First, from Accra, Ghana, Femi Osofisan forwarded the news to me, asking me if I thought it was true. Incidentally, the very week before in Berlin, Germany, he and I had been talking about him, about the eternally youthful “Ade Blow”. Then Olu Ademulegun sent me the same inquiry, this time more anxious, more desperate: is it true that “Ade Blow” is gone? And then finally, from John Ohiorhenuan in New York: “BJ, do you know what took him away?”
I start this tribute to my departed friend in this manner in order to underscore one point: almost to the last person, everyone of our circle of friends, acquaintances and members of our generational cohort who knew Adebola Ibidapo Adefuye somehow did not in the least expect that he would go before any of us. Nearly all the way from primary school through high school to the University of Ibadan as an undergraduate, he was nearly always the youngest in the class, quite apart from also nearly always being one of the brightest. But more than this was what appeared to be his perpetual youthfulness: he looked much, much younger than his 68 years and had consistently looked younger than his age at any time in the last two decades since we, members of his generational cohort, entered our middle-age years. Yes, we have all been joking in the last decade or so that we were all now in the departure lounge of life, but the last person amongst us that we thought would take that “flight” was “Ade Blow”. And indeed, such is the tragic irony of life, of Being itself.
In my sorrow, my heart goes out to his family: his widow, Sola and his three children, Bunmi, Tolu and Baba. I have many friends who are very devoted family men; Adefuye was quite easily one of the most devoted of such husbands and fathers. It may seem that in saying this, I am merely repeating a comforting cliché that is normative in tributes to departed friends, but in this case, it happens to be far more than a customary expression of condolence to the family; it is an incandescent truth. To all who met him, he was the essence of kindness, considerateness and generosity: I think these virtues in his life and work had their roots in the sort of life he shared with his family, with his wife and children. How they will cope with his loss seems unimaginable to me. All I can say, all I wish to express to members of his family and all who knew and admired him as a friend, acquaintance and colleague, is that he left a rich legacy that should be a source of comfort and solace for his loss.
The standard obituary notices and editorials have given the bare bones of his achievements; I repeat them here and will then considerably add finer details of texture and nuance to these achievements. At the University of Ibadan, he graduated from the History Department on top of his class with an Upper Second Class Honors degree. By the way, at the time, I and others speculated that the only reason Adefuye wasn’t given a First Class Honors degree was because up to that point in time in 1969, the History Department at U.I. was “famous” – or “notorious” – in never giving anyone First Class, period. All the same, Adefuye went on to complete all work for his Ph D within four years, then and now something of an amazing achievement. From this he rose steadily from Lecturer 1 to Senior Lecturer, Professor and Head of Department of History, all at the University of Lagos. I think it is on record that when he became Head of Department, he was one of the youngest ever to have acceded to that position in Nigeria. Here, it is pertinent to observe that this was a period when meritocracy was still strong in our universities and the post of H.O.D. was not yet the mostly administrative and highly politicized position that it is today in our universities. To be an H.O.D. at that time was to be a solid source of professional and intellectual leadership within the given department itself and in the wider circles of the profession. Perhaps one way in which I might give an apt illustration of these observations on the academic achievements of Adefuye would be to give an account of what I discovered about him as a distinguished historian in our country’s diplomatic service when I visited him and his family when he was our High Commissioner in the English-speaking Caribbean based in Kingston, Jamaica.
His invitation to me came when, through a phone conversation, he learnt of my interest in, and ties with the Caribbean. I was then at Cornell University and had developed strong political and ideological connections with the workers’ movements in that region of the world, especially Trinidad and Jamaica where I had many friends and comrades. I am not sure of this now, but I think in fact that Adefuye’s invitation to me came as a result of his having met some of my friends in Jamaica who had spoken very warmly about me to him and he had told them that he and I were friends and cohorts at U.I. At any rate, about a week after my arrival in Kingston, I finally made contact with these Jamaican friends. Dear reader, imagine my great amazement and pleasure when these friends recounted to me, with an awe bordering on hero-worship, the “revolution” that Adefuye had carried out in the Jamaican educational system through his introduction of African history into the curriculum of all primary and secondary schools in the country. Adefuye had not kept this information completely hidden from me; he had only in his characteristic humility hinted to me that apart from his diplomatic duties, he had been doing some unpaid work teaching African history in Jamaican schools. But what the Jamaicans themselves told me was something of epic proportions: Adefuye had had systematic discussions with teachers and educational administrators about how to make African history part of the curriculum of Jamaican schooling; he had brought in relevant texts, courtesy of the Nigerian government; he had travelled the length and breadth of the island nation giving lectures and talks; and his activities had begun to redound to some of the other island nations in the region.
This story, this narrative which at the time seemed to come from a deeply redemptive response to the long, worldwide ignorance of African history, would be incomplete if I don’t link it with the effect that it had on Adefuye’s standing among all the other diplomats without exception in Jamaica when he was our man in that country, that region of the world. Simply stated, Adefuye was the most highly admired and respected diplomat of any country in the Caribbean at the time. The other Ambassadors and High Commissioner saw the great esteem in which the Jamaicans and the other countries of the Caribbean held Adefuye; they more or less had to “fall in line” with the situation. Two days before I left Jamaica on that visit, I went with Adefuye to a dinner at the home of one of these ambassadors at which virtually all the others were present. The high regard for Adefuye was more than palpable; it was electrifying. Everyone was duly impressed when Adefuye introduced me as Professor of English at Cornell; but they all quickly turned away from me to my friend, each one regaling me with his or her particular story about Adefuye’s enormous popularity in Jamaica and the Caribbean. Adefuye was clearly the unelected doyen of the diplomatic corps in Jamaica. About two years later when Emeka Anyaoku became the first and so far only African Secretary-General of the Commonwealth, it was largely thanks to the fact that through Adefuye’s work in the Caribbean, all the votes in that region went to Nigeria’s Anyaoku.
In bringing this tribute to my friend to a close, I would like to end by exploring deeper ramifications of the link between history as a discipline and the place of diplomacy in the modern world with specific regard to jokes and conversations that I had with Adefuye over several decades concerning politics in general and socialism in particular. This needs to be told delicately and with becoming circumspection.
Now, Adefuye belonged to one the two well known Nigerian schools or formations of historians and historiography, these being the Ibadan-Nsukka school and the Ahmadu Bello University school. Frankly speaking, the Ibadan-Nsukka school to which Adefuye belonged is much better known worldwide. Its three main driving ideas are, one, that Africa, like any other region of the world, has a history; two, this history of Africa did not begin with the coming of the Europeans and of writing to Africa; three, this history of Africa is part of the history of the world without which world history would be incomplete, truncated. You could say that the ABU school of history also accepts all these ideas of the Ibadan-Nsukka school, but it goes one step further by raising fundamental questions about how history in general and world and local histories in particular are written in order to advance the interests of dominant groups.
Adefuye knew that though both of us are products of U.I., I was more inclined toward the ABU school of historians. And from this arose his good-natured but merciless teasing of me on account of a pre-recorded message that I had left on my phone answering machine when I arrived at Cornell in 1988. The message said: “I greet you in the name of socialism; please leave a message and I will get back to you as soon as possible”. Every single time that he either saw me or spoke with me on the phone, “Ade Blow” would start the conversation sarcastically by repeating that recorded message. As a retort, I would say, I wish I could greet you in the name of the capitalism or the bourgeoisie whom you serve as a diplomat, but you know that I don’t think the future lies with either capitalism or the bourgeoisie.
Well, everyone reading this tribute would recognize immediately that my retort was too long, too clunky. And at any rate, it is not something attributable to Adefuye himself. He was not the subservient tool of any government, any abstract ideology. He treated all with whom he came into contact with a deep respect of their innate dignity, whether or not they were rich or poor, the powerful or the powerless. I can report with great pride about my friend that more than any other ambassador we have ever had in Washington Adefuye made the embassy in D.C. the most welcoming place for all Nigerians from every part of the country and of all social and economic groups. The tremendous respect that he enjoyed as a diplomat was reflected in the kind of place the embassy in DC was under his ambassadorship; both in turn, derived from his sense of the place of the history of Africa in world history. How many of our diplomats and political leaders have that sort of rich intellectual background?
In his play, Julius Caesar, Shakespeare famously wrote the following lines to be delivered by Mark Anthony, the dead Caesar’s friend: “The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones. So let it be with Caesar”. To that I say: No, not with Adefuye. The good that he did will be remembered, with gratitude and with solace in the recognition that when he was here, he made a big difference. My condolences, Sola, Bunmi, Tolu and Baba. May you and other members of the extended family be comforted by fond memories of who and what he was.
Biodun Jeyifo
bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu
