name, I was at ease. He was a good Provost, and with his wealth of experience, he understood our shortcomings, and allowed us to learn by observing him.

We soon became friends. I knew I had a lot to learn from him, and so each time I went to see him, I would take a bottle of wine with me. After lunch, he would talk from one topic to another. His favourite topics were Aime Ceasaire, new ideas on Negritude, colonialism, post-colonialism, the state of Nigeria’s politics and KWASU. He had a deep passion for the young university, and despite his age, he had big dreams on making it a first class, global university like Harvard. I would lap it all up with pride.

I was so taken in by his wealth of knowledge and felt the urge to document it. When I received a grant from Tetfund, my good friend and I, Prof. Femi Abodunrin decided to embark on an interview on the later years of Abiola Irele. I am happy we did. Now as I flip my mind back on the interview sessions, I remember how we enjoyed the food, drinks, little chops and banter, and how relaxed and happy he was. Like a great eloquent teacher, he would pour his heart out on issues, and we were good students… It was good we did it. In his honour, we have teamed up with Prof. Rasheed Na’Allah, the Vice Chancellor of KWASU, who brought Irele back to Nigeria to publish his interview of the younger Irele. When it is published, we would have given a befitting farewell gift to this great intellectual icon.”

 

Executive Secretary, National Institute for Cultural Orientation (NICO), Dr. Barclays Ayakoroma:

 

“Prof Abiola, to me, was the African equivalent of the respected World Theatre historian, Oscar G. Brockett. As young theatre students, we saw in his works that assurance that there was some sense in our opting to study Theatre Arts as a course in the university. He had left indelible mark in the history of African Theatre. May his soul rest in perfect peace.”

 

President, Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA),

Denja Abdullahi:

 

“Prof Abiola Irele was a distinctive voice in the criticism of African literature. He was a bridge-building critical oracle; unravelling the ideology behind literary productivity of Fracophone Africa to Anglophone Africa and vice versa. His was that of a life-long commitment to understanding, through critical enterprise, the cultural life of Africa. His labour was sedately done but with profound impact on literary criticism in Africa and beyond. He was a man of the world as much as he was a great son of Africa. His death is a message to us all that we must encourage new set of critics who will inherit and extend the critical rigour of the likes of him, the Nnolims, Obiechinas, Emenyonus, Izevbayes, Obumselus, Dialas, Tanimu Abubakars, Abubakar  Uba Abdallahs, etc.”

In the words of writer and essayist, Okey Ndibe: “Irele was one of our most insightful and generous scholars, a man whose weighty books illuminate Africa’s literary expressions and bridge the gulfs created by British and French colonial legacies in Africa. Beyond being an extraordinary, world-class scholar, Irele was also a deeply humane person.”

The late Irele studied French and graduated from the University of Ibadan in 1960. He also completed a Ph.D in French at the University of Paris, Sorbonne in 1966.

Until recently, he was a Visiting Professor of African and African American Studies and of Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard University. Other institutions where he taught  included University of Ghana, Obafemi Awolowo University, University of Ibadan, and Ohio State University, US.

In 2010, he took up the appointment of Provost of the Humanities at the newly founded Kwara State University, Ilorin, Kwara State. Irele has been described as a most authoritative voice in African Literature, as well as a fundamental figure in Francophone African and Caribbean Studies. His dozens of academic papers and books spanning his five decades of work testify to this.

 

A tribute to the master,

by Odia Ofeimum

In 1986, a tribe of Nigerian writers, journalists and academics were in Stockholm to celebrate the award of the first Nobel Prize for Literature to a writer of African descent. A prime denizen of that tribe was Professor Francis Abiola Irele who was then superintending at the Faculty of Modem Languages and Literatures at the University of Ibadan, and whom many of us would have given the Nobel prize for literary criticism if there was such a prize. The main site of the celebration was a hotel lobby where the resident pianist was having a virtual sit-down strike, pelting the cold winter night with little ditties, until the horde from Nigeria gravitated towards her and the roof had to be (literally) raised to accommodate the noise. We had a joyfully executed stampede which tested but proved the virtuoso skills of the pianist.

The night began in earnest when Abiola Irele was importuned to a performance, a sing-along Italian song, which drew out Franscesca Emmanuel, that delectable soprano whom no one ought to allow to get old. After paying his European dues, perfectly discharging his acclaimed closeness to Puccini and Donizetti and justifying the “lyrical delicacy” of his younger days when he rendered Ina Furtiva Lagrima, Your little hand is cold and Come back to Sorrento at University concerts, he turned to traditional Nigerian songs and highlife music. Alone or in good company, Irele sang better than Tunde Nightingale, the highlife maestro, reminding all of us of the tale told by Wole Soyinka, one of the singers of that night of revels, of how, in their days of holding the night to ransom at Bobby Benson’s Caban Bamboo in Lagos of the 50s, Irele would take over the night when it was time to welcome the dawn.

Irele’s voice welcomes the dawn even in everyday conversations and carries its sing-song quality very well into the art (or is it now a science?) for which he is best known: literary criticism. Come to think of it, music is a fitting metaphor for Irele’s embroilment in that art. Rendering arguments in essentially narrative modes, he brings to it a modulation of language and ideas which thrives on the surprise of evenness and authoritativeness, never allowing a discordant note to pass without contrapuntal pruning. His ease of navigation between different languages and disciplines is his main asset in this regard. What he professes, being in European languages, may seem irrelevant to identifying an active note of his natal Ora, a dialect of the Edo language, in his performances. The Yoruba language may be considered more like it because he has drawn attention to it in his studies of the Yoruba writer D.O. Fagunwa in relation to the Anglophone writer Wole Soyinka, who, by an insider stretching, is regarded as a Yoruba writer. A complex melding of forms, I believe, is involved: as his Ora dialect, interweaves with Yoruba in the manner that his Yoruba intervenes in his French and English/ the two pillars of his engagement with the literatures of francophone and Anglophone Africa, the Caribbean and the Americas. He has brought all of them together in seamless transactions across disciplinary boundaries – from anthropology and political science to linguistics and philosophy – and in ways that affirm his quintessential role not only as an interpreter of what writers write, but of how what they write inter-relates with our past present and future. With Irele, so to say, literary criticism rises to the level of a philosophy of culture in the best traditions of, as Biodun Jeyifo has argued, “scholar-critics from other societies and periods like Dr. Samuel Johnson, Mathew Arnold, F. R. Leavis, George Luckacs, Walter Benjamin, and Eric Aubach”. He is in this sense often distinguished among a distinguished run of African literary critics who include Eldred Durosimi Jones, Michael Echeruo, Emmanuel Obiechina, Dan Izevbaye, Isidore Okpewho and of course Jeyifo himself.

In his essential practice as a critic, Irele has covered, with a scholar’s doggedness, what may be called the commanding heights, the canonical works, in African and Caribbean literatures, especially Leopold Sedar Senghor and Aime Cesaire, Wole Soyinka and Chinua Achebe. His interventions in the major altercations in African philosophy, as witnessed by his introduction to Houtounji’s African Philosophy: Myth and Reality, are like his involvement in contemporary discussions of directions and mis-directions in African education: seminal, comprehensive and as rigorously enlightening as when the deep calls to the deep. Never inclined to discount knowledge in favour of fashion, Irele remains one of the most astute defenders of the historical validity of Negritude in the face of the carping sendup that has become the norm in Negritude criticism. Similarly, he has refrained from sitting on the bonnet of post-modernism and its disconnection of critical sensibility from engagement with author and literary text. As readers of his book The African Imagination can attest, Irele accommodates the excitements of new tropes in cultural studies, deploying a firm grasp of the classics within elucidatory practices that remain stubbornly literary. Perhaps, I should note that the most remarkable part of his general practice is his essential appreciation of the need to re-invent Africa’s intellectual resources, not just by going to the source, or as Negritude wished it, through a culture-clash dialectics, but having the imagination and boldness to turn colonial alienation and the pressures of a globalising world into founts of creativity and weapons of integration.

It is not surprising therefore that Professor Francis Abiola Irele, has been very concerned about creating rooms for new experiments, new adventures if need be, beyond the pursuit of commanding canons.  Jeyifo has dated this turn in Irele hermeneutics to that point in 1983 when he delivered his inaugural lecture at the University of Ibadan IN PRAISE OF ALIENATION. It was not so much a break, not such a fundamental rupture but a re-tracking of give-away idiolects, ideas that were always there but subsumed under grand frameworks that had Negritude and its sub-texts of culture clashes sorted under the rigours of a Senghorian zeal that had a place for the concept of cultural mullato. Irele had grown beyond such datum, beyond the distinction between Them and Us to a de-racialising of viewpoints that did not remove drawlines but minded the logic, not the geography of ideas. Standing on common grounding with the philosophers and critics of the Western world that he had always celebrated and virtually luxuriated in, it was time to go swimmingly with them into a common whirlpool. It was in a way like seeking freedom from the constraints and restraints of colonial history but re-using the instrumentalities of ideas and ideals that, within the European context, once transgressed geography. Rather than distancing away, at the level of thought, from the Gauls, the Saxons, and the Visigoths, Irele opines “The necessary effort of understanding our alienation and coming to terms with it justifies all forms of scholarship devoted to European culture and Western civilisation, considered as totality… the Hellenic and Roman Civilisation have a direct significance for us”.

Even before he expressed it in these formal terms, this was already  the context in which his intellectual odyssey was viewed by many of his work-a-day assessors.  Many scholars who encountered him through his editorship of Research in African Literatures would, I assume, agree that it was this reprieve of alienation in its positive reconstruction that made all the difference to his scholarship. That he had begun to make a programmatic fare of it is really the point that Jeyifo seemed to be making in relation to a heightened cultural activism, at the seething centre of which was the translation of francophone African writers into English and setting up outlets for younger writers shortchanged by the doldrums in African publishing. It is fair to say that Professor Irele’s penchant for good deeds had to shift base or be overtaken by the travails of a continent that soon ran into a near reversal of the preconditions for the levelling of the landscape of interaction  between the West and the rest of us in modalities that made for the beneficiency of alienation.  It just happened to have occured at the point where Africa, a continent not yet near optimum in the production of academics, became a bullish exporter of intellectuals. As a star in the international elite corps, Africa’s gift to the global academic circuit, in the past four decades, Abiola Irele has become as much an advertisement of the best minds that Africa produces for the self-aggrandisement of the developed countries as well as a personification of that very dilemma of the have-nots in the throes of expatriation.

No question about it: it would have been more than tragic if expatriation had led him, as it has led some to a refuge in silence, or turning their backs on African studies. Thankfully, whether in his Chair at Harvard, or at Cambridge before it, Professor Irele has consistently pursued a practice that puts Africa in the reckoning. True, the homefront remains bereft of the synergies that so much expatriation has occasioned. But the kind of involvement that Irele has made the very mark of his academic interests promises that someday when Africa shall have done away with the rude regimes and their principals in the international system that have reduced her to, and kept her on her knees, there would be quite a bank of creativity to draw upon in the process of reconstruction.

Over a decade ago, I had speculated that his lecture on the occasion of Wole Soyinka’s 70th Birthday would be a part of that process of reconstruction; if only because it was impossible to engage that devotee of Ogun without encountering the necessity to break through dead ends, build new roads, clear the way, through impervious gulfs, for the affirmation of some new directions. Well, that was before he moved his stool to the Kwara State University where, among other things, he was reworking a base for a journal that it appeared his stay in the United States had removed from practical considerations. There was a sense in which it implied a burst in a new enough direction to set a format for return to old turfs and abandoned projects. There was a reason to feel some exhilaration at the notion of the Master, having traversed the world, returning home, with all the wisdom of the indigene and the cosmopolitan intermixed in his pouch. Wistfully, one wished it was possible to have all those avatars of academia who expatriated returning to enjoin a truly critical mass that would revamp the doldrums that swallowed up the world that they were building!

Not that one could be sure that the very abiku syndrome that plagued earlier efforts would not intervene. And not that anyone, knowing the debilitating tertiary climate across the Nigerian University system, could be sure that every such effort would not end in sheer projecteering and a permanent wait and see experimentation without a sense of the conclusive. It kept too many alarm bells ringing across Nigeria’s academia! Whatever it was that could enthuse him to beat a retreat, return from the land of the golden fleece, as it were, whether family issues, professorial re-think, or delayed ideological re-awakening, the general feeling was that it would be good for the national Ivory Tower. But, and it mattered to ask – would it be good for the Master?   Who would want to see Professor Abiola Irele, in his prime, experimenting where there should be an edifice in glorious sky-writing regailing us with a bullish tradition of the old Mohican,  sustaining a battle-ready generation of younger academics  who need to be weaned off the work-a-day skinting that had become the pattern across Nigeria’s tertiary world!

The tragedy of our national situation is that Abiola Irele had not returned to a country any different from the one he left three decades earlier. Across the board, the same old questions were  still being asked; the kind of questions that, for three decades, hastened the exodus of the best in our midst to off-shore havens. Not to forget: the expatriation to the United States began in the decades when  Professors were being rusticated for teaching what they were not paid to teach and members of the Academic Staff Union of Universities had stickers on their jalopies depicting the government, as a clowning employer, who paid a take-home pay that could not take anyone home. A seeming improvement materialised between the years, with leeways for the University class to join the jeep-riding classes guzzling oil money across the country. It was a sop that left everyone in doubt as to whether the devaluation of the university system was now being affirmed by a bulging pay-packet that demoted academic freedom by adding routine decimation and degradation of facilities to the usual forms of official indifference; giving rise to strikes and closures of the university. As if to prove the point that the more things change the more they ape the past, the University System, especially as it relates to the state-owned tertiary institutions, entered the era of labour Armaggedon in which there are actually universities owing teaching and administrative staff up to six months salaries in arrears. It is impossible to appraise the circumstance! That Abiola Irele  returns home to a country that begs a devastation in the nature of the submission to ghosts that the off-shoring of two decades ago appeared to have exorcised, at least, at the level of the individual. Sadly, it has spelt a narrative of Afro-pessimism that holds no indication of  abating.

Quite intriguing is that we are back at the fort of old questions, so to say, that have remained hideously clamant. They are questions, looming large, even larger than they did when they came to the fore at the Symposium organised in April 2004 by Professor Richard Joseph, my old Political Science teacher at the University of Ibadan in the 70s, who had become the Director of the Centre for African Studies at Northwestern University, Illinois. It was what may be called a culture risk symposium, the kind aimed at finding exeats from a dilemma that ends up yielding a recrudescence of the crying issues.

The symposium was  preceded by pre-seminar circulation of papers by Professors Irele, Micere Mugo, and Jeyifo, before the seminar encounter with Soulaymane Bachir Diagne. As I reported it at the time: they were “Two Nigerians, one Kenyan and a Senegalese… eminent representatives of one side of the coin of Africanism: that  is, Africans who entered the stream of African studies from the inside rather than as outsiders from the West – but who, before they really had time to establish and entrench viable space for alternative paradigms, found themselves relocating to the West due to the destruction of the economy and political freedoms in their countries. In their midst, at Evanston, I was the lone non-University intervener at the symposium … What the interaction revealed to me, as someone without professional familiarity with the debates, is that there may be less difference between Africanists and native academics in diaspora beyond the fact  that those  who should never have left their turf were forced by one reason or the other to vacate their trenches.

Specific to the area of imaginative literature: the intriguing part, at the symposium, from this distance in time, is that Irele put his finger on the node of crisis by delineating the quandary of his expatriation. With alienation fully consumated, as it were, the claims of cultural geography were being exacted by an environment that would not let him forget where he was coming from. The heart of the matter is that he who had pontificated In Praise of Alienation, was being hedged by it, overwhelming his sense of balance. He had, he said, generally refused to allow that “structuralist and deconstructionist approaches are necessarily the most productive in rendering a proper sense of literary texts in their fullness of being, involving a proper conjoining of form and reference”;  but he had now to look back with rueful nostalgia at his own essays written during a period in which, in his own words, “I have been removed from my habitual environment, a condition that has involved a physical and mental distance from the primary audience that I assumed I was addressing during an earlier phase of my professional career in Africa”.

He was actually adverting  to the makings of a  real tragedy. Not just an issue of his distance from  “an audience constituted by the local community of students and scholars”. It was also that it irked him to pursue  “the profession of scholarship  ….. in exile” …where African literature, his primary concern, is considered a very narrow area of studies and of  specialization and is “largely marginal to the interests of the scholarly and intellectual community” within which he has to operate. It  led him to broaden out, pay obeisance to the reigning  idols of the post-modern academy, in a way that forced a shift in the cursor of concern from what he would normally see as more primary issues. Inexorably, in the face of this need to share turf with  the post-modern Argonauts, Irele found that he had to treat structuralist and deconstructionist approaches as African literature-friendly; a matter of abiding the “transformations in the Western Academy through which imaginative literature has come to be regarded less as purely aesthetic phenomenon, enjoying an ideal status in an autonomous realm, that is essentially a mode of discourse, a common ground in social experience and cultural practices”.

The hard reality is that Irele’s dilemma was not a personal one, but a feature of a national, and continental travail. As it turned out, his contribution at that symposium was coincident with Jeyifo’s discussion of de-territorialisation (best viewed in line with Tanure Ojaide’s  title ‘when it no longer matters where you live’) as a fact of our  post-modern   globalising times. Within the de-territorialised space, as Jeyifo perceived it, there is  a widening of the horizons of literary studies. Except that this has to take place within an exuberant displacement of the aesthetics of and the space for  ‘minority discourses”.  He brought out the  implication that the dispersal of Africa’s intellectual elite had become a virtual requirement of turning the back on Africa. And this was at a time when that dispersal had also become “the most salient historical and social basis of the production and interpretation of texts in nearly all post-colonial societies, but more acutely so in Africa”. This is simply a  statement of fact: constituting a loaded admission that  “both the producer and the interpreter, the writer and the critic, the artist and scholar, belong to a structurally and demographically tiny cultural elite members of which, … in the words of Chinua Achebe’s essay,  “lived in the same place”, until recently, with the post-colonial societies of which they constitute a nascent elite”.

What it presupposed is that the massive  movement of this tiny elite – those who were best placed to write their people into history – was leaving  a vacuum that drew unsullied guilt  in some quarters but could still be blandly extenuated by mere academese or sheer theory. No one was more aware of this at that Symposium than Jeyifo  who in the form of some extenuation argued that: “Since writers and scholars can write anywhere in the world and indeed sometimes find that exile, enforced or voluntary, often fuels their creativity and productivity, “living in the same place” with one’s society has never been a matter of literal co-habitation. He pressed the argument to the effect that: “neither those who have relocated nor those who have stayed “live in the same place” with their society. This was indeed the rub but only superficially true. It called for weighing up a society that has a B.J., and an Abiola Irele  sitting at their posts and being merely dependent, in the exercise of their grand feel for home, on missives sent from outer space to obviate loss of presence. A case for Representation or presence. Make your pick.

There was a sense in which having come to the Symposium from Africa where the absence of BJ and Irele was a transmogrifying lacuna in our intellectual space, I tried not to be hard on what I thought was becoming too much of an extenuation. It got to saturation when Micero Mugo took the position I would only have agreed, too readily with, if she spoke anywhere in Africa. In a way that was certainly not a consolation for Irele’s unredressed nostagia for where he was coming from, she went magisterial: “unlike the European situation where language and nation tend to sit together, there is in the post-colonial circumstance a ‘divergence from the natural relationship between language and literature and between literature and nation’. She was driving it home when she added that “African Academics and intellectuals who are most often obliged to use the languages that are legacies of colonialism are already distanced by that very fact from their people in a manner that removes them from their communities. Writing literature, writing their people into history in languages that majority of the people do not understand, the writers, she argued, are  already like exiles in their own country. She then added the matter of life-style,  in which the average native academic is in exile even when at home. The life-style of the University-based intellectual, ensconced within the cloistered atmosphere of the Ivory Tower, sedately distant, far from the madding crowd of the peasant and slum dweller, could well be easy to take on as part of the issue in Africa.  At Evanston, it became so much less the issue. Because: emphasizing the class dimension that virtually, ontologically, removes the intellectual and the academic from the mass to which he  and she belong, turned into an abstraction, a mere matter of academic disquisitions as to “their apartness” and un-”connectedness to the community…” Their ‘alienation’, as Irele may have retorted from an earlier incarnation  – was now much less the frightful issue than the absence of even that basis for class distinctions that had been savaged at the expense of the very idea of the university.  In the course of  the symposium, Jeyifo appeared to be pursuing this at another level, when he noted that the most profound sense in which a writer or scholar in diaspora “stops living in the same place with her society is when her work, her productivity is cut off from her society, most especially when this happens not by censorship or total loss of contact through enforced exile, but because of the banal and pervasive collapse of the institutions and infrastructures which would make her work available to the mass of readers and interlocutors in her society.”  Yes! This was it. For the academic at home as well as in diaspora, the sense of exile deepens, becasue according to Jeyifo, society, “that “society”, under the combined assault of seemingly larger-than-life internal and external forces, seems more and more beyond recognition and. more importantly, beyond the power of the progressive, radical fraction of the elite to intervene productively in the historical process in their own societies, let alone the world-historical process of advanced global capitalism”. Jeyifo added: “This seems to be exceptional to the African post-colony… it is in reality merely an exacerbated instance of patterns that are widely, though differentially distributed throughout virtually all the postcolonial societies of the world”.

At this point, the conversation was like a painting of the threatened extinction of the  specie, making the phenomenon of exile, no matter how pictured, an implacable loss-making conundrum. It shifted the phenomenon of intellectual dispersal from a factor of choices that had to be made by members of the elite for their own survival, to a causal frame identified with the textures not only of post-colonial societies but the interstices that Africans are allowed within the diaspora communities in which they operate even in exile.

The short of the argument is that in the de-territorialised space available to them, there may indeed be a widening of horizons for literary studies in general. So much more about Africa may manage to be produced and to travel. Except that it removes nothing of the reality: that the movement into Western Academies by prime producers of African scholarship spells an opportunity cost, missed engagements, that, had they materialised, could have created synergies beyond the commonplace for the abandoned society. The paradox, as it might be claimed is that, but for the grace of the exit-taking that saved the day for many, so much of the extant scholarship could have perished, product and producers destroyed, or so much in deterioration; and so much more slated for extinction by the rude circumstances of the homeland. Which, so to say, offers no consumate extenuation, but hyper-inflates the cultural losses to Africa of the exit-taking into offshore havens by its prime producers.  In the nature of incalculable losses, it is about the disruption to work-a-day intellectual life in the home country as well as in the displacement of that critical mass without which major transformations in cultural economies become easily reversible.

 

 

 

 

The tragedy, and this is the core issue of this intervention, the tragedy, is that to see Irele come back to Nigeria and then return to the United states at a time when the infrastructure for the defence of education is in the throes of another degradation even more pulverizing than the original one that prompted the First Exodus, turns Afro-pessimism from sore to abscess. It may yield some sense of reprieve to talk about the afflictions of African scholarship being reduced or offset by the reality that so much of our history continues to take place outside Africa where incommodious spaces superiour to home-based sham may well be yawning and waiting. The truth nevertheless is that it implicates more than is implied when it is said that so much of  British history happened outside Britain – in the empire. Britain, at least, was in control of that history in a way that Africans are  not of theirs. The whole  issue of exile and the kingdom, as it might be called, boils down to Africans not being in control  of their  own history and therefore, whether at home or in Diaspora, are bedevilled by an absence of requisite physical and mental infrastructure for exercising will, and forstering normal conversation. Basically it is a function of economics – the fact that societies trapped in currencies that are not convertible cannot operate on equable terms with those that are more bullish. By the same token, University teachers in such societies necessarily operate at great disadvantage in relation to colleagues offshore. Quite some good romance therefore when an Irele chooses to stay for any length of time for the half-way house solutions to the hash of home-based academia in the form of sandwich performances, sabbaticals, and publications in common journals.  Other arrangements enable academics in diaspora to make side-kick research visits to home-based Universities for a while before returning to base. But these are mere gap-fillers. Too random. They cannot make up for the  real thing – having Universities in the neo-colonies that can attract professors on their own terms in competition with universities in other parts of the world.  To surmount this calls for taking on the whole cultural economy in the country, one in which a Professor Abiola Irele can be home, decidedly tenured,  without the banality of grand presence in a University run by a State government that may not be able to pay salaries for six months…..It is a fate too worse off for discourse. Especially around a man at 82, still intellectually productive enough to be imagined at the height of his power